Sociology lecturer knows how to keep up her 'guard'

     Mary Karpos knows what it's like to stand guard, unarmed, in
a prison yard with 500 inmates.
     As the first female guard in California to work in a male
maximum security prison, she experienced life inside the walls on
a daily basis.
     Twenty years later, she is bringing the insight and knowledge
gained in the prisons to her classes at Vanderbilt, where she
lectures in sociology while completing a doctorate.  Not
surprisingly, she teaches a course on prison life.
     Karpos, who stands barely over 5 feet, knew her trailblazing
work to become a prison guard in 1975 would not be easy.  She had
become interested in prisons as a small child when she noticed
that there were "people living under the courthouse" in the small
south Texas town where she grew up.  What she had seen were
prisoners housed in the town jail, located in the basement of the
courthouse.  This discovery motivated Karpos to read every book
about prisons she could find in the library and by age 12 she had
decided on a career in penology.
     Armed with a bachelor's degree in criminology and soon to
receive her master's degree in the same area, she applied for a
job with the California Department of Corrections.  She had
already spent eight months as a case manager in a federal women's
prison, but aspired to be the first woman to work in a male
maximum security prison in the state.
     "I really strongly believed California was going to allow a
woman 'inside,'" Karpos said.  She trained hard, including lifting
weights, and prepared well for the written, oral and physical
exams.
      As Karpos had correctly guessed, the political climate was
right. Gov. Jerry Brown came into office with a willingness to
break down gender barriers and he hired an equally unbiased
director of corrections. Karpos passed the exams and was assigned
as a guard in a men's prison.  Her ordeal, however, was just
beginning.
      "I faced full force what they meant by 'women not welcome',"
Karpos said.  "Co-workers and administrators made it very clear
that I might have made it that far, but that I wasn't going to
make it any further‹ that I didn't belong, that I had no place
there." 
     Her first assignment was the yard.  She spent two and a half
hours guarding about 500 prisoners each morning, making sure no
one was knifed or beaten and that contraband had not been hidden
on the premises.
     In the afternoon, another 500 maximum security prisoners
filed in.  Karpos spent the time mingling with the inmates while
unarmed and without a means of leaving the enclosure.  A guard on
the tower kept an eye on her and told her what the consequences
would be if the prisoners began harming her en masse.
     "The guard on the tower said, 'If they attack you, the best
thing I can do for you is to shoot you.'  Given however many
rounds he had, he would have never been sufficiently capable of
protecting me. It was understood that it would be merciful to
eliminate me because there was nothing they could do.  There are a
lot of male officers who don't like working out there (in the
yard) because the truth is you are expendable."
     Karpos said the administrators thought she would quit after a
few weeks in the yard.  Three months later, she was still
reporting for duty with a smile on her face.
     She was next assigned to supervise a kitchen crew of more
than 200 minimum security prisoners‹the largest working crew of
inmates in California, according to Karpos.  Her crew prepared
meals for more than 3,000 inmates a day who were housed in
adjacent minimum, medium and maximum security buildings.  
     Successfully handling the kitchen crew for a year gave Karpos
enough experience to move to the maximum security housing unit,
better known as the cell block.  Now she was working locked in an
area of three double-sided tiers of cells which housed 250
inmates. She spent two years on the cellblock, ultimately rising
to senior housing officer.
    Whether in the yard or on the cellblock, it was not unusual to
be verbally challenged by inmates.
     "Just coming over to talk to you, they'll get right in your
face," Karpos said.  "For me, it is natural to step right up to
them.  That's a very clear signal and it's not something that
people anticipate, particularly from a small woman. In hindsight
it could have been frightening but I guess my mindset truly was
that I wanted to do this bad enough to take whatever the risks
were."
  She was later transferred to another prison in a small
California town, where events took a turn for the worst. Although
Karpos had endured the cold shoulder and silent treatment at the
first facility, she had also received grudging acceptance for her
professionalism and felt the institution was well-managed.  Such
was not the case in her new assignment.
     "The administration made it very clear they were going to do
everything within their power to ruin my career," Karpos said.
"Whatever it took might mean my life.  It was just very clear to
me that I wasn't safe.  They were seriously ready to see a woman
get killed if that's what it took."
     She was struck, grabbed and injured during skirmishes with
inmates at this facility. In at least one incident, other officers
witnessed a prisoner assault her but failed to intervene. Karpos
subdued the prisoner and marched him off to solitary by herself.
    She and her family were ostracized in the town, which revolved
around the correctional facility.  Despite pregnancy, she worked
as a guard until her son was born.      
     After taking maternity leave, Karpos opted to leave the
prison.  She had spent five years "inside."  Writing a program for
labor market deployment of parolees led to her spending almost 10
years working for the Employment Development Department.
     Karpos, however, wanted to return to academia to pursue
research and teaching. She felt her correctional experience would
facilitate the production of research that bridged the gap between
theory and practice. She came to Vanderbilt in fall 1989, still
retaining her interest in prisons.
     "The older I get, the more committed I am," Karpos said. "We
spend billions of dollars on an environment we know so little
about.  Very few people question what is the most efficient way to
spend this money. We've not had an active dialogue about penology.
It's always been an obscure area of our society so it continues to
intrigue me. That's why I love to teach about prison life."