Review by Ed Quillen
Corrections – February 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Pain and the Pride – Life inside the Colorado Boot Camp
by Brian P. Block
Published in 2000 by Waterside Press
ISBN1872870848
IF YOU’VE EVER WONDERED what happens at the boot camp at the Buena Vista Correctional Facility, here’s an easy and engaging way to satisfy that curiosity. The author, a British magistrate, was on a 1998 vacation in New Mexico and wanted to go north without taking Interstate 25. That put him on U.S. 285, en route to Buena Vista, where there was a prison boot camp.
England doesn’t have any prisons of that nature, so he was curious. To their credit, Major Mike Perry (the superintendent of the boot camp) and the Colorado Department of Corrections accommodated him, first hosting a short visit, and then a lengthy stay, where he had the run of the place and full interview access to the inmates, providing he stayed out of the way.
Upon Brian Block’s return to England, so many people asked him about the boot camp that he decided a book would save time and effort all the way around. Thus this book is written for a British audience. This can be distracting on occasion, but generally it makes the book more informative, since we learn about Great Britain’s penal system in the process.
As for our boot camp, it sometimes seems mysterious because it doesn’t allow visitors until graduation, three months after the inmates (who are all volunteers who have the reasonable hope, but not the guarantee, of a reduced sentence) arrive.
The day that inmates get to boot camp is one of the most confusing, terrifying days of their lives. The bus arrives at the gate at 1 p.m. But the gate doesn’t open until 1:15 p.m., leaving the inmates in suspense. Once the gate opens, nothing goes right for the inmates. They’re ordered off the bus, but they all can’t get off in time, and when they try to form up outside, there aren’t enough places, so it’s back into the bus, for another try, which of course they fail at.
As Block observes, this is theater, but the inmates don’t know that. They just know that they can’t do anything right. But in time, with a strict regimen that includes physical training and academic schooling, they start doing things right.
This process is called “Boot Camp,” and it’s based on how our military quickly converts civilians into soldiers. Reading about it sure brought back memories, few of them pleasant, about my brief exposure 30 years ago to Basic Combat Training at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo.
Block explains the process, and talks to inmates as well as their drill instructors, counselors, and classroom teachers to provide a well- rounded picture.
He notes the scenic location of the camp, two miles south of Buena Vista, and observes that “If sites of outstanding natural beauty were an inoculation against offending, Colorado would be a crime-free zone.”
Block arrived with some assumptions. “We had wanted to see a boot camp to confirm our preconceptions that it would be brutal, militaristic, harsh, and pointless, full of shouting and marching. We heard shouting and saw marching; the camp was run on military lines. But we saw no sign of brutality, no harshness, and what was being done was far from pointless. We also saw education in progress: classes in cognitive thinking, alcohol and drug abuse rehabilitation and general education.
“The drill instructors yelled at the inmates during drilling or physical education sessions, but when they talked to us it was clear that they knew that they were part of a programme, and that the heart of the programme was to re-educate the offenders and change their mind-sets away from crime. The teachers were passionate about what they were doing and they in their turn recognised that the drilling and shouting were also necessary, in order to instill a sense of discipline that the offenders had hitherto lacked….
“There we were, a couple of bleeding-heart liberals, impressed by what was going on in an American boot camp and regretting that we had nothing like it in our own country.”
BLOCK’S CONCLUSIONS are generally favorable. He points out that even if the recidivism rate is no great improvement on a regular prison’s, the boot camp accomplishes the same results at a lower cost.
But he does have some criticism. One is that there’s too much make-work — hauling stones from one side of a field to another, for instance — when there’s an ample supply of real work in this world. Another is that the boot camp can come at any point during an inmate’s sentence, and the lessons would stick better if the boot camp was always near the end. And he’s appalled by the length of American prison sentences, compared to Britain’s.
One classic book once resulted from a foreigner’s examination of American prisons (Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America). It’s doubtful that The Pain and the Pride will ever reach that status, but it’s certainly good reading, and full of information about a nearby place that had seemed rather mysterious.
— Ed Quillen
