I quit my job today...

OK, I'm just kidding. Not only did I quit not quit my job, but I'm actually enjoying the present one I have. Maybe I'll be here for more than a month.

And yet I'm not even sure who I'm employed with.

Overall, I work for a non-profit company called Peer Assistance Services. PA does all kinds of addiction counseling. If your company has some kind of employee assistance program, and you called it because you thought you drank too much, a company like PA would would be on the other side of that phone call.

Peer Assistance also runs the Colorado TASC program. TASC (Treatment Accountability for Safer Communities) is a program that is contracted out by the Colorado Department of Corrections to help parolees with recovery. I work at the SouthEast (i.e., Colorado Springs) TASC office, which we share with all the local parole officers.

Following me so far?

Anyways, so while technically I'm not an employee of the Colorado Department of Corrections, I'm required to go through all the basic DOC employee training, and I'm paid by funds provided by the DOC. I'll spend the month of August in Canon City, at the same intro course that the prison guards and parole officers go through. After this I'll be issued some kind of special badge that allows me entry into the zillions of prisons in Colorado. Yes, I'm hoping to get a picture with the Unibomber, but I'm not holding my breath.

Colorado has major issues with it's prison system. Years and years ago, some politicians decided to get tough on crime, and thought that super rough prison sentences would deter folks from breaking the law. Sounds like a great idea, right? So they started throwing everyone in jail. So they had to build more prisons to make room for all these folks. And then they got tougher on parolees, often throwing them back into the brig, on top of all the new lawbreakers who were being jailed. Through the years this has snowballed, and the prison system became something of a monster that grows by feeding off itself. They keep throwing parolees back into prison, and they keep adding new people to the jail population. This year's budget for prisons in Colorado was over $591 million, and it's expected to grow $100 million more each year for at least the next five years.

So, from somewhere deep within these hundreds of millions of dollars, comes my measly paycheck. I'll try and get some parolees to say no to drugs. They won't do that, and they'll go back to jail. And then I'll try to get a new group of parolees to say no to drugs, and they won't...and on and on the cycle goes. And the prison population keeps growing, and they'll hire more folks like me, which will just serve to send more parolees back to prison. It's actually quite funny how everyone knows how bad the system is broke, but nobody can really do much about it.

But, if nothing else, the job is exciting. Get to work with all kinds of addicts and criminals. AH3 crack whore jokes aside, some of these folks are in a world that, luckily, I'll never get to know. I have a LONG way to go before I can even be considered as the minor leagues to some of these hard core boozers.

So my blog should get a lot more interesting now that I'll be posting stories from the world of alcoholism and drug addiction (not that it wasn't already the coolest blog on the internet).