High risk inmates management and assessment

High Risk Inmates

In a culture with a growing prison population, and an unequal ability of prison infrastructure to add more beds to facilities, there must be a greater emphasis on high-risk prisoners and high-risk prison behaviors. There are several types of high-risk inmates, the two being dealt with in this work are those who are violent toward others, such as other inmates and/or prison guards and those who are likely to do harm to themselves, the most extreme case being suicide. The identified causes of prison violence, have been established for more than 30 years but the ways to deal with such issues are ever evolving, and often facility specific. One issue that has been difficult to overcome, is that a general feeling of concern for prisoners and their safety is not a popular research topic and for this reason a great deal of research deals with protecting the public and more importantly in correctional facilities, protecting prison employees.

Park 278) the major surmountable obstacle being that the institutions must live by guidelines that are more humane than those held by some of the prisoners themselves. To get a general idea of the four "causes" or reasons for the occurrence of prison violence one must look back to the inception of the ideas.

Foundational work on the reasons for prison violence was conducted in the early seventies, and for the most part the ideas are similar to those today in that the reasons violence, and sometimes murder and/or suicide occur in prisons have similar if not the same social functions as they did then. The four groupings are more or less important, depending on the institution, its environment, type of inmates, and of coarse, regional issues:

1. Violence as a function of a closed prison society, or that which occurs as a result of adjustment to the system and all its rules and restrictions;

Gambling, homosexual interactions, crowded living conditions, poor institutional design, inadequate training and supervision of staff, inmate incompatibilities in life style and cultural or racial identifications, treatment by courts and parole boards, and the inability of a cumbersome bureaucracy to meet human needs -- all contribute to an underlying tension present in most institutions. This violence is usually between individuals, although racial violence is apt to involve larger groups. Predators will sometimes form small, relatively temporary alliances for the exploitation of other inmates.

Park 279-280)

2. Violence as a function of individual emotional disturbance, the violence that stems from the adjustment to having little if any external stimulation, allowing the individual to reflect on past deeds and possibly face regrets, addressing internal angers.

This continues to be a significant source of assaults on staff at institutions where large numbers of psychiatrically disturbed inmates are managed....The right of inmates to refuse medication must be balanced against the safe and orderly operation of institutions, a task that has not yet been completed in the courts or the legislatures.

3. Violence as a function of revolutionary-retaliatory ideology. This type of violence has largely been ignored based on the changes within the social structure of the nation, having been closely linked to civil rights issues and arrests. The new face of this type of prison violence will be linked to terrorism.

Several murders of prison employees were attributed to such groups in the early 1970s.Prison staff were particularly resentful of the encouragement being given to aggressive inmates by revolutionary activists in the outside community who furnished moral support, legal aid, free literature, and attractive visitors for cooperative prisoners. Curiously, this sort of violent activism has largely disappeared from the prison scene as it has from college campuses, although terroristic acts continue to occur in the community and may even be increasing worldwide. Outbreaks of violence in 1979 directed toward former participants in the prison reform movement of the early 1970s and continuing threats against others suggest that revolutionary-retaliatory violence has not vanished but is waiting for a suitable set of conditions for its reactivation.

4. Violence as a function of organized gangs. Prison gangs have been around for many years and can be based on ideology and/or internal perceptions of protective networks, but violence in these cases is often associate with extreme secrecy as well as planned and directed acts of violence against targeted inmates of rival gangs or those who wish to join or leave the institutions. These types of associations and their subsequent conflicts are often based on race.

The prison gangs that emerged in the late 1960s have maintained their identity for more than a decade and they remain a major source of violence in... prisons. A quasi-military type of organization continues to provide the continuity that the old-style predatory alliances lacked and to allow transfer of power when gang leaders are killed or segregated. The tight organization and discipline of these groups enable them to dominate much larger groups of unorganized inmates. Inmates continue to be the primary victims of the gangs, whose activities are the largest source of assaults and deaths in the California system. A major development in recent years has been an escalation of gang activities in several...communities, and there have been more gang-related homicides outside of jails and prisons than inside.

The reasons having been established for why violence so frequently occurs in prison environments this work will now go on to discuss environmental contributors to violence in prison. One of the most striking, as our prisons stay the same size and the populations grow is overcrowding, creating bad conditions and more opportunity for inmates to interact with one another.

In Texas the rates of suicides, violent deaths, disciplinary incidents, and natural deaths for "elderly" (age 50 or more) inmates increased beyond statistical expectancies. The larger prisons in the Texas system (1600 average daily population) consistently demonstrated rates higher than the smaller (800 average daily population) prisons, a consistency that could not be readily explained by demographic characteristics of the populations, housing mode, or average amount of space per inmate. Data from Oklahoma on crowding and violent deaths corroborated the Texas data. The apparent explanation of this data is that sheer population size of an institution exerts a negative influence on its inmates, an influence that is seemingly independent of other factors.

Carter and Glaser 120)

It is clear that overcrouding has a positive correlation with prison violence and prison deaths. In many if not all prisons designated classes and systems are in place that isolate or segregate individuals who have been prone to violence, outside as reflected by the type of crime convicted of and also as a result of prison incidents, this also includes those who are suspected of suicidal tendencies.

Champion 11) One of the most important issues that must be addressed to reduce prison deaths is programs that identify high-risk prisoners and assist these prisoners to adjust to the prison system and environment.