In the beginning

About three years before I retired I began to read back over hundreds of pages of notes I had kept during my career, thinking about the people I had known and worked with and around, chuckling at some of the memories, shedding tears at others. All the events in my memories are true, but all the names have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty. After all, you know who you are...right?

The inmate kite was rumpled, stained with something brown (coffee, I hoped) and lying on the floor next to the Sergeant’s desk. The handwriting resembled that of my four-year-old grandson’s and it read: “Need to see psike havng flashis and exploshuns in my brane.” It was not the first inmate kite (request form) I had ever read and certainly not the most interesting, but there was a moment’s hesitation when I wondered if I should call out the bomb squad. It made me pause in my day’s duties to think back on all the multitudes of requests from all the hundreds of inmates I have mused over during the past fourteen years. Everything from explosions in their brains, phone calls to the Governor and marriage proposals, it has run the gamut. I have met and worked with literally every type of human being with every known mental and personality disorder, addiction, phobia, paranoia and just plain rotten luck that could be imagined. To date I have been pretty much unscathed by it all and don’t regret a single day of my career, but if someone were to ask me, on the day of the Exploding Brain kite, why I had become a Detention Officer and what I got from it, I would have had trouble explaining.

I was forty two years old the winter it began, newly divorced and freshly relocated from the suburbs of Southern California to the mountains of Prescott, Arizona, without a clue on earth as to what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I had taken a job at one of the small, local newspapers doing graphic art and designing advertising just to pay my living expenses. My background, education and degree were all in the arts after all, and I had so far managed to keep my head above water doing newspaper ads. It was poverty level living, but respectable work. The problem was there was no future in it, no benefits and no real security, plus the fact that doing advertising layouts day after day tended to take the creative edge off of my spirit. I really was tired of it.

That was when I read the ad in the “other” local paper: “Detention Officers needed. Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office. No experience necessary. $17,350 yr. Full benefits. Women & minorities urged to apply.” That was what got me at first: women urged to apply! I could do that. I was a woman. And I fit the second requirement, as well; I had no experience whatsoever. That was two of the criteria without even trying! The third qualification I had was that I really could use $17,350 a year in wages, plus benefits. I was making a whopping $6.00 an hour at the paper which amounted to $12,480 a year if I took no sick days or vacations. It was not a big decision to make. I had nothing to lose. I applied.

Back in those days (1989) the hiring process for a Detention Officer was not really all that complicated: background questionnaire, note from a doctor saying you had a heart beat and some level of blood pressure, and an oral board of assorted people from the jail itself who wanted to know why I thought I would make a good Detention Officer. I really had no idea how to answer that question because I did not even know what a Detention Officer did, but I was always good at bluffing. I loved essay tests in school because I could write pages on a subject without ever saying anything incriminating. It seemed to me that telling this oral board my real qualifications - that I needed the pay and the benefits - would not sit well with them so I bluffed. I told them how I wanted to have a career with some meaning, to do something for the community, yada, yada, yada. It must have worked because they bought it. Years later I came to find out my bluffing tactics were totally unnecessary. Most of the people who applied to work in the jail were after the same thing: pay and benefits. At any rate, they evidently saw some redeeming feature in me because they told me I had passed the oral boards and now came the last step of the hiring process: the dreaded Polygraph.

** Hang onto your seats...more to follow!**