IT'S as familiar a sight in Bathurst as the entrance to the Simplot factory or the Howick Street post office building, but it takes something dramatic to remind locals that the Bathurst Correctional Centre is not like other employers in our city.
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When an inmate climbed up on the roof of one of the centre's buildings in January last year while wearing a cape that had been fashioned from a bed sheet, that was a reminder.
And the occasional violence at the jail, such as the stabbing of an inmate in 2017, is another reminder - albeit a brutal one.
But it's not all bad: Corrective Services NSW does a good job during its open days for the region's media, explaining to press and broadcast journalists (and therefore the public) about some of the industries behind the jail walls and the work that goes on to rehabilitate prisoners.
The stories that come out of those days serve to emphasise that the grand sandstone facility is unique among the workplaces in this city.
News in the past couple of weeks of staff at the Bathurst Correctional Centre testing positive to COVID-19, and another inmate contracting the virus, has been a reminder of the dangers and difficulties of this jail environment.
Corrective Services NSW hasn't made clear how the coronavirus outbreak at the facility started, but what we do know is that eight staff have tested positive and that has had ramifications for those they work beside and those waiting for them at home.
We can only guess what sort of impact this has had on the overall staffing of the facility - this is a very specialised line of work, after all - and the stress it would be placing both on management working to keep the operation going and those staff who remain in a much reduced pool still able to work.
A recent podcast, Behind The Walls, offered a surprisingly honest look at what it is like to do a job that most of us would simply find unimaginable.
"I think that it all comes back to confidence: being confident in yourself, confident in your team and confident in the job that you're doing," an officer told journalist Michael Duffy.
That confidence would be needed now more than ever during a challenging time for corrections in this state in general and for Bathurst in particular.
We can't know what's going on behind the walls as we drive past on Vittoria Street, but we can imagine.
