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Perhaps the main, and most important, focus of The National Association for Female Correctional Officers is bringing a far greater awareness about two big issues confronting female corrections officers. One is sexual assault and the other is harassment. This goes right along with some of the recommendations presented by Britton. If a greater awareness of these two issues were brought to fruition, it would help decrease the dominance of males in the field of corrections officers. This would be accomplished by allowing the introduction and discussion of female issues into this profession. Both Britton and NAFCO agree that this has not yet happened.

If NAFCO’s proposed legislation passes, it would mean a zero tolerance policy meaning that each and every assault against female corrections officers would be prosecuted. Their hope is also that this would cause the accountability of officials within the prison to increase as regards failing to detect, reduce, prevent, and even punish the perpetrators of these assaults. It has been found that male corrections officers and male prison officials believe that the huge risk of harassment and sexual assault are just part of the territory for female corrections officers. The males believe it is the woman’s choice to work there, so they know the risks. I think a big reason the males feel this way is because they don’t run into the same issues female corrections officers do. Single mothers take on jobs as corrections officers because they need a wage they can actually live on and raise their children. NAFCO’s work has been endorsed by Britton.

Another bad thing about being a female corrections officer is that advancement opportunities often turn out very disappointing simply because women are passed over for supervisory and managerial positions because they have the commitments at home that men often do not have.
No doubt there are a huge number of issues female corrections officers must deal with each and every day. For this reason, reform is extremely necessary.

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The Lewis Prison incident is one that I can still remember. Two prison guards were taken hostage by inmates Randy Wassenaar and Steven Coy. The two men had obviously planned their escape, though it went very awry. Wassenaar had beaten a guard and stolen his uniform from him. That way, he was able to pose as a guard and get into the guard tower that overlooked the entire prison campus. He then took Lois Fraley and Jason Auld hostage. Because of the way Wassenaar gained access to the tower, the two guards were totally unaware and were not able to subdue him. Fraley related how the situation just didn’t seem right to her when Wassenaar asked to be let in the tower. She tells us that her “stomach just knotted up-it didn’t feel right.” She goes on to tell us that Auld hit the button to let Wassenaar in before she could even tell him of her feelings.

What happened from that point to fifteen days later was awful. Officer Auld was critically injured immediately. He was then kept in the tower for seven days. The inmates finally released him after seven days so he could be taken away and his critical injuries tended to.

What all Fraley said was very scary. She relates how she was raped repeatedly. She also tells us how she contemplated suicide after four days by using the pin of her name badge to puncture her wrist vein. Thankfully, she did not do this. In an effort to become so unappealing that the two inmates would not want to rape her anymore, she stopped washing. She also stopped drinking so she would not have to urinate in front of them. The inmates had been telling her when she could and could not urinate.

I don’t believe the turnkey chapter in Britton’s book describes the hostage situation at Lewis. In the book, corrections officers lived at the prisons quite often for days at a time. Their working conditions were not good. These guards worked a whole lot of hours—far more than they should. Thankfully, that is not the case today.

The Director of the Department of Corrections for the State of Arizona at that time was Dora Schriro. She had been on the job for less than a year when the hostage incident took place. Schriro and Governor Janet Napolitano were at the prison to greet Fraley when she was released. Schriro relates in this article how she found that a full one-fourth of the Lewis corrections officers could not even pass the lowest level of the competency test given to guards. I feel it is obvious from the way Auld allowed Wassenaar access right away that there needs to be more training for guards so they know how to handle situations like this one before they become situations like this one. This showed that the tower was not the safe place it should have been. Schriro really appears to be a no nonsense leader who won’t take anything from anyone. Because prisons have been gendered for such a long time as masculine structures, Schriro will definitely have her work cut out for her as far as proving herself and earning the respect she deserves is concerned. One of the newspapers in the Phoenix area showed the hairstyles that Schriro has had in the past and criticized her for them. Phoenix Magazine sexualized Schriro when they wrote about her personal life that included her love life and also how she loves to garden.

Gendered organizations are all around us. The treatment Schriro received is proof of that. In an ideally non-gendered organization, this would not be happening.

Britton definitely has some good ideas. She says that more training is needed. She also says that better policies are needed. According to Britton, better policies could avert future hostage situations by inmates. Better training should include specific training for men’s prisons and women’s prisons. There are too many situations that are different between the two.

Because of the fact that prisoners are subordinates to corrections officers, a prison is a total institution. A prison has a very distinct hierarchy. A prison is a place where that hierarchy must definitely be followed in an effort to keep things peaceful and quiet.

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I was very enthralled at watching this clip of Geena Davis. I have always been a fan of hers, so I was very interested to hear what she had to say. Because she has three children, she became aware of how females were being depicted in the media and felt it was time to change that.

Being older than Geena Davis, I could relate to a lot of the things she said about older television. I must admit that I had not thought about it before. The one thing I had thought about before because I think it is so totally absurd the way she is presented is Miss Piggy. Giving a female pig cleavage is ridiculous. Giving a female animal of any breed other than a human cleavage is ridiculous for that matter. That is not for the children. That is meant for teenage and adult males. Stereotyping in the media is way out of control. She also brought up how the Smurfs were originally all male until one female came along. She was named Smurfette. This is a perfect example of stereotyping. Smurfette was supposedly ugly with ugly eyelashes until Papa Smurf performed plastic surgery, or “smurfurgery,” and transformed her into a beautiful blonde bombshell. In other words, if you are a female and not a blonde, you cannot be a “bombshell.” How ridiculous!

She also tells us that seventy-eight percent of senior girls do not like their bodies. A full one third of third graders have been on diets. Excuse me! Our media has portrayed females so ridiculously that our they are ruining the female part of our society. This brings to mind an incident back when I was about twenty. A fifteen year old girl in my church, who seemed to really have it together, committed suicide because she was made fun of all the time because, according to what she heard in the media, wasn’t a bombshell.

Geena Davis said exactly what Britton said; seeing these characters portrayed like this has spilled over into the way we act even as adults. This influences work in that men and women are often treated very differently in the jobs. Even male and female corrections officers and prisoners are treated differently. I hope this changes someday, the sooner the better.

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Training for corrections officers consisted primarily of hands-on physical training. This training was usually administered by other male corrections officers. This is a formal training that all recruits are required to complete. Men and women are usually trained in the same classes, not separated. Reading Britton made me aware that the federal penal system has a lot more money than the states because the federal system receives money from the federal government. Perhaps because they appear to receive a better grade of training than state recruits, federal officers seem to be more satisfied in their positions. However, many of the officers said that their “real” training comes on the job.
Something I am just so surprised at is the number of officers who have said that other corrections officers had helped them, but that the inmates provided a good bit of their training. According to these officers, the inmates helped them learn their job quite willingly. That is probably because the inmates wanted peace and quite in their prison just as much as the officers do, if not more.

Most officers said that violence in the prisons was hugely exaggerated in their training. What was presented in training was so bad that it caused some recruits to withdraw from the program. A 1995 survey shows that ninety-one percent of the prisons surveyed had no violence in an entire year.

Men are much more likely than women to serve sentences for violent crimes. Men also tend to have a longer criminal history than women. Something else very interesting is that men tend to escape from custody a lot more than women.

A big problem with the training is that corrections officers continuously say that the training is pretty much based solely on male inmates in prisons. This means officers are not being trained correctly and that training programs need to change.

Another very interesting thing brought out in Britton’s study is that male and female corrections officers alike preferred to work in male prisons. They said this was because women tend to be much more emotional than the men do. Additionally, women’s complaints were viewed as being petty some of the time while men’s complaints were usually legitimate.

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The best way for me to start out this blog is to say wow! Watching this documentary from the North Carolina Women’s Prison was very interesting. Our readings in class thus far could never have prepared me for what I saw in the film.

I feel the warden really had things together. She also did her best to make sure her entire staff at the prison had things together as well. Her staff included both male and female officers. There are more than 1,100 inmates at this facility and, from what I saw in the film, they are all properly handled. While I’m sure it is probably this way in every women’s prison, I was impressed to see that male officers were required to have female officers with them when going into certain areas so that no accusations could be made against them. The corrections officers really seemed to exercise caution when handling the inmates. When they had to be, they were assertive. None of the officers exhibited aggressive behavior when not needed. There were some instances where the guards actually came across as being sensitive and genuinely caring about the inmates’ lives. One such situation was the closing of the movie when the one inmate was released and the guard drove her to the bus stop. The guard did not act like she was doing this just because she had to. She acted like she was pleased to do it. She even wished the released inmate good luck.

Inmates at this facility had been convicted of crimes such as drug possession and/or dealing, fraud, murder, burglary, and assorted other crimes. It was very interesting to me to see that every inmate interviewed in this film made no bones about what they had done. No one tried to say they didn’t do it.

Through my years of life, I have heard it said that people could be heterosexual going into prison and coming out of prison, but they might be homosexual while in prison. This seemed to be the case in this documentary. One lesbian couple in particular were the prison loan sharks. They had also become lovers. One member of this couple had been married to a male before coming to prison.

While we did not really see it, there had to have been corrections officers that did have inappropriate liaisons with inmates because there was talk of inmates that were able to obtain drugs, cigarettes, and the like from officers. I am sure this is the situation in any prison, whether male or female, in the country.

One thing that could be interpreted in opposite ways was the cosmetology school on the grounds. While it was an excellent trades program for the prisoners, I personally felt the guards were almost too laid back while in there having their hair done. The one guard said on camera that she was very comfortable with having that particular inmate do her hair. Other jobs at which the prisoners could work to earn money and also a trade included answering phones for the North Carolina Tourism Bureau and also making dentures. I found it really neat to hear the one inmate helping the person on the phone plan their vacation. It put me in mind of how one can call the Department of Motor Vehicles here in Arizona and will, most likely, be speaking with an inmate at one of the state’s prisons. It gives the inmates a bit of contact with the outside world and, again, helps them learn a trade. An inmate I found to be really interesting was the one in the denture manufacturing program. She said she had tried other trades programs in the prison and, shall we say, found them to be ho-hum, tried the dentures program and really liked it. She really sounded like she knew what she wanted to do the rest of her life after release from prison.

So often we see inmates, whether male or female, depicted as rough and hard. I cannot say that I really saw more than maybe one inmate in this film that came across that way. It was really hard for me to tell that she was really a woman. She was a lesbian and really looked like she would take the male role in a lesbian relationship. She also looked very big and very tough. An inmate that really came across as remorseful for what she did was the forty-six year old woman who was a former corrections officer herself. She had killed her husband of twenty-two years and was incarcerated for the rest of her life without the possibility of parole. She commented about how she wished so many times that she could go back and undo what she had done. This documentary really proved that not all prisoners are no good so and so’s. Some prisoners do realize they made a mistake and are sorry for it.

Both Britton and the documentary show that caution must be exercised at all times. If caution is not exercised, then there can be serious consequences such as injury or death.

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Amazingly, previous law enforcement experience is not a requirement to become a corrections officer. The requirements are actually quite lenient. You must be at least twenty-one years of age, have no felony convictions, and have a high school diploma. Jobs in a prison are not really attractive to people in today’s society. It seems like many people that end up in prison work never planned on it. They just sort of “drifted” into it. Some people wanted to be police officers but, when they could not do that, chose to be corrections officers.

Corrections officers start out at about $ 23,000 per year if they have no experience. This is actually below the national poverty level. However, if you do not have any education after high school, this tends to be the pay level you will find a job in. One good thing about being a corrections officer is that there is usually a great deal of room for advancement. Perhaps because of the low starting pay, the benefits packages tend to be very good for corrections officers. Many females, African-Americans, and Hispanics can be found in these positions. Britton tells us that most of the corrections officers she interviewed did not plan to be in their current position (pg.80). Absolutely none of her interviewees planned while growing up to be in this position. Many of them bounced from job to job before ending up as a corrections officer. An interesting tidbit here is that one percent of children surveyed in a survey said they wanted to be a corrections officer.

Forty-four percent of the men Britton interviewed had some sort of military experience before becoming a corrections officer. Only seven percent of the female interviewees had military experience. No men had clerical experience prior to entering their current position, but thirty-seven percent of the women did.

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The first prison in the United States opened in the 1780’s. It took a very short time to open up more prisons. There were fifteen prisons in the United States in 1820.

In the early days of the prison system, women were thought of more as being annoying and men were in prison to be reformed. Women and men were both originally housed in the same prison. The first women’s prison was the Mount Pleasant Prison and it opened in 1839.

In what is known as the second phase of the penal system in the United States, women were often sent to half way houses instead of actually being kept in a prison. It was thought that women were not as violent as men, so they did not actually need to be in a prison, per se. The prison system wanted to rehabilitate the male prisoner into what they thought was the ideal man.

A problem throughout the history of women being incarcerated is that of female inmates being raped and abused. While we would tend to think that those that did this were male guards, I feel confident that other female inmates were also guilty of this act.

Current statistics show that, for every one female inmate, there are twenty-four male inmates. That number is shrinking, though, as more and more females are incarcerated.

One thing very prevalent is the gender perception and segregation in prisons. Women are often made to cook, clean, do laundry, do gardening, and other “female” tasks while men tend to work in construction, the railroad, and other supposedly more demanding jobs.

The first prison in Arizona was the Yuma Territorial Prison. It opened in 1875. The Yuma Prison housed both men and women together. As prison reforms continued to be birthed, the Yuma Territorial Prison eventually closed.
Today, men and women have separate prisons. This is the case both in Arizona and across the country

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Britton starts out by telling us on page three of “At Work in the Iron Cage” that the theory of gendered organizations says that we should not see an organization as a neutral organism that has been infected by the identities of a worker’s gender, sexuality, race, and class. We should, instead, see these as places where “these attributes are present in pre-existing assumptions and constructed through ongoing practice.” While Britton uses a number of sources, her main venue are interviews with seventy-two corrections officers. These officers work in two male prisons and three female prisons. Structural, agency, and culture are all linked together in organizational gendering because, as Britton tells us, there are various cultural ideologies and cultural ideas that affect job choice, employer preferences, organizational practices that have an influence. For example, my mother used to work in a daycare center. If she had gone in there to apply for a job at the same time a man had, she most likely would have gotten the job because she is a woman. This could be because the employer would assume she had past experience in taking care of children as a mother.

Britton also tells us that the public sector and the private sector definitely have a division when it comes to work. Culture defines what our beliefs are about gender. These beliefs include specific things that men do and that women do. This is what Britton refers to as “organizations gendered at the level of structure.” Often, a man can leave work for the day and he is done for the night. However, a woman often leaves work and goes home to work many more hours as a wife and mother. She could very easily be working harder at home than she does at work.

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According to Britton, a corrections office is a big man that is very stern. He also portrays the image of having a great deal of power. The portrayal in the media conjures up the idea of a Rambo-type person in a corrections officer uniform. From my personal experiences, I would say nothing could be farther from the truth. I know two men who are corrections officers in the Arizona Department of Corrections. The one man is tall, buff, and bald headed. He does portray the image of power, though he is a sweetheart of a guy. He has said in past conversations that they were taught that corrections officers, no matter how nice they really are, must convey an image of power to the inmates. They were taught that, if an inmate detects the least little bit of non-control on the part of the officer, there will often be trouble. This man has worked out with weights a lot in his life to look stronger to the inmates. He also told us that female corrections officers in a male prison that is more than minimum security tend to be devoured by the inmates because they know they are bigger than the officer.

The other man I knew years ago was, at that time, a corrections officer on Death Row at the Florence prison. He was the total opposite of the man I just described. This man was very much over weight. He probably could not run very fast if he needed to. It did not seem to matter to him, though, because he said the prisoners on Death Row were usually so secured that they could not do anything. His main job when an execution occurred was to clean out the death chamber afterwards.

I have watched television shows and movies in the past that had female police officers and corrections officers in them. The women often seemed to be depicted either as sex objects or as women that really looked more like men. I don’t believe either of these depictions is valid for the most part. My thoughts on female corrections officers are that they do have to be strong. I would guess that, if they have long hair, it probably has to be up in a bun so that inmates cannot grab their hair as easily. One thing I have noticed when I have seen Sheriff Joe’s female officers on television is that their uniforms usually tend to be almost skin tight. I would think this would lead to unwanted, unnecessary heckling from the inmates. As concerns whether male correction officers can do the job better than a female officer, I don’t believe so.

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Occupational segregation exists for several reasons. One reason is that, no matter how hard we try to make the genders equal and allow both men and women to work in the same jobs totally across the board, I don’t think it will ever happen. That is not to say that it could not happen. I just don’t believe it will. That is very sad. If a woman wants to enter a male dominated occupation, or vice versa, they should have that opportunity. It is extremely encouraging to see how many occupations both men and women do work in side by side today. If one were to look back, say thirty years ago, you would never see a woman riding a fire truck as a firefighter. You would never have seen a man working as a secretary. Today, you see both of these occurring. I, in fact, am a male secretary and love this line of work. Consider the day when you would not have seen a female attorney. Now there are numerous female attorneys.

Occupational segregation, while it seems to have been around since the beginning of time, can be cyclical. There was a time when clerical workers were all male. Then it cycled around to where most clerical workers were women. Now the cycle has begun to swing around again to where men are entering clerical work more and more.

Social and institutional factors contribute to this problem in several ways. Even before a baby is born, we get everything pink for them if they are a girl and everything blue for them if they are a boy. This carries on after birth, thereby reinforcing the gender segregation.

According to the YWCA’s article “Increasing Women’s Incomes” Non-Traditional Training and Employment Fact Sheet,” occupational segregation plays a huge role in the number of women that live below the poverty level[i]. This same report states that, in 2002, women earned only 77 cents of every dollar a man earned. This is preposterous! Even worse is the fact that African American women earned less than that and Latinas earned even less than African Americans.

Women tend to earn more when working in a male dominated occupation than if they were working in a female dominated occupation. However, as we have already stated, they do not make as much as men do in these same occupations.

If men lose by women entering their male dominated occupations, it would only be in that there may not be as many positions to go around. It is obvious from the figures cited above from the YWCA article that men do not lose wages. What needs to happen is women’s wages need to increase to match the men’s wages. I would throw out a “monkey wrench” here from my personal experience. As I already said, I am a male working in the clerical field. When a male enters a
female dominated occupation, they do not earn as much as the female, at least I didn’t.

[i] www.ywca.org, “Increasing Women’s Incomes: Non-Traditional Training and Employment Fact Sheet” in Eliminating Racism, empowering Women.