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BY MICHAEL OVERALL World Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 04, 2007

For more: Read part 1 of the series, listen to Michael Overall read excerpts and watch a slide show.

Related stories: Going inside

Related stories: Doing time

A prisoner is headed for his 'biggest nightmare'

Editor's note: Prison officials won't let anyone even take a close-up photo of the front gate at the Lexington Assessment and Reception Center, where all Oklahoma inmates begin their sentences. Until now, only the guards and the inmates themselves ever got a good look at the other side. Here, for the first time, the Tulsa World follows one prisoner through the gate.

Part 3 of 3

GRANITE -- A white Chevrolet van pulls off the road and stops in front of a tall chain-link gate topped with barbed wire and surrounded by surveillance cameras. It all looks terribly familiar to Craig Steed, shackled hand and foot behind the tinted windows.

When the van left Lexington a couple of hours ago, he expected to head northeast toward Vinita, where the Oklahoma Department of Corrections has a drug-and alcohol-treatment program. Instead, the van turned southwest, and Steed opened his official travel documents to see the destination listed as "OSR."

"It took me a minute to figure it out," he says. "OSR?"

The Oklahoma State Reformatory sits along a desolate stretch of highway that connects Lone Wolf with Granite, just west of Quartz Mountain, where the big-sky landscape looks more like Wyoming than southern Oklahoma. The ground stays as flat as a ping-pong table until it reaches the horizon; then it stands straight up to form gigantic rocky buttes.

The reformatory itself is just another rock formation of sorts. In 1908, prison laborers took stones from local quarries and piled them into a castlelike fortress, a 24-foot wall of solid granite that surrounds several medium- to maximum-security cellblocks.

When the gate opens, the van pulls into a compound where Steed and several other inmates clamber out before having their shackles removed. They've arrived just in time for dinner, served in a large, noisy hall with long rows of crowded tables. "Straight out of 'The Blues Brothers,' " as Steed describes it.

The newcomers walk single-file and sit together, with the other inmates watching them, calling out to them, winking at them, whistling and blowing kisses.

"We're the fresh meat," Steed says. "OK, I know some of them were just kidding, just trying to get to us."

Some of them. Probably most of them. But not all of them. Steed can't eat, leaving most of his meal on the tray.

"I couldn't believe they were doing this to me," Steed says later. "They were putting me behind the wall. My biggest nightmare was coming true."

After dinner, the guards take the newcomers to the basement, where they change out of Lexington's orange jumpsuits and put on the gray pants and button-up shirts of ordinary inmates. From a supply closet, a trusty hands out fresh bedrolls.

"Uh-oh," the trusty smirks at Steed. "The next time they bring you down here, that's going to be bad news. Very bad news."

Baffled by the cryptic taunt, Steed quietly follows a guard down the hallway, away from the other inmates. The guard takes him upstairs and outdoors, across the compound and back through the chain-link gate where the white Chevrolet van arrived two hours ago.

Stopping just outside the prison wall, the guard points down a gravel road that leads to a separate, industrial-looking metal building.

"There you go," the guard says. "That's minimum security."

As the guard turns back inside the main prison, Steed walks by himself, but he doesn't stay on the road. For the first time in six months, since he was taken to jail for driving under the influence, he walks on the grass.

sh6 'Work'

Nothing but a simple padlock secures the gate in front of minimum security. Greg Brooks, the warden's assistant, digs through his pocket to find a ring of keys, trying several before finding one that fits. It might have been faster to climb over -- razor wire tops the fence, but not the gate itself.

As he walks down the sidewalk, Brooks says hello to several inmates, calling a few of them by name as they linger in the yard.

"Anybody seen Steed?" Brooks wants to know. The men shake their heads.

"This is an open-cell unit," Brooks explains, reaching for the front door to show that it's not locked. "They can come and go as they please, within limits."

Inside, Brooks stops in the middle of the building at a guard's station with a 360-degree view through bulletproof glass, which allows just two or three uniformed officers to keep an eye on several different dormitories at once.

"Which one is Steed in?"

A guard directs Brooks to an irregular-shaped room -- a parallelogram with benches in the middle and bunk beds stacked two-high along the walls. At 11 o'clock in the morning, a few inmates are still tucked under their blankets, sleeping, while several others are lying on top of the covers and watching their personal television sets, listening through headphones to keep the room quiet.

"Steed!" Brooks demands. "Which one is Steed's bunk?"

"Over there," an inmate points toward an empty bed on the far wall. "He's at work."

Two weeks after coming to Granite, Steed has landed a job at the reformatory garage, where inmates service the entire fleet of Department of Corrections vehicles.

Before his arrest, Steed ran his own lawn-care business, where he developed an almost compulsive need to stay busy and a fondness for working outdoors. He craves the feel of soft grass underfoot, but he took the job that was offered, even if it was indoors.

For extra cash, he used to spend the weekends rebuilding car engines, so he already knows how to tear apart a white Chevy van and put it back together.

A five-minute walk from his cellblock, the garage sits next to a parking lot for the prison staff, without so much as a fence between the open garage doors and the highway entrance about 100 yards away.

"Nobody's going to run," Steed promises.

There's really nowhere to go, and when you inevitably get caught, you don't come back to minimum security. You go behind the walls, to maximum -- and Steed has already had a glimpse of that.

"I'm going to do my job," he says, "cause no problems, and count the days until I get out of here."

At the moment, he has 898 days to go. But with points for good behavior, the days could tick away before this time next year.

'Friends'

In the basement of the main prison, where Steed changed clothes on his first day here, the trusty gave him pants that were several sizes too big.

Maybe it was an honest mistake, and maybe it wasn't. Either way, it takes several days to order a new pair. In the meantime, he has to walk around with one hand on his belt loop to keep them from falling down.

"It's cruel," Steed complains, "It's really cruel. What takes so long to get a new pair of pants?"

He feels that some of the other guys are watching him, following him -- whistling at the glimpse of his underwear, making suggestive comments when he turns around.

Steed can't walk down the hall without somebody slapping his bottom or trying to grab his crotch.

Inmates call them "canteen pants."

"You know -- easy access," Steed explains. "Some guys want to wear their pants like that so they never have to pay for their own candy bars from the canteen, if you know what I mean. Baggy pants are an invitation, like 'come and get it.' "

In theory, minimum security should have nothing but the best kind of prisoners -- the nonviolent offenders and the short-timers, inmates who can expect to get out within a year or two if they just don't make any trouble.

In practice, however, the theory doesn't always hold true. With enough time, even hard-core criminals can "work their way down the system," as wardens call it.

When a maximum-security unit reaches capacity, some of the guys who have been there the longest get kicked down to medium security, where somebody has to make room by transferring outside the wall. Eventually, even a rapist or a career gang-banger can find himself in a bunk next to a drunken driver such as Steed.

"Some of these guys have been institutionalized for so long, they wouldn't know what to do if they ever got out," he says. "In here, you get three meals a day and a roof over your head and cable TV if you want it, and you can sit around on your butt all day if you want. On the outside, some of these guys would be at the homeless shelter."

The dormitory where Steed sleeps has a full-length window, floor-to-ceiling, with a view of the yard and across the gravel road to the old prison wall. Inside the watchtower, a guard with a high-powered rifle slung over his shoulder stands silhouetted against the blue sky. It serves as a constant reminder of where an inmate will go if he causes a problem. But some of these guys wouldn't care.

"They've been behind the wall before," Steed says. "Shoot, that's where their friends are. Going back would mean nothing to them."

In the evenings before sunset, Steed likes to take a walk along a dirt trail behind the cellblock to work off some of the weight he's gained. At the far end of the trail, he's nearly half a mile from the nearest guard.

At night in the dormitory, with about 50 guys sleeping almost within arm's reach of the next bunk, the lights go dim but never turn off, leaving the room just bright enough for the guards to see what's going on.

But in minimum security, the guards are kind of like doctors at a hospital -- they make the rounds and come running if somebody calls, but otherwise they don't hang around much. Steed says he can go hours without seeing one.

"You have to be able to take care of yourself in here," he says. "You can't count on anybody else."

'Addicted'

Back at Lexington, visitors walked into the prison through a lobby with a receptionist and a sitting area, not so different from a doctor's office. But here in Granite, the front door is an old-fashioned set of iron bars, virtually unchanged since the first prisoners were housed here in 1910.

Visitors walk down a short hallway past the warden's office and through another set of iron bars before reaching the cavernous hall of the historic cellblock. Used only for storage and meeting space since the 1980s, after modern cellblocks were built in the old prison yard out back, the main hall smells of fresh paint with the DOC's ubiquitously gray walls.

Brooks, the warden's assistant, brings Steed to an interview room for a private conversation, away from his cellmates. Scientists know about "the observer's effect," a rule that says the mere act of observing a natural phenomenon can alter that phenomenon, tainting the research. Journalists know about it, too.

The other inmates realize that Steed is talking to the Tulsa World about his experience, and that itself is affecting his experience. He's been called a rat. A snitch. A traitor.

"They don't know what I'm going to say," he explains. "Basically, I'm pretty much an outcast at this point. Nobody wants to be near me."

Regardless of whether his fellow inmates believe it, Steed has never named names.

"The thing is, I don't give a rat's ass if you're using tobacco in here or if you're sneaking a joint out back," he says. "If you want to fight somebody, that's got nothing to do with me."

The inmates have unspoken rules about fighting. If you get hurt, you lie down in your bunk to heal -- you don't go to the nurse's office. And if the guards ask any questions, you say you slipped in the shower or fell out of bed.

"Fights don't happen," Steed says. "I mean, they happen. But they don't happen."

And that's all he will say about it. If he's been in a fight himself, the marks don't show.

"I'm not trying to get anybody in trouble, least of all myself," he says. "I'm not even talking about the guards; I'm not trying to cause them problems. That's never been what this is about."

Oklahoma plans to spend a record $573 million on its prison system next year to house more than 23,000 inmates. The question is: Does the money do any good? Or will those prisoners get out someday and go right back to committing the same crimes that put them here in the first place?

Take Steed, for example. Presumably, the state wants him to stop drinking and driving. For a confessed alcoholic, that means not drinking, period.

So has the state accomplished anything by just putting him in prison?

"I can tell you that I don't want to drink anymore," he says, emphasizing "want."

"I mean, look at me. Look what drinking has done to me, where it's gotten me. I don't want to do it anymore."

A month ago, when Steed first came to prison, he seemed almost grateful to be here. Getting arrested stopped him from drinking himself to death, and with alcohol treatment, he was hoping to start a whole new life when he gets out, free from the addiction that has chased him since he was 15.

For now, he's on a waiting list for that kind of program, but no one can guarantee that his sentence won't run out before his turn comes around.

"I hate to say this," Steed says, looking down at the floor, avoiding eye contact. "But I'm just being honest. If I got out of here today, I would try not to drink. I would try, and I think I could do it for a while. I went four years without a drink before this last time, and maybe I could go that long again."

He takes a deep breath, still looking down.

"I think sooner or later, I'll be drinking again. If you've never been addicted, you won't understand."

Listening from the corner, Brooks clears his throat. Time is up, and Steed needs to get back to his cellblock.

In minimum security, an inmate doesn't need an escort. The warden's assistant just opens the front door and lets Steed go by himself.

Head down, hand in his pocket, he walks beside the old prison wall, past the watchtower and around the corner, in front of the chain-link gate where the white Chevrolet vans drive in. But at least he gets to walk in the grass.

Michael Overall 581-8383
michael.overall@tulsaworld.com

Kansas mandates treatment

Three years ago, the state of Kansas decided to provide treatment instead of mere incarceration for nonviolent drug offenders.

Not just for some drug offenders; not even for most drug offenders.

For all of them.

The logic, state officials say, was as simple as the landmark legislation’s name, Senate Bill 123.

“Here we are convicting the same people for the same offenses time and time again,” says Helen Pedigo, the executive director of the Kansas Sentencing Commission. “Obviously, what we were doing wasn’t working, so why not try something different?”

The legislation mandates that anyone who is convicted of drug possession receive as much as 18 months of supervised rehabilitation.

The law doesn’t specifically include drunken drivers, but many drunken drivers — some national studies suggest a majority of them — also have drug addictions. Thus many drunken drivers are, in fact, receiving treatment under SB 123.

“The crucial point is that the state of Kansas put money in a pot for this treatment,” Pedigo says. “I think every state has realized that treatment is the way to go; the thing is paying for it.”

She’s convinced, however, that the state will save money in the long run.

With $8.9 million per year budgeted for “123 treatment,” Kansas is spending an average of $3,600 per offender. But compare that with the average of $20,000 that Kansas would spend sending those offenders to prison.

“It’s especially a good investment when you consider that it’s going to break the cycle for at least some of these offenders,” Pedigo says. “They’re going to be a productive part of society and contributing to the economy instead of being someone that you and I pay for.”

After only 36 months, Kansas hasn’t had time to prove that its treatment program will reduce repeat offenders. But for evidence, officials point to the state of Washington, where lawmakers decided 12 years ago to make treatment available for nearly all nonviolent drug offenders.

Under the state’s “Drug Offender Sentencing Alternative” program, inmates can reduce the length of their sentences if they complete rehabilitation.

Without treatment, nearly half of drug offenders return to prison within three years of their release, according to a 2006 study from the Washington State Institute for Public Policy.

With treatment, fewer than one out of three returns to prison. The study concluded that for every dollar Washington spends on treatment, it saves $7 to $10 in prison costs.

“It’s not being soft on crime,” Pedigo says. “It’s being smart on crime.”

Attacks in prison are underreported

Prison officials have long suspected that most inmate-oninmate violence goes unreported, but now studies have proven that it’s true, especially with sexual violence.

The U.S. Department of Justice, analyzing reports from federal, state and local lockups, found that a minuscule percentage of inmates reported sexual assaults while incarcerated.

Sexual assaults were reported at a rate of 2.8 per 1,000 inmates, according to a Justice Department report last year to the federal Prison Rape Elimination Commission, which was created by Congress in 2003 to study the issue.

In confidential surveys, however, more than 8.5 percent of inmates reported being victims of sexual assault, according to another report submitted to the prison rape commission.

More than 18 percent of inmates have been the targets of sexual harassment, according to the same survey, which was funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Associated Images:

Craig Steed walks down a gravel road between minimum security and the Oklahoma State Reformatory in Granite.

In the minimum-security barracks, the inmates live in tight quarters while the prison guards keep a low profile. “You have to be able to take care of yourself in here,” Craig Steed says.

The watchtower serves as a constant reminder of where inmates will wind up if they cause problems in minimum security, but some wouldn’t care. “They’ve been behind the wall before,” Craig Steed says.

Craig Steed reports for work at the reformatory garage, where not so much as a fence separates the unlocked door from the public highway nearby. “Nobody’s going to run,” Steed promises.