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THE CORRECTIONAL OFFICER
The professional correctional officer follows a strange calling. He keeps people where
they don't want to be and don't want to stay and no one likes him for it. By doing his job well he helps inmates in ways they
may not appreciate or acknowledge.
The correctional officer protects inmates from the anger and guilt they feel for
other reasons. He enforces rules, which protect them from themselves and from one another in subtle ways civil rights lawyers
never suspect.
The correctional officer knows inmates as people, 24 hours a day. He knows them, as does no other employee
in the justice system. Their snores, coughs, moans and screams, and their fitful sleeplessness at night, their bathroom and
eating habits, their bullying, their remarkable idiom and symbols, and unique body language, the kindness and tension rise
and subside to mysterious, unconscious tides and social rhythms no sociological treatise will ever explain.
Scholarly
criminologists who never carried the keys frequently remark that correctional officers, like inmates, are "doing time".
It is usually said for effect... but it says nothing to the initiated. It isn't true.
Correctional officers don't do
time. No one should try to lay that on them. They needn't accept a transfer of guilt from quarter. Not from inmates, surely,
because, correctional officers have not done the crimes that bring people to prisons.
If he is professional, the correctional
officer does his job knowing he will not be romanticized by t.v. like police.
Those who want him to be a helping person
will see him seen as punitive. They usually don't consider how hard it is for the normal person to routinely inflict discomfort
without provocation.
He will absorb and contain hostility without being himself hostile and will pay the price of that.
He is the stuff high blood pressure is made of.
The correctional officer will do his job knowing that citizens who demand
big time sentences for criminals will not pay big taxes to buy the painfully expensive maximum security space that these sentences
require. As always however, the job will be done though the risks are increased. The correctional officer is not doing time.
He is doing a job and that's enough.
By Robert Barrington, Professor,
Department of Criminal Justice,
Northern
Michigan University
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