WITNESS
Lou West has been a corrections officer in St. Louis, Missouri, for twenty-five years. He is currently a Corrections Officer I at the St. Louis County Justice Center and has worked in that facility since its opening as a direct supervision jail in 1998. Mr. West has also worked in the jail's drug and alcohol treatment program, Choices, since 2000. In 2002, he was named the Justice Center's Employee of the Year. From 1980 to 1990, Mr. West worked at the maximum-security main confinement unit of the St. Louis County Jail. He was promoted to the jail's transportation division, where he worked for six years before being transferred to the medium-security Gumbo jail in Chesterfield. He has also supervised inmates on work release.
Mr. West graduated cum laude from Tougaloo College in Mississippi in 1978 with a B.S. in political science. Prior to becoming a corrections officer, he worked briefly as a psychiatric aide at the Mississippi State Hospital in Whitfield and at a children's day care center in St. Louis.
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STATEMENT
Working in a direct supervision environment is extremely stressful. …There is currently one corrections officer (CO) to 67 inmates. The inmates express their wants and needs at the same time to the CO, and are not overly concerned about what other people's needs are. The CO is expected to be their caretaker. COs working in direct supervision require multifaceted skills. We have to deal with all types of personalities. Nowadays, we have to work with many mentally ill individuals who end up in the jails. I have to play a lot of roles — inmates think of me as their psychiatric aide, their counselor, their social worker, their brother figure, their father figure, and their mentor. …It's like a giant customer service center — people want my attention, want me to take care of them, and ask for stuff, even in the middle of a disturbance. It is a nerve wracking situation that can really try your patience — I can't be everywhere at once. Luckily, I've been blessed with a lot of patience!
In my 25 years on the job, I have endured a lot and had to withstand a lot. I and other COs I work with are offended by the term "jail guards." That would be appropriate if that's all we did — locked inmates up and guarded the doors. But the average person doesn't know what we do. We are not robots. We are law enforcement, and actually have more interaction than the police do with those who are arrested — we have to live with inmates in an open environment every day.
Excerpted from a written statement submitted to the Commission
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