Series: Part 2 Of 3

ON DOPE ROW

Often relationships begin with small favors, according to Joe Howard, a
former Arizona correctional officer. An inmate begins doing favors, such as
small menial chores, and eventually asks a guard to violate a rule, such as
providing extra food, he says. Soon the inmate has the guard working for
him and fearing for his job. "All you have to do is look at all the BMWs
the employees are driving and ask yourself how a guard making $24,000 can
afford a car like that." In some cases, guards recruit coworkers by
threatening to falsify reports against them unless they cooperate with the
drug deals and take the money. "Once a correctional officer takes money he
is working for the inmate," says Howard. "Bad cops don't always get into
trouble; good cops do."

Asked whether Maryland guards are dealing or using drugs, Sgt. Flynn, a
Maryland correctional officer, snaps, "We don't have guards here, sir. We
are correctional officers, sir." So, are correction officers dealing or
using? "No sir," he says. "Very rare."

Reviewing court and prison records for the last three years, Insight
discovered the following:

In 2001, prison guard Ronald Martin was sentenced to four years upon
conviction for his role in a heroin-smuggling scheme.

In 2000, 16 prison employees in Maryland triggered "alerts" by drug-
sniffing dogs that detected narcotics on their bodies or clothing.

In 1999, at the House of Corrections in Jessup, Md., the high rate of drug
use found in random testing prompted a large-scale sweep resulting in 19
inmates being transferred and three guards flunking drug tests. Seven other
guards that year were found to have triggered scanner "alerts" during
random checks.

Hensley says, "In the 1980s inmates were against the officers and didn't
have relationships with them that they have today. Now they are having sex
with each other. They know each other or their relatives. They went to
school with each other. They lived in the same neighborhoods. It's like
they send the officers to the target range every two weeks and then they
tell them they can go visit their cousins during the work week."

Maryland prohibits corrections staff from supervising relatives who are
inmates, though distant cousins may slip through the cracks. It's also more
difficult to transfer employees because, under civil-service laws they
can't be moved more than 50 miles. Inmates, however, can be transferred and
sometimes are moved after involvement in drug trafficking.

That said, Brosan notes, prisons close to Baltimore - such as the House of
Correction, the House of Correction Annex and, to some extent, MCI-J - are
the scenes of most of the drug problems and the highest number of assaults.
Inmates suspected of trafficking were transferred to prisons on Maryland's
Eastern Shore, but the drugs remained, he says. "The drug problem is double
in central Maryland what it is elsewhere," he observes. "Now it's not
politically correct for me to say so, but you can deduce whether we have a
staffing problem there or not."

Inmates say guards often look the other way when drug deals go down. But it
is the same with other contraband. When inmates make wine from bread and
fruit juice, the smell sometimes is so strong the inmates wonder how
correctional staff can overlook it. "Part of the problem is they just don't
want to do the paperwork," says Hensley. "And even when they notice someone
on drugs they send them back to the cells."

Drugs can mean big money in the prisons. While inmates are not allowed to
carry cash, they find creative ways to hide smuggled bills. "There is no
money dog," Hensley laughs. "You hide money in pens. You peel back a book
cover. You swallow it. Guys shove it up their rectum."

Brosan says he is following the money. "Dope has to be paid for," he says,
"and inmates have accounts." They get money by working menial prison jobs,
or friends and family members deposit funds in their account. "So when the
drugs are going in you have to have money going out," he says. Heroin is
the drug of choice in Maryland. A number of years ago a kilo of heroin cost
you about $8,000 on the street and a kilo of cocaine $24,000. Those numbers
are reversed now," Brosan says, noting the price inside a prison is even
higher.

Money is not always the main method of payment, however. In the past the
most common prison currencies were cigarettes and sex. But since Democratic
Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening imposed a ban on smoking to settle a
lawsuit that claimed inmates were put at risk from secondhand smoke, the
preferred currency has been stamps, Brosan says.

Maryland may be leading the nation in per-inmate deaths from drug
overdoses, but Brosan says he is determined to stop the flow of drugs into
the state's prisons. He has hired his own team of 20 detectives - a move
that is rare among prisons, where most rely on state police to investigate
prison incidents. By his own admission, however, the detectives have been
overburdened with hundreds of thefts and assaults. Then they launched
Operation Inside/Out. The idea was that when an inmate asked for cash from
his account to pay someone, detectives would check the payee's name against
a list of prison employees. "That would take care of the stupid ones,"
Brosan says.

How did it work? "I found out that we did not have the investigative
expertise to do this, or the manpower, so we just brought in a retired IRS
agent on a grant to pay him to work on Operation Inside/Out," he says.

When it comes to prosecution, it is "uneven," Brosan continues. "Some
counties prosecute and some don't because of their workload. They say if
you want to see the world's skinniest marijuana cigarettes you have to go
to prison," he says. "A thimbleful of drugs goes a long way in prison. You
are talking to a guy who's seen tons of the stuff, and now here I am
putting in as much labor and time to find a thimbleful of drugs as I put
into finding kilos and pounds of drugs. Everything is so secret here and no
one is cooperating."

How Blankenship obtained a lethal dose of heroin remains a mystery. Brosan
won't comment on pending investigations, but Weidenfeld wonders if there
was ever an intensive investigation, noting that she never was interviewed.
In fact, she had to call authorities to find out what they were doing. She
learned of interest in only two things: Where the drug came from and if any
staff member had done anything wrong.

Blankenship was supposed to report to work in the prison kitchen at 4 a.m.,
which means a guard had to come by to let him out of his cell. Weidenfeld
figures the guard couldn't wake him up and did nothing, despite the fact
that those who overdose often go into a seizure and can be saved if caught
in time. As for how Blankenship got the drugs, Weidenfeld says she has
"suspicions" but would not elaborate.

Blankenship injected himself with heroin, which also raises the question of
where the needle came from. According to inmates and parolees interviewed
by Insight, needles are provided by the prison to diabetics who might share
or sell them for the right price. Others simply use a paper clip to inject
themselves.

But Weidenfeld's fiance was not a heroin addict, according to his friends.
His parents, Beverly and Donald Blankenship Sr., sent their son to the best
private schools, where he earned a football scholarship to Wake Forest
University but turned it down because he wanted to play baseball at Western
Carolina University. But an Maryland also has been one of the more
aggressive states when it comes to drug testing. Of the 50 states, it was
ranked eighth in the number of drug tests conducted in 1999, according to
the 2000 Corrections Yearbook.

According to Brosan they conduct three types of drug tests: spot tests,
which are for cause, routine tests for those on prerelease and random
computerized tests. Since 1998, he says, positive test results from random
drug tests have declined 33 percent, to 1.4 percent. Both spot and routine
tests have driven Maryland's average positive result up to 2.8 percent.
However, this still is below the national state prison average of 3.7
percent, according to the 2000 Corrections Yearbook. "We reduced the number
of drugs in prison," Lt. Gov. Kennedy Townsend says. "We're doing better
than the national average."

Sounds good. But, Insight discovered, basing statistics just on urinalysis
is a contrivance. "It's absolutely ridiculous to do urinalysis tests in
prisons," says Daniel Crane, corporate medical director for ACI Drug Rehab
Center in New York City, noting that heroin stays in the system 24 to 72
hours in a process that can be even faster if the inmate drinks vinegar or
grapefruit juice to fool the tests. "Every inmate would have to be tested
every day to make urinalysis testing useful, and that's impractical."

Pennsylvania didn't trust urinalysis testing. In 1996 its correctional
system and the National Institute of Justice partnered in a groundbreaking
hair-test study to determine the extent of illicit drug use. "In our study,
standard urinalysis showed almost no recent drug use when we conducted the
survey in 1996 and again in 1998," noted Jeremy Travis, executive director
of the NIJ in 1999. "If our only measure of drug use had been determined
through urine tests, we would have said that these five prisons have no
drug problem in 1996 nor any drug problem two years later. Yet hair
testing, which reveals whether someone has used drugs within a three-month
period prior to the test, showed that 7.8 percent tested positive in 1996.
There was a serious drug problem."

Pennsylvania was determined to rid its prisons of drugs. Its effort to do
so included greater use of drug dogs, purchasing IonScans for all 26
prisons and videotaping all visitations. It tests with both hair and
urinalysis. Those caught with drugs are punished in Maryland, but in
Pennsylvania they must then attend drug treatment. If they refuse, it
counts against release.

The result? "We are 99 percent drug-free," says Beard, noting a rate of .03
positive drug tests in 1999 and a decline in recidivism (returning to
prison within three years) from about 50 percent in 1995 to about 39 percent.

"We really made a commitment," adds Pennsylvania Correctional Agency
spokesman Michael Lukens. "A year or two ago we had a drug-treatment system
where we treated inmates closer to parole. But it started to make sense to
expose inmates to drug treatment as soon as you can."

Why doesn't Maryland do hair testing, purchase IonScans to scope out every
prison, use its champion dogs more frequently and begin mandatory
treatment? Sipes says they are starting to do some of those things,
including tape-recording every telephone call.

If so, it's too late for Blankenship, says Weidenfeld. "For now, the state
of Maryland needs to be held accountable for his death," she says. "The
judge sentenced Donnie to 18 years in prison, but through the [prison]
administration of Gov. Parris Glendening and Lt. Gov. Kennedy Townsend it
was changed into a death sentence."

Timothy W. Maier is a writer and Brandon Spun is a reporter for Insight.

(SIDEBAR)

Method for the Investigation

To try to quantify drug abuse in state correctional facilities INSIGHT
filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with every state asking
for the number of fatal drug overdoses in their prisons between 1990 and 2001.

Maryland and Oregon were the first to respond, sending detailed lists of
death data. Not every state was so forthcoming. Some insisted they did not
have the information; others needed months to sort out the facts. Two
states flatly rejected the FOIAs, while others responded that they were
incapable of complying.

After calling Delaware at least once a week for four months, INSIGHT
finally was promised the FOIA data. Two days before deadline, Delaware
authorities simply denied the request, claiming that since INSIGHT is not a
Delaware resident it has no standing to request such information.

Most states provided the information for free, but New York state charged
$99 and then sent a copy of the prison system's "Unusual Incident Report" -
almost 1,000 pages of documents. None of it had anything to do with the
requested data on drug overdoses. When INSIGHT inquired about a refund, the
reply was that the magazine should write a formal complaint so that a
review board meeting in a few months could decide whether our request had
been met.

After lengthy discussion, it was explained by New York state prison
spokesman Daniel Martuscello that, "New York doesn't keep those records.
You'd have to call county medical examiners." So INSIGHT systematically
contacted every county medical examiner in the state, confirming that they
didn't have the information, either. Finally a call to the office of
Republican New York Gov. George Pataki broke through the bureaucracy. The
data and an apology arrived in short order.

The last of the 50 states, Louisiana, responded Dec. 21, 2001 - nearly six
months after the FOIA request was made. The final word: "We don't keep
those records." Those states that claim not to be able to provide records
of the numbers of inmates killed by overdose of illegal drugs while locked
up in their prisons are: Alabama, Delaware, Louisiana, Nebraska, New
Hampshire, Utah, Virginia, Washington state and West Virginia.

The Analysis

Most prisons reported relatively few drug overdoses compared to the number
of deaths by suicide and from HIV/AIDS.

Of the states that responded, many supplied limited and at times
contradictory information. Reporting increased for more recent years. No
state reported overdoses in 1990, three did for 1991 and 12 for 1999. Some
states, including California, Texas and Maryland, gave statistics for 2001.

The "unexplained death" category was used either to obfuscate or cover up
sloppy investigations and reporting. While federal prisons have from time
to time used this category as an indicator of overdose deaths, state
prisons never have clarified the category. If some states do use this
category for death by overdose there were significantly more fatal
overdoses than could be counted with certainty.

Forty states responded to the survey. Only 24 reported any overdose deaths
in the last 10 years. In general, drug-abuse experts were not surprised by
this claim, though none were precisely sure what to make of it.
Organizations including the National Institute on Drug Addiction, the
Sentencing Project, the Justice Policy Institute and the Center for
Substance Abuse Research declined to comment.

The number of reported fatal overdoses does not shock Chris Menton,
professor of criminal justice at Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I.
He explains that the state prisons house a little more than 1 million
inmates and that the population turnover is nearly 70 percent. Considering
the turnover and the large base, he contends, there is a relatively low
death rate. Menton insists this is because "drug trafficking is suppressed
in that environment." He explains that it was impossible to assess private
prisons because they only have been tracked for a few years. The private
prisons also have been uncooperative with oversight agencies.

Others agree the overall death rate is low, but identify other drug- abuse
issues. "Most prisoners have drug-addiction problems," says Karen Gotsch,
public-policy coordinator for the National Prison Project of the American
Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in the nation's capital. She does not believe
that overdoses are isolated incidents. "Usually there is a history behind
what is happening," she says, declaring that any system with this problem
should ask itself what it is doing wrong.

Gotsch believes better reporting would turn on the lights and help rectify
the situation. "A lot of times deaths are improperly classified or
unreported because prisons don't want controversy."

Orange County, Calif., Superior Court Judge James Gray has presided over
many drug cases. He authored the book Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and
What We Can Do About It. Gray agrees with Menton that fatal overdoses are
relatively rare, but says drugs are readily available behind prison walls.
He explains that "the reason drugs are in prisons is because you can make
money selling them. As long as there is a demand, it will be impossible to
keep drugs out." Gray believes the laws of supply and demand will overcome
any prison system - federal, state, county or private. That is, prison
walls, razor wire, bars, locks, gun towers and armed guards are not enough
to stop drug trafficking, use, and death by overdose.

States claiming no fatal prison overdoses from narcotics (1990-2001)
included: Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky,
Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, North
Dakota, Oklahoma, Vermont, Wisconsin, Wyoming.