Pennsylvania "Corrections" employs about twice the number of guards it really needs. The Department is a make-work project for hicks, rednecks and hillbillies who vote Republican, but can't make it without Big Brother to carry them. It's a kind of grand "work-fare" for the rural areas where excessive inbreeding has produced a peculiar species of oafs.
Typically, the species is dull witted, brutal, arrogant and vindictive; perfect for prison guards. But their outstanding trait is laziness. It's truly remarkable how little these men do. We taxpayers pay them an average of over $4400 a month in wages and benefits. For that, they lounge around seldom bothering to move while eating the food that was bought to feed the inmates.
These guys are extremely lazy even for state workers. They make the PennDot highway drones look like fireballs! It's not unusual for 30 to 40 of them to be standing around in knots gambling or chattering about killing deer.
But, the administration must occasionally find something for this huge excess of loafers to do. One solution is "Baby Hughie's Raiders." There's a huge, dumb guard sergeant who's remarkable for his laziness, his arrogance and his nastiness. He's known as "Baby Hughie" after the cartoon character that he resembles.
A prison administration (being no smarter than Hughie himself) has Baby Hughie "leading" a gang of about a dozen of the overpaid guards who can't find anything else to do. Hughie doesn't really do much "leading" because, mostly, his drooling mob of defects just stand around. A couple of them concentrate on picking their noses.
Now and then, however, Baby Hughie has to get the thugs moving and they go on a raid. Today I'm able to report to the taxpayers on one such successful raid. I know you'll be happy that the Commonwealth is spending your hard-earned money as it is!
We taxpayers pay Baby Hughie's Raiders about $300 an hour. In one shift they cost us about $2500. One day recently Baby Hughie's Raiders spend their shift lying in wait. At exactly the right moment, they rushed into one of the prison's slave-labor sweatshops. They stripped down all the workers.
The surprise raid was a great success. Baby Hughie's Raiders discovered one of the prisoners was trying to steal one of the shirts that he was making in the sweatshop. The slime ball inmate was wearing the shirt. He tried to say that he was just trying it on.
But, heroic Baby Hughie and his dozen raiders caught the crook. He was thrown into the hole for 60 days. That will teach him!
Of course, the shirt was only worth $11 even at the grossly inflated prices charged by the prison overlords. We taxpayers paid $2500 to nab an impoverished inmate who may have been trying to purloin an $11 shirt that he himself had made.
Another odd little twist is that the prison intends to give the shirts out free to prisoners in any event. So the inmate's only offense was that he possessed the shirt early.
But that doesn't diminish how important a job Baby Hughie's Raiders are doing. I'm sure we taxpayers are all delighted to shell out $2500 a day to safeguard an $11 shirt.
Then there's this other little thing. We are all familiar with the stickers that we put on our license plates to renew them. You know what you pay for them; plenty!
Well, it seems that Baby Hughie's Raiders were alertly on duty outside a shipping area in the prison. Packed up nearby and sealed for shipment were boxes of those expensive little stickers.
After a while, Baby Hughie and his raiders wondered off. Later on it was discovered that someone (I wonder who it could have been) who knew where the boxes were stacked, used a knife, cut through the plastic wrapping and stole about 5000 of the stickers. That's about $15,000 worth of stickers. On the black market they will bring about half of that.
Not surprisingly, guards want us to believe that prisoners stole the stickers. We aren't quite that stupid. Prisoners don't know where the stickers are stored, don't possess knives and seldom drive cars that need stickers.
My suggestion is that if you need a sticker to renew your registration plate, befriend one of that special species of guard who makes up baby Hughie's Raiders.
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