I mean, they can’t just go around and open each cell door. But at the same time, they can’t let everyone out to run away, either. What’s the procedure?
There are different sorts of prisons. That other thread seemed to be talking about maximum security prisons with cells and chaining the inmates. The couple of prisons I’ve worked in have a few cells for misbehaving inmates awaiting transfer. The rest of the inmates are housed in dorm rooms. They’re not locked into the rooms although the are locked into the housing unit. But that involves opening one door for something like 75 inmates.
I’ve also worked in a non-housing facility in a jail complex. When we had fire drills, the inmates were neither chained nor watched by armed officers. Of course, the entire island is nothing but jails and other correctional buildings so there really isn’t anywhere to run too.
Basic rule is you evacuate the building. You can’t leave people inside a burning building after all.
Every prison is going to have evacuation plans and drills. We have designated areas where the prisoners will be evacuated to (usually a yard of a gym).
If a prison actually burned down, we’d have to send the prisoners to another prison. That’s a really rare situation. In twenty-seven years of working in one of the country’s largest prison systems, there were only two occasions where there was a major relocation like that.
Thanks. Of course I didn’t think you’d leave people in a burning building, I just wondered how it was done.
Was Attica one of them? Were you working there when the uprising happened? Ofso, could you please share a bit of your experiences?
I worked at Attica but not at the time of the riot.
In a real secure area, the system is designed so you can normally only have one cell door open at a time. But there’s an override switch you can unlock that let’s you open all the cell doors at once.
If you lose power, there’s a manual system that let’s you open individual cell doors with a wrench key. And finally there’s a gallery manual override that you can unlock and lift this big metal bar. If you do that it unlocks all the cell doors at once. Not only would that be an annoyance because you’d have all your prisoners running around but that system also requires you to manually reset each individual door before you can lock them again.
From my perspective:
First, we do a lot of drills on fires, natural disasters, riots, and escapes. The drills enforce the training that is done regularly, so in these events, everyone knows what to do.
In the event of a fire, there are a lot of sections to most prisons, so even though in one section (housing unit, workplace, rec area) most of the prison will be unaffected. If a large fire occurred in one section, the inmates in other sections would lock down (go to their cells in the housing units, or stay put in the other locations.) In the area the fire occurred, the inmates, if the fire occurred in a housing unit, may simply be told to go back to their cells. The cells provide adequate protection against fire for a good amount of time.
If the inmates had to be evacuated from a section of the prison, the inmates know where they are supposed to report to. The correctional staff would escort the inmates to the evacuation point and then conduct a head count and report that up to the prison leadership.
If the fire occurred in a maximum security section, the inmates are already locked-down. The inmates could be removed one at a time, as needed, but again, the fire would have to be huge to require moving many inmates out of the max custody unit, because the cells themselves provide protection from the fires.
SFC Schwartz
I’d guess that was most of it, right there.
Comayagua prison fire, Comayagua, Honduras, 14-15 Feb. 2012: 360 dead.
2010 Santiago prison fire, Santiago, Chile, 8 Dec. 2010: 81 dead. ETA: 14 others with life-threatening burns.
I’m sure there was another fairly recent major Latin American prison fire disaster, but maybe the Comayagua fire is the one I’m thinking of.
A gent at my parent’s church was one of the injured guards at Attica-as memory serves, he was one of the head injuries. I do remember that his survival was touch and go for quite a while.
The prisoners find a surprising abundance of ‘pork’ on the menu afterward.
I get your point, however, of the 10 fires listed, only one occurred in the United States, and that was in 1930, and was a result of:
> Most died of smoke inhalation when breakdown in command kept guards from unlocking cell doors.
In my post, I did not mean to suggest that the only option was to keep inmates in their cells, just that there are times when that is the safest option. As I also noted, there are evacuation routes that the inmates drill on in the case of a fire.
Just trying to clarify.
SFC Schwartz