Date: Fri 10-May-1996

Publication: Bee

Full Text:

Garner's First Warden Moves On With A Sense Of Accomplishment

BY ANDREW GOROSKO

Frank Crose, the Garner Correctional Institution warden, will soon be leaving the prison for a new post. He has been promoted. He leaves May 17 to take over as warden at Cheshire Correctional Institution, a 1,300-inmate, high-security prison in Cheshire. His replacement at Garner will be Remi Acosta, who currently is warden at Brooklyn Correctional Institution.

Mr Crose is leaving Newtown with a sense of accomplishment. Though Garner houses some of the state's most dangerous felons, including gang leaders who are used to exerting power through violence and intimidation, it is now known as one of the most trouble-free prisons in the state.

That was not always the case.

Mr Crose vividly recalls the summer of 1993.

On a dark August night, two inmates, George Galberth and Stanwyck Peppers, had just pushed their way up through a mesh fence atop an exercise courtyard of a Garner cellblock.

Separately, the two men bolted across the roof of the newly-opened, high-security prison on Nunnawauk Road.

Scrambling to the front of the building, they separately jumped from roof level to roof level and then down to the ground.

Two hours later, Pepper was apprehended while hiding in the woods about one-half mile away.

But Galberth was luckier and more wily than his counterpart. He made his way across a field and forest to the vicinity of the Main Street flagpole where he stole an unlocked car which had its keys inside.

Galberth fled, reportedly went on a crime spree, and was apprehended by the authorities 18 days later in New Haven.

Although both men were back in custody, the public was shaken by the nighttime escapes.

Just four months earlier, Garner, a new $67 million prison, had been rocked by a serious riot which sent more than two dozen prisoners and correction officers to area hospitals for medical treatment. The gang-based riot resulted in more than $100,000 in damage to a new cellblock. Rounds of inmate arrests and prosecutions followed.

Besides the rioting and the escapes, incidents of prisoner violence against correction officers had become commonplace at Garner in 1993.

Problems/Solutions

The public perception was that something was markedly wrong with how the state Department of Correction (DOC) was running Garner.

Although Garner had numerous security devices, the inmates who were living in it were experienced prisoners. The correction officers, however, were largely new staffers assembled to work in the state's newest prison.

Realizing that some basic changes were needed, DOC officials sat down to design a realistic and effective way to keep the inmates incarcerated without major incident. The state also built electronic security zones on the prison roof and along the prison perimeter to thwart escapes.

Warden Frank Crose was one of those DOC staffers who set up what has become known as "close custody," a system of handling prisoners to prevent violence in the prison as well as to rehabilitate the men.

"It's certainly the direct opposite of what it was. It's a different place entirely," he said. "Certainly our mission has changed. The department's mission has changed," Warden Crose said in an interview this week.

"When we opened [in November 1992] there was a lot more open movement in this facility," he said.

Starting in the fall of 1993, the DOC designated Garner as a highly restrictive "close custody" facility for unmanageably violent prison gang leaders within the state prison system.

As the close custody system evolved, DOC officials modified it to allow inmates to progress through three phases and eventually "graduate" into the general inmate population of a prison, Warden Crose said.

Of the 752 inmates now housed in Garner, about 360 men are in the close custody program. Since the program started, 258 inmates have graduated from it and entered general prison populations at other DOC facilities in the state.

Six of the inmates who have graduated from the program, failed to behave appropriately at some point after their graduation, according to the warden.

"It was our intention to come up with something that would work," Warden Crose said, pointing to the high success rate of close custody.

The DOC typically has low expectations for inmates in the prison system, he said, noting that the DOC can't coerce prisoners to improve themselves.

Prisoners are only required to do their time, he said.

"But that's not the real world," he added.

Warden Crose described close custody as "a very intense, difficult program" that requires that inmates apply themselves to succeed.

"It's very hard but it's doable," he said. "We expect excellent behavior," as well as inmates treating prison staff members with respect, he added.

Inmates have been as close as three days to graduation when they failed the program, he said.

In Phase 1 of close custody, which lasts at least eight months, inmates are kept in their cells 23 hours daily, they are permitted three showers per week, two monitored telephone calls weekly. Inmates are always escorted by correction officers when they move about within the prison. The DOC never allows more than eight Phase 1 inmates to be in the same area at the same time.

In Phase 1, only members of the same gang are allowed to live in the same two-man cell. Adjacent cells are occupied by members of different gangs so that alliances can't be established among prisoners, Warden Crose said.

Inmates enter Phase 2 if they want to and if DOC staffers want them to, he said. Prisoners are organized into 12-man squads which have mixed gang memberships. The 12-man units stay together for a 60-day period.

"We deal with gang membership as an addiction" in Phase 3 which lasts 90 days, the warden said.

"You have to make amends for your past indiscretions," he said, noting the parallels in treatment between Phase 3 and Alcoholics Anonymous.

"The success rates have been incredibly good," the warden said, noting that corrections officials from across the United States have visited Garner to learn how close custody works.

"This building is ideal for this," he said, noting that Garner's design lends itself to putting hundreds of inmates through close custody conditioning.

"These [cells] are for men who have been involved in very serious incidents," he said, noting that the average sentence for an inmate participating in close custody is more than 12 years.

Besides its cellblocks for close custody inmates, Garner contains a special unit for acutely mentally ill prisoners, as well as units for chronically mentally ill inmates, plus a general prison population.

Public Apprehensions

When Garner opened in 1992, the public was apprehensive about the presence of a high-security prison in Newtown, Warden Crose said. The public had a right to be upset, he added.

"I couldn't blame them," he said.

But prisoner handling procedures at Garner have markedly improved, he noted.

"Now, we're at a point where we wanted to be when we opened," he said.

Town officials and the public in general has been very reasonable considering the growing pains Garner experienced in the past, he said. "The town has been good to us," he said.

About six weeks ago, correction officers made an extensive weapons search of Garner and came up with no weapons, Warden Crose said. He termed that "a very good sign."

"Inmates will generally arm themselves when they feel threatened by each other," he noted. But because no weapons were found on the search, it indicates the prisoners generally feel secure while in Garner and thus are less prone to violence, he said.

Warden Crose, 52, said that his move to Cheshire will be his tenth move during his 22 years in the DOC. Leaving Garner will be the hardest of those moves, he said.

"It's leaving the staff that will be difficult," he said, adding he has made many friendships here.