Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, August 1, 1994 TAG: 9408010077
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURA LAFAY LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The moment of truth in Ron Angelone's career as a corrections boss came on Friday the 13th, October 1989, at a prison in northern Nevada. An inmate with a knife had taken a doctor hostage in the prison infirmary. The inmate made one demand: He wanted to die the next day, the 14th anniversary of his crime.
To die on that anniversary, he felt, would give some symmetry to his life's story. He didn't want to hurt the doctor, he told hostage negotiators. He would kill himself at midnight. All they had to do was wait.
Angelone, now the head of the Virginia Department of Corrections, never even considered it.
Four hours before midnight, his officers dropped a percussion bomb on the infirmary, stormed the premises and shot the inmate in the head.
"Things worked out for the best," Angelone told a newspaper reporter that night. "We did what we had to do."
The hostage incident took place four months after Angelone took over as director of the Nevada Bureau of Prisons. It set the tone for his five-year, no-nonsense, hell-for-leather reign over that state's 19 prisons and 6,500 inmates.
He made prisoners pay room and board and charged them for medicine and trips to the infirmary. He armed corrections officers with pellet guns and authorized them to "shoot to wound" inmates who got out of line. When a garbage truck drove over a prisoner who had escaped from the Nevada State Prison in a trash bag, Angelone was unsympathetic. When officials wondered why Angelone chose to house a notorious Utah inmate who had tried to escape from prisons in Utah, Colorado and New Mexico, he shrugged.
"We don't have a problem with inmates in Nevada," he told USA Today. "If they try to escape, we shoot them."
The inmate from Utah, Richard Worthington, was assigned to Nevada's Ely State Prison, recently dubbed "The Toughest Prison in America" by the tabloid news show "A Current Affair." Within days of his arrival at Ely, Worthington hanged himself with a bedsheet.
He couldn't take prison in Nevada, he told his ex-wife. Death was preferable.
"He said he was in a real prison and he couldn't get out, and he couldn't handle it," Angelone says with some satisfaction.
Angelone cultivates and enjoys his tough-guy reputation. The USA Today quote is enshrined on a shelf in his new office in Richmond, along with memorabilia from his tour in Vietnam as a combat infantryman for the Army's 101st Airborne Division, golf photos, baseball caps, coffee cups, a proclamation from the governor of Nevada and name tags from various corrections events such as the 1985 Texas Prison Rodeo.
"I can't talk," Angelone tells a caller during an interview. "I'm being interviewed by one of those pinko, left-wing, liberal reporters."
At 47, Angelone is tall, with salt-and-pepper hair, a graying mustache and a perpetual Dunhill cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Born and raised in Rhode Island, he has the accent of a New York City street cop and an attitude to match. He got into corrections as a college student and stayed in the business, taking on prison management positions in Illinois, Virginia, Oklahoma, Texas, California and Nevada.
In a prior stint with the Virginia Department of Corrections, Angelone was a superintendent of the Academy for Staff Development and Training in Waynesboro and served as warden of the state's prisons in Staunton and Marion. He left in 1980 to take a job as a warden in Oklahoma, then moved on to Texas, California and Nevada. By June 1989, he had ascended to the helm of the Nevada Bureau of Prisons.
"True story," Angelone says. ``It was during the elections; I was in my living room in Nevada watching C-Span, and [recently elected GOP Gov.] George Allen comes on. I said to myself, `I enjoy this man's philosophy. I enjoy his candidness' - never knowing he would win. And then I was watching on election night; I was glad to see he won.''
A few months later, Angelone got the call from Virginia. He wasn't interested at first, he says, "but when you come back to Virginia and you see the trees and you see the family values in this state ... It was a marriage of two things: the philosophy of George Allen, and providing my family with ... a positive experience."
On a recent bus tour of Southampton Correctional Center, Del. Glenn Croshaw, D-Virginia Beach, waxed enthusiastic.
"He's not your typical Virginia bureaucrat," Croshaw said. "I like his bluntness ... Make no mistake: He's blunt."
Del. William Robinson, D-Norfolk, got the same impression.
"There's no ambiguity with this guy," he said. "He's frank, and he's letting the inmates know that this is no picnic. This is prison. With him, it's going to be very clear that you better get with the program, or there's going to be difficulty."
Angelone, who took office in May, already has shuffled and reassigned some wardens in the state's 42 prisons and has other changes in mind. There are too many inmate assaults on prison staffers, he says. Perhaps, he says, Virginia's 22,000 inmates are not receiving sufficiently harsh punishments for "touching the cloth."
"If there are no major repercussions for doing that, then there's no reason not to do it," he says. "If there are major repercussions, an adult can decide not to do it."
In Nevada, Angelone says, inmates convicted of assaulting staff members get five years in an isolation cell and are shackled during their one hour of recreation a day.
Also in Nevada, officers armed with pellet guns are placed in strategic positions throughout the prisons. The guns, Angelone says, cut down on inmate-on-inmate rapes, beatings and murders.
They could serve the same purpose here.
"We shot 200 inmates last year in Nevada," he says. ``Nobody ever died. Nobody ever got permanent damage. But there are a lot of inmates out there who said, `Thank God for the guns.' At least they can walk in the yard.''
Predictably, Angelone's view of the world outrages civil libertarians and inmate advocates.
"He has a reputation as being an outrageously harsh, punitive administrator who is living in the 19th century," says Al Brownstein, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Prison Project in Washington.
"He engages in, condones and promotes practices that have long been abandoned by the mainstream people in American corrections ... At Ely [the maximum-security prison where Worthington hanged himself], guards have instructions to shoot at prisoners at the slightest provocation. That's unheard of in America today. It's counterproductive. It's wrong ... And it will have no impact on crime whatsoever. It will lead to an increase of crime, because prisoners will come out of there so full of hate and bent on revenge."
Angelone dismisses the ACLU and its assessment of him with contempt.
"Coming from that source, that's a compliment," he says. "That's an endorsement. The ACLU looks for every chance they can to undercut public safety in the interest of convicted felons ... I will not sacrifice the safety of correctional officers for inmates committing more felonies. You got that all down? You misquote me, I got friends that are inmates."
by CNB