By Chris Powell
People may never care much about the health of criminals serving prison time, nor about their treatment generally, even if most of them will be released eventually and many may have a barely suppressed desire to take revenge on the world. But Connecticut should start caring more than it has cared lately.
For years miserable medical care for the state’s prisoners has been a scandal. Lawsuits and other formal complaints have disclosed many cases where prisoners with serious ailments were misdiagnosed or denied proper care until it was too late to save them. These cases were in large part what two years ago prompted the General Assembly and Governor Lamont to create an ombudsman for the Correction Department, an outside officer empowered to investigate prisoner complaints, examine records, and question prison employees.
But the position is yet to be filled amid wrangling between the governor and urban legislators from minority groups.
The minority legislators represent the families of prisoners, most of whom are from minority groups and thus may be easier to abuse or neglect. The minority legislators want the new ombudsman to be strong and aggressive, and they have favored a candidate who several times sued the Correction Department on behalf of prisoners.
The governor seems to want an ombudsman who won’t be eager to embarrass his administration. So the appointment and even the mechanism for developing candidates remain tied up in slow and fitful negotiations.
The governor has the upper hand insofar as he can stall the appointment forever if he wants to. In retaliation, the minority legislators seem to think that they can only threaten to make trouble for legislation sought by the governor. But the legislators could do more than that. They could insist that the legislature undertake its own regular investigation and oversight of the Correction Department, something the legislature should do in regard to failing policy and administration in other respects but never does, contenting itself with less important matters.
Both sides should compromise to get the ombudsman position filled urgently, if only with an interim appointee. For the Correction Department is the most insulated and secretive part of state government. The public and news organizations have little access to prisons and no way of reliably evaluating contradictory claims by prisoners, prison administrators, and prison employees.
Forty years ago when the Journal Inquirer had a columnist who was a prisoner at the high-security prison in Somers, the prison administration was enraged by the public’s peek inside and by the threat of accountability. Eventually the administration transferred the prison writer out of state, purportedly for his own safety but actually to silence him and thereby kick the public out.
Meanwhile in a letter the warden threatened the newspaper’s managing editor with criminal prosecution for communicating with prisoners by mail. When the editor conveyed the warden’s threatening letter to the state’s attorney and asked for a ruling, the threat was quickly dismissed as a baseless attempt to intimidate.
Such are the totalitarian impulses nurtured by secrecy in government. Connecticut’s prison administrators today may not be as heavy-handed but they surely won’t be if the minority legislators maintain their nerve and insist on transparency and accountability.
All state agencies would benefit from a full-time auditor-journalist with access to everything. The legislature long has empowered the office of the child advocate to investigate and bring transparency and accountability to the occasional serious failures of the state Department of Children and Families, and the same principle should apply to prisons, though prisoners are seldom sympathetic characters like children.
If the governor won’t compromise to the legislature’s satisfaction on a prison ombudsman, the legislature should claim subpoena power and start doing the job itself. Maybe then the legislature will understand better why it should stop enacting exemptions to the state’s freedom-of-information law to protect special interests. For state government is the biggest special interest of all.
Prison administration is thankless work but keeping the public ignorant deserves no thanks. As a practical matter the prison ombudsman will be working for the public as much as for prisoners.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 