Heavy Penalties for Gun Works and Correctional Facility for Worksite Safety Violations

The operator of a Mississippi correctional facility is in trouble with the law for numerous worksite safety and health violations.

"This employer knowingly put workers at risk of injury or death by failing to implement well-recognized measures that would protect employees from physical assaults by inmates," said Clyde Payne, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) area director in Jackson, Mississippi, in castigating The GEO Group Inc., a correctional and detention organization, for its many safety and health violations, including exposing its employees to workplace violence, a relatively uncommon violation reported to OSHA.

OSHA training, such as OSHAcampus.com 10 hr safety training and OSHA 30, is now required by many employers as hiring requisite. Unfortunately, many workers are still needlessly exposed to worksite hazards because of employer or management negligence, ignorance, or plain disregard of legislated safety protocols.

"Prisons may be inherently dangerous workplaces, but the employer is still required to take every reasonable precaution to protect corrections officers and other staff against safety and health hazards, including assaults," Payne pointed out. All told OSHA discovered six safety and health violations, one of them willful, after its inspection of the correctional facility in December 2011. OSHA proposed penalties amounting to $104,100.

According to OSHA, the willful violation, which rang up a $70,000 penalty, involved the company’s failure to adequately staff its facility, to repair defective cell-door locks, and to train its employees on how to protect themselves from inmate violence, even though it was well aware of all these infirmities.

GEO was also cited for one repeat health violation, carrying a $16,500 penalty, for its failure to carry out medical evaluations for workers required to wear respirators. OSHA cited GEO's Florida facility for a similar violation in November 2010.

Meanwhile, something dangerous but less deadly than violent inmates has visited the gun range of Illinois Gun Works Ltd—lead, that neurotoxic (and carcinogenic) heavy metal.

Recently, OSHA proposed a hefty penalty of $111,000 for Illinois Gun Works Ltd. for 28 alleged health violations after the worksite-safety watchdog’s inspection discovered that two of the company’s gun-range operators had been exposed to airborne lead levels 12 times the allowable level.

"Illinois Gun Works has a responsibility to protect the health of its employees by ensuring that they operate in a manner which eliminates or minimizes lead hazards, including exposure," stated Diane Turek, director of the OSHA Chicago North Area office in Des Plaines.

According to OSHA, 27 of the violations were considered serious, and 13 of them were related to violating the lead standard. The violations included: failure to institute engineering and work practice controls to minimize lead exposure; failure to ascertain the effectiveness of the ventilation system in controlling exposure; failure to provide personnel clean protective clothing; failure to dispose of or replace protective clothing; failure to provide clean changing rooms or separate storage facilities for used protective clothing to prevent contaminating street clothes; failure to require workers exposed to lead to shower after work or to wash their hands and faces before eating during breaks; and failure to have a medical surveillance program for employees exposed to lead at or above the action levels.