Saturday night, Jayme Lee Biendl, a 34-year-old female correctional officer with eight years on the job, was killed by an inmate at the Washington state prison in Monroe. Her tragic death might have been prevented were it not for the ‘petty bureaucratic book keeping requirements’ of the Washington Department of Corrections.
Here is what Centurion wrote after I gave him a heads-up on her slaying:
I probably told you Howie....after I retired from California I went to work for a short time for Washington DOC. I didn't like it much. In fact....I quit after only six months. Those poor bastards have no gun coverage for the most part, no batons, no OC...no nuthin. They are so burdened with meaningless repetitive documentation, that they have little time to focus on personal safety awareness in the moment.
Shit...I was running my ass off all night in a first watch (10 pm to 6 am) job just trying to keep on top of all their petty bureaucratic book keeping requirements. One count every hour in a dorm consisting of four wings, outside exterior building checks required of dorm officers...mandatory documented searches in the middle of the damn night. Stupid shit.
So I am not surprised that a female was working alone with violent male felons in an isolated area. Their focus is all on the paperwork showing that they are doing the jobs. So much so that it's very difficult to actually do their jobs.
Centurion went on to add:
My Washington experience was short lived Howie. Their system was designed with input from inmates. This is one reason the officers have very little real power. There is a sergeant supervisor for every 5 or 6 officers, and they have a myriad of bureaucrats - counselors, program administrators, and social workers - running the units. Everybody is a friggin expert. One of my assignments was in our 100 cell ad seg building. It took two full time officers just to run the control booth...ten corridors with ten cells each. Four floor cops...total six cops. One sergeant for each and every shift. Two counselors, and one program administrator JUST FOR A FRIGGEN 100 man Ad Seg building.
There were eleven...and I counted them ELEVEN locked doors between an ad seg inmate and the outside world. Each and every one of these doors had to be opened by some guy viewing you through a camera. (This institution was big on cameras. All the "experts" figured they could run the place from behind their computer screen. Anyway, you would push a little button on a panel next to the door and some poor clown sitting at a console with a camera would identify you and electronically open the door for you to pass.
When we did our outer security checks we had a twenty item check off list. We were to initial each item we checked (ie..a valve...a valve cap...the lock on a fire door)...and note the actual time we checked and initialed each and every item.
Howie....I worked at night and sometimes we were doing these checks in two foot deep snow drifts in the middle of a storm.
Requiring that we initial besides each item and enter a precise time encouraged officers to fudge their entries. I mean...who in their right mind is going to take a paper worksheet out into a snow or a rain storm and write all these times down.
Nobody would, and nobody did. This taught people something that carried over into other activities and other forms of documentation. It taught people to forge paperwork....to give it a Wild Ass Guess and write it down on an official document. A document that could end up in court and testified to.
This adds to the mindset that... the documentation is more important than the activity being documented. That's a dangerous mindset in our profession Howie....and a whole generation of correctional officers in the state of Washington are being taught that.
I could go on and on all night....but you get the picture I think.
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