Law enforcementFederal prison guard arrests increase nearly 90 percent

More prison guards are getting a different perspective // Source: cigarettesflavours.com

Over the past decade, arrests of federal prison guards have increased by nearly 90 percent and misconduct investigations have doubled according to a recently released Justice Department Inspector General report.

The sharp rise in misconduct among federal prison guards could be a result of poor hiring practices during a 25 percent increase in prison growth as more than half of the offenses committed occurred ruing an officer’s first two years on the job.

To help mitigate misconduct and poor behavior, the Inspector General recommended the Bureau of Prisons (BOP improve its background investigation of job applicants and create a better process to evaluate its rookie officers.

“To further reduce the likelihood of Correctional Officer misconduct and arrests, particularly within the first two years of being hired, the BOP could consider additional ways of assessing applicants,” the report concluded.

In particular, the report recommended considering the development of “a composite scoring mechanism for assessing the suitability of Correctional Officer applicants.”

Barry Krisberg, a law professor at the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice, argued that improving screenings are not enough because the process for punishing guards has become so convoluted some believe their actions have no consequences.

“Screenings are a good start, but what we need is far better training in terms of what the expectations of the jobs are, better supervision to identify potential problems and ways to deal with complaints about their behavior,” Krisberg said.

Joe Baumann, top union official at California’s Rehabilitation Center in Norco, said extended training and increased wages helped to vastly improve the quality of prison guards in the past. In 1998, California doubled its training from eight to sixteen weeks and pay went up about the same time.

As a result, “the caliber of person just went up. More people had degrees, previous employment or previous careers when the pay scale went up. We started getting a lot more people from private enterprise,” Baumann said. “Prior to that, we got a lot of people who worked fast food, manual labor jobs.”

In addition, the Inspector General found that the rising number of private prisons and the changing demographics of prisons with increasing numbers of female prisoners and young offenders have contributed to the problem of officer misconduct.

The report did not detail how many misconduct cases came from private federal prisons, but these facilities have increased their populations by 120 percent over the last decade and some believe their standards are more lax than at federal prisons.

“Private prisons aren’t always held to the same standards as public ones,” said Baumann. “That’s where so much of the stuff I come across is from, the private contractors.”

Robert Perkinson, the author of “Texas Tough,” a book about prisons in Texas, explained that prison demographics have changed and could be responsible for the increase in inappropriate behavior.

As the number of female prisoners grows, so has the rate of sexual harassment between officers and prisoners. Furthermore with federal prisoners getting younger this has created a more unruly prison population, Perkinson said.
“In federal prisons, it used to just be drug kingpins, tax-fraud prisoners, assassins,” he said. “But now it’s become full of more low-level offenders, which ironically makes for more violent prisoners. A middle-aged kingpin is a relatively calm, responsible guy, whereas an 18-year-old who was selling meth out in Nebraska is going to be a lot more impulsive.”