There are games inmates play.
That's what Deputy Director Mike Siseros said during media day at the Metropolitan Detention Center on Tuesday.
Capt. Heather Lough has also seen how inmates can disturb the comportment of the guards.
"We had a few guards who had been worked on - getting close to the inmates or giving away too much," she said. "So we started training cadets to be ready for the flattery - to not let them play their inmate con games."
Everyone who works at the center must learn to expect anything from the jail's tenants, she said.
"This population came from a predatory, manipulative culture," she said. "We're trained to recognize it."
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The guards said the most common weapon at an inmate's disposal is sycophancy.
"Entire escapes have been executed by persuasion," said Harry Tipton, the director of the detention center.
Tipton said inmates will sometimes pretend they've made a connection to a guard.
"They'll say, 'You're the only person who talks to me,' and as human beings, we like hearing that," he said.
There are 262 cameras monitoring the jail 24 hours a day, and visitors can only see the inmates by videophone.
Rapid advances in technology have made security less of a problem at the detention center, but it will always be a concern.
"Contraband was an issue, in terms of passing it," Siseros said. "We would find things on babies and stuff like that."
Siseros described an elaborate method to get drugs into the open-roofed recreational areas in some of the jail's holding wings.
"There's a grate at the top of the rec area with little - about one-inch - holes in it," he said. "People outside will fill balloons with heroine or marijuana and shoot them with a slingshot onto the roof."
Five to 10 percent of the drug packs get through the grate.
Inmates will sometimes anticipate their arrest, and, though they are taken straight from the scene of their crime to the booking area, they'll get to their cells with drugs, as one guard put it, "keistered."
"We have inmates clean all areas of this facility, including the lobby," Siseros said. "Sometimes visitors will throw away trash, like a crumpled Burger King bag with drugs in it, knowing who will be cleaning."
More dangerous plots are devised in areas such as the gang unit, a room in which inmates are locked alone in their cells for 23 hours a day and never come into physical contact with each other.
During the guided tour, the guards showed an expansive collection of razor-sharp shanks found all over the different cells.
"They make weapons," said Lough. "They'd pull apart doors and make shanks out of different items."
Lough talked about her own incident with a shank-armed inmate.
"He was behind a door, and when I walked through, he put me in a headlock and put the shank to my throat," she said.
Another guard managed to wrestle her attacker off, she said.
"He was always high-risk," she said. "We knew that, and he wanted to make rank before he was sent off to prison. Later we found out that he was going to kill me, take my keys and go kill another inmate."
