Assaults on staff level out in Pa.’s SCI-Camp Hill prison

After two months with above average numbers of assaults on staff at the state prison in Camp Hill, the PA State Corrections Officers Association called for harsher punishments after violence. But the association misread the data and significantly overstated the problem. Now there's new data. I spoke with WITF reporter Jim Jordan Wilkie about the real scope of violence at SCI Camp Hill. The corrections officers association says there's a problem with violence against staff at the President Cumberland County. Are they right? To answer that question, I need to start by saying that while there's disagreement about what, if anything, needs to be done, everyone agrees violence is bad. Mike Oler, who leads the Officers Association and spokespeople for the Department of Corrections, all say basically the same thing, that even one instance of violence is too many. Keep that in mind as we talk about the numbers, because behind each stat is a story of injury, perhaps fear, and sometimes a visit to the ER. So is violence a problem at SCI Camp Hill? Not compared to last year, according to data from the state. But that same data had Oler up in arms just a couple of weeks ago calling for reforms. What happened? Oller made two mistakes. First, he misunderstood the data from the state, and he thought there had already been more violent incidents against staff this year than all of last year. Not true. Not even close. The report he was using showed the number of incidents so far this year compared to the same number of months last year. His second mistake was that there's a difference between having two months of relatively high numbers of incidents and having a trend. Just one more month of data and what looked like a big spike in assault on staff now looks much more modest in the data through June. So what are the numbers? 33 SCI Camp Hill staff were assaulted through June. That's exactly the same number as the first six months of last year. Importantly, and here's where Oler has a point, eight staff suffered major assaults this year compared to just one over the same period last year. The department counts it as major when an officer goes to the hospital, and that decision is entirely up to the officer. When calling for more punitive policies around violence, Oler pointed to an assault in early July, where an officer was stabbed in the face. The department said none of the officers assaulted so far this year have been admitted to the hospital. Is the prison going to put any changes in place? The Department of Corrections didn't say specifically whether they changed any security procedures. Instead, they said that they constantly review and update operations. But the department pushed back on the request that Oler made last month. He wanted entire units to be locked down after an incident. And the department said that their responses are targeted to the people who cause violence and aren't meant to punish the people who aren't involved.