The Help

My true story of having the craziest prison job at Club Fed

So by now you know all about what we did at Vandenberg AFB (now Vandenberg Space Force Base, as I’ve come to learn), wearing our scary red jumpsuits and mowing lawns. Well, there were only about 30 of us with that job. What about the rest of the 400 guys at the Club Fed?

Well a group of them had our same job, but rather than serving the Air Force base a bus ride away, they served the prison compound itself. There’s a medium security (commonly called a SuperMax) and some of our guys would mow around its fence, but not go inside. There’s the Low, or low security, which is where all the chomos (child molesters) go, and higher level drug offenders. None of those guys could ever qualify to be at the camp, where we were. Guys at the Medium and the Low referred to our guys as “the help,” as they always saw us doing their greenscaping for them.

Still another team served the staff housing just outside the prison facility. Some would mow, others would weedwhack, others would blow. Being a CO at a federal prison means you get free greenscaping services, apparently.

These guys were the ones who always came back with the best stories. Part of their job was to take the COs’ garbage cans to a dumpster somewhere, so they always got to see what was inside. CO trash consisted of a remarkably high percentage of nudie magazines and empty liquor bottles – like, a lot of liquor bottles. According to one of our guys, there was one CO who put away a half gallon of hard liquor every day. (They say the Bureau of Prisons is the only government agency with lower employee satisfaction than TSA.)

But it was the other component of their garbage that I wanted to comment on here today.

First, a word about our food. Our food got delivered on trucks. Guys from the camp unloaded those trucks at the Medium. Guys inside the Medium — and remember, despite its name it was the highest level, the baddest-ass guys and thus the highest in ranking — did all the food preparation every day. Some of our guys picked up prepared trays of food before every meal from the Medium; delivered a load to the Low; then brought the last load back home to the camp.

As the low people on the totem pole, here’s what we got. No meat, ever. Only on holidays, or days when inspectors were present, did we ever get any meat. What little the Medium guys didn’t keep for themselves was all taken by the guys at the Low, leaving none for us. I never once saw a floret of broccoli; we received only stalks. Basically, the guys who cooked the food at the Medium kept everything that was decent for themselves; the guys at the Low kept everything else; and those of us at the camp got only the leftovers that nobody else wanted. The hierarchy system there was very clear.

But not even the guys at the Medium were the top of the totem pole.

Because the main thing that our greenscaping guys found in the trash cans of the COs were the actual, original food boxes.

Not only does being a CO give you free greenscaping, it also gives you free food. They stole as much of our food as they wanted, every day. All the steaks. All the fruit. All the soft drinks, and all the everything else. Then the Medium guys took theirs. And then the Low. And then us.

I mean, I don’t really care, I’m just glad to be out of there. And I don’t mean to sound bitter, and I’m sure there are decent people who work as COs… but not there. Taking food from guys with nothing left in life is pretty damn low.