Ombudsman blasts Palmer prison

SUTTON — In a scathing report detailing — among other things — how a guard took a bag of heroin home before testing it, the State Ombudsman has recommended the Palmer Correctional Center overturn disciplinary actions taken against a prisoner there.

The report, dated Dec. 30, 2014, begins with an October complaint the inmate made with the Ombudsman, Linda Lord-Jenkins.

The prison’s property officer had found a baggie of heroin amongst the inmate’s belongings, which had been put in safekeeping while he was in solitary confinement. The property officer handed the baggie to a guard who put it in a cargo pocket and tested it the next day.

The prisoner objected to the chain of custody on the drugs.

“She didn’t say she put it into the evidence locker… where’s the evidence locker number at? I mean where’s the chain of evidence at? It could have been anything,” the inmate said in hearings the Ombudsman quoted.

The prisoner said that he’d been told his cellmate had rolled up his belongings, not an officer. The officer who was handed the baggie later admitted in an employment disciplinary hearing to forgetting about putting the drugs in the pocket and taking them home.

The Ombudsman’s report actually doesn’t fault the department for this lapse, citing findings from Xavier Frost in the state’s Division of Personnel and Labor Relations.

“Mr. Frost stated that the sergeant [name redacted] had self-reported that he/she had taken the heroin home with him/her. The division determined that the incident was a one-time mistake, and that there were no apparent issues regarding substance abuse use or other misconduct on the sergeant’s part,” the Ombudsman wrote.

The officer was reprimanded.

Where the Ombudsman does find fault, though, is in various other parts of how the case was handled.

For instance, the Ombudsman writes that the investigation should have included reports from the property officer rather than from the sergeant who later tested the drugs.

Acting Corrections Commissioner Ronald Taylor wrote in a Dec. 23, 2014, letter to the Ombudsman that this issue had been corrected.

“The second allegation, which was added to the complaint by your staff, states that the writer of the report was not the person with direct knowledge of the incident. This procedural technicality was addressed up on rehearing the matter as the Property Officer [name redacted] submitted a report and testified,” reads a part of the letter included in the Ombudsman’s report.

The Ombudsman bristles at this.

“The acting commissioner’s characterization of a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment as a ‘procedural technicality’ that was ‘added to the complaint by your staff’ shows a disturbing nonchalance on the part of the agency. The allegation was not surreptitiously added by a staff member, it is the Ombudsman’s own concern over constitutional violations of a kind that the Untied State Supreme Court has carefully considered and found to be intolerable in this country,” the Ombudsman writes.

And while Taylor claims the matter was addressed, the Ombudsman writes, the prison officials didn’t provide any tapes or transcripts of the hearing to prove it was, so the Ombudsman doesn’t consider the matter satisfied.

That lack of tapes and transcripts also led the Ombudsman to stick to her guns when it came to a finding she’d made that the department didn’t give the inmate an adequate explanation of the charges for him to defend himself. Taylor had said the matter was addressed in a rehearing.

The Ombudsman also found that while possession of narcotics is a Class C Felony under state law, the inmate was punished as if he had committed a much more serious Class A, or unclassified felony.

Taylor’s letter describes this finding as minimizing the crime of drug possession while the Ombudsman insists the only intent was to make sure that the right procedure was followed.

In addition to the recommendation that the prisoner’s discipline be overturned and a new hearing be held by the correct standards, the Ombudsman recommended that the department follow the law in disciplinary hearings.

Taylor wrote that this recommendation, “makes a number of conclusions regarding what due process is required in prison disciplinary hearings,” but that, “prison disciplinary hearings are generally informal, streamlined administrative proceedings and are not considered administrative appeals that are referred to the superiors court.”

The Ombudsman disagreed, using perhaps the strongest language of the report.

“The agency’s response to the recommendation reflects a disturbing lack of familiarity with important elements of the department’s own laws,” the report states.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.