Correctional Professionals: Misconduct and Responses

Correctional Professionals: Misconduct and Responses

CHAPTER 13 CONTENTS

Misconduct and Corruption

Explanations for Misconduct

Responses to Corruption

Conclusion

Chapter Review

Study Questions

Writing/Discussion Exercises

Key Terms

Ethical Dilemmas

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

  1. Explain the Zimbardo experiment and what it might imply for correctional professionals.
  2. Describe types of misconduct by correctional officers, including the typology of misconduct by Souryal and McCarthy.
  3. Describe types of misconduct by community corrections professionals.
  4. Provide explanations for misconduct.
  5. Present some suggestions to decrease misconduct by correctional professionals.

CHAPTER SUMMARY

This chapter examines various forms of misconduct by correctional professionals. Suggestions to reduce misconduct include ethics training and improving management. Restorative justice principles may help to improve the sense of mission and commitment to ethical behavior by correctional workers.

CHAPTER OUTLINE

LO 1: Explain the Zimbardo experiment and what it might imply for correctional professionals.

  • Dr. Phillip Zimbardo conducted an infamous experiment on the grounds of Stanford University designed to explore the effects of power.
  • College men were arbitrarily assigned to be correctional officers or inmates, and a mock prison was set up in the basement of a building on the grounds of Stanford University.
  • The changes in both groups were so profound that the experiment was cancelled after six weeks. Officers became brutal and authoritarian, and prisoners became manipulative and exhibited signs of emotional distress and mental breakdown.
  • The conclusion was that the environment itself caused people to act in ways that they would not otherwise.
  • The pattern of a small group of officers who use violence as retaliation and to control inmates is repeated in several other prison and jail scandals across the country over the last several decades and the culture of prison tends to protect and support illegal violence and juries are not inclined to find guilt.
  1. Misconduct and Corruption

LO 2: Describe types of misconduct by correctional officers, including the typology of misconduct by Souryal and McCarthy.

  • McCarthy and Souryal discuss the major types of corruption by correctional officers and other officials in institutional corrections.
  • Under misuse of authority, McCarthy details the following:
    • Accepting gratuities for special consideration during legitimate activities
    • Accepting gratuities for protection of illicit activities
    • Mistreatment/harassment or extortion of inmates
    • Mismanagement (e.g., prison industries)
    • Miscellaneous abuses
  • Souryal (2009)describes the types of corruption as falling into the following categories:
    • Misfeasance—illegitimate acts done for personal gain
    • Malfeasance—acts that violate authority
    • Nonfeasance—acts of omission such as ignoring rule violations
  • Bomse identifies different types of prisoner abuse as follows:
    • Malicious or purposeful abuse
    • Negligent abuse
    • Systemic or budgetary abuse
  • If there is sexual misconduct, there is also smuggling. If there is physical abuse of inmates, there are also other forms of mistreatment.
  • Sexual abuse of inmates, brutality, bribery at the highest levels, and drug smuggling all are reported with depressing regularity.
  1. California
    1. California’s Department of Corrections has been, in the past, described as corrupt “from the top down” because investigations of wrongdoing seemed to be thwarted by powerful union leaders.
  1. Florida
    1. Florida’s prison system is the third largest in the country, after California and Texas, with one of the highest rates of imprisonment.
    1. An entrenched culture and code of silence is very difficult to change, but it is even harder to gain success when there is a lack of commitment from state legislature to fund at a level that provides programming and safety for both inmates and officers.
  1. New York
    1. The New York Department of Corrections and Community Services (DOCCS) has had a series of scandals in recent years, not the least of which was the escape from Clinton prison in 2015 by two prisons, aided by staff members and the negligence of others.
    1. The difficulty in removing problematic officers is exemplified by one officer in a woman’s prison who was investigated by the internal affairs unit four times between 2008 and 2012 on suspicion of sexual assault yet remained in his job.
    1. Only a strong oversight and discipline department has any chance of changing a culture where abuse of inmates is accepted.
  1. Treatment Professionals
  2. Most news items and academic articles describe misconduct in prisons by correctional officers, but there are instances where counselors and other treatment professionals also engage in misconduct.
  3. Probably the most common issue for treatment and medical personnel is not providing the services that inmates are legally entitled to.
  4. Medical personnel sometimes adopt the “penal harm” philosophy of corrections and deprive inmates of services because of a belief that they don’t deserve treatment.
  1. Community Corrections
  2. While most news items describe misconduct in prisons, there are also examples of ethical misconduct and criminal acts by community corrections professionals.
  3. In response to scandals, there has been a proposal to fund body cameras for probation officers to protect them from allegations that they plant evidence or steal items from probationers’ homes.
  4. The unfortunate reality is that a few people can taint the entire agency or program and, even though community correctional alternatives are sorely needed, programs will be eliminated if perceived as allowing violence, drug use, or other forms of misconduct to occur.
Media Tool-(Individual Non-Graded Critical Thinking Exercise/Activity)(Not Submitted) What was the corrections officer accused of? What will happen to her? How did this misconduct come to light? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0B6hE0fsJ4
  1. Explanations for Misconduct

LO 3: Describe types of misconduct by community corrections professionals.

LO 4: Provide explanations for misconduct.

  1. Individual Explanations
  2. Correctional managers attribute misconduct to low pay and poor screening during hiring.
  3. Another individual explanation of misconduct is posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
  4. Many slide into corruption because of a lack of organizational support for ethical behavior.
  5. The personal lives of correctional officers influence their professional ethics.
  6. The discretion and authority inherent in the role of correctional, probation, or parole officer takes maturity to handle as well as a strong internal ethical code.
  • Organizational Explanations
  • When the abuse in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison was exposed, many made comparisons between the behaviors of military prison correctional officers and those of correctional officers in U.S. prisons.
  • Allegations of misconduct in prisons and jails in the United States that were like what took place in Abu Ghraib include
    • male inmates being forced to wear pink underwear as punishment,
    • inmates being stripped as punishment,
    • inmates being made to wear black hoods, and
    • using dogs to attack inmates.
  • The Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons was created after the scandal at Abu Ghraib.
  • The commission’s major finding was that a culture of violence needed to be replaced with a culture of mutual respect.
  • The informal culture of a prison is created by administrators and staff. If administrators turn a blind eye to misconduct and excessive force, then COs will feel free to engage in such activity.
  • Unions have been seen by researchers as a force resistant to rehabilitation, concerned only with individual benefits for members rather than the mission or goal of corrections.
  • In their study, Stohr and colleagues found few significant correlates between values or attitudes and behavior.
  • Mesloh and colleagues found that the existence of a deviant subculture among correctional officers affect misconduct.
  • In cases of abuse in prison, the reasons seem to be a failure of leadership and lack of discipline, training, and supervision.
  • Procedural justice includes the idea that the perception of legitimacy (of legal authorities) comes about when the elements of procedural justice are present and treatment is fair; specifically
    • participation (letting people speak),
    • neutrality (governing by rules neutrally and consistently),
    • dignity and respect, and
    • illustrate trustworthiness (authorities are sincerely concerned with well-being).
  • The “trickle down” theory of ethical management is that officers will treat inmates the way they perceive they are being treated by management—with fairness, compassion, and respect, or with less than fairness, respect, and compassion.
  • Societal Explanations
  • The community helps to create the correctional environment by their tacit or direct endorsement of the informal subcultural norm that inmates deserve less due process and legal protection than the rest of us.
  • When criminal correctional officers are not prosecuted and simply fired, this provides a message that there are few costs involved in such misconduct.
  • If society wants an ethical correctional system, then we must demand it and expect that even murderers will be treated according to the law.
  • There is no ethical or legal justification for punishment that is not the product of formal due process and restrained by legal guidelines, regardless of what the inmate has done. No ethical system supports such conduct; even under utilitarianism, the cost to justice and due process is just too high.

What If Scenario-(Individual Non-Graded Critical Thinking Exercise/Activity)(Not Submitted)

What if you were asked to participate in the Zimbardo experiment? Would the role you were asked to play affect your ethical outlook?

What If Scenario-(Individual Non-Graded Critical Thinking Exercise/Activity)(Not Submitted)

What if someone said he or shedidn’t think organizational explanations really mattered, that it was all about the individual and the choices he or shemakes? How would yourespond?