There was reportedly a murder in January at California’s High Desert State Prison. And another in February. And another in July. There was also reportedly a riot there in April.
“It can be dangerous, but I don’t look at it that way,” Dennis Hurd said recently over the phone.
Hurd, a 1985 Warwick graduate, has served as a corrections officer at High Desert – a maximum-security prison located in Susanville, in the remote northeast part of the state – for 17 years. The one-time Warriors basketball star (and older brother of Jack Hurd, one of the best to ever play in Lancaster County) knows the lay of the land. Knows what to say, and what not to say. Knows that you have to keep “your head on a swivel.”
“It sounds crazy, but you get used to it,” he said of the violence. “It doesn’t happen to me. … They don’t come after us. They go after each other.”
There’s a reason for that, he believes.
“We’ve got a cowboy reputation for shooting a lot,” he said of himself and his fellow COs. “They know we’re not going to let things happen.”
Hurd turns 55 in November, and because of his experience he said he tends to get “pretty good jobs” within the prison. As an example, he mentioned that he sometimes works in one of the towers at High Desert, which once housed 3,700 inmates but according to Hurd now holds fewer than 2,000, following the release of hundreds of nonviolent offenders. (Another prison in town, a minimum-security facility called the California Correctional Center, has been designated for closure, though that is the subject of considerable debate.)
He said the COs who work the yard have to endure “more nightmarish things,” and that only once did an inmate come after him. It happened about a decade ago, by his recollection. He was walking the guy, a member of the Los Angeles Crips who fancied himself a rapper, across the yard. The guy was in fact freestyling, and Hurd was admittedly impressed.
“The next thing I knew, a fist was coming at me,” he said. “I was shocked. We rolled around a little. I let (other officers) take him. They were able to keep him away.”
While he has gone relatively unscathed, the question arises as to why he decided to put himself in harm’s way in 2005 – why he assumed a position as challenging as this one. By that point in his life he had been in California for 16 years, having gone out to visit his sister right before the 1989 earthquake ravaged San Francisco, only to discover that he liked it there. He bounced between jobs for an extended period. Security at Candlestick Park. Pedi-cab driver. Commercial fisherman, catching prawns off the Cali coast and salmon off the coast of Alaska. Group-home worker, in a facility for troubled teens.
Then he thought about becoming a California Highway Patrolman, only to be told that at 38 he was too old. (There was also the matter of the speeding ticket he had received for going 90 on his motorcycle.) So corrections it was.
“Money’s involved,” he said. “It’s good money. It’s a job I don’t hate to go to. It doesn’t get boring.”
Hurd, a married father of a seven-year-old son, did admit that there are slow days on occasion, but he likes to read, even if that presents challenges unto itself. He was once diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder, and has always had trouble absorbing the written word.
“Especially nonfiction,” he said.
At one point in his younger years he was prescribed medication for ADD – he can’t remember the name, but knows it wasn’t Ritalin – though eventually he stopped taking it because it made him feel loopy.
He has other reasons for giving up basketball.
“I’m fat,” he said. “I’m 300 pounds right now.”
Hurd, who stands 6-4, was part of a District Three championship team his junior year at Warwick, and an All-Section Two performer as a senior. He keeps in touch with some of his high school teammates – guys like Lance Wagner, Brock Barnett and Dave Sensenig – and occasionally gets back East, whether to stop off in Lititz or to visit with Jack and his family in Collegeville.
Jack, now 52 and the human resources director for the Montgomery County Intermediate Unit, called Dennis his “hero” in a phone conversation earlier this summer. Dennis fairly scoffed at that, but when they lived in Lancaster as kids Dennis would always include Jack, always bring him along to the playground and the like.
“I was always grateful for him,” Jack said.
Later, when the family settled in Lititz, Dennis gave him something to shoot for, as he was part of a long stretch of strong teams coached by Dave Althouse.
Jack was something of a late bloomer. He was a 5-7 player-manager on the middle-school team as a seventh-grader, a kid so smitten with the Big Five that he fashioned the No. 54 of Villanova’s Ed Pinckney out of tape and affixed it the back of his practice shirt. But as he began to grow – he would shoot up to 6-1 by eighth grade – his life was turned topsy-turvy. His parents were in the throes of a divorce, and he was “kind of being an idiot, getting myself in trouble,” as he put it.
Althouse, who by then was also the athletic director, began huddling with him in his office after school.
“We’d talk about basketball, talk about life,” Jack said. “When I look at it, it was probably a time in my life when I was at a fork in the road.”
“I knew he was having a tough time,” Althouse said recently. “His Dad and Mom split. I knew he needed attention, more than anything. That’s all it was. I was willing to take some time with him. There wasn’t a lot that was said. I just knew he needed help. I didn’t know how else I could help him at that point.”
By ninth grade, Hurd’s game had reached the point where, he said, “I wasn’t scared of anybody, basketball-wise.” He kept on growing – he would top out at 6-6 – and kept developing. Althouse said he “might have been the most intelligent player I ever coached.” Also one of the most competitive. Night after night, he found a way, no matter the challenges.
Consider, for instance, that Manheim Township coach Pat Mowrey, after seeing Hurd torch his team for 29 points in the 1987 Lancaster-Lebanon League championship game, deployed his team in a triangle-and-two – with two defenders on Hurd – when the two teams met again in the final a year later. Hurd nonetheless scored 18, and Warwick pulled out a 47-42 victory to repeat as champs.
Hurd finished his career with 2,160 points, still the fourth-highest total in league history, before heading off to LaSalle, where he was a four-year starter. Dennis, who had played at Stevens Tech out of high school, was just settling in out West right about then. And when Jack played in a tournament in Portland while in college, Dennis was only too happy to hitch-hike up there from San Francisco to see his brother. The bond was that strong, and remains so.
But Dennis was always looking for something different, always looking for something new. Eventually that took him to Susanville, and High Desert. To a job that’s definitely not for everyone. He often works 16-hour days, from 10 p.m. to 2 p.m., but always goes about his duties with eyes wide open.
“You just know how to deal with inmates,” he said. “You just act professionally – be professional, not act. It’s how you talk to them.”
Also how you carry yourself. And how you look at things. Especially that.