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| Non-Confrontational Mindset |
| By Tracy E. Barnhart |
| Published: 08/16/2010 |
Dedicated to Juvenile Correctional Officer William Hesson Everyone who knows me best knows that I am big on the warrior ethos and obtaining and keeping a survival mindset. But in writing this training article I was very apprehensive on what to call it. I wanted to call it, “The Survival Mindset” but in doing so it would have indicated that we are in a survival fight for our lives with extreme peril and most administrators would have disregarded it as not applicable. I thought about calling it “The Warrior Mindset” but that would have given us a wrong public misconception that we are bloodthirsty combative killers, not good for appearances. So I sat and thought about this article and came up with a great administratively PC correct title that seemed virtually calming and non-aggressive and above all, totally crap. Many correctional administrators will flinch and scream in their offices at the thought of their officers being anything confrontational while on duty. This would bring about a possible lawsuit and that seems financially unacceptable. I argue that aggression is an essential tool of our primary mission to obtain and keep stability and maintain institutional control. When I was a police officer, I was dispatched to calls and I never knew what or who I was going to be dealing with. I could have made contact with a very angry and frustrated mayor of the city that was driven to situational violence. Most of the time my general appearance and verbal skills were enough to establish a calming control in the situation. My presence brought about the thought that if you screwed up, someone is going to jail. That in itself was a strong deterrent and calming effect. Now that I have entered into the prison, that professional appearance effect is gone. Not that my uniform is not pressed or dirty but that it does not bring about the same meaning or authoritative results. “What are you going to do, lock me up? I am already locked up!” Everyone I deal with now has the certain ability, desire and determination to become violent and often has a direct desire to fight you without any provocation. Inmates know exactly what you can and cannot do as it relates to force and will attempt to intimidate you at all cost. So when administrators take the survival and warrior mindset into consideration they must also have the understanding that we work in a people zoo in which everyone is a predator. We walk among the predators wearing handcuffs and shackles ourselves and are expected to do a job without any thanks and recognition. It’s not sexy to be a correctional officer. It is a known fact that correctional officers, like anyone else, are creatures of habit. We tend to do things the same way daily without fail. This brings about situational consistency and stability with the inmates, and officers soon become aware that any change during their shift brings about aggression. The most noteworthy danger to the correctional officer in the institution today is the very routine and repetitive tasks that we must perform daily. These tasks include handcuffing, searching inmates; maintain a constant state of personal hyper-vigilance, and basic awareness frame of mind. A survival minded correctional officer understands the importance of proper mind-set and training and always takes it seriously. Your goal should be to develop an “unbeatable attitude” that can be maintained throughout your entire career. Yes, it is a fact that each year correctional officers are assaulted and killed by the very inmates we are bound to protect. I have heard officers say, “It could never happen to me like that.” While it is true that it may not, the simple facts support that it could. You must plan for the day when you may become involved in a life threatening encounter. This is the only way to be truly mentally prepared for involvement in a critical incident. You must believe that it will happen during your career. If you believe this, the question in your mind will be, “When is it going to happen?” OR “What if it happens to me?” With this type of mind-set, you have the advantage of reinforcing in your mind the fact at any time you may be faced with a life or death situation. By being continually conscious of this, you will be more alert, knowing that each inmate encounter could be the ultimate test of your training and experiences. The proper survival mindset should be built with this axiom as its foundation: “I know it’s going to happen, I just don’t know when.” Of course, this is a confrontational situation during which you’ll have to use force to save your very life. Such threats may face you several times over the course of your career. However, you may not be able to predict with any certainty how the scenario will begin, you must prepare yourself mentally and physically to the extent that you know damn well how it’ll end, with you as the champion! So you will be mentally saying, “When it does happen they will wish they chose someone else!” “The military trains and trains and trains and rarely fights, whereas correctional officers fight and fight and fight, but rarely train.” There are a few theories that “try” to explain why most correctional officers do not train with the same integrity and intensity as their military cousins. The only one in my opinion that is expressed all over the country is that budget and time restraints make it difficult. But that’s still no excuse when you consider: THE DUTY TO TRAIN OFFICERS IS UNAFFECTED BY THE LACK OF REIMBURSEMENT SOURCES The lack of funding from outside sources does not, in any way, relieve a department of its obligation to train its officers. The United States Supreme Court has held, “inadequate training may form the basis for a civil rights claim against the agency where the failure to train amounts to deliberate indifference to the rights of persons the officers are likely to encounter….The focus must be on the adequacy of a training program in relation to the duties the officers are expected to perform and the identified deficiency, in a city’s training program….” The decision to eliminate training programs or reduce the amount of training, based upon the lack of reimbursement sources, would most likely be viewed, by a court, as deliberate indifference to the rights of others. (Emphasis added) [City of Canton Ohio v. Harris, 489 U.S. 378 (1989)]. Coach Bear Bryant said, “The will to win compares little with the will to prepare to win.” One of my many favorite training quotes. Training is part of the job and you better take it seriously, because today’s inmate sociopath is far more dangerous than ever before. Defensive tactics skills are perishable, especially our watered down versions of real life personal defensive tactics. If you don’t use them, you’ll lose them and the absence of your physical confidence when you need it most, could be the difference between you going home or going to the hospital. You can not poorly train and expect to be your best at a moment’s notice. Boxers agree to fight 6 months in advance to prepare for a physical contest. We as correctional officers don’t have that luxury. “You can’t fake endurance during a confrontation.” As a correctional officer, tell yourself mentally now and then “I will survive any situation I get into because I am trained for it,” “I will never give up, I am prepared for any situation I fall into because I train for it as a Professional Correctional Officer,” “I will never give up.” Now I’m not saying go get crazy on competitive training and martial arts preparation, but the point is that we as correctional officers need to keep positive attitudes especially when it comes to our survival. We don’t want to give up in situations and think “It looks pretty bad, I’m not going to make it,” we want to say and think “I will survive this, doctors can patch me up and I will be back to look at this guy again.” We don’t use words like: try, and I think, or I hope. We never say, “I will try to survive this”, or “I think I will survive.” These are negative words and trick our minds into thinking we really won’t survive. We WILL survive. The ethos of being a warrior is disappearing within our agencies; unit esprit de-corps built around “bonding” between warriors is now disparaged as an irrelevant concept and one that only serves to rationalize politically incorrect behavior and policies. Toughness and courage are born out of esprit, but that doesn’t count for much anymore. We, as a nation, seem to have lost sight of why we “raise, train and maintain” a military force and that one of the basic precepts of the Constitution is to “provide for the common defense.” We’ve gotten so sophisticated and tolerant that simple truths and principles about our protection are always suspect. Our noble correctional institutions, warrior culture and life have become the targets of current cultural extremists. There is an aura of self-righteousness among administrators about their activities and they are afraid there is a broadening gap between “society” and correctional officers, and that some of us are “violent extremists” and flaunt it by wearing fancy pressed militaristic uniforms, and that if we get “out of touch” we will not be able to serve our agencies objectives. It is time to step up and take a stand for the protection and safety of our correctional officers. Administrators need to realize that giving in to inmate grievances; law suits and unreasonable demands are weakening our institutions and the rights to safety of our correctional staff. I have talked about being ready and willing to fight, but willingness means other things besides being prepared to punch or defend. It also means the willingness to attend additional training even if it is on your time off and on your own dime. There are two thought processes inside a prison, one of security and one of rehabilitation. To this point, rehabilitation has failed to make any effective change in society other than educating better criminals. With the current death of one of our very own professional correctional officers, William Hesson ODYS, I am compelled to write this article on the topic of officer survival and the warrior ethos. Anytime you’re daily activities become “routine” or your thoughts believe that there is no risk involved in your career, the stage is set for violence against you. Predatory and opportunistic inmates read your body language. A lack of mental awareness increases the inmate’s perception that you’re an easy mark. Officer Survival Training serves as a means toward high-level performance by correctional officers. Training is an input toward proper performance after a regrettable incident. Unfortunately, many agencies conduct training to avoid, or in response to civil liability rather than to promote high-level performance. We will never know what was going through Officer Hesson’s mind that night, but I bet he was not thinking that he needed to kill the inmates attacking him in order to live on. He probably thought is was going to be a simple assault that left him injured, but this unfortunately, was not the case. As correctional officers, we must clearly identify when the use of deadly force is justified and in turn know when we need to use it. Did he believe he could physically subdue the inmates? Did he not want to hurt the youthful inmates because of their age? Or was he fearful of the administrative, civil and criminal backlash? In the current ODYS policy, there is never any printed mention on the use of deadly force, and they have evolved into the realm of “keep your hands off the inmate” physical policy. I believe officer Hesson was more fearful of the administrative backlash and loosing his career by hurting one of the inmates, and it lead to his death. When dealing with Inmates:
The term Deadly Force has crept out of the correctional environment because of administrators who believe that deadly force is never justified. There are too many legal ramifications involved with this officer action. Deadly force may be used as a last resort in the defense of oneself, when there is reasonable cause to believe that the officer is in imminent danger of death or serious bodily harm. Deadly force may be used as a last resort in the defense of another person or persons whom the officer has reasonable cause to believe is being unlawfully attacked and in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm. “The danger justifying the use of deadly force must be absolute, imminent and unavoidable, and a necessity of taking human life must be actual, present, urgent and absolutely or apparently absolutely necessary. There must be no reasonable opportunity to escape to avoid the affray and there must be no other means of avoiding or declining the combat.” Nothing in the law suggests that persons who reasonably believe that another person is about to use deadly physical force against them must calculate whether it is possible to retreat from that threat before they use deadly physical force in their own self-defense,” the court ruled. Oregon Supreme Court March 30, 2007 To survive is defined as “to remain alive or in existence”. This is another very necessary element of your training that is often overlooked. Regardless of how much we train, there may be circumstances in which fighting may not be our best choice. This is one of the hardest things to accept for the warrior officer. Our ego might tell us that we can take multiple armed opponents because we are in better shape or we know this particular technique, martial art; or high percentage move but in truth, the chaotic nature of real attacks and real fighting leaves far too many variables. Sometimes the best option is to run or call for assistance before it turns bad but you have to know the difference between the two options. Understand, escape is not cowardly it is survival. Visit the Tracy Barnhart page Other articles by Barnhart: |
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