From Shanks to Handshakes
The Pull Up Podcast | Season 1, Episode 9 — from shanks to handshakes
That's not normal. Nobody in corrections would have called that normal two years ago at Jefferson City Correctional Center.
That's exactly the point.
Episode 9 of The Pull Up Podcast is a late-night conversation — Bo Cornelius, Gary, JD, and CERT Team Captain Justin Davison, sitting outside Housing Unit 2 at three in the morning — about how one maximum-security prison has gone from beanbag shotguns at every chow line to something that looks, cautiously and genuinely, like trust.
It's not a feel-good story. It's a complicated one. And it starts with a man pulling a shank through a chuck hole for graham crackers.
Day One: Don't Shake Their Hands, Don't Ask How Their Day Is
Captain Davison's first shift at JCCC looked like most people's first shift in corrections. He was late because he didn't understand the schedule. He fell asleep standing up in the dining room by shift two. He went home and told his wife he wasn't sure he wanted to do this.
What he was told when he walked in: no handshakes. No fist bumps. Don't ask how their day is. That's weakness.
He followed it. He didn't know anything else yet.
The moment that started to crack that open came during his first week on OJT. A man in B-wing asked for graham crackers — "grams" — and Davison, not knowing the lingo, went to the sergeant, figured it out, and came back with them. He opened the chuck hole.
An arm came out holding a knife.
The man wanted his crackers. The knife was how he knew to make sure he got them — or how he made sure Davison wasn't going to do something else first. Davison didn't panic. He told the man to put it back and step away from the door, and he'd slide the crackers in.
The man did. Davison closed the slider and kept moving.
He thought that was normal. He thought that's just how prison was.
What he didn't understand yet — what takes years and attention and humility to understand — is that a man who holds a knife through a food slot for graham crackers isn't an animal. He's a man whose interactions with authority have so consistently ended in humiliation, deception, or violence that a weapon is his most reliable equalizer. He was sweet as pie standing in front of that window, Davison says. The knife was his insurance.
That's not insanity. That's learned behavior. And the environment taught it to him.
When Dignity Is Gone, Violence Is What's Left
Bo watched a man die on a prison floor early in his sentence. What shook him wasn't the death. It was the 150 men immediately moving toward the dead man's locker.
People don't wake up deciding to loot a man's belongings while he's dying. They get to a place — slowly, through accumulated deprivation and dehumanization — where that becomes a rational move in an environment that has stripped everything else from them. When you have nothing and no one treats you like you have anything worth protecting, you take what you can when you can.
Gary names it plainly: he learned at nine years old that violence worked. Something was happening to him, he committed a violent act, and it stopped. That lesson went in deep. When he got to prison and found the same dynamic — staff on top, residents beneath, compliance enforced through threat — he had a ready-made response. The only way up was the way he already knew.
He also says something harder: he wanted to be treated like a person, but he wasn't treating staff like people either. Because they wore a badge, he'd preloaded them as the enemy. He wasn't giving them the benefit of the doubt he wanted for himself.
That realization didn't come from a program. It came from GLA — from sitting in a room with staff long enough to see them as people having bad days, not representatives of a system designed to crush him.
The Benefit of the Doubt Has to Go Both Ways
One of the episode's sharpest moments is a simple exchange between Gary and Bo about what changed.
Gary spent over two decades in prison convinced that how he was treated was intentional — that it was policy, that it was calculated to dehumanize. After GLA, after real conversations with people at different levels of the institution, he came to understand something different: most of the people running corrections have never done time. They don't know what it's like. That's not an excuse. But it's not malice either.
And if he wanted to be seen as more than the worst thing he'd ever done, he had to extend the same possibility to a CO who walked into a housing unit in a bad mood. Maybe it's just a bad day. Maybe it has nothing to do with him.
Now, Gary says, he can walk up to a staff member and say: You're being weird today. You're not your normal self. You all right?
That sentence — an incarcerated man checking in on a correctional officer — is either completely unremarkable or the most significant thing in this episode, depending on where you're standing.
Emotional Intelligence Is What Stops a Use-of-Force Before It Starts
Davison doesn't traffic in the myth that good intentions are enough. He has a framework.
After a use-of-force — after the situation is already over — he goes and talks to the person who escalated it. Not to discipline. To understand. What happened? Did something else go on that I don't know about? Are you having a bad day? Did you lose somebody?
More often than not, the person tells him. And more often than not, it traces back to something that had nothing to do with the immediate incident — a family loss, a history with a particular officer's tone, a button that got pushed that nobody knew was there.
He describes learning to humanize through crisis negotiation training — imagining he's talking to his son or daughter when he's trying to reach someone in crisis. He needed to get a particular tone in his voice, he says, something that would come through even on a phone when he couldn't see body language. Imagining he was talking to someone he loved was what got him there.
Then he took it off the phone and applied it everywhere.
The result: 90% of the time, he can de-escalate a situation by shutting his mouth and letting someone vent. Not agreeing. Not dismissing. Just listening, validating that he can understand why someone would feel the way they're feeling, and then finding shared ground before he has to deliver news that nobody wants to hear.
JD adds the institutional dimension: once something gets labeled "behavioral," the original complaint disappears. The legitimate grievance — the thing that might have been addressable — gets buried under the incident. Nobody's looking for root causes anymore. They're managing consequences.
The shift Davison represents is catching the thing before it becomes behavioral. Hearing it when it's still just a man who's frustrated and wants to be heard.
Who Went First? GLA Created the Conditions for Both Sides to Try
The episode circles back to a question that doesn't have a clean answer: who moved first?
Gary and JD talk about the early GLA sessions with wariness. After years of bad history with a particular major, they were checking with each other after every meeting: Is he really on this? This doesn't seem like him. By the end, they were certain. He was all the way in.
What GLA created wasn't automatic trust. It created a structure where trust could be tested and proven over time. Staff said they were going to do certain things. They did them. Incarcerated men said they were going to do certain things. They did them. A year and a half in, both sides had a track record.
Davison describes the stigma he had to dismantle on his own side — the reputation as the captain who'd lock you up and destroy your stuff. He did it through empathy, through humility, through consistent behavior that didn't require him to announce his rank or his capability. Arrogance requires advertising, he says. Confidence speaks for itself.
Gary watched him give praise constantly and consistently — noticing when someone was doing the right thing and saying it out loud. Not in a performative way. Just: I see you. I see you doing what you're supposed to be doing. That's how you build a culture. Not through the threat of consequences. Through the recognition of effort.
The Beanbag Era Wasn't That Long Ago
2021 and 2022 at JCCC. Guards every ten feet in the chow line, carrying beanbag shotguns and 40-millimeter launchers. Two-on-two fights breaking out at the ball field while Davison was spraying and couldn't reach anyone. Flashbangs thrown into wings to restore order.
That was three years ago.
Gary describes multiple incidents in the same period that were stopped before they started — because there were now people with the standing and the trust to walk into a situation and say: Bo thinks JD said one thing. JD thinks Bo said another. Neither of them is right. Let's settle this. The fight never happened. Nobody filed a report. Nobody got sent to ad-seg. Nothing showed up in the data.
That's the invisible work of culture change. It doesn't generate incident reports. It generates the absence of incident reports.
The softball games and small social interactions that the episode's later chapters reference are the same principle at scale: when staff and residents are allowed — encouraged — to have normal human interactions, the social permission for violence shrinks. Not because people become different. Because the environment stops rewarding the worst options.
What's Next for the pull up
The Pull Up is expanding. Davison's trip to another facility to help establish GLA there is already happening. The conversation recorded at three in the morning is proof that the culture at JCCC has shifted enough to make that conversation normal — and the goal is to make it normal in more places.
If you're inside a facility and want to bring the GLA model to your institution, reach out through official channels: have your warden, chaplain, or activities coordinator contact Second Mountain Leadership or Our Daily Bread Ministries directly.
The Pull Up Podcast is produced by Second Mountain Leadership in partnership with Our Daily Bread Ministries, with production by Golden Eagle Creative. New episodes explore prison culture change, correctional leadership, and what trust between staff and incarcerated people actually looks like when it's real. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.