Smoking in the joint: Is the ban worth the headache? |
By Ian Demsky
Tacoma News Tribune
TACOMA, Wash. — Tobacco isn’t allowed in Washington’s prisons, but that hasn’t stopped some inmates from lighting up.
Smoking has gone underground since a 2004 statewide ban, making cigarettes and tobacco products a popular and lucrative form of contraband – and a headache for prison administrators.
Systemwide statistics weren’t available from the Department of Corrections, but cigarettes, loose tobacco, rolling papers and fire sources were some of the most frequently seized items at one South Sound prison in 2007, a News Tribune review of records found.
Tobacco products were found and seized at least 127 times at McNeil Island Corrections Center last year. That averages out to roughly one in every 10 inmates at the 1,300-man facility being caught with tobacco.
It’s definitely the inmates’ “drug of choice,” said McNeil Island prison superintendent Ron Van Boening. “There are more smokers than users of other kinds of drugs,” he said.
McNeil’s main facility houses medium-custody offenders. The Special Commitment Center on the island is run by a separate agency.
The Steilacoom facility isn’t alone in its problem, corrections officials say.
“I’ve remarked to my colleagues that we’re experiencing Prohibition all over again,” said assistant deputy secretary Dick Morgan, prisons administrator for Western Washington. “It’s good social policy, but it brings with it some Eliot Ness challenges.”
Following a national trend, Washington’s ban was aimed at saving taxpayers money on inmates’ heath care costs.
And while the illicit tobacco is relatively safe – no one is going to overdose on it or stab someone with it – it does create a security risk, like other items that are bought, sold and traded behind bars, creating underground economies. If an inmate can’t pay a debt, violence can follow. Officials point out that a $50 tobacco debt is no different than a $50 heroin debt.
“We watch our violence pretty closely,” Morgan said.
In Washington, like in other states that have banned tobacco, it quickly gained ascendency as a contraband commodity.
Because tobacco is both legal and readily available on the outside, visitors and even some staff members who would never think of sneaking in illegal drugs don’t have the same compunction about bringing it in, Morgan said.
“I can’t tell you today what a cigarette costs,” McNeil’s Van Boening said. “But it can go for two, three, even 10 times more than what you’d pay for it on the street.”
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported last year that since tobacco was banned in that state’s prisons in 2000, it had become the “leading contraband item.” According to the paper, a $2 pack of loose-leaf tobacco could bring a profit of more than $78 inside prison.
Washington officials knew the same type of demand would be created here, but decided the pros outweighed the cons, Morgan said.
“Anecdotally, that speaks to the addictive nature of nicotine compared to other drugs,” he said.
Keeping all types of contraband out is a Sisyphean task for prison administrators everywhere.
“It’s like mushrooms,” said Colorado Springs, Colo.-based corrections consultant Thomas A. Rosazza. “They just grow. It’s a universal problem.”
There’s no baseline or right level of contraband, he said. It depends on how worried officials at each facility are and what kinds of fallout they’re seeing.
“As a warden, I’d rather have a tobacco problem than a drug problem,” Rosazza said.
According to Rosazza, the two best ways to cut down on contraband are to routinely search cells, which McNeil does, and to search employees, which the prison doesn’t. McNeil employees, however, are subject to random searches when boarding the ferry that brings them to the island. If employees know they’re going to be searched, it can help them resist being pressured to smuggle something, Rosazza said.
“That’s the perfect out to say ‘I can’t do it,’” he said. “And for those few who are dishonest, it takes them out of the mix, too.”
Contraband can also be introduced by visitors or through the mail, Van Boening said. Unlike staffers, visitors are screened and put through a metal detector.
But while most staff members do their jobs well and honestly, there are always some who break the rules.
In 2005, during an investigation into whether an office assistant had been impregnated by an inmate, the office assistant was reportedly discovered to be smuggling cigarettes and other contraband, prison records show.
The inmate, who admitted to having sex with the woman, told investigators she “introduced thousands of dollars worth of tobacco into (McNeil Island) and that he always made sure she had ‘thousands of dollars’ for herself from their dealings involving introduction of contraband,” the investigative report said.
She never brought in drugs, the inmate said, but did smuggle in food, clothing and CDs and “just about anything he asked her to bring in.”
The woman resigned, and Pierce County prosecutors declined to press charges for custodial sexual misconduct. Prison officials did not ask for charges related to the contraband.
Such charges are rare unless someone brings in dangerous weapons or illegal drugs, Van Boening said.
In the last couple of years, McNeil officials have forwarded four cases to prosecutors for consideration, he said. One involved embezzlement, one involved the shoving of an inmate by an officer (which prosecutors declined to pursue), and two were related to inappropriate relationships between inmates and officers (one of which involved bringing in contraband).
Prisonwide contraband sweeps are rarely done at McNeil, but each shift usually searches a few cells, sometimes randomly, sometimes acting on intelligence, Van Boening said.
The department’s drug-sniffing dogs aren’t trained to find tobacco, he said.
It would be possible to train dogs to sniff out tobacco, said Morgan, the prisons administrator. The question is whether the expense would be worth it – or whether increasing the penalty for tobacco smuggling and putting more people in prison for that crime would benefit the public.
“You have to ask, ‘How much money do I spend on this? It’s just tobacco,’” he said.
What else is hot behind bars?
Besides showing tobacco was king of contraband at McNeil Island prison, nearly 100 pages of handwritten contraband seizure logs reviewed by The News Tribune also revealed:
Steel wool was a hot item, seized at least 39 times. Like pencil lead, it can be used to create a spark for lighting up.
Tattoo guns and/or paraphernalia were seized at least 11 times.
illegal drugs or possible drugs, aside from various pills, were seized 18 times, records show. They included marijuana, balloons filled with unknown substances, white powders and pruno, a type of home-brewed prison booze likened on Wikipedia to a “vomit-flavored wine cooler.”
Weapons or potential weapons were seized at least 34 times. They included razor blades, sharpened pieces of metal, plastic and wood, a 3-foot “sword” and two 9 mm bullets.
Ian Demsky, The News Tribune
Prison drug use
Only a small fraction of Washington inmates are testing positive for illegal drugs, records show.
The Department of Corrections conducted 21,100 tests in 2007, averaging slightly more than one test per inmate over the year. The results included 197 positives for marijuana, 175 for opiates (such as heroin), 90 for amphetamines and 48 for cocaine, department figures show.
Yet while those numbers are relatively small, the number of positives was up last year from the year before.
Positive cocaine tests more than doubled from 2006 to 2007, while those for pot rose by almost one-third and amphetamines by 20 percent. Opiates were virtually unchanged.
Copyright 2008 Tacoma News Tribune