With approximately 1.9 million people behind bars, the United States now incarcerates
(per capita) more of its own citizens than any other nation in the world…including
Russia and the Republic of South Africa. Why is America, the world's greatest
experiment with constitutional democracy, caught in this bind?
We have reached the millennium 2000, bringing with us an unprecedented criminal
justice industrial enterprise of jail and prison construction that surpasses
that of the current development of public schools, hospitals, highways, and
even hotels.
We are now also experiencing the entrepreneurial emergence of a gulag of private-for-profit
prisons to augment the budget glut of the public sector. This situation is the
direct result of the complex criminal enterprise of drugs and substance abuse
feeding on our national heart and soul.
Rural areas are not immune, either, as drugs and crime spread to some of our
smaller cities and towns and the prisons in those areas grow, too. This plague
divides us further in a national mind set of racism and despair.
George Orwell fantasized a world of mutants and controlled beings out of such
a scenario. His fiction was predicted on the vast future of 1984 -- a year already
of long ago history. Well, then, if the past is indeed a prologue to the future,
the appointment of a drug czar in our staging of a vast and desperate struggle
with "the war on drugs" seem to give credulity to Orwell's fantasy.
But, I fear this is a subject far too complex and esoteric for the immediacy
of these issues, save to say, it forces us to focus on some unsung heroes --
those serving in the front line of the consequences of this struggle.
Look closely and you will find them. They are America's men and women correctional
officers, standing their daily duty-posts and coping as best they can with the
seemingly endless stream of inmates produced from today's urban storms of drugs
and crime, violence, anger, anomie and despair.
American prisons continue to crowd with an inmate population that is younger,
uneducated, unemployed, unemployable, and increasingly, a population of minorities;
a population that is more alienated and more violent; less healthy and less
afraid of punishment. Today's inmates are more aware of their rights. They are
more easily politicized, and they are more difficult to manage.
Most significantly, they are the awesome responsibility of the heroic men and
women correction officers of the United States. At this very minute, correctional
officers are filling duty posts in jails and prison of every type, federal,
state and local.
The watch is covered, the walk, the tower, the transportation vehicle, the
command center…the clinic and hospital run, the tuberculosis/aids ward, the
prison hospice, the suicide, the funeral detail, the emotionally disturbed person.
The operational exigencies of the food service and the commissary, the medical
clinic, sick call and hospital, protective custody and punitive segregation,
the recreation yards, the visits, the nursery, the law library, and religious
services are carefully covered.
All of these actions are performed within the incessant din of gates slamming,
radios blaring, toilets flushing...the tedium, the lines, the danger, the despair,
the fear, the violence...the concentrated stress of a mono-sexual confinement..."Hell,
with the lid lifted!"
The emotional stress of the regimentation and institutional schedules is always
there, the constant hunger and need of inmates for empathy and response; the
requirement for an alert ear to all fear; the demand for inordinate discretion
and constant attention, the discipline and the calculus of necessary and unnecessary
force, institutional searches, body searches, searches of visiting women, children,
parents and grandparents. In all of this, the ignoble is given undue homage.
In this environment, our nation's correctional officers must prevail as the
"unpopular" public safety officers of the jail and the prison. With no constituency
beyond their peers, resented by their wards, abused by the press and media,
correctional officers maintain the watch in this environment of chronic and
incessant stress. Yet, in this seemingly incomprehensible situation, the officers
contain the institutional order and operational duty of the day.
For the correctional officer this is a task that must be done under the brunt
of disdain, while locked-up and isolated in an occupational identity that has
no arena beyond its own. In this dilemma, correctional officers, on and off
the job, can easily become the other prisoners in the "barbed-wire bureaucracy"
of American corrections.
There is no escape into a public recognition reward of a "job well done." Increasingly,
the correctional officer's occupational role is subject to automatic disregard
and bashing ? "A job for those who couldn't get a job anywhere else."
So where…where does the correctional officer go to get the necessary personal
pride, spiritual sustenance of a job well done? Where does the correctional
officer draw the courage to sustain a career within such brutal occupational
isolation? How does one avoid the stereotypical stigmata and thoughtless press
usage of the term "guard" ? Or of references to "goon," "screw," "hack," or
other unspeakable labels? Where do correctional officers obtain the validation
and empowerment for the vital tasks they perform in protecting the public safety?
How do we bridge the vast gap of ignorance and prejudice concerning their roles?
Just as the job has become more complex, the men and women entering and maintaining
the ranks are equally more sophisticated in preparing themselves for modern
correctional service. These new generation correctional officers come form diverse
backgrounds and are increasingly bringing higher education credentials to the
job.
It is imperative that correctional agencies provide adequate training to correctional
officers in role fulfillment and occupational dignity as a source of expertise
and skills in the management of prisons. If a feature of the occupation is that
correctional officers must turn to themselves for validation, then we must develop
programs that introduce their public safety roles to the larger community.
Equipped with only a body alarm, a few keys, "a hopefully functional" intercom
and video system; often on duty alone or paired in single tour teams; locked-in
and living-the-sentence with the confined, one or two correctional officers
are found moving through 50 to 100 or more of the confused, addicted, emotionally
disturbed, violent humanity crowded into the inmate population under their remand.
These men and women correctional officers must perform their duties with compassion,
wit and true grit.
It is the correctional officer that must give the essential rhyme and reason
to the daily despair of the confined-processing the day, relaying the operational
accord for the task at hand; a safe tour for both the keeper and the kept.
Jess Maghan - Correctional Officer Memorial Week Ceremony, Washington, D.C.
, May 1999