BEN NEARY Associated Press writer | Posted: Saturday, March 31, 2007 12:00 am
CHEYENNE - Wyoming Attorney General Pat Crank says he's optimistic that a recent agreement with the American Civil Liberties Union signals that the state will soon be able to end federal oversight of the state prison system.
The ACLU recently agreed to drop five separate requests for a federal judge to hold officials with the Wyoming Department of Corrections in contempt of court over their handling of conflicts among inmates.
In exchange for the ACLU not pressing the requests, state officials acknowledged some minor policy violations in handling prisoner disputes.
Crank said Friday he hopes the agreement signals that the state will soon be able to get out from under federal oversight of the state's prison system.
U.S. District Judge Clarence Brimmer in late 2003 ordered the state to improve aspects of its prison operations. The order came in response to a lawsuit the ACLU filed on behalf of inmate Brad Skinner, who charged that other inmates beat him because they thought that he was an informant.
Brimmer last summer ended his supervision of prison staff discipline, but declined a request from the state to end his oversight of inmate conflicts.
Brimmer had scheduled a hearing for Wednesday to consider the five contempt motions in which ACLU lawyer Stephen Pevar argued prison staff had failed in areas such as completing incident investigations within 30 days and other errors.
"We're trying to get this resolved, and end the court supervision of operations at the Wyoming State Penitentiary," Crank said.
Crank said his office is anxious to see an end to the federal lawsuit. He said the state has paid about $630,000 to cover Pevar's legal fees since the case began.
"What we hope is that sometime in the near future, the court finds that the problem that necessitated the plan has been solved and that we can go back to running the penitentiary without oversight," Crank said.
Crank said he believes that conditions at the penitentiary have improved dramatically during the lawsuit.
"My overall thought about this is there were real problems at the penitentiary with inmate on inmate assaults," Crank said. He said that before 2002, "we were not policing inmates like we were supposed to."
Now, however, Crank said, "The problem is solved. The Wyoming State Penitentiary is a fundamentally different place than it was then.
"At some point, it's a law of diminishing returns," Crank said. "Having Stephen Pevar looking over our shoulder every move we make with the threat of continuing contempt actions is not helping the matter. The problem has been fixed, and it's time to let those folks run the pen."
Pevar, whose offices are in Hartford, Conn., said Friday that the federal Prison Litigation Reform Act requires states to wait one year to ask a federal judge to end oversight of a prison system once such a request is denied.
Pevar said he expects Wyoming will file a new request asking Brimmer to end his oversight of the state system this August, a year from when the state's last request which was partially denied.
While Pevar said he believes Wyoming has made "enormous progress" in improving conditions at the penitentiary, he said he's not sure the ACLU will agree that the federal court should drop supervision of the prison system.
"Until last week, I would have said that I was very optimistic, highly optimistic, that there will be no opposition," Pevar said of the prospect of dropping federal oversight. He said he still hopes that his group won't have to oppose such a request.
However, Pevar said he's recently received some investigative reports from the prison system that he says are troubling. He said he intends to look into those fully before making a decision.