ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, July 14, 1996 TAG: 9607150084
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-6 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: HARRISONBURG
SOURCE: Associated Press
State prison officials, alleging misuse of funds, have shut down an inmate-run peace study group headed by former death-row inmate Joseph M. Giarratano Jr.
Prison officials contend that funds intended for the peace group were used fraudulently, although no criminal charges have been filed.
Giarratano, 38, returned to the Augusta Correctional Center this week with minor back and arm wounds from a stabbing at another prison last week.
David Botkins, a spokesman for the Virginia Department of Corrections, said Wednesday that Giarratano's ``Peace Studies - Alternatives to Violence'' program at the prison was closed after an internal investigation indicated inmates were using money for their own purposes.
``Money was being used for personal use and gain,'' Botkins said. ``Criminal activities within an institution will not be tolerated.''
Botkins would not say how much money was involved, but he indicated it was substantial. ``We're not talking nickel-and-dime stuff,'' he told the Harrisonburg Daily News-Record.
Giarratano was being held in what Botkins called ``investigative segregation'' while officials looked into the attack on him last week at the Buckingham Correctional Center, where he was held for nearly a year. He was not seriously injured.
Supporters of Giarratano's peace studies group contend the prison system unfairly shut it down as part of an overall toughening of prison conditions, from limited parole to longer sentences.
Colman McCarthy, a syndicated columnist who runs his own peace studies program at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., said Giarratano's program was highly successful, with 200 of the nearly 1,000 Augusta inmates enrolled and 300 on a waiting list when it closed.
Inmates read and discussed the works of Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Leo Tolstoy and others noted for work against violence, he said.
``Since the program's inception, not one of the participants received an incident report for engaging in violent activity,'' McCarthy wrote in a letter to Peace Studies supporters.
``It was a wonderfully successful program from what I know about it,'' said Gerald Zerkin, a Richmond lawyer who appealed Giarratano's case to then-Gov. Douglas Wilder in 1991.
Giarratano was on death row from 1979 to 1991. He was convicted in Norfolk Circuit Court of the slashing death of 15-year-old Michelle Kline and her mother, Barbara Kline, 44.
Wilder gave Giarratano a conditional pardon in February 1991 and commuted his sentence to life in prison.
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