They’ve been beaten, stabbed, kicked, choked and scalded while serving the medical needs of killers, cannibals and rapists the courts have deemed criminally insane.
But New York state mental-hospital security officers have been denied any protection as they perform their dangerous job – other than a pair of latex gloves.
Now, as many of the workers reveal to The Post for the first time the horrors they have endured, they are demanding state lawmakers take note of their plight and enact reforms.
The guards – officially called security hospital treatment assistants (SHTAs) – are paid between $35,000 and $50,000 to serve in the hospitals where mentally ill criminals are taken for special care.
But unlike prison guards, SHTAs have no handcuffs, batons, radios, straitjackets or stun guns to protect themselves.
“All they carry is their wits,” said Mitzie Vilsaint, vice president of the state Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association, the union representing the SHTAs.
Union President Richard Harcrow calls the conditions for his members “unacceptable” and has scheduled a press conference next week to call on state legislators to enact laws to protect the officers.
The state has two main maximum-security facilities for the criminally insane: Kirby Psychiatric Center on Wards Island in Manhattan and Mid-Hudson Forensic Psychiatric Center in New Hampton.
Inmates committed 433 assaults during the past two years at Kirby, state Office of Mental Health records show. Officials claim the attacks resulted in only five injuries – a figure disputed by union officials.
At Mid-Hudson, inmates committed 643 assaults during the same period, resulting in 80 injuries, OMH records show.
Several SHTAs, who asked not to be identified, told The Post of violent assaults.
“When you’re in there, you’re fighting for your life,” said a veteran male guard who was beaten by an inmate wielding a telephone handset last year.
A female officer was out for two months after a patient tossed scalding water on her last Thanksgiving Day. She suffered a broken shoulder and fractured wrist in another incident.
“The inmates really are running the asylum,” she said. “They pull your hair, they beat and kick you and destroy anything in sight until they get what they want.
“These people are criminals who are looking for any weakness, any opportunity to exploit the system.”
Other violent incidents at Kirby, according to the union, include:
* A female guard was stabbed in the head by a patient who heard voices telling him a black female “had to die.”
* The chief security officer was punched in the face.
* A guard wearing a crucifix was choked while working with a patient who said he hated Christian symbols.
* Attempted rapes of several female guards.
OMH spokesman Roger Klingman said all employees received special training before being assigned to wards.
“The safety of our patients and staff is one of our highest priorities,” he said.
But about 30 of the 150 guards at Kirby are currently out on worker’s compensation as a result of injuries inflicted by patients, according to union business agent John Nicolosi. Another 30 officers are out at Mid-Hudson, he said.
Harcrow is expected to use next week’s press conference to call for SHTA guards to be granted peace-officer status so that assaults on them would become felonies. Guards should also have uniforms, carry handcuffs and batons and be allowed to restrain patients without a medical order, the union says.
SICK LIST
Patients who have been committed as criminally insane to New York institutions include:
* Daniel Rakowitz, 40, an East Village resident who murdered his girlfriend in 1989, then boiled her remains and fed them to the homeless in Tompkins Square Park. He had tried to kill his father during an earlier homicidal rage, but his gun jammed.
* Jeffrey Rose, 33, who repeatedly stabbed a baby in the face with a pen during a failed purse snatching on a Manhattan street in 1993.
* Vivian Miranda, 45, who in 1998 put a plastic bag over her 17-year-old daughter’s head, suffocating her because she thought the teen was possessed by demons.
* Armando Johnson, committed to the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center in 1976 for fatally stabbing a man, went on to strangle a fellow patient there in 1985.
* Albert Fentress, a history teacher and gourmet chef who ate a teen’s genitals before fatally shooting him in the head in 1979.
* Ronald Crumpley, 40, a city transit cop who fatally shot two men and wounded six others outside the Ramrod gay bar in Manhattan in 1980.
* Archie Bristol, 33, who used a pair of socks to strangle a fellow patient at the Mid-Hudson prison for the criminally insane in 1998. After the killing, he broke all his victim’s fingers.