The United States is a country that believes strongly in the necessity and in the effectiveness of incarcerating all sorts of malcontents in federal, state, and county prisons and jails. It is estimated that there is approximately two million Americans that are imprisoned at the current time, to which it is further estimated by abcnews.com that "The average in state and federal prisons is one officer per 5.6 prisoners." This means that the taxpayers throughout this country are responsible for not only the payment of the facility incarceration structure itself and its incumbent infrastructure, but also the labor costs of compensating the staff necessary to guard and to maintain order in these prisons. As reported by chron.com, "As of 2011, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that correctional officers earned an average of $43,300 per year." Additionally, while the skill-set needed to be a correctional officer does vary it is basically sufficient to have a high school diploma or better, with a professional certificate in criminal justice or equivalent also being desired.
While, on the one hand it may seem insane to have prisoners guarding other prisoners, in point of fact, the technology and the security of modern-day prisons, clearly allows a hierarchy of labor in regards to the duties and functions of correctional officers. This means that while the integrity of the security of a given prison must be maintained by professional correctional officers, this does not necessitate that everyone serving in the capacity of a correctional officer, needs to actually be one. People are in prisons for all sorts of reasons to which the majority of these prisoners will one day be released from prison. If, we do not allow these prisoners the opportunity to show their maturity and responsibility while in prison, their chances of success outside of the prison, are thereby minimized.
While many Americans wrongly believe that only the worse of the worse and thereby the most violent and incorrigible are incarcerated in America, the fact of the matter is that most prisoners are in prison for offenses that are non-violent offenses. It is therefore these non-violent prisoners that could have the capability to become guardians of other prisoners, to which I suspect that a meaningful portion of them would have an abiding interest in any opportunity to show their worth and would welcome the challenge to demonstrate that they could perform their duties in a professional and effective manner.
In America, too often, when it comes to our disgraceful amount of humans that are incarcerated, that the basic attitude can be summed up into "out of sight, out of mind", but all that really does is two things: it just kicks the can further down the road without resolving anything, and it is an unnecessary waste of the taxpayers' money.
A policy to which you treat a man as if he should be broken down into a docile animal, does not make for a future, good and viable citizen, it instead does more to break the spirit of that man, and his self-esteem. Under the right conditions and under the right programs, prisoners could indeed guard other prisoners, giving these men the chance to demonstrate courage, conviction, responsibility and negotiation skills.