Unit C Blog #20

The hostage takeover at the Lewis prison shows many things to be true about Britton's study as well as all of the information about gender in prison we have learned up to this point. Their were many aspects that went right along with the study such as the leadership role shown by Dora Schriro in a situation that required a strong leader. Dora had her doubters when she came into this job but she had already led the Missouri prison system and was very experienced in her leadership roles to that point. She was dealing with a situation in which she had a female officer who was being sexually assaulted and had the potential of being killed. This situation went on for 15 days and the leaders who led the prison before Dora had not accurately mapped out the tower which was supposedly impenetrable. Schriro had to use her knowledge of prisoner behavior in order to understand how these men were going to act as well as what would make these men want to reason and give up their stand off when they literally had nothing better to do than to sit and rot in jail. This is one of the reasons why Ms. Fraley (the hostage) felt so suicidal. She felt that her existence was over, she had been morally beaten down to a level in which she could almost not return from, considered suicide on more than one occasion, and was brutally raped, beaten, sexually abused, among other things until she could begin to reason with the men.

Fraley's story of being stuck up in the tower for 15 days kind of fits like a puzzle piece into Britton's study because Fraley had to use her natural ability to nurture and to reason to show these men that she was a human, ironically the same benefit of the doubt that many corrections officers give to these men as they care for them on a daily basis. Fraley eventually made a connection with her assailants by telling lies to get them to relate to her. This most likely did not come invested in the training that prison guards received but maybe this is exactly what an observing person like Britton is trying to get across. Britton wants us to realize that the gender roles as well as the ways that these prisons are generally gendered make the officers in these type of programs need additional training. While the masculine side of the job, which is a large part of what the training details, came out in this situation, a women in the job more than held her own in a situation where she was no doubt feeling alone and that she would die. The job trains men and women alike in the practices of defending against a violent outbreak, but for a "total institution" like a state prison to allow for a total breach of security in a tower that was built for defense shows that perhaps some of the previous male counterparts to Dora Schriro were not held properly accountable for putting officers at a risk for something as horrible as what Fraley had to go through for 15 days. Britton would want us all to see that some of these inmates need help, and the Association for Female Corrections officers is pushing along with Britton's type of study that some of these men get help, but more importantly to help the correctional officer females from being subject to sexual abuse.

It is hard to say whether Britton's suggestions could have prevented this type of hostile take over or not, but it seems that it could have helped. When situations like these arise it is hard to take the blame and to lay it on one person or thing whether that be on an individual, on a training program, on a director, or anything else for that matter. What we do know is that it would be easy to incorporate some better training for female as well as male officers into the program to become a correctional officer and this additional training could be the difference between life and death, or the difference between a hostile prison takeover or just another day on the job.