A Suicide On CO Row

When Scott Jones left the house on July 8, 2011, he told his wife Janelle and his 10-year-old son Tyler that he was driving to High Desert State Prison to ask for his job back. He never made it to the prison.

Police Chief Tom Downing and his wife, friends of the Jones family, found Scott the next day near a rocky, dirt road along Eagle Lake, 10 miles outside of Susanville, California. He lay dead among the desert brush, a gun in his hand, around 200 yards from his dark green pickup truck. He was 36.

The police chief opened Scott’s truck. Several sheets of paper, ripped from a small notebook lay on the dashboard beside a small brass chip that guards use to trade in for equipment when they arrive at work. Dried teardrops stained the sheets. There were messages on them, etched into the paper with the chip.

“Mom & Dad Love you.”

“Tyler Love you most!”

“Janelle Love you Sorry.”

“I told the truth.”

“The job made me do it.”

Carl Costas for BuzzFeed News

Seventy miles northwest of Reno, past the desert brush and the grazing cattle and the strip mall at the edge of town, down a winding road in a quiet neighborhood at the base of the Diamond Mountains, sits the house where Janelle Jones last saw Scott. There are reminders of his life all over the house. The vacation photos hanging on the wall by the bedrooms, the family portraits on the living room table, the antlers from the deer he shot on a hunting trip hanging on Tyler’s wall, and out the dining room window in the distance, Diamond Peak, the view that had persuaded Scott that this was the house where he would raise his family.

Beyond these walls, though, the reminders of his death remain, too present and pervasive for Janelle and Tyler to escape. The home lies in a neighborhood that locals call “CO Row.” Scott’s old boss lives down the street. Other former colleagues not much farther. Three times a day, in the hour or so before each of the prison’s three shifts, the neighborhood stirs, garages opening, engines rumbling to life, a parade of pickup trucks snaking east toward High Desert prison.

“It’s all correctional officers,” Janelle said. “That’s all it is everywhere you go. To watch my son grow up without his dad and try to understand this and grow up in a small little town where all you see is correctional officers — it’s been difficult.”

After his dad died, Tyler had to switch schools. Many of his classmates had parents who worked at High Desert. Having a parent who works in corrections is valuable social currency around town, and the class hierarchy among both kids and adults is tied directly to the prison industry. There are the correctional families, then the working-class families, then the inmate families, who moved here to be close to loved ones serving long stretches at High Desert. “It’s sort of a status symbol here,” Janelle said.

Scott had loved working at High Desert at first but hated it by the end. Over his nine years as a prison guard, he had seen terrible things. He had seen his fellow guards abuse inmates and when he reported their misconduct up the chain of command, they turned on him. He broke what one former prison guard called “the green wall of silence” — the code of silence that has turned California's state prisons into insular and isolated facilities of unconstitutional conditions, where what happens on the Inside stays on the Inside. It is an unwritten rule meant to protect the men and women tasked with overseeing the state’s 130,000 inmates, and Scott had to pay for violating it.

Over the last decade, at least three High Desert COs who were bullied by colleagues have killed themselves, according to two guards and a 2012 lawsuit against the state’s corrections department. The lawsuit claimed that a guard who killed himself in 2008 and a guard who killed himself in 2012 had each faced “harassment” and “retaliation” for complaints they filed. Supervisors, the suit stated, “tolerated and ratified such a harassing environment.”

Bill Sessa, a spokesperson for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitations said: “We cannot know the motivations of any officer who commits suicide. There are many factors that lead someone to such a tragic decision and we are not in a position to speculate on that."

Two High Desert COs said they watched their colleagues harass Scott, and they watched how it changed him.

“I saw those guys turn on Scott,” said a High Desert CO. “They wanted to take him out. They pecked on him like a bunch of chickens to try to break him and they did. It just makes me so mad because these guys, they won. They got him to do exactly what they wanted him to do, which was to shut up.”

There are three prisons in the area — High Desert, which houses 3,400 maximum security state inmates; California Correctional Center, which houses 4,600 minimum security inmates; and Federal Correctional Institution, which houses 1,600 federal inmates 30 miles south of town. Those three prisons employ around half of the town’s adults. “If those prisons said they’re moving out of town, I don’t know what would keep this town alive,” said Police Chief Downing.

Susanville, tucked away in the northeastern corner of California, had always been an industry town. It was a logging town through the first half of the 20th century, but then the logging industry dried up and the mills closed, and Susanville fell on rough times.

Then, in the early 1990s, the state came with an offer. Tough-on-crime laws drove the state’s inmate population from around 20,000 to more than 160,000 between 1980 and 2000. To keep up, the state built prisons at a fast rate, and 21 new facilities would emerge over those two decades. Susanville’s California Correctional Center had been around since the 1960s, but what the state now wanted was a state-of-the-art complex to house inmates serving serious time. The state would pay the city $50 for each inmate, plus a $2 million bonus to improve schools, public services, and infrastructure. In 1992, 57% of Susanville residents approved the ballot proposal, and in 1995 High Desert State Prison opened its doors.

They built it on the outskirts of town, and from the nearest roads, the low-slung, sprawling complex lies nearly hidden behind acres and acres of desert shrubs. The prison’s most visible marks on the landscape are the watchtowers and the dozens of tall stadium lights that rise from the dry dirt like beanstalks and drown out the stars at night.

Workers poured in from all over the west to take the new jobs at the prison. From 1990 to 2010, the town’s population increased from around 7,000 to 18,000, including the 8,000 or so inmates. Among the newcomers was Bob Hartner, Janelle’s dad, who took a job at the prison and moved his family to Susanville in 1996.

Over the last decade, at least three High Desert COs who were bullied by colleagues have killed themselves.

Carl Costas for BuzzFeed News

Bob Hartner had worked at a state prison in Southern California before jumping to High Desert. Corrections was good work for him: a $50,000 or so starting salary with just a high school diploma required, room for advancement, a solid pension after 10 years, and after 20 years a pension that’ll take care of your family for life.

“He almost never talked about work,” Janelle said. “He definitely didn’t stress about it.” And so she didn’t think much about the prison. It took her many months before she noticed that maybe half of her classmates at Lassen High School had parents who had the same employer her dad did. “And then you kinda realize that everybody on your street works at the prison,” she said.

After a couple of years at the local community college, she worked part-time at Susanville Supermarket, bagging groceries and ringing up customers. She noticed Scott Jones immediately. He was a sturdy 6-foot-1 with a square jaw, prominent cheekbones, and engaging blue-gray eyes. He stocked produce and seemed to take his work seriously, always running around the store and often staying late to help close shop. But he also had a class-clown eagerness to make others laugh. He was popular among his co-workers, and she admired the way he wielded that power, like the time he stood-up for an overweight employee who’d been getting picked on. She had a crush on him, but he was six years older and she felt intimidated. And so she was surprised when a mutual friend told her that Scott liked her too. He took her to McDonald’s during their lunch break for their first date. Their relationship grew from there.

By the time he met Janelle, Scott had been working to build a better life for himself in Susanville. He had applied for a job with the corrections department. Scott completed the 16 weeks of academy training in Sacramento, and a few months after he and Janelle started dating, he began working as a prison guard at CCC.

He didn’t like the job. His co-workers were much older and they were mean to him, he told Janelle. He worked the overnight shift and, because he was new, he often had to stay for a second shift when they needed an extra body. The hours, and the colleagues, wore him down quickly. He quit within six months and returned to the store.

He had no backup plan after that. Perhaps he would’ve stayed at the store for many years. But Janelle got pregnant and when Tyler was born in 2001, Scott needed a job that paid well. And the only good-paying job available to him was in corrections, so he went back.

This time, he took a position at High Desert. It was much better. His co-workers were around his age and they built a camaraderie. He worked a more convenient shift, from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m., which allowed him to stay at home with Tyler while Janelle was at work as a county court clerk. And even though this prison housed some of the state’s most violent inmates, he told Janelle that he felt safer at High Desert than at CCC because “he believed those guys had his back.”

“He was solid,” said one CO who worked with him. “He followed the rules. He respected inmates. He knew how to treat people. He knew how to treat inmates.” Another CO said, “I never felt more comfortable standing on a line in a riot than when I had that fuckin’ guy standing next to me. ‘Cause if I was going down, he was going down with me.”

With a solid paycheck coming in, Scott moved the family into a house on CO Row. It was a two-bedroom, with lots of natural light and a view of the mountains, on a block with pickup trucks in nearly every driveway. They felt safe in the neighborhood, but still kept their checkbooks and a gun in a cabinet inside a closet in the spare bedroom. Scott had a tendency to worry and liked to be in control of his surroundings, Janelle said.

Sometimes this was positive trait, one that manifested in an obsession to protect and provide for his family. Sometimes, though, it was a dark trait. Janelle learned this shortly after they married in 2004. Scott told her stories he had heard about his co-workers cheating on their husbands and wives, sometimes with each other, sometimes with inmates — allegations two COs also told BuzzFeed News. Scott heard these stories enough that he grew paranoid and told Janelle that he was suspicious of her. These suspicions shortened his temper and they argued often. He was verbally abusive at first. Then one night, she said, he hit her and she left him.

Janelle wanted to make it work and Scott did too, so they went to counseling together. And over those sessions, Janelle learned about Scott’s past. His parents worked at the lumber mill. His brother, eight years older than Scott, was a mild troublemaker, out late drinking or bringing home girls. Sometimes his parents asked Scott where his brother was or when he came home last night or if he brought somebody into his room. Honesty was the principle he valued most, Janelle remembers him saying in those sessions, and he didn’t have it in him to lie for his brother. His brother beat his ass for snitching. Wary of their oldest son’s behavior, Scott’s parents became very strict with Scott. They rarely let him leave the house. He couldn’t hang out at a friend’s place. He couldn’t invite people over. He spent most of his days at home, stuck on a rocking chair in the living room, listening to his parents shouting at each other in the other room.

The couple became much closer over those counseling sessions. They got back together. “Things were so much better between us from then on,” Janelle said. Before, Scott didn’t talk much about work when he got home. “Leave it at the gate” was his philosophy, Janelle said. But now he spoke more openly about it, and soon Janelle began to learn about the internal dynamics at High Desert.

One night in August 2006, Scott returned home from work upset and in pain. He told Janelle that he and some co-workers were hazing a colleague that day by pouring a bucket of cold water on him. The guy tried to get away, and they chased him with the water, and the guy fell into Scott and the two of them tumbled to the ground. Scott’s leg bent awkwardly and he felt a sharp pain in his knee. He went to his sergeant’s office and told him that it hurt badly. He had to write up a report about the injury, in case he’d have to miss time on medical leave.

The sergeant cut him off and told Scott that the story he recounted was not what happened, according a lawsuit Janelle filed against the CDCR after Scott’s death. The sergeant told Scott to keep the hazing incident secret and instead pin the injury on an inmate, two COs said. Scott told Janelle that he resisted at first, told his boss that he was uncomfortable lying on official forms. But the boss pushed and Scott gave in.

“They said this inmate that he was escorting turned and they both went to the ground,” said one CO familiar with the incident. “He was ordered. What it came down to was, you either do this or you lose your job, you lose how you take care of your family.”

The inmate was booked on assaulting a peace officer, the two COs said. That night, Scott told Janelle that he was ashamed of what he had done. He was also scared. He kept thinking about how he could go to prison for it.

“Scott understood corrections,” said a CO. “He took his job seriously. He did everything by the book. And when he was forced to lie about it, it took part of his soul. It was killing him.”

He went on medical leave for several months. He had torn a ligament and needed surgery. A few weeks after he returned, another sergeant confronted him. As Scott recalled to Janelle when he returned home, the sergeant pepper-sprayed him in the face and asked if he was going to rat him out.

"And then you kinda realize that everybody on your street works at the prison.”

Carl Costas for BuzzFeed News