By C1 Staff
LANCASTER, NC — A Lancaster County Jail detention officer has been fired after sleeping on the job while an inmate hanged himself.
The Charlotte Observer reports that the officer’s supervisor was also terminated after ignoring the employee’s sleeping on the job, let work for an hour without permission and failed to make sure officers were checking on inmates.
The officer was found to have slept for two hours with headphones on, and then falsified reports to show that she had made routine checks on inmates when she had not.
Following the inmate’s suicide, five detention center employees were placed on administrative leave. The officer found sleeping and her supervisor were later terminated, while the last three were suspended without pay for three days. They have since returned to work.
Though the Sheriff’s Office investigation into the incident found that the actions of the officer and her supervisor did violate jail policy, they did not contribute to the death of inmate Randy Williams Stevens. Stevens hung himself with a bed sheet above a toilet on May 20.
Stevens was listed as a “special needs inmate” due to being drunk and violent, and as such, should have been checked on every 15 minutes, according to jail policies.
Sleeping on the job is a common problem for jail officers working long shifts.
“Number one, it’s hard to stay awake and number two, it gets very boring going around [making checks], because you’re never going to see anything 99 percent of the time,” said John Boston, director of the Prisoners’ Rights Project of New York City Legal Aid Society.
“One percent of the time, though, somebody’s life is at risk.”
May 20 was not the first time the same officer was caught sleeping at work, but officials find the manager OK-ing the practice and not being on site more troubling.
“If your supervisor doesn’t care you’re doing X, Y, and Z, where’s the motivation?” asked Brad Tripp, a Winthrop University sociology professor who teaches classes in criminology and corrections. “By leaving and doing other things during [that] shift, others picked up that, ‘You know what, chill out, relax, it’s not a big deal.’”
“If somebody falls asleep and the supervisor is out to lunch or out to the Walmart of whatever, then you really have no protection,” said Boston. “The question really is, does that point [to] at lack of oversight from the top? … This kind of stuff really puts people at risk. It does seem very clear that they have or had a supervision problem at that jail.”
“If someone who is in a managerial capacity takes their duties that lightly,” Tripp added, “that’s something to be very concerned about.”