My Personnel Dilemma

My Personnel Dilemma

In the current job I have I have been faced with a number of moral dilemmas on a nearly daily bases. I work with the management of federal and state inmates. In my last 14 years of working in this field, I have been offered money to say a positive urine test was negative, begged not to turn in an incident report, and every time the result was the same I did what was expected of me by my employer and my own feeling of the general feeling that it was the right thing to do. However, I have been placed in situations by my employer which I must say or do something that I don't necessarily agree with.

The most resent dilemma that comes to my mind just happened two weeks ago. On a Friday afternoon a resident signed out of the facility to go eat across the street. He was given an hour. This was around 12 p.m.in the afternoon. It was not discovered until 4:55pm that he was missing. When a resident is found to be missing, it is part of our procedure to start checking the local hospitals and jails as well as family members listed in there contact information. It was found that he was in the Oklahoma City Jail for trying to cash a fraudulent check. The staff member on duty told the family member that the resident needed to return immediately to the facility upon release of jail. When he was released he came straight to the Halfway House as instructed. However, when I was given the hearing he was still being charged for Escape. Escape is a huge charge and comes with harsher punishments. My supervisor insisted the charge was correct and that she was certain that I would be able to find the charge fitting. In this situation, it almost always feels as if I am being told this as a under the table way of saying this is why you are going to find him guilty. Instead of relying on the information found to support a charge.

The resident was placed on high restriction for the remainder of the weekend. On Monday morning he was picked up and placed in the Grady County jail. I was assigned a formal hearing with him on the following day. While driving to the jail, I was battling the idea of finding him guilty of this charge. He returned as he was instructed upon his release. Once I got to the jail and listened to his side of the story, I believed ever so more that he was not trying to escape. He was off his itinerary by not being where he was signed out to. This was a much lesser charge and I just kept telling myself you have to do what is expected of you. Yet it was hard to do I did what I believed was the proper thing. I found him not guilty of the charge of escape as there was not sufficient evidence to support the charge. However, I did find him guilty of the charge of violating a condition of a community program. He was guilty of violating the program based on the fact that he knew when he signed out to go eat that he was only allowed to do so. He admitted that he knew that he was violation