Prison barred from accreditation
By Sean Murphy / Daily News Staff
Tuesday, February 28, 2006 - Updated: 01:35 AM EST
WALPOLE -- MCI-Cedar Junction maximum-security prison has lost its bid for reaccreditation, but corrections officials and a member of the accreditation commission are confident the prison will regain its high marks before the end of the year.
Correction officials said the failure to gain reaccreditation has nothing to do with door security problems at the Walpole prison the past two years.
Massachusetts Department of Correction Assistant Deputy Commissioner Timothy Hall and department spokesman Dianne Wiffin announced yesterday the American Correctional Association declined to reaccredit the prison in January due to violations found during a November 2005 visit by the association’s commission on accreditation.
The violations did include safety and security issues, but most involved inventory maintenance and other problems that can be easily corrected, according to Hall.
In November 2004 and July 2005, inmates in the prison’s most secure wing, the Department Disciplinary Unit -- or DDU -- managed to exploit a mechanical flaw in their cell doors to pop them open and, in a 2004 incident, attack two officers with a homemade knife, seriously hurting one. A renovation to address the problem is expected to be completed in May.
Hall and Hampshire County Sheriff Robert J. Garvey, chairman of the association’s commission on accreditation, said these problems didn’t affect the accreditation process, because the accreditation standards don’t directly address the door issues the prison has been dealing with.
Hall said the prison, to be reaccredited, needed to comply with 90 percent of a list of 443 non-mandatory standards, and 100 percent of 62 mandatory standards. Cedar Junction met the non-mandatory qualifications, but did not comply with six of the mandatory standards.
Those standards, Hall said, had to do with storage and inventory problems. Among them, Hall said the prison:
Didn’t properly mark dental drill bits and tools in the prison dentist’s office, which would make them difficult to keep track of.
<LI>Didn’t properly store some oil rags in a maintenance area, creating a possible fire hazard.
<LI>Didn’t properly inventory a pallet of paint cans being used to repaint the DDU, which might contain dangerous chemicals that could have wound up in inmates’ hands.
<LI>Didn’t properly inventory an aerosol can of Pam cooking spray brought in by a staff member, which could have been used by an inmate as a potential explosive.
<LI>Didn’t properly catalogue some discharged fire extinguishers being kept in a garage outside the prison walls, but on the prison’s property.
Garvey said the violations could have led to an accident or misuse by an inmate. Hall said the department understands the seriousness of the violations, but called the loss of reaccreditation only "a small step backward."
"Those issues for the most part are very easily corrected," he said.
Garvey also said the problems were easily correctable, and did not believe the temporary loss of accreditation will seriously affect the prison.
"I think it’s more an embarrassment to the department than anything," he said.
Hall said Cedar Junction got its accreditation in 2003, making Massachusetts only one of six states nationwide that had all its facilities accredited. This is the first time the prison has been re-evaluated.
Normally, it takes at least a year before an institution can get its accreditation back, but Hall said Cedar Junction will be revisited by the committee in June, and perhaps re-evaluated again in November. Hall said the review is on the fast track because he believes the department will be able to correct the problems quickly.
Wiffin said the department does not blame the staff at the prison for the problems, understanding that moving DDU inmates into another part of the prison during the unit’s renovation may have contributed to the staff’s workload, causing the problems.
"We commend the staff of Cedar Junction for their hard work," Wiffin said.
Steve Kenneway, president of the Massachusetts Correction Officers Federated Union, was unavailable for comment.
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