he gates of a jailhouse are rarely opened for press tours; the average citizen will never wear a prison uniform; and the correction officers, wary of being stereotyped as brutes or simply misunderstood, are often vague about the details of their working lives.

So to hear Daryl Letsome talk about the nearly 21 years he spent as a correction officer in New York City, which operates the largest penal colony in the country at Rikers Island, is like watching a spotlight illuminate a darkened patch of ground.

Mr. Letsome, 46, is a correction-sized man, a firm 6-foot-4, who worked at Rikers Island and the Bernard B. Kerik Complex in Manhattan, more commonly known as the Tombs, before retiring last year. He describes a rule-driven environment quite different from Abu Ghraib, the prison near Baghdad where American soldiers abused Iraqi inmates.

As in all prisons, the complicated guard-inmate relationship is the central one. "Every day the balance of power seems to be slightly reset," said Ted Conover, who wrote the book "Newjack," about his experience as a correction officer at Sing Sing in Ossining, N.Y. "Somebody will gain a little and lose a little." The other day at a Midtown diner, Mr. Letsome, who lives in Upper Manhattan, talked about how this power struggle played out for him, about his sometimes grueling work and about being a controlling force without losing control.

I STARTED as a guard on Rikers Island in 1982. I worked in C-74, which was a facility used to hold adolescent offenders. My feeling was always, I'm here to do a job. I was not the judge. I was not the jury. A lot of these guys were detainees. I tried to put myself in their situation. Suppose I was mistakenly locked up. How would I feel?

Most inmates, if you give them a small degree of respect, they will respect you. About 2 percent are nasty and disruptive. They take kindness for weakness. You can always pick out the trouble inmates. You can tell by their conversation or by their mood. Maybe they're saying: "Yo, I'm innocent. That guard better not mess with me, man."

Our training was held on Rikers Island. It was a three-week course. It's a seven-week course now. There was physical training and legal training about the rights of inmates. They told us we could only use physical force to protect ourselves, a fellow officer or an inmate. The rule was to try to defuse the problem with your brain.

If a guy steps out of line, you speak in commands. "Hold the noise down." "I'm warning you, step away from that guy." If two inmates get into a fight, you're not supposed to get involved until you have to. The department doesn't want you involved in any physical interaction with the inmates. If you break a leg or get your jawbone broke, how are you going to explain that?

It's very hard to hold back in certain situations. Let's say you respond to a call where an inmate has physically assaulted an officer. You've spent the last eight years working with this guy. Your families know each other. And now you see him on the floor bleeding. That's a situation where a supervisor may not reprimand you for using force.

At Rikers, I worked all over - in housing areas, dorms, the Bing, which is for high-risk inmates. In a housing area, one officer watches 30 to 35 guys. You sit and guard the inmates while they watch TV. It can be intimidating at first to be left alone with 35 guys who you don't know very well, but you become used to that confinement.

One of the scariest moments as a guard is when you see an inmate with a homemade weapon. They sharpen steel to make knives. Early on in my career, we had an incident in C-74. One inmate stabbed another inmate. To see the blood and mutilation was difficult. I was part of the response team. You're equipped with a helmet and a baton. Most prisoners will stop fighting once they see the response team.

I anticipated this job being hard. But being young and from Harlem and having street smarts, I wasn't that concerned. The job is stressful because of the environment. At Rikers, if there was a red alert, no one could leave the island. Let's say you've worked all day and you're getting ready to go home and there's a lockdown. You don't leave. That happened two or three times. At lunchtime, you can't go outside to eat. As a correction officer, you have to know how to interact with the inmates. The inmates are dependent on the guards. "C.O., can I get into my cell?" "C.O., can I use the phone?" They have no other alternative.

The public perception of a C.O. is very negative. People think you're a tormentor. Newspaper articles call you a jail guard. The public thinks all you do is turn a key. But you're dealing with people that have different mind-sets than yours and they're confined. You have to handle all those personalities just to get through the day, and in the city jails, the inmate population is always changing.

I found a lot of the inmates weren't bad guys if you got them one on one. It's when you put them in a group they become dangerous. My demeanor is one where I don't let things bother me too much. I'm easygoing. My wife said the job changed me to where I always need to be in control.

When I saw the difference in the Tombs, I said this is where I want to be. It was like night and day compared to Rikers. In the borough jails, there seem to be fewer incidents than on the island. On the island, if it's 90 degrees in the summertime, there's no way to alleviate the heat. The Tombs has air-conditioning. And if a visitor wants to see an inmate on Rikers, they have to go through Queens, cross a bridge, go through security checks, then take a bus on the island to the specific facility. Some family members won't even bother with the hassle. At the Tombs, visitors walk right off the street. If I'm an inmate, I want to be in the Tombs. When I got there, I felt like I was already retired.

As told to Steven Kurutz

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