The correctional officers’ life expectancy at the Allegheny County Jail is 61 years of age, 16 years below the life expectancy of the average American. Experts agree that a critical difference in what makes this expectancy so low is the constant exposure to the possibility of physically intervening in a situation of violence or potential violence in a confined institution.
Studies have been done examining how the physiological and psychological effects of this constant exposure affect major declines in health over time which leads to low life expectancy.
Each Allegheny County Council member will be voting on a measure to give officers interventions such as the use of the restraint chair to reduce in a major way the risks to their safety and safety of the residents.
In essence, each county council member needs to understand that their vote over time will have an effect concerning how long our officers will live.
Besides this factor of constant exposure to violence, can council members put themselves in the shoes of the officers and see how all the volunteer and forced overtime our officers experience propels these risk factors to dangerous levels?
The county jail is the only jail in Pennsylvania that does not have interventions such as the restraint chair because of a nebulous referendum ballot question in which voters never saw these interventions on the ballot that were banned and so many voters had no idea what they were voting for.
John Kenstowicz
Morningside