ToersBijns - Diary of a Wimpy Man - My journal: 2012-06-03

Thursday, June 7, 2012

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Time to make Change Mr. Charles Ryan, Arizona prisons are failing

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.