By Andrew Welsh-Huggins
Associated Press
COLUMBUS, Ohio — The future of an Ohio program that allows low-risk inmates to work at the governor’s official residence, a practice that has been in place for decades but has come under intense scrutiny this year, is now in jeopardy after two inmates were found to be drinking there.
The outcome of a review ordered by Gov. Ted Strickland will determine whether the program continues, spokeswoman Amanda Wurst said Friday.
“The continuation of the program does depend on what the external review finds, so there is a possibility the program could end,” Wurst told The Associated Press.
The review follows the discovery Thursday that two inmates who spent the day working at the residence had been drinking. And it comes days after the state Senate denied confirmation of Stickland’s nominee as public safety chief, who was found to have called off a planned sting in January after inmates were suspected of using their mansion jobs to smuggle tobacco into prison.
A state report found that the official, Cathy Collins-Taylor, had called off the operation to spare the governor embarrassment as he entertained John Glenn, the astronaut and former U.S. senator, at the home the night of the planned sting. Collins-Taylor calls the finding biased and denies it.
The reports of drinking at the residence only served to heighten the scrutiny around the inmate worker program, which is not unique to Ohio but is rapidly evolving into a scandal that the Democratic governor, who is up for re-election this fall, doesn’t need. Strickland asked the prisons department Thursday to suspend the program until the external review is done.
One of the prisoners, identified as Nicholas Hoaja, had a blood-alcohol level of 0.27 percent, three times the legal limit for driving in Ohio. He had to be treated at the Ohio State University hospital later Thursday, prisons spokeswoman Julie Walburn said.
A prison worker picking up four inmates at the end of their shift at the governor’s residence Thursday noticed Hoaja acting strangely and contacted authorities when they arrived at the Pickaway Correctional Institution.
An investigation determined Hoaja and a second inmate, Dallas Feazell, had been drinking, and both were tested by patrol officers. Feazell had a blood-alcohol level of 0.53 percent.
Both the prisons system and the patrol are investigating how the inmates got the alcohol, but the assumption was they found it at the residence, where some alcohol such as beer and wine is kept in unsecured refrigerators. Those refrigerators are supposed to be off limits to inmates.
“We have no reason to believe they would have been able to get it anywhere else than the residence,” Walburn said. “We’re incredibly disappointed that it happened.”
The nearly 50-year-old inmate-worker program allows low-risk inmates nearing release to perform tasks such as tending gardens, handling minor maintenance and staffing state dinners.
Hoaja, 32, is serving a 3 1/2-year sentence out of Champaign County in western Ohio for driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs. He had worked as a cook and on a landscape crew at the governor’s residence since August 2009. Feazell, 47, is serving a three-year sentence out of Clinton County in southwest Ohio for illegal manufacturing of drugs. He had worked on a landscape crew at the residence since March 2009.
Any new charges against them would depend on results of an investigation by the Ohio State Highway Patrol.
Governors in Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina and South Carolina have similar inmate work programs at their official governor’s residence. Some of those programs have survived scandals in the past.
Some North Carolina inmates do landscaping and gardening outside the governor’s residence, while others - including women - do housekeeping indoors and work as waiters. The program is at least 40 years old with no plans to change.
“It provides the inmates with meaningful work they can do as opposed to sitting idle in prison,” North Carolina prisons spokesman Keith Acree said Friday.
Then-South Dakota Gov. Bill Janklow’s skirting of rules was blamed for allowing two female inmates to hold a clandestine party at his state residence in 2000. Janklow won his bid for Congress that year.
In South Carolina, then-Gov. Jim Hodges fired his prisons director in 2001 after guards allowed inmates working at his official residence to have sex in the basement. Hodges lost his re-election bid the following year to Mark Sanford - who shared Kasich’s credential as a former congressman.
Inmates in Alabama, Arizona and Florida, among others, also do maintenance and groundwork in and around state office buildings.