Sergeant Furman Camel at North Carolina’s Polk Youth Institution.

Polk Youth Institution in Butner, North Carolina is a prison for young men between the ages of 19-25.  For our series Prison Diaries, I gave tape recorders to a handful of inmates at Polk to tell the story of life behind bars.  After visiting the prison for a few months, I realized I had been overlooking the stories of the guards. Pretty much every guard I talked to said they serve time too – in eight hour shifts. In this episode of the Radio Diaries Podcast, listen to their audio diaries.

Radio Diaries is part of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of the best story-driven podcasts on the planet. This week’s episode is sponsored by The Great Courses.