Sergeant James Booker
speaker
93 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Sergeant James Booker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Because when I was at prison, at the prison system, I knew I had guys that were never going home. You know, their people was coming and going. It was always going to change, you know.
But being in the jail system, it was quite different because you had a lot of laws that you had to learn, a lot of different rules you had to learn versus prison was basically set in 33-8, which that was the code that governed the prison at that particular time.
I met Raymond... I was his supervisor. Okay. And, oh, man, I can't do not. I'm trying to think because that's been so long ago. Because, like I say, we were all young. Because I made a supervisor, like, the first two years I was down as a sergeant. And so Raymond worked under me, and I would say probably 87, 88. I'm thinking maybe the time frame that he was working for me.
And Raymond, like a lot of the young guys who worked up under me, and at this particular time, now I'm becoming one of the older guys because I'm five, six years older than them. I'm much older now. So these guys, they would go out, they would party, then they called in sick for work. So I give them the talking to. Okay, they're not getting the talking to. Now I got to give them some paperwork.
So now my thing will say, hey, press down hard, third copy yours. Take that one for yourself. And believe it or not, I wrote Raymond up. I disciplined him for calling in sick. And that, believe it or not, brought us closer together because he came to me and said, you know what? I'm so glad you wrote me up because you made me realize I have a family and I need this job.
And that's how he and I became close friends. beyond the job. Because I looked at him and I thought, you know what? This guy want to be here. He understands what this means to have this job. Because his family was the most important thing. And unfortunately, some of the young fellas that came along, they ended up getting terminated because of the sick time.
And he straightened that part of himself out. And Raymond was, man, let me tell you, Raymond was the type of guy at the job And you see the size of Raymond, right? You see the size. He's a massive guy. And back then, you know, guys in jail were big guys because we had weights in the jails at the time. And these guys work out.
And now that they've been working out, they want to test their strength or they want to test themselves, you know, because they feel like, okay, I've been working out. I've got to see. I've got to put this to use. Let me see what I can do with style. So a lot of times Raymond was called in because of his strength and his size.
And especially when he worked for me, I won't call any names, but I had this particular inmate. He was disrespecting one of the females. And he was saying all kinds of derogatory things to her, saying whatever he was saying to her, vulgar, you know, it was really nasty stuff.
So when I came back to work, she said, hey, Sarge, listen, this guy, he's been disrespecting me, you know, and why you been off? I said, okay, no problem. Let me talk to him. So I called Raymond down. I said, hey, I need you to come down. Come down here to the unit. Because we always use strength in numbers whenever you work in that environment. It's never one-on-one.
In this normal situation where you really don't want to use force, that's the last thing you want to do. But you always want to show a use of force. And most guys will back down when they say that use of force or when they say that use of force. So this particular guy, he decided he wanted to go ahead and he wanted to put some work in. Okay, well, you know what? Let's get at it.
And subsequently, you know, it didn't go well. Yeah. It did not go well for him. Yeah. And Raymond was always that guy that, listen, man, loyal, first to come in, always treating these guys fair with respect because he could have hurt a lot of guys. He'd be the big guy. But that wasn't his demeanor. His demeanor was not to come there and be a bully. That wasn't who he was.
And the thing about it, Raymond was the type of guy, he would help these guys. He would talk to these guys. Because a lot of these guys, he knew because he was from the community. I wasn't from the community, so I didn't know any of these guys. He knew these guys. He grew up with a lot of these guys. So he had their respect. And then a lot of times, I can call Raymond down, he can talk to a guy and
kill the situation for him. I ain't even got to deal with it. He just talked to the guy because he had that relationship. And that's the thing about working in that environment that most people don't understand. At that particular time, there was no taser. There was no shield. There was no mace. There was no stun gun. It was none of that. It was your verbal and it was hands-on.
And no one really wants to go hands-on because, you know, even if you win the fight, you still can get hurt. And no one wants to get hurt. You know? So he was very, very, very good at his job, man. The man was good. In fact, I don't know if he ever shared with you, this particular lieutenant, they was finna throw this guy off a top tier.
Raymond, I don't know if I ever told you the story or not, but Raymond broke his index finger, saving his lieutenant from getting thrown over the rail. Wow. Yeah. That's the type of guy he was. You know what I mean? He was that type of guy.
And, I mean, any time that they had an issue with a person that they thought was going to be physical or be a problem, he was one of the guys that they called on. Wow. They called on him. Yeah. And the guy was always there, man. You know? And his uniform was always impeccable. He made sure his dress was where it needed to be. Because me being his supervisor, listen, that's something I enforced.
If your uniform wasn't right, that is a problem for me. And at the time, we had a scoring system. If your uniform was not what it's supposed to be, I'm going to give you the score you deserve. So whatever that score is, if you get a one, you got a one because you didn't maintain your uniform. That's why you got a one.
And I set the example because I wanted you to see what it's supposed to look like. You know, look that way every day when you go to work because people are respect. You don't have to know anything. But if you look the part, they'll respect you right off the bat because you look professional.
Absolutely. And it's the other thing, just like doing the legal documents that we had to do when something occurred and we had to write what was called an event report or a medical report or something like that. I literally would take a red pen and I would write on the report because I needed you to understand that this report can't go in.
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