Guards Bothered to Help Save a Man’s Life. That’s Unusual.

“Yeah, they shocked his bitch-ass back to life,” a white prison guard said to a few other white guards standing around him laughing at his cruel words.

The guard referred to an older incarcerated black man who’d suddenly dropped dead on our prison yard about a week ago, and had then been resuscitated by two (rare) heroic guards and our overworked healthcare staff.

“If it wasn’t for them idiots sprinting their stupid asses over there to revive the dead fuck, I’d not be mandated,” he finished with a sneer. “Can you believe that shit? They should’a just let nature take its course.”

The listening white guards standing around and laughing at the almost-having-died black man’s plight, all nodded agreement. They couldn’t “believe that shit,” couldn’t wrap their minds around the idea of one of their own actually going out of his or her way to save an incarcerated individual. They too shared the opinion that another dead black man was preferable to them having to work an additional “mandated” eight hour shift on today’s Modern Prison Plantation.

Yet we (I and every other incarcerated/enslaved individual across America) are considered the monsters in any scenario comparing prison guards and police officers to us. What’s that old saying: Murder one person and you’re a Murderer. Murder three or more and you’re a Serial Killer. Murder thousands and you’re a King. Only, in this instance, the System, through its Police Officers, Courts, and Prison Guards, has murdered thousands of poor Blacks, Hispanics, Whites, Natives, and many others across our great nation.

Kings indeed.

Personally, I believed what the guard was selling, because I’d seen his kind peddle their narrow, racist, and sadistic view-of-life countless times over the past three decades. And there I was once again witnessing a representative of the System devaluing a human’s life simply because that black incarcerated man’s near death experience (through no fault of his own) had somehow inconvenienced the white guard.

How sad.

This is one of the major reasons (if not the main reason) our American penal system of rehabilitation is so broken. Shattered actually. Eight out of ten employees working in prisons across the United States shouldn’t be working there. Hell, many of them aren’t even emotionally fit to manage a dog kennel, let alone a kennel full of fathers, sons, uncles, grandpas, great-grandpas; or mothers, daughters, aunts, grandmas, and great-grandmas.

The men and women who seek jobs in prison do so for various reasons, but my experience (which is ample) has taught me that seldom do they choose prison jobs because they wish to usher in change and help rehabilitate the incarcerated individuals under their care. No, too often the people hired into American prisons are power hungry men and women salivating at the thought of controlling and abusing another human being whether it be with words, deeds, or complicities.

Albert Einstein famously defined insanity as attempting the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. That’s our American Prison Industrial Complex. How about we rally as a people and try something new, something different, because what we’ve been doing as a society for the last fifty or sixty years hasn’t been working. Have you driven through an urban neighborhood lately, or a trailer park out in the country? Both have been decimated by the For-Profit Punishment Policies that have swollen U.S. prison populations like a rotting animal carcass left in the sweltering summer sun to bloat.

Let’s find more men and women like the two heroic guards (one black and male, another white and female) who swooped in and immediately began performing CPR on the downed, incarcerated black man, even though they had to have known they’d be criticized and degraded by their less-caring, gestapo-like coworkers. Let’s ignore outdated rules and advance these kind-hearted and good men and women regardless of seniority or rank. Let’s spend some money to educate these types of caring men and women in the areas of human relations and rehabilitation. Let’s insert round pegs into round holes. Let’s stop trying to hammer square pecks into every hole other than the square ones.

My name is Jerry Metcalf, and I wish to make the world a better place. If you do too, please join me on social media.

Jerry Metcalf
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