The article was interesting to me because I have a friend who is a Prison Guard. He regularly tells stories about working in the system, about the prisoners, an

The article was interesting to me because I have a friend who is a Prison Guard. He regularly tells stories about working in the system, about the prisoners, and about his work mates. With the prison system here in Australia, he says there is a genuine drive to get rid of hard-ass prison officers, and replace them with what he calls "yes men", who will back down from any potential engagement with prisoners, because it is essentially bad publicity for the prison system, and the media loves to jump on prison violence (especially caused by the guards). In this the guards are already coming from a weak position because the inmates can actually use the media attention to their advantage Anyways I'm getting off track, but my mate refers to himself as part of the old school system, where if you care to break the rules at all, it will be met with swift and violent retribution at the guards hands in the form of some sort of midnight visit. This is all being phased out though, as I already mentioned in the previous paragraph. Also, the inmates definitely know the system, and know how to get around the justice system - There was a recent riot in the local prison here, where the prisoners attacked two of the guards, but even though the prisoners knew there was CC TV on them, they simply covered their faces with towels as to avoid identification. Now the guards could identify them based on mannerisms on camera (the way they walked/moved, used weapons), however it didn't go to trial because the the video was the only evidence, and a prosecution would never get a jury to convict because mannerisms would never be enough to identify the perpetrators. Kind of a long winded way of saying the prisoners know what they can get away with, very well. I asked him what would have happened if the prisoners had actually killed one of the guards, and he said well they would have got away with murder. Scary place, he certainly earns his 90k per year. Sorry for the long winded response!