Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
First the good news…
The prisoner who walked away from a work detail in Tucson on Wednesday was captured without incident on Thursday morning. Inmate who left Tucson work crew found sleeping.
Thursday night, fugitives John McCluskey and Casslyn Welch were caught in Apache County. Arizona inmate and fiancée captured in Apache County:
[I]t was the work of a keen-eyed forest ranger that did the couple in.
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The ranger, whom authorities did not immediately identify, saw what he thought was an unattended fire. When he inspected the area, he found a car backed into the trees "like someone was attempting to hide it," said David Gonzales, U.S. marshal for Arizona.
When the ranger checked the license plate on the Nissan Sentra, the tag came back as being stolen from an area near Santa Rosa, N.M.
After Thursday's sighting, the U.S. Forest Service contacted the U.S. Marshals command post in Phoenix, which has coordinated the nationwide manhunt. Through the make and model of the car and the origin of the stolen license plate, investigators determined the couple in the car might be McCluskey and Welch.
The Apache County Sheriff's Office sent a tactical-response team and arrested the couple with help from the state Department of Public Safety and members of the Forest Service.
Now the bad news…
The rash of prison breaks in Arizona in recent years is likely to continue. Howard Fischer reports Security 'gaps' at prison loom large:
An executive with the firm that runs the private prison from which three dangerous inmates escaped promised Thursday to beef up security but said that's no guarantee it won't happen again.
"Escapes occur at both public and private," Odie Washington, a vice president of Management and Training Corp., said while noting it's incumbent on the company and state to do whatever is necessary to close those security gaps prisoners can take advantage of.
But a security review of the MTC-run prison near Kingman, released Thursday, reveals that what Washington referred to as "gaps" were more like chasms. As a result, State Corrections Director Charles Ryan has ordered 150 of the highest-risk prisoners removed.
The report shows the prison perimeter-alarm system was essentially useless. Bulbs showing the status of the fence were burned out on a control panel. Guards were not patrolling the fence. And a door to a dormitory that was supposed to be locked had been propped open with a rock, helping the inmates escape.
Washington, however, said that's not the fault of the corporation. He said company employees at Kingman never told anyone at the corporate headquarters about the problems.
Ryan admitted his own audit team, which had been to the prison before the July 30 escape, "didn't see or didn't report" the shortcomings.
All that is significant because the three inmates escaped when an accomplice tossed them wire cutters and they made a 30-by-22-inch hole that went undetected for hours.
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"What was found were excessive false alarms," Ryan disclosed, noting over 16 hours on July 30 there were 89 alarms. "The system was not maintained or calibrated."
The result, he said, was employees were "desensitized" to the alarms going off, and it took 11 to 73 minutes for staffers to check out problems and reset the alarms.
"That is absolutely unacceptable," he said.
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The findings prompted Ryan to put limits on what kind of criminals can be housed at the facility.
Until now, the 1,508-bed medium-security section has included people convicted of murder.
His order removes, at least from Kingman, anyone convicted of first-degree murder, anyone who attempted escape in the last decade and anyone with more than 20 years left on a sentence. All told, 148 inmates were taken from the facility.
But Ryan would not rule out allowing murderers back in the prison after he is satisfied that security has been upgraded.
He defended the classification system that allows convicted murders – and even lifers – to serve their time in medium-security prisons.
Gov. Jan Brewer sidestepped questions about the system, saying it was in place long before she became governor in January 2009.
"It is something that maybe should be reviewed," the governor said Thursday, but added, "That classification is used across America."
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The Republican-controlled Legislature remains very much in favor of private prisons, as does Brewer. That support hasn't wavered because of the escape.
Brewer said the report from Ryan underscores her belief the escape was caused by human error, and nothing inherent in private prisons.
"It's very obvious those alarms should have been responded to," the governor said.
But the problems that Ryan sketched out go beyond the actions – or inactions – of guards.
Washington admitted there are "significant construction issues" with the perimeter fence and the alarm system that will have to be handled.
And Ryan found flaws with the entire way MTC allowed the facility to be operated.
For example, he said no one was making regular checks along the fence to look for breaches. And Ryan said guards were "not effectively controlling inmate movements" within the prison system.
Other flaws included inmates not wearing required ID badges, grooming requirements being ignored and proper searches of people going into the facility not being done.
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Another problem is that the design of the prison allows anyone to drive up close to the facility. Corrections officials want traffic routed away from the fence.
State Corrections Director Charles Ryan's report calls into question the accuracy of all audit reports filed by MTC. Audits give Arizona prison where 3 fled high marks:
Past audits of the Arizona state prison where three inmates escaped last month gave the facility high marks and revealed few issues with security or staff training, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.
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But if there was an indication of any widespread security problems at the facility that houses minimum- and medium-security inmates, it doesn't show in the internal audits.
On security issues, the audits showed overall compliance rates of 98.8 percent in 2007, 99.9 percent in 2009 and 99.5 percent in 2010. Nearly 2,870 areas of security were audited over the three years and 37 were marked as noncompliant.
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No independent audits of the Kingman prison have been done. The audits instead are conducted by a team of about 15 made up of staff at the corrections department and the prison who are considered subject matter experts.
Ken Kopczynski, executive director of the Private Corrections Working Group, said it's difficult to tell whether the audits are a true reflection of the operations at the prison without attached documentation to support the findings. The group advocates against private prisons he said typically overwork, underpay and don't properly train the staff.
Audits are used a lot of times to make things look like they're OK," he said. "Maybe they are OK. I doubt it."
There needs to be an independent audit of all of Arizona's prisons in light of what has been discovered about the operation of the MTC-run prison in Kingman.
Attorney General Terry Goddard, says the public is at risk in Arizona because of what he calls “a climate of permissiveness” toward private prisons. Goddard says Arizona too easy on private prisons:
Goddard directed that criticism at the Republican-led Legislature and Republican Gov. Jan Brewer after Brewer’s corrections director said his department’s investigation found numerous security flaws at a Kingman prison where three convicts escaped July 30.
Goddard said he would have already fired the company that operates the prison on grounds that it “clearly breached the public trust.”