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.
I have been in the middle of a couple of full-fledged riots. That is very scary. Even if you are not a specific target it is completely possible to get hurt. I was't, but it was still scary.
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Very few humans are willing to blame their own problems, or the problems of their family, on themselves. Therefore they blame others, or forces beyond their control, to avoid taking responsibility for their own actions. It is human nature. Humans are funny critters.
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That is a good question and the issue is very much in flux right now, especially now that the courts are getting involved more and more. Under the old rules, at least in CA. it was simple. If your birth certificate said MALE and you had a penis you went to a male prison. Anything else was up for debate. Now the courts are in some jurisdictions mandating that prisoners be allowed to self-identify according to gender and the agencies housing them often are not permitted to question that self-identification. The matter will get messier before it is sorted out.
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Obviously staff must just BE AWARE of things going on around them. One of the things is being alert to coerced cell change requests and of course doing regular patrols into relatively isolated areas where inmates might have a reasonable reason to be, like warehouse and work areas. Especially if you see an inmate who APPEARS to be acting as a lookout. With a little time and experience you get used to spotting such things.
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Audiologist
Are earbuds dangerous for my ears?
Farmer
Do friends with office jobs look down on what you do?
Air Traffic Controller
Have you ever ordered a pilot to abort mid-takeoff?
Verbal deescalation is not something I have been trained in, but I developed some skill at it along the way. In this particular environment it mostly consisted of explaining the obvious, that the inmate was NOT going to win a test of force and that if things got physical they would end up in the hole and with administrative charges against them, possibly criminal charges as well. The problem is the inmate often WANTED to go to the hole or would rather "face the music" rather than face his homies if he didn't go thru with being a dick. It was actually common for inmates to manufacture a light-weight situation just to get locked up.
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there were not a lot of overt homosexuals in GP while I was working. remember, i have been out fifteen years. they were a significant management problem then. must be much worse now. they are still trying to figure out who is "male" and who is "female" and what the criteria is and who goes where.
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Too many prisoners, not enough cells. It costs a LOT of money to build a prison cell and the taxpayers are not overly concerned with what prisoners want and don't want. Life is hard, it's harder in prison. Stay out of prison. It is a bad place, full of bad people, and they won't let you out to go bowling on Tuesday night. That being said they usually (but not always) put a prisoner on single-cell status after he kills one cellmate, so they hardly ever kill more than one. Hardly ever.
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