Scenario: You are the commander of three shifts of corrections officers (COs) working around the clock in a maximum-security cellblock in a state penitentiary. You have an exceptionally good group of COs who have managed to intervene in most potentially violent problems without incident. They have developed an effective network of prison informants form the inmate population.
There is a Middle-Eastern man, about 65 years old, who is serving a life sentence for the honor killing of his own daughter. He has been in the prison for about 10 years. Your COs report to you that his mental state appears to be deteriorating. He is a moderately religious person and feels there is no reason for terror violence. Every time an article about terrorism or the threat of terrorism is published in the newspapers provided by the prison library, the inmate reports to the COs that there is a planned violent takeover by groups sympathetic to those terrorist causes related in the news. The Middle-Eastern terrorist sympathizers are incarcerated in the same cell block as the 65-year-old Middle-Eastern man. There are a number of American-born persons of Middle-Eastern descent incarcerated in the cellblock, and the inmate seems to have access to them as a sort of religious leader for prayer services and advice.
At first, you took him seriously, but when he started to explain who the extremists were and what their mission was, you began to realize that he was just selecting inmates in the cellblock and identifying them as potential inmates with violent intent. He would make up stories about the manufacture of makeshift weapons in the middle of the night. He would indicate that the Middle-Eastern terrorist sympathizers within the prison extremists had contacts with other organized inmates throughout the prison and a comprehensive riot and takeover of the prison was being planned. Several prison staff members working in the infirmary have been identified by the inmate as sympathetic to the extremists’ cause, and he has accused them of helping provide weapons and other materials.
Please respond to the following questions:
There are several types of disorders that may apply. Select 1 that you believe is appropriate and may be affecting this complainant. Why did you select that disorder?
What types of referrals are available for a person with a mental illness of this sort?
How should you continue to handle this inmate’s reported intelligence information, and why? In 350 words this will be doc #1.
You are the senior member of a two-man hostage negotiation team for a maximum-security facility in the Northeast. You and partner are called to a cellblock where an inmate, identified as Alfredo Albondigas, has taken two facilities maintenance personnel and a fellow corrections officer hostage. He is claiming that there are aliens from another planet living in his cellblock and demanding that they leave immediately. He has given an ultimatum that if he does not see the flying saucer leaving the exercise yard area in 2 hours, he will kill the maintenance personnel that he has taken hostage because he knows that they are giving signals to the aliens about him and the other inmates.Mr. Albondigas is armed with a handmade knife and has his head wrapped in aluminum foil. The Correctional Emergency Response Team (CERT) working with you has a green light to kill Mr. Albondigas, but there are no current opportunities presenting themselves. You have managed to get a throw phone into Mr. Albondigas and you have direct phone communication with him. Also, because of the phone’s design, when he hangs up, you can still hear what is going on in the room. He has not hurt the maintenance personnel so far, but he is using the corrections officer as a translator to speak to the maintenance personnel, as if the maintenance personnel were not speaking English, but some alien tongue.This scenario may seem humorous because it is fictional, but if it were real, it would be very serious for both the hostages and Mr. Albondigas. You are tasked by the warden and incident commander to make an operations plan centered on dealing with this offender with a mental illness.Address the following questions in a 3–5-page position paper. Present this paper as if it were an operations plan to negotiate with Mr. Albondigas and end the hostage standoff. You do not need to plan the tactical response if the negotiations fail. The paper should confine itself to gathering the information that the negotiator needs and the approach to take when negotiating with Mr. Albondigas to end the standoff. Include the following:
Explain the mental state of the offender and the 2 most likely mental illnesses that are affecting him.
Explain what type of medical personnel you would like to have at the scene, and why.
Relate why you think, if the deadline is reached without a solution, Mr. Albondigas will or will not hurt the maintenance personnel. Explain your answer.
Articulate the persons whom you would like to have brought to the scene for interviews to help with information that you can use to talk to Mr. Albondigas.
Explain your approach as the negotiator when speaking with Mr. Albondigas, and why you would take that approach. This is doc #2