The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

The problems didn't develop overnight, but the prison board was unaware
of just how badly things were spinning out of control, said board
chairwoman Mary Ann Reiter, the elected controller in the county of
95,000.

"It was like their own little island over there," she said.

The board replaced the warden and things have started to improve at the
facility in New Castle, near the Ohio border. It's a community with a
limited tax base that has found no easy solutions.

Pennsylvania's county jails, it turns out, are no escape from big-prison
problems, jail inspection reports and incidents over the past two years
show. Even short time can mean hard time for county jail inmates, most
serving sentences of under two years or awaiting trial.

By their nature, the county prisons and jails are magnets for trouble,
and much of it is never publicized. The state requires counties to
report within 48 hours all "extraordinary occurrences" such as murders,
suicides, escapes and outbreaks of infectious disease, but the contents
of the reports are not released, only the numerical totals.

Across the state each year, about 1,500 extraordinary occurrences are
reported - about two per month for the average jail. Most common are
assaults by inmates on each other or prison staff - more than 2,500 have
occurred since January 2001.

Wardens have a self-interest in not reporting the true extent of the
problems they encounter, said William M. DiMascio, executive director of
the Pennsylvania Prison Society, an advocacy group for prisoners.

"It's their careers on the line, basically," he said. "So it's in their
best interests to make sure that the operation looks as good as it
possibly can. And oftentimes it's, '(Let's) not let out what's bad,
let's not make an issue of things, let's keep them under cover.'"

Many wardens declined to provide The Associated Press their 2003 and
2004 inspection reports, and those that did often redacted significant
portions. When the Corrections Department reversed its previous policy
and released a complete set of the reports - also with certain material
blacked out - it was against the wishes of many wardens and county
prison boards.

Prison administrators say they don't want to release anything that might
compromise security or privacy.

Donnie Moore, president of the 1,800-person union that represents
Philadelphia correctional officers, said one problem is a lack of
training - especially of supervisors.

"They give them a week and they throw them in the lion's den," Moore
said.

At the Lackawanna County Prison in Scranton, criminal charges are
pending against the ex-warden and other administrators for allegedly
misusing prison labor. In a separate case, four guards are awaiting
trial on charges that they beat prisoners.

In Lancaster, a man who was briefly held in the Lancaster County
Prison - before police concluded he had been falsely accused in a
shooting - was severely injured in June in an attack by other inmates.
He has alleged that guards provoked the assault.

At the Mifflin County Correctional Facility in Lewistown, state police
are investigating a September incident in which a restrained 19-year-old
maximum-security prisoner was shocked with an "electronic
body-immobilizing device" by a guard. The guard was fired for what the
warden described as poor judgment and violation of prison policies.

The Harrisburg office of the American Civil Liberties Union maintains a
thick file of inmate complaints about the Dauphin County Prison that
dates back three or four years. They include an untreated spider bite
that turned into a baseball-sized sore, "rampant" vermin and insects,
long untreated plumbing problems that flooded cells and caused toilets
to overflow with feces, access to barbers once per six months and
sadistic behavior by guards. The warden denies that there is any pattern
of problems.

The Huntingdon County Board of Commissioners' insurance carrier paid
$14,000 earlier this year - without admitting guilt or liability - to
settle a sex offender's lawsuit that claimed guards at the county prison
in Huntingdon did not intervene when other prisoners abused him,
including forcing him to brush his teeth with a brush that had been
inserted into another body cavity.

"It was inhuman and barbaric," said Mark C. Frailey of State College, a
former police officer who said he witnessed the alleged abuse in 2004
while jailed on a corruption-of-minors charge. "What the guards allowed
to happen to this kid boggles my mind."

Warden Duane I. Black said the allegations were unfounded - no employees
have been disciplined - but the county settled to avoid costly
litigation.

The state's biggest local jail scandal in recent years was in Somerset
County, where alleged hazing beatings with rubber shower shoes and other
violence led to criminal charges in March against seven current or
former inmates. The investigation of guards and inmates is continuing,
and there is evidence that 30 to 50 inmates were assaulted.

Authorities said most of the assaults were committed by longer-term
inmates against people serving shorter sentences, generally for less
serious offenses, as part of what Somerset Police Chief Randy Cox called
"a culture in which strength prevails."

A former inmate named Brian Young, who claims a June 2003 beating at the
jailhouse put him in the hospital, has filed a federal lawsuit against
the county, the warden and four guards, saying they "sanctioned,
condoned or acquiesced in" the beatings.

What most disturbs Cox about what happened in the Somerset County Jail
is that it occurred in relatively small, 138-bed county lockup, not in a
state prison where more hardened inmates are concentrated.

"It's easy to dismiss the significance and the importance of the
assaults that took place inside the jail by saying, 'Well, they were all
criminals anyway.' But when you stop to think, it could be someone who,
through a series of mix-ups or bad decisions, would get arrested," he
said.

"It could be anyone's son or daughter."