Associated Press
VARNER, Ark. — Lawmakers retraced the steps of two convicted murders who escaped an Arkansas prison wearing guard uniforms, questioning corrections officials Monday over a perceived culture of complacency at the state’s lockups.
The legislators weaved their way past the main control room of the Cummins Unit, where a guard had waved ahead killers Calvin Adams and Jeffrey Grinder, unlocking a series of controlled doors and letting them slip past the warden’s office straight out the front doors.
Arkansas lawmakers applauded the prison system’s efforts to correct the problems exposed by the escape and other recent incidents, but called for more transparency and accountability in the way officials run the 20 prisons and manage their 15,000 inmates.
“It leads me to believe we have a bigger overall problem than one we had that night,” said state Rep. Jonathan Dismang, R-Beebe.
Fifty lawmakers met at Cummins and toured the 1,500-inmate prison. Their meeting comes in the wake of guards shooting a man to death at a contraband checkpoint outside a prison and the near-death of an inmate after officers left him naked and covered in his own feces for a weekend.
Prison officials offered new details about Adams and Grinder’s May 29 escape from the Cummins Unit, a prison about 90 miles southeast of Little Rock surrounded by inmate-tended farm fields. Wendy Kelley, a deputy director of the Arkansas Department of Correction, said one of the inmates collected about $800 in cash before their escape. Cash is contraband in state prisons.
Police in New York state arrested the two June 2.
“They were just trying to get to New York City, where they thought they could blend in,” Kelley said.
Officials fired six guards after the escape and suspended another. Kelley told lawmakers that it appeared Adams and Grinder received no help from correction officers.
However, Adams used his position as a maintenance trusty to steal the uniforms from an attic closet, hide them in a storage room off the library and learn the shift-change routines of the prison, Kelley said. Adams even knew the location of surveillance cameras over the locked doorways from his work putting down wires.
“He ran the camera lines here,” Kelley said.