| DOCS
buying more, better personal alarms Prison work just got safer By Mel Hyman It’s been three years since the brutal attack on a female nurse at the Washington Correctional Facility, and the long effort to get personal-security devices for employees at all state maximum and medium security prisons has succeeded. The devices are used to summon help in emergencies. “Last year, we finally got personal-security devices for prison-support staff at the remaining medium-security facilities that were lacking them,” said PEF Region 4 Coordinator David Stallone, who chairs PEF’s labor-management team at the state Department of Correctional Services. “For years, PEF had to work to convince the state Legislature to add money to the annual budgets for DOCS to gradually phase in these devices throughout the prison system,” Stallone said. “But this year, DOCS didn’t wait for the Legislature to act. It included approximately $300,000 in its budget request,” he said. “This money will fund the first phase of a new multi-year program of maintenance and upgrading the older devices to a new system that can better pinpoint your location in an emergency, so help can get to you faster,” Stallone added. That could be a vital difference for staff whose jobs require them to frequently move around within a facility. “If you happen to be in cell block B, when you activate your alarm, then the alarm light on the facility security monitor will indicate that,” said Stallone, a DOCS education supervisor. The effort to better protect correctional employees has been in progress since the mid-’80s. That’s when pressure from the public-employee unions prompted the state Legislature to allocate funds to put security devices in the hands of workers in all 16 maximum-security prisons and some medium-security facilities. Then, the funding dried up after two years and was not reinstated until 1995 and 1996 when additional rounds of funding (about $320,000 each year) were approved. That allowed most workers in the state’s 38 medium-security prisons to have the devices, too. The best news of all, however, came this year when, for the first time, DOCS included money in its own budget to begin upgrading the personal-security-alarm system. Stallone hopes that this year’s appropriation for the upgrade of the devices is affirmation of the department’s long-term commitment to safeguard its staff, because more money will be needed in the future to keep up with prison expansion and the replacement of worn-out equipment. “We’ve worked hard on this and the department has come a long way on this issue. It makes things a lot safer for all of us who are working in the system,” Stallone said. |