US Authoritarianism

My state's DoC recruiters have been AFTER me on indeed and I almost went for it while getting out of my last job because I love that population (I started my psych career in forensics) but that's the problem I love them so much and I don't think I could cope with coming to work to this:

Apparently what's not well depicted in the image is the smell, a lot of them have been restrained in those positions for 24h+ so they're covered in urine and feces on top of the already overwhelming BO. There's also a lot of wildlife in the room with them as I understand it. My psych nursing background is just screaming imagining everything from the chemical and mechanical skin breakdown, the positional blood clotting from the extended restraints, and the horrifying amount of infectious material (and parasites) against open skin.

They're such beautifully clever human beings. Half of the time when they found a way to circumvent unit rules I had to pause for a moment just to admire the ingenuity of what they'd pulled off. I would argue most of them were actually more polite than my average patient now. You call them sir and ma'am cuz you're in the south and you get it right back. When you go to clean the dayrooms you have three of them jump up to help. I played the hardest rounds of chess and spades of my life at that job. Their senses of humor are exquisitely dark. You can't turn your back on them for a second and they'll definitely keep you on your toes but you'll also be shocked sometimes by how much they do have your back when shit is hitting the fan. This is gonna sound completely unhinged but I'm childfree and kinda even trans (got fixed this last may in light of current events) and the closest I've ever come to feeling maternal was when I was working with the correctional population.

The correctional population is amazing and yet I can never work with them because on top of not being given the support and rehabilitative services they deserve (assuming they've even committed a real crime and not just got caught with their own personal weed), they're constantly being pushed further and further into some absolutely depraved conditions and I feel terrible because I want to be there and try to help them but I don't think the current system will even really let me do that. As much as I love them I can't be part of torturing them.