Who's Afraid Of ‘The Walk'?

Shirley Coody opened doors for women at Angola prison and leads a surge in the labor movement.

By Jimmie Turner

SAINT FRANCISVILLE, LOUISIANA

"Who would ever want to work in a prison?" Maj. Shirley Coody remembers asking that when her husband, a state trooper, decided to take a job as a corrections officer at the Louisiana State Penitentiary.

Coody had been working as a secretary for a small-town newspaper in Richland Parish when he gave her the news. "It was just the craziest thing I'd ever heard," she says of her husband's pronouncement in the summer of 1975. "During that period of time, Angola was, how shall I say it? ... a very bloody prison."

He took the job. And after hearing stories about the place from her husband, she became a CO — and an AFSCME member — there as well.

"The inmates were totally out of control," Coody recalls. "But then the free people [anyone who's not an inmate] didn't treat them like human beings. So there has to be a better way of interacting with the inmates. Yes, there are rules and procedures to follow. But you can give them respect, and they will give you respect in turn."

Today, Coody has much more than respect. She became the first female officer at Angola, the state's only maximum-security prison, in 1987. The trailblazer has progressed to the prestigious rank of major, and serves as president of AFSCME Local 3056 (Council 17).

THE GLASS CEILING. Her road to success was bumpy, to say the least. She bucked the system when she opted to advance — just like men — from sergeant to officer status. One of the requirements for promotion back then was working a beat called "The Walk," the collection of walkways that lead to areas where COs come into contact with inmates. "Women in the '70s were not permitted down The Walk," she recollects. "When you were hired on in security, you either worked a tower, in visiting or in a control center where the [inmate] counts are done."

Working amid inmates was a man's job at Angola, and Coody's male counterparts conspired to keep her out of their fraternity. She got fed up when prison officials chose to reward only men during a promotion cycle. "They were not allowing women's names to show up on the promotion register," she says, "so I filed a complaint with the EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission]. I said, ‘It's not fair, you know. At least give us consideration.'"

Coody won her grievance. Angola management agreed to discuss her future, then offered an evening job in the Big Yard, or main prison. She calls that "the worst place you could offer anybody on Angola on the night shift — but I took it."

The fiery 48-year-old CO says the guys "were always of the philosophy that you had to be a macho man to go down The Walk and deal with the inmates, and a woman doing it was unheard of. They dealt me misery."

DOWN ON "THE FARM." Angola is called The Farm because it spreads over 18,000 acres of flat, sprawling marshlands. The Mississippi River, with its swift and strong currents, borders the prison on three sides. The fourth side is shaped against the Tunica Hills, a dense woodland area with hills and gullies. Rattle-snakes, water moccasins, copperheads and an occasional bear inhabit the hills.

These conditions should give all of the 5,000 inmates second thoughts about an escape, though some still try. If the river or the hills don't contain them, the prison's well-drilled dogs and tactical team almost certainly will.

As far back as the 1940s and '50s, inmates toiled on The Farm under the watchful eyes of a few sadistic supervisors. Inmates still work the property today. The conditions aren't as harsh, but inmates can earn between 4 and 20 cents per hour.

In addition, inmates once manned a dairy farm on Angola. Although it has been shut down, some of the cows remain and can be seen lying under the blazing and muggy Louisiana skies, listlessly grazing on the grass.

Various camps are located on the site. There's Camp F, which houses inmates known as trusties. They have freedom to walk around the property. And there's Camp J, a place that temporarily houses inmates who want to "buck." Bucking occurs when inmates decide, as Coody puts it, "‘We ain't workin'. We ain't goin' in no dorms. We gonna call the shots.'"

UNION BACKING. The taunts and intimidation from male co-workers were nerve-racking during Lieutenant Coody's time on the Big Yard. "Naturally," she says, "they had to share horror stories with me before I went down The Walk: ‘Don't turn your back,' ‘They'll jig [stab] you in the back.' And I'm thinking, ‘I can't believe I'm going down there.'"

She overcame all that. But when management tried to fire her on trumped-up charges, she drew the line, and the union was with her every step of the way. One night her supervisor, a captain, wrote her up for not responding to a fight when a beeper was activated. Luckily, a male sergeant she was working with wrote a statement countering the dereliction-of-duty accusation.

As an AFSCME member, she got a fair and impartial hearing. Coody says it's a good thing the sergeant wrote the statement the night of the incident "because my supervisors, starting the next night, tried to intimidate him to change his story. That statement was the only thing that saved me."

GIVING BACK. Coody now works in Angola's administrative offices as the director of the American Correctional Association (ACA) unit. She is charged with ensuring that all facilities on The Farm are safe and secure. If national ACA audits find otherwise, the institution can lose accreditation.

She's been president of Local 3056 for more than a decade. Some people question how she can be an administrator, with an office directly across the hall from the warden, and still support a union member in distress. Her response: "It's quite simple. I am a major, with a job to do in this institution, and I do it. I am president of the local, and I have a job to do for my members. When I go into a hearing, I'm a union president, not a major.

"I've been president of this local for 14 years, as a sergeant, a lieutenant, a captain and a major. Through all that nothing has changed," says Coody. "The members of the union come first. If a supervisor is harassing a sergeant, as union president I'm not going to have it. And as an officer of this institution, I'm not going to have it."

GROWING — AND ORGANIZING. AFSCME has become more of a presence at Angola recently, and Coody attributes part of that to Warden Burl Cain. He came to the prison in 1996 from Dixon Correctional Institute in Jackson, La., which didn't have a strong union presence. Coody says that, when they met, she assured him that the union was at Angola "to work with him, that what we wanted was to better the working conditions for our correctional officers, and that we were here to help him make this institution work."

COs feared Cain's predecessor, who was seen as anti-union. "We've finally gotten people to understand that Warden Cain supports us," explains Coody. COs proudly wear their T-shirts and union pins with their uniforms.

"They're not afraid of saying, ‘Yeah, I'm a union member. What about it? You want to join?' This morning a lady came by and says, ‘Can I sign a union card?' I mean, they come looking for you now to join the union. Before, it was they see you coming: ‘My God, it's her!' And they'd run."

The warden also has opened the gates to organizing within the institution and even at other Louisiana prisons. "He lets us go anywhere," Coody says of Cain. "We recently did a 90-day organizing drive and went all over the place — in every dormitory, at every cell gate. He started it here with us and shamed a couple of other wardens into it. It's kind of spreading through the state that the union is allowed now to go down the walks and talk to COs." Previously, walks were off limits to organizing.

THE IRONY OF IT ALL. Coody's career as a CO in a maximum-security prison has been marked by challenges: her "free people" giving a modicum of respect to inmates, no matter how felonious they may be; opening doors for women in a time and place that locked them into stereotypical roles; and forging a vibrant labor movement in the face of strong anti-union sentiment.

She has had a hand — often a strong one — in all of these remarkable changes at Angola. As local president, Coody is constantly reminding people that unions are cooperative, not adversarial, organizations. "If your union and your administration are fighting, everybody gets hurt. And the union was not created to hurt people but to help them.

"Pretty impressive stuff from a lady who once wondered, "Who would ever want to work in a prison?"