With a generator powering the house, my family reluctantly went through belongings at my sister’s home. While going through her bedroom, deciding what clothes to keep and what to donate, I discovered a journal containing my sister’s own words about her time as a prison guard. At the age of twenty-one my sister, Jami, went off to the California Correctional Academy with dreams of having a lifelong career. After completing and graduating from the academy at the top of her class, she received a job at Corcoran State Prison.
When it opened in February 1988, Corcoran State Prison was only the nineteenth prison established by the state of California since 1852. The opening of Corcoran, however, came at the beginning of an unprecedented prison build-up: California has built twenty-three new prisons between the years of 1984 and 2007.[1] With more than double the amount of prisons, one would expect…
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LETS GET REAL 