awww,
you guys are great!
Prison is a horrible place. The men I worked with (and women and kids - I've worked in a womens prison, too, and juvenile detention - everywhere, if truth be told! I'm old
But the last place was a mens prison and my guys almost without exception were polite (to me, not to each other
, interested in change, and hard working (or at least aspired to being hard working
.
There were folks at the back of the compound that I didn't work with who were kind of broken, dangerous, and I'm pretty glad I didn't meet them (my guys were all short - about to leave prison - so they were forward thinking and, believe it or not, scared: it's hard to start over when you can't drive, don't have a job, and often don't have a place to go).
but the guards and the other people I worked with. OMG. It was horrific. I'm really nice irl (well, at work I always was - exceptionally so, I don't get angry, I'm very patient). But the people who work in prison, well, some were nice..........but it was so bad. The stories I could tell..........not just physical abuse (I didn't see it from my office), but the verbally abusive language and the degrading way they were treated. Making grown men line up IN THE RAIN, Florida storms, mind you - and stand there. One guard made them answer questions because he thought it was amusing to see them fail (He'd say: I'll let you through if you answer a question to who's smarter than a third grader. In the line in front of other men. In the rain.
As you can imagine, from rural Florida, with only a High School education, he was just the man to humiliate a bunch of prisoners...................
By the way, we reported him! And guess what? His picture was right there on the guard booth the very next month:
(employee of the month).