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Contact with violent inmates creates hazards in the correction officer's workplace that are rare for other professions. More than 2400 correctional workers in the United States required medical attention in 1999 following assaults by inmates, 1 often with unconventional "homemade" weapons.
Items that appear innocuous have been converted into weapons that maimed and killed correction officers. Examples include padlocks, toothbrushes, disposable razors, metal from ventilators, batteries, and even paper hardened with toothpaste and sharpened. These items come from the prison store, prison industries, and visitors, or have been salvaged from prison facilities and modified into daggers, shanks (homemade knives), darts, and saps (see fig 1). 2
Hairbrush modified into a stabbing device.
In the mid-1990s, a survey was conducted of facilities in the southern US to explore the problem of inmates making weapons from prescribed medical devices such as knee braces. Thirty four percent responded that medical devices had been "used or altered in a criminal manner". 3
The objectives of the present study were to (1) describe the weapons confiscated or used in attacks, (2) determine the incidence of injuries from attacks on correctional staff, and (3) determine the resulting cost and time lost due to these injuries. The results of this study identify materials and objects that should be redesigned to prevent modification to inflict injury. This problem is not likely to be unique to the US-violent inmates in any country can create hazards in the form of homemade weapons. It is important to recognize the problem of inmate-made weapons and to decrease the source materials for these weapons.
METHODS
We conducted a survey of medium and maximum security state prison facilities across the country for a 12 month period within 2002-03. All 50 states were invited to participate and 13 states agreed to. There were 187 prisons in these 13 states, from which a random sample of 101 facilities was selected.
A survey form was developed that requested facility information regarding number of employees and inmates. The survey form also requested descriptive information about the weapons that were confiscated or used in assaults, which included what the weapon was made from and the source of this material. Time lost from work and hospitalization was recorded for injured correctional staff.
We contacted the...