Stupid questions you hear in prison

haha.............
the inmate/co relationship is something that no one on the outside can really get...............my colleague who started this thread was making light of some of these issues we deal with daily, but for outsiders it is hard to wrap your head around.

For example, last night I watched an inmate die, and was annoyed because I had just heated up my food, and now it was going to get cold. You can't work in a prison and view inmates as people, if you do, you don't belong there. They are to us as corn is to a farmer. Its how you make your money, and nothing more.

Really?

Wow. I'm not sure I have words...

There was more before this story, I edited down to the part that was just a little harsh. I can't imagine that viewing people as anything but people is okay.

Then you obviously wouldn't be cut out for that line of work...............

what it comes down to is its true, not everyone is cut out for this line of work. There are times when people break down and start to care, its human... and the inmates thrive on this, because if you show any weakness, showing you are human, they take advantage of it. So if you wish to call us heartless for the way we feel, do it, but it is our "heartlessness" that keeps us from being manipulated. It is that "heartlessness" that keeps these inmates in line. The same "human" that some of you are trying to defend is the same POS that raped a 4 year old. That kidnapped a 9 year old, kept her in the trunk of his car for 2 weeks and fed her one happy meal in that period of time, yet he raped her numerous times. the same sicko that adopted a 5 year old girl from Russia and raped her from 5 till 17 when she finally told someone about it. If you wish to help save these people and defend them, then I hope to all that is Holy that you do not have any children of your own. So yes, I can sit right next to a person and watch them die and not feel anything, I can sit and watch them suffer in pain and not care for the life of me. Its how I am, and for that, I deal with it. I am a Correctional Officer, its not my job to care about these "Humans" as you call them, its my job to make sure they do not escape and rape another child.

thank you but sadly, some people will never understand what we go through.
The following is an article in the Arizona Republic Newspaper (Jan. 20, 2004).

A printed correction in name of 'officers'

Jan. 20, 2004 12:00 AM


The people whom most of us still call "prison guards" became "corrections officers" to me back in 1997, when I watched the 3-year-old son of Officer Brent Lumley follow his father's casket into Apostles Lutheran Church in Peoria.

Before that I looked at the men and women who patrolled our prisons as occupying a place on the law enforcement scale somewhere between mall security personnel and parking lot attendants.

The former director of the state Department of Corrections, Terry L. Stewart, once wrote an angry letter to the editor of The Arizona Republic that read in part, "The only group that fails to recognize and embrace the professional function of correctional officers, that seems to believe there is some difference between law enforcement officers and correctional officers, is the media, which insist on referring to correctional officers as guards."

There is something about a thin-skinned bureaucrat that hacks like me can't resist. I asked Stewart in print if he also thought that we should called lifeguards "water safety specialists or human preservation officers?" Or if we should call crossing guards "early morning traffic flow disruption officers?"

The gag gets considerably less funny when a corrections officer is killed on duty, however, as happened to 33-year-old Lumley. Or when a couple of officers are taken hostage, as happened early Sunday morning at the state prison complex outside of Buckeye.

When that occurs we are forced to look at just how much we ask of the people who work in the corrections business and how little we give them in return. The Lewis complex, like just about every other prison in Arizona, is overcrowded and understaffed. For years, politicians have gotten themselves elected by promising to be tougher on criminals. Actually, they were only being tougher on corrections officers.

Sentences went up but not the pay scale of officers. And not the number of officers hired to control the rising prison population.

As Sgt. Joe Masella, president of the Arizona Correctional Peace Officers Association, said Sunday night, "People are applying for this job who shouldn't be working at Sonic burger joints, and are being hired by the Department of Corrections because of low pay. You get what you pay for."

No one goes into law enforcement to get rich. But I can't help but believe that we all would be a lot more focused on a hostage situation that involved two Phoenix police officers, two Department of Public Safety officers or two sheriff's deputies.

It isn't only because we hold those officers in higher regard, but also because a hostage situation that is contained inside a prison, as happened at Lewis, doesn't put any of us at risk. That's something to be remembered. While Corrections officials try to figure out what kind of security breakdown led to the officers being taken hostage, the fact is that the understaffed, underpaid and perhaps undertrained officers kept the trouble from spreading and prevented any of the inmates from getting out. From getting at us.

The reason we don't spend a lot of time thinking about prison issues is because there are so few major incidents at our prisons.

Maybe it takes a hostage incident or some other tragedy to remind us of the service provided to us by the people who work behind the barbed wire. Most of them without weapons. Most of them among our most dangerous criminals, day in and day out.

My guess is that your long holiday weekend was interrupted hardly at all by the hostage situation at Lewis. The local TV news didn't break into the National Football League championship games to provide us with regular updates. There were no scenes of candlelight vigils or midnight prayer services.

Nor did anyone within the law enforcement family ask for such a thing. Although I did have one request from a prison employee waiting for me on my answering machine Monday morning.

"In addition to praying for the hostages and their families," the man said, "I was wondering if you could take a moment to remind folks that we're not prison guards. We're corrections officers." Done.