Lee’s Blog 17

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.