Garner Warden Takes Stock Of

High-Security Mental Health Prison

By Andrew Gorosko

James Dzurenda, the warden of Garner Correctional Institution on Nunnawauk Road, makes a point to regularly tour the labyrinthine hallways and cellblocks at the 245,000-square-foot state high-security prison, in making contact with the 400 staffers who supervise the 575 male inmates who are incarcerated there.

Beyond the various statistics that are kept to gauge the level of inmate violence at the prison, the warden explains that simply walking the halls of the sprawling institution and making contact with the people who work and are incarcerated there provides him with an intuitive sense of how conditions are evolving at Garner.

Garner is the state prison designated to house inmates with serious, chronic mental disorders. On October 17, the warden said that 467 of the 575 inmates housed at Garner were classified as mental health inmates.

The inmates’ emotional problems include schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, substance abuse problems, and various personality disorders.

The presence of those mental health problems among inmates increases the complexity of maintaining order in a high-security prison setting, Warden Dzurenda said. Consequently, inmates at times become violent, physically attacking correction officers and other inmates.

Warden Dzurenda became warden at Garner in April 2005, taking over from Giovanny Gomez, who had served as the warden there for six years. Garner opened in 1992 and is a Level 4 prison in a state prison system in which the highest security is listed as Level 5.

Initially, Garner held a general prisoner population. It later specialized in housing “close custody” inmates, who were members of crime gangs.

In 2003, the state Department of Correction (DOC) began increasing the number of psychiatric prisoners held at Garner in starting to use the facility as a consolidated site for its mental health inmates. Consolidating mental health services at Garner is designed to provide better mental health care for DOC inmates.

The general tenor at Garner is significantly better than it was a year ago, Warden Dzurenda said, noting that the policies and procedures for handling mental health inmates have matured. The DOC uses a tracking system to gauge its progress in treating the psychiatric prisoners who are housed at Garner.

“Things are much better than last year…Things are better organized,” he said.

Warden Dzurenda noted that during the month of September, Garner experienced its lowest incidence of “Class A” disciplinary incidents, or those incidents involving the most serious violent situations, since he started work as its warden in April 2005.

Although the overall number of prisoner incidents at Garner has not decreased, what has decreased is the seriousness of those incidents, he explained.

The number of Garner staffers’ worker compensation claims stemming from prisoner incidents also is used as a barometer in gauging the seriousness of prisoner incidents, he said.

The “mental health” aspect of Garner makes the prison an unpredictable place where violent incidents occur. State police are called in, as needed, to investigate criminal incidents.

The consistent use of proper staff procedures to handle mental health inmates leads to better overall prison management, Warden Dzurenda said. Properly trained prison staff improves the prison’s operation, he said.

Warden Dzurenda estimates that approximately two-thirds of the staff members who start work at Garner are new to the DOC. The remainder is comprised of staff members who transfer there from other prisons. It takes approximately two years to fully learn how to be a correction officer at Garner, he said.

As Garner was making the transition to a mental health prison during the past several years, many DOC staffers who did not want to deal with the added aspect of mental health problems among high-security prisoners transferred out from Garner to conventional state prisons.

Of the 400 people who work at Garner, about 285 are employed by the DOC, with the remainder working for the University of Connecticut’s Correctional Managed Health Care system. The UConn staffers provide the mental health treatment for inmates.

Warden Dzurenda explained that he has the final word on issues that arise at Garner, making the decisions with which all staff members must comply.

Suzanne Ducate, MD, a psychiatrist who heads DOC’s psychiatric services unit, said the consolidation of mental health care for DOC inmates at Garner has resulted in overall better care being provided to inmates at an institution specializing in such work.

The psychiatric screening provided for inmates and treatment is more comprehensive than it was in the past, she said. The basic goal of treatment is to allow inmates to move into progressively less restrictive environments either within Garner or at other state prisons that do not specialize in mental heath treatment, she said.

Before they are discharged from prison, comprehensive discharge plans are prepared for inmates, in seeking to ease their transition into the larger world outside of prison, she said.

Such discharge plans address medical treatment, housing, education and employment, among other matters. Such planning is keyed to reducing the inmate recidivism rate. DOC coordinates that planning with the state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DMHAS).

One of Warden Dzurenda’s initial tasks after coming to Garner was sorting out which inmates should be held at Garner as psychiatric prisoners and which should be transferred to other prisons, said Dr Ducate.

Such a sorting of inmates was intended to extract inmates from Garner who were feigning mental illness and consequently were disruptive elements of the institution.

Warden Dzurenda explained that a basic system of behavior is in operation at Garner.

“We give inmates incentives to behave well,” the warden said. If they behave well, a decreasing degree of control is exercised over them, he noted.