CO uniforms & gear way back then.

[KBCraig]

Originally Posted by Custodian

By the way, is it insulting or a complement to call a Corrections professional, a Prison Guard? (Some like it because it has a hint of old school badazz, others don't like it for reasons I'm not really aware of)

Some people get really wound up by that, which I think is a mistake. The only reason anyone calls us "guards" is either out of ignorance, or malevolence.

If they're ignorant of our job title and functions, there's no reason to get mad. If they're malevolent and calling you "guard" to get a rise out of you, you have a doubly good reason to not get mad!

Everyone should have learned before junior high that reacting to name-calling only gets you more of it. And before you take this job, you should know how to serve up revenge as a cold dish.

[Custodian]

Originally Posted by KBCraig

Some people get really wound up by that, which I think is a mistake. The only reason anyone calls us "guards" is either out of ignorance, or malevolence.

If they're ignorant of our job title and functions, there's no reason to get mad. If they're malevolent and calling you "guard" to get a rise out of you, you have a doubly good reason to not get mad!

Everyone should have learned before junior high that reacting to name-calling only gets you more of it. And before you take this job, you should know how to serve up revenge as a cold dish.

I think if you are getting mad at titles and such in this profession, maybe its time for a change and an exit out of Corrections.

[Cory]

I would be HAPPY to be referred to as a Guard...

Around here.. Guards are Guards.. and Officers are under the Captain's desk

[Devenshack]

got this sent to me long ago...
The following is an article in the Arizona Republic Newspaper (Jan. 20, 2004).

A printed correction in name of 'officers'

Jan. 20, 2004 12:00 AM


The people whom most of us still call "prison guards" became "corrections officers" to me back in 1997, when I watched the 3-year-old son of Officer Brent Lumley follow his father's casket into Apostles Lutheran Church in Peoria.

Before that I looked at the men and women who patrolled our prisons as occupying a place on the law enforcement scale somewhere between mall security personnel and parking lot attendants.

The former director of the state Department of Corrections, Terry L. Stewart, once wrote an angry letter to the editor of The Arizona Republic that read in part, "The only group that fails to recognize and embrace the professional function of correctional officers, that seems to believe there is some difference between law enforcement officers and correctional officers, is the media, which insist on referring to correctional officers as guards."

There is something about a thin-skinned bureaucrat that hacks like me can't resist. I asked Stewart in print if he also thought that we should called lifeguards "water safety specialists or human preservation officers?" Or if we should call crossing guards "early morning traffic flow disruption officers?"

The gag gets considerably less funny when a corrections officer is killed on duty, however, as happened to 33-year-old Lumley. Or when a couple of officers are taken hostage, as happened early Sunday morning at the state prison complex outside of Buckeye.

When that occurs we are forced to look at just how much we ask of the people who work in the corrections business and how little we give them in return. The Lewis complex, like just about every other prison in Arizona, is overcrowded and understaffed. For years, politicians have gotten themselves elected by promising to be tougher on criminals. Actually, they were only being tougher on corrections officers.

Sentences went up but not the pay scale of officers. And not the number of officers hired to control the rising prison population.

As Sgt. Joe Masella, president of the Arizona Correctional Peace Officers Association, said Sunday night, "People are applying for this job who shouldn't be working at Sonic burger joints, and are being hired by the Department of Corrections because of low pay. You get what you pay for."

No one goes into law enforcement to get rich. But I can't help but believe that we all would be a lot more focused on a hostage situation that involved two Phoenix police officers, two Department of Public Safety officers or two sheriff's deputies.

It isn't only because we hold those officers in higher regard, but also because a hostage situation that is contained inside a prison, as happened at Lewis, doesn't put any of us at risk. That's something to be remembered. While Corrections officials try to figure out what kind of security breakdown led to the officers being taken hostage, the fact is that the understaffed, underpaid and perhaps undertrained officers kept the trouble from spreading and prevented any of the inmates from getting out. From getting at us.

The reason we don't spend a lot of time thinking about prison issues is because there are so few major incidents at our prisons.

Maybe it takes a hostage incident or some other tragedy to remind us of the service provided to us by the people who work behind the barbed wire. Most of them without weapons. Most of them among our most dangerous criminals, day in and day out.

My guess is that your long holiday weekend was interrupted hardly at all by the hostage situation at Lewis. The local TV news didn't break into the National Football League championship games to provide us with regular updates. There were no scenes of candlelight vigils or midnight prayer services.

Nor did anyone within the law enforcement family ask for such a thing. Although I did have one request from a prison employee waiting for me on my answering machine Monday morning.

"In addition to praying for the hostages and their families," the man said, "I was wondering if you could take a moment to remind folks that we're not prison guards. We're corrections officers." Done.

[Gaoler]

To be honest, I've almost got a problem with being called a Corrections Officer. I think it sends the wrong image of what we do. We don't correct. That is not my job. I am not responsible for "correcting" these inmates. I supervise them. I make sure they don't escape, kill each other, themselves, us, or anyone else. I attempt to make them follow the rules of the institution. I don't sit around and talk to them about their crimes and how it makes them feel. I don't try to get them to see the light. I just don't want them to kill someone or escape. I've got too much to do trying to keep everyone alive, behind the walls and not breaking too many of our rules to try and address their "problems".

But that's just me.

I'm kind of partial to what our UK brothers are called and what this site is called. Seems to be more appropriate.

[jblevins]

Originally Posted by Custodian

Those men in the photos are straight up Prison Guards. Corrections? Yeah they were correct or at least came that way to those convicts.

By the way, is it insulting or a complement to call a Corrections professional, a Prison Guard? (Some like it because it has a hint of old school badazz, others don't like it for reasons I'm not really aware of)

All I know is I'm never saying the g word on here again lol.

[LDM]

Originally Posted by Devenshack

"In addition to praying for the hostages and their families," the man said, "I was wondering if you could take a moment to remind folks that we're not prison guards. We're corrections officers." Done.

Kind of long but worth the read...from this site...

http://www.correctionhistory.org/htm...wallcreed.html

THE CORRECTIONAL OFFICER

The professional correctional officer follows a strange calling. He keeps people where they don't want to be and don't want to stay and no one likes him for it. By doing his job well, he helps inmates in ways they may not appreciate or acknowledge.

The correctional officer protects inmates from the anger and guilt they feel for other reasons. He enforces rules which protect them from themselves and from one another in subtle ways civil rights lawyers never suspect.

The correctional officer knows inmates as people, 24 hours a day. He knows them as does no other employee in the justice system. Their snores, coughs, moans and screams, and their fitful sleeplessness at night, their bathroom and eating habits, their bullying, their remarkable idiom and symbols, and unique body language, the kindness and tension rise and subside to mysterious, unconscious tides and social rhythms no sociological treatise will ever explain.

Scholarly criminologists who never carried the keys frequently remark that correctional officers, like inmates, are "doing time." It is usually said for effect ... but it says nothing to the initiated. It isn't true.

Correctional officers don't do time. No one should try to lay that on them. They needn't accept a transfer of guilt from [any] quarter. Not from inmates, surely, because, correctional officers have not done the crimes that bring people to prisons.

If he is professional, the correctional officer does his job knowing he will not be romanticized by t.v. like police.

By those who want him to be a helping person, he will be seen as punitive. They usually don't consider how hard it is for the normal person to routinely inflict discomfort without provocation.

He will absorb and contain hostility without being himself hostile and will pay the price of that. He is the stuff high blood pressure is made of.

The correctional officer will do his job knowing that citizens who demand big time sentences for criminals will not pay big taxes to buy the painfully expensive maximum security space that these sentences require. As always, however, the job will be done though the risks are increased. The correctional officer is not doing time. He is doing a job and that's enough.

[miami]

have you sen the new uniforms the BOP now. Pure garbage

[shakedownshorti]

Funny, I never got called, Guard, Correctional Officer, CO etc.....they had choice names for me, but I am not allowed to disclose them on this site because they are all cuss words!!! LOL!!! Fit me pretty well though!

[lwinger]

Originally Posted by PsychoMike

Shakedown.... from what I've seen, there are many, many officers who SHOULD have been sent home. Being a supervisor SUCKS when you have to tell an Officer to go home and get a uniform that wasn't slept in; it REALLY sucks when it's the third time in a quarter and no one above you will give you back up on doing something aobut it.

Psycho mike I got to know who that was.... or they were