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| Pa. County Jails Face Trouble |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 12/26/2005 |
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By any measure, the Lawrence County Prison has encountered serious problems in the past two years, a string of troubles out of proportion to the 300-bed facility's size. One inmate died of a drug overdose. Another attempted suicide by jumping headfirst from a 12-foot-high walkway. A third suffered a severe brain injury in a beating by another prisoner. And the work-release program had to be suspended after inmates were accused of smuggling drugs into the jail. 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. 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. 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. 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 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. |
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