As requested here. What would you like to know?
Although I should point out it’s 2:00 am here, so this will start out as “ask the prison guard and wait until tomorrow night for an answer”.
Is prison rape as common as some people think? Do guards try to stop it?
Little Nemo, did you find it inevitable that that would be the first question asked?
Do your prisoners ever do “slick-legging?”
Where is Mr Jingles
What kind of prison? How many prisoners/guards?
Do what?
To Nemo: how did you get your job? Is it a government job (what level of government?) or some sort of subcontractor? In the prison where you work, what kind of work is done by government employees and what by subcontractors?
How is it that prisons have such a hard time keeping drugs out?
Did you ever have a prisoner who was eventually released after being exonerated for the crime which he was sentenced for? If so, did it seem surprising to you, or (with hindsight) was there anything that would make you think “oh yeah, I could have believed that guy was innocent.” (I understand it’s not your job to determine this, I’m asking more about a general feeling or impression).
Is it as problematic as the movies would have us think when former law enforcement officers commit crimes and go to prison?
Are some prisoners better at prison than others? That is a bizarre question based on someone I know who seems to be good at prison. I’m having a hard time articulating this. I understand that prison isn’t glorified camp or anything like that, but am I crazy for thinking that for some people, the routine of prison provides a stability that they are unable to mentally or emotionally provide for themselves out in the world? I guess this is like a modern day version of the old trope that “3 hots and a cot” was preferable to homelessness/joblessness.
What is the weirdest thing you have seen a prisoner keep in his cell? Maybe this is two parts – the weirdest thing that was allowable but just weird, and then the weirdest thing that someone managed to smuggle in and was later confiscated.
How big of a problem is corruption among guards? How big of a problem is “My buddies are still on the outside and I know where your wife works”? How big of a problem is “I’ll be out one day and I still know where your wife works”?
How big of a problem is depression among the prison guards you work with? It seems like it might be a job that is really tough on the psyche.
Is your warden a former CO, or is he an outsider? How do you and the other guards feel about it either way?
Is it hard to treat the inmates with respect considering some of the crimes they have commited?
More generally, is prison as dangerous as portrayed in the movies or on TV? If a non-violent person was sentenced to prison, and wanted to just mind his own business and stay out of trouble, would he be able to do so? Or would he have to join a gang (or something similar) in order to protect himself?
In these conjugal visits, you can have sex - with women?
Did you read Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full? Were those gut-wrenching prison scenes accurate?
Even if you didn’t read it, do inmates actually create and use the Pizzooka?
What would you like the world to know about prisons/being a prison guard?
Do you ever/how often do you feel in danger doing your job? What are the protocols for handling dangerous/potentially violent inmates? Have you ever been hurt at work?
Why did you become a prison guard? Why did your fellow prison guards become prison guards? What might you have done professionally if you hadn’t become a prison guard?
Do you… like your job? And of course: how much does it pay?
Thanks for doing this.
Sex happens - I don’t think any large group of people have ever stopped having sex. And some of it is coercive. But actual rape in the sense that most people think of it is fairly rare. That isn’t a result of altruism as much as common sense. Most rapists out on the street rely on anonymity to protect them. They can rape somebody and feel confident that their victim will never see them again. In prison, the rapist would be locked in with his victim and the potential for revenge is very high.
Of course we do. We’re the cops in our community and we stop people from breaking the law.
Beats the heck out of me. What is slick-legging?
I don’t watch many prison movies.
I currently work in a medium security prison. One of the largest in the country.
About 1600 prisoners. We have around 500 guards but that’s split up between different shifts and days off and such, so there’s around a hundred working at any given time.
I work for the state. My job, and pretty much every job, is run by civil service - you take a test and the high scores get hired. We’re almost entirely government employees - the only private contractors we have are for construction projects.
Because a lot of people want drugs. The most common routes are visits and packages. Prisoners’ family and friends will bring them in drugs, pass them off, the prisoner swallows it, and retreives it later. Or somebody sends them a package through the mail with the drugs hidden inside something. There have been times when employees have brought in drugs. And we have some prisoners who work out in the community and come back into the prison periodically - they’re an obvious conduit for drugs. We watch all these possibilities (and others).
Actually we don’t really get involved with this. The courts send people to prison and the parole department lets them go. We just watch them in between. In the majority of cases, we have no awareness of what crimes they were convicted of and even less of the circumstances of their case.
In some cases it’s a problem. But I’ve seen some former cops and guards who live in general population with no problem.
We call it “institutionalized” and some prisoners do become very dependant on the routine and having somebody there to tell them what to do.
The weirdest thing I ever saw was in fact allowable. There was a prisoner who had murdered his wife. Prisoners are allowed to keep legal papers involving their cases and he kept some of the evidence from his. Specifically, he had a complete set of the photos and reports of his wife’s autopsy - which he had made into a photo album so he could look at them every day.
I have to go now. I’ll answer the rest later.
Whoa!! Did he openly admit to killing her? What type of homicide? What are most of your prisoners in for? Why wouldnt a murder be in maximum security? I read a lot of true crime…have you ever had any high profile criminals? Any completely insane ones that probably should have been in the hospital?