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Watermen Behind Razor Wire
SOURCE: | By Richard Furno - The Washington Post - December 29, 2007 TOOLBOX
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Her new job is not so far from the bay: The Manokin River inlet, a crooked finger of the Chesapeake, is only about a mile from the prison.
But this is a world apart from home.
"You know, the windowsills is supposed to be clean," Marshall said, pointing to clutter in one inmate's cell. She was patrolling on her own -- at 5 feet 4 inches tall and with a small container of pepper spray -- in a wing where 59 male inmates roam freely.
"I'll remember that," the inmate said. His domino game went on.
Marshall took this job for the pay and the benefits and lives most of the year in Crisfield. Her husband, Bobby, a waterman, needed health insurance, and she couldn't get that picking crabmeat.
In the past two decades, families have faced similar choices all over the Chesapeake. First the bay's harvests declined because of pollution, diseases and heavy fishing. Then the cost of fuel went up, and the math of a waterman's livelihood no longer worked out.
Since 1994, the number of licensed commercial fishermen in Maryland and Virginia has fallen 11 percent, to 9,571.
But state officials say the Chesapeake's economic shift could be more drastic because many watermen kept their licenses even after finding other work. And many other seafood industry workers and watermen's relatives have also sought new jobs.
The change hit Marshall's family as hard as any: Her brother is a truck driver, and her son-in-law works on tugboats. Both are ex-watermen. She came here.
"I'm not afraid to say I work in a prison," she says now, "because it's been good to me."
Several others from Smith Island have made the same choice, because the prison is relatively close. She said they gather in the officers lunchroom -- sometimes talking so fast in their island brogue that officers from the mainland simply can't follow.
"Most of the time it's crabbing, oystering, boats, what's going on 'over home,' " she said, listing the subjects of their conversations. "It's never anything about here."
