By Chris Powell
Connecticut’s top elected officials and members of Congress, all Democrats, excel at criticizing the private sector and the state’s regulated utilities. Indeed, there is always much to criticize, as last week state Attorney General William Tong criticized Connecticut Natural Gas for earning more money than authorized by the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority. The attorney general asked the regulators to order the gas company to reduce its rates.
But those top elected officials and members of Congress are not good at spotting and seeking redress for excesses in government itself, though there are many and they are often more costly to society. To the contrary, the theme of these officials is always that government should do and spend more.
Presumably this is because the Democrats strive to be the party of government and particularly the party of government’s unionized employees, who, when mobilized, are nearly unbeatable in the state’s elections even as government begins to crowd out the private sector, which pays for government.
For example, what should be a scandal in state government has gone without political comment for weeks now — the May 25 strangulation murder of a prisoner at the Bridgeport Correctional Center, Steven Bailey, 43, of New Haven. According to the Hearst Connecticut newspapers, a warrant charging Bailey’s cellmate, Cecil Mills, with murder says other prisoners report that the victim called for help, banged on the wall of his cell, and screamed, “He’s gonna kill me,” but wasn’t attended to until hours after he was killed.
The warrant says prison guards claim to have heard nothing unusual at the time of the murder, and a prison nurse who stopped at Bailey’s cell to give him medicine, apparently after he was killed, thought he was asleep and so walked away.
A lawyer who represents the families of inmates who died in Connecticut prisons, Alexander Taubes, says the Correction Department “has a culture of ignoring inmates’ cries for help and then the state refuses to take any responsibility. The state is 100% responsible for this incident.”
The murdered prisoner’s public defender, Kenneth Bunker, adds, “I don’t fully understand how this could happen while he was in the custody of the Correction Department.”
It will be remarkable if the department’s investigation reaches a conclusion that pins fault on any particular employees, especially remarkable if the investigation attributes fault to particular employees and disciplines them, and shocking if such discipline is not canceled or diminished by the state Board of Mediation and Arbitration, which seems to have been created to relieve state government management of authority and accountability.
Even short of a final investigative report, there is plenty of room for official comment on a murder in prison. For there is no getting around state government’s responsibility. But even state legislators from the cities from which so many of Connecticut’s criminal offenders and prisoners are drawn have been silent on this case. After all, the victim was nobody special, and why risk aggravating the guards union?
The murder raises something else that should become a political issue. That is, the prisoner accused of murder, Mills, is reported to have a long criminal record including robberies and sexual assault. Any prisoner with a long record and long sentence may figure he has little to lose by killing in prison, since Connecticut has repealed capital punishment. Without capital punishment, how can murder in prison be much deterred?
Solitary confinement could be considered a deterrent but two years ago Connecticut essentially repealed that too with a law that forbids holding anyone in solitary for more than 15 consecutive days or more than 30 days in a 60-day period.
On top of that, Governor Lamont and the few state legislators who acknowledge caring about prisoners are at odds over who should be appointed to the new position of prison “ombuds,” which is to investigate the Correction Department on behalf of prisoners. Bailey’s murder shows how much the new position is needed — but it’s still vacant.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 