Pubdate: Mon, 25 Feb 2002
Source: Insight Magazine (US)
Copyright: 2002 News World Communications, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.insightmag.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1107
Author: Timothy W. Maier

Series: Part 1 Of 3

ON DOPE ROW

When the phone rang at 11:30 a.m. and it was not her fiance, Sharon 
Weidenfeld figured he had been caught. They had spent days in long, painful 
conversations in which he swore to her that one more high was all he 
wanted. "I told him over the weekend he was an addict," she says quietly, 
"and there is only one way an addict can say for sure he's getting high for 
the last time - you die."

As a veteran Maryland private investigator, Weidenfeld had cracked dozens 
of cases from lost family heirlooms to serial killers, but in the case of 
her 31-year-old fiance, Donald Wade Blankenship Jr., she felt helpless. She 
listened hard that weekend, attempting to guide him away from focusing on 
the addiction while he begged her for understanding.

Then the call came. "Have you heard anything?," Blankenship's friend asked 
sadly. "They just took Donnie out of here. They're taking him to Laurel 
Regional Hospital. His heart isn't beating."

"He must have OD'd!" Weidenfeld said, breaking down. She rushed to the 
nearby hospital in time to catch the Anne Arundel County, Md., paramedics 
who had brought him in. "How is he?" she demanded as crisply as she could. 
They claimed they didn't know. "That's when I knew he was gone," she says.

A few minutes later, a compassionate doctor held Weidenfeld's hand in a 
private room. "I know he's not alive," she blurted.

"He didn't make it," the doctor quietly replied.

"I fell down to the floor," recalls Weidenfeld. "I was hyperventilating, I 
was just heartbroken. It didn't seem like it could be real."

Blankenship's heart stopped on April 9, 2001, a week before his 32nd 
birthday. Incredibly, he had obtained drugs and fatally overdosed on heroin 
in his cell at the Maryland Correctional Institute (MCI-J), a 
medium-security prison in Jessup that houses 1,100 inmates. He was serving 
an 18-year sentence for drug-related robbery and theft.

Despite the cages, bars, walls, razor wire, sophisticated electronic and 
physical surveillance, armed guards and meticulous design of modern penal 
institutions, this assuredly was not the first of the estimated 1.1 million 
inmates serving time in U.S. state prisons to have died from overdosing on 
illicit drugs.

In fact, a nine-month investigation by Insight has found that during the 
last decade at least 188 men and women died of drug overdoses in state 
prisons, 68 percent of these between 1996 and 2000. Moreover, Insight has 
learned that many of these deaths, and widespread trafficking in dope 
inside the prisons, could have been prevented if state prisons had 
aggressive and competent drug-screening policies, not to mention better 
access to treatment programs. Meanwhile, some correctional officials do 
their best to cover up this growing disaster, some going so far as to claim 
that urinalysis drug testing that often fails to detect heroin use shows 
drug addiction in prisons to be declining.

But the stonewalling and concealment of fatal overdoses uncovered by 
Insight, together with inmate and parolee confirmation of the traffic, 
suggest that some state prisons have become institutionalized crack houses 
and weed and opium dens. The fact that drugs appear to be so readily 
available to prison populations raises a series of questions to be answered 
by oversight investigators: not only how illegal drugs get into supposedly 
secure facilities, but what the states are (and are not) doing to protect 
and treat addicted inmates before releasing survivors back into society. 
And, why are related data being hidden, by whom and who benefits?

Surprisingly, Insight's investigation not only found that many state- 
prison systems refuse to track drug overdoses, but that authorities often 
fail to tally the amount of confiscated drugs, arrests or convictions 
related to prison drug trafficking. Moreover, this investigation 
discovered, there are few rules at the state level - and apparently none at 
the federal level - that require accountability or even compatibility for 
such record collection. This raises still more troubling public-policy issues.

For example, in 1998 Congress provided federal grants to states that 
dedicated part of their funding to drug-treatment programs in the prisons 
but demanded little collection or tracking of statistics. Insight's review 
of some of these programs shows they have failed to reach those serving 
longer sentences who are caught in an addiction deathtrap. The reality of 
prison life, say corrections officials, is that dangerous but nonfatal 
overdoses are so frequent that they are not even counted. Untreated addicts 
such as Blankenship simply disappear as if their lives never mattered, 
their deaths opening other beds in an overcrowded prison system.

Call them the secret prison fatalities: No TV "film at eleven," no banner 
headline, rarely even a death notice in a local newspaper. And while many 
state prisons make known inmate fatalities in public reports, deaths from 
illegal-drug overdoses are embarrassing to authorities and therefore tend 
to be buried in more general classifications or as undetermined. This 
apparent effort to hide overdose deaths prompted Insight to file Freedom of 
Information Act (FOIA) requests with every state correctional agency to 
obtain the number of drug overdoses in their prisons during the last decade.

The agencies stonewalled, obfuscated and resisted. But after more than 300 
follow-up telephone calls, 40 of the 50 states ultimately produced figures, 
previously undisclosed, relating to drug overdoses dating as far back as 
1990. Prison officials for Washington, D.C., refused to cooperate.

So, where are inmates overdosing? Between 1998 and 2001, according to 
figures produced in response to Insight's FOIAs, Maryland had the 
second-highest number of officially reported fatal overdoses with 15 deaths 
- - right between California with 31 and Texas with 12. "I can't believe 
that," says Leonard Sipes, a spokesman for the Maryland Department of 
Public Safety and Correctional Services. "That's just unbelievable. It 
doesn't make sense for those prisons such as in Texas with a larger prison 
population not to have more overdose deaths," he said. California has the 
largest inmate population, about 162,000, and Texas is the second-biggest 
with 148,000. Maryland's inmate population is a relatively small 23,000.

Maryland, which prides itself on being socially progressive, certainly is 
behind the curve in comparison with Pennsylvania, which five years ago 
announced a proactive effort to make its prisons drug-free. "In 1995, we 
had five drug overdoses, and that was one of the reasons we focused on the 
drug problem," says Jeffrey Beard, secretary of the Pennsylvania Department 
of Public Safety and Correction Services. Beard increased both security and 
treatment programs. As a result nearly 42 percent of Keystone State inmates 
are in drug programs, compared with about 9 percent in Maryland, according 
to the Criminal Justice Institute's 2000 Corrections Yearbook.

Insight's investigation also found that the official decadelong total of 
188 drug-overdose deaths in state prisons probably is higher because more 
than 50 percent of the states reported that they were unaware of the number 
of inmates who had died in their prisons from overdoses prior to 1995. 
Maryland, for example, claimed it could not produce records prior to 1998. 
Other states classified some prison deaths without an explanation. In 1999, 
for example, Alabama reported 69 deaths, labeling 52 as unexplained (see 
Chart 2).

Maryland's current $897 million correctional budget to free the state's 
prisons of illegal drugs. "I spent 10 years in the U.S. Customs Service. 
You can't find all the drugs on a ship when it comes in and you can't find 
all the drugs in prison. It's like crabgrass. Do you think you can find all 
the crabgrass in your lawn? If you think you can, I got a bridge in 
Brooklyn to sell you."

"Darryl," who asked that his real name not be used because he is serving 13 
years in a Maryland prison, tells Insight, "The great football hall of 
famer Jim Brown once said prisons are nothing more than housing projects. 
The number of relationships between correctional officials and inmates has 
grown in the last decade."

(SIDEBAR)

Behind This Investigative Report

Nine months ago INSIGHT learned of a drug-overdose death inside a state 
prison. If authorities couldn't prevent drug trafficking and heroin 
overdose in a prison, what hope could there be for the war on drugs? This 
led to a series of questions that no one in authority wanted to answer. 
Among the questions INSIGHT asked were:

How many inmates have died in the last decade of drug overdoses?

How much drug contraband is confiscated in the nation's prisons each year 
and what substances?

Why are there neither uniform reporting requirements nor a national 
database on drug overdoses and other criminal incidents in the prisons, 
available to the public, corrections administrators and lawmakers?

A reasonable person might assume such information could be culled from the 
vast computer resources maintained by the state prison systems, but INSIGHT 
found this data never had been collected, was hidden to save face for 
administrators, or had disappeared. Even where available (mostly for the 
last few years), it seemed gauzy and even dubious.

There are an estimated 1.1 million inmates in state prisons. Billions of 
dollars are spent annually to house, maintain and process these convicted 
criminals back into society, yet the recidivism rate is horrific. How can 
lawmakers or policy chiefs make decisions about public safety if they base 
their policies on faulty, spotty or false data? INSIGHT has contacted the 
two principal bodies of the Congress responsible for oversight of these 
matters - the House and Senate Judiciary Committees - to provide them with 
this investigative report and call their attention to lax record-keeping by 
state agencies that receive substantial federal tax dollars.

This magazine will monitor action or inaction by these panels and their 
members and report to the nation later in the year.

- - Paul M. Rodriguez Editor, Insight
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