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Speaker 1: Now look this morning, what's going inside our prisons? Figures

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Speaker 1: released to news talks there B show the number of

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Speaker 1: approved requests for segregation hit more than twelve thousand in

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Speaker 1: the twenty three to twenty four financial year. That's up

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Speaker 1: sixty six percent from five years ago. Add to that,

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Speaker 1: the number of corrections directed segregations has doubled in the

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Speaker 1: same timeframe. Corrections Association president Floyd Duplessi is with me

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Speaker 1: this morning.

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Speaker 2: Floyd, Good morning, Good morning, Ryan.

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Speaker 1: What sort of violence are your guys seeing?

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Speaker 2: The violence staff are seen within the prisons nets has

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Speaker 2: extremely risen, So there's a lot more serious offending and

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Speaker 2: it's just outright attacks on staff.

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Speaker 1: So punches to the face, I mean just literally just violence.

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Speaker 2: Yes, the type of violence varies quite drastically, but these assaults,

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Speaker 2: assaults by multiple prisoners on one staff member, assaults using

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Speaker 2: weapons that they've improve that they've made, so it does

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Speaker 2: vary quite substantially. But the important thing is that a

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Speaker 2: the severity and the mere number of these instance across

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Speaker 2: the year has drastically risen.

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Speaker 1: And so when somebody when you've got a sixty six

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Speaker 1: percent increase in four years on people asking for segregation,

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Speaker 1: what does that do for staffing levels? Like, if you

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Speaker 1: have lots of people wanting to be in segregated areas,

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Speaker 1: does that increase the number of people that you need.

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Speaker 2: It? Does it correlate into actually having more staff? Unfortunately, no,

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Speaker 2: it doesn't. So the segregation numbers is making it very

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Speaker 2: hard to run the prisons. We've got a lot more

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Speaker 2: prisoners that are segregated and therefore have to be kept

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Speaker 2: separate from everyone else, and so that definitely does increase

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Speaker 2: the workload on staff.

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Speaker 1: You've got apparently two officers and a high security wing

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Speaker 1: of thirty inmates. What should that number be.

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Speaker 2: That's a piece of work that we're saying to the

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Speaker 2: government and needs some serious research. We've looked at the

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Speaker 2: likes of you know, everyone mentions the Scander Navy and

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Speaker 2: model in prisons. We've spoken to the Norwegian prison officers

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Speaker 2: and spoken about how they operate. They run a model

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Speaker 2: that has one staff member to every two prisoners. Now

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Speaker 2: that on the extreme end, but what they've clearly shared

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Speaker 2: with us is having far more staff gives you the

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Speaker 2: ability to do a lot more one on one intervention,

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Speaker 2: a lot more work and support, and so having something

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Speaker 2: closer to that end drastically increases the reduction in violence,

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Speaker 2: and more importantly, on the other end, it helps change

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Speaker 2: these people in a much better way. And so we're

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Speaker 2: saying two staff to thirty high security prisoners is just

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Speaker 2: not good enough. We need more staff on the ground

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Speaker 2: to prevent these incidents and to help with better rehabilitation outcomes.

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Speaker 1: If they're one staff to every two inmates and we're

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Speaker 1: two for every thirty, we had a long way to go,

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Speaker 1: haven't we Absolutely?

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Speaker 2: And that's the reality. Are we going to get there today? No,

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Speaker 2: start moving in that direction to start increasing safety.

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Speaker 1: Floyd Dipolesses, the Corrections Association Museum president.

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Speaker 2: For more from early edition with Ryan Bridge.

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Speaker 1: Listen live to news Talks. It'd be from five am weekdays,

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Speaker 1: or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.