Letter to the editor: Keep prison corrections officers safe

Numbers can be made to look any way you want. That’s what the Department of Corrections did recently in testimony before the state House Judiciary Committee. DOC testified to lawmakers that the prison officer-to-inmate ratio is 5-to-1. This simply isn’t true, because it assumes that all officers work every day, 24 hours a day. Of course, they don’t. The real ratio is about 100 inmates to every officer. In many instances, officers are being left alone with 100 or more inmates at any given time. No officer should ever be left alone.

The DOC must stop skewing statistics and make our state prisons safer for our officers. They can start by hiring more officers to drastically reduce the 100-to-1 ratio. Regardless of how many officers we have, the real ratio certainly shows there just aren’t enough.

Lawmakers can help protect our grossly outnumbered officers by passing legislation to provide them with the ability to carry tasers. Officers do not carry firearms, and assaults by multiple inmates can happen in seconds. Officers deserve better options to protect themselves.

To make prisons safer for officers and all employees, inmates who commit assaults must be punished. As the system moves forward in its efforts to release more inmates, crimes against our officers and others are being ignored. Prisons must punish inmates according to regulations. They should also place dangerous inmates in restricted housing until behavior improves and restrict access to commissaries.

Robert Storm

Harrisburg

The writer is vice president of the Pennsylvania State Corrections Officers Association.