Shaking the Cultural Stigma

Ask the average person what a Correctional Officer does, and you’ll probably hear one of three answers: we sit around watching inmates, we beat the shit out of people, or we’re police officers who couldn’t make it through the academy. Television and movies haven’t exactly helped. Correctional Officers are usually portrayed as stupid, lazy, cruel, corrupt, or some combination of all four. We’re either helping inmates smuggle drugs, abusing them behind closed doors, or sleeping at a desk while half the prison escapes through an air-conditioning vent.

Meanwhile, the public rarely sees what competent officers actually do. They don’t see us responding to suicide attempts, stopping assaults, finding weapons, managing medical emergencies, settling conflicts, or keeping hundreds of people alive through another shift.

Most of our work happens behind walls where the public can’t see it. Unfortunately, misconduct is highly visible. One officer gets arrested for bringing in contraband, assaulting an inmate, or doing something exceptionally stupid on social media, and every one of us gets dragged into the story.

We can complain about the stigma—and some of the criticism is absolutely unfair—but we also have to admit an uncomfortable truth: sometimes Correctional Officers feed the exact perception we claim to hate. Changing that perception doesn’t begin with a public-relations campaign. It begins with how we represent ourselves when people are watching.

And people are always watching.

1. Understand that the uniform speaks before you do. When you walk into a store, restaurant, or gas station in uniform, most people don’t see an individual officer. They see your agency and, by extension, the entire corrections profession. That may not be fair, but it’s reality.

Wear the uniform correctly. Keep it clean. Tuck your shirt in, maintain your equipment, and avoid looking like you slept in the parking lot before wandering into work. You don’t need mirror-polished boots and creases sharp enough to cut your hand, but you should look like you take yourself and the job seriously.

Professional appearance creates an expectation of professional behavior. Looking like an unmade bed with a radio attached to it does not inspire confidence. 

Your behavior matters even more. Be polite to cashiers. Don’t scream profanities across a restaurant. Don’t throw a temper tantrum because your order is wrong. And don’t use the uniform to demand special treatment. People remember how uniformed professionals act in public. Make sure they remember the right thing.

2. Stop confusing authority with importance. Inside the institution, the uniform carries legal authority. Outside the gate, you’re just another citizen trying to buy groceries, pump gas, and get home without dealing with more bullshit.

The cashier doesn’t work for you. The restaurant employee isn’t an inmate. The person taking too long in the checkout line isn’t refusing a lawful order. Some officers spend so much time giving directions that they forget how to make a request. They carry their CO voice into public and speak to everyone like they’re managing a dayroom. Calm the fuck down, Batman.

Being a Correctional Officer doesn’t make you more important than the people around you. It gives you a difficult job and a substantial responsibility. If you want the public to respect that responsibility, don’t act like the badge entitles you to respect, discounts, or immediate service. Real authority doesn’t need to announce itself to the store manager. 

3. Clean up your social-media behavior. There is no such thing as a private social-media account. There are only accounts that haven’t been screenshotted yet.

What you post matters. If your profile identifies you as a Correctional Officer, every racist joke, drunken rant, violent fantasy, and comment about abusing inmates becomes attached to the profession. It doesn’t matter whether the post was made “off duty” or shared in a private group. Once it escapes into the wild, nobody gives a shit about your privacy settings.

Dark humor is part of how we survive this job. I understand that better than most. But there’s a difference between laughing at the absurdity of corrections and publicly celebrating cruelty.

Don’t post confidential information. Don’t share photographs from secure areas. Don’t argue about uses of force. Don’t threaten people, mock vulnerable inmates, or publish anything you wouldn’t want enlarged on a screen during an Inspector General interview. Before posting, ask yourself one simple question: Would I be comfortable explaining this to my warden, a reporter, and my mother at the same time? If the answer is no, keep that shit in your head.

4. Explain the job without pretending to be something else. Corrections has an identity problem. Some people view us as little more than babysitters, while some officers try to compensate by presenting themselves as tactical operators conducting classified missions behind enemy lines. 

   Neither image is accurate.

You don’t have to exaggerate the job to make it important. Correctional Officers maintain custody, control, security, and order in one of the most difficult environments in public service. We prevent escapes, respond to emergencies, enforce rules, manage human behavior, protect staff and inmates, and make thousands of security decisions during every shift. That’s enough. You don’t need to pretend you’re a Navy SEAL to earn a stranger's approval. 

When someone asks what you do, tell them honestly. Explain the responsibility, the danger, the staffing problems, and the amount of judgment required. Share the parts of corrections the public never sees without revealing confidential details or turning the conversation into a two-hour complaint about Administration. The public can’t understand a profession that refuses to explain itself.

5. Hold our own people accountable. This is the part nobody likes talking about. 

We cannot demand that the public separate good officers from bad ones while protecting officers who embarrass the profession. If someone is bringing in contraband, abusing authority, mistreating people, falsifying reports, or compromising security, that person isn’t your brother or sister in gray; they’re a liability. 

Correct minor problems before they grow. Tell your partner when his uniform looks like shit. Stop the rookie from posting something stupid. Pull your friend aside when her behavior in public is crossing the line. Serious misconduct requires more than a friendly conversation. Report it, document it, and let the process work. Protecting a bad officer doesn’t preserve the profession’s reputation. It tells the public that their worst assumptions about us were correct. 

Professional pride isn’t blindly defending everyone who wears the uniform. It’s defending the standards the uniform is supposed to represent. Correctional Officers do difficult, necessary work that most people could never tolerate. We deserve recognition as professionals, but recognition isn’t something we can demand into existence. We earn it.

We earn it through our appearance, our conduct, our decisions, and the way we treat people when nobody from the institution is standing nearby. We earn it by telling our story honestly and refusing to let unprofessional officers write it for us. 

The cultural stigma surrounding corrections won’t disappear overnight. But every interaction gives us an opportunity to reinforce it or challenge it. Make sure you’re doing the right one.

Until next time, represent the uniform well, protect the profession, and try not to become tomorrow’s Daily Cluster.

– D. Mathena