Hold prisons accountable; and money isn’t education

By Chris Powell

Bad stuff happens in prison. Prisoners assault each other and guards, and guards get too rough with prisoners. Not enough people are watching. Prison security makes it almost impossible for the public or journalists to watch, and secrecy breeds criminality.

---

Psychiatric Security Board did its job but insanity law is crazy

Cheng is still pleading poverty; and what do illegals cost?

Connecticut’s sanctimony cities show we could use Elon Musk

---

That’s why in 2022 the General Assembly and Governor Lamont heeded appeals from prisoners and their families to re-establish the office of prison ombudsman, make it independent of the Correction Department, empower it to investigate prisoner complaints, and bring some accountability to the department.

But the governor and legislature failed to appoint an ombudsman for two years, and now that he is in the office, DeVaughn L. Ward is all alone with more than 350 prisoner complaints to investigate and more sure to come. While $400,000 has been budgeted for the ombudsman, authority to hire wasn’t granted until December and no job opening has been advertised yet.

The governor doesn’t think the ombudsman’s work is important, and most people probably would agree with him, though most prisoners will be released eventually and any injustice they endure in confinement may be reflected in their behavior back in society. Indeed, most people released from prison in Connecticut are in trouble again in two or three years.

Ward would like a staff of 16 to cover Connecticut’s 10 prisons and their 10,000 inmates. He’d like to have regional offices too. That would push the office’s annual expense beyond $2 million, and it’s not going to happen.

But before Ward’s idea is dismissed completely, legislators might want to watch the Correction Department’s video recording of the fatal beating of prisoner J’Allen Jones by guards at the prison in Newtown in 2018. Jones was tied up, an irritant-soaked mask was placed on his face, and he was held down as guards beat him, seemingly even after he had been subdued. The department says Jones was handled appropriately except insofar as guards waited too long to try to revive him. His heart disease is said to have contributed to his death. 

His estate is suing the state for damages.

Maybe the beating was justified but a fatality is the kind of thing for which the Correction Department should answer to something other than itself. It won’t be surprising if the state offers Jones’ estate a financial settlement to foreclose accountability.

Connecticut recently established an inspector general’s office to conduct independent investigations of deaths caused by police. It has worked well and the same principle should apply with the Correction Department. So the prison ombudsman’s office should be given enough resources to do some serious work.

*

Hartford Mayor Arunan Arulampalam’s Blue-Ribbon Commission on Education has reported what it thinks is needed to improve the impoverished city’s horrible schools: a lot more money.

While predictable, the commission’s recommendations are reasonable. More money would compensate for the financial drain on the city’s schools caused by regional schools that remove students from the city school system. State government would pay more for “special education” students, of which Hartford and other poor cities have so many, an issue now being disputed by the legislature and the governor. There would be more state funding for students who don’t speak English, many of whom are illegal immigrants, another disproportionate burden borne by cities.

But even if state government provided all the extra money, it would make no difference to education in Hartford. For no amount of money ever makes any difference with education in the cities. More money just increases staff salaries. Education is mainly a matter of parenting, and the cities lack parents.

State government has been throwing more money at schools since the state Supreme Court’s decision in the school financing case of Horton vs. Meskill in 1977, and city schools have only gotten worse. Only better population demographics — the dispersal of poverty — could ever improve city schools.

The Hartford commission’s recommendations are worth considering only because they might allow the city to reduce its excessive property taxes and, over many years, encourage more unpoor people to live there.

---

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)

-END-