Garner Correctional Institution—

Police And DOC Plan Prison

Emergency Training Exercise

By Andrew Gorosko

If you notice a burst of police activity in and near Garner Correctional Institution next week, don’t be alarmed.

On one day sometime during the period from Monday, November 8, through Friday, November 12, police plan to conduct field training exercises inside Garner and near Garner to train police and correction officers how to respond to various prison emergencies, including riots, escapes, hostage situations, and fires.

Newtown Police Chief Michael Kehoe said this week that the large-scale training exercise, which will involve Newtown police, state police, and state Department of Correction (DOC) personnel, will occur during daylight hours on one weekday next week. Several dozen people are expected to participate. Chief Kehoe declined to say on which day the exercise would occur.

Garner, which typically holds between 600 and 700 inmates, is a high security prison at 50 Nunnawauk Road. The prison, which opened in November 1992, has a Level 4 security rating in the DOC prison system, in which the most secure prison has a Level 5 rating. Garner’s specialty is housing inmates who have psychiatric problems in addition to their criminal convictions.

Chief Kehoe said that members of the public who are listening to police radio frequencies during the course of the Garner training exercise may hear conversations that seem authentic, but are actually just a training exercise. Such authentic-sounding radio transmissions also occur when emergency service agencies conduct “mass casualty drills,” which simulate large catastrophic incidents involving many injuries.

How police and DOC staffers perform during such a training exercise will form the basis of a critique on planning for prison-related emergencies, Chief Kehoe said.

“We’re looking for a critique of readiness, how well we respond, how we cooperate,” he said.

It will be the first time that such a field training exercise will be held by multiple agencies at Garner, he said.

State police spokesman Sergeant J. Paul Vance said the exercise will allow state police to test their physical resources and their performance, allowing them to maintain a familiarity with the potential events that may occur at Garner.

Such an exercise makes such training more realistic than the “tabletop” training sessions that state police routinely conduct, he said.

The exercise will include role-playing incidents within the prison and in its vicinity. The reliability of communications equipment will be checked.

The exercise would allow state police to test their use of a helicopter, motor vehicles, and the tracking dogs that would be used in the event of an actual emergency, Sgt Vance said.

Although there will be much law enforcement activity in and near the prison, the public should not be concerned because it will be a drill, he said. Sgt Vance estimated that 50 to 70 people may participate in the drill. “We try to make it as realistic as possible,” he said.

No actual prisoners will be involved in the training exercise, he said.

DOC Director of External Affairs Brian Garnett said the DOC continually conducts training keyed to public safety, security, and order. Mr Garnett stressed that the police who will be in the vicinity of the prison will be there for a training exercise, and not for some actual prison emergency.

Such training events are conducted to prepare personnel for the various types of emergency situations that may arise at a prison, he said. “We want to be prepared,” he said.