Survival mode is perpetual for someone who works with and is exposed to dangerous people and corrupt supervisors as part of your daily working environment. Your mind and body are damaged by this kind working environment to the degree where you have no quality of life. Physical injuries sustained in the line of duty are with you for the remainder of your life. It’s not like the movies where you take a beating or stabbing and in the following scene you are whole again. The physical and psychological injuries you suffer on the job continue to cause you pain and suffering for the remainder of your life. Yet this was never officially recognized by those who ran the show.
From them you often experienced the following idioms:
You’re not tough enough to do this job.
What, are you afraid to work down Inside?
You can’t take it, because you’re weak.
Get out if you can’t handle it.
You signed up for this.
Even today the front-line staff in the CSC are being devastated by the compound stress that they are being exposed to daily while on the job. CSC may now have been forced to recognize the damage caused by their own making and neglect since the MacGuigan report, yet they still have no tangible solution and are not willing to adjust their management styles to lessen the overwhelming impact that this environment has upon their staff. Communication is limited, blame culture is rife and some members are even rewarded for their unethical, harmful and violent attitudes and actions.
Then to compound your injuries, you have the people who are supposed to be looking out for you, watching your back, making it a safe workplace, supporting, and educating you. And, over your years of frontline experience, you come to find that they are not public servants at all. A great many of them are serving no one but themselves and often at your expense, risk, and the cost of your physical and mental health and even your very life.
It’s never the decision-makers who suffer from their own inexperienced input imposed upon the frontline staff. Those who make the policy decisions are so far removed physically from the prisons they manage that they are never in any danger of being harmed by their own errors. They often don’t see the end results of their machinations and never have to deal with the aftermath of their misguided policies and agendas.
The policy makers view the inmates through the lens of their mission document. They seem to see them as what they want them to be, as the end product of incarceration, a graduate of the system and not for what and who they truly are at this particular stage in their life. Those who make policy need to experience first-hand, up close and personal the correctional clients within their charge.