The
Public Image of Corrections in Arizona – an illusory perception
The field of
Arizona corrections is not improving. The process for change remains slow and
difficult, primarily because of the cultural extrapolations and perceptions
that control the mindset of the use of prisons and the necessary funding simply
available to expand private prisons rather than the public sector. This
directly impacts correctional administrators’ ability to recruit quality
employees, provide essential intensive training, encourage continuous
professional development learning efforts, and, ultimately, foster
professionalism.
The recent Kingman
riots bring up an important question how the public perceive the image of our
prison systems. A hybrid of state and private prisons, this network is
interlinked so they function similar but by all standards applied, not the
same. They may share policies and procedures but they differ culturally and
ethically. More vitally, they differ on oversight and performance accountability
factors.
There is no transparency
in prison management. The facts may scare you but in all realisms, the private
prisons are in better order than the public facilities and that trend is likely
not to be reversed any time soon as the majority of the legislative funding has
favored the private sector, neglecting the public prisons. Neglect of our state
prisons has led to low morale, high misconduct and poor public safety.
One can only
imagine if Kingman is such a model prison, what lurks inside the state prisons
so quietly seething with tension, hatred and transgressions. Led by a former
Abu Ghraib administrator of the infamous, Abu Ghraib Iraqi prison, there are innuendoes
of excessive use of force and other abuses coming from the inmates who were
moved from this prison to others throughout the state. Everybody remembers the scandal
at the military’s Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
One could never
imagine that such practices occur here within our own state but the reality is
due to shoddy prison management styles, there are cases of gross abuse and
excessive force happening quite frequently. To be fair and balanced, there are
good administrators at work continuously to meet the tough and complex
human-driven demands, sadly, making their individual efforts often go unnoticed
or misunderstood.
Much of the public
has a negative view of corrections and that is mainly based on the perception
given to the public by the media. Accordingly, the practice of corrections has
been publically mischaracterized and misrepresented, however, recent dismay
over horrors exposed, only adds to the cabalistic mistakes. Public perceptions
about who is a criminal come, in part, from television or newspapers. But the
media fail to fully explore the operations of prison and frequently paint a
picture that closely mirrors stereotypical views.
In my own
experience as a prison consultant, I found the media to be ignorant about
prison conditions, cultural awareness, accomplishments and failures. In fact,
the media, in general, is oblivious to the truth as it stands although they
boldly print and repeat stories often based on hearsay or non-scientific
sources creating rumors and gossip along the way.
Even state
leaders, legislators and elected officials are unmindful to what state prisons
do and how they operate. Whenever critics like myself write them about serious
and public safety concerns, they treat the information like they do spam and
delete it from their files. They would rather not read the information and
become aware than play the ignorant game and allow the conditions to exists and
fester under their watch.
The governor, in
particular is the most aware of all elected officials but rarely does a daily
briefing to stay in touch what happens inside prisons. If it were one of his or
her daily briefings, I suspect the culture and happenings would be much
different than they really exist today. This leaves the burden to manage
prisons to bureaucrats and prison administrators who are really not in touch at
all with the general operational issues and only deal with crisis management or
headline news topics to serve the governor’s desires to conduct damage control.
In Arizona,
prisons are labeled as extravagant wasteland of unimportant significance. The public, and some elected officials view
such places a garbage bins of our own society as well as a habitation for human
warehouses or more commonly called human dumping grounds. These places behind
the razor wire are considered storage bins of lost souls and insignificant
human cesspools with an emphasis of being another avenue to provide our society
a school of criminals housed there only to become career criminals.
Prisons are not at
all frequently subject to public scrutiny. An occasional media distortion in
the coverage of crime, prisons, prison administration, custody, and prisoners
is not common. As a result, correctional officers have become the victims of
the stereotype of correctional officers as corrupt, unprofessional, abusive,
and inhumane. Overwhelmingly, many correctional staff members are highly
qualified, properly trained professionals.
However, incidents
of mistreatment are not rare. When they do occur, corrective action is
typically deliberately slow and a blame game is engaged to remove any
culpability of the administrations. Prisons, like most other public institutions,
are not perfect, and significant change and improvement have been tried several
times over the last 15 years. The anomaly is that Arizona has failed to jump on
this trend of change and has decided that the status quo is acceptable.
Arizona has failed
miserable in the area of change. Their prison system has deteriorated to the
lowest proficiency levels in history, the highest staff, and the worst trained
officers in the southwest. This has led to more confinement lawsuits and
courtroom challenges to vital prisoner health services that need to be greatly
improved.
Arizona has failed
to accept any national standards which have been promulgated based on best
practices. Public prisons insists on the development of policies and procedures
based on failures and lessons learned concepts. Some private prisons have
become accredited, but the state prisons fall short or being close to
accreditation standards. From a statistical view, the number staff assaults
have increased, the rate of homicides and suicides have become greater than
before—in fact, the likelihood of dying in a prison is substantially higher than
the likelihood of dying outside a prison.
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