Does More Staff Mean Less Violence Inside Jails?

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC, good morning, again, everyone. Now we continue with our series, which we've launched in conjunction with the Green Space called Punishment & Profit. The question guiding these segments is who profits when people get put away? Every Tuesday evening through May 4th, the Green Space in partnership with the advocacy group Worth Rises is holding a virtual panel discussion about one aspect of the business side of the prison industry.

We'll have a segment previewing these weekly discussions on Mondays here on the Brian Lehrer Show. Last week, we talked about the history of private prisons in this country. The week before that we talked about carceral design and architecture. The topic for today's installment is personnel. That doesn't just mean corrections officers, but their managers and the private companies that provide online training videos and help fill vacancies, lots of things.

We'll also talk about whether more staff necessarily means less violence and better management. I'll give you a hint. Rikers Island has the highest ratio of personnel to people incarcerated of any jail we know of in the United States. With me now is Bianca Tylek Worth Rises Executive Director, and Insha Rahman, Vice President of advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice, one of the largest justice reform think tanks and advocacy groups in the country. Bianca and Insha, welcome back to WNYC.

Insha: Thanks, Brian.

Bianca: Good morning.

Insha: Good morning.

Brian: Insha, try and think a lot of people might be surprised to learn that fact that I just gave. That Rikers has the highest ratio of personnel to inmates. How did that come to be and is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Insha Rahman: I would say that that is not a productive thing because what we know is that more corrections officers doesn't necessarily produce a better result inside jails and prisons. Here in New York City, we spend over 2.5 billion a year on running Rikers Island and the city jails. We have one and a half corrections officers to every person incarcerated right now, about 10,000 correction officers, about 5,000 people incarcerated and yet we have some of the most violent jails that we have seen, certainly more so than any others documented across the country.

We're under federal lawsuit right now to manage and stem the violence that we see. What we're also seeing is that we're not producing results. We justify the costs of incarceration by saying, "Well, it's for public safety," but, in fact, we know that jails and prisons aren't producing public safety, either inside the walls or when people return because they're not setting people up for the kinds of supports and learning and growth and development that helps people come back to our communities and be able to stay out of the system.

Brian: We'll get back to Rikers, in particular, as we go but Bianca, I know your organization Worth Rises, put out a report all about the business of prisons. Each chapter in the report is a different sector and we're following along for the series. For this chapter on personnel, you focused on third-party staffing by security agencies. The big ones were G4S and Securitas. Can you explain the role of these companies and what jobs they fill in either private or public facilities and why this is an important topic to discuss?

Bianca Tylek: Absolutely. Third-party staffing agencies like you said Securitas or G4S, G4S is actually the world's largest security firm. It's a multinational firm operating all over the country. In many places, it does actually operate private prisons entirely. In the US G4S doesn't operate any private prisons, but provide staff to private prisons as well as other prisons and then importantly, it has a number of contracts with customs and border patrol, as well as ICE. Some of those contracts are for a variety of different services, not just providing security staff, also doing transportation for ICE in a number of those type of services.

They have been deployed widely through-- Assumptions like modern-day mercenary troops. Just deploying these armed security forces into variety of different agencies. It's also important to know that third-party staffing is not just occurring in security position, but also in things like medical positions. A lot of prisons and jails have actually significant vacancies when it comes to medical staff, whether they be doctors or nurses. There are entire firms dedicated to just staffing those vacancies with temporary positions and that has led to some really catastrophic results.

Brian: Is this another case like some of the other things we've talked about during the series, where you think that the outcome in terms of decent treatment for inmates is worse in ways that are measurable when the staff comes from the private sector rather than public employees?

Bianca: Absolutely. I think the important piece to know is two things. One is private sector typically has a lot of the failures in the private-sector non-union, non-organized, no benefits. Things of that sort. Also, that are limited in training which create higher turnover. When you have higher turnover inside of facilities, then by nature, you have people who are not trained and aren't really necessarily be in that environment.

Also, private sector typically pays far less in compensation and as a result, attracts talent that is more likely to be in those buckets. On top of that, often doesn't do the same quality controls and checks because they're just trying to fill positions with bodies. In fact, there was quotes in the report about people in the industry who've said if the RN, the nurse isn't qualified, just put the body in the spot and we'll figure it out later. That particularly in medical has led to really awful, awful events. In fact, tomorrow evening, we'll be talking to an investigative journalist who really looked into a situation in Georgia where a doctor was hired by one of these third-party agencies for a temporary position, ended up working there for nine years.

Had a slightly lower salary than you might expect a practitioner of similar status to have on the outside, but that's in large part because they already were sanctioned in another state, had already had a malpractice, super wrongful death and in fact, nine women incarcerated in Georgia died under his watch. Three of them were directly paying legally to his malpractice. Really there are a number of things that have happened as a result of third-party and private sector hiring that would hopefully likely not happen under public watch.

Brian: Now, listeners, we can take some phone calls either from people who work or have ever worked in jails or prisons, either in the public sector or the private sector or anybody listening who's been incarcerated, who wants to talk about personnel and maybe the differences between different kinds of personnel or the policies that key personnel behaving decently toward you or anybody who works in a related field. We can take a few phone calls for our guests on this segment on personnel in prisons, 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280.

Who has a story to tell or a question to ask? If you have worked as a corrections officer, a driver, a doctor or administrator, anything else in a jail or in a prison, call in and tell us about that job that you have, or that you had. Is it fairly compensated? Do you feel like you received the proper training and support? How did you get your job? What did you think your job was going to be like compared to what it turned out to be, compare public and private sector if you want from your experience and if you've been incarcerated, what's your experience been with staff? Was there a sense of mutual respect?

What kept the staff in line if anything did in terms of human resources practices from their managers or anything else you want to say or ask? 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280. For Bianca Tylek executive director of Worth Rises, the advocacy group that's doing this series with us, and the Green Space, and Insha Rahman, Vice President of Advocacy and Partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice. Insha, nationwide outcry over police killings of unarmed black men and women have reached a fever pitch in part because of the advent of cell phone cameras and laws that now require police officers to wear body cameras, the same sunlight as I understand it does not exist inside jails and prisons.

How difficult is it to get hold of footage from a surveillance camera if the officers themselves aren't wearing cameras? I'm thinking of the death of Layleen Polanco at Rikers in 2019, it took an attorney and national media attention to look at that footage. But ultimately the de Blasio Administration said they would discipline 17 officers. It was so important that that footage would come to light. Is that an exceptional case with an exceptional outcome?

Insha: It is because we don't know what happens behind jail and prison walls, because not only are there not security cameras, but there also isn't accountability and insight into what is happening. Brian, as you know by organization Vera, several years ago, we began taking corrections leaders, advocates, people who've been formerly incarcerated, to go visit jails and prisons in Germany and Norway, to places that do incarceration to the extent that they use it, which is far less than we do in this country.

They do it far, far better. They have far fewer rates of violence incidents that sparked the kind of public outrage that the death of Kalief Browder, Layleen Polanco, and literally tens of thousands of others, behind bars has sparked in this country. From taking those trips and spending time with corrections administrators and leaders in Germany and Norway and walking around their prisons and understanding, how did they build the system that they have? We found three main takeaways.

First is, the use of incarceration is far, far less. If we incarcerated at the same rate as the rest of the world, not even Norway, which has one of the lowest incarceration rates of the entire planet. If we incarcerated just at the same rate as other countries combined, we'd have no more than 360,000 people in jails and prisons in this country today, compared to the over two million that we have.

That's an important point to start with, Brian, because, of course, you are going to have mass violence and punishment when you have a system that is truly mass incarceration. That is step number one, to having jails and prisons that are more humane, it is to simply incarcerate far less, and we can do so and maintain public safety. We've seen it time and time again, but we haven't actually turned that corner in this country and the violence that we saw documented on cell phone footage and that caused the outcry of the protests we saw last year. Hopefully, that will galvanize and continue to push us towards truly ending mass incarceration and our reliance on punishment as we know it.

The second takeaway is that in Norway, they make different decisions about personnel both from hiring as well as training and what personnel do every single day in their jobs. Let me read to you a description of what the job description is in Norway. "Corrections officers are expected for the people in their care and custody, to build educational, recreational, and personal enrichment opportunities to support daily routines, to participate in town halls and other public settings, to communicate with family members."

Compare that to what the New York City Department of Corrections has for its correctional officer job description, which is, "Supervise inmate meals and other congregate activities. Inspect areas for conditions which threaten safety and security. Issue verbal orders, announcements, and explanations to inmates. Just even the tone of how they do hiring is so so different. There's an orientation in Norway and Germany, towards service and counseling and helping people grow and thrive and live as close to normal lives behind bars, which is impossible to do, but as close to normal as possible.

They hire differently, they have expectations of correction staff differently than what we have here. Importantly, the balance of their correction staff are people who are engaged in what they call educational and professional activities. Counselors, folks who lead programs, classes, medical services, care, not simply security and oversight, as is the balance here in this country.

Then the third thing I'll just name very quickly is the way that daily life is set up behind bars there in Norway or German prison, is really to make sure that people who are incarcerated are supported, not punished. Again, that is a philosophical and cultural difference, that you feel palpably when you will walk into a jail or prison in this country versus one in Germany or Norway.

Brian: To put an exclamation point on that sentence, if we can call it that. This could be the lead story within this segment and it didn't get a whole lot of news coverage when it had happened in October. In 2015, a federal monitor was appointed to oversee Rikers, after a lawsuit regarding abuse by staff and an over-reliance on use of force. The monitor has put out 10 reports since that time, and the most recent while we were all consumed with election coverage and COVID, came out in October, and it found that, "The use of force rate per person remain higher than all years prior since the monitor was in place regarding Rikers Island."

Insha: That's right. The important thing for us to note too is what happens in jails and prisons in this country everywhere. It doesn't just stay there, it impacts our communities. If you see the response to COVID-19 and the pandemic, within a pandemic, that's happening behind bars, we know that outbreaks of COVID-19 in jails and prisons have impacted the communities in which those facilities sit.

The complete lack of medical care or programmatic response to contain COVID-19 and to respond to it behind bars has meant essentially that community is where jails and prisons and we've seen these outbreaks that happen, these communities are impacted too. I think it's really important for listeners to remember, well, that's not just over there, it's actually right here, we are all responsible for what happens in our jails and prisons.

Brian: Let's get a couple of calls. Joy in Parsippany, you're on WNYC. Hi, Joy.

Joy: Oh, Hello. Thank you for taking my call. I was hired by an inmate staff within the walls and maximum-security prison in Massachusetts a number of years ago, and I was hired by the inmates of the organization was called Inside-out, apparently a federally-funded national organization. They hired the inmates themselves, the lifers who hired me, and they needed somebody to help them to facilitate their groups. They have been with two groups that I worked with. My task was to be able to lead these people, these incarcerated inside the walls, lifers so that they could be resistant to the drug community within the prison.

Many of them had gotten addicted while they were incarcerated in the prison, and they were addicted intentionally by the administration, apparently, who allowed the guards to sell drugs to addictive inmates so that they could then be used as tools to carry out the bad deeds that the administration wanted done.

Brian: You got an education-

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Joy: [unintelligible 00:17:51] a nasty story.

Brian: You got an education in there.

Joy: I got an education.

Brian: Joy, thank you very much for that revelation. I'm going to go on to Tony in the Bronx. Tony, you are on WNYC. Hello.

Tony: How are you doing, Brian? How are you?

Brian: Good. Thank you.

Tony: Good.

Brian: You're a corrections officer I see?

Tony: I am not. I'm a youth development specialist, which is a YDS, which is what they used to replace for the new bill reform when they passed a law for the case on Rikers.

Brian: Sorry.

Tony: Experience has been everything terrible. What this lady is talking about the Germany reform is what they're supposed to be trying to do with these kids, and they're not doing that. It's pretty much preparing them for prison. That's what this is. Instead of reforming them at a teenage level, it's preparing them for prison life, get ready for prison when you’re 18, 19, 20, and you go through versus trying to reform them. They're not doing that at all at this early stage. It's just the kids running on [crosstalk]

Brian: Give us an example of how? When you say preparing them for prison life, what's an example of that?

Tony: Well, most of the kids that are in our facility are Hispanic and Blacks. The mental health services that they give for these kids, it doesn't reflect the kids. The mental health support, it doesn't show in the day-to-day work. I feel like they consider checking Facebook status or checking the Facebook [inaudible 00:19:24] going on YouTube as network services, but that's not what these kids need, they need more than just that. Basic services and reforming their behavior, their way of thinking, just a way of processing things is not happening. Nobody's thinking about that. If you're talking about prison, why not start with the youth? This is what we're supposed to be doing and that's not happening.

Brian: Tony thank you for your work and thank you for raising that. We'll do one more. Michael in the Bronx, you're on WNYC. Hi, Michael.

Michael: Hi, can you hear me?

Brian: I can hear just fine. Yes.

Michael: Oh, hi. I'm a white gay man, I was at Rikers Island for two years and I could go on for an hour of the things that I experienced there, but the problem was for me at Rikers Island, I'm sure in prisons if you're gay you're put on the same level as pedophiles. The correction officers, I'd get beat up or harassed verbally, physically all the time. The correction officers just look the other way. They would allow me to get beat. The problem was is they could put you in isolation, but isolation at Rikers is like a tiny little cell. It's the same cell that you would put as if you had made an infraction. You're basically punished for trying to protect yourself.

The other issue was a lot of correctional officers and I'm not trying to sound racist, but a lot of-- They're from the same neighborhoods as a lot of people that were in Rikers. They were like their cousins or their brothers are married to their sister and they would just protect them and they didn't protect people like me. You would file a complaint and file complaints and they would just throw it in the trash. On a personal level, I sued them for all the abuse I went through and I settled. It was a lot of work and it took a lot of time, but you're just treated like trash.

Brian: Michael, thank you very much. We only have a few minutes left in the segment, but Bianca Tylek from Worth Rises. Horror stories of sins of commission and sins of omission, at least allegedly.

Bianca: Yes. I think this is-- Even listening to the last story, one thing that we didn't touch on that comes to mind. Is that, in fact, the actual policies and protocols that are supposed to protect against misconduct by correctional officers and protects people who are incarcerated are also in large part drafted by private corporations who are contracted by correctional agencies to draft policies that limit their liability.

When you think about all of these particular abuses that the callers are speaking about, there's actually very little recourse that people inside have because what they'll be told every time they face some form of abuse is that the correctional officers followed protocol. That, I think, in particular, can be particularly alarming.

Brian: Insha before you go, I see the turnover rate for staff at correctional facilities is incredibly high. It's not great a job for many people. If you go to CoreCivic's website, for example, there are currently over 400 pages of open positions. Third-party staffing agencies might say they help fill vacancies quickly. That's a good thing they would argue in terms of the existence of the private agencies, but just give us a thought before we go on the turnover rate. If there's something that needs to be done to make the working conditions better for the people who work in prisons and jails, and whether that would in turn help make treatment of inmates better.

Insha: Brian, the problem is not turnover in and of itself or the conditions for people who work there, but the conditions overall in jails and prisons, we actually took lessons from German prisons, Norwegian prisons and set up units here in the US because we actually think we can have jails and prisons that are more pleasant places for people to be incarcerated, as well as for people to work, again, to the extent that we use incarceration and rely on it at all.

It takes us a fundamental culture change about what the expectations are for people who work there and a much more service and counseling and supportive model than one of supervision. Of course, it's exhausting to feel afraid all day long, which is how corrections officers here are trained to experience their jobs and what the expectations are. If we fundamentally shift that and I'll note that violence in Norwegian and German prisons is far, far, far less, they use solitary confinement. If at all far, far, far less than we do in this country. Again, it goes back to the fundamentals of what the culture and the daily practice and life is like behind bars.

Brian: In a way we have only scratched the surface in this conversation of things that we could be talking about with respect to personnel who work in jails and prisons. Bianca, do you want to just tell people what they can expect to mind night when this is the topic at your Green Space event, your virtual Green Space event that people can attend from anywhere and how to access it?

Bianca: Absolutely. Tomorrow we'll have four incredible panelists. We'll actually have our first panelist [unintelligible 00:25:26] Williams will be calling in from prison and joining us in a recorded fashion, but nevertheless, to share really important experience and perspective from inside the walls. We'll also have two journalists, one Scott Morris, the other Danny Robbins who have written about different aspects things related to personnel.

Scott will be talking about actually one of these corporations that writes these protocols and policies for police departments and correctional agencies across the country. Danny will be talking about this case of this doctor who was hired through a third party staffing firm down in Georgia. Then, of course, we'll also have Insha. Who's here with us today to share many of her insights from her travels to Germany and Norway and generally what we need to be doing around correctional staff. Hope folks join. You can join us by going to the Green Space or to Worth Rises's site. There are links in both places. Thank you.

Brian: Thegreenspace.org folks, if you want to join that. The easiest way to get there through our stuff. Bianca Tylek, Worth Rises Executive Director, and Insha Rahman, Vice President of advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice. Thank you both so much.

Insha: Thanks for having us.

Bianca: Thank you so much.

 

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