Gonna have to take issue with you on this, hostile. I am a career corrections professional. Some people don't care about their job, but most do. It's very difficult dealing with criminals day after day. It's the one place where paranoia is a job skill. Trust only your fellow C/O's and SOME supervisors, the rest will play you in a heartbeat, yes even some supervisors and administration. I get really sick of the dime store novel characterization of the Corrections officer as a neanderthal brutalizer of men. Let's pretend that you're a police officer on the street. now take away the gun, and the car, and everything but your uniform, keys, set of cuffs, a radio or a body alarm. Now the average street officer has a Roughly 1 in 5 chance of running into a felon out on the street in a given day. Inside make that 5 in 5 ... times 100, or 200. Now your jobs include, but are not limited to paperwork, data entry, access control, supervision of prisoner workers, keeping accurate counts,counseling prisoners, determining need and providing access to medical/dental/psychiatric services,controlling prisoner property, and controlling the introduction and spread of contraband, handling of inservice requirements, fire , health and safety codes for both prisoners and staff. Now imagine that you and one other officer is doing this for between 200 and 300 prisoners at a time for between 8 and 16 hours at a time (did I mention that there is a hiring freeze, and you are REQUIRED to work over 1 to 2 times a week?). I am not complaining, I am explaining. I know what I got into when I took the oath, and I accept it every day I put on my badge. I just want to dispel the notion that We are uncaring knuckle draggers. the fact is We are attempting to manage a group of people who don't want to be managed, and whose internal discipline is faulty or nonexistent. What do you get with a group like that? Chaos, in 3D and technicolor. Secondly, corrections is the "out of sight, out of mind " branch of government service. The only time you hear ANYTHING about corrections is when A: the legislature wants to build a prison in a community, which is when you get a reaction somewhat akin to the townspeople in the last reel of "frankenstein", or B: when the "feces" has hit the "rotary cooling device" somewhere. you will never see a headline that says "At xyz correctional facility today, absolutely nothing happened ". But due to the hard work of your correctional services, that's what happens most of the time. Gee, could it be the sensationalistic, lurid nature of prison stories that makes the MSM report it?. The same MSM, people that We turn the gimlet eye to for virtually everything else?. but a prison story gets put up , and it's "those lazy A**H*LE prison workers are letting a awful lot of stuff happening in there!". Do bad things happen in prison ? yes. Is it as bad as The MSM make it ? sometimes,Usually not. Do the MSM exaggerate or outright *lie* to sell papers sometimes? Well, they do about everything else, why not prisons? . Believe what you will about prisons, but please apply the same skepticism to prison stories as we do to other MSM stories on this site on a daily basis. And those of us in the "red headed step- child of law enforcement"(aka corrections) will still proudly serve the citizens of our country to the best of our ability.
FWIW,
CC
Thanks for your input and for the work that you do. I do not want to insult your profession--I really do think a few bad apples in a few spots can make it bad for everyone. I know I couldn't do your job.
I had a problem with the way that the appeals process was handled with this guy who knew he had a problem and complained about it. That's just one part of the whole system.