[Namsan Ddalggakbari] A Current Correctional Officer Shares Stories from 'Inside the Wall'... 'Entering the Prison'

Beep! The mobile strike team that heard the call subdued the tattooed man. The smell of blood brushed past my nose, and several dull cracking sounds echoed repeatedly. I rolled around on the gray concrete floor, trying to stop a burly inmate from self-harming his leg with chopsticks. On my first day at work, the person I encountered was described as “a murderer who killed and dismembered three people five years ago.” When I asked, “Does this kind of thing happen often?” a senior correctional officer handed me a notebook passed down from his mentor long ago. It contained the following: 1. How to subdue murderers 2. What is needed when talking to rapists 3. Reference points when giving instructions to gangsters and drug offenders.

The book Entering the Prison (Bomleum) is a detailed daily record of a rookie correctional officer’s experiences inside a prison. The prison life he describes is truly a jungle. The author feels pity for an elderly inmate who was beaten by a gangster threatening him to “sleep in front of the bathroom because you smell old,” leaving his right eye severely swollen with burst capillaries so badly that the pupil was invisible. However, upon seeing the elderly man’s crime, the author falls into a dilemma: he had threatened a kindergarten girl with a knife, taken her to his studio apartment, and committed a terrible act. Watching the gangster, who was sent to solitary confinement and is now gone, thank him and say life is better these days, the author felt as if a deeply held value he had nurtured suddenly fell away.

Can you read adult magazines in prison? The answer is yes. One inmate imprisoned for sexual assault spent time “lying comfortably on the floor, looking at magazines full of photos of women in underwear.” Some of these magazines even depicted “sexual acts involving minors.” Although I was eager to confiscate them immediately, these magazines were all classified by the Publication Ethics Committee as adult subscription magazines, so there was nothing I could do.

Prison is a gathering place for all kinds of people. Among them are those who see incarceration not as punishment but as care. A homeless man who had never taken off his socks for three years, causing his socks and the skin on his instep to fuse together, said, “Coming here, I took a refreshing hot shower for the first time in years and ate freshly cooked warm rice. Medications were provided free of charge, and hospital treatment accompanied it for the various diseases I had due to my abnormal lifestyle.” Facing someone who would have been defenseless without entering prison, the author wondered, “Is detention a punishment for him? Or a blessing?” A few months after release, the homeless man returned to prison, and “there was no trace of despair, regret, or sorrow on his face.”

There was also a father who used his children as props in court to evoke sympathy. The prisoner, trembling and feigning illness, had told his two sons, “Make sure to wear your school uniforms.” The author recalls that scene as if it were a moment from the movie The Usual Suspects. The prisoner arrogantly asked, “How did I do today? Do you think I appealed to the judge?” as he left the courthouse.

There was a student who visited her incarcerated father every day. It seemed to symbolize “hating the sin but not the sinner,” but unexpectedly, the girl said, “If I don’t come here, my father will beat me to death. (...) He said he won’t leave me alone if I don’t visit every day. I barely get paid daily wages because my boss knows about my part-time job.” The student brought 50,000 won in deposit money to the prison every day. For reference, visits to pretrial detainees are allowed once per day.

Not all prisoners are the same. They have their own ranking, with the lowest being child sex offenders. According to them, child sex offenders are not treated as human beings. However, living day by day, sleeping, eating, and exercising together, they eventually just live on. The inmate who shared this, always smiling and showing a gentle attitude toward correctional officers, later caused a commotion after release by returning as a complainant to sue the officers. He was no longer “the person who mopped the hallways whenever he had time and wrote reflection papers every evening.”

Some people become prisonized. This term refers to the process by which detained inmates accept, conform to, and adapt to prison culture. For them, prison punishment no longer holds meaning. The so-called “beopja” are among them?“children raised by the Ministry of Justice,” referring to livelihood criminals who frequently entered and exited prison from a young age. Initially incarcerated for minor crimes like theft, fare evasion, or fraud in secondhand transactions, they lose their aversion to crime and become accustomed to prison life, returning with more serious offenses.

Of course, this does not mean there is no chance for rehabilitation. Some inmates break down in tears upon receiving letters from victims saying, “I forgive you. Finally being able to forgive you feels like I have been blessed. And I feel reborn.” One such inmate was a perpetrator who, after a quarrel, struck the victim with a blunt weapon, causing a lifelong disability that prevented walking.

The daily life of a prison is conveyed through the eyes of a correctional officer: the musty smell that enters the lungs with every breath due to moisture from leaks and black mold blooming here and there on the walls; the ceiling of the corridor densely packed with exposed pipes and wires; and the paint peeling off here and there, revealing the building’s raw interior.

Entering the Prison | Written by Kim Doyoung | Bomleum | 236 pages | 14,800 KRW

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.