More than 500 cameras now monitor the jail, recording 75 percent of the lockup. Footage is kept for about three weeks; employees and new inmates are all scanned for illegal substances.
By Tim Puko
Pittsburgh Tribune Review
ALLEGHENY COUNTY, Pa. — Sixteen black boxes sit on gray metal shelves, their fans whirring softly in the basement of the Allegheny County Jail. In a facility near capacity, with a recent history of corruption and the constant potential for violence, this is the nerve center.
The boxes record and store everything captured by the jail’s recently expanded video camera system. The new wave of technology at the Uptown lockup also includes a body scanner to detect drugs and other substances, and a key-holding safe that opens by scanning a fingerprint and logs which employees have which keys. The video cameras send out their images to televisions around the jail, including a big flat-screen TV on the wall of Warden Ramon C. Rustin’s office.
Rustin arrived four years ago amid a series of crises involving sex, drugs and illness. Dan Onorato, the county executive who hired him, is touting a national accreditation report released last month as evidence that Rustin has reformed the jail, which holds 2,750 prisoners when it’s full.
“We came up with a plan to change the culture of the institution and come up to 21st-century standards,” Rustin, 51, said from his ground-floor office on Second Street. “I told my staff who was here before, ‘You’ve got to commit to that. If the field of corrections has passed you by ... maybe you should go.’ ... The bad apples are gone.”
Several community leaders, even a regional prisoners advocate, give Rustin high marks. Known as a listener who takes time to walk through the pods that house inmates, Rustin has guided the jail into a period of relative calm. Reports of trouble have slowed from a deluge to a trickle.
When Rustin started, more than a dozen guards had been accused of trading favors for sex with inmates. More guards were arrested in 2006 in a drug smuggling scheme that allegedly pre-dated Rustin’s arrival. Two prisoners died early in his tenure after contracting drug-resistant staph infections.
This year’s problems have been limited to charges of difficult working conditions caused by overcrowding and malfunctioning equipment, allegations a union official called typical. Brian Ferguson, president of the Allegheny County Prison Employees Independent Union, and his predecessor, Chuck Mandarino, both declined to comment on Rustin’s performance.
“It’s a difficult position, because they’re union and he’s fighting the union, but he has done a yeoman’s work to bring that staff up to a professional level,” said Common Pleas Judge Donna Jo McDaniel, the administrative judge for criminal division and chair of the county’s prison oversight board.
The jail’s biggest challenge is its population, which pushed past 2,700 after the long Veterans Day weekend last week, Rustin said. To match it, the budget has risen by a third, up almost $13 million since Rustin took over. Onorato has proposed pushing the jail budget up another 3 percent next year, to almost $55 million.
There are staff shortages, and overtime costs are rising. But those problems are a far cry from the institutional corruption that once permeated the jail, said Marion Damick, the Allegheny County co-convener of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, a prisoners’ rights group. The local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has reported only one minor complaint from inmates in the past year and that was quickly resolved.
“Rustin’s put down the law with the (correctional officers),” Damick said. “He has done a lot to change the attitude of the employees. ... Nobody’s going around grousing, complaining, this or that. He’s done a lot to give confidence and approval, and to encourage them.”
Rustin credits the union leadership for working with him and not fighting some of his procedural reforms. There was some skepticism: Many correctional officers wanted to maintain antiquated traditions and viewed the new technology, especially the video cameras, as a way to keep them in check rather than ensure safety, Rustin said.
But much of what it replaced was flawed, he said. The old video cameras, for instance, only recorded one frame every seven seconds and stored recordings for only a few places around the jail. Incident reports were done by hand, if at all, and problems could occur at the jail without the warden ever hearing about them.
Rustin has a regimented system for reporting incidents and ensuring accountability. Everything must be documented in electronic reports that come through the warden’s office for review.
More than 500 cameras now monitor the jail -- four times as many as when Rustin arrived -- recording about 75 percent of the lockup. Footage is kept for about three weeks, Rustin said. And employees and new inmates are all scanned for illegal substances.
Before applying for accreditation from the American Correctional Association, jail officials committed a year to building and refining policies for every procedure. The accreditation report -- of which jail officials said they’ve received only a summary -- is the first for a jail in Pennsylvania.
The facility met 100 percent of the association’s mandatory standards and more than 97 percent of its optional standards, designed to balance the needs of public safety with those of workers and inmates.
“It recognizes the great work of the employees, from the warden all the way down to the correctional officers,” Onorato said of the accreditation. “It also sends the signal that the problems of the past will not be tolerated. I think the important change was that I brought the warden in. It’s no one single change, but a cumulative effect and a change of mindset.”
Copyright 2008 Tribune Review Publishing Company