Corrections Community

I wanted to posse a question to all those administrators and detention manager about their feelings on staff to inmate ratios in a general population setting? Do you have a set standard through your state government? What do you base your ratios on if there are no guidelines for your state? Thanks, Mike Beaver Juvenile Corrections Officer Washington State

Please pardon the tardiness of my response, I was out a good bit last week.

Florida does not mandate a ratio of staff to inmates, and we don't have a single ratio we apply to all areas of the jail.  The Orange County jail has eight different buildings housing inmates in security settings ranging from Capital/Life felons to Work Release.  We also have several different housing configurations, from various forms of podular, indirect supervision, to 3 physically different versions of direct supervision (open dormitories, 2 or 3 man cells with a large day room where most of the day is spent, to our Work Release Center, which has individual, small dormitories and an officer for each hall patrolling them).  In all of these cases, we established the staff:inmate ratio through a staffing analysis on the NIC model, later slightly revised by a shift from 3 8s to 2 12s using Rod Miller's (with Liebert and Wetzel) Net Annual Work Hours (NAWH).

 

Don Bjoring, Orange County Corrections, Orlando, Florida