The story is much the same in Michigan. Since 2001, the MDOC has gone from 41 facilities to 26. The changes to the psychiatric care in prisons has not been good. In the mid 2000’s one of our maximum security blocks was changed to inpatient psychiatric. Although not officially, another of our max security blocks was effectively turned into a step-down unit for the psych block. Inpatient prisoners were sent to the max security block when they got “better”. That was a revolving door. Many of those prisoners were sent back to the psych unit fairly quickly after they became assaultive or self injurious. On a couple of occasions I had to drag attempted suicides out of their cells covered in their blood. The general response to dealing with the more unmanageable psych prisoners was keep them so pumped full of drugs they were zombies. I got out in 2019 after 25 years. I miss the staff. But not the job.😉
CC
Ditto here. I'm still friends with a woman I met when I first started the job at Auburn prison. She'd been there not quite a year before me. She's about 10 years younger than me, and retired as a Lieutenant. At Auburn, I was one female in a group of 11, ten being men who were sent to the prison in the aftermath of the State-wide strike in 1979. Hiring more staff was part of the contract negotiations after the strike ended. We'd all taken the Civil Service test for C.O. a few years prior. They called us up in the early part of September 1980, and asked if we'd be willing to go to a facility first, and go to the academy later. I took the chance, and even had the choice of prisons I could go to. I chose Auburn because it was only a couple of hours from where I was then living. Moved myself and my two sons there not long after. We had one week's training up front...paperwork, report righting, rules and regs, blah, blah, blah. Then we had a week on the job training with another officer. That's when I met Carol. That next week we got tossed to the dogs. We were on our own...being paid trainee wages for 6 months. We finally got to go to the academy 10 months later. That's where we received our weapons training which we had to qualify for, in order to pass the academy, get our badges and become Peace Officers. I stayed at Auburn until December 1980 when Mid-State was getting ready to open. Our first inmates came in February. Our box wasn't even finished so for disciplinary, we had to lock inmates in empty classrooms and have a 24 hour a day guard outside. We didn't even have an actual visiting room, but of course inmates were entitled to visits on the weekend. There weren't even vending machines back then. We used to have to go around and ask the visitors if they wanted to order food from a local pizza place. A couple of officers would take the orders, and money, call in the order, go pick it up, and distribute it all to the visitors. What a joke that was.
I meet my old friend Carol and her husband every other month at the casino near me for lunch. They're currently on a bus tour of Ireland. They've been all over the world God bless them, Australia, Macho Picchu, even Easter Island, and the Galapagos Islands. Three sons and 6 grandchildren that keep them busy.
I rarely see anyone I worked with anymore. This past June, my closet friend Joann of 40+ years passed. I went to her service and her kids had a nice reception afterward. I was sitting at the table with her husband, her husband's twin sister, and some other family friends, when I see this big guy make his way to me. I recognized him right away. I first met Scott when he was in high school, and hung around with my friend's son Paul. Scott later became a Correctional Officer, and then a Sergeant like me at Mid-State, and retired from there. I hadn't seen him since I retired. I was shocked to see him. He made a bee-line for me, hugged me and kissed me on the cheek. It was such a nice surprise. My friend's son Paul told me afterward that when Scott entered the building, he grabbed him and said "Is she(meaning me) here??? I have to see her first. I'm not doing anything else until I see her." It made me feel so good to know that after all those years, someone I had worked with, thought that much of me to seek me out. I always tried to be an Officer's Sergeant, never forgetting that blue shirt I first wore, and backed the officers up each and every time, because the prison administrators sure as hell weren't going to. Not patting myself on the back, but I had male officers on the afternoon shift, on which I was the senior Sergeant, tell me that they would rather work with me than any of the male Sergeants, because I always backed them up, and the male Sergeants regularly second-guessed and overturned those officer's orders.