Are Prison Reforms Strictly Black and White?

Summary

1. The Lin Wen-wei case is an opportunity to understand the plight of frontline officers and break down the co-constructed hierarchical relationship within correctional institutions. Improving the rights of frontline security personnel is a crucial part of prison reform, and it goes hand in hand with improving the treatment of inmates.
2. Security personnel work in a high-stress environment, with guarded medical trips outside the prison being the biggest issue, including the risk of assessing the need for outside medical treatment and the pressure of preventing escapes.
3. Taking the T'ang Yung-cheng case and the Chan Pao-nan state compensation case as examples, one can see the helplessness of frontline officers as well as the ambiguity and inconsistency of judgments made by higher-ups.

Focus of the Discussion

Today, I will try my best to explain matters from a perspective closer to the frontline, or rather, some issues that correctional institutions can currently resolve.

The insight that the Lin Wen-wei case offers to civil society organizations is that prison administration reform has always lacked the perspective of frontline officers, who in the past were even lumped together with the correctional system as targets of criticism. This incident allows us to re-examine our past discourse on prison reform, which seemed to lack the voices of frontline security personnel. During the 2014 Prison Visit Project Policy Forum, a participant raised a similar question. At that time, our response was: the improvement of rights for frontline security personnel and the improvement of inmate treatment actually complement rather than oppose each other. However, how to make actual frontline personnel feel this way is another issue.

Working Environment of Security Personnel

The general problems of correctional institutions were already pointed out as early as 2011 in Professor Li Mao-sheng's "RDEC 2011 Project Conclusion: Preliminary Thoughts on Prison Reform". Today, the focus will mainly be on "prison medical care." Guarded medical treatment and subsequent medical parole not only concern the lives and physical health of inmates but also constitute one of the greatest sources of stress for frontline security personnel.

The working environment of prison guards can be glimpsed through the current Facebook fan page—"Complaining about Prisons". Although the content of the posts may be somewhat intense, we can still learn about some of the current realities of internal prison operations from these complaints.

Senior prison guards often tell juniors to "treat security as part of reformative education work." However, such comfort is actually quite "poison-like." This is because security is in fact the task that takes up the largest proportion of work yet possesses no reformative function whatsoever; nonetheless, it is the issue that brings the greatest pressure to frontline officers.

The work of prison guards is quite arduous. As noted in Professor Li Mao-sheng's "RDEC 2011 Project Conclusion: Preliminary Thoughts on Prison Reform", as frontline personnel at the front line of prisons, their salary and benefits are quite inadequate compared to ordinary law enforcement officers, not to mention that promotion channels became even more rigid after the establishment of the Agency of Corrections. Some interviewees even stated that non-work factors account for a considerable proportion when supervisors evaluate work performance, such as seniority, interpersonal relationships, and even superiors' personal preferences.

As frontline personnel, prison guards not only have to face inmates, but we also hope to present an issue equally worthy of our attention: whether their careers and status as the very base of the correctional system receive corresponding support from the Agency of Corrections.

Inmates entering prisons may possess life experiences that surpass ordinary imagination, but the daily lives of security officers are also beyond what ordinary people can imagine. The daily routine of security personnel can be divided into day shifts and night shifts. Day shifts are like ordinary nine-to-five office jobs, while the pressure faced during night shifts is beyond ordinary comprehension. The so-called night shift adopts an alternate-day rotation system (working one day, resting the next). After entering the prison to work at 8:00 AM, officers must work continuously for 24 hours until leaving the next morning. This is one of the reasons causing high stress for security personnel. Furthermore, due to the excessively large inmate population, facing inmates whose social experiences exceed imagination and dealing with safety incidents creates extreme pressure. Guarded medical trips outside the prison, hospitalization, and handling emergencies (such as inmates disrupting housing units) are considered by frontline prison guards to be the main sources of stress, leaving them with no energy left to reform or educate inmates.

Guarded Outside Medical Trips as Work Stress

Guarded medical trips outside the prison are one of the biggest sources of pressure for frontline personnel. This includes officers without medical backgrounds having to judge whether an inmate has reached the point of being "beyond saving" (if this threshold is not met, inmates on outside medical trips must wear restraints) and preventing inmate escapes.

As for medical parole, the Ministry of Justice holds that it must go through three stages—outpatient clinics within the prison, guarded medical trips outside, and transfer to prison sickbays (the latter two stages are also where security personnel face the greatest pressure)—and must be further certified by a doctor that the medical condition is life-threatening before an application for medical parole can be made. Prison guards are often run ragged by the discretion and judgments of higher-ups, yet must face the outcome when an inmate is beyond saving.

The main issue is that guarded outside medical trips require assessing the inmate's physiological signs. The listed 15 points create judgment risks; while points 1-8 can be measured through instruments, points 9-14 are truly difficult for on-site officers to assess.

Emergency outside medical visits usually occur at night when medical personnel are scarcer. At this time, the risks of emergency outside medical visits are entirely borne by frontline personnel. When experience is insufficient, frontline personnel find it difficult to accurately determine whether an inmate's medical condition meets statutory standards; sometimes all data measurements show normal readings, making emergency outside medical trips impossible, yet the inmate ultimately dies (as also mentioned in Lin Wen-wei's article).

The Taoyuan Branch Prison is staffed with nurses who cooperate with frontline officers. Even when the nurse is off-site, they are on standby at all times, and detailed security arrangements for inmates are assessed jointly with the nurse, which can alleviate the risk of medical judgment for frontline officers and effectively reduce their security pressure.

Examples of Untimely Medical Parole

To give two examples showing how helpless frontline officers are during the stages from guarded outside medical trips to medical parole, one of which occurred in 2007, showing how long this problem has existed.

For instance, in the T'ang Yung-cheng case, an inmate died of oral cancer due to delayed medical treatment, and the problem lay mainly in the pre-stage of medical parole. However, the treatment records inside the prison (outpatient records from 2006-2007) were extremely vague, making it impossible to see the cancerous progression of the oral cancer at all (this point was also raised in the Control Yuan's investigation report).

After the inmate's condition deteriorated severely, the Agency of Corrections under the Ministry of Justice made inconsistent judgments (on June 5, the Ministry of Justice replied to the Hsinchu Prison approving hospitalization for treatment, but on June 8 ordered the Taichung Peite Prison to bring him back to continue serving his sentence). Under such circumstances, decisions from the upper echelons failed to reach frontline personnel, leaving them at a loss as to how to handle the situation.

Another example is the Chan Pao-nan state compensation case: leaving aside the issue that prior to serving his sentence, it was already known that he met the conditions for medical parole yet he was still ordered to serve his sentence, the authorities twice rejected the inmate's application for medical parole during the process, finally approving it only at the very end, but the inmate passed away immediately afterward. Does this kind of medical judgment really provide frontline personnel with something to follow?

Furthermore, the response attitude of the Agency of Corrections lacked any self-reflection (for example, arguing in the state compensation lawsuit that the inmate surnamed Chan would have died anyway). What exactly did the establishment of the Agency of Corrections intend to improve? Apart from serving as a unified window for the administrative system, we expect the Agency of Corrections to be an agency capable of autonomous reform. However, as Professor Li Mao-sheng previously foresaw—prison execution tending to become closed off, unresponsive to social stimuli, and internal advice being muted (such as in the Lin Wen-wei case)—these have all already happened.

Recommendations

Internally, there is antagonism between the upper echelons and frontline prison officers, while externally, as a single unit, the prison and its staff are viewed as a monolith. Under the current circumstances where this structure is difficult to shake, the Lin Wen-wei case may become an opportunity for everyone to understand that frontline officers also have the right to speak out, and to break down the co-constructed relationship between higher-ups and subordinates (though in reality, a chasm exists between the two).

The Agency of Corrections can currently carry out reforms that include improving the conditions of frontline officers. During this process, cross-departmental cooperation with the Ministry of Health and Welfare is expected to be necessary, and the further reformative role of the Agency of Corrections is also something that can be anticipated.