A FORMER CORRECTIONS OFFICER ANSWERS BACK

A former corrections officer was upset with my "18 Years of Phantom Parole Supervision" blog and responded as follows:
　
Ya know what pisses me off? What pisses me off is administrators and other petty bureaucrats who hamstring public safety officers by refusing to back them when they do their job.

When these people take more interest in pursuing complaints by inmates/parolees/and their families than they do in supporting an officer's efforts to maintain the line.....to maintain order and discipline in a housing unit or a parole region.

Administrators and petty bureaucrats have learned in the past twenty years that they can make more hay out of persecuting and firing employees for "misconduct", than they can for ensuring public safety.

I retired early. I got sick of trying to enforce rules that others winked at....rules that were meant to keep my housing units safe. Because when I enforced those fucking rules and kept my housing unit safe I pissed off the gangsters that were running their little businesses and protection rackets and gambling enterprises.

So these guys complained. They conspired to file complaints on every little misstep, perceived or invented, that I might take, and they complained and got their families to complain. And they got some play with supervisors, bureaucrats, and administrators who would rather sit on their fat asses and do nothing and wait for their next promotion than to back an honest hard working officer.

Bureaucrats without regard for public safety take the path of least resistance. Pacify the complainant. Buy them off by disciplining an honest cop, cause it's easier and makes them look good to their superiors.

Newspapers and a few prosecutors are all too happy to go after a peace officer who has been labeled dirty or who has been accused of some civil rights violation, whether it happened or not.

I was at Corcoran in the early 90's ....working in the SHU.....putting inmates out to yards who we knew were hot and we knew were going to fight .....because of idiot administrators who demanded that we do things that way.

You have no idea how bad things have gotten in this state since you wore a badge.

Line staff are much more afraid of losing their jobs and of being sued because of inept and corrupt administrators than they are of walking the tiers, the yards, or the ghetto streets at night. We can deal with the inmates and the parolees. It's the administrators we are really worried about.

It's so easy to sit in a safe little office and write about lazy cops not doing their job. There are a few of those....but only a few. The real problem is further up the chain of command.