So, You Want to Be a C.O. (Correctional Officer)?

With America leading the charts with the higest number of incarcerated people, there certainly is a great need for prison staff. The inmates themselves do much of the work, cleaning, and cooking and work in the prison industries. But there is a need for correctional officers, or C.O.'S as the inmates would say.

Some states train and screen the people they hire as guards, but some states will hire just about anyone that is healthy enough to be a guard. I belive this is where the problem of abusive guards come in. Guards that don't understand what thier job duties consist of, and have no training on how to handle situations.

The inmates are there to pay their dues to society for the crime they have committed, and it's know to all that some inmates are actualy innocent, that fact has been proven many times. With the use of DNA, inmates are being released as they are proving their innocence after years behind bars.

What happens when there is an untrained, unskilled guard? Someone who isn't there to protect the inmates, as this job requires, but is there just for a paycheck, or someone who has contempt for the inmates.

I recently came across a blog online. It was a Myspace blog of a young women who is a correctional officer in one of the Texas Units. Texas has the highest inmate population in the United Sates, and also the higest execution rate in the nation. I was shocked at what she was writing in her blog, about her job as a C.O.The blog title is "Welcome To Hell, Has Anyone Seen My Mace? That alone speaks volumns. http://www.myspace.com/phiefay

She started off writing about the uniform she wears, and how her day began, but then goes on to say how she would like to see the inmates in diapers, and and sucking on pacifiers. She wishes that for twenty four hours there would be no rules, no laws, no cameras, and that they (the inmates) would be taken care of during that time, "those who lived through it". She laughs and cusses like a sailor the whole time.

Well, obviously people began to comment about this behavior, and most of the comments were deleted. I think she was tired of deleting the comments and began leaving them there.