ISCC WARDEN'S USE OF PEER PRESSURE TACTICS IN ATTEMPTING TO SOLVE PRISON VIOLENCE A FAILURE - AGAIN
Imagine that when one of your co-workers was late to work your entire department was docked a weeks pay for his tardiness - or if your child's entire class had a well earned field trip and three days of classes canceled because someone in her class shoplifted a pack of gum at the grocery store. Is this type of collective punishment appropriate even where those punished have no say in the actions of others? Should these punishments extend even to the denial of medical treatment?
Despite IDOC SOP and regulations preventing any prisoner from having any supervisory or other authority over another inmate, prison administrators at the ISCC continue to utilize "peer pressure" tactics to maintain control of prisoners by punishing (usually by locking down) entire housing units (tiers) when only one prisoner assigned to that tier gets into even a minor altercation or fight with another - even when the offending prisoner is removed from the tier to the hole, or assigned to another unit. This means that the actions of one prisoner may well cause the lockdown - for days, if not weeks - of hundreds of individuals who were not involved, and may not even know the bad actors. These lockdowns prevent affected prisoners from receiving or sending emails, ordering hygiene items (on kiosks), showering, attending educational, vocational, rehabilitative and religious programs, work assignments, participating in court proceedings, meeting legal filing deadlines and in some cases, receiving medical and mental health treatment.
In the years prior to the state taking over the operations of the ISCC (then, the Idaho Correctional Center [ICC] - operated by Corrections Corporation of America [now CoreCivic]) in 2014, the ISCC was dubbed "Idaho's Gladiator School" by many in the press for the number and intensity of fights and levels of violence at the facility. Investigations later found that staff were giving over to prisoners (some say due to staff shortages) the authority to police their own, to mete out punishments upon other prisoners, make housing decisions (usually through threats, coercion and violence) and determine the fates - often by and through cooperating staff - of virtually every prisoner in the institution. It seems that under ISCC warden Jay Christensen, prisoners are again being asked to step up and police their own, and to go back to the days and ways of CCA.
Were these lockdowns being utilized to determine specific facts as part of an investigation into an incident or series of incidents, or to isolate/segregate witnesses, one would have no qualm or argument, but this is clearly (and admittedly) not the case in most instances. Indeed, staff agree that most unit and tier lockdowns are a direct effort to have inmates "clean-up" their areas by getting the bad actors either removed from the unit before an incident occurs or [peer] pressured into "getting with the program". As part of this effort, Christensen has either directed, or acquiesced to a program of placing inmates known to be violent and disruptive in housing areas traditionally known to present few if any behavioral problems.
Thought gone were the days of prison administrators using Kapos, Building Tenders and Turn Key inmates under the guise of being short staffed, or effectively and efficiently controlling the prisoner population - or so we thought - until now... until here.
Despite IDOC SOP and regulations preventing any prisoner from having any supervisory or other authority over another inmate, prison administrators at the ISCC continue to utilize "peer pressure" tactics to maintain control of prisoners by punishing (usually by locking down) entire housing units (tiers) when only one prisoner assigned to that tier gets into even a minor altercation or fight with another - even when the offending prisoner is removed from the tier to the hole, or assigned to another unit. This means that the actions of one prisoner may well cause the lockdown - for days, if not weeks - of hundreds of individuals who were not involved, and may not even know the bad actors. These lockdowns prevent affected prisoners from receiving or sending emails, ordering hygiene items (on kiosks), showering, attending educational, vocational, rehabilitative and religious programs, work assignments, participating in court proceedings, meeting legal filing deadlines and in some cases, receiving medical and mental health treatment.
In the years prior to the state taking over the operations of the ISCC (then, the Idaho Correctional Center [ICC] - operated by Corrections Corporation of America [now CoreCivic]) in 2014, the ISCC was dubbed "Idaho's Gladiator School" by many in the press for the number and intensity of fights and levels of violence at the facility. Investigations later found that staff were giving over to prisoners (some say due to staff shortages) the authority to police their own, to mete out punishments upon other prisoners, make housing decisions (usually through threats, coercion and violence) and determine the fates - often by and through cooperating staff - of virtually every prisoner in the institution. It seems that under ISCC warden Jay Christensen, prisoners are again being asked to step up and police their own, and to go back to the days and ways of CCA.
Were these lockdowns being utilized to determine specific facts as part of an investigation into an incident or series of incidents, or to isolate/segregate witnesses, one would have no qualm or argument, but this is clearly (and admittedly) not the case in most instances. Indeed, staff agree that most unit and tier lockdowns are a direct effort to have inmates "clean-up" their areas by getting the bad actors either removed from the unit before an incident occurs or [peer] pressured into "getting with the program". As part of this effort, Christensen has either directed, or acquiesced to a program of placing inmates known to be violent and disruptive in housing areas traditionally known to present few if any behavioral problems.
Thought gone were the days of prison administrators using Kapos, Building Tenders and Turn Key inmates under the guise of being short staffed, or effectively and efficiently controlling the prisoner population - or so we thought - until now... until here.