Writings chronicle life in Nevada 'Prisneyland'

LAS VEGAS -- The inmates run this place. Not the staff. That's the reality of it. That's the graduation speech Dahn Shaulis says he got at Nevada's prison guard academy. Manage the unmanageable, his trainers said. Learn to provoke power, to play with the "politics of the fist," to control inmates by pitting them against one another, to perfect benign neglect. This is how Shaulis sucked up "40 hours of purgatory and a paycheck" every week for seven years. He worked for Nevada's overcrowded, understaffed prison system, the expensive thorn in the side of state lawmakers who have been arguing about whether to close some prisons to absorb the blow of a budget shortfall. Shaulis walked into the job with a Ph.D. in sociology and left last July with a binder of bitter stories. While working as a corrections officer and a caseworker,... [read full story]