STATE'S PRISONS BRACE FOR BAN ON CIGARETTES

Take 24,000 robbers, drug addicts, killers and thieves. Add 8,000
stressed prison guards and administrators. Then take away all of their
cigarettes.

What happens next?

Maryland prison officials will find out June 30 when, for the first
time, smoking will be banned from all state lock-ups.

"On that date, all tobacco products will be contraband," said Division
of Correction spokesman Dave Towers.

The rule applies to inmates and employees, who won't even be allowed
to sneak a smoke in the parking lot.

More than 30 states have already banned smoking in prisons, said Jim
Turpin, spokesman for the American Correctional Association, but for
years, Maryland officials have resisted the change. In fact,
Maryland's 25 prisons are the only government structures in the state
in which smoking is allowed.

That's because cigarettes play a major role in prison life, officials
said. They are calming agents for high-strung nerves, diversions to
fill long, monotonous days -- and also a prison's currency. Inmates
can't keep money in their cells, so they trade goods and services for
packs of smokes, Towers said.

That's part of the reason that Ohio, widely considered to run a
progressive prison system, decided against a smoking ban.

"Cigarettes now are the same thing as money in prison," said Joe
Andrews, spokesman for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and
Correction. "The problem is they would be worth a whole lot more, and
people have been stabbed for a pack of cigarettes."

But William W. Sondervan, commissioner of Maryland's Division of
Correction, said that while his department understands the ban may
cause some problems, it believes the ban will solve even more.

The most obvious are health concerns -- not just for the estimated 40
percent of inmates who smoke but also for the 60 percent who don't.

"The secondhand smoke issue is even greater in these kinds of close
quarters than in free society," said Richard B. Rosenblatt, director
of Patuxent Institution, a secure facility that treats inmates.

Patuxent, which is not a part of the Division of Correction, banned
smoking in November.

A lawsuit filed on behalf of a dozen inmates who suffer from such
conditions as asthma, heart disease and allergies, which has been
making its way through the courts for seven years, made that very point.

In that case, Baltimore lawyer Andrew Freeman argued that allowing
secondhand smoke in prisons is a violation of the Eighth Amendment,
which bans cruel and unusual punishment.

"From my client's point of view, they were sentenced to be punished by
confinement, but they weren't sentenced to death or to cancer or to
heart attacks," Freeman argued. He said tests showed high levels of
smoke in prison air and in nonsmoking inmates' urine, proving there
was a danger.

Matches and lighters, which will also be banned, are potentially
deadly items in prison, too. Last March, Rosenblatt said, an inmate
lit a fire in his cell, and the smoke ultimately led to the death of
an asthmatic man in a cell nearby.

"I wanted lighters and matches out of here more than I wanted
cigarettes out of here," he said.

Towers points out, as well, that inmates typically come to state
prisons after they've been locked up in local jails, which in Maryland
already ban smoking. "It just makes good sense that we follow along,"
he said.

For weeks, corrections officials have been busy preparing for the
upcoming ban, slowly breaking the news to inmates and staff that their
habits must soon come to an end. They've given workers information on
smoking cessation programs in the community, trained counselors to
teach the same programs to inmates and informed companies that supply
cigarettes to prison commissaries that their products will no longer
be purchased.

"We're going very carefully, very delicately," Sondervan
said.

That's what Rosenblatt did. His plan included in-house classes for
staff and inmates and a giant supply of lollipops to help them through
the cravings. Chewing gum isn't allowed in prisons -- it can be used
to ruin locks -- and nicotine patches were deemed a possible health
risk, so they will not be available.

Sondervan has implemented many of the same ideas.

Yet no preparations could ensure serenity on the day the Patuxent
inmates went cold turkey.

As it turned out, Rosenblatt was surprised how smoothly the change
went.

"It was almost as boring as Y2K," he said.

It turns out that kicking the habit in prison might be easier than on
the outside. Relapse is a lot less likely when there's no tobacco
around to smoke, Towers said.

"A lot of society views prisoners as being different than the rest of
us," Freeman said. "Many if not most smokers are concerned about their
own health and would like to quit. In the prison environment, it is
extremely difficult to quit, given that half the people around you are
smoking."

"It was amazing how many people came up and thanked me for doing it,
both the nonsmokers and smokers who had been looking for that last
excuse to quit," Rosenblatt said.