Many prison employees really don’t worry about it. My Hubby does, which is why our phone number is unlisted and we try to keep from revealing personal information can to a bare minimum whenever possible. (As an example, we use a false name when ordering pizza because our own last name is rare and recognizable.) But many of his co-workers don’t even take those simple precautions. They do get an occasion harassing phone call from family members of inmates, but that’s about it.
Generally, inmates don’t come after employees once they’ve been released unless the employee was abusing them. If revenge for their incarceration is on their minds, they usually have “other fish to fry” than the officers and prison officials who were just doing their jobs.
Hubby did have one inmate who tried to track him down after he was released, but it was because the inmate wanted to give him a gift. The inmate said that Hubby had always treated him fairly and he wanted to show his appreciation in the form of season tickets for a particular football team. (Which is against the rules, of course, and was refused.)
I"m not a criminal professional, but everything I herard from those who were indicated that most criminals (who got caught) were very stupid, quite mad (often from extreme drug addiction), and/or very evil (which psych-types like to call lack of empathy).
The stupidity angle comes in not just because dumb people get caught for more crimes, but because the dumb oens are more likely to think in immediate terms (which include violent crimes). Most liekly, everyone knows someone on the quick path to Hell: most of these folks are just cruel and malicious in their everyday life. But they may have the same attitude as the crooks.
The man who trained my family’s first dog (I’ll call him J) went on to become a convicted murderer. There had been a long-running feud between his family and another local family, who I will refer to as “P.” (Keep in mind this was in the rural south.) When I was in early high school, the P family became more aggressive toward J, and started placing iron spikes out in his fields to destroy his farm equipment. J finally snapped one morning; he took his gun, climbed up a tree at the nearest crossroads, and waited for any member of the P family to drive by. He successfully shot and killed old man P. Another older male member of the P family was wounded in the backside.
I don’t remember what the actual sentence was, but I believe he got off on something close to an insanity plea. He was under house arrest for awhile.
While few people said so aloud, I got the impression that most of the community was pleased that J had killed a member of the P family, the members of which are generally regarded as a bunch of dangerous inbred nutcases. (They had a gallows constructed in their front yard, and regularly hung the sheriff in effigy.)
I never had any contact with him afterwards, so I don’t know how this has changed his personality. I had always thought he was a great guy, and his work with our dog really paid off. His family (cousins, etc.) seemed to stay quite close to him – I remember two of his cousins from my class were absent quite a bit during the trial. (On a side note, I also remember that anyone caught discussing the murder or the trial was sent to in-school detention.)
While I wouldn’t consider him a hardcore criminal, I did grow up with a kid who, at sixteen or seventeen brutally murdered a classmate for no really apparent reason. “They” say it was over drugs, other words are it was a gay-bashing crime, who really knows. The one thing I do remember distinctly about him is how narcissistic and completely without empathy he was. When we were in kindergarten if he wanted a swing, he shoved the other kid off the swing face first into the dirt. Only he’d do it when the teacher wasn’t looking, lie bald-faced to the teacher, principal, and his mom, and his mom would back him all the way… repeat in various incarnations all the way up until he slaughtered his “best friend”.
We were in a very small town, and you couldn’t really avoid someone in your peer group, but I always felt uncomfortable with him and felt vaguely creeped out by him.
My best friend from 6th grade up through high school is probably still in jail. Which would make it about 12 years now. I’ll call him “Doc” because that was his nickname.
He was a really good guy when we were kids. I still remember hanging out in his garage listening to music, riding bikes together, etc. In High School we used to hang together all of the time. I was a little guy and got picked on a lot, but Doc would always stand up for me. But after High school when I was away at college he changed. When I got back home he was trying to become some kind of crack dealer. It was disgusting and it upset me a lot to see my best friend from all of those years become a thug. His personality did a 180, really, to the point that I couldn’t hang out with him any more. He wasn’t very bright, either. He had a brand new car and gave his mother 500 bucks once and told me she wouldn’t take it. He asked me if I thought she might know he was selling drugs. Yeah, Doc, a guy with no job with a brand new car and 500 bucks in small bills? I think she got the idea.
After I joined the army and came back on leave i saw him one last time in a bar and I told him he should probably try to clean up his act. he blew me off, but a few days later I heard from another friend (I had gone back to Ft. Campbell by then) that he got caught with a lot of crack, a gun and a 16 year old kid in the car. I don’t know what his sentence was, but according to a friend of mine who used to work as a paralegal he was under a 3 strikes and you’re out type of thing. I know as of 2002 he was still in prison because my neice’s hubby was a guard there. He told me that Doc had actually asked him how I was doing once.
It wasn’t a close friend, but I was acquainted with a VERY bad dude without even knowing it.
The owner of my favorite pizza joint back in New York turned out to be a major player with the mob. He was convicted of murder by the Feds… but was turned loose on appeal, when he was able to convince the judge the killing was personal, and not mob-related (which meant that the Federal government had no standing to prosecute him!).
I have no idea what eventually became of him, but it was chilling to realize I actually knew somebody capable of that kind of crime.
I knew a guy in high school who is definitley in my pool of “must be dead or in jail by now”.
Let’s call him Darius. Darius was violent, aggressive, and had absolutely no regard whatsoever for the property of other people if he saw an opportunity to make that property his. He mostly stole drugs from other kids, blatantly and without any attempt at furtiveness. He would just come up to someone making a deal in a parking lot somewhere, grab a baggie out of their hands, and walk away. Fights ensued, but he never got arrested during the time I was acquainted with him. Who’s going to call the cops to get their drugs back? That was the main thing he had going for him. But I wouldn’t put it past him to steal other things too. And if he didn’t use the drugs (which he did, but if he stole enough of them), he could then sell them and get other things. What amazed me was that, despite having a reputation throughout the school for this, people still chose to hang out with him.
I was also robbed at gunpoint by someone I knew in highschool, and had acted friendly toward me (again, it was for drugs. No recourse). I had never given him my cellphone number though, and he called me on it which can only mean it was given to him by another “friend” who admittedly may or may not have known his intentions. But I later found out from the “friend” I suspect of giving him my number that he was presently (this being still in highschool) in jail for trying to steal an amplifier from Wal-Mart.
I went to high school with a guy who is now doing 30 or 40 years for kidnapping and rape. He took a girl out on a date, didn’t like how things were going, took her to his cabin in the woods, and it was three days before she was able to escape.
This was after he’d been arrested three or four times for drugs (mostly crank) but he didn’t have any jail time under his belt. For the longest time, no one could figure out how he was staying out of jail. We figured it on the day we saw him last. The last time I saw him, a friend and I were sitting on the friend’s porch. A white panel van with tinted windows pulled up. The back door slid open and the guy jumped out and ran up to us. “Hey, Kevin,” he asked my friend; “you got any crystal meth?” “Um…nooooo.” “Okay.” And he took off again, jumping into the back of the panel van before it sped off. It was so blantantly the Narcs you wouldn’t believe. Very subtle, they were.