Diamonds in the Rough

At about 5:20 AM this morning, as I was walking through the prison compound and on the way to my case management office in Housing Unit #4, I passed the Segregation Housing Unit, where the most troublesome (even for a prison) inmates are kept on absolute lock-down.
It is the nature of these guys to spew profanities from their cell windows to anyone walking by, but, this morning, one poor soul yelled out to me, "Thank you, Mr. Kump! You do your job."
Then, later in the morning, one of my coworkers told me that the inmates in his therapy group told him that I was "pretty cool", and they even looked forward to my "stupid jokes", even as they also told him that they were embarassed to admit that they liked them.
Finally, a mafia kingpin,who has been imprisoned at Roxbury Correctional Institution many years, somehow found out about my upcoming surgery, and he told me on the walk that he would be asking his sister, a Catholic Nun, to include me in her parish's prayers.