Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 8, 1993 TAG: 9309170432
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BALDWIN P. JENNINGS Jr.
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Department of Corrections projects make up 20 percent of all state capital appropriations, excluding roads. DOC has just built a $10 million training center for itself, and is building new prisons in at least four counties and four cities.
By 1997, DOC is expected to have 27,360 convicts. Cost per convict per year in Virginia ranges from about $11,000 to about $40,000, depending on the facility. Using a low average estimate of $20,000, by 1997 DOC will be spending well in excess of half a billion dollars a year just to house convicts. And that figure does not include capital outlay.
Now, spending large sums of dollars is not always bad, but it is always worth taking a close look at. And with DOC, the closer you get the worse it smells.
Most citizens believe that the most secure place in a corrections system is death row. That's probably true in Virginia, too, but that does not mean it's very secure even there. Drugs are reportedly available to prisoners in every prison. Ed Morris, Deputy Director of DOC, concedes that inmates are getting contraband. "Our job is to stop it," he says.
They're not doing their job very well. When a death row convict (Wayne Kenneth DeLong) is found dead in his cell (last March), strangled, drunk, with a syringe sticking out of his arm and cocaine in his blood, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell that DOC is a sick joke.
This is the same DOC, and the same prison (Mecklenberg), that brought you the nation's largest escape ever from a death row: Six men under death sentence walked out in 1984.
Trust me, security is always poor when drugs are readily available. And I do not know of a single Virginia prison that doesn't have a drug problem.
The Commonwealth is sitting on time bombs - we have a fairly large prison system, but a massive leadership lacuna. Prisons that are not run tight are prisons run by convicts. They are riots and escapes waiting to happen.
DOC is the same state agency that pays our tax dollars to convicts as hourly pay for going to school. DOC doesn't make convicts work more than 30 hours a week (including their time in school), and even that work is hardly hard labor.
DOC manages to spend more running prison industries than they make from those industries, and prison products like denims and shoes cost more than do the same products produced by private industry and sold at major retail stores.
DOC will try to tell you it's because training convicts is very expensive, but that's no more true in prisons than in private enterprise.
The truth of the matter is that DOC prison industry management is incompetent and there is no shortage of sewing machine operators and shoemakers in the job market. Training convicts to do what there are already thousands of unemployed civilians trained to do just makes no sense at all. And it's typical DOC.
DOC has yet to figure out how to fully computerize its operation, how to eliminate its bloated bureaucracy, and how to run a prison system. DOC hasn't even figured out that the citizens of Virginia expect DOC, not the convicts, to run the prisons. The department now gives the convicts about everything but out, and gives concerned citizens nothing but a snow job.
Let's hope our next governor has the moral commitment to straighten out the mess and reduce the waste and the danger.
\ Baldwin P. Jennings Jr. retired this month as a food-service supervisor at Staunton Correctional Center.
by CNB