Christopher Zoukis's Blog - Posts Tagged "prison-guards"
Federal Prison Guards Now Armed With Pepper Spray
A new federal law, passed by Congress without a dissenting vote and signed by President Barack Obama, directs the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to provide pepper spray to corrections officers in all federal prisons except minimum- or low-security facilities.
The measure (S. 238, the “Eric Williams Correctional Officer Protection Act”) cleared both chambers of Congress under parliamentary procedures used for non-controversial measures that allowed the bill to bypass committee hearings and votes, and required only a voice vote, not the recording each legislator’s vote, in each house. The bill had bipartisan sponsorship and the support of prison workers’ groups.
Public Law 104-133 bears the name of a 34-year-old correctional officer who was killed in February 2013 in the high-security federal prison in Canaan, Pennsylvania. While working alone to oversee a routine evening lockdown in a high-security housing unit with two levels and over 100 inmates, Williams was blindsided by an attack by an inmate on the cellblock’s second level.
The attack knocked him down a flight of stairs, where the attacking inmate beat Williams so severely that the corrections officer’s skull was crushed. The officer was also stabbed more than 100 times with a shank, a crude prison-made weapon.
The inmate who killed Williams was serving an 11-year term for drug trafficking for the New Mexican Mafia gang, and has also been convicted of the first-drug murder of a rival gang member in Arizona. Prosecutors intend to seek the death penalty when he is tried later this year for Williams’ murder.
BOP policy forbids corrections officers bringing weapons into cellblocks. At the time of his death, Officer Williams had only a radio, handcuffs, and keys; the blind-side attack was so sudden the corrections officer was unable to hit the alarm button on his radio, nor did he have any defensive gear or equipment to repel an attack.
Nor was there any back-up help nearby: in 2005, the year the Canaan penitentiary opened, a cost-cutting BOP measure reduced cellblock staffing from two officers to a single officer. Government records show a very similar fatal attack on a corrections guard occurred in a federal penitentiary in California in 2008.
At the time of Officer Williams’ murder, BOP had begun a pilot program, which did not include the Canaan penitentiary, on pepper spray use. That non-lethal but incapacitating self-defense and riot control compound (more formally known as oleoresin capsicum), irritates the eyes, causing tears, pain, breathing difficulty and temporary blindness.
The new law directs the BOP to issue pepper spray routinely to BOP officers and other employees of all federal prisons, except minimum- or low-security facilities, who may be required to respond to a prison emergency; it can also decide to issue it to other staffers. Initial staff training is required before they can carry pepper spray, along with annual refreshers. The law specifically allows pepper spray use to reduce violent acts by prisoners against other prisoners, BOP staff or prison visitors.
The new statute also requires the Government Accountability Office to study and report to Congress within three years on the effectiveness of pepper spray in reducing prison crime and violence, the advisability and cost of expanding it to minimum- and low-security prisons, and other steps to improve the safety of BOP prison officers and staff.
Hopefully, the BOP will closely monitor its new self-defense measure to ensure proper training of correctional staff as well as to ensure it is used within reason to benefit both correctional staff and inmate safety.
The measure (S. 238, the “Eric Williams Correctional Officer Protection Act”) cleared both chambers of Congress under parliamentary procedures used for non-controversial measures that allowed the bill to bypass committee hearings and votes, and required only a voice vote, not the recording each legislator’s vote, in each house. The bill had bipartisan sponsorship and the support of prison workers’ groups.
Public Law 104-133 bears the name of a 34-year-old correctional officer who was killed in February 2013 in the high-security federal prison in Canaan, Pennsylvania. While working alone to oversee a routine evening lockdown in a high-security housing unit with two levels and over 100 inmates, Williams was blindsided by an attack by an inmate on the cellblock’s second level.
The attack knocked him down a flight of stairs, where the attacking inmate beat Williams so severely that the corrections officer’s skull was crushed. The officer was also stabbed more than 100 times with a shank, a crude prison-made weapon.
The inmate who killed Williams was serving an 11-year term for drug trafficking for the New Mexican Mafia gang, and has also been convicted of the first-drug murder of a rival gang member in Arizona. Prosecutors intend to seek the death penalty when he is tried later this year for Williams’ murder.
BOP policy forbids corrections officers bringing weapons into cellblocks. At the time of his death, Officer Williams had only a radio, handcuffs, and keys; the blind-side attack was so sudden the corrections officer was unable to hit the alarm button on his radio, nor did he have any defensive gear or equipment to repel an attack.
Nor was there any back-up help nearby: in 2005, the year the Canaan penitentiary opened, a cost-cutting BOP measure reduced cellblock staffing from two officers to a single officer. Government records show a very similar fatal attack on a corrections guard occurred in a federal penitentiary in California in 2008.
At the time of Officer Williams’ murder, BOP had begun a pilot program, which did not include the Canaan penitentiary, on pepper spray use. That non-lethal but incapacitating self-defense and riot control compound (more formally known as oleoresin capsicum), irritates the eyes, causing tears, pain, breathing difficulty and temporary blindness.
The new law directs the BOP to issue pepper spray routinely to BOP officers and other employees of all federal prisons, except minimum- or low-security facilities, who may be required to respond to a prison emergency; it can also decide to issue it to other staffers. Initial staff training is required before they can carry pepper spray, along with annual refreshers. The law specifically allows pepper spray use to reduce violent acts by prisoners against other prisoners, BOP staff or prison visitors.
The new statute also requires the Government Accountability Office to study and report to Congress within three years on the effectiveness of pepper spray in reducing prison crime and violence, the advisability and cost of expanding it to minimum- and low-security prisons, and other steps to improve the safety of BOP prison officers and staff.
Hopefully, the BOP will closely monitor its new self-defense measure to ensure proper training of correctional staff as well as to ensure it is used within reason to benefit both correctional staff and inmate safety.
Public Health Service Workers Get Assigned as Prison Guards
Did you know nurses, physician assistants, therapists and other health staff from the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) who have been detailed to federal correctional facilities are also assigned to guard duty or other security-related tasks for which they are not adequately trained?
This astonishing situation stems from persistent security staff shortages across the United States, coupled with a long-festering dispute with the union representing those security staffers. One former U.S. Surgeon General contends that giving PHS health staffers assignments like transporting inmates through maximum security areas, patrolling recreation areas, or securing cellblocks puts “medical professionals in danger” and should be ended.
It’s tough to argue with this logic. I was stunned to learn recently that health staffers are given regular shift assignments performing less dangerous, but still non-health tasks, like monitoring inmates’ correspondence or telephone calls. While the PHS confirms it deals with shortages of security staff by paying overtime to those who work additional hours or by assigning uniformed PHS health staff to security duties, the current head of the PHS recently refused to discuss the controversy, saying it’s wrapped up in an ongoing labor dispute.
The Bureau of Prisons is just one of several dozen federal agencies which draw on PHS medical staffers. By assigning medical staffers to security duties for which they are at best minimally trained, prisons can hold down overtime costs for security staff; the close to 900 PHS staffers assigned to federal correctional facilities, unlike unionized correctional officers, are ineligible for overtime pay.
But at the same time prison medical support staff are being given security-related assignments, federal correctional facilities are experiencing serious shortages of medical staff, ranging in some locations at 40% or greater, according to a report by the inspector general of the Department of Justice Department, which described the shortages as approaching “crisis” proportions.
According to recent media reports, contributing to the problem is a conflict between civilian employees of the Bureau of Prisons, who are represented by the American Federation of Government Employees, and PHS medical staff, who are members of a uniformed military service and are thus prohibited by law from joining a union or being covered by the labor contract.
As a result, some PHS medical staff claim they are being discriminated against because of their uniformed status, in areas like work assignments, in violation of USERRA, the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act. When unionized civilian nurses exercise seniority rights in bidding on work assignments, PHS nurses are often left with the least desirable jobs, locations and shifts.
One recent example is a dispute decided in a 2-1 ruling last October by the Federal Labor Relations Authority -- which resolves labor disputes involving federal workers, as the National Labor Relations Board does in private-sector cases -- involving nurses in a Lexington, Kentucky prison, over the Bureau of Prisons’ attempt to defend the prison’s practice of reserving some nursing jobs for PHS nurses.
The agency argued that if it couldn’t do so, it would likely face a “mass exodus” of PHS nurses. But because it raised that argument too late in the legal proceedings, the agency was told the federal labor contract precluded reserving any jobs for non-unionized nurses. If left unresolved, the dispute could wind up exacerbating prison shortages of both medical and correctional staff. And in this situation, there are no winners.
This astonishing situation stems from persistent security staff shortages across the United States, coupled with a long-festering dispute with the union representing those security staffers. One former U.S. Surgeon General contends that giving PHS health staffers assignments like transporting inmates through maximum security areas, patrolling recreation areas, or securing cellblocks puts “medical professionals in danger” and should be ended.
It’s tough to argue with this logic. I was stunned to learn recently that health staffers are given regular shift assignments performing less dangerous, but still non-health tasks, like monitoring inmates’ correspondence or telephone calls. While the PHS confirms it deals with shortages of security staff by paying overtime to those who work additional hours or by assigning uniformed PHS health staff to security duties, the current head of the PHS recently refused to discuss the controversy, saying it’s wrapped up in an ongoing labor dispute.
The Bureau of Prisons is just one of several dozen federal agencies which draw on PHS medical staffers. By assigning medical staffers to security duties for which they are at best minimally trained, prisons can hold down overtime costs for security staff; the close to 900 PHS staffers assigned to federal correctional facilities, unlike unionized correctional officers, are ineligible for overtime pay.
But at the same time prison medical support staff are being given security-related assignments, federal correctional facilities are experiencing serious shortages of medical staff, ranging in some locations at 40% or greater, according to a report by the inspector general of the Department of Justice Department, which described the shortages as approaching “crisis” proportions.
According to recent media reports, contributing to the problem is a conflict between civilian employees of the Bureau of Prisons, who are represented by the American Federation of Government Employees, and PHS medical staff, who are members of a uniformed military service and are thus prohibited by law from joining a union or being covered by the labor contract.
As a result, some PHS medical staff claim they are being discriminated against because of their uniformed status, in areas like work assignments, in violation of USERRA, the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act. When unionized civilian nurses exercise seniority rights in bidding on work assignments, PHS nurses are often left with the least desirable jobs, locations and shifts.
One recent example is a dispute decided in a 2-1 ruling last October by the Federal Labor Relations Authority -- which resolves labor disputes involving federal workers, as the National Labor Relations Board does in private-sector cases -- involving nurses in a Lexington, Kentucky prison, over the Bureau of Prisons’ attempt to defend the prison’s practice of reserving some nursing jobs for PHS nurses.
The agency argued that if it couldn’t do so, it would likely face a “mass exodus” of PHS nurses. But because it raised that argument too late in the legal proceedings, the agency was told the federal labor contract precluded reserving any jobs for non-unionized nurses. If left unresolved, the dispute could wind up exacerbating prison shortages of both medical and correctional staff. And in this situation, there are no winners.
