Lets see here...
1. I work in a prison. I make a conscious decision to, every day I have to work, go inside a fortress and deal with the absolute worst scum that society has to offer. I go in there, not with a gun, or a baton, but with 3 things: a can of OC (pepper) spray, one set of handcuffs, and a radio. That's it. You work in a unit with 3-5 other officers, and each unit has anywhere from 180 to almost 300 inmates in it. For the non-math geniuses at home, that's about a 60 to 1 ratio. And they aren't just in their cells all day, you run rec, you run schools, shops, meds, and the like. We're officially medium security (double razorwire fence with armed towers and roving vehicles) but we have maximum there as well.
2. I've seen sexual favors in there traded for something as simple as a roll of toilet paper. Rape does happen, but more often than not, the sex is consensual (male prison BTW). I was doing end-of-shift count one day, happened upon two of them bumping uglies, and you know what I did? Marked my count sheet as having both inmates in their cell (which they were) and moved on to the next cell. No gross-out, no yelling, I just kept moving along, because you've gotta get that count in before shift change. Officially we're supposed to write up a disciplinary report if we catch that, but no one does.
3. In the Seg unit, we had lots of...interesting characters. One of the more mentally deranged inmates was getting sent to a mental hospital down the road because he was genuinely crazy (and not fake-crazy like some, or just dickwads like others). This was a guy that spent the whole day kicking on his door and screaming at the top of his lungs. We didn't get him out much because he liked to throw piss and shit at you. When you fed him, you stood to the side of the slot, threw the seg-loaf in, and shut that slot right quick.
Anyways, to get him to put on a pair of shoes, so he didn't cut his feet up walking across the yard (we're monsters in there, because we deal with monsters, but we're not inhuman) one of the more senior officers convinced this inmate that his fairy godmother was coming to take him away, but first he needed to put on his magic slippers. I swear on my fathers grave, this guy, 300 lbs of fucking big, black crazy mother fucker, looks around at us, puts on his shoes, and walks out of the unit like was on top of the world. There were 4 of us, ready to have to get nasty with this guy because of how crazy he was, but we didn't have to do squat.
4. Seen more than a few deaths up close. Stabbings, a couple with lock-in-a-sock getting bashed in the head (brains are not meant to be outside of the skull), suicide in a cell, old inmates dying in their cell, had one have a heart attack right at a grill not 10 feet from me. Just complained about chest pains, fell over, dead.
Want to know what goes through your head at that point? How much of a ***** the paperwork is going to be. That's about it. No disgust, no horror, just bitching about paperwork.
Working in a prison certainly puts the outside world in perspective. Lots of people worry about stupid shit that doesn't matter. Ended up with a medical condition that almost killed me last year, and the only thing that went through my head as I was hearing my heart beating in my head was "Damn, I really wanted to see the Grand Canyon".
So...yeah. Fun stuff.
