Latest / Early Edition with Ryan Bridge / Floyd du Plessis: Corrections Association President on prison violence surges putting pressure on corrections staff

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Floyd du Plessis: Corrections Association President on prison violence surges putting pressure on corrections staff · Early Edition with Ryan Bridge

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Now look this morning, what's going inside our prisons? Figures
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: released to news talks there B show the number of
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: approved requests for segregation hit more than twelve thousand in
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: the twenty three to twenty four financial year. That's up
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: sixty six percent from five years ago. Add to that,
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: the number of corrections directed segregations has doubled in the
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: same timeframe. Corrections Association president Floyd Duplessi is with me
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: this morning.
• 0:22
  Speaker 2: Floyd, Good morning, Good morning, Ryan.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: What sort of violence are your guys seeing?
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: The violence staff are seen within the prisons nets has
• 0:32
  Speaker 2: extremely risen, So there's a lot more serious offending and
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: it's just outright attacks on staff.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: So punches to the face, I mean just literally just violence.
• 0:46
  Speaker 2: Yes, the type of violence varies quite drastically, but these assaults,
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: assaults by multiple prisoners on one staff member, assaults using
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: weapons that they've improve that they've made, so it does
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: vary quite substantially. But the important thing is that a
• 1:05
  Speaker 2: the severity and the mere number of these instance across
• 1:10
  Speaker 2: the year has drastically risen.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: And so when somebody when you've got a sixty six
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: percent increase in four years on people asking for segregation,
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  Speaker 1: what does that do for staffing levels? Like, if you
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: have lots of people wanting to be in segregated areas,
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: does that increase the number of people that you need.
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: It? Does it correlate into actually having more staff? Unfortunately, no,
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: it doesn't. So the segregation numbers is making it very
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: hard to run the prisons. We've got a lot more
• 1:40
  Speaker 2: prisoners that are segregated and therefore have to be kept
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: separate from everyone else, and so that definitely does increase
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: the workload on staff.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: You've got apparently two officers and a high security wing
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: of thirty inmates. What should that number be.
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: That's a piece of work that we're saying to the
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: government and needs some serious research. We've looked at the
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: likes of you know, everyone mentions the Scander Navy and
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: model in prisons. We've spoken to the Norwegian prison officers
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  Speaker 2: and spoken about how they operate. They run a model
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: that has one staff member to every two prisoners. Now
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: that on the extreme end, but what they've clearly shared
• 2:20
  Speaker 2: with us is having far more staff gives you the
• 2:22
  Speaker 2: ability to do a lot more one on one intervention,
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  Speaker 2: a lot more work and support, and so having something
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: closer to that end drastically increases the reduction in violence,
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  Speaker 2: and more importantly, on the other end, it helps change
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: these people in a much better way. And so we're
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: saying two staff to thirty high security prisoners is just
• 2:43
  Speaker 2: not good enough. We need more staff on the ground
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: to prevent these incidents and to help with better rehabilitation outcomes.
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: If they're one staff to every two inmates and we're
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: two for every thirty, we had a long way to go,
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  Speaker 1: haven't we Absolutely?
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  Speaker 2: And that's the reality. Are we going to get there today? No,
• 3:00
  Speaker 2: start moving in that direction to start increasing safety.
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: Floyd Dipolesses, the Corrections Association Museum president.
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: For more from early edition with Ryan Bridge.
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: Listen live to news Talks. It'd be from five am weekdays,
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.