Intresting statement about since its a prison the power cannot be turned off. I am the electrician for a prison. I work for the maintenance dept, but I am the only licensed electrician.

I have shut the power off more times than I can count to various parts of the prison in order to fix things. When I first started I made the mistake of asking the post officer if it was ok, of course it was never ok. Now I go to the building supervisor and tell them I need to perform a shutdown and whats a good time for you. I have had zero problems since I took that approach.

They usually tell me to do it during rack up time when the inmates are already locked in the cells.

I made it clear when I was interviewed that I am the "expert" and if I decide the power needs to be shut down then thats the way it is going to be. They hired me so they must have agreed.

The keys are: do not ask them, tell them, be flexible with the schedule, and be creative in order to reduce downtime.

I had to kill complete power to a control room to fix a UPS that did not have a bypass, this was a few hours of work. Instead of leaving them in the dark for a few hours I made a cheater cord and rigged up some temp power. The total downtime was one minute to transfer to temp and one minute to transfer back to the UPS after it was repaired.

Once last example, I had to shut the power off to the wardens office. He did not care, thats because he had a laptop that ran off the battery.