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Dispute Over Incident Video

February 17th, 2009
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sheriff-david-harder1Broome County NY Jail officials have quietly adjusted the way they handle disputes between inmates, now that a former inmate has sued Sheriff David Harder and three jail employees who he says failed to help him during a fight with another inmate. Report from the Binghampton Press & Sun-Bulletin.

However, Harder says he doesn’t believe Broome needs to change its rules about saving video records of jail incidents. He said the cost of extra storage equipment could be prohibitive and still might not have helped resolve the incident that spurred former inmate Richard E. Sipe Jr., 28, to sue for $250,000. “We have machines set up to record the stuff that goes on in there,” Harder said. “But the lawsuit didn’t happen until several months later. The officers looked at the tape (soon after the incident), and said, ‘It’s only a bloody nose.’ How long are you going to have me save this stuff?” …

County officials said last week that a video of the incident was not retained. They later amended that to say a copy might have been made, but no one has been able to find it. State law does not require counties to retain jail videotapes, though it does require paper records to be kept for specified periods … Broome’s jail video system currently over-writes its recordings after about 30 days, unless a staffer elects to save a copy of an incident, officials have said …

Deputy County Attorney Aaron Marcus said Broome likely will release some or all of the records soon [in relation to media FOI requests]. He has said that jail employees should have retained a copy of the tape when they learned that Sipe claimed to have been assaulted, and asked for medical attention. Sipe says in court papers that he tried within three days of the incident to file charges against Mable.The county acknowledges that Sipe received attention from jail medical staff on multiple days after the incident. But it has not been able to say if he was seen because of the Mable incident.

jakking Inmate Grievances, Inmate Lawsuits, NY Broome County, New York, Video Use

Delays In Response To Inmate Grievances Cause Of Disturbance

February 16th, 2009
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canada_kingston-penThirty-five years after his office was set up in answer to a deadly riot at Kingston Penitentiary, the correctional investigator of the Canadian Correctional system says history is dangerously repeating itself.

Corrections officials now give themselves 60 working days – up from 15 – to deal with the most serious inmate grievances, complaints that sometimes lead to explosive uprisings, Howard Sapers said yesterday in his annual report to Parliament. Such grievances include harassment and discrimination along with claims of unfair segregation and various rights violations.  Mr. Sapers has a ready answer for those who roll their eyes at the dissatisfaction of sometimes brutal convicts.  “It would be easy to dismiss this,” he said in an interview. “But internal grievance resolution … is a core, central component of effective, safe correctional practice.”

Two inmates died and much of the fortress-like prison was trashed during a four-day riot that erupted at Ontario’s Kingston Pen on April 14, 1971.  A public inquiry found that the prison system’s failure to deal fairly with inmate grievances was a major factor, Mr. Sapers said …He chides the Correctional Service of Canada for repeatedly extending the timeline for meeting its legal duty to resolve inmate complaints – especially those that have been deemed serious enough to clear two of three assessment levels. “The explanation given by the service is that … they can only resolve 15 to 20 per cent of these very significant grievances within the previous [15 working days] time frame.  So instead of working to comply with their policy and legal requirement, they simply made the time frame elastic so that it fit their current level of effort.”

The full article at the Globe & Mail has more detail.

jakking Canada, Inmate Grievances