A Prea-Existing Condition Part 2

So.. I gave you the lead-in yesterday.  Or this morning... whenever that was.

The Feds are now wanting to crack down on something that they will never be able to even make a dent in.  So instead they are going to throw money and random legislation at it until they can claim some sort of victory.

Kind of like the "War On Drugs" they started back when I was a kid.  To this day they still haven't figured out which continent they are fighting that war on, let alone the battlefield.

Some of the stupidest rules to spew from their mouths in recent months have had to do with our female officers.

I am not, repeat not.... going to get into the argument of whether or not females belong working in a male prison.  Most of them are just as reliable and capable than the men.  Some of them even more so.  I can think of at least half a dozen of them that I would pick first over most of the men if something went down.
Anyway...

Some of the new rulings coming down have tried to severely limit what female officers can and cannot do.  A short-lived rule pretty much forbade them to pat search any male inmates.  Oh yeah.. That raised a stink.  Many of our female officers got all offended by that one.  The ability to pat search an inmate is one of the staples of being able to do our jobs here.  Without that there would be no end to the weapons and drugs and things that would get smuggled all over the place.

Not only were they hindering our female officers from doing their jobs, but they were also saying that the male officers were going to have to do all of the work they were no longer allowing the females to do.

I believe that ruling lasted all of one weekend.  With a very hastily worded "Whoops... We were wrong on that.  Disregard." the following Monday.

And I'm not exactly sure what had transpired in the interim, but I did hear the phrase "Class-Action lawsuit" bandied about some.

Yeah... that could cost somebody some money...

The latest box of stupid concerned female staff down in the Hive.  Where at the moment two out of three of the assigned Sergeants are women.  And two of the most hard core capable women I know.  Sgt Miz P on evenings and Sgt Firecracker on midnights.

At any rate, the new rule is that is an inmate is on suicide watch and refuses to keep his smock on in the cell, that any female staff in the control room must be removed from her post so she cannot view him on the monitoring system.  And they will also not be allowed in C-wing while this offender remains naked in the cell.
Of course one thing they did not take into consideration is that there is also a monitoring system in the Sergeants office.

So.... if some knucklehead decides he wants to run around his cell naked then not only can the girls not work the control room and cannot go into C-wing, they can't be in the Sergeants office either.  Yeah.... I'd love to see some suit from the capitol come down and try to tell Miz P and Miz Firecracker that.  They'd laugh in his face.  Maybe thump him on the head and throw him out of the house saying "Mind your own damn business, Snaphead.  Let us do our jobs!"

So let's recap here....
The whole hullabaloo is about stopping sexual assaults in prison.
So why are they coming down so hard on our female officers?
In the ten years I have been with the department, I have never heard of one of ours raping an inmate.
Sure, there's been some stupidity, but....

The longer I am here the more I keep thinking to myself...

"What the snap are they thinking???"

Ahh... happy thoughts... happy thoughts.... happy thoughts....
   -Rev