Doing Time: Thoughts of a Corrections Officer

I worked for a time as a Correctional Officer (CO) when I returned to Kentucky. It was a work-release facility that housed prisoners on misdemeanor sentences (a year or less of incarceration). We also handled prisoners that were about to make parole from one of the state penitentiaries. They were brought to us to house them while they found employment, established good work practices and could be placed in a half-way house on their journey to be mainstreamed back into society. One wing of the facility housed inmates that had been court-ordered into drug/alcohol treatment; kind of a last ditch effort by the state to keep them out of the penile system. It was an eye opener for me. I learned a lot on that job about people and society both.

The majority of inmates were where they belonged. They were there through choices they had actively participated in making. They were those men who would not make child support payments, repeat offenders for drunk driving, minor domestic violence offenders, failure to pay fines for one offence or another, burglary, bad checks, forged intruments, etc. Not really bad people per se, just men who had made some less than desirable choices in their life and were now being called upon to answer for them. Almost all of the men there could have their offenses traced through the thread of drug/alcohol abuse or addiction. I think that is probably true for the majority of people incarcerated in the United States if not the world. There were several though, I am sure were there due to a mental illness of one kind or another. They were there by default because there was simply no other place available to put them. They didn't need to be in prison or were not sick enough for the state hospital and could not be placed in the cruel population of the county jail for their own well being. We were the lesser of available evils for them. I really hated it for these individuals and tried to look out for them as best I could, but powers greater than me had put them here. And so it was.