Assignment 2: Plan of Action: Determine an Action Plan to Address a Crisis in the Corrections System

You are the warden of a medium security prison in Susanville, California. You recently discovered that some of your correctional officers (COs) were smuggling drugs and cell phones into the institution to be sold to inmate gang members. The results of your investigation resulted in the firing of ten correctional officers for their involvement in the smuggling which will result in criminal prosecutions of these ten correctional officers which are pending. Two more correctional officers are under investigation for seeking sexual favors from inmates. At your previous institutions (Deuel Vocational Institution and San Quentin Prison), you noticed the same behavior of a small minority of correctional officers. You wonder whether this is a problem only at your institution, or whether it is a problem among prisons nationwide. You certainly believe that ethical behavior among correctional officers is getting worse. You are a graduate student in the Masters of Criminal Justice Leadership program at National University, and you are assigned to write a case study on ethics. You decide to make this your ethics project. You decided that your hypothetical research questions will be as follows:

1. How prevalent are criminal and ethical lapses in correctional institutions, particularly by line correctional officers?
2. What sorts of ethical lapses occur most frequently among correctional officers?
3. Why do correctional officers allow themselves to be compromised by inmates?
4. What are the consequences of being compromised to potentially charged criminally?
5. What are possible solutions to these ethical lapses?
6. What does a survey reveal with respect to ethics among correctional officers?