Blog #18: Training

Prisons become a masculine institution when they try to establish gender-neutral policies. Many of the officers in Bitton’s study feel that their training has left them vulnerable to dealing with women inmates. While going through training, both for state and federal institutions, officers are being trained to work with male inmates. Not is not a direct statement that is made, but training is directed at controlling potentially very dangerous, violent inmates. Most women are not in prison for violent crimes, most women are not a flight risk once they are in prison, and have shorter sentences and “shorter criminal histories” (Bitton, 2003, pg 102). When officers are stationed in a female prison they are not prepared to handle the women. This leads to more leniencies in the facility and the chance for something more detrimental to happen increases. Most all of the officers in the study said that their training focused on the physical aspects of the job, which is one reason why society has previously sought to keep women out of prison work, especially male prisons. The problem with this is the sentiment that many of the officers have voiced that their job is more mental than physical. The prisoners use mind games to try and “one up” the officer (Bitton, 2003). Men prisons focus on keeping and enforcing the institutions policies. Women who work in men prisons also have to face sexual harassment from the inmates, something that they are not taught in training because it would not be gender neutral if they were to. Women officers also have to deal with their male co-workers who do not think that they should be there. When the women do not know options that are available to them it causes some when to leave their jobs. One of the things I find is that in male prisons women are actually able to keep the calm just by being present and how in female prisons the opposite is true. The inmates respond more negatively to the female officers than they do the male officers. All the officers in Bitton’s study claim that their training was insufficient compared to on-the-job training and that they learned almost everything they needed to know about prison work in their first couple of weeks on the job, some of that knowledge coming from the inmates themselves. I think that the state and federal institutions need to re-evaluate their training to incorporate the mental aspect of the job and how different it is to work with female inmates than it is to work with male inmates.