Illustrated Daily; 6076; Grant's Women's Prison

You You You You know we don't go home at 5 o 'clock in the afternoon

You know, we can go to some park and just relax, you know, we depend on recreation, we depend on education, you know, we depend on our work. Something to give us some kind of incentive to say, God, I made it through the day. Give me the strength to make it through tomorrow. You know, they don't see that. The Illustrated Daily, Managing Editor, How Roads. Good evening. Late last month, women inmates at the Western New Mexico Correctional Facility near Grand staged a protest which resulted in a lockdown following fires and other disturbances caused by prisoners at that institution. New Mexico's prison woes are by now the stubs of history and protracted legal battles in the court. The state of course is under a federal court mandate known as the

Durand Consent Decree to make substantial improvements in its prison conditions. And interestingly, the Grand's facility was open just a couple of years ago as a part of planned improvements in the state's correctional program. But the irony, already today, the Grand's prison is overcrowded, 40 % in excess of capacity and that we are told is a part of the problem. Tonight, as the New Mexico Legislature contemplates cuts in the state's correctional budget, problems at the Western New Mexico Correctional Facility with the State Secretary of Corrections, Michael Frankie, and Roger Morris, a long time critic of the state's penal system, and author of the book, The Devil's Butcher Shop, a widely read account of New Mexico's 1980 prison riot. Both Secretary Frankie and Mr. Morris are at the State Library in Santa Fe. First, our producer tonight, Sandy Gerrattano, is just back from a firsthand look at the situation in grants and has prepared this

report. The fact that the women don't have prison industries, which means they can't earn industrial good time, the fact that the women in grants don't have available to them, the same kinds of programs and the same numbers that male inmates have in New Mexico, are just examples that women in New Mexico have been second -class convicts for years. You ask in my opinion if it was understandable that they should be upset by moving from single cells to the modular units. In my opinion, no, the overcrowding that we have right now, as I mentioned earlier, places a great deal of tension

on individuals. The modular units are fixed up as best as we can fix them up. They are receiving the prescribed number of floor space as they would have in their cells. They have access to all the programming that they would have within the institution. In my opinion, the moving to the modular units is a much more viable situation than what they're presently under. Secretary Frankie and other officials here in New Mexico have stated that dormitory settings are not a very good environment for keeping inmates. They're closing the dormitories at the state prison in Santa Fe, and there's reasons for that. One is that keeping four year 50 or seven or eight people in a dormitory setting increases tension. I was really surprised when I found out that the solution to the overcrowding on in grants was going to be a dormitory environment.

You ask if they had reasons to do what they did, which strongly disagree with that. We have a large number of avenues that these inmates can take if they have a viable grievance. One is we have a very extensive grievance procedure system, which they can follow. They have, we have regular classification committees where they meet with their case workers and other representatives where they can also indicate any particular grievances they have. They have full access to the courts if they have a viable grievance. They have access through their plaintiff's attorney through the grand versus Abu Dhabi if they have viable grievances resorting to violence, resorting to damage to an institution is not any way shape or form a way to address your grievance. There is a grievance procedure. That's it. It doesn't mean that we're going to get a response. I filed a grievance October 22nd.

The institutional policy says that they will try to clear up a grievance within 90 days and that's from the time you file through the appeal procedure, right? That's well over three months ago and I have no response whatsoever and I don't think it has so much to do with whether the grievance officer likes you or not, it's that if you have a really good grievance, they sure don't want to have to admit that you got him. We have given individual grievance forms to each of the people that were involved in the case, the actual disturbances and thus far I have received no grievance forms back. Like I live in CUnet and not one lady from CUnet has received any grievance forms. The only thing that they've given us is write -ups or inciting riots or assault or whatever. But there are as far as grievance forms, not one of us has gotten a grievance form.

The hierarchy of the grievance procedure includes probably some people that they're grieving against, namely the warden and some of his assistants and it's an idealistic viewpoint. To think that a grievance procedure is going to clear up every problem. I don't listen prison is not doing nothing, I mean just totally boredom. Your daily routine is getting up in the morning, cleaning your room, taking your shower, going straight outside and just standing around and that's very poor, we need help, we need to be better in our lives instead of dragging ourselves down because believe it or not, I don't know this drag is a person down physically, mentally, emotionally and it needs something needs to be done,

especially for the women and grouts because I was in that position there for a while because there was no jobs and it's a very boring life, a very sad life. You ask about the idleness problem, the weekly status of last week indicate only two female inmates who are totally idle. The rest of them are involved in some type of programming where there be educational programming or in some type of work programming. The laundry, various work programs that we have at the institution and we have a very extensive educational program that we encourage all of them to be involved in. If he thinks that working in the kitchen or cleaning up the pod or picking cigarette butts up in the yard is a job, I guess it's probably true but it's not a job that I like to do day after day and I just don't believe that

there's only two women idling in the whole prison. I mean I've been out there many times to grants and I've seen women hanging around the yard and there's a lot more than two, I'm just hanging around in the yard with nothing to do so I just don't believe them. A woman is different from a man especially in prison because their sentiments and their emotional feelings get stronger than a man where a man has to harden himself. A woman gets more sentimental and more emotionally disturbed because she's away from her family, her kids, the percentage of the women their kids are taken away, where a man, his maybe his family, he has wife out there, his kids, he knows they're taken care of and it's different with a woman because there's nobody to take care of her kids if not foster homes or church people and it's very hard. Well I'm sure that a lot of people in the streets

feel like if you can't do the time don't do the crime. So they're locked up and they're in prison but that's the punishment. The punishment for your crime is going to prison, not hassling you every day, not keeping you isolated from your family, you know, not taking away any privileges you might have. And what all of these things are going to do is it's going to increase the problem. I hope the warden doesn't think he's going to he's going to clear up the problem by keeping people locked up and not being allowed to make phone calls for a couple of weeks. That's just going to increase the frustration and increase the attention. And I don't think he understands that. Okay, I'm in prison. Okay, I'm here to be punished and to be brought up to part of being put back into society. Okay, I've worked on my life. I pay taxes. I vote every year. Okay, now

I'm in absolute exile from everything that I'm familiar with. Everything that is normal to me is a human being and so is everyone else here. I mean, with me, it's my children. You know, I can survive this. I can survive anything. The being removed from my kids is the pain, you know, and unless a person has ever been through that, they think, oh, well prison is not bad, but it is bad. It is. You're here and your kids are there. I've got four kids, you know, and one of them is a baby, a little baby, you know, and I just say, is she okay? Is everything all right? And, you know, it's constant thing. Plus, what you go through every day here, you know, it's psychological. It's not a physical punishment. It's psychological punishment that isn't going to, that isn't going to help you have a better outlook on anything when you leave here. So, voices emanating from the

Grant Women's Prison Facility and Secretary Michael Frankie, I suspect the first question a number of New Mexicans would be apt to ask this point is how does the state now find itself in the position of overcrowding at the Grant's Facility just a couple of years after it opened? How, then, the last couple of years the Women's Population is boomed and we were taken by surprise. We went from about 75 female inmates in the system when I first became the director to 125 now and that's over the course of about two and a half years and it's been as high as 135 in the last few months and that sort of a growth rate, we're talking 40 % growth rate, 30 % growth rate during that time period. Those numbers are not normal in New Mexico corrections or in any correction system so we designed a prison four or five years ago to house 88 people and we got a boom in growth and we were suddenly caught by that and part of it also is that the legislature has not been willing

to spend money to expand the facility in Western. There's a billion this year that has yet to be decided upon and there was a bill also submitted last year which was turned down to add another housing unit at Western. What would it take to put another housing unit over there? About two million dollars for a 44 -bed medium security housing unit. And that would take care of your problem as it is now. Let me ask you, is this growth in the Women's Prison's population, prison population, is that just a glitch or is that sort of portance of things to come? In other words, do we need that kind of accommodation over the long haul? Well, I don't think we're going to experience a dropback and even if we went with our normal rate of about 10 % a year now by the time we could get that 44 -bed unit built, we'd be within 10 people of filling it because it'd be another three years down the road and we would also have to add another modular unit over there to handle another dozen or 15 minimum security inmates. As you know, we use the cell blocks with steel and concrete and individual cells for medium and maximum security and throughout our system, we use dormitory

space like the modular's in grants for minimum security and over the next three years, we'll need to add another modular building over there and we need another secure housing facility as well. Charlie Z, a long time prison critic here in New Mexico, made the observations in the introductory piece that you have never been a great enthusiast of dormitory facilities for inmates, women or men. How comes it now that you're willing to take that measure? That's an easy one to answer. I hope they're all that easy. How the entire New Mexico prison system uses dormitory housing everywhere we house minimum security prisoners except grants and no facility or no thought was giving to housing minimum women over there when grants was designed, the women were living in a minimum security facility down in radium springs. That facility was found unconstitutional in federal court a few years back and then that resulted in consolidating them all over at Western. So we've got minimum security men at Sierra Blanca in dorms, at

Roswell in dorms, in Los Lunas in dorms, to the tune of about 400 people. What I have been a vocal critic of is using dorms for medium security people like Santa Fe and we're very eager to eliminate the use of dorms in the penitentiary if we can get funding to open the new space in Santa Fe, which by the way doesn't seem very likely. I'm going to say the prognosis for funding at this legislature for the new grants facility. Are you holding your breath until that comes through? No, I don't think so. I think there's a sentiment among the legislators that the department should utilize double selling rather than build new capacity to deal with its population growth and I'm not sure what they're going to do with this bill. I hope they fund it, but if that sentiment prevails then it's not very probable. All right, we heard in Sandy's piece that she brought back with her from her visit to grant that women say they are idle that they don't have prison industries like their male counterparts in Santa Fe. There's no effective release program in grants because there are no jobs in grant and that is a grant and that is a consequence. Women

prisoners in New Mexico are second class prisoners in New Mexico. May I ask a reaction to that? Well, this administration was the first one to establish prison industries for programs for women and that was done when they were housed at the central facility in Los Limis. We had them in the micrographics program. We currently have a plan in the industry's division to set up a, I guess, a branch version of the micrographics shop over at Western, so we will have an industry's program for women. We do not have any women working in town in grants. We simply can't find them jobs, but there are women who are taking both vocational and academic post -secondary classes and adult basic education classes at Western and some who are attending the two -year branch college over there. The whole facility over there, the support services jobs like jobs that are done by men and all the adult male prisons, have to be done by the women over there because the other side of the prison is the reception center and those are all transient inmates. They're only there for a month or so and then they're off to a prison wherever they're assigned. So the women at Western

do all the support services jobs and that can include some pretty menial tasks like mopping floors and cleaning out commodes and showers. It also includes plumbing work, electrical work, carpentry work, laundry, kitchen, grounds keeping and all of those jobs and those jobs are done by men and at Western they're done by women and I don't think that relegates them to a second -class position, but the difficulty in finding jobs for them in grants is very real and we as yet have not put an industry shop over there for them, but that is on the drawing boards. All right, another issue that came back from grants was sand, a warden Newton says the grievance procedure is working, but the women say it is not that nothing ever comes with their grievances and thus their protest. Have you personally examined the grievance process over there and what's your assessment? We had a survey done of our grievance system last year toward the end because I constantly emberaged when I visit the facilities and get back in the back by complaints from inmates that

the grievance officer shortstop the grievance or the warden shortstop the grievance and that's the only way they can keep us from fixing it at the department level because we have a grievance appeal officer in Santa Fe that finally reviews them and makes recommendations to the deputy secretary that's involved with that issue and our survey indicated that throughout our system the grievance resolution rate in favor of the inmates is about 50 percent and most of the times when somebody complains to me about a grievance it's Willie's grievance, it's not that person's grievance or it's Susie's grievance and Susie's Willie told him they filed it a year ago and nothing ever happened and when we check we find out that it wasn't filed. We welcome grievances, but an inmate is not satisfied with the filing of a grievance or the denial of a grievance and inmates only satisfied if they win and you know they've been batting 500 or in 1985 and if you could bat 500 in the major leagues you'd be worth a million dollars a year. Roger Morris, you are a frequent frequent critic of the state's correctional system. Frankie, Secretary Frankie has suggested here this evening that many of the problems with which we are dealing with places like grants

could only be solved by more money and that more money is not after before coming at this legislature. What do you agree that that is a major impediment? I don't think that money has the principle problem at grants and as usual in these exchanges I find that the prison that Secretary Frankie describes is quite different from the prison that others of us discover when we talk to inmates or to attorneys or other observers who've been there. This riot, this disturbance at grants among the women had a number of causes and almost none of those causes really had anything to do with money. The idleness is an administrative and a policy planning problem. The administration of this state knew when they put that prison out there that they were putting it into depressed area. Unemployment and grants is over 18 percent. No wonder they can't find jobs. There is no work release. Scraping plates in the kitchen is not rehabilitation, it's not vocational training at all and that's not a money

problem. These women can't get sanitary supplies. Women who were menstruating in that penitentiary were not able to get cortex in the period before this disturbance. That's not a money problem. Their food was bad. Both the men who were there in the in a transfer and facility and the women were ill in the period preceding this disturbance. The women have numerous complaints about good time, about disciplinary procedures, about the inaccessibility of the warden, about failure of the institution to provide proper recreation even to rent movies for the women on weekends. Their clothing was taken away in the wake of this disturbance. On the pretext that it was a fire hazard they were given equally flammable blue overhauls to wear. This is not really a problem of budget. This is a problem of management and administration and as usual we've got an administration in Santa Fe which is either looking the other way or refusing to look at the problem candidly. Well this administration and Santa Fe had nothing to do with putting

that prison over in grants and certainly this prison administration, this prison department, corrections department had nothing to do with that. Well I think they have they have thrown good money after bad and they're even proposing as secretary Frank he just told you an additional facility in this same place out there beyond Mount Taylor. Well these women are out of sight, out of mind. They can't get jobs. They don't have decent educational opportunities. They needed really a halfway house, some kind of facility in Albuquerque or in Santa Fe where women could be educated and could have some opportunity for work release. But the administration took I think for like cowardly course did not try to buck the political opposition in those communities and as a result is stuck with a white elephant out here and I have to say to my friend Michael Frankie that it's called by some of the attorneys in the trade Frankie's folly because in fact they've got a penitentiary in which the people who are there have no real opportunity to earn their way out and you're going to have continued disturbances of this kind. You're going to

have a continued high recidivism rate as long as we're not providing the minimum rehabilitative facilities. So what extent do you see that what's going on at grants in any way in contravention of the Duran consent decree? Oh I think there are a number of violations and one happened during the disturbance. I spoke to a young woman who was quite upset during the initial hours of the disturbance and she asked me what she should do and I told her at the time that she should make an exact log of all the events for legal and for personal purposes. She tried to send that out. The log was confiscated by the authorities. It's now been sent out again but I understand that in fact the authorities at the penitentiary know what's in the log and in effect have been able now to impinge upon the rights of the plaintiffs in the Duran case so that any legal action stemming from this disturbance is already compromised. There are a number of other violations that have taken place. I think there are violations every day in disciplinary procedures and the very lack of programs in that facility is an

ongoing violation of the order. Let's go back to overcrowding over there whether or not an additional facility were built at grants. At the present time they haven't overcrowding problem on their hands. Apparently they did not project back what six seven years ago when that facility was initially envisioned. The kind of women's inmate population we're dealing with here in New Mexico today and they have to deal with what alternatives have they but the modular unit. Well I think they have the alternatives of finding some other facility for these for these minimum security women and I think they also have the alternative of going to the legislature in a much more forthright way and talking about their problems. The women of course are microcosm of the problem that faces the entire system and I don't think that they've been candid with the admit with the with the legislative committees on the magnitude of this problem. We've got Secretary Frankie admitted over 40 % over population now in this facility. It's going to get worse. There are women waiting in county jails to go to grants. We're 33

people short at last count of proper staff out there even for a prison under its proper population of 88 so that we're in a crisis situation. That disturbance is only the beginning I think of the tension that you'll see in that prison and I think there's no alternative but to find some other facility in a more appropriate place. All right Secretary Frankie we're going to be out of time of course fairly soon but there are a couple of points have come up here I think I'd like to hear you respond to. One is Roger Morris's contention I've heard this made by others that there are policy changes within your ability to make which wouldn't cost you a penny which might in turn relieve some of the stress over there. May I ask your reaction to that? My reaction to that is that I would love to see those put down in writing and submitted to me and I'll give you a written answer on them. You know Roger in one breath says we don't have problems that are related to finance and then complains that we don't have adequate education and other programs.

Well who do you think does the teaching volunteers who do you think does vocational training or a special ad or adult basic education it's not free so in terms of inmate activity you can't run an inmate activity program without security staff to oversee that and program managers and teachers essentially to provide the educational content. One other point I need to get in we're almost out of time the the argument that you need to be more forceful with the state legislature. Well Roger hasn't been to the prison at Western and Roger hasn't been in any of the committee hearings where I've testified and I welcome him to come in there I will give him copies of the correspondence between me and the legislators where I think it's brutally frank and on the subject of frankness I'd like to point out that Franky's folly if we can christen the Western facility as Franky's folly the foundations for that institution were in the ground and most of the buildings had walls up the day I took office as secretary of corrections so in terms of withstanding the pressure to build that place it was a very difficult time at which to say I think this might be a mistake. All right so gentlemen we are out of time thank you both for being with us this evening we're going to leave it at that.

Tomorrow in this time slot executive news brief and next week of the illustrated daily on Monday at the legislature where even a tax increase adds up to a lean state budget. Tuesday due southwestern cities other than El Paso also want some of New Mexico's water Wednesday on location at Albuquerque's delightful Nob Hill Main Street project and then on Thursday constitutionally the legislature must adjourn. Meanwhile thank you for joining us I'm Hal Rhodes. Good night.