A Dangerous Job

The news is always filled with stories of police officers who are injured or killed. Yet statistically a corrections officer has a higher rate of assault and injury.

Here's an excerpt from a story in the Dallas News covering the increase in assaults on Texas CO's:

A snapshot of a typical month in Texas prisons – last March, for example – provides a look at the dangers inherent in the job:

•The Telford Unit in New Boston, Texas, went on lockdown in March after 62 inmates – some using broken brooms, socks filled with dominoes and commissary hair gel and dented trash cans as weapons – were found fighting in a dayroom at the facility. Corrections officers used blast dispersion and rubber ball grenades to quell the fight. Four inmates were injured.

•Two weeks later, at the Beto Unit in Tennessee Colony, Texas, 17 inmates fought near their cells, resulting in two guard injuries. Nearly six ounces of Top Cop, a type of pepper spray foam, was used.

•And in March at the Beto facility, a 19-year-old female guard was punched in the face by an inmate who had a nail hidden in his fist.
The guard suffered a gash on the left side of her face. The inmate – 49-year-old T.J. Jones, who is serving a five-year sentence for burglary – was transferred to another unit.
The all-male prison, which houses more than 3,300 inmates, has nearly 500 security guards, only a fraction of what the unit says it needs.

*Thanks to AFSCME's Dean Enge for bringing this article to my attention.