Rick’s first assignment as a CO was at Fishkill Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison in Dutchess County, not two hours north of Manhattan. This is an inherent irony of the system: as more residents of the North Country applied to be COs, jobs in upstate facilities became scarce. They had to be earned, which meant that rookies like Rick had to do their time downstate before transferring back home.

Down in Fishkill, Rick lived in state housing, sleeping in a room “not much bigger than a cell.” There, he learned the ins and outs of prison work. He and another officer would keep track of a 50-person dormitory, marking down where each inmate was every half hour. They accompanied prisoners to the Mess Hall and to the yard, keeping a lookout for signs of violence or trouble. It was a “boring, physically do-nothing job,” Rick says, but it gave him first-hand experience with prisoners.

“They will play mind games with you constantly,” he explains. “You don’t become friends with them. You don’t talk about your personal life, family, anything of that nature. You don’t want them getting anything where they can get inside your head.”

Rick had his first brush-up with a prisoner just a few weeks after arriving at Fishkill. While escorting a group of 20 inmates to the infirmary, he noticed that one of them was staring at him. At the Academy, Rick had learned to never get caught in a staring contest with an inmate — it was one of the ways that inmates played “mind games” with COs. But he was a brand new officer, and he gave in. For about 15 minutes, they were locked in a staring match.

“Finally he says, ‘Last guy that looked at me like that, I shot him in the face,’” remembers Rick, chuckling. “I burst out laughing! I said, ‘Where the fuck’s your gun now, buddy?”

As much as Rick disliked being a CO, he had the perfect personality for it. He was a hardass with a commitment to authority and a respect for the chain of command; his wife Laura describes him as “real straight and narrow.” Being able to shrug off death threats and shout down inmates is necessary for a CO to survive, but not many people are well-suited to the task. Rick’s brother, Doug, also applied to be a CO, but quit after a short time because “it wasn’t for him,” says their sister, Edna Parnapy.

“It takes a special person,” she says. “Rick’s got the patience for it. Personalities make a difference.”

Edna was more like Rick: a real hardass with little patience for people who whined or misbehaved. It was hardly surprising that she, too, ended up working with inmates.

While Rick was down in Fishkill, Edna worked at the Franklin County jail back home. For a time, she lived in Western Canada with her first husband, where she gave birth to two sons. But like her little brother, she eventually returned to the North Country. There, she had her third child, a daughter, and found work as the head cook at the county jail. Five inmates helped her in the kitchen; they were, supposedly, well-behaved inmates who had earned the title of “trustee.” To Edna, though, the term “trustee” is ridiculous — a “fictitious word,” she likes to say. Still, she was never scared of the inmates, even if she didn’t trust them.

“There were no cameras in the kitchen, but I was meaner than them. I never had a problem,” she says. “I think they were more afraid of me than they were their COs.”

This has more to do with Edna’s attitude than her physical appearance. Barely five feet tall, with skinny limbs and short, curly hair, she could easily pass for a young boy if not for the cigarette wedged permanently between her lips. She’s almost cute, like a chipmunk, with quick brown eyes and a tiny nose that scrunches up when she laughs. Until she opens her mouth, there’s really nothing intimidating about Edna at all.

“I’ve punched an inmate,” she says, matter-of-factly.

This was not at the County Jail but at ComLinks, a community service agency run by the county, where Edna worked more recently. She helped run the Food Pantry there, collecting, cooking, and storing food for needy locals. And, as part of the program, inmates from nearby facilities came to help her in the warehouse, cleaning the floors and stocking the shelves.

“Manual labor BS,” Rick pipes in. “One real employee would do ten times the work than five inmates.”

“Yeah,” agrees Edna. “It takes five of them to do what I can do in 20 minutes.”

Like the inmates who helped Edna when she worked in the County Jail, these ones had earned the title of “trustee.” Still, they had to follow strict rules, and a CO from the prison came with them to supervise. One of them, Edna said, had a habit of touching her and the other cook, stroking their shoulders or gently squeezing their sides.

“I don’t like to be touched,” says Edna. “I told ‘em three times. I didn’t tell ‘em in front of the guard. I should have, but Barry woulda killed him.”

“So?” said Rick.

“Then I’d have blood all over my kitchen!” says Edna. “Now, he’s walkin’ across the warehouse. And that son of a bitch, he’d do this to you” — she pinches her arm —“and say, ‘How are you, sweety?’ I was walking, I had my hands full. He’s a big guy. And I just bang — right in the frickin’ chest. I said, ‘Listen, motherfucker, I told you before. Keep your fuckin’ hands to yourself.’”

Barry, the CO who was supervising that day, took the inmate away; he lost his “trustee” privileges. Edna didn’t feel bad for him, but she was mad at herself for giving in to her anger. Like Rick, she knew that she wasn’t supposed to let the inmates get into her head.

Even if they mistrusted the inmates, though, Rick and Edna approved of programs like ComLinks. One of the biggest gripes they had when they worked in the prisons was the waste — the state gives the inmates too much, they say, and the inmates gave nothing back. While residents struggle to pay their bills, the prisoners received free medical care and education opportunities. Other than making the region seem more populated and ethnically diverse in the U.S. Census, the prison population contributed nothing to the North Country.

“The manpower that we have sitting and doing absolutely nothing in the state facilities is just astronomical,” says Rick. “There’s lots of land around that could be growing potatoes, or carrots, or beans, or whatever. I’d be more than happy to go back to work, just give me a horse and a shotgun. I’ll ride the perimeter of the field, make sure the boys are behaving.”

But to participate in outside programs, inmates have to meet a long list of requirements. If they’re doing time for a violent offense, they are automatically disqualified, and even non-violent offenders have a difficult time gaining access to the programs. Harsh restrictions keep most of the inmates inside the prison walls.

Policies vary from state to state, though, and some prison towns across the country utilize their inmate populations more than others. In Beeville, Texas, inmates from the state prison work on local farms and fields frequently. Eric J. Williams, a professor of criminal justice at Sonoma State University, spent almost a year in Beeville doing research for his book, The Big House in a Small Town: Prisons, Communities, and Economics in Rural America. Having inmates work outside the prison fostered a friendlier relationship between the inmates and the locals, he says, but it caused other, less obvious problems. In Beeville, as in the North Country, the majority of residents are white, while the majority of inmates are black or Latino. The image of black prisoners wearing “stark white uniforms” as they worked in the fields, he says, recalled one of the darker periods in American history.

“They felt like slaves. It sounds awful, but they really did. People almost act like they’re not there.”

When Williams asked local residents about it, though, they didn’t seem to notice the racist undertones.

“It was almost too subtle for them to realize,” he says. “But I had real problems with the fact that they’re not seeing African Americans who are lawyers and doctors. I think that affects people views on race, and I find that really troubling.”

In the North Country, Rick didn’t have to get on a horse and supervise a field of prison laborers — racism has seeped into the local mindset on its own. Of the 3,127 black residents who lived in Franklin County in 2010, 2,811 were behind bars. In Dannemora, all but five of 1,649 black residents were in Clinton Correctional Facility.

For people like Rick and Edna, who grew up surrounded by white people, it’s easy to equate all minorities with the inmates they encountered in the prisons. Their deep-seated racism has trickled into their language and, perhaps unconsciously, distorted their view of society.

“I’ve met an awful lot of niggers in my life, but not too many black people,” says Rick. “I wasn’t prejudiced before I took the job, and it wasn’t the job that made me prejudiced. It was the people from the street that I met. I worked with some real good black officers. But I worked with a lot of fuckin’ niggers.”

He was recounting an incident that took place towards the end of his career as a CO, when he was working at Upstate Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Malone. Now a sergeant, Rick supervised busloads of inmates who were transferring to and from facilities in the North Country. On one occasion, as they were traveling to Mount McGregor Correctional Facility in Saratoga County, an inmate named Joseph was giving Rick a particularly hard time.

“All the way down there, he’s telling me how he’s gonna make me a porn star when he gets out, he’s gonna be fuckin’ me in the ass, he’s gonna fuck my wife, and my daughter, and on and on — just every nasty thing he can say to me,” Rick recalls. “He’s a good-sized nigger. This one’s a full-fledged nigger to the core.”

“Some of them are,” says Edna, nodding her head. “And the black people will tell you that.”

That day, Rick was working with three other officers. Two were older than him, and one was a young, relatively new officer, Rick said, who was still “wet behind the ears.” When they arrived at Mount McGregor, they had to give the inmates their lunches. State regulations restrict gun use around inmates, so Rick and his second officer, both of whom were carrying guns, stayed outside. Before the other two went in, Rick warned the young officer about Joseph.

“I said, ‘I don’t think he’s going to, but if Joseph does something stupid, you let Jay handle it.”

Sure enough, Joseph used his free foot to kick Jay behind his knee, trying to take him down. Rick acted quickly, relieving the second officer of his gun and sending him into the bus to help. But the three COs couldn’t get Joseph under control, so Rick called a sergeant over from another bus, disposed of of his guns, and went in himself. By now, the other officers had Joseph pinned to the back of his seat, but it hadn’t done any good — he was still kicking and fighting back.

“I kicked him right in the nuts,” says Rick. “It didn’t work. He’s that big. I kicked him again. It still didn’t work. So I grabbed him, and we took him to the floor.”

Once Joseph had calmed down, the COs had to fill out a number of reports and bring him to a nurse, in accordance with state regulations. But Joseph was pretending to be paralyzed and was too large to lift, so the nurse had to come on the bus to examine him. She was a “tiny little thing,” says Rick, and she quickly told Joseph that he was fine and to stop being a “big baby.” Embarrassed and defeated, Joseph was finally sitting in his seat when Rick, triumphant, leaned over and whispered to him, “Who fucked who?” Immediately, Joseph filled the bus with a stream of threats and curses. This time, however, the nurse was there to end it.

“She went off and slapped him upside the head — ‘Watch your mouth, there’s a lady present!’” remembers Rick. “The rest of the inmates are splitting a gut laughin’. That was perfect — that just made my whole day when she cracked him.”

When Rick returned home that day, he told his wife, Laura, about Joseph. This was unusual — most of the time, Rick didn’t talk about the inmates around his family. At the Academy, he learned to leave his job at the prison and, he said, he got really good at it.

“You end up having a split personality,” he says. “I could be Jekyll and Hyde.”

Sometimes, during a fight, Laura would accuse Rick of treating her or the kids like inmates. That always pissed Rick off. He was a strict father, but the way he acted at home, he said, was nothing like the way he acted “inside.”

The truth, though, was that his family didn’t understand what it was like to work inside a prison. Like most people, they remained on the outside. And from the outside, things looked different.

“We’re looked down upon by society as glorified babysitters,” says Rick. “They say, ‘Well you just got the job so you can beat up inmates.’ Yeah, I’ve beat up a few in my time, but none that didn’t deserve it!”

To Edna and Rick, the prisoners weren’t people. They were animals, and they deserved little sympathy. Liberals often argued that the laws were too harsh, and advocated rehabilitation instead of incarceration. But Rick and Edna thought that the idea of rehabilitating prisoners was a joke. They never befriended any of the prisoners. They viewed the well-behaved ones with a small degree of respect, but they never felt compassion for any inmates, and had no patience at all for the ones who misbehaved, complained, or tried to push the boundaries of what the state owed them. Most prison workers shared this attitude; they, too, laughed when inmates like Joseph were punished or humiliated. Some COs, however, were more sensitive. When Rick worked on the prison’s Inmate Grievance Resolution Committee, where he and other COs had to listen to inmate complaints, his supervisor was “an inmate-loving piece of fucking shit,” he said.

“Oh, don’t you love those bleeding hearts?” says Edna.

Sometimes, the COs took pleasure in screwing around with the inmates. At the County Jail, Edna says, the officers would periodically find the inmates’ contraband hidden above the kitchen ceiling — shanks, toothpaste, hooch.

“They always gotta have hooch. Not gonna tell you what the officers did to it,” she Edna, laughing.

But most amusing were the inmates’ reactions to the North Country. Since most of them came from the New York City area, they were bewildered by their rural surroundings. In the winter, Rick says, when the wind blew tracks in the snow, the COs told the inmates that the marks were from snow snakes. Even in the summer, the prisoners were intimidated by their surroundings — they knew they were in redneck area.

“Most of them were literally afraid to get out of prison up here,” says Rick. “Because, they’d say, ‘I’m gonna be runnin’ across some fuckin’ field, and fuckin’ Joe Farmer shoots me!’”

“Yep, we’d tell ‘em that,” says Edna. “You wanna be careful if you escape up here. Fuckin’ farmer down the road’ll shoot your ass. Or pigs’ll eat ya, or somethin’. There’s no place to run. There’s nothin’ but wilderness up here.”

Landscape wasn’t the only thing separating the inmates from the prison workers. If it weren’t for New York City, New York would be considered a Republican state. Rick maintains that George W. Bush was a good president, and during the 2012 GOP primary campaign, he supported Newt Gingrich; Mitt Romney, he said, was only “Obama Light.” Even more than Obama, though, he hates New York’s Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, as does Edna and his wife, Laura. There is a rumor around town that in March, the state will start bussing people up to the North Country’s prisons to visit their relatives, free of charge.

“It didn’t surprise me when I heard that,” says Edna. “Sure, why not? Let’s give ‘em some more. They’re already usin’ our money, the welfare bastards.”

“Cuomo and all his cronies, he just gave all his people an 18% raise,” adds Rick. “Across the board.”

“And nobody shot him?”

“You wanna know my political agenda? We should annex Canada and Mexico, right down to the south side of the Panama Canal, and the rest of the world can piss off,” says Rick. “Canada has massive natural resources. Mexico has tons of people that wanna work. And they’ve got a few drug lords down there that are raisin’ hell, but we bring our military home, sweep the drug lords. They got Catholics down there, Christians that wanna work, that aren’t about killing Christians. And they’ve got their own share of natural resources.”

Even as they vote for the Republican Party, though, many of the North Country’s residents hold political views that are closer to libertarianism, or even anarchism. They mostly regard the government as a pain in the ass — a waste of time and money, an irritating and futile nuisance.

“The state’s got their nose stuck everywhere,” says Edna. “Everywhere.”

That’s the maxim: no politician is trustworthy; all of them are corrupt. Many people seem to think that the North Country would be better off on its own.

But as much as they resent the government, it’s one of the only reasons that residents up here can survive. Edna and her husband both receive unemployment benefits from the state. Her husband works at a granite quarry, but when it closes during the winter, he relies on unemployment checks. Edna, meanwhile, is still waiting for her job at ComLinks to return — in 2010, the state government audited ComLinks and found that its CEO had misappropriated funds. A year later, the company was upgraded from “at risk” to “stable,” and Edna thinks she’ll go back to work there soon — “if they ever get their shit together.” Both of her sons, meanwhile, receive money from the VA. And Rick wouldn’t have been able to retire at 46 if it weren’t for the relatively high salary and decent benefits he received as a CO.

Even if the first Cuomo’s prison boom saved the region from an economic depression, it didn’t stop a cultural depression from setting in. Simultaneously hating the state and relying on it has stirred up a bitter cloud among locals, made bitterer by the concrete walls and the daily experience of dealing with violent, angry inmates. To call the North Country home, residents are forced to accept a certain kind of life.

“You feel like you’re just kind of worthless,” says Edna. “You mean nothing to society.”

“It’s an unrewarding career,” says Rick. “In 25 years, I accomplished nothing. This morning I delivered ten bags of pellets — that’s all I did today. But I still accomplished more today than I did in 25 years.”