'mo Prison

First thing I noticed about prison? It's clean. The only place I've ever worked at that was cleaner would be the BYU art museum. If you read the introduction to the facility I copied below here, you'll notice that all inmates have to work... which means that there's lots of janitors and groundskeepers... honestly the place is cleaner than most church buildings I've been to, and when you consider that 600 men live there, that's a pretty decent achievement.

There's funny rules. I can't wear denim or blue (that's what the inmates wear), and I'm not allowed to intervene or dicipline or anything (a major change from my last social work job). It makes this a sweet opportunity to actually focus on just being a counselor, not merely a babysitter... we have the department of corrections for that. I'm not allowed to wear a tie, since it's a handy weapon.

Next reaction: these are nice guys. Most of them want to be in the program there. Naturally there's the occasional flareup, but it's very different from the adolescent facility I worked at. It's funny to think that I can get a room of 60+ mentally ill and addict felons to behave better than the kids at Northwest. Interestingly enough, there's not a lot of difference between the populations. My boss says the only differences are 20-30 years, facial hair, and a felony.

Anyway, I'm really tired... and there's too much more to say.