On July 28, NJ.com published a story headlined: “N.J. prison officer had sex with inmate who paid lookouts to hide it, feds say.”
What the headline lacked in creativity, it made up for in sensationalism. And as of now more than a dozen outlets have trumpeted the prurient news about CO Jordan Pensak.
Pensak was charged by the U.S. attorney’s office with sexual abuse of a person in federal custody. But, in my mind, “abuse” is a mischaracterization. The fact is that she had consensual sexual encounters with an inmate. What she was actually guilty of was abusing her position of authority, not sex crimes. She exercised extremely poor judgment, demonstrated distasteful ethics, and showed a touch of contempt for the law.
What I find interesting about this case is that the local media is treating the story like big news when, in reality, sexual relationships between prison staff and inmates are extremely common. In fact, there is probably a Jordan Pensak inside every prison in America.
In Mike Tyson’s autobiography Undisputed Truth, he detailed his own trysts and other dealings behind bars— namely, bribery in the form of cash and gifts delivered to his state-employed sexual partner. He described their methods for meeting and carrying out clandestine liaisons for years inside an Indiana state correctional facility.
With about 12 years of incarceration time behind me, I’ve either witnessed or heard countless similar stories. What surprises me is not that this instance happened, but that the government is aggressively prosecuting Pensak for it.
Normally, in my experience, accused staff members are investigated in-house. The suspected parties are separated. The staff member is usually given a different detail—working the visiting room or some other harmless placement—until the investigation concludes. If the officer is found guilty of misconduct, they are fired. Pensak, however, was charged with a crime and is going to court.
I’m no expert, so don’t take what I say as gospel, but it seems to me that Pensak must have really pissed someone off.
How could this happen?
Outsiders might wonder how this could happen. Aren’t prisons among the most secure environments possible? Aren’t there cameras? How could an inmate and a guard get away with this for a day, let alone a year or more?
The answer in the Pensak story will surprise you.
The sprawling, low-security compound of FCI Fort Dix is actually a cluster of buildings. Within each are confined roughly 360 men under the watchful eyes of only one officer. And there’s not a single surveillance camera anywhere inside those buildings, except possibly in the aisle where the counselors’ and unit managers’ offices are.
Your guess is as good as mine regarding why that is. I imagine the administration doesn’t want anyone else seeing what goes down in those buildings. If they did, they’d quickly realize that illicit sexual encounters by a rogue staff member and an inmate are the least of their problems.
Lieutenants at Fort Dix have been accused of beating and even crippling the inmates they are charged with watching. I’ve personally witnessed two such incidents, yet they never made the news. This is not speculation; it’s fact.
Inmates also routinely beat and cripple each other. This doesn’t make the news either.
Cell phones move through these same buildings almost as freely as commissary items. On every floor, paid lookouts stand or sit at their posts. Their job is to signal when a staff member leaves the office or when a compound officer enters the building. The lookouts sound the alarm like meerkats warning of predators approaching, and the warning call reverberates through the building—from lookout to lookout, floor to floor. Pensak and her inmate friend had no need to pay anyone to hide anything, because the lookout system was already operational with or without them. It’s an organized system created to protect inmates’ privacy and property. It existed long before Pensak worked at FCI Fort Dix, and it will exist long after she’s gone.
But the FBI affidavit and news articles make it sound like the lookouts existed for, and were paid by, Pensak and her inmate lover. I find this part of the accusations against them absurd, and obviously false because had they told anyone else what they were doing, the entire prison would have known about it by the next day. As they say in the underworld: the only way two people can keep a secret is if one of them is dead.
Knowing how the Feds operate, I believe the indictment is likely worded the way it is to criminalize what was not a prosecutable act. At least not in the way Pensak was charged.
My time with Pensak
I met Pensak when she worked my building, 5803, on the West Side of FCI Fort Dix.
She looked like Jennifer Grey from Dirty Dancing, if Baby had grown up drinking gas-station coffee and smoking menthol cigarettes. She wore glasses. Her skin had imperfections, and I could tell she didn’t spend a lot of time taking care of her hair because it always looked a little greasy and dingy. Yet, all that aside, she was young and thin and still mildly attractive, especially in that setting.
Although the news media reported that Pensak is 27 years old, she acted like she was still a kid in some ways, as evidenced by her naivety and poor decision-making. As a prison guard, she conducted herself inappropriately almost every time I saw her, regularly patting down inmates she wanted attention from. She seemed to straddle the line between authority and familiarity with inmates, which wasn’t always a bad thing. On her good days, she was friendly and approachable. She seemed more comfortable with us than she was with her fellow staff members.
This was especially observable when she worked outside the mess hall during the lunch and dinner rush hours. While Meal-Team 6 was patting people down looking for suspected apple smugglers to body slam, Pensak usually stood away from the other guards, off somewhere by herself. I got the sense that she rejected what was expected of her and that’s why she separated herself from the rest of Meal-Team 6. This was one of her more admirable qualities, in my eyes—but I’m sure it also further alienated her from her colleagues.
Pensak’s less admirable qualities were on full display at other times in our unit. I can recall her entering our room one day and searching our lockers on a whim while we were lounging in our beds. She smiled and joked and almost flirted with the inmates she was harassing, because she was obviously enjoying herself. As much as we didn’t mind her presence overall, it was still annoying having her invade our personal spaces and go through our shit. So we would ask her what she wanted, and whether we could just give her whatever it was so she would get the fuck out of our room and leave us alone.
Pensak responded that she needed books of stamps (prison currency), and that she was looking for cell phones to confiscate so she could sell them back to us and make some money. Maybe she thought this shit was cute, but we were not amused.
We all knew what she was up to, trying to be like another guard who also searched cells looking for cellphones and stamps (the rules say each person is limited to three books). But the difference was that when the male guard – who we called Silver – did it, he was consistent and fair. We respected him. He used the books of stamps he accumulated to help inmates, not screw them over with their own money. For example, he paid inmates to paint murals on the walls inside the building, making the place look nicer. He gave people a break, a job, a fair shake—that’s how we saw it.
But when Pensak tried to emulate him, it just pissed us off. So we booed and growled with our bad attitudes until she left us alone and went on to find someone else easier to fuck with, because our room just wasn’t into it.
Needless to say, Pensak was the source of a lot of gossip while I was incarcerated at Fort Dix. I didn’t really care for her, but I didn’t mind her presence all that much either. One thing was clear from the beginning, though: We all knew she would crash out eventually.
And that she did.
Who’s really at fault?
What the system didn’t do however, was look too hard at the circumstances that made the whole indictment scenario possible in the first place. One officer. Three hundred and sixty men. No cameras. A lookout system that runs every day whether anyone is having sex in the office or not. Never mind these things, they said, it’s cheaper and easier to ruin a few more lives, and scare the hell out of everybody else.
The BOP could have just fired Pensak, transferred the dude who scored against all odds, and bought some cameras to prevent things like this from happening again. Instead they wrote a federal indictment. They conducted a big investigation and spent a lot of money prosecuting alleged crimes. They publicly shamed a woman who was already a tortured soul when they hired her.
The way this all played out tells you everything you need to know about the federal Bureau of Prisons, and what it actually prioritizes protecting. It’s their own asses, not the individuals in their care.
And the kicker is that Sean “Diddy” Combs is locked up at this same prison right now. If she’d had sex with him, Pensak would be world famous by now.
Pensak was scheduled to appear in federal court last week. The Bureau of Prisons indicated she was still employed at the time of the reporting. The rest is yet to be written.
