Positive start for de-escalation

Staff at nine of Corrections’ twenty prisons around the country have begun de-escalation training to enable them to better de-fuse situations involving angry or upset prisoners.

Initial feedback shows that after only two weeks of receiving training, 65 percent of corrections officers have already used the techniques to calm prisoners down.

Unit Manager Rick Dobson from Spring Hill Corrections Facility gives an example of the techniques in action:

“We had an incident where a prisoner was standing in the unit compound challenging the rest of the prisoners to fight him.

“Corrections Officers Joe Lewis and Ronnie Pike approached him and took up the protective position as trained, using calm, non-confrontational body language and staying back a little.

“Officer Lewis asked the prisoner to stop challenging the others, explaining that he didn’t want an incident in the unit where everybody was fighting.

“He gave the prisoner the option of either going quietly back to his cell, or undergoing a general lock-down of the unit, warning that the officers may have to use force if the prisoner wouldn’t comply.

“The prisoner calmed down and Officer Lewis confirmed his instruction to return quietly to his cell.

“On the way back to the cell he took the prisoner to an interview room to find out a little more about why he had been acting this way. He found out the prisoner hadn’t been taking his medication as prescribed.

“This is a great example of the new training helping to avert and discover the cause of what could have become a much higher risk incident,” says Rick.

Spring Hill Corrections Facility Manager Gavin Dalziel says he’s had numerous comments from staff singing the praises of the course as a ‘very relevant and valuable tool’ in their kit.

“The longer-serving staff are saying it puts the approaches they used intuitively into perspective and is giving them a framework  to check their strategies against,” says Gavin.

Corrections began rolling out the three-day training programme in tactical communications and de-escalation techniques to all corrections officers (up to 4,500 staff), prison managers and unit managers in September 2009.

What are tactical communications and de-escalation techniques?

These techniques are about assessing a volatile situation and deciding on how best to deal with it. This could mean using verbal and body language to reduce the emotion, disengaging or delaying a response, calling for back-up or escalating the response.