On the morning of 28 November 1994, Jeffrey Dahmer was assigned to clean a bathroom in the gymnasium at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin. He had held the janitorial job for about three weeks.
He did not come back from it.
Apart
When Jeffrey arrived at Columbia in 1992, officials did not place him among the general population. He was held in administrative confinement: a cell of eight feet by ten, in a unit of about forty inmates, with work in the mornings, meals with a small group, and the rest of the day alone. His days were narrow. By 1994 he was allowed to mix with other prisoners, though he was housed alone in his cell, at his own request.
In that context, a work assignment was not a small thing. It meant a reason to leave the cell, a place to be at a certain hour, and contact with other people. By the standards of his sentence, it was close to ordinary life.
The evaluations
Prison work is graded. An officer scores attitude, effort and performance, and the numbers go into a file. According to the AP report, an incident report written on 16 October 1993 noted that Jeffrey had scored unsatisfactory totals on his last two monthly evaluations. It was signed by a corrections officer, Mike Rickey. When Rickey first raised the record with him, Jeffrey replied: “I don’t care if you give me all zeros, I have a lot of time to do it.”
Then, according to the report, he took his copy of the evaluation, erased the numbers and gave himself all zeros. In the space for staff comments he wrote a crude suggestion that he be let out for a day to visit a brothel in Chicago, and signed it with Rickey’s name.
Rickey asked him why he did not simply quit, since his work records were so poor. Jeffrey answered: “I have nothing else to do. I have over 900 years to do.”
It is easy to read the prank as contempt. It can also be read as the only control he had over a grade that could change nothing. He could not improve the score, so he rewrote it. The answer to Rickey’s question is not a joke. A man serving life sentences is not working toward a promotion, and the job was one of the few parts of the day that was not the cell.
The room
The attack came shortly after 8 a.m. Jeffrey and two other inmates, Christopher Scarver and Jesse Anderson, had been sent to the gym to clean. Jeffrey was found badly beaten in one of the recreation area’s bathrooms. He died at 9:11 a.m., on the way to Divine Savior Hospital. Anderson died two days later.
The job that gave Jeffrey contact with the world is the same job that put him in that room, with those men.
What the paper leaves
The record of his work is a record of zeros, one crude joke, and a man who said he had nothing else to do. It says very little about what the work meant to him.
What we know is small: three weeks, a mop, a bathroom floor.
Sources: Associated Press, “Dahmer not always model inmate, released records reveal” (Madison, Wis., December 1994); UPI, 28 November 1994 (“Dahmer killed in prison”); Deseret News, 23 July 1992 (“Dahmer slowly settling into life behind bars”).
