3 years later: Warden warns shrinking staff to remain vigilant
By Larry Lough - llough@svnmail.com
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| Inmate John Spires watches a TV program during a group therapy session, February 13, 2009. Spires wears a green jump suit to identify himself as an escape risk and is housed in an escape proof plexiglass stall as he partakes in the session. Tamms super-max prison located in Tamms, Illinois, is a facility described by critics as Illinois' Guantanamo Bay. (John Smierciak/Chicago Tribune/MCT) |
After passing through the double fence that surrounds the medium security Dixon Correctional Center, it’s easy for visitors to forget they’re inside a state prison.
» Related link — Was he legally sane? Case turns on Spires’ mental health.
The campus has a casual atmosphere where inmates often walk unescorted between buildings to attend classes or work assignments.
“I have to say, Dixon is not a cookie-cutter-type institution,” Warden Nedra Chandler admitted. “We’ve got a lot of space. [Inmates] don’t have that feeling that they’re closed in. It’s more like a college campus; that’s what they call it.”
Even inside the secured and monitored residential buildings that are spread around the prison’s 462 acres in northeast Dixon, the men generally look comfortable and relaxed as they socialize in the day rooms in front of a television, over a game of cards, or during an impromptu hair-braiding.
They don’t look like thieves and burglars, drug dealers and armed robbers, even killers. But they are, and Chandler says it’s best not to forget that.
“Everybody gets ... sometimes you get complacent,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “You just got to remind staff this is not the place where you become complacent. Inmates are not your friends.”
THREE YEARS ago this Monday, John Spires was an inmate in the notorious “X House” at Dixon Correctional Center.
The building gets its name from the aerial view of its X shape, formed by its four wings.
But the name also reflects the forbidding nature of the prison’s maximum security psychiatric unit.
The building houses mentally ill inmates, like Spires, 53, a serial rapist who has been locked up the past 35 years.
For privacy reasons, the Illinois Department of Corrections will not provide information on Spires’ mental condition or the medications he has taken.
A sister who lives in Orland Park, however, has said Spires has fought mental illness since he was a child. Since he has been in prison, he has been medicated to regulate his behavior, she said.
Still, things inside a prison are relative to their surroundings, and Spires once was considered something of a model prisoner in X House, so much so that he was given a work assignment that allowed him some freedom of movement inside the building.
That was, by all accounts, a mistake.
ACCORDING TO a Notice of Intent of Claim for Personal Injury pending before the Illinois Court of Claims, this is what happened inside X House on May 11, 2006:
“[Victim] is a psychologist who at all times relevant was and is employed by Wexford Health Sources Inc. In the course of her employment, [victim] provided service to inmates at the Dixon Correctional Center in Dixon, Illinois. While at the Dixon Correction Center on 5/11/06, [victim] was called to another inmate’s prison cell to discuss some issues that he was having. While standing outside the inmate’s cell, another inmate who was working on a janitorial work detail grabbed [victim] by her hair, held a knife to her throat and pulled her into the maintenance storage closet. The inmate barricaded the door so that no one could open it from the outside. [Victim] was held hostage by the inmate for approx. 25 hours, from 12:30 PM on 5/11/06 until 1:30 PM on 5/12/06. [Victim] was bound with tape on her wrists, ankles and mouth and sustained some abrasions in those areas. She was also raped by her captor. [Victim] was eventually released and taken via ambulance to Catherine Shaw Hospital in Dixon, Illinois. [Victim] has also been treating with a clinical psychologist ... on a weekly basis since 6/16/06.”
Spires is alleged to have been “another inmate.” He has since been moved to Tamms Correctional Center, a state maximum security prison at the southern tip of Illinois.
WHY WAS Spires – an inmate of the psychiatric unit – allowed the freedom that is associated with a work assignment?
Prison officials have declined to discuss how or why Spires was chosen for a job, although they might have to answer that in an official setting. The then-29-year-old psychologist who was attacked has filed a claim alleging the prison’s negligence and carelessness led to the assault. She is asking for the maximum that state law allows for such damages: $100,000. That action is pending in the Illinois Court of Claims.
Three months after the 2006 attack, officials at the Dixon Correctional Center changed the policy that spells out how inmates are given prison jobs, such as janitors, kitchen workers and landscapers, among others.
Among the changes: The warden must approve work assignments for any inmate from the psychiatric unit, where Spires had lived. Such jobs previously could be handed out by the warden’s designated “assignment officer.”
Another change: Inmates’ assignments must be reviewed every 6 months.
And for the first time, language was added to the policy to express interest in safety and security: “... [O]ffenders’ assignments shall be reviewed and rotated periodically to aid in the compliance to initiatives of the Agency to provide a safe and secure environment for staff and offenders.”
The revisions expanded a four-page policy to seven pages, mostly to accommodate specific procedures under a new section titled, “Review and Rotation of Offender Assignments.” Sauk Valley Newspapers obtained a copy of that public record by filing a request under the state’s Freedom of Information Act. Before the Illinois Department of Corrections produced a copy, prison officials blacked out about a third of the changes, citing safety and security exceptions allowed under the public records law.
Chandler said the changes were not completely new. She said she had informally reviewed policies every month.
“We always had a review policy for assignments,” the warden said. “Department heads or supervisors are always reviewing their inmate work force. So we’ve always had that.
“I think it became a more formal process when we had the critical incident that we had. When things happen, whether they’re insignificant or critical, you’re always looking at it because everything deserves some tweaking. We’ve got to tighten it up so everybody knows specifically what they need to do. We made an assumption that everybody understood what the broader language meant ...”
THE WARDEN would not say whether other security changes were made in light of that “critical incident” 3 years ago. She said she couldn’t comment because of civil and criminal proceedings pending in the May 2006 attack.
But a group of prison employees, in a later interview at their union headquarters, offered details about what DCC Lt. Robert Armour called “subtle procedural changes” that were made after the assault:
• Work assignments inside X House are now given to minimum security inmates from outside the building. Although nothing in the revised policy bans the use of X House inmates, the procedure for assigning them is more stringent.
• A “restricted padlock” now secures the supply closet where the attack occurred. “I don’t even have a key,” said correctional officer Shane Oltmans, 35, a 14-year employee of the Dixon prison who often works in X House.
• Nonsecurity personnel get a personal, one-on-one escort throughout their visit in X House. “If we can’t be with them, they wait,” said officer Lester Ruffin, 47.
Prison officials are also secretive about many aspects of the work assignment policy, fearing that security could be compromised if certain procedures were made public.
Among the information prison officials censored is a list of routine jobs assigned to prisoners and a list of members of the assignment review committee. The blacked-out areas make it unclear whether the policy lists members of the committee by name or merely by job description. Much of the “redacted” language is similarly obscured so as to make it impossible to know details of the policy.
BUT DIXON Correctional Center has one issue of safety and security that cannot be covered up with a black marker: A dramatic drop in the number of staff members.
DCC began this decade, in 2001, with nearly 600 staff members. The prison started this year with 478, a decrease of nearly 20 percent.
The inmate population, however, has remained steady, hovering around 95 percent of its capacity of 2,250.
Chandler, who says 620 is her “magic number” of employees for full staffing, is philosophical about the declining guard-to-prisoner ratio, in light of state government’s severe financial problems.
“People are always going to have varied opinions on what that ratio needs to be,” she said. “But you know my staffing is what it is; my inmate population is what it is. I can’t change those.”
For her, safety is as much about strictly following procedures as it is about current staffing levels.
“Am I comfortable that every day I come in here, staff are coming into a safe environment and inmates are living in a safe environment? Yes,” she said. “That doesn’t mean that I don’t have to address fundamental correctional responsibility for all staff.
“We’ve got to remind them about the ABCs of security. Sometimes you’ve got to remind staff about escorting movement, about the things that you sometimes think that you can take for granted. There’s not a supervisor in any work environment that doesn’t have to remind staff on occasion what their job entails and how to go about getting that job done.”
NO ONE doubts that a prison – even a medium security prison like Dixon’s – can be a dangerous place to work.
“You never know what day you might walk in and they’re going to carry you out,” said Rick Ruthart, 38, a correctional officer for 14 years.
Members of Local 817 of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which represents most of the prison staff, say job cuts have made prison work more dangerous in more ways than one.
For one, there are fewer officers to respond when an “all call” goes out for immediate help. At one time, Ruthart said, a “sea of staff” would come running.
“It’s scary now,” he said. “You’re lucky if you see five.”
For another, fewer staff members are available to supervise recreational activities for inmates. Filling leisure time with games and exercise leaves less time for such things as gang membership, gambling and fighting, staff members say.
“You lose staff, you lose activities,” officer Oltmans said during an interview on a recent afternoon. “Intramural sports are down to nothing; they took half the weights away from them. ... Take away activities, you have more problems.”
And those problems now come more often.
“Staff assaults are a weekly thing anymore,” Oltmans added. “Use of force is a daily thing. I used force four times today.”
Third, a reduced staff means more mandatory overtime, a practice Warden Chandler does not deny. Repeated double shifts can make officers less attentive, said Lt. Armour, who reported that he was forced to work every day of the month last August.
“The staff we have is tired,” Armour said. “... You’re almost a slave to the job, because you can’t go home. If they want you to work that job, that’s it.”
Prison work does pay better than most jobs in this market. A correctional officer can make $65,000 with the overtime that’s required these days.
“I don’t get paid for what I do,” officer Ruffin said. “I get paid for what I might have to do.”
Union President Harold Hunt, 66, an educator at the prison, says more staff would help them do it better.
“We always feel we need more staff,” Hunt said. “For years we have cried for, picketed for, petitioned for more staff. We’re fortunate in that we haven’t had critical situations when we have felt severely understaffed.”
CHANDLER DOESN’T deny that staffing is a problem.
“My biggest frustration – but I understand it – is staffing,” she said. “I want my staffing levels to be where they need to be, based on our assessment. ...
“I think no one will question the fact that we, through attrition, have lost a substantial amount of staff across the board, not just in security. So I would like to see some of that staff replaced. I would like to see some positions filled. I don’t think anybody else would disagree with that.”
But she acknowledges that the state budget, facing a deficit of about $12 billion, is in no shape to offer her more staff. Correctional officers say that even shortages in supplies have led inmates to fight over toilet paper and laundry soap.
“It all impacts, generally, the day-to-day life of the inmate population,” Lt. Armour said. “People can take only so much cold water and dirty laundry – even felons.”
The warden said she appreciated the staff’s efforts under those conditions.
“I’ll be the first one to say it: I have some of the best staff in the state,” she said. “And despite our staffing challenges, the staff has risen to the occasion. They work the overtime; they do what they need to do to get things done, to keep the public safe, to keep the inmate population safe, to keep themselves safe.”
Union President Hunt suggested prison employees might do their jobs too well. He said an “excellent staff” masks the prison’s “severe shortages” in many positions.
“The downside to that is that if you’re not [fully staffed], you’re going to have a lot of people getting hurt,” officer Oltmans said. “And that’s what it’s going to take, unfortunately, to increase staff.”
“And,” Lt. Armour added, “we might not even get it then.”
