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| I feel your pain - A response to “When do COs get to speak?” |
| By Tracy E. Barnhart |
| Published: 04/03/2007 |
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In response to your letter, When do Corrections Officers get to speak, 3/21/2007) I can honestly say, “I feel your pain!” I too am a juvenile correctional officer in a maximum security juvenile prison. What takes my breath away is that we have 43 beds at our facility that are a super maximum security capacity. Our state felt that the juvenile offenders were becoming too violent, aggressive and non amiable to treatment, so our new state of the art facility was built in 2000. It was meant to be an answer to our failed youth services policies and inadequate aging prisons, which could not handle the level of offender that they were now receiving. The trouble is that since the opening of our facility the stigma and power that we once posed has been eroded to the point of laughable. It was the social workers and psychologists within our agency that felt that our facility was too harsh on the youth and that locking them down for their criminal behaviors was not practical or beneficial for their youthful development. However, it was not those bleeding hearts that were being assaulted, victimized, verbally harassed and manipulated into eventual termination. The youth that we housed were still the most violent, aggressive and non amiable to treatment but yet possessed a stigma that we could not control - youthful offender. I have worked for our agency at this juvenile facility for over seven years now and you know what? I have never seen any juvenile CO actually retire with the full required thirty years of service with our agency. I have, however, seen over a thousand officers hired and resign, terminated or disabled in that seven-year span. At our facility we go by the eighty/sixty percent rule. Eighty percent of officers hired will never make their one year probation. Sixty percent of youth released from our facility will be incarcerated again within one year of their release. We are in a losing battle with no light at the end of the tunnel. Until our legislation and administrators realize that the laws need to be changed in favor of more offender accountability and consequences for their actions, we will never establish positive change in the offenders that we are charged with securing, correcting and maturing. Part of the reason that there has been no effective change is that what goes on behind the fence, usually stays behind the fence. If a police officer on the street is violated, it makes front page news and the laws and policing strategies are immediately changed to protect them. If our correction officers are assaulted, victimized or violated, nobody ever knows about it and the veil of secretiveness is maintained. Corrections officers are the forgotten peace officers of the law enforcement society. We walk among the predators, because nobody else will! |
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