Last Thursday, September 27, 2007, I had a chance to read the article "Who or what is, to blame for prison escape?" at kvou.com by Dave Fehling, reporter of 11 news. Throughout the article, Fehling really concerned about prison escape problem, especially in Texas. Moreover, he also emphasized that our government should maximize the prison security as well as reduce its cost. According to the article, Fehling introduced the two most shocking truths about Texas prison: the male guards were overpowered by the inmates, and many prisoners walk away from low security facilities. As the result, this leads to the death of Susan Canfield, one of the female guard. The escapees knocked her out of the horse while they fled in a stolen truck. This is a climax, a cry for help from our Government to find a better solution to stop the crime before it gets much more serious.
Besides, Fehling also stated that prison policy allows prisoners to work in a vegetable field outside the prison even though both inmates were violent offenders. He also offered a really interesting questioning the article “But are the guards and the policies they’re supposed to be following really to blame, or is there something bigger and deeper at fault in a state that imprisons as many people as Texas does?" About the low security facilities, Texas has very few, on average one of the lowest rates in the nation, hundreds of prisoners escape every years.
According to Mitchell Roth, teacher at Sam Houston State University, accepted that sometimes guards do deserve criticism, like after Gulule fooled them by putting a dummy in his cell bed. “If you saw the dummy it didn’t look like anything from this earth, and yet they passed on it and didn’t report somebody missing,” Roth said.
Another problem needs to be solved is the amount of prison staffs, there are about 150,000 prisoners in Texas prisons but only 3,000 guards. Low payment is also one of the reason why Texas is shortage of guards. Problem will become worst because this November, our government plan to build three more prisons which would cost a quarter billions dollars. On the other hand, we also need more guards and they need to be trained. Consequently, this project will cost lots of more money.
Instead of wasting that much money to build three other prisons, I think that government should invest that into training the guard staffs to solve this serious prison escape first, well-equipped our prisons and fix some prison policies such as not allowing dangerous inmates work outside of the security range.
http://www.khou.com/news/state/stories/khou070927_ac_escapes.1164381fe.html
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If the state of Texas paid a professional wage to its correctons officers the state would be able to hire more officers and could demand higher standards. I made more money in my first year as a security guard than I did in my first year as a corrections officer.
There is a mimimum security prison in Austin that would be extremly easy to escape from. Many of the inmates are violent.
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