Did I just miss it, or did they forget it would be a very good starting place to ban restraints unless the kid is *actively* an imminent danger of serious physical harm to himself of moderate or greater physical harm to someone else, to limit the kinds of restraints that are legal, to make it illegal to strike a kid, to put up webcams all over the place feeding their video data to an offsite, privately contracted storage site with no connection to the jail or the people working there, to make employees criminally liable for striking kids, for using illegal restraints, for restraining kids based on risk to property, or for restraining kids who are not being violent to themselves or others for mere non-compliance. To make it a mandatory termination offense for employees to bait a kid in a way that escalates the situation until the kid becomes violent. To train all employees in conflict de-escalation, in the risk to life inherent in all restraints, in when restraints are not legal, in how to do the legal restraints properly, and when restraints are legal and when they're not.
To have the nursing staff be supplied in cooperation with a local hospital, with the licensed nurses being *frequently* rotated out so that they identify their fellow nurses and doctors in the hospital as "coworkers" and the staff at the prison as prison guards who work for a different organization and *are not* their coworkers.
The prison should contract with the hospital or with a nursing temporary service, the nursing professional organization should encourage nurses and hospitals to do the contract and take the duty as a public service inherent in the profession---to protect the health of the inmates.
A good way of doing it would be to have two nurses on for six months, one T-Th-Sat, the other M-W-F-Sun. Then rotate in another two. Or something interspersed with normal nursing shifts so that only half of their shifts in their six month period are at the prison.
The nurses should never think of the prison staff as "us" or their employer. Always "them" and the state itself as the contracting entity, with the hospital as the nurses' employer and signing their checks, supervising them, and doing their performance reviews, in a neutral to adversarial relationship with the guards for the protection of patient health.
1) Webcams with feeds out to offsite computer contractors and long-term (at least for the whole statute of limitations) data archival, with software detection of camera "malfunctions" leading to immediate repair and investigation.
2) Strict laws to protect the inmates from guard violence, with criminal and civil liability as well as job risk, and thorough training so they know what they're supposed to do and what they're not.
3) Arm's length, detached relationships between the medical people working in the prison and the actual prison staff.
4) Comprehensive education services that emphasize literacy to a high school level, at least, first. Then they should add in the inmate's choice of college prep or vocational training.
Instead they're putting a flashy bandaid of Same Old Shit on top of the problem.
Why am I not surprised.
Actually fixing the problems would cost money in the short term and smack of being soft on "those rotten kids."
Julie
