So cracked, makes an Armadillo look smooth !

Prison employees arrests continue climb
Critics: Low pay, hiring shortfall gets blame

By Mike Ward
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, April 23, 2006

It might have seemed like a few tough weeks for Texas' prison system.
The system's former gang-enforcement chief pleaded guilty to sexually harassing employees. The personnel chief of the prison school system was arrested after being accused of lewd conduct at a Conroe park. A human resources official was sought as a fugitive after being charged with killing two pedestrians in an alleged drunken driving hit-and-run.
And three guards were arrested separately, one accused of raping a male convict, another of smuggling marijuana into a prison and the third of holding his ex-wife hostage at gunpoint.
Five weeks this spring saw almost two dozen arrests of correctional employees, on an assortment of felony and misdemeanor charges.
But it wasn't just a bad month. It was fairly typical for the state's 38,600-employee prison system, the second-largest in the country.
State records show at least 761 arrests of Texas Department of Criminal Justice employees in 2005. Another 148 arrests have been logged during the first two months of 2006 — a number that, if the trend continues, could set a record.
The number of employee arrests has steadily climbed during the past decade to a record 781 in 2003, the agency's statistics show, even as officials say the number of employees has remained about the same.
"Maybe it's bad luck, and maybe it's because we pay too little. Because we're 2,500 correctional officers short all the time, I guess we can't be too choosy about who we hire," said state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, which monitors Texas' corrections system. "Maybe the problem is where we built all these prisons. Maybe there isn't anything else to do out there but get in trouble."
Little else is known about the arrests. Prison officials said they could not immediately make public the details of who was arrested, when and on what specific charges. They also would not provide details on how many of the arrested employees were convicted.
Agency officials insist that the increasing numbers of arrests are no cause for concern. Others disagree, noting that lawbreaking by prison employees can compromise security and endanger lives. At the same time, they concede the problem is not just who is being hired, noting that several of those arrested in recent weeks are longtime employees.
The percentage of prison employees arrested in other states is lower.
"We probably had three or four dozen (arrests) last year," said Linda Foglia, a spokeswoman for the New York State Department of Correctional Services, the nation's third-largest prison system, with 32,000 workers in 69 prisons, 21,000 of them correctional officers.
In Florida, the fourth-largest state prison system, 297 of 26,700 Department of Corrections workers were arrested in the past year, about 1 of every 90. The Texas ar- rest rate was 1 in 51.
"It's not a good situation," said Brian Olsen, executive director of the correctional employees union, which represents about 4,000 of the agency's 23,700 correctional officers. "But when you're hiring so many new people so fast — the turnover is about 500 people a month — you're going to get some bad apples. And that's happening more than occasionally."
Still, Olsen and others involved with the prison system said they think the situation is improving. In recent months, they said, the quality of new hires has improved.
At the same time, officials are "getting better at catching the bad apples," Olsen said.

Ongoing problems
The issue surrounding arrested and convicted employees sometimes working in Texas prisons is nothing new.
Ask longtime employees about it, and many will tell you about a case in the late 1980s in which a man once convicted of conspiring to kill the Huntsville sheriff was discovered working in maintenance at the Huntsville prison while still on probation, after which he was quickly cashiered by red-faced prison officials.
But a growing chorus of officials and employees worry that the increasing numbers of arrests bode ill for the agency, leaving some wondering whether hiring standards have been relaxed too much and why the strict line that's supposed to separate the guards and the guarded has become increasingly blurred.
"If they're breaking the law, we want them out of there," Olsen said. "If they're bringing dope into the units, or cell phones or tobacco or any other contraband, and selling it to the inmates, then the inmates own them. And pretty soon, the inmates will control the unit.
"That endangers people's lives," he said.
Carol Blair Johnson, the prison system's human resources director, said that since 1985, the agency's hiring criteria have gotten more restrictive on past criminal convictions.
"There are no policy exceptions to the employment criteria relating to misdemeanor and felony convictions," she said.
Under current policy, enacted in 1998, no convicted felons can work in the prison system.
But prisons will accept applicants convicted of Class A or Class B misdemeanors, the two most serious categories, so long as the convictions are more than five years old. Under state law, people convicted of Class A misdemeanors (such as second-offense drunken driving) are prohibited from becoming police officers. Those with a Class B conviction (first-offense drunken driving) can be considered after five years.
Prison employees convicted of such crimes are terminated or allowed to resign.
Anyone convicted of Class C misdemeanors, the least serious, can be considered for work in the state's prisons.
"For security reasons, it is in the agency's best interest to hire correctional officers with limited or no criminal history," said Johnson, noting that pre-employment background checks are conducted to weed out those who do not meet the qualifications. Roughly half of the applicants are hired, Johnson said, though she said the reasons vary: Some fail required exams or the background check; some want to work only in areas of Texas where prison jobs are not open; and some take another job.
Since February 2005, applicants no longer have to take a physical agility test. The reason: Too many applicants might not pass, officials concede.
"The number of correctional officer applicants reflects the decrease in the number of Texas residents who are seeking employment," Johnson explains on the agency's Web site. "In order to ensure that staffing and security needs continue to be met in the current economic climate, the agency must assess various factors that may further influence the number of correctional officer applicants."
Prison officials say their hiring standards are strong and fairly standard: An applicant must be a U.S. citizen or an alien authorized to work in the United States, be 18 years old, have a high school diploma or General Educational Development certificate and never have been convicted of a felony, a drug-related offense or a crime involving domestic violence, among other qualifications.
Increasing workload
In March, when the agency hired 514 correctional officers, Johnson said it was still 2,616 short. Critics say low wages are a key problem. Texas ranks 47th among the 50 states in correctional officers' salaries, starting trainees at about $22,000 a year.
Critics and agency insiders both argue that if Texas were to increase its wage scale for correctional officers and raise its hiring standards, the high numbers of arrests among prison employees would decline.
In addition, they say, all employees should be electronically fingerprinted to improve enforcement, a system implemented nearly a decade ago for convicts, but not for employees.
To be sure, the increasing numbers of employee arrests mean more work for the prison system's Office of the Inspector General, the independent bureau that serves as an investigative watchdog.
The office is working with fewer resources just three years after lawmakers slashed its budget to save money. Seventy employees, half of them investigators, were cut.
"It's a 24-7 job. There's no hanging it up at 5 o'clock any day," said Inspector General John Moriarty.
Despite the increasing workload, officials say they increasingly rely on technology such as hidden cameras to catch bad actors — with success.
Consider what showed up months ago on a surveillance videotape in a hallway at one prison, the contents of which were described by prison officials.
A female guard grabs an inmate and holds him in a long embrace — a fireable offense.
A sergeant practices hitting a guard in the face, then slugs him hard. Investigators think that was to cover for an
unauthorized use of force, so the guard could say he was hit first by an inmate when he wasn't — another fireable offense.
A short time later, another guard is caught on camera leading an inmate into a room where they have sex — another fireable offense.
For the record, officials said, all those employees were let go.
mward@statesman.com; 445-1712

Arrests of Texas prison employees
Numbers are totals for the calendar year
Year Number
1991 140
1992 189
1993 229
1994 350
1995 529
1996 548
1997 562
1998 598
1999 560
2000 632
2001 630
2002 666
2003 781
2004 704
2005 761
2006 *148

*2006 numbers are for January and February.
Source: Texas Department of Criminal Justice

source: http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/04/23PRISON.html
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A miscue that still troubles
Klan leader almost hired as prison guard

By Mike Ward
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, April 23, 2006

HUNTSVILLE — Five years later, they're still wondering how James Lee Roesch slipped in.
Roesch, then 20, was an aspiring Texas prison guard. He'd passed his background checks and was within weeks of graduation from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's spring training academy. He'd even volunteered to work on the tougher-than-nails East Texas prison that houses death row.
Then, he opened his mouth.
According to internal prison system documents obtained by the Austin American-Statesman, Roesch seemed to know too much about the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, a notorious prison gang, during a presentation to his trainee class by a gang-enforcement officer.
He even bragged that "he had friends who were members of ABT and who had been in prison."
Prison investigators decided to dig deeper into Roesch's background.
What they found was a story that never has been publicly told: Roesch was the national Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, whose white separatist views had earned him national headlines and a rap sheet with Ohio authorities, two years before the prison system hired him.
Somehow, that hadn't turned up in prison officials' previous background checks, which included a search of state criminal history files with the Department of Public Safety. If it had, officials insist, Roesch would never have been hired in March 2001.
Before the prison system hired him, Roesch had been interviewed dozens of times by reporters, chronicling his fast rise to become head the Klan's old-school, hard-line Knights of the White Kamellia faction. His photo in Klan regalia had appeared in national magazines.
Police in Ohio — where he lived before moving to Jasper in 1999, just after the racially motivated dragging death there of James Byrd — had arrested him as a teenager for menacing another teenager with a handgun and for plastering posters to a tree that demanded: "Deport Niggers."
In one magazine interview in April 2000, Roesch even acknowledged pasting stickers on Byrd's gravestone in Jasper: "A Ku Klux Klansman Was Here."
On his application to become a prison guard, Roesch acknowledged the Ohio arrests for misdemeanor crimes — menacing and mutilation of a public tree. But apparently no one delved further, officials now privately concede, since misdemeanors do not automatically keep someone from being hired as a prison guard in Texas.
"It is my belief that Trainee Roesch may be associated with or have ties to Aryan Brotherhood of Texas and that he needs to be monitored for ABT activity," gang-enforcement officer Irma Fernandez wrote in a memo after meeting Roesch at a training session a few weeks after he was hired. "Trainee Roesch was informed that correctional officers are not to associate with ex-convicts. Roesch then corrected himself and said that he has not associated with them."
Roesch was interviewed by internal affairs investigators on April 12 and gave a written statement detailing his rise to power in the Klan, beginning at age 15 when he and a friend "started a little group called NWO (New White Order)." Ohio state police quickly filled in other details.
Roesch was let go four days later, officials said.
Roesch, who lived in the Woodville area at the time he was hired, could not be reached for comment last week.
Though investigators were unsettled that Roesch was even hired, another fact left them even more unsettled.
Just after he started his training, Roesch submitted a handwritten request to work in Livingston, where the prison that houses death row is located. There, two of the three men convicted of killing Byrd awaited execution.
Did he want to work on death row? And to what end?

source: http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/04/23PRISONSIDE.html
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COMMENTARY: JOHN KELSO

Prison guards, prisoners: in Texas, you can't tell 'em apart
Sunday, April 30, 2006
The Texas prison system has some of the meanest, hardest criminals on the planet.
And the convicts are pretty bad, too.
Whom would you rather meet in a dark alley over in Huntsville: a guard, or an inmate? Heck, if you met one of each, you might get mugged twice.
It's as if some prison employees are working on their felony merit badge. The personnel chief of the prison school system gets busted for lewd conduct at a park in Conroe, the former gang enforcement head pleads guilty to sexually harassing employees, one guard gets popped for raping a convict and another gets nailed for holding his ex-wife hostage at gunpoint.
That's why I'm suggesting Prison System Swap Day, which I'm hoping will improve prison system employee decorum.
On Prison Swap Day, to be held once a month, the inmates would become guards for the day, and the guards would become inmates. That's right. On this day the two sides would simply change uniforms and the sides of the bars they stand on. A little bit of this treatment and maybe the prison workers might straighten the heck up.
There could be arts and crafts. It would be interesting to see who could make the highest quality shiv: a guard, or an inmate.
It's often been said that there's a thin line between law enforcement and criminals. But at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the line has gotten so thin you could read the newspaper through it.
Look, 148 TDCJ employees were arrested during the first two months of this year. If that pace keeps up, 888 TDCJ workers will be busted this year, which would break the old 2003 TDCJ record of 783 by 105 arrests.
See, the problem in Texas is that our prison system is a major industry. We've got so many darned lockups that it takes 38,600 workers just to keep these joints up and running. And who at high school career day raises his hand when the guidance counselor asks, "Hey, y'all, who in here wants to work at a place where the men bang their dinnerware with a large spoon?"
Hey, it ain't the class valedictorian.
So, you got prison correctional officers in 2005 being popped for assault and family violence, hot checks, smuggling cigarettes into jail, cruelty to animals, carloads of DWIs (maybe the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission is running a sting operation at the Walls Unit), bigamy, even littering.
Naturally, it was a higher-up guard — a lieutenant — who got arrested for bigamy. Only a lieutenant could afford that second double-wide.
And littering? You'd think a prison guard could at least pick up after himself. That's the embarrassing one, if you're in the slammer.
"Whaddaya in for?" "Littering." "Hey, girls, dig this. Missy here is in for gum wrappers."
So anyway, I'm thinking it would be swell if the guards and the prisoners just switched positions on an occasional Swap Day.
Maybe that way some of the convicts' good behavior would rub off on the guards.

John Kelso's column appears on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Contact him at 445-3606 or jkelso@statesman.com.

source: http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/04/30kelso.html