By AL MASCITTI
02/22/2005
Gov. Ruth Ann Minner doesn't want you to read today's column.
In a prepared statement issued to accompany the release of a report on the July 12 hostage incident at Delaware Correctional Center near Smyrna, Minner was quoted as saying: "For anyone with an interest in this report, I would urge that they not rely on the media's or anyone else's summary of it. It is a document that can only be properly judged in total, not in pieces."
For anyone with an interest in political mendacity, it should be noted that the report includes an executive summary, and I would agree with the governor to a point: Don't stop there. That summary doesn't do justice to the unholy mess Minner's blue-ribbon panel describes.
I doubt that's the point Minner wanted to put across. Indeed, she and her team of handlers did their best to highlight the portions that praised what went right that dreadful day when counselor Cassandra Arnold was abducted and raped by inmate Scott Miller after he passed through two security checkpoints armed with a homemade knife. Miller was later shot and killed by a corrections officer.
But asking the public to focus on the positives is like praising the work of the air traffic controllers after a plane crash - that's nice, but it's beside the point. The system doesn't work unless everything goes right, and if everything had gone right this task force wouldn't exist. (That said, the panel deserves praise for overcoming a crushing deadline to craft a report impressive for its thoroughness, readability and willingness to tell troubling truths.)
Despite Minner's attempts to soften the blow, parts of the report are scathing in their findings, though not their language. The authors describe a prison that is everything its critics have alleged for the past eight months: understaffed by people who are virtually untrained and managed by superiors who are unresponsive to ever-worsening security and morale problems.
Minner and her prison chief, Stan Taylor, have made the right noises about accepting responsibility for the situation. But given Delaware's track record on prisons, that means little. The department's critics have noted for months that when past prison reports highlighted similar problems, nothing was done to fix them.
In that regard, the signs for the future aren't good. Minner received the report Monday but didn't release it immediately; her spokesman, Greg Patterson, claimed she wanted to study it. I guess all that studying strained her - she didn't show up for the news conference when it was released.
The more likely explanation for the delay was a basic fact known to all press offices: News released on Friday gets buried in Saturday's newspaper, the least-read edition of the week. That's especially true of holiday weekends.
So when Minner and Taylor say they'll study the report to come up with ways to implement the task force's copious suggestions, the public is being invited to put its faith in the very people whose lack of concern led to the problem in the first place.
To gauge Minner's trustworthiness on the subject, recall that on the campaign trail Minner took credit for making the tough decision on whether to use deadly force against the inmate.
But on page 23 of the report, its authors state, "The task force found no evidence that the governor or anyone from her office ordered the use of deadly force. ..."
Contact Al Mascitti at 324-2866 or amascitti@delawareonline.com.
