Yep. Like I said, it’s what they teach us, but I haven’t actually seen it in practice. The two wards I did Clinicals in were pretty much like what you relate (except that they didn’t even do vitals; if you had a medical condition that required vitals to be taken daily, you were moved to a medical floor.)
Most of the prisoners I have dealt with in the past wanted to work. The really good jobs are valuable. If you work in the kitchen you have to wake up early, but you can get yourself extra food or dessert. Working what they called security was a way to make the most money, like 50 cents an hour. The guys I worked with were contracted to the State Dept. of Natural Resources, they made like 35 cents an hour and loved it. They got out into the fresh air every day, makes the time go faster. They got sack lunches and an occasional restaurant meal.
If you really put your mind to working hard for eight hours a day while in prison, that’s eight hours you don’t feel like you’re a prisoner.
Being able to buy at the commissary is a huge deal, a guy with something as silly as a cup-o-noodle is in control of his life. He can skip dinner if he doesn’t like it, or
The people in jail awaiting trial are not in prison yet, so they are presumably operating under a different set of rules.
There was a post above mentioning the difference between jails and prisons.
R.I.P. sitchensis 25 March 2011, shanked while in mid-post to the SDMB.
Someone heard he was a sitch and there wasn’t a chance to clear up the confusion.
I meant that the attitudes of the prisoners was opposite. In one instance, it’s normal for prisoners to wake each other up. In the other, they are expected to let each other sleep.
Maybe they wanted his cup of noodles?
Eeeeevil shenanigans!
Not necessarily. Some of them are Chaotic Neutral.
Yes, but in the first post, the poster was talking about prisoners sleeping during the day. Your post seems to be talking about prisoners sleeping during the night.
Sorry. Missed this one before.
If he’s going to be late, he’s supposed to call and tell us. If it’s a minor thing like fifteen minutes, we’d just ignore it as long as it didn’t become a regular event. If he’s later than that, there’d be a hearing to determine if he was at fault. We would check on things and accept reasonable excuses like a bridge being closed due to an accident. If it was him just being late, we’d probably let him off with a warning the first time. But if he did it again, he’d most likely lose his outside work privileges. We are, after all, letting a convicted felon go out in public unsupervised - we expect him to show some personal responsibility.
I once had a guy come back two months late. We didn’t let him go back out on his own.
They’re probably allowed to sleep in in *this *prison.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1986002,00.html
The fewer employees needed when inmates are sleeping explanation fits with what I know from another institutional setting: daycare.
I used to work at a preschool/daycare where parents would complain, “Why does my child need to rest on a cot for an hour every day? Giving her books and quiet toys is not enough. She hasn’t napped at home for a year, so she should be allowed to play quietly while others rest.” The answer was “Ideally we’d love to tailor the schedule to the needs of your child. But it’s state law that one adult can only watch 24 kids when they are all lying down resting. The law also provides that each of us two teachers should get a half hour lunch break which we take turns doing while the kids are resting. The daycare would need to hire another person for an hour a day to do what you want.”
(I did hate doing that to the kids though, and now I work at a school where I don’t leave the classroom for lunch because I can eat, surf the internet, and glare at noisy children all at the same time, and let them up after about 23 minutes.)
I apologize ahead of time for resurrecting an old thread.
I have a couple of questions of which I cannot seem to find answers.
How often do correctional officers make rounds in a medium security prison? (more specifically, if it’s mandated by law, Illinois)
Is it possible for an inmate to go without contact with a correctional officer, while in their cell, for 6 hours if it’s not during the normal hours designated for sleeping?
While it’s been one day shy of two weeks, an embattled but good friend of mine was found “unresponsive” in his cell in Pinckneyville Correctional Center. (Pinckneyville is a medium security facility but they have, due to overcrowding, elevated to a medium/high security facility)
The absolutely only thing the family has been told is that he was found unresponsive and the coroner pronounced death at 11:21p No cause of death has been revealed even after an autopsy. (He was 33-years-old)
He was a labeled a “non-violent” offender and was sharing a cell with a murderer.
Life-saving efforts were not deployed as he was clearly displaying signs incompatible with life.
I’ve pieced together, from a couple of sources willing to divulge small amounts of information, that he had been deceased for at least 6 hours, which would have put the strangulation at around 3:00-4:00p. (He was found by his cellmate tipping off the guard, at 9:44p.)
6 hours seems like a lengthy amount of time for inmates to go unchecked with at least one contact during the late afternoon, through supper, up until the final check at the “lights out” time.
Any insight would be very much appreciated as we’re attempting to get footing on exactly what happened and if the murder could have been detected sooner.
Thanks.
If “No cause of death has been revealed even after an autopsy” why do you think he was “strangled”? Strangling leaves marks that most certainly would be found on autopsy.
It is possible for people in their 30’s to die suddenly without foul play. Indeed, just last month one of my nephews was found deceased in his father’s home, no cause detectable at autopsy, and he was only 30. An undiagnosed heart arrhythmia could do it, and those don’t show up on autopsy.
I’m sorry your lost your friend, but I’m unclear why you think there was foul play.
Why do you think your friend was murdered?
Well his cellie was a known murderer…once you get the taste of blood, it’s hard to give that up.
I’ve overseen hundreds of inmate mortality reviews, including many where someone was unexpectedly found dead. Usually the autopsy will reveal a cause, like sudden internal hemorrhage or massive blood clot or large MI. Sometimes we find the patient riddled with previously undiagnosed metastatic cancer, which often precipitates a severe hemorrhage or clot.
When the autopsy shows little, I wait for the toxicology report to come back. This can take weeks to get. Often we find illicit drugs in the system, smuggled in or diverted from other inmate patients. We’ve traced certain drug ingestions by inmates having their source in being sent watercolor paintings from their kids. The paint had dissolved buprenorphine or fentanyl in it. The inmate appreciated the art, then ate it, then got a buzz, sometimes a fatal one.
But on infrequent occasions, the death is due to inmate on inmate violence. Usually though, evidence of such an occurrence is pretty obvious to officers, and even more so to the coroners.
I’m no security expert, but I do know that in a maximum security institution an inmate might be left strictly alone for up to 6 hours. Sometimes the official “count” (done 3 to 4 times a day where each inmate must stand and be accounted for) has 6 hour or longer intervals in between counts. If the inmate appears to be sleeping in his bunk in between counts the officer will not go check to see if he’s alive without a reason. I’m sure there’s similar windows of time in medium security institutions, where the monitoring isn’t as strict.
Sometimes no certain cause is found. Both in prison and in the real world, relatively young and healthy people sometimes turn up dead and the answer is not clear as to why.
I’m sorry for the loss of your friend.
Life isn’t a novel or TV show.
Generally killing someone leaves evidence, and it appears there was none at autopsy. And just because a guy is put in prison for murder doesn’t mean he’s hungering to do it again. I can understand the cellmate being viewed with suspicion, but if the authorities thought he’d killed his cellmate wouldn’t they be prosecuting him for another murder?
The recent poster who resurrected this zombie seems to think there was some sort of neglect, foul play, wrong-doing, or other bad thing occurring.
All our prisoners are observed a number of times per night, which means they will sometimes block up their observation panels, and that’s a disciplinary issue.
If they are ‘at risk’ prisoners then an assessment will be made to decide how often they need to be observed and what protocols will be involved, and this works its way right up to constant observation.
Unless this person has specific risk issues then there is no reason to increase the frequency of observations, however it seems really unusual that a two prisoner cell has an unobserved death for 6 hours, especially since it seems this would have been even longer if the alarm had not been raised.
The time of death seems pretty odd to me, since prisoners would likely still at work, and would have to return from work. There would have been a post work roll check. I would have imagined that in a 2 person cell that the other prisoner would have been awake and watching tv, and depending upon the prison regime lock-up would have been later than this - there are usually a number of after work activities that go on until around 19:00 and it means an eyes on head check must be done some time after that time.
In short, I am a bit surprised that the incident was not noted much sooner - which is not to say it should not have happened - answers about cause would come from the autopsy.
I actually have two contacts within the system and have been privy to the information. When the sister delivered clothes to the funeral home, the director said, “I think we may have to bury him in a turtleneck” and then avoided the issue further after seeing the sister’s reaction. (She had no clue) It was also disclosed by the funeral director, there were ligature marks.
In the information I received, the cellmate confessed. In the report, there was no mention of that.
The cellmate has since been transferred to a maximum security facility.