Cheaters and Nincompoops

They promoted the "chief of security" to assistant warden the other day; it figures. This guy has been here less than two years and the compound is more poorly run than ever. There has been a massive turnover of long-term staff; may new officers stay just a few months and then leave; drug use is rampant; the attitude of the general offender population worse than ever; so why not promote this guy? It makes sense if you see how money...and lives...are mismanaged in here.

Of course, why wouldn't you promote a guy like this to assistant warden when the general inmate population is how it is? Just a week ago there was a small "cheating scandal" in one college class. Two guys way too close to each other (isn't funny when a 30 something sex offender finds his soul mate in a 19 year old sex offender?) decided to cut corners on a take home math test. Like so many other scams run in here, however, these two Einstein’s wrote down the exact same wrong answers (the only two in the class to miss those questions!) and turned their papers in "together." Yeah, being arrested and convicted and sent to prison doesn't say much about your intellect--I know it first hand.

The compound is awash in "rats"--guys who will sell out anyone for a kind word from the investigators even though that won't do anything for their sentence; there are degenerate gamblers who spend what little they have every week chasing one of a dozen parlay tickets only to lose and then--with huge debts owed to usurious "scoreboxes" --"check in" (they go to the hole and then get moved to either the other side of the compound or to another level 2 facility); you get drug users crying all day about their pills - the med unit won't give them heavy enough psychotropic drugs (and why do they give out so many pharmacologic scripts to a population overwhelmed with drug use and abuse? why indeed!).

Re-entry is a failure. You can't convince guys to "live clean" when they have no education, no job skills, no hope. So instead they create some silly "word of the day" classes with names like "thinking for a change" and "ready to work" even though their entire time locked up has been just the opposite. And the people who run all that, they get more responsibility even as they waste more money and get the same--or worse--outcomes.

So am I surprised our illustrious "big hat" the chief of security with no significant higher education got promoted--no. It happens all the time.

In here life truly is lived "through the looking glass." The more incompetent you are, the more disrespectful you are as a CO, the quicker you'll move ahead. And the offenders... they keep getting dumber and younger; and the cycle goes on.

Will it ever change? Maybe. It’s beginning to in other places in the country. The states and the Federal government are starting to see that costs outweigh the results...and that is the only sensible thing in all of this.