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Day long public safety forum underway at Mitchellville prison

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Iowa Department of Corrections director Jerry Bartruff.

Iowa Department of Corrections director Jerry Bartruff says the state is facing “new and, in some cases, daunting challenges” when it comes to public safety.

“The rise of the opioid crisis, rising violent crimes and arrests in rural areas, disparities in our criminal justice system and an ever-growing population of persons with mental illness and other behavioral health issues in our jails and prisons are just some of the troubling areas we really need to start to address collectively,” Bartruff says.

Bartruff made his comments early this morning at the opening of a day-long forum on public safety at the state women’s prison in Mitchellville. Iowa Department of Public Safety Commissioner Roxann Ryan said the forum is focused on problem solving.

Iowa Public Safety Commissioner Roxann Ryan makes a presentation with Governor Reynolds.

“Public safety has always been one of the foundations of every community,” Ryan said. “I hope that our discussions today will lead to many more discussions throughout the state. The ideas that we discuss today will be the policies and programs that we develop tomorrow.”

Governor Kim Reynolds gave a welcoming speech at the forum and touted some already launched policies, like apprenticeship programs in the state prisons for inmates who’ll eventually be paroled.

“We need to give hope to incarcerated Iowans so that they can make positive decisions,” she said, “and begin new lives upon release.”

Legislators, officials from several state agencies and mental health advocates and are among the dozens of people who stayed to participate in the forum.

Union president: 16 inmates with makeshift weapons in fights that led to prison lockdown

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Danny Homan (file photo)

Danny Homan (file photo)

The president of the union that represents prison guards has issued a public statement that reveals more details about a recent lock-down at the state’s maximum security prison.

AFSCME Iowa Council 61 President Danny Homan said working conditions at the Iowa State Penitentiary in Fort Madison “are an outrage.” Homan said correctional officers “are truly and reasonably afraid for their safety.”

Homan’s written statement reveals the recent lockdown happened after “a series of fights” among about 16 inmates and those inmates had “makeshift weapons.”

Homan charged staffing levels “are so critically low that there are not enough bodies” to respond to emergencies. According to Homan, “at least 15 officers” from nearby prisons have been sent to Fort Madison in the past two weeks to deal with problems at the maximum security prison.

A spokesman for Governor Terry Branstad dismissed Homan’s assertions.

“The Vice Chair of the Democrat Party, Danny Homan, is only interested in taking cheap political partisan shots,” Ben Hammes, Branstad’s communications director, said in a written statement. “Gov. Branstad will keep his focus on the effective management of taxpayer resources at the Department of Corrections and the public safety of Iowans.”

A spokesman for the Iowa Department of Corrections issued a “no comment at this time” when asked to respond to Homan’s statements.

(This story was updated at 4:37 p.m. with additional information.)

Iowa gov’t policymakers rarely use “cost-benefit” analysis

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A new report finds policymakers in Iowa used a “cost-benefit analysis” just five times in a recent four-year period to make budget decisions about state government operations.

Gary VanLandingham — director of what’s called the “Results First” Initiative — says Iowa is among 29 states with a “mixed” record when it comes to evaluating the costs and benefits of taxpayer-financed programs.

“Those studies tended to be fairly limited in scope and there were some evidence that policymakers had used the results, but more in an indirect way to make a budget or policy choice,” VanLandingham says.

The national “Results First” initiative is currently working with 14 states, including Iowa.

“Cost-benefit analysis is a business-oriented approach. This is how the private sector makes their investment choices,” VanLandingham says. “Increasingly we can do that same type of analyis in the public sector.”

The “Results First” initiative is focused on evaluating the costs and benefits of programs within Iowa’s prison system right now. It could expand to help evaluate child welfare, education, substance abuse and mental health programs.

“Those are the areas that we think are most ripe for states to use this type of approve to improve return on investment for taxpayers,” VanLandingham says.

The group’s national report found cost-benefit analyses helped states “make better investments of public dollars by identifying programs and policies that deliver high returns.” But the group also found a majority of states, including Iowa, are not often using cost-benefit calculations when making “critical decisions” about government spending.

Eight maximum security inmates involved in “fights & assaults”

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Officials have restricted the movement of inmates at the Iowa State Penitentiary following  Monday morning fights inside the walls of the maximum security prison.

Prison officials say there were “fights and assaults involving eight” inmates. One of the people in a “Corrections Emergency Response Team” trying to break up the fighting got a puncture wound on their right hand that required treatment at Fort Madison’s hospital.

The eight inmates involved in the skirmishes had been separated from the general prison population because of previous behavior. A news release from the Iowa Department of Corrections indicates the fights happened “during a program designed to prepare offenders for their eventual” return to the general prison population.

The state’s maximum security prison is in lock down mode, but inmate movement inside the prison is restricted, so inmates can leave their cells to eat, but exercise breaks aren’t allowed.

Tabled House bill to ban shackling pregnant prisoners

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A nurse who is a state legislator says she’s satisfied state prison officials have a new policy in place that no longer requires the shackling of a female prisoner during the final trimester of a pregnancy and the delivery of her baby. Representative Linda Miller, a Republican from Bettendorf, says earlier this week she was able to review the “confidential” details of the new Department of Corrections policy.

“Our goal was always to solve the problem,” Miller says. “Not necessarily is it necessary to pass legislation to do that.”

Miller says if she gets an inkling something’s awry, she will revive her legislation, but Miller says she believes the agency now is following the “best practices” of dealing with a pregnant prisoner.

“I have the bill in my desk drawer,” Miller says, “and if it doesn’t look like that’s true, I have something to bring forward immediately.”

Miller is chair of the House Human Resources Committee and she held a public hearing on this issue in early February. A state senator who’s been working on the same issue plans to forge ahead with a bill yet this year that stipulates in state law that shackling pregnant prisoners is forbidden — and the baby’s father may be present during the delivery.

New effort tries to keep mentally ill out of prison system

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Corrections Department director, John Baldwin with the Governor and Lt,. Governor. (file photo)

Corrections Department director, John Baldwin with the Governor and Lt,. Governor. (file photo)

State officials say 30 percent of the inmates in Iowa prisons are “severely mentally ill.”

Dr. Harbans Deol, the director of medical services for Iowa’s nine prisons, says those inmates diagnosed with illnesses like bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and depression “take a lot of resources” and require special training for the staff who deal with them.

“They’re really hearing voices. They’re seeing things,” he says.

“They cannot picture what you’re talking about and if you start giving them orders when they’re having an acute episode…to say, ‘Hey, get up and go ahead make the bed,’ guess what? In that little sentence you have given them three different orders. They don’t get it. You have to direct them step by step.”

Dr. Gary Hinzman is a top administrator in the community-based corrections system that manages half-way houses and other low- or no-security facilities.

“We have come to learn that within our system we have people who come to us with mental health issues who would otherwise not be criminals,” Hinzman says. “And if we can identify mental health issues on the front end of the system, we can prevent those people from entering into the system further, into the costly prison system or even our own residential facilities, which are costly.”

According to Hinzman, the “shadow behind the curtain” is that many of those who are on probation have mental health problems that need to be diagnosed and treated.

Iowa Department of Corrections director John Baldwin says the governor has approved plans to hire more psychiatrists to work in the nine prisons. Those psychiatrists will do video consultations with people who’re charged with a crime, have a mental illness, but are in halfway houses or other community-based facilities outside of the nine state prisons.

“We think that’s a huge step forward and we’ll be the nation’s trend-setter in trying to keep people at the lowest level of the corrections continum,” Baldwin says. “That’s just huge because so often they come to us when, if they had some psychiatric care in the community, they would not have continued up the corrections scale.”

According to Baldwin, mental health professionals in the private sector do a good job, but they often can’t handle patients who get “aggressive” and the downward spiral starts — and those patients wind up being charged with a crime.

“We’re going to work with those people to try to keep them in the most logical place that they can be housed,” Baldwin says. “…I’m just so excited to have this conversation now.”

Baldwin and other prison officials were invited to speak before an Iowa Senate committee Tuesday. The committee’s focus on mental health issues is one reaction among Iowa legislators to the mass shooting at a Connecticut elementary school.

Gun rights advocates have proposed other measures, like allowing Iowans who have a permit to carry a concealed weapon carry that gun in a school.

Groundbreaking for new women’s prison

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State and local officials gathered in Mitchellville today for the groundbreaking on a new state prison for women. Patti Wachtendorf, the warden of the Iowa Corrections Institution for Women, says the new facility will be the “premiere” women’s prison in the country when it’s done.

groundbreaking

“Honestly, we’ve been long-overlooked.  Women have taken leftovers throughout the state,” Wachtendorf says.  “…In 1982, 50 women moved here from Rockwell City and it was a training school, so we went in, took a training school and made it into a women’s prison.  Did we make it work?  You bet we did, but it’s not the opportunity that we have today to design a prison for women.”

About 27 percent of the women who’ve been paroled from the current facility committed another crime and have been sent back. The warden says the environment in the new prison will be focused on helping the female prisoners learn skills to help them succeed once they’re released.

“Today really is history for Iowa — building a new prison for women,” she says.  “…It’s going to be a bright, positive female facility to make the changes these women need to make and that’s why we’re here.”

Robyn Mills, chair of the Iowa Board of Corrections, says this day has been a long time coming. “I worked for a number of years in the legislature and we always knew that there were problems out here, but we never knew how to address them without pouring tons of money in — and it always seemed like there was never enough money and we consistently put Band-Aids on (the women’s prison),” Mills says.  “But now I’m very excited to see that this new facility is going to be built.”

The $47.5 million for the construction project comes from the state’s I-JOBS program. The I-JOBS money was borrowed and is being paid back with some of the gambling taxes the state licensed casinos pay the State of Iowa. Governor Culver says 350 people will be hired for construction of the prison and about 200 more people will work full-time in the new prison when it’s done.

“Those hardworking men and women and their families will benefit from this important project,” Culver says.

Today there are more than 700 women in the current state prison in Mitchellville, up from nearly 600 in 2000.  John Baldwin, the director of the Iowa Department of Corrections, says 40 percent of the women coming into the state’s prison system have a diagnosed mental illness and the new women’s prison will have “an amazing” mental health facility inside.

“We are going to address that very aggressively,” Baldwin says.

A new maximum security prison for men is being built in Fort Madison to replace the current facility — “The Fort” — which is the oldest prison on this side of the Mississippi.

Grassley seeks ban on cell phones in federal prisons

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Hundreds of cellular phones are being seized every year from inside America’s federal prisons.

Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley says while there are already rules against smuggling cell phones to inmates, those rules apparently aren’t being enforced, and convicts are continuing their lives of crime from the inside their prison cells — using cell phones. Grassley says cell phones should be banned from federal prisons.

“Oddly enough, there are some rules or regulations that would say that they aren’t, and regulations ought to have the force of law if they’re based upon the law,” Grassley says.  

Grassley is introducing legislation that would clearly spell out that cell phones and other wireless devices are contraband and they’re barred from being used or possessed within federal prisons.

“We need to put a big stamp of disapproval on cell phones being smuggled into prisons,” Grassley says, “because people that’re in prison direct additional crime from inside.”

Cell phones found in federal prisons are not specifically defined as contraband and as a result, Grassley says guards and inmates found with cell phones are rarely punished.  Grassley says there are indications the current rules aren’t being enforced so it needs to be made law so it’s clear to everyone in prison and to those on the outside who might be considering smuggling a phone to an inmate.

Under Grassley’s bill, anyone who provides, or attempts to provide, an inmate with a cell phone faces up to one year in prison. Last year, federal prison workers confiscated more than 1500 cell phones from federal prison camps and more than 250 cell phones from secure federal institutions. This year, authorities have discovered more than four-thousand cell phones among inmates in California prisons. In May, a report found California prison inmates pay $500 to $1,000 per cell phone. The report noted, one corrupt correctional officer received nearly $150,000 in one year to smuggle cell phones to inmates.

Clemons man to spend 15 years in federal prison

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Ralph Edwin Johnson A 52-year-old man who was living in the small, central Iowa town of Clemons has been sentenced to 15 years in a federal prison on child pornography charges.

Last October, an undercover cop received child porn from Ralph Edwin Johnson over the Internet. It was part of a national sting operation.

In November, authorities searched Johnson’s home and found "numerous images and videos of child pornography on (his) computer." This past April, Johnson pled guilty to child pornography charges. His sentence was handed down this week.

Johnson has other convictions on his record, including a 2005 conviction for sexual exploitation of a minor in Marshall County. His name and picture are posted on the state’s Sex Offender Registry.

Lamoni man gets 10 years in prison for "sexually-explicit chats"

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A southwest Iowa man has been sentenced to 10 years in a federal prison on sex-related charges. 

Forty-five-year-old Robert Kevin Woodard of Lamoni pleaded guilty in March to a charge of “enticement of a minor for sex.” He was sentenced this week.

Authorities say back in 2007 — from the end of March ’til mid-June– Woodward had a number of “sexually-explicit online chats” with someone he thought was a 14-year-old girl. But Woodard’s chats were with an undercover officer from the Black Hawk County Sheriff’s Office.

Authorities examined Woodard’s computer and confirmed he was the one chatting online. They also found Woodard had downloaded and saved images of child pornography on his computer.