The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

What’s surprising, according to law enforcement officials in those towns, is that inmate relatives and friends don’t commit more crimes than anyone else. Just as prison backers in other rural towns learned that the penitentiaries’ economic impact was less than they hoped, so, too, opponents learned the social cost of prisons has been less than they feared.

A worrywart
Measures in place to prevent escapes

On Feb. 28, 2001, Lee John Knoch, a 23-year-old convicted murderer, became the only person to successfully escape from Snake River Correctional Institution. The feat took several hours, as Knoch cut through fences, eluded guards, stole a pickup and fled the state.
No one has escaped an Oregon prison since the incident, according to Department of Corrections spokeswoman Perrin Damon, although 39 inmates have walked away from work crews.
Knoch’s escape fulfilled the fears of many in Ontario who opposed the Snake River prison, but confirmed a popular belief of prison supporters: If someone breaks out, they’re not going to hang around town.
Knoch cut holes through four fences and made his way five miles to Ontario without being spotted by guards.
Police apprehended Knoch the next day on the Fort Hall Indian Reservation, 300 miles away in southeastern Idaho.
In Madras, the Deer Ridge prison will rely on a variety of measures to prevent inmates from breaking out:
• A 12-foot-high, no-climb fence will surround the medium- and minimum-security portions.
• A second 12-foot fence will encircle the medium-security prison.
• Rolls of razor wire will line the fences and the space between the double fence layer.
• Electronic surveillance devices, which DOC officials declined to identify, will monitor the perimeter.
• An armed guard will patrol the site in a truck or jeep.

Longtime Madras resident Margaret King, 84, was afraid when she first heard plans for a prison in her town.

“I’m always afraid of escapes,” King said. “It’s not too close to the middle school, but it’s there (on the same road).”

“I think it’s going to bring a lot of undesirable people,” King continued. “I assume not many of them have much, so it’s just going to be where we’re supporting them on welfare, and we’ve got enough of those here already.”

“I’m just a worrywart I guess,” said King, a widow who moved to Madras 56 years ago.

King is not the only worrywart. Deschutes County Sheriff Les Stiles, among others, has expressed concerns that criminally inclined friends and families of inmates will bring their problems south from Madras to Redmond and Bend.

Yet, crime rates in Umatilla and Ontario are down since prisons opened, and most residents say their communities haven’t changed much.

In those cities, the social cost of the prisons fell most heavily on two groups of people — the officers who work in prisons and the families of inmates who relocate to be near loved ones.

Misplaced fears

Fears of escaped convicts, overloaded social services and an influx of welfare families were common reactions from opponents of new prisons in Ontario and Umatilla.

In a survey of 800 Ontario residents taken just before Ontario’s Snake River Correctional Institution opened in 1991, 45 percent of people said they thought inmate friends and family members would move to Ontario, and that it would be a “bad thing.” More than 70 percent said people who moved would “share the inmates’ lifestyles.”

More than 10 years later, though, the crime rate in Malheur County, where Ontario is located, is down slightly from 1994, the year the prison expanded from 500 to 3,000 inmates.

All of the 15 social service providers The Bulletin interviewed said they haven’t noticed a large impact, although they don’t track how many clients are associated with the prison. The worst fears — of escaped cons and inmate families clustering together in “felony flats” — never materialized.

“We were real concerned with people following their loved ones to be closer to their inmates and that hasn’t happened, except in a few cases that I know of,” said Ontario Police Chief Mike Kee. “It’s been nothing but positive as far as we were concerned.”

Harlan Hartman, a retired factory worker who lives less than a mile from Snake River Correctional Institution, said the prison’s impact has been small.

“Wal-Mart changed Ontario more than the prison,” Hartman said.

A prison family

In Walla Walla, the site of the Washington State Penitentiary, Helen Schaub agreed that the prison doesn’t have much effect on their lives.

For the past 55 years, Schaub has lived in a cozy white house a block from the penitentiary, home of the state’s most dangerous prisoners. Schaub, 78, raised four children there with her late husband, George Schaub, and never feared for their safety, she said.

“I’ve lived here 50 years and never had any trouble,” Schaub said.

In that time, she said she never met any former inmates or even any family members of inmates.

“Usually those guys, they have somebody pick them up out on the highway or something,” Schaub said. “They don’t come around the neighborhood.”

Last month, it was an invasion of roosters, from the neighbors next door, perhaps, that most concerned Schaub.

Yet, there’s at least one of those prison families in Schaub’s neighborhood. Just a few houses down the street in an old white trailer, Junior Gonzales, 25, lives with his 5-year-old daughter Leticia and a couple of friends.

It’s crowded, said Gonzales, who works at a nearby car wash, but better than he had it as a kid, when his mom raised him and his six brothers and sisters while working minimum-wage jobs.

His dad, Rogaciano Gonzales (he was convicted under the name Rogaciano Mendoza, according to a prison spokeswoman), was never around, at least not after he was sent to prison 23 years ago for murdering two people in the Tri-Cities.

To be close to him, Junior’s mom moved the family to Walla Walla, Gonzales said. Gonzales was 2 years old; his youngest brother, he said, was conceived in a conjugal visit trailer.

No agency in Oregon or Washington tracks where inmate families live, according to officials at several state departments, but activists and researchers in Walla Walla and Ontario say there are plenty of people like Gonzales, who move hundreds of miles to be near incarcerated parents or spouses.

A study in the early 1990s by Whitman College professors Keith Farrington and Pete Parcells found that at least 93 families in Walla Walla — a total of 286 people — had transplanted to the town to be near inmates.

Oregon law enforcement officials, including Ontario Police Chief Kee and other community leaders, said that doesn’t happen here because the state Department of Corrections can transfer inmates from one prison to another with little or no notice.

Snake River Correctional Institution Superintendent Jean Hill, who reviews visitor logs regularly, said only a handful of inmates have family in the Ontario area.

“We know of two or three, half a dozen at the most,” Hill said.

Wendy Hill, Department of Human Services child welfare manager for Grant, Harney and Malheur counties, said she hasn’t noticed much impact from prison families either.

“We thought there would be this big influx of people moving to Ontario and overloading our systems, but that didn’t happen at all,” Wendy Hill said.

Charles Logan-Belford, head of the Umatilla County Juvenile Justice Department, a county that includes Pendleton’s Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution and the Two Rivers Correctional Institution in Umatilla, said his department doesn’t know the impact of the two prisons, but plans to start tracking whether youths have connections to them.

“We often get told ‘my Dad’s in prison,’ but what we don’t ask is which prison,” Logan-Belford said. “It’s actually a question we’re going to start asking.”

Todd Siex, who currently oversees the DHS offices in Grant, Harney, Malheur, Baker, Union and Wallowa counties, put it even more succinctly:

“We’re pretty remote,” Siex said. “Families just don’t do that.”

Under the radar

But families do move. By knocking on doors in an Ontario neighborhood for just half an hour, The Bulletin spoke with two families that moved there to be near incarcerated loved ones.

Becky Smith, founder of Freedom SPIRIT, an advocacy group for families of inmates in Ontario, said she’s spoken with 75 families in the past year who relocated to be near loved ones at the 3,000-inmate Snake River Correctional Institution. The real number of relocated families is probably double that, or about 5 percent of inmate families, Smith estimated.

That ratio is similar to what Farrington and Parcells discovered in Walla Walla, where 93 families at the then-1,700-inmate penitentiary — 5.5 percent — relocated.

If that trend continues for Deer Ridge, Central Oregon could expect 94 families of inmates to make the move. But there’s reason to believe even more will move to this side of the mountains, Smith said.

“You’ll probably have more people relocate there because there’s more that that area of the state has to offer,” particularly recreation and a large number of low-wage jobs, Smith said.

Madras is closer to Portland than Umatilla or Ontario, which could also make the move easier, but far enough away to make visiting difficult, she said.

Families move because it just isn’t feasible for wives and family members of inmates to make regular visits to Ontario, situated on Oregon’s far eastern border, Smith said. That’s especially true for those from the Willamette Valley, where most inmates are convicted.

“It’s an extreme burden: a time burden, emotional burden, financial burden, for people to make that commute,” Smith said.

Smith, 50, knows that firsthand, since both her husband and her brother are currently housed at Snake River Correctional Institution.

Her 60-year-old husband, Robert, has been in prison almost two years after being convicted of assault in Newberg, about 20 miles southwest of Portland, a Snake River Correctional Institution spokeswoman said. Smith declined to discuss the details of his case.

Smith said she doesn’t worry her husband will be moved without warning, as some law enforcement officers have claimed. Unless inmates cause trouble, they’re seldom moved and usually given notice before that happens, Smith said.

Inmates are assigned to prisons based on a variety of factors, said Bobbi Burton, community corrections manager for the department of corrections.

First, they’re assigned to a minimum, medium or maximum security level, based on the length of their sentence, gang affiliations, mental health and other risk factors. Then the department sends the inmate to a specific prison, Burton said, taking care to keep accomplices or enemies from the same facility.

Initially, Robert Smith bounced between Snake River Correctional Institution and a prison in Salem while undergoing treatment for a heart attack, but when he recovered, they both settled in Ontario, Smith said. She said she had been recently laid off, which made relocating easier.

They’ve been there for a year now, but it wasn’t easy at first, Smith said.

“When he first was brought out here, I was devastated,” she said.

Smith learned the system: what to wear when visiting her husband (no jeans, blue denim or revealing clothes), how to send him mail and other things she never even thought about.

And once she got to the visiting room, Smith began meeting other women who had moved to Ontario because of the prison.

Smith offered her home as a place to stay for women who were visiting prisoners over the weekend. Over the past year, those connections grew into a full-time job. Now, through Freedom SPIRIT, Smith is hosting a Saturday night support group and working to get discounts at hotels and child care centers.

“The one thing people fail to realize about families of incarcerated people is they are frequently alienated from their other family members, from their friends,” Smith said. “They become isolated. They’re trying to pay for the appeal and put money on his (commissary) books and pay for their usual expenses.”

She has a passion for the work. Smith got angry when asked about the stereotype of welfare-dependent inmate families committing crime and burdening local governments.

“That’s a bunch of (lies),” Smith said. “Anybody who will move umpteen hundred miles to be near an inmate is more concerned about the love of the inmate and supporting their family than attacking Madras, Oregon.”

But is that true? Do people who move to be near relatives who’ve been locked up for stealing, dealing drugs and hurting people really break the law just as often as the rest of us?

According to a study of inmate families in Walla Walla, the answer is yes. The study, by Whitman professors Farrington and Parcells found they committed crimes at almost exactly the same rate as the rest of the community. Inmate visitors to Walla Walla made up .7 percent of the county’s adult population, and were also .7 percent of people arrested over an 18-month period in 1990 and 1991.

State statistics show the crime rate in both Umatilla and Malheur counties followed national trends by decreasing in the years after their prisons opened. For the rate of crimes against people, both counties ranked below the state average in 2003, the most recent data available.

The cool kid

Families of inmates may not commit more crimes than average, but they do have their own problems, said Kim Haus, a teacher at Walla Walla’s Green Park Elementary School. Two years ago, Haus pioneered a program to work with children whose parents are incarcerated.

“Most of the time, these kids aren’t academically successful,” said Haus, who identified 23 children of inmates at her school this year. “They don’t have healthy outlets for their time.”

Almost 70 percent of children of incarcerated parents will eventually have some involvement with the justice system, a 2000 U.S. Senate report concluded. Those children are six times more likely to be incarcerated than other children.

The reason, according to Haus, is twofold: Kids lack positive role models and they’re traumatized by the effective loss of one or more parents.

“That other person is supposed to be there in the child’s mind,” Haus said. “These kids need somebody to fill that void.”

Schools and social service providers don’t ask if students’ parents are incarcerated, Haus said, which makes it hard to help those kids. Most parents are reluctant to volunteer that information and some don’t tell their children, she said. It took Haus a year of making discreet inquiries and befriending children before she compiled her current caseload, she said.

Junior Gonzales, the 25-year-old Walla Walla resident, said kids knew his dad was a murderer, but it didn’t cause any trouble.

“I wasn’t embarrassed,” Gonzales said. “I was the cool kid because of it.”

Still, the superintendents of the Jefferson County and Culver school districts said they don’t think Deer Ridge Correctional Institution will create any unique problems.

“I don’t have any worry about that,” said Guy Fisher, of the Jefferson County School District. “If we have students who come here for any reason, they’ll just be kids in school here.”

Higher-quality people

Inmate relatives, of course, aren’t the only people who relocate because of the prison. In Central Oregon, current and former DOC employees predict that hundreds of correctional officers will move here to work at Deer Ridge Correctional Institution.

Residents of Umatilla and Ontario described corrections officers at Two Rivers and Snake River correctional institutions glowingly.

“Their employees are what I would consider a higher-quality-type citizen,” said Bill Killion, president of the Ontario Chamber of Commerce and owner of the local Sizzler restaurant.

A large portion of prison employees also seems to take the time to volunteer for nonprofits, said Estela Gomez, former director of the Malheur County Commission on Children and Families.

“They really have people involved in the community,” Gomez said. Snake River employees sit on nearby chambers of commerce, Rotary clubs and domestic violence prevention groups, among others.

The Department of Corrections makes a point of hiring employees with a record of community involvement, said Snake River Correctional Institution Superintendent Hill.

“It’s just incredibly important,” Hill said. “There are things other than payroll that are important to us.”

Officer M. Willis was jobless, coming off five years as a waiter in Portland, before he joined the Department of Corrections seven years ago. Willis (who declined to share his first name, citing security concerns and prison policy) heard the department was hiring for jobs at Snake River Correctional Institution and thought he’d give it a try.

“I’d never had benefits before,” said the 34-year-old Willis, who transferred to the Two Rivers Correctional Institution in Umatilla a few years ago.

Benefits include paid vacation, full medical and dental coverage and particpation in a state retirement plan, said Bobbi Burton of the DOC. The starting salary for an Oregon corrections officer is about $30,000 ranging to $42,000, according to Department of Corrections Spokeswoman Perrin Damon. That’s well above Jefferson County’s $20,670 per-capita income.

According to the Department of Corrections Web site, qualified applicants:

• Must be at least 21 years old.

• Possess good hearing, vision and “overall good physical health.”

• Have a high school diploma or GED certificate.

• Be a U.S. citizen.

• Possess a driver’s license and “acceptable driving record.” Applicants who’ve had their license suspended or a DUII will have their records “analyzed on an individual basis.”

• Have a history of law-abiding conduct, with no felony convictions.

Fellow Two Rivers officer C. Stensrud, 43, said she signed up at the prison after losing her job at a food dehydration plant near Hermiston.

“I never thought I’d be in corrections,” Stensrud said. “This just came along and I thought I’d give it a try.”

Both officers said they like the work, but when Willis started, he said, he tended to take problems home with him.

“There were some days I was kind of stressed out,” Willis said. “You realize you’re doing it and stop doing it.”

Willis rarely had a problem with inmates in his seven-year career, he said, but he’s had a few run-ins. The worst was a 26-inmate fight in the chow hall at Snake River, but he got out of it OK.

“I negotiated it,” Willis said.

Umatilla County Juvenile Justice Administrator Logan-Belford said that stress might contribute to a high rate of domestic violence among prison employees. When Two Rivers Correctional Institution opened in Umatilla, that was the one impact he noticed.

“We saw a dramatic increase in the domestic violence,” said Logan-Belford.

Terri Cribs, supervisor of the nearby nonprofit group, Domestic Violence Services in Hermiston, agreed with Logan-Belford. Neither cited any statistics or studies.

Burton of the corrections department disagreed and said her agency takes those crimes seriously.

“That’s not acceptable behavior and employees can be disciplined on the job for that kind of behavior,” Burton said.

Both Willis and Stensrud said their most important challenge is the balance between keeping discipline and maintaining a good relationship with inmates.

“Treat others as you like to be treated has gotten me a long way,” Willis said.

Stensrud said she likes her job, particularly a policy that lets officers rotate jobs within the prison every six months, but she said she’s changed, too, since she became an officer.

“It’s just going to the grocery store and being able to spot things that maybe aren’t right,” Stensrud said. “Taking in the whole restaurant, not sitting with your back to the door,” where she could be surprised.

Steve Johnson, a 50-year-old first-year corrections officer, said it wasn’t an enormous adjustment from his old job at a food processing plant. He’s shifted his sleeping schedule to stay awake for the night shift. And every once in a while, at work, he realizes he’s locked in a prison, weaponless, with hundreds of inmates.

“It’s not stressful, unless you think about it,” Johnson said.

Constantly being in charge of other people in a place where there’s always a potential for violence also prompted Willis to undergo some soul searching, Willis said.

“It makes you examine yourself,” Willis said. “The environment necessitates examining yourself and choosing who you want to be.”

Keith Chu can be reached at 541-504-2336 or at kchu@bendbulleti