The official ADC line from Barrett Marson

by David Safier

I had a few interesting email and telephone discussions with Barrett Marson, the spokesman for the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC), on the days before the assessment of the private, for-profit Kingman Prison was released. Marson's basic take (or spin, if you will) on the situation was that private prisons are roughly equivalent to state-run prisons in the quality of their staff and their facilities, an assertion the Kingman assessment calls into serious question

And Marson called the July 30 prison break by violent criminals that resulted in the murder of a couple in New Mexico "human error."

Have you noticed how the term "human error" has disappeared from the governor and ADC's talking points since the damning assessment of Kingman was released? It seems Brewer's lie about severed human heads in the Arizona desert was more credible than saying "human error" caused the escape of the Kingman 3. She stands by the severed heads story to this day, but "human error"? Not so much.

Marson emailed me after he read my August 15 post about Kingman prison. I had written, among other things, that the guards were unarmed, implying that was a sign of poor security at a medium security prison housing violent offenders. Marson's email informed me, "officers and the yard, in housing units are NOT armed" in most public and private prisons. "An armed officer in a housing unit is a recipe for disaster." He said, however, guards on the perimeter and in the tower generally are armed.

That makes sense. I can see that the introduction of weapons into a prison, even in the hands of guards, would be a terrible idea in most cases. I made my statement out of lack of knowledge about prisons, not an effort to deceive, so I appreciated Marson's correction.

I used Marson's email as an opportunity to open a dialogue with him, first in a series of emails, then in a phone conversation, all before the release of the official Kingman assessment.

The basic nature of our interaction was this: I pressed Marson to find out if there were any deficiencies in Arizona's private prisons that would make them less secure than state prisons. He answered that Arizona's private and state prisons were very similar, and the prison break was the result of human error.

Marson's answers weren't false. They were selective truths and overly rosy assessments of the security at Kingman. Based on what we have learned since, what Marson told me either reflected his ignorance about the problems at Kingman, or it was pretty much a snow job.

For instance, Marson wrote, "The prison ops for Kingman was appropriate." In our phone conversation, he added, "Those officers and that prison must comply with our standards. So it's our training curriculum, it's our policies that must be followed."

In fact, the Kingman operations were far from "appropriate." You don't have multiple problems with prisoner discipline, alarm systems, perimeter surveillance and officer training at a place where the operations are appropriate.

Any teacher can tell you, a curriculum means nothing without adequate instruction, and the value of instruction fades over time if it isn't reinforced. As the Kingman assessment made clear, the training at the private prison was woefully inadequate, no matter what curriculum they were supposed to be using. Officers patrolling the perimeter didn't know proper procedure. Officers who were new or moved to new positions weren't adequately briefed, nor were manuals readily available. Put simply, the staff training was dangerously inadequate.

When I asked Marson about state oversight of the private prisons, he replied, "I would say we do have oversight over the prisons . . . We do have absolute — it is the department's responsibility for those inmates."

If that's true,people at the highest levels of ADC were guilty of serious lack of oversight of the Kingman facility. The higher ups should take the blame, and take the fall. If there are firings, fire the people in charge.

That's probably not going to happen, though. Marson implied the department had found a low level fall guy to blame for the lack of adequate oversight: the ADC's monitor at Kingman. "There is an administrative investigation under way now," Marson told me. "The department has a monitor who is at Kingman and is at every private institution that we have. And their duty is to monitor. And so there is an administrative investigation going on to determine if there are any issues with the employees who are stationed up at Kingman."

If I were a betting man, I would lay odds the higher ups will dodge blame by accusing the monitor of not alerting them to the problem. That's the way it always goes in these situations — think Abu Ghraib, think BP. For that matter, think Management Training Corporation, which runs Kingman. A vice president said the poor conditions at Kingman were not their fault, because their employees at the prison didn't tell them about the problems.

It's never the fault of the folks at the top of the food chain. They claim credit for everything that goes right, but they duck blame for everything that goes wrong.

Marson was very polite, patient and helpful in our interactions, and I learned a lot of factual information about the prison system. It's just that, whenever he could, he gave me soft spin instead of the hard truth. When his statements to me are compared to the information in the Kingman assessment, much of what he said was misleading or wrong.

But that's what spokesmen are for, isn't it?