A New Correctional Facility
Correctional facilities play an integral role in the criminal justice system. All manner of criminals are sent to these facilities in order to serve their jail sentences. Systems and practices have been put in place as a countermeasure to deter or control the social menace brought by crime. These systems and practice constitute the criminal justice order in which law enforcement officers abide by to control crime, enhance law and order, and institute various correctional efforts and facilities to make an offender a better person within a community. The criminal justice system depends on correctional facilities to detain a culprit for some given time, during probation, court proceedings, and adjudication in order to allow the police carry out their investigations.
This is a detailed report on the new correctional facility that is to be designed in order to support the criminal justice system. The report outlines various elements of a standard correctional facility in order to facilitate a smooth way of managing offenders during their court hearings. This correctional facility will accommodate various types of offenders including life-sentenced individuals, adult men and women offenders, juvenile offenders, and sex offenders.
Life Sentences Individuals:
Life sentenced individuals serve life sentences in the corrections facility. They are dangerous criminals who are monitored to ensure they do not escape. Their areas of confinement is controlled by an access control unit, and monitored by a video surveillance system, which helps in tracking inmate movement and other suspicious activities. This also ensures that they are present in their respective cells for the purpose of monitoring them. These basic security implementations will be configured at various points where an offender is likely to walk or be seen passing. This will include the stair cases, corridors, and other hidden places.
Adult Men and Women:
The security facility that will be in place in men and women adults will include closed circuit television cameras, access control, and sound systems. The CCTV will be configured to rotate at an angle of 360 degrees to capture all movements while the access control system will mainly be used by officers to allow or direct convicts and inmates to special places. On the other hand, sound systems will be configured to alert the management in cases of attempted escape and breakages, and alerting people in the event of an intrusion. Another security implementation will be the use of a contraband body scanner to detect drug peddling and other dangerous weapons, such as knives that can be used to harm or kill other inmates.
Juvenile Offenders
The security facility that will be implemented will include closed circuit camera, access control system, and sound alarm. The closed camera will monitor suspicious elements while the access control will be used to limit movement of people in different places, while the sound alarm will trigger alerts, especially in instances where there is an intrusion to a no go place, or an attempt to escape.
Sex offenders
The security facility that will be put in place will consist of an indoor camera, access control as well as fire and an alarm system. The indoor camera will monitor inmates that can sexually harm others, while the access control system will be used to control access to various units in order to deter the re-emergence of sexual vices. On the other hand, the fire alarm and alarm system will trigger an alert on suspicious escape attempts or assault on an offender.
Security Practices
Long term sentenced individuals will be given their rights irrespective of their status, while the administrative security policies will be employed to ensure that there is minimal interruption on other inmates, as well as uphold the dignity of the correctional facility. This will be enhanced to prevent the likelihood of such inmates back to the community, based on their criminogenic characteristics. This will result in establishing conducive environments based on a dynamic security perspective in order to ensure that fatal risks and circumstances are reduced to the minimum. The prisoners will also be allocated their respective wings in the correctional facility, especially being in a position that is not close to the perimeter walls to reduce chances of the convicts from escaping.
Apart from that, intelligence parameters will be employed for security reasons within the facility to ensure that the administration is aware of possible occurrences in the facility. This will mitigate such occurrences and encourage a prison friendly climate where inmates are nurtured rather than being tortured. This calls for proper usage of security tools, where closed circuit television would be deployed to monitor the convict’s behavior patterns in order to be able to implement proper security principles to govern both the dangerous and less dangerous inmates.
Adult men and women pose the greatest challenge in correctional facilities, especially when housed together. The facility will implement security practices and principles in order to sustain the convicts and provide a conducive environment where both can live together. The administration will ensure that there is no long stays together especially where there is a likelihood of men and women meeting. This will be to discourage improper behavior, especially where men inmates are likely to sexually abuse or have sex with women inmates. The administration will also ensure that violent male inmates are segregated from other male inmates due to the high likelihood of inmates having illicit behavior that may be inappropriate.
In other circumstances, the administration will ensure that violent inmates pass through body scanners when going for meals in order to check for dangerous weapons such as knives that may be used to cause bodily harm on other inmates. On the other hand, the administration will also ensure that juvenile offenders are given a chance to live in conducive environment. The administration will ensure that juvenile offenders live in a secure way, by only allowing them to socialize with other inmates, especially life-sentenced inmates during specific hours, to reduce instances of harm, while on the other side, the administration will deploy standard camera’s to monitor their movements, behaviors and characters to facilitate easier control in the correctional facility.
The administration will also implement security policies to ensure that sexual offenders are secure in the correctional facility. These offenders could be addicted to inappropriate sexual behaviors, which they may also practice on their fellow inmates. Adult sexual offenders will be segregated from both young and women offenders to prevent instances of sexual abuse.
The sections housing the sexual offenders will be fitted with sound alarm systems to trigger an alert in instances where there in sexual molestation towards other colleagues, and the offenders will be required to go through body scanners to detect any metal or weapon that can be used to intimidate inmates, in instances where inmates are sexually addictive.
The administration, however, believes that managing juvenile and sexual offenders will be easy compared to the others. Juvenile offenders are still young and thus will be easy to manage, especially when the administration lays down proper management programs. On the other side, sexual offenders would also be easy to manage since they can be counseled and trained in order to develop positive lifestyles and to break the addiction. The administration also believes that managing the females will be easy compared to males, especially when females may not have violent characteristics as compared to their male counterparts.
The facilities administration will also ensure that there are proper characteristics to enhance effective coordination and management between inmates and the administration. The administration will ensure that both juvenile and sex offenders are given room to express themselves in order to help the administration understand the underlying causes of the behavior, as well as their addictive nature. The correctional facility will be able to create a conducive environment where the offenders can freely communicate with the administration regarding the attributes and factors that lead to their behavior patterns.
These factors would help assist the administration to understand the criminogenic attributes that are the causing factors towards the given crime. This conducive environment would assist in voluntarily giving of information that would help in assessing their attributes, learning their behavior characteristics in order to help the administration in the proper management of these various types of offenders. A conducive environment would thus help the management to study properly the offenders in order to help them handle various degrees of circumstances within the facility.
The management will also encounter numerous challenges in managing sex and juvenile offenders, especially when these offenders are in the public limelight for doing wrong. These may be a challenge in that it may hamper the successful initiation into community programs to ascertain the genuineness of the offenders. On the other hand, the administration may not be in a position to handle sex offenders due to their perceived ill behavior, which may involve most communities being against the housing of such offenders within the neighborhood. These types of offenders should therefore be put into consideration by the administration of the facility, in that their housing units should be constructed separately, as well as be monitored to deter any misconduct that may lead to sexual abuse.
Given the nature and classification of offenders to be housed in this facility, the facility should occupy at least 100,000 square kilometers, of land, with single cell occupancy to house the classes of offenders in the facility. Due to this, the administration will implement standard practices in the facility such as safety, security, proper staff scheduling, emergency preparedness, and inmate grievance handling. In safety, the management will ensure that the staff and inmates are safe from dangerous hazards, as well as ensuring there is enough security, which will be manned by a properly constituted team.
The administration will also ensure that grievances as well as other cases are handled in an appropriate manner to as to give each and every one a fair judgment. This shall be incorporated in the daily management of the correctional facility to ensure that the facility is efficiently managed.
Daily Inmate movement
Morning
6:00 am – Inmates waking up
6:30 am – Inmates taking breakfast
7:00 am – Inmates are briefed concerning the days operations/headcount/roll call
8:00 am – Inmates travel to their respective work sites
8:30 – 10:30am – Short break, supervisor checks the various worksites
10:35 – 12:35pm – Work in various sites
1:00 pm – LUNCH BREAK
Afternoon
2:00 pm resume work in various work places
2:00 – 3:30pm work
3:30 – 4:00 pm – returning to the main correctional facility
Evening
4:00- 5:00pm – Shower
6:00 – 7:00pm supper
7:15 – 8:20pm – Inmates devotion/special programs
8:20pm – 9:20pm – meeting various colleagues
9:20pm – 9:50pm – Return to housing units/various cells
10:00pm – sleeping time/lights off
The corrections facility will be managed by various personnel’s in different capacities which will be tasked with managing various functions of the corrections facility. These roles will include a chief administrator, house matron, corrections officer, facilities and maintenance manager, safety and security personnel, cooks, wardens and public relations officers. The chief administrator will work on daily basis, together with the cooks, corrections officers, security and maintenance personnel. They will be trained to handle various inmate behavior characteristics, as well as emergency preparedness, evacuation and security programs.
The administration would also consider implementing offender programs at the facility to enhance positive behavior change. These programs being considered would include educational services, counseling and trauma services, conjugal visits as well as faith-based programs. The educational programs would impact fresh ideas into the minds of inmates. Counseling and trauma services would help other offenders to cope mentally with the environment, especially in juvenile offenders. Conjugal visits would prevent instances of sexual abuse in both adult men and women, where partners would have sexual intercourse with their partners, especially in instances where either of the partner is serving a term at the correctional facility.
The programs would help the management to handle difficult inmates and establish a bond in which inmates would be appreciated, hence making them easy to manage.
These programs will bring a difference when implemented in this correction facility. However, for their delivery to be effective and to bear fruits, they need a strategic plan that involves a private-public partnership model. This would involve private training firms and state agencies where consultants would be contracted to spearhead the programs at different levels.
On the other hand, the corrections administrative unit will need to implement self-learning programs that can enable the inmates to learn by themselves at specific times rather than depending on an individual. This cultivates a sense of responsibility, which most of the times would prevent the re-emergence of vices.
The corrections facility will house several offender classifications according to the plans. This will be to deter and prevent the occurrence of such crimes by the offenders in the future. They will be housed in different zones, with each being given proper housing requirements in order to facilitate the stay and well-being into being responsible citizens. On the other hand, the administration will implement offender programs in order to help rehabilitate the offenders by impacting skills into their lives while also taking into consideration of both married men and women inmates.
The prison project will be worth undertaking and will likely impact positively on the offenders lives in the future.
Aerial view of the corrections facility