The goals of this guide, which was funded by the National Institute of Corrections and National Institute of Justice, are simple but important. It is hoped that the guide will result in improved prevention efforts, planning, and response, so that some emergencies may be averted entirely and others may be mitigated. If this guide helps prevent violence in just a few locations and if it minimizes injuries, deaths, or escapes during just a few prison crises, then it will have fully satisfied its objectives.

Prisons and Major Emergencies

Emergency preparedness is a central, even critical issue throughout American corrections. Today, most public agencies must have emergency plans, and even private businesses have turned to disaster preparedness and business recovery planning. Prisons, however, are not like other public agencies. They are responsible for the safety of large numbers of individuals who are usually locked up and cannot protect themselves in many emergency situations. Further, and perhaps ironically, the very people who are locked up and whose safety must be assured are the source of the most frequent and the most serious prison emergency situations. Finally, the
first priority for every prison is community protection, which means that even in the chaos of a major emergency, prisons must ensure against escape.

No prison is immune from large-scale emergencies. A minimum-custody facility housing short-term inmates may be at very low risk for riot and disturbance situations, but a minimum-security designation is no shield against fire, earthquake, chemical spill, or staff walkout. A complicating factor is that the twin risks that an emergency will happen, and that it will go badly, are heightened by population overcrowding and decreases in staffing levels and other resources, as well as by the elimination of some programs that help stabilize prisons (e.g., earned good time). These conditions are ubiquitous in American corrections. As a result, most state
prison systems are in a more precarious position with regard to major emergencies than they were 15 or 20 years ago.

Another factor affecting how prisons deal with major emergencies is the changing composition of the correctional workforce. Recent years have seen the wholesale retirement of staff who began their careers in the late 1960s and 1970s-staff with 25 or 30 years of experience, many of whom had been through riots and hostage incidents and had demonstrated leadership under fire. Today, prisons promote staff much more quickly than once was customary. A captain may have 8 years of service now, whereas 20 years ago a "young" captain in the same department would have had 16 to 18 years of experience. In the absence of experience, agencies are far more dependent on policy, plans, and formal training. However, not everyone recognizes that reality. If the likelihood and dangers of large-scale crises in prisons are widely acknowledged as real, does it not follow that almost all state prison systems would commit serious time, resources, and thought to emergency preparedness? In fact, that is not the case. The reasons are complex.

One reason that most prison systems have not placed high priority on emergency preparedness is that planning for emergencies does not seem as pressing as day-to-day problems-until there is an actual emergency. Second, most people judge emergency situations by their outcome-whether they ended well-rather than looking at how the situations were handled-whether staff performed properly, the right training and equipment were in place, policies proved valid, etc. In too many systems, no serious scrutiny or review takes place unless a situation ends in tragedy.
Third, effective, comprehensive emergency preparedness is demanding and difficult to achieve. Fourth, some traditions in corrections work against effective emergency preparedness:
*Management by personality rather than by procedure and policy.
*Separate plans for various types of emergencies, with no requirement that the plans be integrated or consistent.
*A deep-rooted belief that riots and hostage situations are the only prison emergencies that really matter.
*An equally deep-rooted belief that planning really isn't important because every emergency situation will be different.

Assessing Emergency Readiness

Effective planning plays a crucial role in preventing major emergencies and, more commonly, in containing crisis situations once they arise. With good planning, some situations-planned disturbances, some kinds of fires, some types of hostage incidents-may not occur in the first place. Good planning can also result in early intervention that resolves small, localized crises before they escalate into major emergencies that threaten the entire institution. The lack of effective emergency preparedness may increase the likelihood both that a major emergency will occur and that if a large-scale crisis does occur, it may go more badly than necessary.

If a state department of corrections (DOC) does not have the level of emergency preparedness that it wants or needs, assessment is the logical first step. Traditionally, administrators have either asked their own people to conduct an assessment or contracted with outside consultants to do the job. Both approaches have drawbacks. Involving the management staff of an institution or a department in evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of their own emergency preparedness (policies, procedures, plans, equipment, etc.) may be all the motivation they need to begin to improve their emergency systems. On the other hand, staff may lack the objectivity to point out areas in which "the Emperor has no clothes." Even if they are objective, in-house staff may not notice obvious problems because they have lived with the conditions for so long that they think of them not as problems but as the natural state of affairs. Further, internal staff are unlikely to be aware of the breadth of alternative solutions available across the 50 state correctional systems. In addition, politics and personalities can impede an internal assessment.

A different set of problems arises if external consultants are engaged. First, consultants cost money, and a serious evaluation may be expensive. Second, most consultants have specialized areas of expertise. Some are very good with fire prevention and firefighting systems, others with CERT and SWAT, and still others with training hostage negotiators-but very few people in the country have in depth experience and expertise with the entire gamut of comprehensive emergency
preparedness issues. Third, management staff may see outside consultants as "walkthrough experts" and not take them seriously. Finally, political rather than purely constructive motives may govern how a department or institution uses a consultant's report.

The 1996 NIC Self-Audit Monograph

Since many DOCs rely heavily on self-audit procedures in other areas of their operations, it followed that a well-designed self-assessment instrument to analyze emergency preparedness could be extremely useful. Such an instrument could help to address some of the drawbacks of self-assessment mentioned in the preceding section. Thus, the primary focus of NIC's 1996 monograph on emergency preparedness was the development of a detailed, comprehensive self-assessment instrument for evaluating emergency preparedness in both state DOCs and individual correctional institutions. Further development of this tool remains one of the central objectives of this guide.

NIC has received substantial feedback aboutthe self-audit materials in the 1996 monograph. Almost all of the feedback has been extremely positive. The monograph continues to be frequently requested and used, and its popularity suggests the need for new, improved self-audit materials that reflect the many changes in the correctional environment since 1996.

Prison Emergencies and the National Incident ManagementSystem (NIMS)

Some correctional administrators are already familiar with NIMS or with the Incident Command System (ICS). Both are generic, multiagency systems for responding to major emergency incidents (although NIMS is generally a broader approach than ICS). A brief review of NIMS and how it relates to prison emergencies and to this guide provides important context for the guide's users.

Background

Prior to the 1970s, there was no nationally recognized system for managing emergency incidents or natural disasters. ICS was developed by fire departments in the early 1970s as a system for coordinating the response of multiple agencies to the same fire or group of fires. The heart of ICS was a command-and-control system, and ICS was intended to overcome many of the traditional problems associated with multipleagency responses, such as ambiguous or unclearlines of authority, incompatible communication systems, and lack of standardized equipment and terminology. From its inception through the 1980s and 90s, offshoots of ICS evolved insome agencies and states. ICS was also adapted for use by law enforcement agencies in a number of state and local jurisdictions.

After the events of September 11, 2001, a primary concern of the newly established Department of Homeland Security was coordination among agencies that would potentially respond to a terrorist event. A presidential directive charged the new department with establishing standards for a national emergency system.

That system, called NIMS, is largely an outgrowth of ICS. NIMS represents a major step forward: for the first time, the nation has a unifying system for coordinating the response to incidents as diverse as a forest fire, a tornado, or a terrorist bombing.

How NIMS Relates to Prison Emergencies

For corrections officials, and for this guide, the key question is: what is the relationship of NIMS to prison emergencies? The answer is that NIMS is both a help and a challenge.

NIMS is a help in several obvious ways. When a correctional agency assists in the response to a community disaster, radio frequencies of the various responding agencies are more likely to be compatible, and information about the emergency is more likely to be shared in plain English rather than in codes. Jurisdictional issues are more likely to have been worked out in advance. Coordination and planning may well have been tested during drills and exercises.

The same issues of coordination, planning,communication, command, and logistics also apply when a correctional agency has a major emergency itself and needs assistance from fire,police, and other external agencies. Thus, correctional agencies clearly should embrace NIMS and become familiar with its concepts and terms.
The challenge for corrections officials is to recognize that NIMS is a generic interagency structure; it is not procedural, and it does not speak to specific correctional issues. Nothing in NIMS tells a correctional institution how to evacuate the segregation unit of a large prison (just as nothing in NIMS tells a fire department how to put out a petroleum fire). Thus, while NIMS provides important and necessary assistance in areas such as interagency coordination, resource allocation, and planning, a correctional agency still needs all of the corrections-specific expertise that has traditionally existed within a correctional emergency system.

An analogy may be in order. To compose a document on a computer, you use a word processing software program that determines how you move text and format the document. However, you also need another software program: the computer's operating system. Although it has little to do with the specifics of composing the document, the operating system sits above the word-processing software and allows it to run on the computer. NIMS is like an operating system in that it provides the framework and architecture in which all of the corrections-specific emergency provisions reside.

A correctional agency has two alternatives with regard to NIMS. It can adopt NIMS and then set about developing its own corrections-specific policies, procedures, and other emergency system requirements, tying all of that to various components of NIMS. Or it can adopt NIMS and use a comprehensive correctional emergency system within NIMS to provide the substance and content that make an emergency system useful in a prison. If it chooses the second alternative, it must take care that its emergency system is consistent with the NIMS framework. For  example, the Nebraska DOC has worked with LETRA's corrections-specific emergency system for 10 years, but it has also been identified as the state's lead agency for homeland security and is in the process of training staff on NIMS. Nebraska's experience is that the two systems-NIMS and a corrections specific emergency system-are compatible, not contradictory.

How This Guide Relates to NIMS

Users of this guide will find that it is consistent with NIMS. In particular, the three freestanding self-audit checklists that constitute the heart of the guide (see section 3) include items that cover every aspect of NIMS, ranging from risk assessment to interagency coordination to requirements for drills, exercises, and simulations. The checklists include even more items that are corrections specific and are not part of NIMS. For example, the general emergency preparedness checklist includes many questions about hostage negotiation teams and tactical teams. Almost all of these questions are corrections specific; because NIMS is generic, it does not provide policy direction for a hostage negotiation team or direction for operating a tactical
team.

In summary, this guide is consistent with NIMS, and it directly addresses a number of key provisions and concepts within NIMS. However, it is comprehensive with regard to expertise about correctional emergencies and should not be regarded, directly or indirectly, as a systematic presentation of NIMS issues.

For the entire document, see this week's Resource of the Week at http://www.nicic.org/pubs/2005/020293.pdf