“Those vacancies put a huge stress on the officers present and on the day-to-day function of the jails,” said Noah Barth, the prison monitoring director for the Pennsylvania Prison Society, an independent organization that monitors conditions in jails and prisons across the state and advocates for humane conditions for incarcerated people.īarth said he didn’t have access to the staffing logbooks, but said monitors for the society had previously reported issues with reported falsifications in the recreation logbooks and in laundry logs. The department is a little more than 800 officers down, which is about 40% below the city-approved deployment plan to safely cover the jails that house about 4,300 men and women. That’s what happened the night the men escaped, he said.Ĭity officials said they were investigating what protocols were not followed and how the counts did not turn up the missing inmates until the next day.īut Robinson and others, including former City Controller Rebecca Rhynhart and prison monitors have all complained about the worsening staffing levels and the potential dangerous situations that come along with it.

When other officers don’t report to work, or the prison reaches critically low staffing levels, one officer might be assigned to monitor multiple units, Robinson said. But with recent staffing shortages, the prison has regularly only had one officer assigned to housing units. When the prison is fully staffed, two corrections officers would be assigned to each housing unit. The city’s prison department is so understaffed that they have not had the armed perimeter guards on duty during that specific nighttime shift for eight or nine months, said David Robinson, president of the public service employees union’s District 33 Council that represents the correctional officers.

The men were gone for nearly 19 hours before officials knew they were missing from the Philadelphia Industrial Correctional Center. PHILADELPHIA (AP) - There were no corrections officers assigned specifically to watch the housing unit of a Philadelphia prison when two inmates escaped Sunday night, and no armed perimeter guards were on duty as the men broke through the prison’s fence, a correctional officers union official told The Associated Press on Tuesday.ĭays later, authorities are still searching for the two men - including one who is facing charges in four murders.

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