A Co's View

This is another back story to Willie's Dad, from the correctional officers point of view

The Back story: A Correctional Officer’s View of Jarret

Jarret really hasn’t been a problem compared to so many of the guys locked up here. I show everybody their respect, as long as they show me mine, and that works for most of the cases. My job is often made harder by having to deal with the fallout left by some guard taking out his life’s frustrations on the inmates. Some of these guys are more corrupt than the prisoners, and they act like their job is to personally punish them. It’s no surprise what happens when they get cornered by somebody they have been screwing with.

On the other hand, some of these inmates are a clear and present danger to anybody who has to deal with them. It don’t matter if you give them their respect, because they only see kindness as a weakness. In reality, they aren’t much different than anybody else. When people are put in extreme situations, they exhibit extreme behaviors, and when you think about it, the behavior makes sense, given the situation.

A lot of the other officers tell me to shut the hell up with my philosophy. They think that I feel I am better than them. Really, I just have a high vocabulary, and higher curiosity. I mean, if you are a curious person, there’s a lot to learn from studying behavior in a correctional facility.

I don’t think that I am too good for this job, but I am smart enough and adaptable enough where I could do a lot of other things. That’s not a crime. A lot of the correctional officers here aren’t really cut out to do other work, for this kind of money. I kind of want to move on. Coming in here, you get to share the misery, and the joy, of these guys, the ones who are doing time by the day, and guys like me, who kind of do time eight hours at a stretch.

Inmates ask me, “would you shoot me if you saw me climbing over the fence?"

I just smile and say, you know, it’s kind of nice having you around, so stay of the fence brother, that’s all I’m saying”. They just laugh, I laugh, but they better stat off that fence. They put me in the tower for a reason, I can shoot. I’m not afraid to shoot either, I don’t want to shoot nobody, but stay off the fence okay?

So many of the brothers locked up are from Chicago. I like to go to Chicago, hang out at the beach, go see the Cubs or Bears or Bulls. There’s a million things you can do there. I think it’s one of the coolest cities in the world. I carry my pistol when I go, though, because you never know who you might see, maybe they think they got some beef with me. I treat everybody with respect, but that don’t work with everybody. Sometimes I see brothers who been locked up. Ain’t had a problem yet, they give my props for treating them like humans, but there’s always somebody who don’t care about that. I’m tired of feeling like I need my pistol, you can’t go swimming with a gun, you can only walk on the beach. I want to go away long enough to be forgotten, do something else, maybe write a book about my life.

Now that Jarret, I didn’t think much about him, he was kind of quiet, tried to stay neutral, if you know what I mean. I didn’t have any opinion of him one way or the other. I watched him in the visiting room that day. He told another man he wouldn’t be mad at him if he took his woman as his wife and raised his son to be a man. I respected that, you know. You ever hear how some people act like crabs in a bucket, always pulling each other down from making it out? Jarret decided that if he was going to be stuck in the bucket, he wasn’t going to pull his folks down with him. I don’t know how he caught his case, but that’s how he caught my respect.

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