Here's the thing about people who volunteer in prisons, not that I'm against it. They get a distorted view of inmates. Inmates are on their best behavior in front of these people.
You're absolutely right. We always--almost always--get to be the good guys, and the COs have to be the bad guys. Occasionally we see or discover something unsavory about a prisoner, but more often our experience of them is all good and no bad. We get that.
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Yet these people will talk as experts and think I'm just a hard azz thug as a C/O, not realizing that I spend 8 hours + a day with those same inmates and know far more about them than they ever will.
Expert what?
Certainly I have never represented myself to be an expert CO: I'm no kind of CO. I couldn't do what you do.
However, it's just as true that because you do what you do and know what you know, you could never do what I do.
We'll both get more productive work done if we each hold off a bit on running the other guy down and concentrate on the work that has been vouchsafed us.
And incidentally, I have no idea whether you're a hardass thug. Some COs are; some are pretty much regular folks; and a very few have such a gift for the job that everybody loves them, from the prisoners to the volunteers to the other COs clear on up to the warden. I've met two such in my twenty-some years of volunteering. As far as I know now, you could be in any of those categories.
"But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain--that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist." --Lysander Spooner, 1867
