Reaction

Intro to Corrections

Before I watch the films in class I thought I had a pretty good insight on how prison worked and how corrections were used in the prison system. As I watched the films it gave me the visual part of the learning experience. It gave me the inside view of the system and how it works, but not only that it also showed me more on drugs in prions, fights, gangs, and the struggle to keep control of the prison. Not only had that it gone along with the book and everything we are learning in class.
Now the film showed a lot of gang violence in prions. I saw how classification works better. In book it talks about how they can look at some tattoos and can tell if they are in a gang or not, now the officers in the films would use tattoos and markings to mark them violent activities. But certain tattoos will put a guy in a certain gang. This would help them classify them. This helped them be aware of certain gangs and different ways to handle them, and who to watch for and who to be more cautious with. The officers would find out new inmates and there gang history just by their tattoos. The max security prison system works a little differently with the gang situation. In the max security prison it is more about color of skin that whites stick with whites, blacks with blacks and etc.
Overcrowding is no joke in prison. Now in class we learned about this and how prisons had to put multiple inmates in one room. In the video in showed exactly that! Sometimes 150 inmates would be in the same room at once. No walls separating them. Color wars got really bad in these situations. But once you start getting over crowding you start getting understaffed. These situations can be dangerous, when most rooms require 2 to 3 officers at a time and you can only put one in there. It’s not their fault but some people can’t handle the pressure. Understaff make the staff there work a lot more than they can handle. In the end it is the warden’s job to make sure his staff doesn’t get burned out from over time. When there is stress and burned out you get more room for mistakes and that makes it more dangerous
Prison safety is a huge concern to everyone in the prison all the time. Prisons are always on the watch for weapons and drugs. Inmates have come up with some clever ideas to make weapons. So the officers are on the watch and alert all the time. When an officer puts there guard down something can go wrong or someone gets hurt. That can never happen. The ratio in most prisons is 200 to 1. When one officer lets there guard down there life and the life of others are on the line. So it is huge that training and weapon training is done properly. Some officers come to life or death situations and proper training in there tools will make the difference in life or death. Officers have to always be on their top alert, not for only themselves but for their fellow officers.
Now what I learned from all this is that prison can be a mean and nasty place but with proper training and control it doesn’t have to be nasty and mean. It helps a lot to read about all this stuff like classification and to see it in use in real life in the prison system today. How it has changed over time. I learned that in some prisons it’s about survival of the fittest. That two gangs that hate each other will come together to survive in prison. Prisons are always in need of help. Overall this was a great learning experience.