Ethical Issues In Jails

After attending my internship at the Ulster Correctional Facility there was one common theme that each employee had there, the job was relatively dull. Media has us believe that jail can be a very dangerous area with fights breaking out every so often and that it is a high-risk jobs for the officers. For a little number of jails or prisons that can be correct but overall most jails are quiet, no fights or any outbreak of the sort. Stemming from personal experience the most action I saw was doing rounds which were me and my supervisor that day walking around the pod pressing certain buttons on the wall. Not what the show Cops portrays at all, I even had the experience of going out on a boat patrol and then the most action thrilled part was pulling

Overall police are seen as harsh or intimidating even though they are society’s protector, also many stories about cops using excessive force are prominent in the media news. Even though I have witness an all of two officers acting in inappropriate manners I can say they were the minority of the group of officers there. Many of the officers displayed much control over their emotional states and told me that I should do the same and treat the inmates some in for serious crimes as regular people showing some hints of respect. This was a theme to many officers who regulated the pods within the jail most of them rarely spoke down to the inmates or in any harsh manner of the same nature. Uniquely both of these two themes were very prevalent within my internship and spiked my interest into further research about job satisfaction as well as the emotional labor in the police field. In so doing try to find a similarity or a connecting thread between the two, can the emotional state officers portray on the job lead to the dissatisfaction of the job. In thinking with regular jobs it makes sense to think, because when one is not emotionally satisfied at their job could lead to job

Choose this route to start my reading because police work is a very specific field for an overall theme to start with. After time filtering through some journal articles and rewording search text I eventually found an article by Cynthia D. Fisher called Mood and emotions while working – missing pieces of job satisfaction which was written ibn 1998. Fisher does a real good job evaluating the problems with current ways jobs study their employee’s emotions. She makes a good point to define moods which are usually studied and emotions in quoting “Moods tend to be longer lasting but often weaker states of uncertain origin, while emotions are often more intense, more short lived, and have a clear object or cause” (Fisher, 1998). Which in this part makes a lot of sense when relating it back on my personal job and the internship. In my job sometimes I like it and sometimes I truly dread working there day to day the emotion changed but in an overall sense I do not care that much as long as I get my paycheck. The internship behaved in the same way with its overall ups and downs but in an overall sense I was happy going there if I learned something that day. So my mood stays constant and might not represent my overall feelings about my job or the internship, when my emotional state could prove to be a more accurate representation of my overall job satisfaction.