The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

The announcement comes just two weeks after a prisoner attacked two officers at the Corrigan-Radgowski Correctional Center in Montville with a handcrafted shank, stabbing one officer in the neck.

A day later, an inmate at the Enfield Correctional Institution also attacked two officers, leaving one with back and leg injuries and the other with a broken eye socket, nose and cheekbone.

The incidents are evidence of systemic problems in the state's prison system, lawmakers and correction officers said, including the failure of a segregation program for the most dangerous inmates at the state's sole maximum-security prison - Northern Correctional Institution in Enfield. They also say recent budget cuts by Gov. M. Jodi Rell have hurt efforts to shrink the number of inmates.

”If there are policies on the books that inhibit the performance of core duties, then we need to get rid of them,” said House Speaker James A. Amann, D-Milford. “If there is legislation we haven't thought to pass to ensure correction officers' health and safety, we must identify those recommendations as well.”

”Our failed policies from the Department of Correction have escalated the assaults that have been happening,” said Rep. Kathy Tallarita, D-Enfield, who advocated, along with Rep. Karen Jarmoc, D-Enfield, for the establishment of the task force, which Jarmoc will chair. Enfield is home to several of the state's largest prisons.

Corrections officers blamed the current level of prison crowding for “indirectly” enabling the Corrigan attack, and said it showed the breakdown of the “administrative segregation” program established at Northern when the prison first opened in 1995.

The intent, said John Pepe, the president of Local 391 of the correction officers union, had been to provide a system of severe punishment and behavioral therapy for the worst inmates, including any were violent toward guards and staff, and remove them from the population of the state's medium-security facilities.

The segregation program may have worked at first as a deterrent to bad behavior in prisons, Pepe said. But now Northern itself holds nearly 450 people, and correction officials have cycled problem prisoners through the segregation program and back to other institutions too quickly for it to have much of a correcting effect.

”Now nobody's afraid to go up to Northern,” Pepe said. “... The inmates know that all they have to do is wait a little while and they're gone. They don't really have to do any programming.”

One of those inmates was Bobby J. Beale, 25, a convicted murderer who had been sentenced for additional crimes while already in prison, including third-degree assault. Beale had already been sent to Northern twice, then transferred to other facilities before he attacked the guards at Corrigan on July 9, union officials said.

Correction officials denied that the prisons have grown more dangerous for their employees, noting the average stay at Northern is two years.

”Connecticut's prisons are safe and secure,” said Brian Garnett, a spokesman for the Department of Correction. “The rate of incidents remains at an all-time low. While prisons can be dangerous, we are committed to the protection of our staff and do not tolerate any form of assault against these professional men and women.”

The department has added more than 1,100 officers over the past five years, Garnett said, and increased the posts - individual positions or stations staffed by officers in prison buildings - by 253. The recent state budget cuts specifically exempted the correction department.

But prison population has also mushroomed in the past two decades, from about 5,400 in 1985 to nearly 20,000 today, lawmakers said.

Meanwhile, said Rep. Michael Lawlor, D-East Haven, Rell's budget cuts had not spared some of the spending initiatives approved with much fanfare just months ago.

Lawlor singled out funding for programs in the Judicial Branch and Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services that redirect nonviolent or mentally ill offenders to treatment rather than prison, and funding for long-delayed staff and technical improvements in the Department of Public Safety and the Division of Criminal Justice.

”Just because it's not in the headlines anymore doesn't mean we can forget about it,” Lawlor said, referring to the $10 million criminal justice reform bill the legislature passed this spring. “It's a commitment we all made and we ought to honor it.”

Rich Harris, a spokesman for Rell, called Lawlor's comments “irresponsible,” but could not rule out the possibility that budget recissions had affected some of the new criminal justice spending.