Bob Walsh
Stockton, CA
Male, 60
I worked for the California state system, starting as a Correctional Officer and retiring as a Lieutenant in 2005. I now write for the PacoVilla blog which is concerned with what could broadly be called The Correctional System.
Sorry. Question is so general it makes no sense to me. Good and bad? Male and Female? Smart and Stupid? Young or old?
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My current title is RETIRED. I worked for the California Dept. of Corrections. It's purpose was to incarcerate persons committed to it by court action for the period of time prescribed by law.
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it depends a huge amount of the jurisdiction. in California now parole is virtually automatic. they are trying to reduce sentences. in some states they are very snotty about it, especially depending on the offense and record of priors.
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I have no idea. I have never worked a women's prison. Unless there was a serious security issue I expect it would not be necessarily or desirable, but for all I know there is some specific regulation about it. The only thing I know for sure (and it may have changed since I retired) was that, even if the birth takes place at the prison, the birth certificate does NOT say State Prison as place of birth.
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Air Traffic Controller
What was it like in the tower on 9/11?
Border Patrol Agent
How easy is it to forge a US passport?
Private Detective
Has anyone ever caught you surveilling them, and what happened?
The chances that the police even responded to your noise complaint are almost zero in most towns, so they don't care one way or the other. If you make a LOT of complaints and they mostly turn out to be bogus the cops might be irritated but under the circumstances I am completely competent that the local cops couldn't care less. (My expertise here comes from being the guy making the complaints and not the guy responding to them.)
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Least enjoyable aspect of the job was people on occasion trying to kill me. Most enjoyable was general job satisfaction coming from doing a job that I was good at and that had social relevance and importance. Pay started at about $1,000 per month, but that was 35 years ago.
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It is hard to say what stresses one person and not another. I never had a staff member murdered on the job in all the time I was there. I did have staff members die. I had to tell staff that family members had died. I had to tell inmates that family members died, and tell family members that inmates died, often violently. I had inmates I got along wel with murdered, at least once by mistaken identity of having gotten in the way of something that was going on.
For some people the on-going stress, not immediate situation stress, is what gets to them. When the alarm goes off you don't know if it is a false alarm or someone has just gotten murdered. At the end of shift and you really want to go home you can't, because some butthead called in sick so he could watch the game. (That happened to me on Y2K when a couple of guys that had been prescheduled to come it simply didn't show.)
Sometimes the stressors are from above, from management. I had one boss who I truly beleive was deliberately trying to get me hurt to force me out of the job. I had one or two others who were lazy and/or incompetent. One or two that were just plain nasty for no reason. I was screwed with repeatedly on promotional opportunities, little things like mailing my interview notice to a "mistaken" zip code in Saskatchewan so I got it after my interview date. Once I showed up for a promotion interview 12 minutes early and I was ordered to leave as I was "too early" or I would be arrested for trespassing. Really. You get used to the inmates trying to screw you over. Its expected. You don't get used to staff trying to screw you over.
Soledad was a very violent place at that time. People trying to kill you just because you are there can mess with your head.
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