Oklahoma prison called drug haven by inmates
By Kevin Dayton
Advertiser Capitol Bureau Chief
Inmates and former staff members at an Oklahoma prison where some female prisoners from Hawai'i are housed say illegal drugs are abundant there.
Wisconsin inmates who served time at the privately operated prison repeatedly told monitors from their home state that drugs were widely available there. Former prison employees told The Advertiser that the Oklahoma prison staff seemed unable or unwilling to cope with the drug problem.
A former inmate from Hawai'i, recently paroled after serving time at the Central Oklahoma Correctional Facility, said drugs were far more plentiful in Oklahoma than at the Women's Community Correctional Center in Kailua, where she had also served time.
Inmates at the Oklahoma prison had access to heroin, crack cocaine, crystal methamphetamine and marijuana, said the inmate, who asked that her name not be used because, as a parolee, she feared retribution from authorities.
"Occasionally, somebody would bring something in" to the Kailua facility, she said. "(In Oklahoma) this was a whole drug-dealing thing, where they had money sent on the wire, put on people's books (accounts kept by inmates). ... There were drug dealers in this prison, a whole bunch of them. They'd have it regularly; they'd get shipments in. This is not the occasional person who was able to hide something from the police when they got brought in from the street."
Total bill about $24 million
Hawai'i spends about $24 million a year to house about 1,200 men and women in privately operated Mainland prisons because facilities here are packed. State officials say housing inmates on the Mainland is an inexpensive short-term solution to crowding at Hawai'i's prisons, but troubles ranging from gang violence, drugs and sexual abuse involving Hawai'i inmates have surfaced recently in facilities in Arizona and Oklahoma.
Officials of Dominion Correctional Services, which runs the Oklahoma prison, and the Hawai'i Department of Public Safety said there are no signs of an unusual level of drug use at the prison.
"We're not aware of any pervasive problem that is excessive (compared) to any other facility or any other system," said Jim Hunter, vice president of Dominion Properties. "Every correctional facility in the world has some level of drug activity or contraband activity.
"There is a tremendous amount of effort spent in interdiction, but where there's a will, there's always going to be efforts made. But I have no reason to believe that it is greater than any other comparable institution in the country."
There are 63 Hawai'i women in the prison under a contract that costs the state about $1.1 million a year. The facility also houses inmates from Oklahoma.
The state first sent inmates to the Central Oklahoma Correctional Facility outside Oklahoma City in 1998 and is negotiating a new contract with Dominion. The prison was operated by the Sarasota, Fla.-based Correctional Services Corp. until December, when the operation was taken over by Dominion.
Former prison staff members such as Sid Stell, who worked as a training officer, captain and acting chief of security at the prison, said drugs were so widely available by early last year that inmates would brazenly smoke marijuana in the six prison dormitories.
"We did urinalysis on inmates on a regular basis and they were clicking positive, like, most of the time," said Stell, who is now a deputy sergeant with the Oklahoma County Sheriff's Department.
Linda Phipps, a former grievance officer and compliance officer who worked at the prison until March, said: "Drugs are rampant there. They are absolutely all over the place."
Sandra Green, who worked as a corrections officer at the prison in 1999 and 2000, said she was astonished at how often corrections officials turned up evidence of drug use. She estimated she smelled inmates smoking drugs inside the prison on 10 occasions. Once, she said, she saw inmates lined up out the door of a bathroom for a chance to smoke crack cocaine.
Green said she intervened, seized crack cocaine and had an inmate punished. But she said she doesn't believe that officials at the prison were aggressively seeking out the drug smugglers or users.
Fired but not prosecuted
Staff members were caught smuggling drugs and were fired, Green said, but they weren't prosecuted.
Stell said he obtained a confession from a corrections officer who was smuggling drugs into the facility, but said the local district attorney declined to prosecute because he believed that the guard was not properly advised of his rights.
Larry Fields, president of Dominion Correctional Services, said he is not aware of any officers' being caught or fired for smuggling drugs. He said it is possible but unlikely there was such a case before Dominion took over daily operations of the prison from Correctional Services Corp.
Fields said the Oklahoma Department of Corrections demands that officers be prosecuted for smuggling.
"Obviously, you'd want to do that immediately," Fields said. "That would be of great benefit to the facility because you'd send a message to other folks that we're not going to tolerate that sort of thing."
Fields also said urine tests of the inmates "don't suggest that we have more of problem than any other facility that I've been involved in, but we do have some positives from time to time."
Authorities are investigating the drug-related death of an inmate in January. The state medical examiner found inmate Gwenetta Holmes, 40, of Oklahoma had used cocaine before her death. The autopsy listed heart disease as the probable cause of death, with drug abuse listed as a secondary cause, according to Jerry Massie, spokesman for the Oklahoma Department of Corrections.
Fields said that Holmes tested positive for drug use about two weeks before she died, and she was punished. The autopsy showed she used cocaine again shortly before her death.
Stell was also responsible for training corrections officers at the prison, and drugs were a problem partly because the prison couldn't seem to recruit well-qualified staff.
For example, Stell said he warned a crew who supervised visits that drugs were being smuggled in tennis shoes. The inmates and their visitors would wear similar shoes and swap during the visit, allowing the inmate to return to the facility with shoes that had drugs concealed inside.
The following Monday, Stell said, an excited officer told him someone had been caught over the weekend trading shoes. Stell said he listened incredulously as the officer recounted how he approached the inmate and visitor and announced, "I saw you switch shoes. You put your real shoes on and get out of here."
The point to that story, Stell said, is "no matter how much I trained 'em ... no matter how much I told them, unless I told them specifically what to do, some of those people didn't have a clue."
The inmate from Hawai'i agreed: "I mean, people had everything in there. They don't know how to search stuff in there. It's very easy to get through visitation. Or a lot of times, it's officers bringing it in."
Wisconsin monitors
Wisconsin placed about 150 inmates at the Central Oklahoma Correctional Facility for a year, and those inmates twice told contract monitors from Wisconsin that drugs were readily available inside the facility.
On Feb. 26, 2000, the Wisconsin monitors filed a report that noted: "Several inmates expressed a concern with the high amount of drugs available in the facility." Those concerns were relayed to the prison administration, according to the report.
A follow-up report by the Wisconsin monitor on May 10, 2000, stated "many inmates report that drugs are very available in this facility." Then-warden Howard Ray disputed that, arguing that drug tests of the inmates did not suggest widespread drug use, according to the Wisconsin report.
"You can't stop it 100 percent. Visitors bring it in and they hide it in various parts of their bodies, and obviously a metal detector won't find drugs," said Jan Mink, a contract monitor for Wisconsin. "We just didn't have any good evidence that it was anything out of the ordinary."
Ted Sakai, director of the Hawai'i Department of Public Safety, also said the urinalysis testing and other information from Oklahoma suggest the drug use there isn't out of line with other prisons.
"The use of drugs by our inmates hasn't been raised to a level where we need to investigate or consider canceling the contract," Sakai said. "Drugs are a problem at every facility, and we wouldn't be surprised if we had inmates who use drugs. It's something we will monitor very closely — we always do — but it hasn't been a concern at that level yet at that facility."
Reach Kevin Dayton at 525-8070 or kdayton@honoluluadvertiser.com.
