Inmate attack reveals dangerous conditions

In a violent middle-of-the-night attack over the weekend at East Moline Correctional Center, an inmate repeatedly struck a correctional officer in the head with a rock. The officer was working alone on the unit and struggled to call for help on a faulty radio. When the attack was finally quelled, the officer was rushed to a hospital for six staples to close her head wound, but serious questions remain about the increasingly dangerous conditions for employees of the state prison.

“Men and women who work in state prisons do a dangerous job to keep the people of Illinois safe,” AFSCME Council 31 executive director Roberta Lynch said. “We owe them a debt of gratitude, but more than that, we owe them the staff, resources, tools and training they need to stay as safe as possible.” 

• Lack of staff, inability to respond. When the attack happened shortly before 2 a.m., the correctional officer was the only staff member on a unit of 110 inmates. Although the facility's population has spiked by 30% in recent years—to more than 1,300 inmates—staffing remains approximately the same (now just 187 officers to cover three shifts, seven days a week). As a result the third (overnight) shift commonly has a skeleton staff, with just one officer per housing unit of up to 136 inmates. That lack of staff has dire consequences in the event of an attack like this one, where the lone officer had no backup when the inmate struck. Other officers were likewise alone in their own dorms—and ultimately had to lock and leave them unattended in order to save their fellow officer.

• Unreliable radios. As the rock-wielding inmate rained blows on her, the officer frantically pressed her radio’s “man down” button—but the call wasn’t heard. Screaming, she managed to engage the radio’s microphone as she tried to defend herself, and fortunately the garbled traffic that resulted caught the attention of a lieutenant who went to search for the source of the call. He found the officer bleeding profusely and called for all staff to respond. The failure of the radio in this incident underscores recent staff concerns about unreliable radios at East Moline and other Illinois prison facilities. East Moline employees have repeatedly raised the matter in labor-management meetings but management has taken no action to address it.

• Increasingly dangerous inmates. EMCC is a minimum-security facility in which inmates live in dormitory settings, up to eight men in a room with doors that do not lock. Given these conditions, IDOC policy has maintained that inmates could be transferred to EMCC only with eight years or fewer remaining on their sentences, and not  if they had been convicted of rape or murder or if they were deemed to pose a risk of escape. But as of mid-July, the Department of Corrections is now permitting murderers, sex offenders, escape risks and other inmates with up to 10 years remaining to be sent to EMCC. Making matters worse, a significant and growing number of inmates at EMCC have mental illnesses that require treatment—even though EMCC has no special unit dedicated to this population. Like other Illinois prisons, EMCC is under a court order to improve the training provided to all staff in dealing with inmates with mental illnesses and must hire more specialized staff such as psychiatrists and counselors to deal safely with these inmates and the unpredictable challenges they present.

“I started six years ago,” said Cody Dornes, a correctional officer who is president of AFSCME Local 46 at EMCC. “Since then, it seems like everything has changed about the inmates at East Moline—there’s more of them, and they’re more dangerous—but nothing has changed to make us safer. We need more staff, better training, and functional equipment to help prevent the next attack and to respond more quickly if and when it comes.”