Jailer with dreams
Two Vitamin C tablets in the morning. A stash of rubber gloves in the handcuff case in the Toyota. A gray fabric mask, handwashed each night and hung to dry from a pull string on his ceiling fan.
That’s the armor keeping 42year-old detention officer Kerry Baird COVID-free in one of the most potent coronavirus breeding grounds in Houston: the Harris County Jail.
“We’re not at the peak yet,” Baird said. “It gets scary.”
A Houston native whose father and grandfather worked for the sheriff ’s office, Baird finds his job rewarding after 21 years. He’s a talker who likes to interact with different people. Working in mental health, he feels he makes a difference.
“I’ve had people coming in wanting to kill everybody and wanting to fight,” he says. In a few days, with medication, “you can go up and talk to them and they’re not the same person.”
These days, somebody coughs, everybody looks. In a place where 6-foot social distances are as plentiful as fresh breezes, people are on edge. Some jailers are hesitant to come in. Baird takes every precaution. He and his wife, a nurse, strip and shower when they hit the door.
“We can’t stop. There has to be officers,” Baird says. “We’re the one place that can’t say ‘OK, we’re closed. Y’all can go home.’”
Of jail staff, 150 have contracted COVID-19. Baird says a recently recovered deputy described the experience: “She said it feels like you’re scuba diving and somebody’s pinching the hose.”
That keeps him diligent as he escorts masked inmates to Zoom appointments with lawyers and hearings before judges. The special assignment puts Baird right next to inmates as he hands them pens, holds a computer tablet while they sign, disinfects their headphones.
Sometimes, he knows who’s quarantined. One time he found out after. He says he handles them all the same, as he does those in for murder and those in for traffic tickets.
“All you know is they’re in the jail. If you try to treat them like human beings and with respect, 90 percent of the time, you’re going to get that back.”
To lighten the mood, he teases people. Some return the favor. But something else keeps him going at the end of a 16-hour shift when he’s already broken up several fights, when he’s got 10 minutes but a report that will take 30 minutes to finish, when he’s hungry, stressed and faced with the fact that he’s due back in eight hours.
“A 42-foot Sundancer,” he says wistfully of his dream mini yacht.
“I think of that, of winning the lottery. I think of just running away. There’s times I’ve thought ‘I’m done, I’m leaving. I’m not coming back.’ But I still show up the next day.”