Other than the previously discussed article concerning the LA cell block for gay men, does anyone know of notable examples of humane and safe jails IR prisons in the US? How typical is Rikers?
Other than the previously discussed article concerning the LA cell block for gay men, does anyone know of notable examples of humane and safe jails or prisons in the US? How typical is Rikers?
My parents' neighbor is a prison guard. He seems nice enough when you see him outside of prison.
I am probably a broken record, but I recall James Gilligan's book Violence as a pretty good analysis of how prisons can exacerbate (or not) inhumane treatment and the mental illnesses of incarcerated people.
I have a first cousin who worked as a prison guard for a couple of years (in British Columbia). Come to think of it, one of his older brothers (so: also my first cousin) served time as an inmate at a prison (not the same prison as the one that was guarded by his younger brother: and wouldn't that have been weird?!)
My first cousin the former prison guard is a good-looking charmer, with a drinking problem, a sentimental attachment to family, and a bit of a violent streak. He is twice divorced, which may sound normal in some quarters, but is considered quite aberrant in my maternal extended family. Out of several dozen first cousins, I can think of only two who are divorced (and this is under the liberal divorce laws of Canada! but the Catholic subculture that my cousins inhabit exerts a strong influence, stronger than the lax and modern norms of the Soviet Canuckistani state).
Long story short: I wouldn't necessarily trust the account of a prison guard.
I've heard knowledgeable people say Rikers is one of the worst jails in the U.S. I was able to go on a really remarkable tour of several of the component prisons that make up Rikers a few years ago, and even just being a visitor for a few hours was hard to take. Part of the problem with Rikers is that it's so big, so there's a certain dehumanization that goes beyond what most prisons produce. Also a persistent culture of impunity in the city's Department of Correction, which city government has either chosen not to or has failed to correct.
I wonder who would be able to investigate this brutality well and what the mayor would need to be able to do to back the person up.
ABC News is reporting that the Feds are suing the city over this.
It's funny, my knee jerk reaction to the linked article is "Oh, yeah, the problem is the union leader. Riiight, funny how it always works out that way." Once I've got the knee under control (picture Dr. Strangelove wrestling with his arm), the union leader certainly sounds like a problem, but how weak is management? It is possible to fire people for misconduct even when they have a contract, I've been professionally involved in that kind of thing. It's a lot of work, but you suck it up and do it.
9: I support unions generally, but I also have a knee jerk reaction; it's "Prison Guards are bad and promote excess incarceration." In a state hospital I saw that a lot of nurses were really afraid and used restraints more than they should have because of that.
I don't necessarily think that it's all the union's fault. I'm sure that management is to blame. My guess is that the whole culture is to blame.
Prison guard unions should be allowed to negotiate wages, hours, and benefits, and seniority, but nothing at all to do with work conditions or firings for misconduct. Yeah, maybe they shouldn't be, but they in fact are a major roadblock to any meaningful reform.
When I try to load this window in Firefox, only the comments through Bave's #6 show up. Safari, however, is working fine. Does anyone know why that would be?
Regardless of one's jerkiness reactions for unions and prison guards, that union head sounds like a freakin' nightmare, and a huge part of the problem. At least as portrayed in the article. Retaliation by not letting buses off the island for contract negotiation or to keep an inmate from testifying against a guard for brutality? Seems like there should be able to be a response to that.
(For the record: I'm not calling anyone a jerk, was just referring to the knee-jerk comments above.)
I'm pretty pro-union, I undergo the same Gestalt switch when you put the words "prison guard" in front of union that I do when you put the word "national" in front of the word "socialist".
16 just about sums it up. You know who else looks bad in that article? De Blasio.
"Prison Guards are bad and promote excess incarceration."
Are prison guards' unions politically active in promoting tough-on-crime policy outside California? This is the third time I've mentioned this here, but they seem to have mostly gotten out of that game here where that was especially prominent.
Seems like there should be able to be a response to that.
I don't know the details of the contract, but roughly the response is that you bring a notice of discipline against each of the guards involved for misconduct in refusing to drive the buses. Mostly, you can't fire someone on the first NOD, but something that huge you'd definitely get a substantial suspension without pay.
And then you do it again, every time you become aware of misconduct, and the second or third time you do it, the wrongdoer loses his job, and you hire a replacement. And the union members eventually notice that obeying the union president's orders to commit wrongdoing under the contract gets them fired for cause, and they stop electing him.
17: Yes, a bit, but the process I described in 19 is a long game, and DeBlasio's only had two years so far. That doesn't say he's been doing as much as he should (or that he's doing anything effective at all), but the fact that he's not making a public deal of butting heads with Seabrook isn't dispositive of nothing useful happening.
Does the process work like that or do the fired people go into arbitration with a strong chance of getting their job back with back pay? I am thinking of what happened locally in this case.
They do go into arbitration (I'm not saying the process isn't a lot of work), but the arbitration isn't wildly unfair against management. If DOC couldn't make NOD's stick on the bus facts, it's because they weren't trying. (Oh, there are flukes, but generally if you're right you can discipline someone.)
I come into contact with public-entity management, and they often complain about how hard it is to fire people, but the way they say it does make me wonder how much they feel at-will is the proper state of affairs and don't like to do the legwork to reasonably demonstrate the case for firing someone.
You don't have to have too many flukes like that to cut public support for public sector unions.
And on 21, here's a quote from another story on the reinstatement:
Union leaders and the family of a Hazelwood man who died waiting for an ambulance during a snowstorm last year are speaking out after a paramedic involved in the case was reinstated.
It was a year ago this month Curtis Mitchell was found dead in his home. For two days, he called 911 for help. It never arrived.
Now, the paramedic crew chief fired for not getting there has been reinstated with back pay.
"It knocked me down, I couldn't believe it," Mary Bey, Mitchell's aunt, said. "I said, 'Reinstated with back pay?' The way she talked, the way she cursed and treated my nephew like he wasn't even a human being, like his life didn't matter."
Union leaders say it's just not the case, calling paramedic Josie Dimon an excellent employee with a spotless professional record, saying she was ordered to leave Mitchell's neighborhood the night he died.
"They were told that he was walking to their truck," Paramedic Union President Anthony Weinmann said.
"They confirmed with an administrative chief. 'What are we to do?' Give him five minutes. If he doesn't show up, go back in service.
"That was because they were inundated with calls. They were ordered to go back in service. They were following a direct order," he explained.
Obviously, I don't know the evidence at the arbitration, but that doesn't sound like "There's no way to fire anyone" that sounds like "The evidence showed that the person they were trying to fire wasn't actually responsible for the tragedy."
23: Ding ding ding. It's effortful, but as someone on the management side of that process sometimes it doesn't seem unreasonably effortful to me, and management is inexcusably bad at it.
23: I also wonder how often union contract rules are flouted. Typical private-sector employees get warnings. In some union settings management will get rid of union employees without warning if it's still the probationary period.
Union Protections: Frequently not as good as you thought they were.
Well, there's some excuse for firing probationary employees fast if they're not working out, because it's your only shot before protections kick in, and if you miss the window it's missed. I have a case in which an agency thought they'd fired someone in his probationary period, got the dates wrong, and had to take the firing back. (And then he wouldn't take his job back -- this bit is actually a side issue.)(I don't deal with firing people all day -- it comes up in one or two cases a year.)
When my partner and I moved to small town Central NY for my job, he joined a local MMA club to try to find a community of people in the area that weren't my coworkers. Several of the club members were prison guards, not unusual given the large number of prisons in our economically-depressed area. They were all in this club to get skills that they perceived as necessary for their jobs. Common topics of conversation included 1)how the problem with America is that prisoners have too many rights, 2)how much better it was to work in the prison before CC cameras were installed, since now it's more difficult to beat prisoners up with impunity, and 3)how awesome various guns are.
After 18 months, we moved to the nearest big city and now I commute 50 minutes each way.
25: I didn't find his case convincing and that article doesn't have the detail from the other side. Certainly there were other failures and other people were disciplined. I wouldn't want somebody to face criminal charges over what he failed to do, but being unable or unwilling to act independently without instruction in an emergency strikes me as a perfectly reasonable cause for firing an Emergency Medical Technician.
31: If that article isn't straightforwardly misrepresenting the evidence, the issue isn't that she was unwilling to act independently without instruction, it's that she was directly instructed by a supervisor to wait five minutes and then leave (presumably to go help other people). The supervisor's order sounds as if it were mistaken, but disciplining someone for following an order (under circumstances where it's not clear that the order was illegal) is a problem.
I obviously don't know all the facts put forth at the arbitration, but if she was being told by a supervisor to leave, then that seems like a solid defense to me.
29: There is, but I've never seen a private-sector company work the way I saw one state entity do it. A culture of fear sets in pretty quickly.
32: I don't buy that. The supervisor had only two sources of information, a caller with no medical training and Dimon. You can't consider a supervisor's order as if it were independent of the information received. The order to leave came after Dimon sat there for twenty minutes. See the timeline here.
Also, after Mitchell died, the fire department made it to the house easily. The snow had stopped by then, but it was all still there.
(On a side note, I don't trust the arbitrator at all. The idea that Hazelwood is too dangerous for the EMS is absurd. The idea that Hazelwood is too dangerous for the EMS when there is 18 inches of snow on the ground is obvious bullshit.)
I don't buy that. The supervisor had only two sources of information, a caller with no medical training and Dimon.
I don't understand what information you think Dimon had that the supervisor didn't that would justify Dimon's disobeying an order.
What looks problematic (that is, that it might justify the firing) to me is that I don't get why Dimon was sitting in the ambulance waiting for the guy to come out rather than walking into his house/apartment to assess him. But that seems to be treated in the three stories I've seen so far as a non-issue, which suggests that there's some explanation.
I'm not faulting Dimon for disobeying an order. I'm faulting her for doing nothing in the 20 minutes before that order came and what she communicated (or didn't communicate) to her supervisor during that time. She's not a fry cook. This is a job that pays $40-$50k a year with full benefits plus overtime. The judgment to say something like "I can't get there, send a 4x4" or "how the fuck is somebody sick enough to need an ambulance going to walk through this much snow" would seem to be required for anybody in charge of operating in the field. To accept her argument (or the argument that arbitrator put forward for her) you have to accept that it was somehow such a chaotic situation that she couldn't communicate her concerns with dispatch but somehow not chaotic enough for her to have thought it was somehow irresponsible to wait unmoving for a sick guy for 20 minutes. Or that an EMT isn't
36: Yeah, I'm really having a hard time seeing a legitimate explanation for sitting around like that. Obviously I don't know what their SOP is but why would just going into the house to assess the guy not be the obvious choice? Is there a moat? A gorge in front of the house and the bridge is out? Why sit there?
The only person I've ever been in a physical fight with (it was middle school) was, last I heard, working as a prison guard. Seems fitting.
3&: my impression was that prison guards were the people who got screened out of the police academy.
36: That doesn't sound right to me, but it also sounds like something that her supervisor knew about just as much as she did -- that is, the supervisor knew when she got there, that she wasn't walking the four blocks through the snow to get to the guy, and told her to leave anyway. As far as I can tell, Dimon didn't have any information the supervisor didn't have other than "The ambulance can't make it the last four blocks to the guy's house", and that seems to have been communicated.
I could buy the argument that the supervisor should have been fired also. The lack of action was the same. But I think the deciding factor for the city was what they call "failure to render the respect due a patient." It seems reasonable, but not necessary, that failing to act plus demonstrated disrespect is worse than mere failure to act.
Ironically, if she had said what she said ("He ain't (expletive) comin' down, and I ain't waitin' all day for him. I mean, what the (expletive), this ain't no cab service.") to her supervisor, instead of a some random coworker, I think it would have strengthened her case for staying.
LB is right in general. (I haven't looked at the particular ambulance case at all.) It requires a bit of work to fire someone and make it stick under a just-cause provision, but people do get fired for just cause all the time. Some employers, and it's usually certain public-sector ones rather than private-sector, are really bad at documenting poor performance, giving written warnings and suspensions, etc. It would not surprise me that NYC DOC is bad at this.
I've seen private-sector employers get bad about this stuff, usually because some key manager is bad about it or has decided to see how far they can go in fighting with the union. The result is that the union wins a bunch of arbitrations, and the manager is told by her bosses that she needs to reduce the employer's arbitration loss rate, and so the manager makes some policy or procedural changes and the company gets better at following just-cause procedures. That's how the process should work.
With dysfunctional bureaucracies, it doesn't happen. NYC DOC, like the city's police force, has been weirdly insulated from risk-management budgetary pressures compared to the rest of the city's agencies. This might have something to do with the power of the CO union, but I suspect there are also non-union-related political reasons. And likely also just plain cultural issues within the department. I think it would be almost impossible to keep your soul intact after years of being a guard, or a supervisor of guards, at Rikers.
I am just back from Santa Rita. I don't hear as many horror stories from folks there as at Rikers, but I also haven't been talking to people there very long. The first rotten thing I've heard is that...well, we went on a tour a couple of weeks ago, and the person who was giving the tour said inmates get to go outside a lot, and this is apparently not the case. She told us rather proudly that they do, and how it improves their mood, but this was in the midst of a conversation with lots of unintentionally revealed ideology, so whatever. The first thing, before even the power point presentation, was a cabinet she opened to show us a ton of shanks made of this and that. The most choice moment was the use of the phrase "the structure we offer them."