This is a big question and the simple answer is yes, police officers should be segregated from the other prisoners should they be convicted and sentence to a prison term. One thing that we must understand is that this person has been working to put people behind bars and while he is now behind bars, putting him in a general population could be certain death for him. The world forgets that people do make mistakes and police officers are not immune to making mistakes. To think that I could potentially share the cell with a person that I put behind bars for many years is a scary thought.
The laws must protect each person and everyone knows that if a police officer is placed into a general population situation the experience will be tenfold what it would be for a normal person going into a jail facility. Some people will say that is not fair. A person convicted of a crime is a criminal regardless of their previous career. I would have to disagree. When you are dealing with someone who in some cases worked hard to put bad guys behind bars, you have to think that those same people would love the opportunity to have that person on the same level in a sometimes unsupervised area. I’d say that the officer has little to no chance of surviving in that situation.
Everyday hundreds of men and women take the oath to uphold the Constitution of our country and of their state, though in some instances, that oath is violated. The government must still have an obligation to protect those people who take that oath so that they may do their job without worrying about the government abandoning them when the going gets tough. Police Officers have to know that the protection of the government will always remain in effect even after they leave their position. If not it would be so easy to breed corrupt cops because the police officers would go where the protection is a sure thing.
Right or wrong, putting a former police officer in a general population environment is a certain death sentence regardless of what the actual sentence or crime was. I feel that the government must take extra steps to protect former police officers when and if they are sentence into a prison population that they had a part in building. By not providing protections for people in careers where they have placed men and women behind bars, they are essentially sentencing that person to death.