> Today's prison guards were yesterday's unionized
> blue-collar workers.
You think so? I wonder. I don't have any data on the subject, but isn't it more likely that they're the sons (and daughters, in this wonderful equal-opportunity world of ours) of "yesterday's unionized blue-collar workers"?
At a corporation where I used to work, I had a sharp exchange once with a "security guard" -- a thing that seems to happen to me quite a lot.
In the slanging-match that ensued, it developed that the "guard's" previous job was being a screw in a prison.
How or why she ever managed to lose or quit this job did not appear, since the incarceration sector had already begun its still-ongoing period of phenomenal growth. But I've always thought it was quite funny that a person who used to do cavity-searches of thieves and murderers should have graduated -- or been demoted? -- to monitoring nominally free corporate employees.