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Written By Incarcerated - Advancing Social Justice

Female correctional officers win lawsuit for hostile work environment

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Corrections Officers guarding the East Gate

Female correctional officers have won a $20 million settlement of a lawsuit claiming sexual harassment and a hostile work environment in federal prisons.

The settlement also includes 20 pages of procedural changes to improve employee safety, including improved training about sexual harassment, better monitoring for processing incident reports, and removing front pockets from inmate clothing to eliminate hidden masturbating.

The settlement resulted after a judge ruled in 2016 in favor of the lawsuit filed by a collective of women working at the nation’s largest male federal prison in Coleman, Fla.

The settlement was one of the largest class-action settlements leveled to date for pervasive sexual harassment, The Washington Post reported Jan. 27.

“These women walked into a high-security prison every day, knowing that they were going to be harassed by inmates and told by male colleagues and supervisors that they shouldn’t be there,” said Heidi Burakiewicz, lead attorney for the case.

The lawsuit alleged that more than 500 female correctional officers, teachers, nurses and office services employees were subjected to a hostile work environment, sex discrimination, and deliberate indifference.

The lead plaintiff was Correctional Officer Taronica White. She said from the first day she started working at the new maximum-security prison, she routinely got catcalls as she walked across the exercise yard post and inmates exposed their private parts to her during count time.

White said she reported the incidents to her superiors. Nevertheless, little to nothing was done to stop the behavior.

The Post reported that another plaintiff said one night she was exposed to 25 to 30 inmates masturbating. “It felt like a free for all … I was afraid for my safety.”

25 percent of millennial-age American men think asking a woman who is not a romantic partner to go for a drink is harassment, according to a recent survey by The Economist/YouGov reports The New York Times 1-17-18.

More than a third of millennial say that if a man compliments a woman’s looks it is harassment, according to a recent survey by The Economist/YouGov reports The New York Times 1-17-18.

Sexual misconduct by the inmates remains a serious problem in a male prison, said Unit Manager Tammy Padgett.

Improvements are being made “but we still have growth to do,” said Shirley Moore Smeal, president of the Association of Women Executives in Corrections. “Some people would still rather not have women working in corrections at all.”

“Women are drawn to these jobs for the same reason anyone would be, they are stable government jobs with low entry requirements,” said Dana Britton, director of the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University.

Prisons provide attractive jobs in pastoral, economically depressed areas. Nevertheless, women’s increasing presence in men’s prisons has often sparked conflict with the men who have traditionally held those jobs.

The Post article says that men’s prisons did not start hiring women until the 1970s, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Today women account for 30 percent of correctional department workers; this includes community-based facilities, juvenile facilities, and jails.

A similar lawsuit involving the District of Columbia Department of Corrections was settled in 1999. Lawsuits have also been filed in New Mexico, Denver and Cook County, Ill.

http://sanquentinnews.com/former-prisoner-files-sexual-harassment-suit/

Police continue to shoot about 1,000 people a year

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Child holding a gun and ammo

987 people were fatally shot by police officers in 2017

Police across the country shot and killed approximately the same number of people in 2017 as they did in each of the previous two years.

Because there is no official nationwide tally of fatal police shootings, The Washington Post took charge and has compiled the most accurate accounting of these incidents – 2,945 shooting deaths in all since 2015, with roughly 1,000 each year. According to the Post’s report, 987 people were fatally shot by police officers in 2017.

“The numbers indicate that this is not a trend, but a robust measure of these shootings,” said University of South Carolina criminologist Geoff Alpert, who specializes in the study of police use of force. “We now have information on almost 3,000 shootings, and we can start looking to provide the public with a better understanding of fatal officer-involved shootings.”

Intimate partner violence accounts for 15 percent of all violent crime. One in three women and one in four men in the United States has experienced some form of physical violence by an intimate partner. Husbands are five times more likely to kill wives than vice versa. A third of female homicide victims are killed by an intimate male partner or ex-partner, according to FBI reports. http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ndv0312.pdf

Deadly police shootings came to the forefront of national attention in 2014 when an unarmed Black teenager, Michael Brown, was killed by a White police officer in a suburban community outside St. Louis, Mo.

The controversy surrounding his death sparked a huge public outcry that contributed to the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement, the Post reported.

The number of unarmed persons killed by police has shown signs of decreasing, according to the Post’s data. After 94 unarmed persons were fatally shot in 2015, that amount dropped to 51 people killed in 2016 and inched back up to 68 in 2017.

“African American families comprise 42 percent of welfare recipients…but are 59 percent of poor people shown on television are African American.” “Sustaining Stereotypes” by Lanien Frush Holt in QUILL Summer 2018 www.spj.org/quill

“The national spotlight on this issue has made officers more cautious in unarmed situations,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington-based think tank. His group developed training for dozens of departments aimed at de-escalating potentially violent encounters.

“We are giving officers more options like slowing the situation down and using time and distance to gain a tactical advantage,” Wexler said.

In a 2015, the Los Angeles Police Department began to emphasize that their officers strive to preserve life in all encounters. In 2017, the LAPD started to award Preservation of Life medals to officers that demonstrate exemplary action in avoiding a fatal shooting. Local police unions were derisive, but top managers in the LAPD think de-escalation training has made a difference.

“Our officers are in 1.5 million volatile encounters a year, so shooting someone is an incredibly rare event,” LAPD First Assistant Chief Michel Moore told the Post. “Yet we pull each instance apart to see what factors might have played a role and train our officers to make that rare event even more rare.”

“Police departments in 13 of the 25 largest U.S. cities did not post their (operating and use-of-force) procedures online.” “The Opaque Blue Line” by C.J. Ciaramella in Reason magazine May 2017

About one out of four fatal shootings in 2017 involved persons experiencing some form of mental health crisis.

“We call 911 for other medical emergencies, and they bring specially trained medical technicians, but when it’s a mental health crisis, we send the police,” said Ron Honberg of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

For each of the last three years, the Post documented more than twice the number of fatal police shootings than were recorded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is limited by its reliance on voluntary data submissions from police agencies.  The Post did its own research by sifting through local news coverage, public records, and social media reports.

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San Francisco DA Gascόn stands apart from law enforcement to endorse bill

Black incarceration on the decline

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The percentages of Blacks and Whites being incarcerated are converging. Nationally, Black incarceration rates are dropping, while Whites are on the increase, according to a Marshall Project analysis of yearly reports by the Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The report found that between 2000 and 2015, the imprisonment rate of Black men dropped by more than 24 percent. At the same time, the White male rate increased slightly.

The narrowing of the gap between White and Black incarceration rates is “definitely optimistic news,” John Pfaff, a law professor at Fordham University, told The Washington Post.

Among women, the trend is even more dramatic. From 2000 to 2015, the Black female imprisonment rate dropped by nearly 50 percent. During the same period, the White female rate rose by 53 percent.

The racial disparity between Black and White women’s incarceration was once 6 to 1, according to the Sentencing Project. Now, it’s 2 to 1.

“If we want to continue or accelerate [that trend], we need to acknowledge it and figure out why it’s happening,” said Adam Gelb, director of the public safety performance program at The Pew Charitable Trusts and an expert on prison data.

“Tennessee is 17.1 percent Black, but Blacks make up 69 percent of all drug-free school zone offenders…”REASON Magazine, January 2018

Prison system experts attribute the narrowing gap between Black and White incarceration to a number of reasons, including a general decline in crime and arrests; a significant drop in violent crime, which means fewer substantial prison sentences; a shift away from crack and marijuana toward meth and opioids in the war on drugs; and, the fact that criminal justice reform has occurred in cities, where more Black people live, while less progressive change has occurred in rural areas.

Another possibility: White people have faced declining socioeconomic prospects, leading to an increase in law-breaking among that population. From 2000 to 2009, Black incarceration for property offenses fell 9 percent, while White incarceration for those crimes increased 21 percent.

“African American families comprise 42 percent of welfare recipients…but are 59 percent of poor people shown on television are African American.” “Sustaining Stereotypes” by Lanien Frush Holt in QUILL Summer 2018 www.spj.org/quill

Even so, racial inequality in the prison system remains a serious issue. At the current rate, the disparities would not fully disappear for many decades, according to the Washington Post.

“Until we learn the true value of the lives we have wasted, and until we truly reckon with our nation’s history,” Michelle Alexander (author of The New Jim Crow) told the Marshall Project in 2015, “… we will find ourselves in an endless cycle of reform and retrenchment—periods of apparent progress followed by the creation of new systems of racial and social control.”

http://sanquentinnews.com/optionb-org-support-group-overcoming-effects-incarceration/

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