Ken Rideout

And

When I graduated from high school, I started working as a guard in a prison.

And that was my first, or corrections officer.

When I call it a guard, sometimes the prison community, the prison social media crowd attacks me for calling it a guard.

Corrections officer.

It's just weird that people get hung up on some things like this.

But I was a corrections officer.

To me, it was I was a prison guard.

When you were 18, right?

And I probably looked like I was 15.

No, four years while I went to college.

So I worked there full time in the summer and then a few nights a week while I was in school.

And, you know, it was exactly what you would expect, like an aggressive environment and a very steep learning curve.

But again, most of the people that I knew in there, prison's very segregated.

So I knew most of the white guys going in there.

Matter of fact, one of the other corrections officers was a guy called Mickey Ward.

They made a movie called The Fighter about him.

Mark Wahlberg played him.

And his brother, Dickie Eklund, was an inmate played by Christian Bale in the prison that we were both working at.

And then eventually, my stepfather had already been an inmate there, and my brother, who's 11 months younger, would end up being an inmate there multiple times.