AGAIN I hear of a staff JCO getting injured and having to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance... it's getting to be a fairly frequent occurance, eh?  The problem is that there's no official sharing of what's happened -- everything starts out as a shred of information that may or may not simply be RUMOR then gets passed around from staff to staff, shift to shift, before the truth comes to light.  In the meantime, JCO's fan the flames of fear and frustration.

I SAY take down that damn "days without injuries" sign in the gatehouse!!  It has NEVER been kept current/updated... and who's idea was it, anyhow, to get it?  The only purpose it serves is to increase the disgust factor of those of us who must bear witness to our fellow co-workers being hurt on the job.  Get rid of it.  Get more staff on the dorm, more discipline for the kids, and less lip service to what a GREAT JOB everyone's doing here.  That's just NOT TRUE.

There is NOT ONE JCO I know of that thinks our campus is being run in a way that serves the youth in a meaningful way or provides ANYTHING but a paycheck to them individually.  The idealism is all GONE.  The hope is ALL GONE.  A visiting staff said to me last night that she thought we'd NEVER get back to helping the kids since everything has gone to hell as much as it has... what we've lost is impossible to get back.  This particular staff has over 25 years of working with youth -- she's not wet behind the ears -- and is herself burnt out like the rest of us.



USED to be there was NO grafitti in the toilet stalls on the dorms.  Look at them now -- worse than a NYC subway station, and nothing is being done about it.  NO WONDER there's a gangland culture on campus!  Kids wearing doo rags openly?  Happens all the time now... and don't get me started on how it's our JCO "responsibility" to tell them not to.   Admin has washed their hands on this, just as they have on the "no black shorts" rule (HAH!!), parade rest, marching, etc etc etc.  All gone... and all we have left is ...what?  A thugocracy run by teenage boy felons who decide what they want and just do it because they know they'll wear us down eventually to where no one calls them out.  Sigh.



Sure, corrections is a dangerous job -- as we all know.  But does that mean it also has to be PSYCHOLOGICALLY and EMOTIONALLY debilitating??  I would hope not, but such is not the case.  Take the case of the JCO who was told to work on a particular dorm last night and had the staff on BOTH SIDES of the dorm tell her they "would not" work with her.  She ping-ponged back and forth until deciding to go back to her usually assigned dorm, whereupon another more somehow "suitable" JCO was sent over to work as the visiting staff.  Hmmmm.  Does anyone see anything WRONG with this situation? 

If someone marches to the beat of a different drummer does that mean others have the right to just say "I refuse to work with you"?  Could be a lawsuit coming up??  It  certainly would serve a purpose -- to let everyone know it's NOT OK to discriminate on the job, regardless if it's a matter of someone's age/race/orientation/gender or whatever.   Trust me, there's folks that work here that I find VERY DISTASTEFUL as human bengs, that I would NEVER associate with outside the gate, that I DO NOT RESPECT -- but if assigned to work with them for a shift I just do it and make the best of it.  After all, it's just a job.  It's just a paycheck any more.  And it just sucks.

I'd write more today, but alas... got a 12 hour shift coming up and don't have the time.  Word to Admin and Austin -- I'm about at the end of my rope, along with everyone else who actually is expected to do the WORK around here on the dorms.  I'm TIRED of being TIRED.  These 12's are doing me in, and making it harder to grudgingly drag my butt out of bed to  face another shift without support or the authority to make any sense of what's being expected of me.  Pull yer heads outta yer rear ends, y'all -- THIS PLACE STINKS!