Lee’s Blog 18

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.