How do we prevent mistakes of the heart? Mistakes of the heart are not intentional. I like to think they happen to officers that are good hearted and mean well in their actions. Most often they go the extra mile to do good deeds and that can result in mistakes or errors of judgment. Unfortunately, good deeds are not well thought out and give prisoners an opportunity to take advantage of the officer’s good-hearted actions. There are so many items that can be used as weapons by creative prisoners; therefore it doesn’t take much for these mistakes to introduce weapons into the facility.
As a supervisor I believe we need a range of officer’s personalities; however, I feel the easy going and laidback officer are the ones that we end up having the most concerns with when contraband is involved. When it comes to contraband, the hardcore officer will be less likely to introduce contraband due to lack of attention to detail. They may, however, cause hate and discontent everywhere they go that causes co-workers to put out fires behind them.
Let’s now focus on the easy going officer that makes mistakes of the heart. Prevention can be difficult in any arena but is more difficult when it comes to an employee’s kindness.
Dig deep in the interview
Have you ever sat on an interview board? If so, you know that most often they include questions like why are you the best candidate for this position? What are your hobbies? And other questions that anybody with a fifth grade education could answer and pass with muster. I am guilty of that too and those are questions we should use as part of the process.
However, we should also be asking questions that make them dig deep and think. Lay out a scenario and ask them what they would do. Make sure you leave room for discretion and judgment in these answers. Keep in mind these question may have no right or wrong answer. Their answers will simply give you a look into their state of mind and how they think with no time to prepare an answer.
After the interview, a proper background investigation needs to be documented. I touched on this in previous column. Administrators need to make sure they know as much as possible about the potential future employee. Last time I was focusing on weeding out officers that are more likely to mistakes of the head before we hired them.
What can a back ground investigation turn up that may weed out the excessively nice applicant? Corrections employees are in the customer service business, but not in the sense of “would you like fries with that”, “have great day”, please come again”. Therefore we need to look for clues that will tell us they have a mind set for working in the trenches of a correctional facility.
Focused training
After our boss decides to hire this future nightmare of an employee that does not know how to tell a prisoner no, we need to train that person and it becomes our responsibility to set them on the straight and narrow from day one. One of the hardest people to train is the employee that has been working in the field and they make it clear to the trainer that they already know everything. It’s equally difficult to train a brand new corrections officer that has no clue what the job entails, that does not seem to catch on and/or has the “would you like fries with that” attitude. It is important to have the training officer reinforce from day one to the new corrections officer how important it is to maintain a proper standards in all aspects of corrections.
Employers also need to not be afraid to admit that made a mistake and hired a person that is not cut out to work in the corrections field. It is far better to tell the probationary employee they are not working out than to explain to another officer’s family that their loved one was critically injured because the prisoner had access to contraband caused because a corrections officer does not know how to say no.
Do you know how to say ‘no’?
I will pose this question. Is it possible to truly prevent contraband from being in our facilities? My answer is ‘no.’ Prevention loosely defined is the act of stopping something bad from happening.
We can certainly take preventative measures in hopes to reduce contraband from entering our facilities. I’ve always been of the mindset that goal should be realistically obtainable. Therefore our goal should be to drastically reduce the amount of contraband that enters our facilities.
To achieve this goal we need everyone’s help. This includes grunts in the trenches doing their best to help prevent contraband from making it into our facilities and being vigilant in searching for it. It also includes first line supervisors holding the slackers to task and leading by example. It’s also important that our decision makers also have the backs of those in the trenches.
This could include simply supporting the decisions made regarding sanctions imposed on prisoners that violate rules and more on point in this article, getting rid of the excess baggage we carry with corrections officers that have no business working behind the walls with the rest of the top notch hard working officers.
The moral of the story is that not everyone should be working in the corrections field and but we can all help identify those that do from those that don’t if we all work together to make our field more professional.