Blog Number 16

In Britton’s study when comparing the difference between both male and females about how they became correctional officers is quite drastically different. To begin men that become prison guards usually wanted to enter into law enforcement however, they were unable to get into that profession. This in turn was the next best thing for them to get into. The study that was performed 44% of the guards that were interviewed had previous military experience while only 7% of the females had military experience. This is quite a difference as the job of a guard has a lot of similarities to those employment positions that were in the military. Now males usually come from the military a large portion of the women that were interviewed 37% come from some sort of clerical or secretarial type job. While there was not a single male in this study that reported previous work experience of this kind. One thing that was pretty much said by all of the women in the study was that this job was taken as a last resort and they all had some sort of hesitation about the position and taking the job. Now a few interesting comments that I thought were a bit different was the information that was given from the daycare providers. They said it almost felt as if they did not have much of a difference between taking care of both children and inmates, and that this felt somewhat the same. Overall when it came to the training it was the same for both women and men officers. Women officers felt in some areas that they had a little more to offer in regards to diffusing a situation as they are often able to take more of that motherly approach. Women usually also take the stance of trying to verbally diffuse a situation while male officers usually take a physical stance. This is one of the biggest things that still give this job more of a ‘masculine’ stance. Either way, women these days are becoming more and more in the scene of being a correctional officer. They are continuously hiring women officers; it’s just a matter of squashing the preconceived notion that is portrayed on TV of the difficult life that goes on it the prisons. Honestly if that much crime occurred in our prison system as television portrays it would be extremely difficult to run a prison system.

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