CHEYENNE - The American Civil Liberties Union is calling on the state to respond to claims that the Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins allowed an untrained recruit to work unsupervised there and carry chemical weapons this spring.

Pete DelPrince, 31, from Buffalo, N.Y., said in an interview Friday that the Wyoming Department of Corrections recruited him to come to the state in March.

"I worked there from day one," DelPrince said of the penitentiary. "And they were so short, me with no training whatsoever, I was still asked to work overtime. In pods by myself, with no training whatsoever. Which was a danger to myself, and probably to inmates, also."

Bob Lampert, director of the Wyoming Department of Corrections, countered Friday that his agency does not assign untrained personnel to positions where they would have to work with inmates without proper support or oversight.

Lampert said recruits are often allowed to work under supervision in the prison before they complete their academy training.

Lampert said all recruits are given temporary certification as law enforcement officers. In common with other law enforcement agencies around the state, he said, the temporary certifications allow correctional officer recruits to work for up to a year before they undergo academy training.

Lampert said correctional recruits who haven't yet received their academy training are paired with seasoned officers, or placed in jobs where they won't be allowed to work alone with inmates.

"There may very well be occasions when the experienced staff has to go do something else during that period," Lampert said.

DelPrince said he was terminated without explanation on June 16, just before he completed his training at the state corrections academy in Rawlins.

State corrections officials this spring said that more than one-third of the 322 authorized security positions at the Rawlins prison were vacant. The state recently graduated a training class of 28 new officers, and another class is under way, officials say.

Officers at the Rawlins prison have been working overtime, mandatory in many cases, to cover shifts there for many months. The corrections department has called guards from other facilities as far away as the state boot camp in Newcastle, on the South Dakota line in northeastern Wyoming, to travel to Rawlins to help.

State officials say high housing prices in Rawlins make it hard to attract and retain officers.

Stephen L. Pevar, a lawyer with the ACLU, reported DelPrince's claims on Friday to the Wyoming attorney general's office. Pevar is involved in a federal lawsuit over conditions at the Rawlins prison.

Pevar wrote that DelPrince has said he was allowed to carry pepper spray in the prison even though he had never been trained to use it.

"(DelPrince) claims to have observed fatigued officers fall asleep on their shifts," Pevar wrote. "He has also witnessed officers reporting in logs that activities were undertaken that had not been undertaken, or forgetting to complete assignments, such as equipment checks."

While Pevar emphasized that he hasn't investigated DelPrince's claims himself, he stated, "If these allegations are true, prisoner and staff safety are in jeopardy."

In a letter to Pevar, DelPrince states he was left in charge of pods in E Unit - a mental health unit at the prison - as well as another unit, "by myself with no other staff members, without having undergone any of the required classes and training per the policy and procedures that govern the Wyoming Department of Corrections."

Lampert said he hadn't seen letters from DelPrince or Pevar. But Lampert said, "If he was assigned to A or E Unit, he would have been assigned with other more experienced staff."

Lampert said he couldn't address DelPrince's claim that he was issued pepper spray despite his lack of training.

"Generally speaking, that goes to our first responders, and I seriously doubt that he would have been assigned to be a first responder in any situation because he hadn't been through the training," Lampert said.

DelPrince said he's looking for work in law enforcement in the Rawlins area. He said he would like to find a lawyer to help him get his state job back and said efforts to get the corrections department to tell him why he was terminated have been unsuccessful.

Meanwhile, DelPrince said short staffing is grinding down correctional officers at the Rawlins prison.

"Even now, I see officers out there, and they say that they're getting rid of good officers that we can't afford to lose," DelPrince said. "They say, 'We're tired, we can't spend time with our families, we can't even go on vacations. All we do is work.' They're falling asleep, they're emotionally drained. A lot of people are going through divorces over at that facility."

And DelPrince said he believes the staffing situation is affecting security at the prison. He said inmates see the same guards coming in every day and know that they're tired and stressed.

"From what I'm understanding from officers and inmates as well, we've been told that there's a big to-do coming down by the inmates. And with the way the staffing is, somebody could be injured, or even killed," DelPrince said.