Floyd du Plessis: Corrections Association President on prison violence surges putting pressure on corrections staff

Corrections staff are struggling to accommodate at-risk inmates as prison violence and aggression grows. 

Staff accepted 12-thousand requests from inmates to be separated from the general prison population in the 2023 financial year. 

Many do so because they feel unsafe or vulnerable, as more prisoners become gang-affiliated.  
 
Corrections Association President Floyd du Plessis told Ryan Bridge it's putting greater pressure on staff. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now look this morning, what's going inside our prisons? Figures
released to news talks there B show the number of
approved requests for segregation hit more than twelve thousand in
the twenty three to twenty four financial year. That's up
sixty six percent from five years ago. Add to that,
the number of corrections directed segregations has doubled in the
same timeframe. Corrections Association president Floyd Duplessi is with me

(00:21):
this morning.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
Floyd, Good morning, Good morning, Ryan.

Speaker 1 (00:24):
What sort of violence are your guys seeing?

Speaker 2 (00:29):
The violence staff are seen within the prisons nets has
extremely risen, So there's a lot more serious offending and
it's just outright attacks on staff.

Speaker 1 (00:40):
So punches to the face, I mean just literally just violence.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
Yes, the type of violence varies quite drastically, but these assaults,
assaults by multiple prisoners on one staff member, assaults using
weapons that they've improve that they've made, so it does
vary quite substantially. But the important thing is that a
the severity and the mere number of these instance across

(01:10):
the year has drastically risen.

Speaker 1 (01:12):
And so when somebody when you've got a sixty six
percent increase in four years on people asking for segregation,
what does that do for staffing levels? Like, if you
have lots of people wanting to be in segregated areas,
does that increase the number of people that you need.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
It? Does it correlate into actually having more staff? Unfortunately, no,
it doesn't. So the segregation numbers is making it very
hard to run the prisons. We've got a lot more
prisoners that are segregated and therefore have to be kept
separate from everyone else, and so that definitely does increase
the workload on staff.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
You've got apparently two officers and a high security wing
of thirty inmates. What should that number be.

Speaker 2 (01:57):
That's a piece of work that we're saying to the
government and needs some serious research. We've looked at the
likes of you know, everyone mentions the Scander Navy and
model in prisons. We've spoken to the Norwegian prison officers
and spoken about how they operate. They run a model
that has one staff member to every two prisoners. Now
that on the extreme end, but what they've clearly shared

(02:20):
with us is having far more staff gives you the
ability to do a lot more one on one intervention,
a lot more work and support, and so having something
closer to that end drastically increases the reduction in violence,
and more importantly, on the other end, it helps change
these people in a much better way. And so we're

(02:40):
saying two staff to thirty high security prisoners is just
not good enough. We need more staff on the ground
to prevent these incidents and to help with better rehabilitation outcomes.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
If they're one staff to every two inmates and we're
two for every thirty, we had a long way to go,
haven't we Absolutely?

Speaker 2 (02:56):
And that's the reality. Are we going to get there today? No,
start moving in that direction to start increasing safety.

Speaker 1 (03:04):
Floyd Dipolesses, the Corrections Association Museum president.

Speaker 2 (03:08):
For more from early edition with Ryan Bridge.

Speaker 1 (03:10):
Listen live to news Talks. It'd be from five am weekdays,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.