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The Other Side of the Badge
Paperback
Publisher Price: $16.99
Publisher: North Country Stories Press
Published: Aug 17 2026
Pages: 204
Weight: 0.56
Height: 0.51 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
For more than two decades, Correction Officer Cal Mercer has walked through prison gates and entered a world most people will never truly understand.
It is a world of steel doors, concrete galleries, radios crackling with emergency calls, and men serving sentences for crimes that range from tragic mistakes to unimaginable violence. It is a place where an ordinary shift can turn dangerous in seconds-and where the officers wearing the uniform learn to depend on one another in ways few outsiders ever see.
Now Cal has just six months left until retirement.
Six months until he can hang up the uniform.
Six months until he can walk through the gates for the last time.
But after so many years inside, leaving may not be as simple as handing over his keys.
Cal has witnessed the realities of prison life at their worst. He has responded to brutal assaults, overdoses, mental-health emergencies, and desperate attempts to save lives. He has seen officers injured and inmates killed. He has stood in the middle of chaos while everyone around him depended on him to remain calm.
A fatal stabbing in the yard. A vicious slashing that leaves an officer requiring more than eighty stitches. Inmates intoxicated on dangerous homemade mixtures. Narcan deployments. Emergency responses. Violence that explodes without warning and then, somehow, becomes just another incident report before the shift is over.
Inside the prison, Cal knows exactly who he is.
He is a correction officer.
He knows the rules. He knows the dangers. He knows the people standing beside him. And when the radio calls for help, he knows what to do.
Outside the walls, things are not nearly as simple.
His wife, Mara, has spent years waiting for him to come home-through mandatory overtime, missed dinners, interrupted holidays, and nights when she had no idea whether the man she loved was simply working late or dealing with another emergency behind the walls. Their children, Maria and Calvin Jr., have grown up around a career that has shaped their family even though they never wore the uniform themselves.
Because prison does not always stay inside the prison.
Sometimes it comes home in silence.
In exhaustion.
In hypervigilance.
In the inability to explain why something that happened during a shift is still running through an officer's mind hours later.
And sometimes the people carrying part of that weight are the ones waiting at home.
As retirement draws closer, Cal begins confronting something he never expected: after spending so much of his life learning how to survive inside the walls, he must figure out who he is without them.
Through brotherhood, family, faith, dark humor, tragedy, and the quiet moments shared by people who understand the weight of the uniform, Cal begins looking beyond his final shift toward a life he nearly forgot was waiting for him.
But first, he has six months left.
And inside a prison, six months is a long time.
The Other Side of the Badge is a raw and emotional novel about the realities of correctional work and the people who carry its weight-both inside and outside the walls. It is a story of danger and brotherhood, trauma and sacrifice, marriage and family, faith and healing, and one veteran officer's journey toward discovering that sometimes the hardest gate to walk through is the final one.
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