Topic: A Broader View / A Correctional Sense of Humor

Stay on as long as you can. I’m bored now that I’m retired out of the system. It remains a unique job where you really learn to take a good look at people who present themselves as wonderful angels.

Topic: A Broader View / A Correctional Sense of Humor

I recently retired after 40 years in the prison’s system and as such, also saw a lot of what others could only describe as being simply awful (ritual murders,cannibalism, hostage incidents and some very serious assaults). I saw similar incidents of body carnage at motor vehicle accidents. It was many a time that I saw prison staff, policemen and paramedics laughing and joking at these scenes: People who were actually from very religious backgrounds and who were known to lead sober, law-abiding lifestyles.

The media and human right’s activists used to criticize us for this, but the humour was actually a psychological barrier which we had subconsciously developed to protect ourselves from the realization of the horrors that we were viewing. However, the very same critics had themselves not been exposed to the physical traumas and mutilations which we had to see and endure while performing our duties of having to manage these incidents and accidents.

We all went back to our private lives after these incidents and it was remarkable that people would stare at us in disbelief when we spoke and joked about what we’d witnessed: Thinking that we were simply callous and inhuman. However, many of us eventually developed psychological disorders as a result of these incidents. Joking about what we had seen rather served to protect us from the psychological impact of what we had endured.