The most difficult part of my job is being a supervisor to the library clerks. As all library clerks are inmates they bring a unique aspect of supervision that I was not aware of before, trust. For the most part when you work in a library on the streets you hire people based on their work experience, their history, a background check may be done, and as such you hire the best person for the job. This is not always true when it comes to hiring workers for the library. Some times you are just hiring the least offensive one of the bunch. I am not saying that there are not any good workers among the inmate crews, because there are, but sometimes you just don’t get lucky enough to get one of them.

For the most part I have a pretty good work crew, they show up on time, they do their job, and they don’t complain too much. However, there are occasions when I wonder what they were thinking. This is where the trust issue comes into play. It is a given then an inmate that is working for you in a prison library has been convicted of a crime, wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t. So taking that into consideration you establish ground rules and you try to make sure they follow these rules. However, they do not always do so and that is where a lot of frustration of my job comes from. For the most part it is nothing major, they are placing property stamps over the pictures in all the books because they don’t want them to be stolen, or hoarding books because they think they will be stolen or they want to make sure their friends get them first. These are thing that you have to watch for, even if their intentions are fairly good, they are still disobeying the rules.

However, the ones that are extremely frustrating are the ones that feel they are entitled to special privileges because they “are getting screwed by the man”. These are the ones that take books without checking them out, who take supplies out of the library to for their own use, or those that abuse the copier to make copies for their friends. We try to put protections in place, such as a code for the copier, but there are also times that we leave them alone with the copier for short times to make copies for the library. Also we cannot watch every book to see where they put it, or who they give it to. So for the most part we have to trust them to do the right thing, to follow the rules, and there are times that we get disappointed and find that our trust was misplaced.

So does this mean we stop trusting? No, but it does mean we become more watchful and we try not to get too frustrated.