The difference between a street cop and the jailer is, cops drop off their criminal to a jail. The correctional deputies, like me, had to deal with criminals for ten to twelve hours a shift. We couldn’t drop them off. Although, we had fantasies about dropping them off a cliff.Assigned to the Women’s Jail for the first four years of my career, changed my view of women and criminals.As Correctional officers, we feed them, dressed them, broke up their fights, squashed their suicide attempts, and dealt with completed suicides and the fall out of the incident. We knew their families, and saw their children visiting, listened to their complaints. Endured colorful names aimed at us, during moments of frustration.We helped deliver babies. In my career, I delivered four babies in the jail, and one in the booking drunk-tank. Mommy, was too drunk to realize she was in labor. I stood in delivery-rooms armed to the teeth with shot guns and weapons as a new life is born to a hardened violent criminal shackled to the bed. We had to deliver bad news from the outside, such as a death of a loved one. All of this could happen in a days work. If only half of this went down, it was considered a slow day.The energy inside women’s jails is intense. Crossing over the threshold into an all female facility, the feel of the place is immediately noticeable. It’s as if a suction cup found its way to attach to your being, pulling it out. From both inmates and the officers, a lot of hormones fly through the atmosphere filling it up with tiny atoms of despair. The air feels thick, as if squirrels on acid are running in circles without meaning; its worse then Alice’s confusion in Wonderland.For the female officers it’s a powerful experience. We’re forced to push aside any understanding for our own sex to do our jobs. We’re mothers; we’re wives and were supervising the same. Only those mothers and wives lives had fallen into a pit of self-destruction.What is so striking, we know there is a very thin wall between what those women had become and who we are. A wrong turn in life, an experimentation with drugs gone wrong could leave behind a powerful addiction. Living with an abusive man to be forced into a downward spiral into the depths of darkness. As much as we push aside the reasons that brought them to jail, in the motion of day-to-day living in side the dorms, there is a familiarity.They crochet baby blankets. They listen to each other’s problems and offer comfort when they miss their children or when loved ones forget to visit. They fix each other’s hair, and share letters from home. It’s a frightening realization, knowing it didn’t take much to bring them to this place. Whether it was an addiction to alcohol, prescription or street drugs, or a partner, we saw a little of ourselves veiled in their grieving eyes for a life wasted.It was exhausting to keep up the wall, to pretend your better then them. When in your heart you knew it could have been different, if the path taken led into this place they called life.As female officers it’s often a topic of discussion, that swirling path. We are in denial when we say it couldn’t happen to us. But it could have with one simple misstep. When we avoid the topic, it is when we know an officer who took that wrong turn in the path. Even after witnessing what life is like on the other side, still they fall into the black ditch of midnight. It happens, cops go to jail. And when they do it seems particularly sad, because the destruction is so complete.In 1988, the Sheriff’s Department opened the doors for female officers to work in the men’s facility. The first in line to volunteer to transfer, I never looked back, never went back, never wanted too.  Next week a female officer in a men’s jail.Question of the Day: Is this what you expected to hear about the female sex under these conditions?