An extended news segment covering the recent assault of Officer Terry Breedlove at the Clallam Bay Corrections Center aired on Friday on public radio across the Puget Sound region.

The piece includes testimony from Joschue Reyes, a Shop Steward at CBCC as well as comments from Michelle Woodrow, our President and Director of Corrections & Law Enforcement.

Woodrow says that the incident "highlights that the system is broken when we have to rely on offenders to intervene when one of our members is being assaulted.”

You can read the piece and link to it below:

5 Years After Chapel Murder, New Questions About Prison Safety
By Austin Jenkins

A Washington state correctional officer is recovering at home after a vicious assault. The attack came almost five years to the day after another prison guard was murdered. This latest incident is renewing questions about staffing levels inside Washington’s prisons.

It happened the morning of January 25 at Clallam Bay Corrections Center on the Olympia Peninsula. An inmate on Officer Terry Breedlove’s unit had managed to remove the top of a metal stool inside his cell. As Officer Breedlove passed by the cell door on a check of the tier, the inmate suddenly attacked.

“He exited his cell with the stool top and struck the officer repeatedly,” said Brian King with the Clallam County Sheriff’s office. He said other inmates stopped the attack and summoned help. But not before Officer Breedlove suffered serious head wounds.

“It’s a brutal assault,” Kind said.

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