Emergency Response Plan

The mentally ill who are living in custody, are totally dependent upon authorities for their welfare during a disaster, and therefore, they too are a vulnerable population (Hoffman, 2009). When disaster or emergencies strike, communities, homes, and lives are often impacted with negative implications. With over half of the prison and jail inmates diagnosed with some degree of mental instability, facilities face even greater challenges when addressing emergency response plans for this population. The day-to-day activities the general population perform such as seeking medical care, evacuating in the event of an emergency, obtaining food, shelter, and supplies are not possible for inmates. They must rely on authorities for all their basic needs. For the

Also, in the chaos of an emergency, inmates are subjected to attacks by fellow prisoners or poorly trained, panicked guards (Hoffman, 2009).
The first way to lessen the vulnerability for mentally ill inmates is to have a well developed and tested contingency plan that is established in collaboration with Federal, State, local, and private sector entities to be used in the event of an emergency or disaster. This is important because studies have shown many of the plans that organizations have in place do not address large scale events, which affect the facility and the surrounding communities, areas, states, and regions (Kovach, 2013). Another solution is by the prison and jails having routinely practiced drills for disaster. After the facility has developed the emergency plan, the plan should be taught to staff of all ranks and practiced through tabletop exercises, drills, and mock emergencies (Kovach, 2013). Routine drills would provide a somewhat of a routine or scenario for the inmates to help familiarize them with how they would react in the event of a natural disaster. For the guards, the drills would provide practice on how they are to react to a natural disaster