STATE PRISON BACK ON TRACK A YEAR AFTER ABUSE SCANDAL

But officers still keep the upper hand over the inmates in the Intensive
Management Unit

SALEM -- It's 10:30 on a recent Tuesday morning as Oregon State Penitentiary
officers queue up to deliver lukewarm Reuben sandwiches to the state's 130
worst inmates.

"Time to feed the animals," a corrections officer says, unlocking a section
of Alpha Unit in the prison's Intensive Management Unit.

Oregon's only maximum-security prison is a walled city of 2,100 criminals
with caste systems and preferred neighborhoods not unlike those on the outside.

General population provides the most freedoms and privileges; the special
management unit is the equivalent of a mental hospital; disciplinary
segregation is the jail.

The Intensive Management Unit, the IMU, is the prison within a prison -- a
two-story, rectangular fortress opened in 1991 to house Oregon's most
disruptive, assaultive and, in some cases, mentally disturbed inmates.

Alpha Unit is where the worst of those live.

It's also where the careers of a dozen correctional officers ended and four
others were marred. Eleven months ago, five IMU officers were indicted for
physically abusing inmates, including throwing punches and using pepper
spray and stun guns, or for lying to cover it up. Three pleaded guilty, and
one was convicted at trial; the fifth is awaiting trial. Eventually, 11
others resigned or were fired or disciplined because of the scandal.

In the year since then, prison officials have made sweeping changes,
including bringing in nearly 50 new security staff members and telling them
upfront they can only stay in the unit two years, then they'll be rotated
out and replaced by mentally fresh troops.

The new crew doesn't want to be tainted by the sins of the past. But just as
they spend their days watching inmates, they, too, know they're being
watched by outsiders.

IMU from the inside

On this day, the IMU is calm by its standards. There's the usual inmate
singsong of grievances and trash talk emanating from spartan cells and
bouncing off cream-colored walls.

Confinement there is a last resort for the hardest of hard cases. To get
there, inmates have to repeatedly flout big rules, such as smuggling drugs
or assaulting staff or one another.

The only new admission this day is Horace Denson, a 38-year-old Multnomah
County man who was written up eight times for misbehaving in downtown
Portland's Justice Center jail. Three of those writeups were for assaulting
corrections deputies.

Once in IMU, the average stay is six months -- a penance completely devoid
of natural light or fresh air. Inmates spend about 23BD hours a day in
their 6-by-9BD-foot cells. The few minutes they're allowed out is only on a
tether that resembles a dog leash with handcuffs dangling from one end.

IMU inmates can be so dangerous that even taking them out of their cells for
something as simple as a haircut can be harrowing. So an officer cuffs the
inmate from behind and wraps the other end of the tether around his wrist to
gain tight control. A second officer shadows the inmate from the other side.

Inmates are allowed to attend therapy sessions, see visitors, shower and
exercise in an enclosed concrete room. They get three meals a day, prepared
by inmate chefs and served in plastic food trays with disposable utensils.
If inmates throw their food, their next meal is Nutra-loaf, a block of
blended and baked food that resembles day-old meatloaf.

The environment for corrections officers also is bleak. They spend their
entire shifts inside one of four units. Each unit has 49 cells arranged
along three, double-tiered wings facing a darkened command center under the
watch of a lone officer who controls every electronic door.

With their badges and black jumpsuits the focus of every inmate's contempt,
a few officers have been known to crack under the pressure of constant
verbal abuse and occasional assaults.

The investigation one year ago ripped apart a unit that must be close-knit
out of necessity: Officers not only have to watch one another's backs but
are part of an inner circle that is out of the emotional and physical reach
of other prison officers.

"The biggest thing is the mental stress," says Capt. D. Heppner , who has
run the IMU since November 1996. "You don't realize it at the time, but
dealing with high-maintenance inmates day in and day out gets to you. These
guys are constantly driving on you."

Cloud of misconduct

In February 1997, corrections officer Christine Cilley reported to a
superior her fears that an inmate had been abused. Then she dropped a
bombshell: Cilley reported that in spring 1996 she saw Sgt. Thomas Robbins
and corrections officer Richard Robinson punching a mentally ill inmate,
Steven Willits, in the face.

Two months later, Cilley laid out her allegations in a written complaint,
adding another inmate she suspected was abused and also accusing Robbins of
sexually harassing her.

Cilley claimed she sat on the allegations for almost a year because she
feared retaliation from co-workers and a job reassignment.

In mid-April 1997, the Oregon Department of Corrections' internal affairs
division and the Oregon State Police launched an investigation that four
months later triggered five grand injury indictments.

Robbins, Robinson and the three other indicted officers were fired, as were
two other security staff accused of following an unwritten "code of silence."

In the final months of 1997, Cilley and four other officers resigned, and
four were disciplined, according to their union, the Association of Oregon
Corrections Employees.

Cilley quit after first being told she would be fired and later that she
would be demoted for failing to immediately report her allegations.

She has filed a discrimination complaint against the corrections department
with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and is awaiting its
ruling. Cilley refused to comment, citing her attorney's advice.

Union president Gary Harkins says the IMU investigation resulted in "uneven,
excessive discipline" and new, ill-advised policies that force officers to
report even unfounded rumors.

"Management had to do something," says Harkins, an officer who works
elsewhere in the prison. "Innocent people got caught up in the sweep."

Mitch Morrow, acting superintendent of Oregon State Penitentiary, says as
painful as it was, the investigation was necessary to root out a threat to a
vital prison mission: to treat inmates with dignity and respect.

"I don't think the intensity of the investigation was inappropriate," he says.

Volatility and unpredictability

Many of IMU's inmates don't engender respect.

One man claims to have been in the IMU 100 years. Another screams out, "I'm
your worst nightmare." A convicted murderer usually is respectful to staff,
as long as they call him by his true name -- "Satan."

L.C. Oddie Jr., 26, a convicted robber and burglar, has been in the IMU
nearly four years. Unlike some of the other inmates, Oddie doesn't
strengthen his 6-foot-2, 230-pound frame by using his bunk to perform step
aerobics or by rolling up all his possessions in a mattress and using it as
a curling bar.

He doesn't have to.

Oddie is the only IMU inmate to ever use his bare hands to open the
electronically controlled door to his cell. Even after improvements to the
locking mechanism, Oddie can still jiggle the door hard enough to set off
the warning light in Alpha Unit's control center.

"You never know when he's going to snap," Officer L. Coolbaugh says. "He's
full of rage."

Oddie responds best to female officers, who have their own set of obstacles
to overcome in the IMU. Aside from the usual catcalls, there are menacing
love letters from inmates. On this day, an inmate is written up for telling
a woman officer that he wanted to have sex with her.

"You try not to take it personal," Officer M. Laker says. She joined the
unit six months ago.

Staff members say some inmates spend practically every waking moment
devising ways to manipulate or torment officers. One favorite inmate stunt
is spreading butter on the floor just inside their cell doors so officers
slip and fall when they enter.

The worst indignity is getting hit by human waste. Corrections officer C.
Story once was bombed by four consecutive inmates while walking a tier.

"My wife knows I've had a bad day when I get home wearing a different
uniform than the one I left in," Story says.

Officers are trained not to react. The procedure is to keep quiet, exit the
tier calmly, shower and change uniforms. If hit in the face, hepatitis blood
screens are required at the local hospital.

Then officers must hurry back to the unit to send a message to the inmates.

"If you can't immediately walk back on that tier, you never will," Story
says. "If the inmates think they've buffaloed you, they'll abuse you and
treat you no better than the child molesters in here."

Fingerpointing and whispering

Three weeks after the IMU investigation began, inmate Willits died in his
single cell inside Alpha Unit. Unbeknownst to staff, he had been stockpiling
a psychiatric medication and used it to overdose, a toxicology report showed
later. He was the fourth IMU inmate in five years to kill himself.

Right after Willits' death and before the cause was known, Story says other
prison officers ostracized him and his IMU colleagues.

Story, who took stress leave, says he made three trips to the state police's
Salem headquarters to be interviewed in connection with the alleged abuse in
IMU. Corrections investigators questioned him three or four more times.

Nearly nine months later, he learned that he had been exonerated early on.
He's angry that he was not told at the time.

"I was left dangling for 8 months," the 38-year-old officer says. "My own
colleagues called me a murderer. A staff member said, 'You had to kill one
to cover it up, huh?'" he says.

"We were the pariahs of the whole institution."

Across IMU, morale among the 57 security staff plummeted.

Consultants were brought in from the National Institute of Corrections in
Washington, D.C., to audit the IMU. Among their recommendations: screen
officers for assignment to the unit and rotate them out after two years to
reduce stress and burnout. The corrections department agreed.

Only eight of the unit's current roster were assigned to the IMU when the
abuses occurred two springs ago, and they are being rotated out.

The consultants also recommended increasing the visibility of managers on
the inmate tiers.

Sgt. R. Hetlage was promoted to lieutenant and transferred from another
prison to run the IMU's swing shift and boost morale.

Hetlage is a 52-year-old former competitive power lifter who spent a year as
pro wrestler Hulk Hogan's bodyguard. Hetlage uses a keen sense of humor to
manage his officers and earthy fairness to manage the inmates.

Hetlage's favorite shtick for colleagues is to jam a push pin or staple into
his forehead to illustrate the hardness of his skull. When it comes to
inmates, Hetlage's philosophy is mutual respect.

His bedside manners are atypical. Each shift, Hetlage walks by every IMU
cell to field grievances from 34 murderers and an assortment of child
molesters, drug dealers and rapists.

Many of the IMU's inmates are members of white supremacist, Latino and
African American street gangs.

Yet Hetlage prides himself on calling them "sir" and saying "please" and
"thank you."

"It takes a special breed of staff to work here," he says. "When you
encounter this amount of disrespect and verbal abuse, you have to have a
different level of thinking. You don't personalize.

"We're not just security staff but counselors. When I come to work, I'm
coming to the inmates' house, but they must understand I'm their landlord
and that we have renter guidelines. I like to keep them on equal footing as
long as they treat me with respect."

Stable and recovering

The Washington, D.C., prison consultants who audited the IMU last year came
back this spring to follow up. They found that the corrections department
has "clearly reinforced" its zero-tolerance policy for inmate abuse and
staff misconduct.

The auditors concluded that the IMU operations are now "stable and well into
recovery."

Morrow, the prison's acting superintendent, says the auditors confirmed what
prison administrators always believed: The misconduct occurred among a small
circle of officers, and the vast majority of IMU staff members are
"dedicated professionals."

"We've extracted the cancer and are moving toward healing," he says.

J. Todd Foster covers crime issues for The Oregonian's Crime, Justice and
Public Safety Team. He can be reached by phone at 221-8070, by mail at 1320
S.W. Broadway, Portland, Ore. 97201, or by e-mail at
jtoddfoster@news.oregonian.com

Checked-by: Melodi Cornett