By Tim Redmond
Editors note: Just a Guy is an inmate in a California state prison. His dispatches run twice a week.
By Just A Guy
An officer and I had a discussion a couple of weeks ago. I asked him a question; I don’t remember exactly what it was. But what I remember about the conversation is interesting. He told me he hated working here, that this place has the worst morale of all the prisons in California, that the administration has the corrections officers concentrating on all kinds of pettiness in order to keep them occupied — and that there is so little violence and need to watch one another’s back that there is no unity among the COs as there is at prisons with more problems.
To me it’s very discouraging that a lack of violence and other problems endemic to prison life would be a catalyst for enmity between officers, that it would cause a lack of unity and lack of respect among the staff.
I would think it would be the goal of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to create prisons with no violence , no racial divide and prison politics and mechanism that make prison a recidivist machine.
But, as it turns out, a prison with less violence, racial division and those other mechanisms is considered an awful place to work because it creates a divide between the people running the prison.
This, my friends, is irony.