Mentally exhausted correctional officers practiced unsafe work habits, which led to the murder of a correctional officer and inhumane treatment of inmates at Telford maximum-security prison in Texas.
Understaffing forces the officers to cut corners and work too much overtime, according to sources of The Texas Tribune. The prison has the state’s highest rate of assaults on staff and following the murder, the number of vacant positions has skyrocketed.
“Working those longer hours and having that safety aspect in the back of your mind that maybe you’re not as safe as you should be or as you were, it wears on you,” said one former officer who asked to remain anonymous. “I’ve known [officers] to get physically ill at the mere thought of going to Telford.”
It’s not just Telford; Texas has a widespread problem of understaffed prisons. During the last fiscal year, three out of every 10 officers quit the department. Prison wardens have the authority to enforce mandatory overtime for up to 10 consecutive days or more than 16 hours in a day.
“I knew I’d be doing a dangerous job,” said one former Telford correctional officer who wished to remain anonymous. “But they were making me work so much overtime, I didn’t get to spend any time with my family.”
Understaffing concerns at Telford took center stage after Correctional Officer Timothy Davison was murdered. He had just opened the cell to Billy Joel Tracy’s cell in the highest security area of the prison, when Tracy slipped free of his handcuffs. Tracy knocked Davison to the floor, beating him with the metal bar used to open the food slot on the cell door.
An internal investigation found that protocol wasn’t followed. Tracy’s handcuffs weren’t fully secured, and a second officer wasn’t around. Tracy was sentenced to death last year for the murder.
Two former correctional officers confirmed that prison staff didn’t follow departmental policies even after Davison’s death, partially because of understaffing.
The Department of Criminal Justice says that no clear correlation has been found between staff assault rates and staffing numbers. Even so, inmates say that they too suffer because of the shortage.
The meager diet, the morale and the leadership make this prison the worst, inmate Omar Edwards told the Tribune. He has been housed in nine different prisons over his 25 years of incarceration. “This unit to me is like a bunch of dead souls.”
Telford was on lockdown for about 100 days last year. During lockdown the men aren’t allowed to leave their cells to go to the dining hall or buy food from the commissary. The men claimed they were underfed and given spoiled meat in sack lunches that sometimes contained bugs or showed signs of being gnawed at by rats.
The department responded to claims of inadequate nutrition by stating that the department follows federal dietary guidelines in planning nutritionally balanced meals.
While the correctional officers may not be overly sympathetic – “It’s prison,” one said – lockdowns weigh on them. During normal prison operations, the cooking and cleaning is done by inmates, but all that work must be done by prison staff during lockdowns.
To ease the burden, the department has begun the process of transferring nearly 400 men who have a history of disciplinary issues.
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