By Aaron Gould Sheinin
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Joining their colleagues at the Department of Mental Health, state prison officials said Monday that they, too, plan to ban the use of tobacco at Department of Corrections facilities.
Corrections Commissioner Brian Owens told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Monday that the agency will begin a phase-out of tobacco use beginning Jan. 1.
“It’s 2010 in a few days and it’s time to do the right thing,” Owens said.
Unlike Mental Health, which told the AJC that it will implement a total smoking ban in all seven state mental hospitals on Jan. 5, Owens said that beginning Jan. 1 smoking and tobacco use will be banned at two diagnostic facilities where inmates are evaluated after being transferred from county jails to the state prison system.
Then, on July 1, 2010, the Augusta State Medical Prison — where the system’s sickest inmates are housed — will go tobacco free, followed by a total tobacco ban in all state prisons beginning Dec. 1.
Owens said he recently surveyed county sheriffs and jailers and found that almost all are already tobacco free.
Inmates, Owens said, “were getting off tobacco in the county jails and then getting back on it when they came into the state system.”
Owens said he’s making the move for two reasons: It will save taxpayers money in health care costs for inmates and it will protect non-smoking prisoners from second-hand smoke.
Owens believes the phase-out of tobacco use at prisons will allow inmates to prepare and the department will offer cessation programs for those who want to participate.
It will, Owens said, allow Corrections officials to “implement this policy without many ripples.”
When the state last tried a smoking ban in prisons in 1995, about 150 inmates at the Lee Correctional Institution in Leesburg refused to work during a 90-minute protest against the policy. All but seven of the protesting inmates went to their job assignments at the prison after the warden called in the prison’s riot squad.
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Copyright, 2009 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution