Given that the prisoner was originally intent upon murder, it just shows how serious the security lapse was, it was only chance that the prisoner never felt that the opportunity to commit murder had arisen.
There should have been no way he should have been able to get out of sight of staff at any time.
Any and all staff and prisoners were at risk from the moment this person went awol.
This had absolutely nothing to do with the womans ability to work with prisoners, and this incident is not one in which her personal competance could reasonably have prevented.
I think the Governor of this state should be reminded of this.
I do think that the woman knowingly took a risk by working with the prisoners and was compensated for this risk by the higher pay. I think that this should keep her from being able to sue for something that she would reasonably expect to happen like:
A prisoner punches her in the face unexpectedly.
There is a riot and she is raped or beaten.
Or even if she were raped by a lone prisoner under different circumstances.
These are all things that could happen despite the best security measures. She takes a risk of these things by working there at the hazard pay rate. However, since the prison seems to be so lacking in this particular situation, I would think that she deserves some compensation. The guy took her in front of three guards. That shouldn’t have happened. He had her in her office for hours. That shouldn’t have been allowed. He only raped her after the foolish note sent in by the warden. That was stupid.
It seems that unless the links from the OP are leaving out something, the prison system really failed this woman.
The prisoner managed to get away from supervised custody, it may seem odd to you, but she was actually safer with the group of inmates in the room rather than just the one. Prisoners who attack and rape women don’t dare try it when in a crowd, they’d be killed by the other prisoners.
Working with prisoners can be stressful. and this is the real risk, the risk of personal violence should be limited to the totally unpredicatble, thus a punch in the face is such a quick event its not easily stopped and is deemed acceptable provided the extent of the attack can be limited.
The riot scenario is not an acceptable risk, managed correctly, riot is extremely unlikely in a prison, despite what you may see on the tv news.
These things do not happen when the best security measures are applied, not despite them at all, here the correct security measures were not applied.
I know the link i posted to the inquiry is a long read, but it details the failures well, and for those of us working in the industry, the failings are pretty bad, understanding, as we do, how things work in jail.
It appears that Ms. Minner knew the condition in advance and willingly accepted the ‘hazard’ pay. When push came to shove she wants to renigue and not accept the consequences of placing herself in the way of potential harm.
Poor woman.
Stupid way to run a prison.
Pity it took such a horrible thing to happen for them to start fixing fairly obvious flaws.
Reasonable precautions to protect her from harm were not taken. I hope she wins.
If a someone takes hazard pay and is injured because of an unforseen or unpreventable problem, fine. If they were injured because the safety procedures to protect them were not adequate or the procedures were not properly followed, that’s hardly the same.
Where is the impeus to make prisons safer for the staff and prisioners if the prevailing sentiment is “We pay them enough money, let’s not worry about their safety”.