Hooray, after plenty of years I made it through. One year early because things worked out right.
Do, no more juvenile 40 year old offenders to deal with.
That was always the easy part,
Now no more managers to deal with either, having been a senior union rep I was always amazed at just how little our managers knew of their own rules, policies and guidelines - heck, I was a frequent amending author to many of those policies, in a vain attempt to make things easier and more consistent.
Most of all, goodbye to the political interference that has led to the loss of 30% of the workforce, along with a 162% rise in violent incidents in a year and suicides at all time record highs, along with self harm, and increase in prisoner numbers from 50k in 1996 to the current almost 90k and a lack of resources both inside and outside prisons to actually effect rehabilitation.
The sad thing is, across my decades of services, I have seen, indeed have made significant contributions, to report after report which all say the same things, and have the same recommendations - its not as if its a secret, we pretty much all know what to do, academics, staff, senior managers, staff association representatives and consulting agencies such as Howard League for penal reform. …and yet the recommendations have almost always been acted upon in the most ineffective and peremptory ways possible, and largely all have been reduced to checkbox exercises designed to enable politicians to quote utterly meaningless numbers in parliament in the pretence that these ‘facts’ actually mean something.
Politicians put in place by the public, all trying to use a media sound bite without any understanding of what they are talking about, to placate a population that knows even less.
Result is that our system is about little more than vengeance, contrast that with Holland and Norway - where they are closing prisons because they don’t have enough prisoners to fill them, but our great and good persist in visiting the US system - which is also largely a failure too.IMHO
You’d imaging that across the North Sea is easier to visit than across the pond, and our Euro colleagues speak English perfectly well, you have to believe we could learn something.
Anyhow, I could go on, but its all behind me now, I’ll probably still support and advise union members but my time is my own - first job is, well who is counting?
That’s the beauty of it.
It might be the middle of winter here, but the sun is shining on my house.
Get off my lawn!!!
