Al Mascitti
By AL MASCITTI
09/02/2004
It's been six weeks since an inmate at Delaware Correctional Center took a counselor captive and raped her before being shot to death as he attempted to kill her.
At the time, people outside the state Department of Correction called for an outside investigation into how it happened, but Gov. Ruth Ann Minner wanted the department to conduct its own investigation first. The public was told prison Commissioner Stan Taylor would finish the internal probe by the end of August. It's now September, and no report has been produced.
Since the absurdity of allowing Taylor to investigate his own department hasn't convinced Minner she's wrong, perhaps she should consider the experience of Douglas Ingram.
Ingram worked for the state Department of Correction from 1980 to 1985 before joining the federal prison program, where he specialized in analyzing security procedures. Last year he returned to the Delaware prison system at the Sussex Correctional Institution in Georgetown as an employee of Civigenics, the contractor that runs the department's drug-abuse programs.
After an incident last winter in which a prisoner escaped after being transported from that prison to the Kent County Courthouse, Ingram said he talked to friends in the Department of Correction. He said that if they wanted him to, he could audit their security procedures for transporting inmates.
He spent two days, on his own time and for no fee, examining procedures. What he found appalled him. Prisoners weren't thoroughly searched. Drivers didn't know which prisoners they were transporting. Officers received no specialized training for handling prisoners in transport. "I couldn't even say they were violating their policies, because they had no policies," Ingram says. "I had to say, 'Here's what you're doing, and here's what you probably should be doing.' "
When he presented the information to officials in early February, he says they promised to move it up the chain of command. But as the weeks wore on, more security breaches hit the news. One prisoner brought a razor blade into a courtroom, where he slashed his own throat, causing a mistrial. Another was caught with a key to his handcuffs, which he promptly swallowed.
That wasn't the part that troubled Ingram. "Prisoners can get access to keys at several points," he said. "What I didn't understand was how he left [the prison] with a pocket full of pepper," which he intended to throw in his guard's face before using the handcuff key. "You can't hide that anywhere but in a pocket, which means they hadn't searched him. They weren't doing anything I asked them to do, things they could have done at little or no cost."
Three weeks later, the key still hadn't been recovered, so the inmate was taken to Beebe Hospital in Lewes for X-rays. It turned out that he had excreted the key, hidden it in his clothing and used it to open his handcuffs in the hospital. Ingram said this near-disaster convinced him to take his report to the Delaware State News.
Within hours of its publication June 4, Ingram said he was suspended, then transferred to a halfway house in Georgetown. He said he is no longer permitted to work inside a Delaware prison.
Stan Taylor, meanwhile, remains in charge of investigating his own department's failures. Contact Al Mascitti at 324-2866 or amascitti@delawareonline.com.
