blog 17

Working within a prison is dangerous, not only are you exposed to dangerous people but you are also in danger of contracting disease, your exposed to mental illness and you deal with a great amount of stress due to your job and these dangers specifically. Building any sort of relationship builds trust, the power dynamic in a correctional officer and inmate relationship is almost impossible to build and trust is not something that should be involved in this work situation. The officers talk about how some inmates are experts in constructing weapons out of random items, examples like this make for a good argument that you cannot trust an inmate.
The officers assumed the worst a lot of the time; in the video some female officers used gloves so they wouldn’t have any skin to skin contact. This was for various reasons including sexual arousal and disease. I also think that the lack of enthusiasm or the prominence of negativity is also the conditions in which these officers work. It’s an aggressive, sometimes very unpleasant environment, they are dealing with people who obviously don’t want to be in prison and they are on constant alert. Not to mention prisons themselves are usually dirty, or they have harsh conditions. When explain why they were in corrections a white man, a white woman, and a African American man all had different but similar answers. They stumbled upon it, it had benefits and decent pay plus they didn’t have any other education after high school. Correctional officers are in demand and since they do not have high qualifications it is safe to say that many officers may not be the best fit for prisons.
Hearing that inmates are the ones that actually a help ‘train’ officer is very upsetting, I would suspect that inmates do know how to do the job since they observe it all the time but it says something for the amount of training these officers get. It also says something about the safety they are providing for themselves other employees and even the inmates. The training deals with a lot of physical aspects for the officers, but what many reported was the mental issues they had on the job. Seeing as the job can be tedious or violent any given day they should offer more training in all areas. Also they need to make training more specific and let women know what they are getting themselves into with male and female inmates. Britton mentions that many officers being trained only knew what to expect in male prisons because the women’s prisons are so different, their assumptions were that all prison and prison systems are alike.
Officers of color see more of their race on any given day then a white officer. There seems to be more of solidarity among minorities a feeling of brother/sisterhood so not acknowledging you own race must be extremely difficult. Also seeing an inmate as a human being and not as a dog is hard for some people, it has to be astonishing when inmates show humanity and become a ‘friend’ to an officer. You don’t always want to see people locked up and maybe they even disagree with their sentence depending on their crime but the job is to be something like a care giver. They make sure that the inmates aren’t sick, dying, or hurting one another or themselves. Some talk about the inmates having it too easy some talk about how inmates don’t have enough rights. There isn’t a single mentality of the correctional officers in Britton’s book because in different prisons there are different standards and different guidelines. Different officers of different races have mixed feelings, not so much based on just race or their race but differences in the crimes and the individual inmate. Which looking at people as individuals even inmates is helpful in the long run because an officer can determine what that inmate needs and how much of a risk they are to the prison and to the officer. Correctional officers, have a lot going on not only physically and dealing with convicts but how to determine what is appropriate when it comes to interaction with the inmates both male and female. They aren’t necessarily trained well, but they learn along the way which can be expected to a certain degree. Mentally this job is exhausting because of the constant stress, influx of prisoners, and changing technology.