Assignment Details

Scenario: You are the senior member of a two-man hostage negotiation team for a maximum-security facility in the Northeast. You and partner are called to a cellblock where an inmate, identified as Alfredo Albondigas, has taken two facilities maintenance personnel and a fellow corrections officer hostage. He is claiming that there are aliens from another planet living in his cellblock and demanding that they leave immediately. He has given an ultimatum that if he does not see the flying saucer leaving the exercise yard area in 2 hours, he will kill the maintenance personnel that he has taken hostage because he knows that they are giving signals to the aliens about him and the other inmates.

Mr. Albondigas is armed with a handmade knife and has his head wrapped in aluminum foil. The Correctional Emergency Response Team (CERT) working with you has a green light to kill Mr. Albondigas, but there are no current opportunities presenting themselves. You have managed to get a throw phone into Mr. Albondigas and you have direct phone communication with him. Also, because of the phone’s design, when he hangs up, you can still hear what is going on in the room. He has not hurt the maintenance personnel so far, but he is using the corrections officer as a translator to speak to the maintenance personnel, as if the maintenance personnel were not speaking English, but some alien tongue.

This scenario may seem humorous because it is fictional, but if it were real, it would be very serious for both the hostages and Mr. Albondigas. You are tasked by the warden and incident commander to make an operations plan centered on dealing with this mentally ill offender.

Address the following questions in a 3–5-page position paper. Present this paper as if it were an operations plan to negotiate with Mr. Albondigas and end the hostage standoff. You do not need to plan the tactical response if the negotiations fail. The paper should confine itself to gathering the information that the negotiator needs and the approach to take when negotiating with Mr. Albondigas to end the standoff. Include the following:

• Explain the mental state of the offender and the 2 most likely mental illnesses that are affecting him. 
• Explain what type of medical personnel you would like to have at the scene, and why. 
• Relate why you think, if the deadline is reached without a solution, Mr. Albondigas will or will not hurt the maintenance personnel. Explain your answer. 
• Articulate the persons whom you would like to have brought to the scene for interviews to help with information that you can use to talk to Mr. Albondigas. 
• Explain your approach as the negotiator when speaking with Mr. Albondigas, and why you would take that approach.