‘They were moving me all around and I had a broken neck.’
Imagine falling and breaking your neck, but no one takes you to the hospital right away.
That’s exactly what a local woman says happened to her inside the St. Clair County Jail and now she’s trying to make sure something like this doesn’t happen to anyone else.
Lisa Brown takes full responsibility for why she ended up briefly behind bars. But now she says a 20-day jail sentence has left her with a life sentence of partial paralysis and disability.
I imagine some of the problem is compassion fatigue - lots of prisoners are antisocial assholes who refuse to abide by society’s rules (or they’re just fucking criminally stupid).
It’d be tough to keep caring about that sort of group day in and day out.
I had a friend who was one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met. She told me she was going to police academy. I didn’t feel like she was the right kind of person for it because her family is full of drug addicts and she’s very bitter about it, which she has the right to be, it’s a rough life. I just worried she’d see addicts through the lens of her own issues, you know?
Well, somewhere along the way during police academy, she decided to become a CO for a bit. I had never told her about my own issues with addiction, but I decided that then was the time to do it. I thought that she would hear about my struggle and it would help to humanize the inmates a bit. Her response made me feel like I got to her. That made me feel better.
After a few months working there she started going on about those people as “animals”. She developed reputation for being a cruel and callous guard who reveled in the misery of the inmates on her watch.
She and I aren’t friends these days. She is a county cop now and I hope I never encounter her. I really do.
And that’s the truth about ACAB. The system makes them bastards, whether they go in that way or not.
True, and this is why the system needs to provide mental health services for these caretakers too. Right now, you’ve got the overwhelmed and frustrated overseeing the overwhelmed and frustrated, which is a recipe for disasters like this. Add a profit motive, and now you’ve got yourself a stew going.