Post by Fields on Jun 7, 2009 5:48:00 GMT -5
Prison Blues
Bulging Jails and Tight Budgets Make Job of Guard Even Tougher
In Oklahoma, the 2000 Killing Of a Young Officer Lingers;
Staff Positions Go Unfilled; 'I'm Going to Cut Your Throat'
By GARY FIELDS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
November 2, 2005; Page A1
A Doctor's Discovery His partner watched the serving line, his head swiveling back and forth as if watching a tennis match. A cadet officer stood at the entrance. By the time all the men straggled in for ham sandwiches and pound cake -- to be eaten with plastic utensils -- there were 120 prisoners in the dining facility. Their arms were covered by tattoos of dragons, devils and rival gang symbols.
If trouble erupted, the cadet by the door wouldn't have been much help to her colleagues. Not yet trained, she was under instructions not to intervene but to run outside and get help.
Two months earlier in July, there had been a racially inspired melee at the maximum-security prison. When the fight started, there was a lone guard caught in the middle. The prison has 100 officers watching over 1,059 inmates, one in nine of whom has killed someone.
The job of prison guard, which has always been perilous, is growing harder. Because of tougher sentencing laws and budget constraints, the number of inmates in the U.S. is growing rapidly, far outpacing the hiring of prison officers. The number of federal and state prisoners nationwide hit 1.5 million last year, up 51% compared with 1995. The number of prison officers increased 8% during the same period, to 239,079.
In practice, because only a fraction of guards work any one particular shift, the split is even more lopsided. As a result, it's not unusual for only 17 or 18 officers to be responsible for 1,000 inmates.
Being a prison guard has rarely been an attractive profession. The rate of turnover is high and salaries are low. But today, the pressure on guards is growing worse, because state and federal budgets have not kept pace with the increase in inmates. There were 7,795 inmate assaults on prison officers last year, up 13% from 2003, according to the American Correctional Association. That's in part due to staff shortages, but also because of lengthier sentences, which give inmates serving life little to fear.
One of the direst cases is Oklahoma, where the 2001 recession and subsequent sluggish recovery dampened tax revenues. Rising Medicaid and education costs have crowded out other spending priorities. The state has 2,553 authorized corrections-officer positions overseeing 23,000 inmates, but only 1,968 of those are filled.
The state corrections department says it needs $29 million beyond its current $409 million budget to cover some of the vacancies. The state budget office says a number of unexpected expenses, such as medical costs, insurance and energy bills, has forced it to leave positions unfilled.
Both Democrats and Republicans are calling for more funding, but they disagree on the urgency of the problem. Senate Democrats called a special session in August. The Oklahoma House Republican leadership says it won't address the matter until February. The Democrats "have not shown that this is a special emergency," says Damon Gardenhire, spokesman for the Republican House speaker.
Corrections officials and the Oklahoma Public Employees Association say they can't afford to wait. Support staff, from mail clerks to accountants, are routinely asked to watch inmates, according to officials of three prisons in the state. Around the country, the federal Bureau of Prisons has also reassigned staffers. A Bureau spokeswoman says these employees have the same training as full-time corrections officers.
"When a guy is arrested it makes the news. Then it gets publicity when he goes to court. When he's locked away for 100 years, he's forgotten," says Lenora Jordan, the Oklahoma State Reformatory's warden. "And the people that take care of him, we're forgotten too."
It's easy to forget Ms. Jordan's prison. It sits about three hours southwest of Oklahoma City at the end of a dead-end road, surrounded by wheat and alfalfa farmland. Silence abounds except for the moaning of the wind blowing across the prairie.
Visitors are greeted by a three-story, granite building cut from Wildcat Mountain, which lies behind the prison. The first 60 inmates, who built the prison in 1910, arrived mid-week in covered wagons. Six escaped on Sunday.
Today, there are about 100 officers and another 100 staffers running this facility. There should be 131 officers, say prison officials, but the money isn't there to staff vacancies. The jobs aren't high-paying -- an officer's starting salary is $20,672. But the prison offers one of the few career opportunities in this remote part of the state.
Kenneth Monday, the chief of the corrections' officers here, is 33 years old and has been a prison guard for 10 years. He lives in one of the houses near the prison. "You're never really off," he says. "Even when you're home, you can smell the food cooking in the dining hall. You can hear the sounds there too."
At 5 foot 8, Mr. Monday is solidly built and has a no-nonsense air about him. His bluish gray uniform is impeccable, with his top button and belt buckle perfectly aligned.
Mr. Monday says he knows "it's not smart" to work in a prison but explains that he likes the mission "to protect the public and protect your co-workers and protect the inmates from themselves." Also, he says, it's a steady job that provides both life and health insurance. Mr. Monday is one semester from finishing an undergraduate degree in criminal justice from Mid-America Christian University, an Oklahoma City school.
It's hard to shield his family from life in the prison, although Mr. Monday tries. He has a 10-year-old son and four-year-old daughter. "If I get up in the middle of the night and I have to go over to the prison, my son will ask, 'Why do you have to go, did somebody get stabbed?' " Mr. Monday says.
On June 5, 2000, an inmate armed with two homemade knives attacked a guard attempting to count inmates. It's not known why. Sgt. Joe Allen Gamble, a 28-year-old officer, came to help and was stabbed as well.
Mr. Monday was then a lieutenant and a member of the Corrections Emergency Response Team, a kind of prison SWAT team. He arrived just as the prisoner reached out and slashed Sgt. Gamble's throat. As Mr. Monday and his colleagues tried to disarm him, the prisoner blurted out: "I should have got you, Monday." Mr. Monday later visited the hospital and learned that the prognosis was grim. "I can't tell you I didn't sit here and cry like a baby, but I also had to come back and make sure everyone was safe," he says.
Sgt. Gamble died the next morning. There is a memorial to him at a picnic area at the end of the prison road. "I used to watch him playing with his boys," says Mr. Monday. "When he wasn't here, he was with those kids, taking them fishing. He was a good man." Mr. Monday keeps Sgt. Gamble's employee identification card in his wallet.
On a typical day, Mr. Monday spends at least half of his shift with the inmates. Officers are encouraged to do that as much as possible to learn inmates' moods. Quick thinking and perceptiveness are an officer's primary weapons. Mr. Monday speaks to a couple of prisoners but there is no joking here. Unlike many prisons, where banter can be routine, inmates here glower at the staff and each other.
"The staff is stressed," says Skyler Bull, a former prison officer here and now an inmate counselor. He dates the change in the guards' demeanor to the murder of Sgt. Gamble.
A more recent blowup made matters worse. One evening this summer, about 7 p.m. on July 10, inmates of Unit D were outside in their exercise yard. There, members of the United Aryan Brotherhood, a white-supremacist group, called to Donald Jones, a black inmate on the unit who was serving 20 years for rape, according to Mr. Monday. When Mr. Jones stepped around the side of the unit, he was stabbed more than two dozen times and dragged around the yard. The killing was retaliation for the murder of an Aryan Brotherhood member at another prison by members of the Los Angeles black street gang, the Crips.
The black inmates in Unit D, outnumbered, unarmed, and largely unaware of what had happened, didn't intervene, according to senior prison officials, including Warden Jordan and her two deputies. But black inmates in the neighboring Unit C exercise yard saw everything. They located knives and other weapons hidden around the unit and began attacking white inmates in retaliation.
There was only one officer on duty in Unit C that evening, guarding 80 inmates, prison officials say. Fearing for the man's safety, another officer in a guard tower more than 200 yards away and three-stories up, fired a warning shot with his AR-15 rifle. The slug buzzed across the Unit C exercise yard and slammed into a wall.
The inmates dropped to the ground. Six officers rushed into the yard with pepper spray and batons as the inmates quickly resumed the battle. Officers are told not to carry guns inside the grounds for fear that inmates could overcome them and arm themselves.
One inmate raised a knife toward Sgt. Chad Dennis and said, "I'm going to cut your throat first," the sergeant recalls. "I knew I was going to get cut, but I figured I was going to do some damage too," Sgt. Dennis says.
The 29-year-old sergeant raised his baton, a signal to the guard tower that an officer was in danger. The inmate noticed too and turned toward the tower to see an officer peering at him through a rifle scope. "He backed up when he saw the tower drawing a bead on him," says Mr. Dennis.
It took four hours to get all the inmates back into their cells. Prison officials say a total of 15 inmates were stabbed and nine were hospitalized. Two of the more seriously injured were in their cells when the attacks began. Inmates picked the locks and stabbed the pair more than 50 times. They both lived.
With a full complement of staff, nearly three times more officers could have gone to the recreation yard leaving enough inside to secure the unit, says Mr. Monday. At the time, there were 19 officers on duty for the entire prison. At full strength, the number would have been 30.
Warden Jordan, who has run the prison since 2002, has since limited inmates' movements. "We have to figure out how to handle the inmates we have with what we've got," says Mr. Monday. Now, he says, it is less likely that one officer will end up alone with 80 or so inmates at any one time.
There is new fencing and razor wire dividing recreation yards. Inside the units, mesh-like metal bars have been placed over the traditional bars to make it more difficult for inmates to jab at passersby.
The guards aren't taking chances. Some wear stab vests, which resemble bullet-proof vests worn by police officers. Inmates can make knives out of sharpened toothbrush handles. Razors, broken out of their disposable casing, can be easily attached to mop handles.
In a recent check of the prison's high-security segregation unit, a knife blade was found hidden in one of the cells, says Howard Watkins, a 72-year-old retired tax adjuster who is now a prison officer. That prompted more searches. By the end of the search, nine knives were found. "And this is supposed to be the most secure unit," says Mr. Watkins.
Mr. Watkins has a quick smile and calm nature. He says he joined the prison services after tiring of traveling and spending nights away from his wife of 46 years. He also wanted a job that would challenge him. He knows that an officer who forgets safety procedures, especially on this unit, chances being doused with feces, urine or worse coming through the cells' food tray slots. His seven grandchildren and four children think he's lost his mind. He tells them: "When you get old you might do something stupid too."
Mr. Watkins, like most other prison staffers, has a sense of fatalism. "You're out there with 160 inmates and [if] they decide you're going to get whipped up, well, you're going to get whipped up."
Ten weeks after the July racial brawl, the inmates and the guards were trying to get back to normal. As a group from Unit D returned from lunch, Sgt. Nita Nigel, an eight-year veteran of the prison, was watching them in a control room on a bank of TV monitors. That afternoon, she was keeping tabs on 159 people.
The other officer assigned to watch the unit was outside watching stragglers. One officer must stay in the control room at all times to prevent inmates breaking in. From the booth, they'd be able to control who gets in and out of the unit.
Sgt. Nigel, who comes from a family of corrections staffers, says that even off duty she goes over the emergency procedures in her mind. For instance, if the inmates rush the control room, she plans to seek refuge in an adjoining room. She would take keys, batons, spray and anything else that can be used as a weapon. The door can be locked from the inside and in the ceiling there is a lockable trap door that opens to the roof.
"You get used to it," she says of the threat of danger. "But you don't forget where you are either."
Bulging Jails and Tight Budgets Make Job of Guard Even Tougher
In Oklahoma, the 2000 Killing Of a Young Officer Lingers;
Staff Positions Go Unfilled; 'I'm Going to Cut Your Throat'
By GARY FIELDS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
November 2, 2005; Page A1
A Doctor's Discovery His partner watched the serving line, his head swiveling back and forth as if watching a tennis match. A cadet officer stood at the entrance. By the time all the men straggled in for ham sandwiches and pound cake -- to be eaten with plastic utensils -- there were 120 prisoners in the dining facility. Their arms were covered by tattoos of dragons, devils and rival gang symbols.
If trouble erupted, the cadet by the door wouldn't have been much help to her colleagues. Not yet trained, she was under instructions not to intervene but to run outside and get help.
Two months earlier in July, there had been a racially inspired melee at the maximum-security prison. When the fight started, there was a lone guard caught in the middle. The prison has 100 officers watching over 1,059 inmates, one in nine of whom has killed someone.
The job of prison guard, which has always been perilous, is growing harder. Because of tougher sentencing laws and budget constraints, the number of inmates in the U.S. is growing rapidly, far outpacing the hiring of prison officers. The number of federal and state prisoners nationwide hit 1.5 million last year, up 51% compared with 1995. The number of prison officers increased 8% during the same period, to 239,079.
In practice, because only a fraction of guards work any one particular shift, the split is even more lopsided. As a result, it's not unusual for only 17 or 18 officers to be responsible for 1,000 inmates.
Being a prison guard has rarely been an attractive profession. The rate of turnover is high and salaries are low. But today, the pressure on guards is growing worse, because state and federal budgets have not kept pace with the increase in inmates. There were 7,795 inmate assaults on prison officers last year, up 13% from 2003, according to the American Correctional Association. That's in part due to staff shortages, but also because of lengthier sentences, which give inmates serving life little to fear.
One of the direst cases is Oklahoma, where the 2001 recession and subsequent sluggish recovery dampened tax revenues. Rising Medicaid and education costs have crowded out other spending priorities. The state has 2,553 authorized corrections-officer positions overseeing 23,000 inmates, but only 1,968 of those are filled.
The state corrections department says it needs $29 million beyond its current $409 million budget to cover some of the vacancies. The state budget office says a number of unexpected expenses, such as medical costs, insurance and energy bills, has forced it to leave positions unfilled.
Both Democrats and Republicans are calling for more funding, but they disagree on the urgency of the problem. Senate Democrats called a special session in August. The Oklahoma House Republican leadership says it won't address the matter until February. The Democrats "have not shown that this is a special emergency," says Damon Gardenhire, spokesman for the Republican House speaker.
Corrections officials and the Oklahoma Public Employees Association say they can't afford to wait. Support staff, from mail clerks to accountants, are routinely asked to watch inmates, according to officials of three prisons in the state. Around the country, the federal Bureau of Prisons has also reassigned staffers. A Bureau spokeswoman says these employees have the same training as full-time corrections officers.
"When a guy is arrested it makes the news. Then it gets publicity when he goes to court. When he's locked away for 100 years, he's forgotten," says Lenora Jordan, the Oklahoma State Reformatory's warden. "And the people that take care of him, we're forgotten too."
It's easy to forget Ms. Jordan's prison. It sits about three hours southwest of Oklahoma City at the end of a dead-end road, surrounded by wheat and alfalfa farmland. Silence abounds except for the moaning of the wind blowing across the prairie.
Visitors are greeted by a three-story, granite building cut from Wildcat Mountain, which lies behind the prison. The first 60 inmates, who built the prison in 1910, arrived mid-week in covered wagons. Six escaped on Sunday.
Today, there are about 100 officers and another 100 staffers running this facility. There should be 131 officers, say prison officials, but the money isn't there to staff vacancies. The jobs aren't high-paying -- an officer's starting salary is $20,672. But the prison offers one of the few career opportunities in this remote part of the state.
Kenneth Monday, the chief of the corrections' officers here, is 33 years old and has been a prison guard for 10 years. He lives in one of the houses near the prison. "You're never really off," he says. "Even when you're home, you can smell the food cooking in the dining hall. You can hear the sounds there too."
At 5 foot 8, Mr. Monday is solidly built and has a no-nonsense air about him. His bluish gray uniform is impeccable, with his top button and belt buckle perfectly aligned.
Mr. Monday says he knows "it's not smart" to work in a prison but explains that he likes the mission "to protect the public and protect your co-workers and protect the inmates from themselves." Also, he says, it's a steady job that provides both life and health insurance. Mr. Monday is one semester from finishing an undergraduate degree in criminal justice from Mid-America Christian University, an Oklahoma City school.
It's hard to shield his family from life in the prison, although Mr. Monday tries. He has a 10-year-old son and four-year-old daughter. "If I get up in the middle of the night and I have to go over to the prison, my son will ask, 'Why do you have to go, did somebody get stabbed?' " Mr. Monday says.
On June 5, 2000, an inmate armed with two homemade knives attacked a guard attempting to count inmates. It's not known why. Sgt. Joe Allen Gamble, a 28-year-old officer, came to help and was stabbed as well.
Mr. Monday was then a lieutenant and a member of the Corrections Emergency Response Team, a kind of prison SWAT team. He arrived just as the prisoner reached out and slashed Sgt. Gamble's throat. As Mr. Monday and his colleagues tried to disarm him, the prisoner blurted out: "I should have got you, Monday." Mr. Monday later visited the hospital and learned that the prognosis was grim. "I can't tell you I didn't sit here and cry like a baby, but I also had to come back and make sure everyone was safe," he says.
Sgt. Gamble died the next morning. There is a memorial to him at a picnic area at the end of the prison road. "I used to watch him playing with his boys," says Mr. Monday. "When he wasn't here, he was with those kids, taking them fishing. He was a good man." Mr. Monday keeps Sgt. Gamble's employee identification card in his wallet.
On a typical day, Mr. Monday spends at least half of his shift with the inmates. Officers are encouraged to do that as much as possible to learn inmates' moods. Quick thinking and perceptiveness are an officer's primary weapons. Mr. Monday speaks to a couple of prisoners but there is no joking here. Unlike many prisons, where banter can be routine, inmates here glower at the staff and each other.
"The staff is stressed," says Skyler Bull, a former prison officer here and now an inmate counselor. He dates the change in the guards' demeanor to the murder of Sgt. Gamble.
A more recent blowup made matters worse. One evening this summer, about 7 p.m. on July 10, inmates of Unit D were outside in their exercise yard. There, members of the United Aryan Brotherhood, a white-supremacist group, called to Donald Jones, a black inmate on the unit who was serving 20 years for rape, according to Mr. Monday. When Mr. Jones stepped around the side of the unit, he was stabbed more than two dozen times and dragged around the yard. The killing was retaliation for the murder of an Aryan Brotherhood member at another prison by members of the Los Angeles black street gang, the Crips.
The black inmates in Unit D, outnumbered, unarmed, and largely unaware of what had happened, didn't intervene, according to senior prison officials, including Warden Jordan and her two deputies. But black inmates in the neighboring Unit C exercise yard saw everything. They located knives and other weapons hidden around the unit and began attacking white inmates in retaliation.
There was only one officer on duty in Unit C that evening, guarding 80 inmates, prison officials say. Fearing for the man's safety, another officer in a guard tower more than 200 yards away and three-stories up, fired a warning shot with his AR-15 rifle. The slug buzzed across the Unit C exercise yard and slammed into a wall.
The inmates dropped to the ground. Six officers rushed into the yard with pepper spray and batons as the inmates quickly resumed the battle. Officers are told not to carry guns inside the grounds for fear that inmates could overcome them and arm themselves.
One inmate raised a knife toward Sgt. Chad Dennis and said, "I'm going to cut your throat first," the sergeant recalls. "I knew I was going to get cut, but I figured I was going to do some damage too," Sgt. Dennis says.
The 29-year-old sergeant raised his baton, a signal to the guard tower that an officer was in danger. The inmate noticed too and turned toward the tower to see an officer peering at him through a rifle scope. "He backed up when he saw the tower drawing a bead on him," says Mr. Dennis.
It took four hours to get all the inmates back into their cells. Prison officials say a total of 15 inmates were stabbed and nine were hospitalized. Two of the more seriously injured were in their cells when the attacks began. Inmates picked the locks and stabbed the pair more than 50 times. They both lived.
With a full complement of staff, nearly three times more officers could have gone to the recreation yard leaving enough inside to secure the unit, says Mr. Monday. At the time, there were 19 officers on duty for the entire prison. At full strength, the number would have been 30.
Warden Jordan, who has run the prison since 2002, has since limited inmates' movements. "We have to figure out how to handle the inmates we have with what we've got," says Mr. Monday. Now, he says, it is less likely that one officer will end up alone with 80 or so inmates at any one time.
There is new fencing and razor wire dividing recreation yards. Inside the units, mesh-like metal bars have been placed over the traditional bars to make it more difficult for inmates to jab at passersby.
The guards aren't taking chances. Some wear stab vests, which resemble bullet-proof vests worn by police officers. Inmates can make knives out of sharpened toothbrush handles. Razors, broken out of their disposable casing, can be easily attached to mop handles.
In a recent check of the prison's high-security segregation unit, a knife blade was found hidden in one of the cells, says Howard Watkins, a 72-year-old retired tax adjuster who is now a prison officer. That prompted more searches. By the end of the search, nine knives were found. "And this is supposed to be the most secure unit," says Mr. Watkins.
Mr. Watkins has a quick smile and calm nature. He says he joined the prison services after tiring of traveling and spending nights away from his wife of 46 years. He also wanted a job that would challenge him. He knows that an officer who forgets safety procedures, especially on this unit, chances being doused with feces, urine or worse coming through the cells' food tray slots. His seven grandchildren and four children think he's lost his mind. He tells them: "When you get old you might do something stupid too."
Mr. Watkins, like most other prison staffers, has a sense of fatalism. "You're out there with 160 inmates and [if] they decide you're going to get whipped up, well, you're going to get whipped up."
Ten weeks after the July racial brawl, the inmates and the guards were trying to get back to normal. As a group from Unit D returned from lunch, Sgt. Nita Nigel, an eight-year veteran of the prison, was watching them in a control room on a bank of TV monitors. That afternoon, she was keeping tabs on 159 people.
The other officer assigned to watch the unit was outside watching stragglers. One officer must stay in the control room at all times to prevent inmates breaking in. From the booth, they'd be able to control who gets in and out of the unit.
Sgt. Nigel, who comes from a family of corrections staffers, says that even off duty she goes over the emergency procedures in her mind. For instance, if the inmates rush the control room, she plans to seek refuge in an adjoining room. She would take keys, batons, spray and anything else that can be used as a weapon. The door can be locked from the inside and in the ceiling there is a lockable trap door that opens to the roof.
"You get used to it," she says of the threat of danger. "But you don't forget where you are either."