Report details allegations of prisoner rights abuses

WASILLA — State prison officials potentially violated inmates’ rights during an investigation into an alleged escape plot at the Palmer Correctional Center last year.

That’s according to an Alaska Ombudsman report detailing the incident, which unfolded in May of 2014.

Rumors ripped through the Palmer Correctional Center at that time that several men were plotting to kill a corrections officer, take two other officers hostage, drive heavy equipment through the fence surrounding the prison, steal a car, and flee. A confidential informant — who previously had helped correction officials locate a contraband cell phone — gave Sgt. Francis Buzby the names of seven men he said were involved in the escape plot, according to the report on the incident and administrative process that followed.

Then a John Deere tractor key went missing May 6, fueling more speculation.

Superintendent Tomi Anderson wrote an email to Deputy Director of Institutions Floyd Sherman on the morning of May 7.

“The CI (confidential informant) added that he believes the breakout will be soon, since the prisoners are speaking about it so much on the compound,” she wrote.

Kitchen staff reported they had overheard plot details through the center’s ventilation system and through uninsulated walls.

At that point, officials placed all eight inmates in administrative segregation — isolation from other prisoners reserved for violent or unruly prisoners. That typically involves 23 hours removed from other human contact, with a single hour for shower and exercise.

Prison staff conducted a series of brief hearings two weeks later and sentenced the men to punitive segregation — sometimes known as “the Hole” in prison slang — for up to two months. Based on the kitchen memos and the informant, they also took away “good time,” or sentence reductions offered in exchange for good behavior. They also removed access to commissary and placed at least three of the inmates — who later filed a complaint with the Alaska State Ombudsman — on “close custody,” restricting work assignments and removing their furlough eligibility.

The response was a serious miscarriage of justice, according the report, and potentially violated the men’s Constitutional right to due process.

“To put the matter in the simplest possible terms, the Department accused seven men of extremely serious crimes, ignored their pleas for the most basic levels of justice, and, with no credible evidence whatsoever, found them guilty and punished them severely,” the report reads in part. “Through this process, the Department repeatedly violated its own regulations, and repeatedly failed to implement the reviews required by law that should have corrected this series of errors.”

The Not-So-Great Escape

The report compiled by assistant ombudsman Dale Whitney found numerous errors in procedure, but only after issuing a subpoena.

Corrections officials at first refused to provide documents identifying the informant. Then-Director of Institutions Bryan Brandenburg (who has since resigned and is a defendant in a lawsuit for allegedly retaliating against an employee for union activity) wrote to say that the informant faced possible recrimination, and the risk of identifying the man was too dangerous even to tell another government agency.

“The individuals you are representing are extremely dangerous and violent offenders who have been in our system for a considerable period of time,” he wrote. “They were planning an escape that part of which included the killing of one of my staff. The individual who provided us with that information is extremely creditable and helped us avoid not only the potential escape but the possibility of losing one of my staff.”

When corrections officials did provide the requested documents, at the behest of then-Commissioner Joe Schmidt — now an employee of the Mat-Su Borough School District — they revealed that three of the seven inmates knew or suspected the identity of the informant. In one case, an attorney had told his client the man’s name. In another, a US Marshal investigating a federal prisoner’s role in the attempt told him (the Marshals declined to consider the case as part of his federal custody). A third man was able to guess the informant’s name based on the list of identified prisoners.

Schmidt did not return a call to his cell phone.

The informant’s record — included in the report — also appears to contradict Brandenburg’s statement about veracity. The informant had been reprimanded for “lying or providing false statement” the month before. Between March and July 2014, he received 13 disciplinary violations, and received 225 days of punitive segregation in two institutions (Palmer Correctional and Goose Creek). Prison officials suspended all but 50 days, and gave him 20 days of work credit, meaning he eventually served a total of 30 segregation days for 10 counts.

“The informant emphatically agreed in an interview with the ombudsman investigator that he expected to receive some kind of reward or preferential treatment in exchange for proving information to the facility, and that he believed providing enough information on his fellow inmates will ‘get me out of here,’” the report reads in part.

Other details strain credulity. For example, one of the inmates — labeled Inmate 3 in the report — has been in prison since the 1970s on a first-degree murder conviction. He “used a cane or walker and at over 70 years of age has limited mobility,” the report reads. The informant said Inmate 3’s role would be finance the prison break with thousands of dollars in private funds. But Inmate 3 had only $500 in his prison bank account at any given time, the investigator wrote.

“It is theoretically possible that Inmate 3 has accumulated substantial wealth over his decades in prison that he keeps in outside institutions, but if he was planning to escape, he apparently had not foreseen the obvious fact that any effort to access a bank account would almost certainly put an end to life on the run,” the report reads.

Each of the seven inmates was given a hearing to defend themselves. Corrections officials told the men in advance their accuser would not be present, and they could not question him. When Inmate 1, a 34-year-old drug prisoner since transferred to federal custody, questioned the credibility of the informant, and the case against him, he was repeatedly overruled, and the questions were deemed irrelevant by the committee chair. When questioned, Buzby could not say how or where Inmate 1 had communicated with the other members of the alleged plot.

Inmate 1 was put in punitive segregation for 60 days and lost commissary access for 90 days.

“Does my word mean anything in this matter?” the report quotes him as saying. “’Cause as far as I’m concerned, we’re both in yellow, I’m in orange, we’re both in jail, so how is his word or her word better than mine?”

Buzby didn’t answer Inmate 1’s question, and the chair of the three-person discipline committee disallowed it.

Inmate 2, the last of three inmates who filed a complaint with the ombudsman’s office, was denied several witnesses, and pointed out that his overall goal was to be a mentor in a prison-provided substance abuse program, and that seeking escape could jeopardize his chance at parole.

Inmate 2 had hoped to be eligible for parole within a year. As a result of the hearing, his release date was set back to Jan. 1, 2030, according to the report. He also received 40 days of segregation and 60 days without commissary.

The disciplinary committee sentenced Inmate 3 to 30 days segregation, 40 days without commissary, and removed a full year of accumulated good time.

The longest of the three hearings specifically recounted in the report took under 13 minutes.

“The remaining four hearings were similar to those of the complainants, both in their brevity and their result,” the report reads.

The lost tractor key that seemed to give credence to the informant was located on the evening of May 6 in the jacket of the man — labeled Inmate 8 — who reported it missing.

“After hearing Inmate 8’s testimony and that of his witnesses, the disciplinary board concluded that Inmate 8 had in fact misplaced the key by genuine accident,” the report reads.

Officials never identified the source of the original report.

Lingering skepticism

All three inmates appealed the rulings to Anderson, who issued virtually identical denials in each case.

“Based on the incident report, staff memorandums (sic) and a reliable confidential informant’s testimony, I concur with the disciplinary committee’s guilty findings (B3-F) and penalties,” Anderson wrote. “The confidential informant was not called to testify at the disciplinary hearing due to the risk of reprisal.”

Anderson issued roughly the same decision when Inmate 2 asked eight questions about the proceedings and evidence.

Anderson now serves as the superintendent at Mat-Su Pretrial, in addition to Palmer Correctional. She told the Frontiersman in September on a guided tour of Pretrial she was proud of her work with the department.

Corrections officials referred comments to the governor’s office. Asked if Anderson’s additional duties constituted a promotion, governor’s office spokeswoman Katie Marquette said the report was a personnel matter and officials would not comment.

Each inmate also appealed the decision further to Sherman, who issued an identical one-sentence rejection in all three cases: “Appeal denied, concur with Supt.’s findings.”

Sherman no longer appears in the state employee white pages.

Department of Corrections officials did not specifically respond to each allegation. Ronald Taylor, who resigned earlier this week following a system-wide administrative review of several inmate deaths, had replaced Schmidt. The Palmer Correctional report was one of three issued while the administrative review was underway, and the authors of the administrative review noted it in their report.

“The Ombudsman report provides a detailed analysis of what went wrong in those cases, and provides important lessons that the Review Team encourages the Department of Corrections to embrace,” the administrative review reads.

Anderson came to the attention of the reviewers in the inmate death review, according to Marquette. She did not specifically identify Anderson by name.

“The review team was aware of complaints about this superintendent, and looked into them in earnest,” Marquette wrote, in an email. “Issues surrounding the superintendent are still pending, and it would be inappropriate for the Governor’s office to discuss the matter any further.”

An e-mail sent to Anderson’s listed state email address returned only an automatic out-of-office reply. Calls to her extension went unreturned.

Taylor issued a short response to all the allegations.

“The Department believes that any prisoner has the right to have their disciplinary decision reviewed by the superior court to determine if any violation of due process has occurred,” Taylor wrote. “This is a remedy that was available to each of these inmates, and should be considered an adequate remedy under” Alaska law.

The Ombudsman rejected Taylor’s response, calling it a “stunning lack of accountability for unlawful conduct.”

The report recommended reversing the original decisions, issuing a letter of apology, reviewing past disciplinary hearings at Palmer Correctional, and outsourcing hearings to another agency. Corrections officials said they had already reversed the findings of the original hearing, and rejected or inaccurately responded to the remaining recommendations.

For example, to the suggestion that they review all suspect disciplinary hearings, the officials responded that they had “reviewed all cases related to this escape incident as stated above.”

That drew a rebuke from the Ombudsman.

“The Ombudsman can imagine legitimate reasons why the Department might elect not to implement this recommendation exactly as presented, but the people of Alaska deserve a more honest response from their government when its activities are called into question,” the report reads.

This story has been changed from its original print version, which incorrectly summarized an Alaska Dispatch News article about a lawsuit involving former Director of Institutions Bryan Brandenburg. He was a co-defendant in the lawsuit, not the plaintiff.

Contact reporter Brian O’Connor at 352-2270, brian.oconnor@frontiersman.com, or on Twitter @reporterbriano.