When a man or woman is booked into a jail, what exactly is it society expects them to give up?
Their freedom to do what they want when they want, of course, because of a suspected inability to stay within the bounds of the law. It’s also expected they will lose access to the community against whom they are alleged to have committed a crime. The people being served by a jail remain outside its walls, and they expect jails to create barriers that will keep dangerous law-breakers away from law-abiding people.
question is how to deny someone’s liberty without diminishing his humanity. That will sound, to some, like liberal notions tantamount to coddling the criminal, but there are ways to enforce laws without becoming thugs.
How our jails treat their inhabitants says more about the community than about the men and women confined in those spaces. Especially when it comes to people accused of crimes - not convicted yet of anything - there’s a high expectation that the people we ask to serve as jailers will act with decency.
We, as a people, have grown enough to understand that denying one’s liberty is not permission to treat him inhumanely.
That’s why it was so disturbing to watch the video of three Benton County jailers who, in January, were fired by Sheriff Kelley Cradduck.
The men were dealing with a 25-year-old Joplin, Mo., man arrested on misdemeanor charges of resisting arrest, criminal mischief in the second degree and loitering. Arresting oft cers told the jail staff Taylor might be under the infl uence of a illicit substance.
The detained man committed the additional offense of knocking on a jail cell window, so deputies rushed in and knocked him to the floor. He was strapped into a restraint chair that immobilizes its occupant, then he was left alone.
The man worked his leg loose, prompting deputies to return to the cell. In the video, one deputy stomps at the man’s leg as another tries to secure it. Then a jail corporal pulls pepper spray from his belt and sprays it directly into the man’s face, apparently trying to make him more compliant with the one leg he’s been able to free.
The jailers’ treatment of the man is tortuous and unjustifiable, given the fact he’s almost entirely immobilized by the restraint chair.
Cradduck said his jailers should have never restrained the man just because he knocked on a window. The man was making no threats to jailers.
“There are times when we are going to go hands on hands with an inmate when it’s the only option,” Cradduck said. “This was not one of those scenarios.”
The use of pepper spray on the restrained man is inexcusable. Cradduck said the deputies were good men who used bad judgment.
“We’re still a tough jail, but we are going to be a professional one,” Cradduck said of the incident.
“That is the standard and I will not lower it. We are paid professionals and we are going to act like it.”
Cradduck’s stance is the right one, and he’s right to clearly outline his expectations among the men and women charged with managing the jail population. His call for a new training system for jailers appears an appropriate response to ensure jailers clearly understand what kind of tactics are appropriate within the confines of the jail.
Opinion, Pages 5 on 02/15/2013