So.
My 22 year old son lives in Florida (near Gainesville) with his mother. He was working for Walmart, unloading trucks for a year. He told me a few weeks ago while he was here for a visit that he had applied for a job with the local prison. He began working there last week.
He is currently being trained. He likes the job, but given what he has related to me that is inconceivable.
Could someone who has done this for a while help me understand what the job is like?
My BIL is a corrections officer in NY State, now a Lt. The job has all sorts of different roles and responsibilities depending on your assignment. What has your son related to you so far?
My cousin had a B.A. in psychology. He started as a counselor in a state prison.
He related to me many scary stories of what goes on in there.
But, he stayed with it. Became assistant warden and ended up with a nice pension.
My advice would be to take advantage of all the training. And distance yourself from the population as soon as possible.
Seems a pretty young person for such a role, at least by my take on it.
I am aware that folk can apply at whatever age but seems to me that having some life experience would be important.
Prisoners are largely badly educated early teen boys in the bodies of grown men, they can be street sharp and deviously manipulative, I think 22 is rather too young.
Mind you, what would I know about it? 21 years and still counting
He told me he is in a trainee group of seven new COs and a Sargent. He has done dorm searches, finding porn (why isn’t porn allowed?), blades, cigarettes, cellphones, etc.
He has done random pat-downs, with emphasis on “cupping balls”, searching inmates leaving the cafeteria (where the food is awful, but inmates try to bring food out), walking the grounds.
On Monday he did “intake”, learning how to do rectal exams on new inmates; finding drugs, cigarettes, etc.
After texting back and forth I’m left feeling sad/dirty.
As in you’re 21 years old, or you’ve been a corrections officer for 21 years?
We’ve actually had that discussion.
I would tend to disagree. New York used to hire people as young as 18 but they raised the age to 21. And I feel it was a mistake.
I concede the maturity issue exists but I don’t think it’s fixed to a particular age. A lot of people who are too immature to be a good CO at 18 are not going to have “grown up” by 21. But I feel they are people who are mature enough at 18 and we lost our opportunity to hire those people.
You have to look at employment life cycles. If you hire 18 year olds, you’re hiring people who just graduated from high school and are looking for a job. If you hire 21 year olds, you’re hiring people who have been out of high school for three years and are still looking for a job.
That all sounds like part of the normal processes. It’s prison; body searches are a big part of keeping contraband out. It may not be for everyone, but I can’t imagine any of that was a surprise to find on the list of job responsibilities.
I’m not a CO but have worked and trained with many of them. Some have had specialized jobs (Investigations, mostly - the “cops” of the facility) and some have been the line workers. Frankly, I don’t see how they can do it but none said that they hated it or anything. Lots of overtime and a pension at the end. Some have used it as a stepping stone to becoming cops on the outside. Maybe an option your son would want to consider?
My father was a corrections officer in the Federal prison system. While he was there, it was a decent career that offered advancement for non-college graduate types. Once you move up a bit you get away from the (literally) crappier jobs.
The Federal system also offers transfer opportunities around the country, with advancement coming quicker for those that transfer. My father did not take advantage of that, we stayed in one place.
In the Federal system there are different tiers, Minimum Security, Medium Security, Maximum Security (I think). We were at a Medium Security facility, so they didn’t have the really bad guys.
To me, it looked similar to a career in the military.
The biggest thing is to always remember to maintain a clear line between the employees and the prisoners. You can’t treat prisoners like you’d treat friends or co-workers or employees or customers. Your role is to be in charge of the prisoners which is an unusual role in a workplace. You have to be an authority figure.
This doesn’t mean being an arbitrary tyrant. But the prisoners have to recognize that you’re the person in charge. They generally won’t like having somebody in charge of them as individuals. But by imposing your authority over the group you’ll keep the group in good order and the prisoners will be happier with that. Prisoners need to live in a structured environment and you’re the person who is imposing that structure. Prisoners generally dislike the process of having this structure imposed upon them while liking the eventual environment that results from it.
I’m sure that although they hate having authority exercised over them, they see the value in keeping the other knuckleheads in line.
I would think (without any experience in the matter) that being a corrections officer would tend to make you less trusting and harden your personality.
He should shave his head and grow some serious facial hair. If he has material and if allowed.
I guess it’s easy to see the career appeal after having worked for Walmart. Don’t worry kayaker, just don’t get busted for anything in Florida that might have you visiting your son at work. The whole ball cupping thing would probably be awkward.
He had better not be overly emotionally sensitive or trusting. Being locked up with the scum of the Earth for the majority of your working life will eventually affect how you view and interact with the outside world and not necessarily in a positive way.
The inmates will continuously try to play you and believe it or not the workplace politics in corrections and enforcement type jobs can be ferocious.
If he’s okay with all that he can give it a shot.
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Who is the employer? A government job under the Dept of Justice or Corrections or a private contractor? It really makes a difference.
If he is working for one of the top 3 contractors who run prisons, MTC, CCA, or GEO he will start out making only a little more than Wal-Mart, $11 to $12 and he will stay there.
The Dept of Justice has realized the problem with these private contractors and has decided to let all the current contracts for Federal prisons expire and then revert to Dept of Justice employees running them.
The problems with the private contractors are many, starting with staff pay and retention.
Look into who the company is that he will be working for. If it is one of the contractors I listed he has a better growth opportunity at Wal-Mart.
Read this link and find many others.
Exactly. Every prisoner wants you to enforce the rules on everyone else while you leave them alone.
In my particular role, I tend to be fairly isolated, I run workshops, education and training environments
This means I am not in the same position as the discipline staff, there is nothing like the mutual support that a young CO would have in a unit.
I also have to get something out of prisoners, I have to get them to work and learn, something that the discipline staff have as a much lesser priority, this means a certain level of cooperation, and one heck of a lot less reliance on authority power.
I have to hold the attention of prisoners, and command respect in a very different way, they have to believe that I know all the tricks, I am there as training professional, its teaching except that these days am in the grounds teaching horticulture and groundworks.- that means using machines such as tractors, rotovators, towed farm tools, wood chippers - that sort of thing.
I do have to be somewhat devious myself, working around the prisoners agenda - lets face it, how do you get unwilling individuals to actually work or learn?
I think 22 is too close in age range to prisoners to carry it off its like having 13 years olds teaching 13 year olds - it works in a limited way but you need the maturity and age difference.
I have taught construction site safety, live electronic repair work on 240v appliances, and those prisoners have to believe I have the experience and knowledge to show them how. They have to trust that I know what I am doing, in some ways their have to put their lives in my hands, and teaching trades skills means I have to have credible skills, sorry but a 22 year old electrical foreman just would not have the credibility, not on a construction site, and not teaching lifelong learned skills.
I actually do not know of any apprentice trained 22 year old supervisor, given that the apprenticeship takes you up to 22, it’ll be at least another 10 years or so before you’d get the slightest sniff of being a supervisor.
My role is not working on the housing units, and prisoners see me differently to the CO, and the result is that I get to hold very different conversations - often being told things that they would never tell a CO.
Underneath it all, everyone in a prisoner facing role has certain dynamic security and disciplinary aspects to their work - its just that I also have to try train them and get some work effort out of them too.
CO do tend to come into prisons at lower ages than trades trainers, even do, I still think 22 is pushing it - yes some of them will be fine.
At the other end of it, I actually believe that working with prisoners can be corrosive to a person over many years, and folk only have a certain number of working years with prisoners before they are worked out, starting younger only means finishing earlier - I just think its asking rather a lot, I would recommend some military time and some life adventures first.
A career working in prisons is pretty much a career to settle down, you need to be settled and stable, in some ways its almost like getting married too young, it can work, but its not for everyone