Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 26, 1995 TAG: 9511250015
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Still, because Allen was elected on a platform with parole and corrections at its heart, and has continued to make political use of prison issues, the embarrassments for him are keener than they might otherwise be.
Particulars:
The resignation under fire of Parole Board Chairman John B. Metzger III, an Allen appointee and former political director for the state Republican Party.
Metzger's stated reason for resigning: "irreconcilable differences" with other board members. He has conceded telling inappropriate sexual jokes to the other four board members, three of whom are women. More serious, if true, are allegations that he falsified parole warrants and warrant dates. However, an internal auditor's probe, now under review by the State Police, concluded that Metzger had not done so.
The Allen administration deserves credit for undertaking the investigation and for promptly securing Metzger's resignation once the report was in the hands of Secretary of Public Safety Jerry Kilgore. Even so, Metzger was a political operative, and he was one of Allen's most important appointments, given the emphasis on parole reform in the 1993 campaign. Metzger's downfall puts the governor's judgment in a poor light.
The death in September of boot-camp inmate Ronell F. Mason.
Mason, 24, died during his first day of physical conditioning at Southampton Intensive Treatment Center, apparently as a result of an irregular heart rhythm perhaps related to his sickle cell anemia.
Failure to detect Mason's conditions during routine medical screenings may well be defensible. Mason, convicted in Tazewell County of distributing cocaine, appears to have been an appropriate candidate for the boot camp, an intensive three-month program in lieu of longer prison terms for youthful offenders. Virginia, indeed, needs more boot camps.
The Department of Corrections can be faulted, though, for not releasing any information about Mason's death at the time. More than two months later, the department confirmed the death only after an inquiry from this newspaper. The scenario raises an obvious question: What else is being kept from the public to maintain a positive political spin? The noncommunicativeness is in accord with the spirit of Allen's more general gag order for state workers.
The administration's downward revision, released the other day, of prison-population forecasts through the year 2003.
In ordinary circumstances, the revision wouldn't be the stuff of embarrassment. After all, projecting into the future inevitably involves guesswork subject to modification as new information emerges. In this instance, however, Allen had been treating the earlier projections as hard fact - while his critics questioned their accuracy.
In the 1995 General Assembly session, Allen used the higher projections in asking lawmakers to speed up funding authorization for prisons whose sites had not even been chosen. Then, in this fall's legislative campaigns, Allen tried to make the assembly's refusal to approve the speed-up authorization an issue against the Democrats. In opposing the prison-construction funding as premature, it now turns out, the Democrats were right.
Traditionally, the public's attitude toward prisons, as with landfills, has been out of sight, out of mind. In bringing corrections policy to the center of the political stage, while launching a major spending program for prisons, Allen has changed that - and invited heightened, overdue scrutiny.
by CNB