130: A Return to Where It All Began – Behind Those Walls

After nearly three decades in corrections, I returned to the prison where my career began.

Walking those old cellblocks brought back memories I hadn't thought about in years—the lessons, the mistakes, the friendships, the fear, and the moments that shaped the leader I eventually became.

In this deeply personal episode of The Prison Officer Podcast, I take you behind the walls of the institution that started it all. You'll hear stories from those early days, reflections on how corrections has changed, and why some lessons never leave you, no matter how many years pass.

This visit also became the perfect opportunity to introduce my new book, The Weight of Justice: Leadership Lessons from Inside America's Toughest Prisons. Many of the experiences that began behind these walls ultimately found their way onto its pages.

If you've ever wondered what it's really like to spend a career in corrections—or how those experiences shape a person long after they leave the institution—this episode is for you.

Tour the Missouri State Penitentiary: https://missouripentours.com/

Buy The Weight of Justice:

Buy on Amazon or Kindle: https://amzn.to/3PLr5tR

Buy on Books2Read: https://books2read.com/WeightofJustice

Transcript

Book Announcement And Big Thanks

SPEAKER_01 0:53

I was curious. No, it's not just what kind of a place would I think for a job. Hey guys, welcome back, Prison Officer Podcast. My name is Mike Cantrell. Um special day for me. You know, I'm a couple of things. One is I'm going to announce my new book. Uh that's what this podcast is about, The Weight of Justice. Um it's been a long time coming, and I'm going to go more into that, but you might be wondering, where's he at? Well, this is where I started. And I tell people, people say, How long have you been in Corrections? I said, I've been in corrections so long that the first place I worked is now a museum. And uh so that's where I'm at. I'm at Missouri State Penn in Jefferson City, Missouri. They were kind enough to uh let me come over here and uh shoot the shoot this episode, uh kind of take a look around and remind myself what it was like when I first got into corrections, when I first um walked into these buildings and inside these walls and and everything that went with that, right? One of the things you might notice, and that's just uh these these buildings weren't air conditioned when I worked here, and they're not air conditioned now. So um it looks like I'm gonna uh sweat through this episode, but uh it won't bother you guys, and I'll take a shower when I get done, I promise. But uh I want to thank a few people. Uh first, I'd like to thank Sheila from uh the Museum Association here at Missouri State Penn. Uh she's helped me get this going and got me in here this morning and got us all set up, and I really appreciate her. Um, if you guys get the chance, check out uh Missouri State Penn Tours on the internet. Uh, you can come over here, you can walk through this prison, you can see what I'm looking at now. Of course, I've got memories to go with it, but uh um this is open for the public now. And so contact them and tell them thank you for letting me come over here. I hope you enjoy this episode.

Back Inside Missouri State Pen

SPEAKER_01 3:39

Uh, another person I want to thank is uh uh a friend and a former uh supervisor with me when I worked in the Bureau of Prisons, and that is uh Fred Coss. He's retired now, but uh Fred also worked here, so I invited him up. He's he's helping me, taking some pictures, helping me get things going in here, and I really appreciate Fred. He's always been a big supporter of the things I've done, and I appreciate him for that. You'll notice in the weight of justice, uh a couple of the pictures uh were taken by Fred, and uh, of course I mentioned him in the acknowledgments also, so make sure you check that out. Um and finally, Pepperball. You know, Pepperball's been a sponsor of this podcast for a long time. I appreciate them. I wish I'd have had Pepperball when I worked here. I know we could have used it. I didn't get that until I went to the Bureau of Prisons, but uh um thanks thank you, Pepperball, for supporting this podcast and being uh uh letting letting me get this information out to correctional officers. You know, it's it's been a pleasure over the last five years to talk to directors and wardens and trainers and and people who've worked in corrections and and those who've been through some really tough stuff and to talk to all of them about resilience and emotional intelligence. And uh it's just been a pleasure to do that. And I thank you guys. Uh, I thank you for all of you that have subscribed, that have supported me over this journey. And it's not done, but I really feel like with this book, um, that a lot of things have come together finally. Um, this book's been floating around in my mind and on paper and everything for at least 15 years. Um, and a lot of it started here, even though I didn't immediately uh write down my thoughts while I was here. Uh I saw a lot of things. You know, Missouri State Penn was built in 1838. At the time, it was the oldest penitentiary west of the Mississippi. Um, Time Life magazine had called it the bloodiest 47 acres in America. It was a violent place. It was, it looked almost this old when I walked in. And I was a 22-year-old kid who had never been around anything like that. I'd been in fights on the Ava Square, I'd been in fights in high school. Um, that was pretty normal, but the violence of having somebody attack you is different than the violence that we saw in school or uh, you know, fighting your fighting your friends who you go out and drink with the next week. So walking in here and seeing that level of violence, seeing the shanks that were made in the uh uh license plate factory, seeing the blood from suicides, from one man sitting on top of another man on the ground and stabbing him that hard was all stuff that you you're trying to process as a 22-year-old, as a new officer. Where's where's my place in this? What does that even mean? What am I dealing with? What are humans? Where's God? You know, these were all things that went through my head. And so a few years into my career, I started writing poetry. And I wrote several poems just um, you know, talking about the the violence I saw in the yard. Um, one of them is called the old oak tree. It's not down there anymore. But there was like a 200-year-old oak tree on that yard, and I always wondered how it felt with all that

First Encounters With Real Violence

SPEAKER_01 7:29

blood going into its roots, you know. Did that affect it? He'd been sitting there watching this penitentiary for for you know 100 plus years, 150 years. So my mind would wander on that type of stuff. Uh I dealt with a staff suicide, and I wrote about that. You know, we had a lot of sayings back down, back then, you know, when you come in here, you're doing life eight hours at a time because you never get back out of it. And once your brain sees some of this stuff, once it comes in here and once it's um inundated with the stuff we see, you can't ever get rid of that. So there is no time off for a lot of us. And I think I've gotten better as I've got older, but when you're in it and when you're going back day and day, and you guys know what I'm talking about, there is no getting out of it because the the things you've seen live in your mind. So that's kind of what started the book Wade of Justice was when I started writing some poetry. And uh then I started writing some stories, started chronicling, you know, some of what I'd seen, uh, writing down uh some of the things that affected me the most in my career. Rather, that was, and the first story in the book is is about Missouri State Pen. I had an inmate here who uh uh spit on me. This is the first time in my life I'd ever have eBay spit on me. And if if you've never had that done, you don't know the what comes up inside a person to when you get spit on by another human. And uh I talk about how that felt, and I talk about the revenge I got. And then later he came with a group of another inmates to try to kill me, or at least hurt me really bad. I mean, they were intent, they brought weapons. Um, and that's one of the first stories I wrote, and that happened in Missouri State Pen here. So that's why I'm so just excited to be here and and to look around. You know, it looks smaller. Uh Fred said that a while ago. He said, Boy, it looks smaller in here. And uh I was smaller back then, you know. Um, but now that I look at it, I mean, look right there. There there's very little room. But I remember things like this, you know, this is uh uh it's an atom locking device. Uh they've got levers in some of the other places, but this one you dial and then you can deadlock this unit. As you can see, it's all open bars. And that is most of this institution. You know, a lot of people these days they talk about inmates banging on the doors. I didn't have inmates banging on the doors. I had inmates who could reach through and touch you. I had inmates, if they threw a tray, it was going to hit you. I had inmates who could throw piss and shit and spit through the bars, which is a real change from what um people see and think about these days when they talk about prison or jail. Um, and it was something to get used to. It mattered how you carried yourself in here. It absolutely did. There was no place for uh walking around here like you're bigger than everybody else because no matter who you were, there was somebody bigger in here. I'll guarantee it. And back then, that was another one of the things that I remember the most about Missouri State Penn was the weight piles. Uh we didn't have little pull-up bars and we didn't have little uh, you know, body weight exercises. No, they had weight piles out there, and they had huge human beings that worked on those weight piles. Scary. And as a 22-year-old who wasn't as big as I am now and with no experience walking on that yard and walking next to those guys, or to go tell one of them, you know, go, you need to go to your cell, and you're looking up at this giant. Um that's another difference that I've seen over this long career of corrections. I don't see inmates like that, or very rarely uh do I see inmates like that anymore. But back to the book. My poetry's in there. I wrote stories in there uh talking about what I saw and what I experienced. But

Poetry As A Way To Cope

SPEAKER_01 12:09

all of that changed me. And if there's a theme to the book, that's that's the theme. What changed me? What changed me here? Well, it changed me in a whole lot of ways. You know, one of the ways that it changed me was um I was raised up in church. I went to Sunday school, and you come in places like this and you wonder if God still exists. Um, or if he does exist, how does he allow this stuff to happen? For some of you guys that are still working, you probably have heard of something called PRIA, the Prison Rape Elimination Act. Um, and and I know that there's a lot of problems with it. I've talked about it. I did an episode several episodes ago about the problems with it and why it doesn't work the way it's been put together. But I can tell you, I saw prison rape here that would gross you out, blow your mind. It wasn't right for human beings to be treated that way. So I know why Priya was put in place. I don't think it was done as well as it could have been, but I know why it was put in place. And I'm not gonna go too deep into it because um I don't think most people um want the visions and the the scenes I have in my head. I don't think most people want that in their head. But this was one of the first places that I saw that that I took a guy to medical who had been raped forcibly. That doesn't go away. And you can't tell me that doesn't change you. That you don't get numb, that you don't get emotionally numb. Um and we don't just leave that inside, we take it with us. We take it outside to our families, we take it outside to our friends, and everybody that knew me over those years can attest to the fact that Mike Cantrell changed. And that's what that book is about. The bad things that I saw that changed me, and then kind of how you know I had a reckoning one day in a parking lot at uh the Federal Medical Center where I looked around. I'd worked so much, I didn't know where my car was, I didn't know what day it was, I didn't know really even why I was there. And something had to change. You can't live like that. So that was where um I kind of had the reckoning that you can't hold on to what you see here at Leavenworth. Um, you can't hold on to that forever. You've got to deal with it, you've got to move forward. And the way I moved forward was twofold. One, I started looking at leadership because, and I teach this now, you've got to be able to lead yourself. You've got to be able to take care of yourself before you can lead others. And I had been put in positions of leadership, team leaders, uh, I was uh acting lieutenant at the time. So I was number one in a segreg segregation unit and in a lockdown unit. So I had been put in the positions of leader, but I hadn't really thought of myself as a leader, and I definitely wasn't leading myself through that. So when I when I finally understood that there was more to this career than overtime, than segregation units, then use

Learning The Job On The Tiers

SPEAKER_01 15:44

of forces, then violence, that was when I decided that I wanted to help staff be safe. And that's when I got into training, which, as most of you know, that's that's what I do a lot of now. Um, you know, the people say, well, we didn't get much training back then, and I didn't, as far as formal training. Uh, we went right over here to a hotel um for three weeks. I think it was three, it may have been two, I think it was three, for three weeks, and we were taught, you know, a little bit of defensive tactics. We went and learned how to shoot firearms, which I was already well qualified in that. I grew up hunting, fishing with dad. So that wasn't that wasn't something that I needed too much of. But they taught us about all the rules. We got a red book that was like this thick with all the policies that you were supposed to remember and enforce. And um so sit over there for three weeks, came back over here, and they did not really give me one thing that I can remember that made this job easier at the walls. Where I got taught, the people who trained me were in places just like this. This is you'd have one of those senior officers take you aside, and he'd he'd stand up here. Usually we'd go up to the top, and we'd stand on the fifth tier. And he'd say, You see that there? Why is that guy talking to that other guy? Why is he moving? This he should be in bed. He worked over, he worked midnight in food service. And they would talk to me like that, and they would show me the things about human behavior so that I could understand what I was seeing. Because when you've got 3,000 people in here focusing on one and understanding one seems seems irrelevant, but it's not. Learning to focus on those individual, we call them anomalies, right? Learning to focus on those individual anomalies is what makes this look good, is is what makes us understand what's going on here as we look through uh all the inmates, as we look through them as they're they're moving around below us. So this was where I got trained. This was where I learned was on these tiers, these concrete tiers, open bars. Look, look, I can barely you think you can get away from somebody's arm? You think you can get away from a shank? You couldn't. You had to be careful, you had to have your head on a swivel. Situational awareness on on tiers like this is a whole nother level. Later on in my career, I'd work in places that had solid doors with windows. That's a comfort for a correctional officer. You didn't have that here. This was a whole different place. I hate to see it, I hate to see it falling apart. I do. It's amazing how many layers of paint there are on these walls. Um who knows? I mean, that paint is it's at least an eighth of an inch thick, multiple layers. Painted over and over and over again since 1838.

SPEAKER_00 19:17

Think about the humans that traveled through here in 150 plus years. There's not one spot in this prison that there was not a person standing.

SPEAKER_01 19:31

There's probably not very many spots in this prison where a person wasn't attacked or that violence didn't occur. It's crazy to think about. You know, during the summers they would let us take our outer shirts off because it got so hot in here, and you see me sweating. And so if you were working these upper tiers, you could just have a t-shirt on, which was amazing uh to be to cool down a little bit. It was horribly hard to hear because you can hear one fan in the background. That's one fan. Imagine eight more of those going, and then we've got open bars. So all of these men talking, so you have this roar of human voices, you have this fans going on, it was hard to hear. Despite that, you could absolutely, after you'd been here, hear the tone of voices

Yard Fights And Loyalty Under Pressure

SPEAKER_01 20:29

when people called on the radio. And and one of those was, you know, when they called a 10-5 or 1049, a fight, a fight on the lower yard. Well, if you're working up here and this is secure, a couple would stay behind, but some of us had to respond. Running down these stairs, taking multiple stairs at a time, right? As fast as we could around the corner to get to the yard. And the reason we wanted to get to the yard is because we had an officer in trouble, and nothing else mattered at that moment than to get there to that officer. But you could tell who had ever been at the bottom of a pile when there was a fight on the yard. Because if you were one of those officers who'd ever fought and sometimes fought for your life, it felt like you knew what that felt like to them. The person that was on the radio and their their tone, sometimes, sometimes yelling, sometimes screaming on the radio. 1049, lower yard, 1049, lower yard. And so we ran with everything we had. Um those of you that have done this job for a long time understand that builds a level of camaraderie that you can't get anywhere else. Maybe the military in a foxhole, right? But the dependence we have on each other in these places, the dependence we have that that person's gonna run for me and that they're gonna run as hard as they can still astounds me. I talk about it as it's it's almost an expression of love. To to be on that bottom of the pile and people start grabbing inmates and pulling them off of you. It's almost an expression of love that they care that much about you. And one of the things that we don't do well is when we go home with this stress, when we go home with all of this uh violence in our minds, we go with a s a a a Distorted sense of what reality is. Yes, that feels good, and yes, that's love, but a five-year-old grabbing your leg can't give that to you, right? We have to change a little bit. We have to let that prison out of us when we go home and when we we you know hold on to our loved ones. My wife has stayed with me more than 30 years, and I know that it was not easy because I brought a lot of this job home. I absolutely did. So think about that. Know that this job changes you. You can't get away from it. You have to be moving forward. You have to be thinking about what's retirement gonna look like? What's my family gonna look like in 30 years if I keep coming home and don't give them anything emotionally? How's this gonna work? And how I made it through

Bringing Prison Stress Back Home

SPEAKER_01 23:29

it, I don't know sometimes. But I credit a lot of it to the writing I did, to the poetry I wrote, to the training I did, and all of those things kept me creative and kept me thinking about the future and helping others. And that's part of the reason why this book means so much to me. So I named this book Weight of Justice. And the name means as much as anything to me, uh, as much as the writing does. Because the one thing I discovered over the years, you know, we have a three-prong justice system. You have the law enforcement who arrests, you have the judges, the judicial who sentence. And then the public pays correctional officers to carry the weight of that sentence, of that inmate, of that punishment, of that rehabilitation until they're gone. The public gives us money to do that job for them because I didn't write the laws. That's one thing I tell people in the book. There's not one inmate in jail that I put there. I agreed to, I took an oath, I agreed to take a certain amount of money so that I could protect the public. And I I truly feel like that's what we do. I I I believe I believe in Dave Grossman's analogy of the sheepdog. I think you have to have sheepdogs to keep the wolves at bay. And that's what I feel like I did in a career. The thing nobody looks at is the weight of that career, the weight of what you see, the weight of how people are treated and how people treat each other. It all looks pretty on TV, it looks good in the movies, but the reality of what goes on in these places is

What The Weight Of Justice Means

SPEAKER_01 25:29

much deeper and cuts much deeper than what they could ever portray on TV.

SPEAKER_00 25:40

So do me a favor.

SPEAKER_01 25:42

First, thank the Missouri State Pen uh Tours and the Museum for letting me come here and do this and talk to you about the book. Um, and reach out to Pepperball and tell them thank you for the sponsorship. Go ahead and like and subscribe this channel if you want to see more. And I want to personally thank you for all the support that you've shown me in the last five years with this podcast. And already it's been amazing the support you've shown me by buying the book, The Weight of Justice, and all the all the great things that I've I've heard from you guys and the people who understood what I was trying to say and the emails and the notes and stuff. So until next time, let's be safe out there.