Assault!

Well it finally happened. After three years of working with inmates at the county jail I finally got attacked. On Wednesday I was working our maximum security unit and an inmate broke the rules. I then ordered him to go to his cell and lock down. Isn't it interesting how much these people act like, and then are treated like children? You did a bad thing. Go to your room! Anyway, he didn't want to go to his room, so then I had to put him there. Long story short, he punched me in the left eye, I then subdued him and he got a new felony charge for assaulting a peace officer. I heard yesterday that he received a $20,000 bond on that, so I don't think he'll be going anywhere any time soon. Now that all laid out as it is, I would like to comment on some feelings I had during the event.

People often ask me one question in particular when they find out I work at the jail. They want to know if I am afraid working around all those inmates, and the answer is no. Most of the time. I explained in a previous post that we have all sorts of inmates in the jail, ranging from jaywalkers to multiple murderers, and at times I will be in the same room with forty-four of any mixture of them. Most times I am not afraid, because I have worked there long enough to realize that most times even murderers are still just people. They are not monsters. I will say this, though, and I suggest that you never tell your children this. There are monsters out there. We like to tell our kids that monsters are just make believe, but I have met a few, so I know they are real. But they are exceptionally rare, so as I stated before, I am usually not afraid to be in a room with forty-four inmates. On the day I got assaulted, I was in a room with two inmates and another officer, and though I think I remained as rational as you can in this sort of situation, I was afraid. Unless you are in a sport fighting match and you expect to get hit, the moment someone hits you in the face, you are fighting for your life. Adrenalin levels go through the roof. Your heart rate skyrockets and your vision narrows. All you can think of is either neutralizing or escaping the threat. It's not a good feeling. But, at the same time it is. It's a primal kind of feeling rooted in the very beginnings of our beings, and even though it is scary, it feels almost right. Your body is doing what its core programming was meant to do. You're not sitting in front of a computer screen or shuffling papers from here to there. You are fighting for your very survival. It's something that has been going on for eons, and though we have lost touch with that most basic version of ourselves through all of our superficial modern society, I was shown proof that we are still animals, and if we are forced to, we will fight to survive.

This is not a boast, but I won that fight. The reason I don't consider it bragging is that when it comes down to us (detention officers) versus them (inmates), we always win. In order for us to lose, someone would have to die, or inmates would have to escape, and we do our very best every day to make sure that neither of those two things happen. We are looked down upon by our colleagues in street patrol as being "just jailers," but they drop their problems on us and then they leave. We are the ones that have to deal with these people on a daily basis. We have to manage the problem instead of dropping it on someone else to handle. In this kind of a situation, having to manage a population of people that already have a disregard for the rules, you find yourself building relationships with inmates. They must remain professional and never reach a personal level, but they are necessary for gathering information and accomplishing tasks. There are even several inmates that I personally like. I will never associate with them on the outside, but if I see them on the street I say hello and might even chat with them for a few minutes, but they will never be coming over for dinner on Sunday. I have also now developed a relationship with the inmate who decided to hit me. I feel almost like we've shared something now. We've gone through combat together and we have survived, and that connects us somehow. Of course we won't be able to discuss it since he probably going to prison for a long time, but that's all right, because I doubt he places the same kind of significance on the event. For me it becomes about finding meaning in a place where everything seems so pointless. Where lives are squandered and people a lot of times have lost hope. It's easy to be drawn into apathy in a place like that, and that is why it is important to examine events such as this and realize that they do have meaning. It allows you to maintain some sense of hope, and that is incredibly important in this type of environment.