Bob Ortega’s prison stories has set off a tsunami
of events that will require the Director of Arizona prison to explain why the
agency is in such a turmoil and bad shape or maybe not if the Governor doesn’t
care about how she spends her prison money and constituent’s family members
dying at a record rate.
Mr. Ryan, in his traditional mannerism continues to
blame the former director for all the “problems with violence” inside his
prison system on the former director, Dora Schriro who has been gone now since Gov.
Brewer took over as interim governor and appointed Charles L. Ryan as the
prison director.
Bob’s reports are an accurate reflection of the
truth as it is. He has examined the system’s root problems more so that the
director himself who is still in denial there are problems. Mr. Ortega writes
“Department of Corrections Director Charles Ryan denies the rising murder and
assault rates indicate there's a problem with violence in the prison system. He
attributes the increase in assaults, in part, to staffing cuts before he became
director in 2009 and to a change in how the department defines them. Ryan says
his predecessor recorded assaults only that resulted in injury. The department
now records a range of incidents as assaults, from inmates flinging urine or
feces at officers through their cell's food slots, to attacks with crude
weapons in which inmates or officers are badly injured.”“
Ryan predicted assault rates will remain the same
or decline slightly for the current fiscal year, which ends June 30. Having
more corrections officers will improve safety for inmates and officers, he
said.”Most likely, Ryan offers no explanation or a plan to counter these
deaths, assaults and violence related issues any time soon. His response to
expensive lawsuits continues his denial of fault and those staff guilty of
deliberate indifference. His answer is a partial truth of the past as I was
part of the administrative plan to re-allocate correctional staff in a hasty
and ill-prepared plan that took officers away from “essential posts” and spread
them out too thin around those facilities that had already established a record
for the propensity of violence such as Yuma, Tucson, Lewis, Winslow Florence
and Eyman. Using this new terminology of "pull posts" and "shutdown"
post, he created a method called "shadow posting" where an officer is
assigned to the post on paper but is actually doing something else, as a result
of the extreme staff shortages on these shifts.
It often left the yard officer by themselves with
few as back up and did not provide any support for emergency transports during
the shifts or suicide watches at another location leaving the shifts with
barebones for an emergency response or at the very least delaying emergency
responses by those officers left behind to fend for themselves and no
additional resources.
If Mr. Ortega were to pull all staff disciplinary
records for the time period of October 2009 through the present he will see how
many staff members have been disciplined for failure to perform because of limitations
imposed by the central office administration and not the local wardens or unit
managers. Mr. Ryan expects staff to be in two places at once and that's how he
operates.
Secondly, he robbed Eyman and Florence as well as
Lewis of key supervisory staff positions that were vacant and moved those
positions to lower custody level units throughout the state leaving these
higher custody units without proper shift coverage, guidance and
decision-making personnel creating a void in leadership and good prison
management.
Although wardens expressed deep concerns with this
plan, the choices and decisions were left up to people in central office that
had no knowledge of each complex's dynamics and therefore created deep
interruptions in the daily operation abilities everywhere.In the meantime, more
people will die, hospitalized, assaulted [this includes staff as well] and
nothing will be done until Mr. Ryan gets “more boots on the ground” that he
says he desperately needs to combat this problem is currently doing nothing
about except to blame the former director for skewing her report mechanism to
indicate a higher number when in fact, these incidents are real and are
happening at a dreadful pace that makes Arizona prison unsafe for employees to
work in and threatens public safety in the long run.
I will be the first to admit you can fabricate
reports to suit the outcome but in this case, these events already existed and
whether or not they were reported accurately has nothing to do with prevention;
intervention and reducing them to make prisons safer for all that work there
and keep a secure and orderly environment for the prisoners.
Today, Arizona prisons are more deadlier than other
prisons because of an era under the current administration and as Mr. Ryan as
director that has included poor policy making, poor staffing patterns, poor
drug interdiction programs, unaddressed issues on violence and arbitrary
enforcement of institutional rules and regulations on the mentally ill that has
filled our maximum security units to capacity and showing signs of punitive
segregation methods that created deaths and suicides under his term while
embracing a culture of brutality, indifference and high tolerance to loss of
life inside our prisons.
Surely this is a most difficult working condition
to put our correctional officers and employees under and expect successful
results. The prison system is in need of new ideas and return back to basic
that include sound acceptable evidence based practices instead of these ad hoc
procedures implemented under the current regime that has resulted in failure
after failure with severe consequences to staff and prisoners.
My recommendation is three-fold - review this
administration's performance record and determine successful goals and failures
of goals of their strategic plans and address failures (this includes support
programming as well as medical and mental health services) - implement an
external investigative unit e.g. State Police or DPS as investigative agents to
review deaths and assaults - create an oversight committee for policy reviews
and consider accreditation by American Corrections Association standard to
eliminate the piece meal method used today to promugate poor policies and
adhere or follow sound correctional practices already recognized by the ACA and
National Institute of Corrections.
Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/ne...
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