DRUGS IN PRISON

A recent drug bust at Ironwood State Prison near Blythe highlights a
problem that is almost certainly more widespread than officials admit.
The drug dealer arrested Dec. 30 was not a street punk but one of the
prison guards. More arrests, quite likely of prison guards or civilian
prison employees, could follow.

It's far from the first such incident in California prisons. In
November a female prison guard was arrested, along with two cooks and
a parolee with a violent past, as part of a ring smuggling drugs -
heroin was seized in November, methamphetamine in an earlier arrest -
into San Quentin.

Last July a 54-year-old veteran prison guard at New Folsom prison near
Sacramento was arrested after buying a pound of marijuana from
relatives of inmates who were working undercover for the prison
system. Officers also seized $19,000 in cash and bank deposits that
they said were prison drug profits.

Perhaps, as prison officials say, these incidents represent only a few
"bad apples" in the system. But reporter Andy Furillo of the
Sacramento Bee, in researching the story, talked to a parolee with a
history of drug convictions who claimed that his "job" while inside
prison was cultivating guards and other prison employees for drug
smuggling, that he was quite successful at it and that the practice is
widespread throughout the California prison system.

That possibility is reinforced by an incident last Wednesday at a
state Senate hearing for three wardens up for periodic reinstatement.
A spokesman for a new group of prisoner families, called United for No
Injustice, Oppression or Neglect (or UNION), claimed that guards at
the Tehachapi prison ran drug rings. The senators expressed shock at
the allegation, then the warden admitted there had been a couple of
"bad apple" guards who had smuggled drugs but said they had been fired
and the problem no longer existed.

Such allegations should not be shocking. Considering the profits to be
made, it would only be surprising if no guards ever smuggled drugs.
The question is how widespread the practice is.

The arrest at Ironwood was the work of the California Department of
Corrections' new Office of Internal Affairs, created last summer in
response to state Senate hearings into allegations of prisoner abuse
at Corcoran State Prison near Bakersfield. So there's evidence that
those in charge are trying to correct at least some abuses in the
prison system.

But California's prison system has expanded so dramatically in the
last couple of decades that it has outrun the ability to manage itself
effectively.

Some abuses are inevitable; more are likely to surface. In the long
run the best approach is to consider and implement alternatives to
incarceration for non-violent offenders, who make up about two-thirds
of the prison population.