mrwil65
Active member
After becoming a Corrections Officer, my brother got his start in the prison system. He can’t speak to every prison, but he does know his own experiences and those of the officers around him. In a nutshell, none of them really gave a care why people were in prison. What you were in for really didn’t matter. They didn’t care. What they cared about was how you acted while you were in prison.
Imagine two inmates.
Person A is in prison for murdering 50 people in a massive postal style shooting. While in prison, he is being polite, respectful, he does everything the guards ask of him, keeps his living space clean, has good hygiene, and breaks no rules or causes no trouble.
Person B is in prison for something stupid. Growing Marijuana, or stealing his grandmother’s car, or whatever.
Make up whatever crime you think is the dumbest reason to go to prison and imagine that one. He is somebody that they would have NEVER said deserved to go to prison for this crime. But while he’s incarcerated, he is an absolute problem, every day. He won’t shower. He won’t clean up. He wipes his feces on the walls. He wants to fight, every single day, and will not do anything the guards need him to do unless they (the guards) get physical. When the guards feed him, they then need to fight him just to get the empty meal tray back. When they wrestle around restraining him, he will always start urinating, to make sure to cover the guards with his urine even though he can’t physically stop himself from being restrained. He’ll spit in their face, he’ll punch you in the back of the head, he will take any cheap shot he can to intentionally cause as much problems as he can for as long as he is there.
You’re a working stiff with a wife and a mortgage and a couple of kids. When you go to work, which one of these two inmates do you hate dealing with more? The new guys sometimes started out trying to judge people based on what they did, but very quickly anyone who made a career of corrections realized that they really didn’t care what people did; they cared about how they act.
My brother would take a polite murderer over a discipline issue any day, regardless of the guy’s crime.
Imagine two inmates.
Person A is in prison for murdering 50 people in a massive postal style shooting. While in prison, he is being polite, respectful, he does everything the guards ask of him, keeps his living space clean, has good hygiene, and breaks no rules or causes no trouble.
Person B is in prison for something stupid. Growing Marijuana, or stealing his grandmother’s car, or whatever.
Make up whatever crime you think is the dumbest reason to go to prison and imagine that one. He is somebody that they would have NEVER said deserved to go to prison for this crime. But while he’s incarcerated, he is an absolute problem, every day. He won’t shower. He won’t clean up. He wipes his feces on the walls. He wants to fight, every single day, and will not do anything the guards need him to do unless they (the guards) get physical. When the guards feed him, they then need to fight him just to get the empty meal tray back. When they wrestle around restraining him, he will always start urinating, to make sure to cover the guards with his urine even though he can’t physically stop himself from being restrained. He’ll spit in their face, he’ll punch you in the back of the head, he will take any cheap shot he can to intentionally cause as much problems as he can for as long as he is there.
You’re a working stiff with a wife and a mortgage and a couple of kids. When you go to work, which one of these two inmates do you hate dealing with more? The new guys sometimes started out trying to judge people based on what they did, but very quickly anyone who made a career of corrections realized that they really didn’t care what people did; they cared about how they act.
My brother would take a polite murderer over a discipline issue any day, regardless of the guy’s crime.