Читать книгу Prison Puzzle Pieces 2 - Dave Basham - Страница 27

One of the jobs as a corrections officer is to try to maintain a safe secure environment. The way to do this is to enforce the institutions policies.

There are problems with this. Some officers are afraid to enforce policy, some don’t care and some are lazy. Some officers don’t know the policies and some don’t agree with them. Some officers took the job to smuggle items to their friends, sell contraband and get out before getting caught. Who knows how many other reasons there could possibly be for not doing the job we were hired to do.

If inmates wanted to stay out of trouble, I would coach them on how to deal with policies. I told them there was no way to know all of the policies. There were two ways they could go to stay out of trouble.

The first was that you could just figure there was a policy against most everything and you would be alright.

The second way was to ask an officer. Whatever they tell you takes the blame off of you and puts it on them if they were wrong. A big point here was to make sure you ask an honest officer, one you can trust to step up and say, “Yes, I told him he could do that.” Also, write down who told you what; when they told you (date and time), and where both of you were when he told you. It never hurts to have witnesses to what the officer told you either; write their name down too. You can never be too careful.

Officers will be wrong at times. I hit this often. I would get on an inmate for a policy violation. He would tell me an officer on third watch said it was alright. I would ask the name of the officer. If they wouldn’t tell me, it never happened and the inmate was in trouble.

If they gave me a name, I’d contact that officer and ask them. If they confirmed that they told the inmate it was alright, the inmate was off the hook.

If the officer stated that they never said it, I’d weigh out the credibility of the inmate verses the credibility of the officer. If I determined the officer to be more credible than the inmate, I’d get the inmate for the policy violation and for misrepresentation. Rarely would any inmate ever lie to me about something like this. If they knew me, they would know that I would be checking out their story.

Once in a while, I would find the inmate to be more credible. In a case like this, I would not write up the violation.

The DOC did a good thing with that misrepresentation word. People get angry when you call them a liar. When you say that they misrepresented the facts, they will more readily admit to that, even though it’s the same thing.