The local police presence is two RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) officers, working out of one small station building. The back of that building has two rooms made of concrete (or at least painted with a hard concrete-like surface layer) with massive sliding steel doors. Those two rooms are the local holding cells. When people get arrested, usually for being drunk and aggressive, they get put into those cells until they’re either released or sent south to Yellowknife, where the real machinery of the justice system lives.
By law someone has to always be watching the people in those cells, in case they have a medical emergency, there’s a fire, etc. So the local RCMP are always looking for people to work as jail guards.
After about 4 months of waiting for security check paper work to go through, I took the job. Now I get called in to the station, usually on short notice, usually about 3-4 times a month. I typically work an 8 hour shift.
The crime rate here varies dramatically with how accessible alcohol is (i.e., whether the winter roads, or in summer the river, are open). The work tends to come in waves. I’ll hear nothing for weeks, and then suddenly be called in 4 days/nights in a row.
The job involves:
- Checking on the prisoner/s at least every 15 minutes, either by looking at a camera or through a window in the door.
- Making a note in a log book of what they’re doing. Usually it’s either sleeping, sitting quietly, or screaming abuse at either me, the police, or the world in general.
- Keeping myself entertained, usually by either reading or working on other projects on my laptop.
- Keeping myself awake if it’s an overnight shift. Turns out you can do quite a lot of exercise in a holding cell area, especially if one of the cells is unoccupied (so you can do chin ups on the rails that hold up the heavy steel door) or if you use the bags of police body armor as weights.
The pay is pretty big (like every job up north), the cops are nice and the work is easy and can be doubled up with other computer-based work. Plus, as a bonus, my “ignoring belligerent drunk people” skills are improving super fast!