Heading: Type 3 Violence - Staff - prisoner
Type 3 Violence - Staff - prisoner
Excessive use of force is unlawful, both in a situation where some force might be legitimate, and also where there is no legitimate reason for any force to be used by staff against detainees. Such use of force may result from frustration, a desire for revenge for some real or imaginary slight, fear or just general aggression. The proper recruitment, training and support of detention staff are crucial in ensuring such violence is not normal in an establishment, as is prompt action against the perpetrators if it does occur.
It may well be in the nature of such violence that the report rate by prisoner/victims is low, and the reasons for this are not always suspicious. In the living dynamic community which is the prison, staff and prisoners have to work out a modus vivendi. In the good establishment, both staff and prisoners know they rely on each other for safety and good order. They thus have an understanding of how far each can go in their conduct towards the other and generally act within those limits. Staff should, of course, have the ultimate say, but it would be wrong to characterise any establishment as being totally run by staff. There is a formal code of rules to enable order to be maintained, but there is also an informal code and the sanctions for breach of the informal code may well include the acceptance of some violence. Only if the violence is grossly excessive, and sometimes not even then, will prisoners make an official complaint of it. This makes such occurrences difficult for the official system, including the medical staff, to deal with. There may be a temptation simply to provide the required medical treatment and not interfere with the dynamic of the relationship. There may also be a threshold, in the level of violence involved or in the frequency of such violence, that the medical staff simply cannot allow to be crossed.
However, there are also less benign reasons why prisoners may not report such violence or try to conceal the causes of injuries they have received. The most obvious situation is where the prisoner remains afraid of the staff who have caused the damage and does not wish to be seen to be causing any further trouble. This might lead the prisoner to avoid seeking medical intervention altogether, or to present with a false account of an incident if such treatment is sought or offered. The difficulty faced by the detainee is obviously aggravated when detainees have to make application through staff to see a doctor, and may be impossible when non-medical staff filter applications to see the doctor. You must ensure, therefore, that you have a robust system for ensuring that all prisoners wishing to obtain medical treatment can access it without revealing any medical matters to non-medical staff. But what do you then do about the situation?