Watermen Behind Razor Wire
Many Crabbers And Their Families Adopt a Most Landlocked Job

By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 30, 2007

WESTOVER, Md.

Everybody knows that the Chesapeake Bay's watermen are vanishing. This is where some of them went.

At Eastern Correctional Institution, a state prison here on the Eastern Shore, the water is so close that gulls sometimes fly in and waddle around the yard. But the birds aren't the only bay creatures here. At least 30 of the prison's correctional officers used to have full-time jobs in the region's seafood industry.

They were brought to the prison by an outgoing demographic tide around the Chesapeake: a diaspora of watermen and their relatives, dispersed to new jobs by failing shellfish harvests.

Some have chosen trucks, tugboats or taxis. And some have chosen this job, gaining steady pay by immersing themselves in a sometimes violent, vulgar world.

One of them is Janice Marshall, 62, a waterman's wife from Smith Island. Her previous jobs include picking the meat out of cooked blue crabs. Now, three generations of her family work behind razor wire.

"This time of the day, I'd probably be fishing up my crabs, if I had any -- if I was lucky enough to have any -- and I'd be getting ready to start supper," Marshall said as she started one recent evening shift at the jail. "Fishing up" means plucking crabs in mid-molt out of a holding tank, before their soft shells harden.

"Whoever thought, in your lifetime, you'd be here working?" Marshall said.

Correctional Officer-2

Janice Marshall

Marshall had spent almost her entire life on Smith Island, a spot of marshy ground, slowly sinking, 12 miles out in the bay. She founded a crab-picking cooperative there. She sang parodies at the watermen's association fundraiser: "To All the Crabs I've Caught Before" and "Hey, We Got Crabs, Babe."

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."

But after eight years, Marshall seems at ease with the blustery interplay between officers and inmates. The inmates call her "Grandma Dynamite," she said.

On this night, for example, one inmate threatened to file a complaint against her.

"Just make sure you spell my name right," she told him, smiling.

Sergeant

Willard Marshall

In the parking lot of the Kent County Detention Center in Chestertown, Md., Willard Marshall, 45, held up his work belt, laden with keys, flashlight, handcuffs. A jailer's tools.

"Ten years ago," he said, "if you'd told me I'd be carrying this, I'd have called you a liar."

Ten years ago, Willard Marshall -- Janice's son -- was captain of the workboat Whippoorwill II out of Rock Hall. Then the oysters collapsed. Then the crabs started to go. Then, six years ago, he had a daughter.

"It's always job security" in corrections, he said. "You'll never run out of criminals."

He's now a sergeant on the overnight shift -- 7:45 p.m. to 7:45 a.m., plus weekend shifts -- at this small jail on the northern end of the Eastern Shore.

"I came so close to quitting so many times," he said. "Whenever it's a get-together, I've got to go to work."

Ex-watermen have similar problems in other jobs. At one tugboat company in Baltimore, six signed up last year, and all six left. They couldn't take being on somebody else's schedule.

"They're not going to do well at Wal-Mart," said Michael Paolisso, a University of Maryland professor who has studied watermen's culture. "They're captains."

Marshall hasn't worked on his boat since September, when he went out on a day off from the jail. He'd like to pass on his license. But he wonders whether his daughter will ever work on the water.

This is his work now: head counts, rubber gloves, strip-searches, prisoners in isolation cells. One recent night, he was about to open a cell when another officer stopped him.

"Be careful," the officer said. "He's got scabies."

Marshall said he has no plans to leave. There's nothing near his home in Rock Hall that would pay as well.

"Yes," he said later that night, doing paperwork, "10 years ago, if you told me I'd be doing this, I'd have called you a liar."

Correctional Officer-2

Jacqueline Hair

Jacqueline Hair's worst day in Eastern Correctional might have been the one when an inmate attacked his cellmate with a "lock in a sock."

That's a padlock inside a tube sock, swung like a mace.

"Blood was just coming out of the cell," flowing under the door, when she arrived. "It stayed in my mind for, like, a day," Hair said. "I just kept seeing that picture."

Hair, 24, is Janice Marshall's granddaughter, the child of Willard Marshall's sister. She, like her uncle and grandmother, has become part of a slow bleed of natives from Smith Island, population about 364. She now lives on the mainland.

"It's kind of a spiral. The more people leave, the more some other people leave," said the Rev. Rick Edmund, pastor of Smith Island's three Methodist churches. Fewer residents mean less demand for shop clerks, waitresses, teachers.

Hair works in a medium-security compound. Assaults on officers are said to be rare there. But the air is full of menace.

And Hair, more than her grandmother or her uncle, already seems to have breathed in a little bit of the prison.

"Ever since I've been working here, I don't like being around crowds," she said. An officer in a crowd of inmates could be in danger. "I hate going to the mall."

Then there's the profanity. On Smith Island, cursing was rare. In the prison, it's almost as common as punctuation.

"If I do use it, I feel so bad," Hair said. "I'm like, 'Lord, forgive me!' "

Back on the island, Hair used to work at the crab co-op, picking lumps of meat out of sharp-shelled crustaceans. Maybe it doesn't sound like fun to a mainlander, but now -- on guard in a cellblock -- the memory makes her wistful.

"You're sitting there, picking with all the women, and they're laughing, carrying on," she said. "Here . . . it's not very fun. But it's not supposed to be."