A room-sized pit that prisoners dug in the ground and furnished with chairs and shelves was not part of any escape attempt at a Kincheloe prison last week, but was motivated by prisoners seeking a place to get away from the eyes of guards and other inmates, said a spokesman at Kinross Correctional Facility. The large open hole, made by enlarging an existing pit in a compost pile, was fashioned by a crew assigned to garden work and covered by a plastic tarp for overhead shelter. It was discovered by prison staff Monday, September 21.

"They expanded the compost area so there was a hole in the ground, and ran a tarp over the top," Mike Sibbald, administrative assistant to Warden Jeffrey Woods, told The St. Ignace News Friday. "The garden crew would have been out there working with guards present, but [the guards] didn't notice they'd expanded the compost pile until they put a tarp over it. That drew the attention."

The covered pit was promptly dismantled with a front-end loader. Part of the compost pile was already below ground level, Mr. Sibbald said, making the prisoners' surreptitious work less noticeable. Most of the digging was likely done during the September 19 and 20 weekend.

"Basically, it was a hole in the ground right out in the middle of the compound, nowhere near the fence. There was no place to go from there," Mr. Sibbald said. "Privacy is precious when you're in here with that many people, and that was the point of it."

Where and how did the prisoners get the furniture and the tarp?

"That's a good question. They are ingenious. It was chairs and a shelving unit. I'm not sure where they got that, but I suspect from one of the greenhouses," Mr. Sibbald said. The tarp "might have been used earlier this summer for construction, and somebody snagged it.

"That's what they do, and we try and catch them."

Prison occupancy and staffing at Kinross Correctional Facility have been impacted by the August 8 closure of the nearby Hiawatha facility. After the restructuring at the Kincheloe facilities, prompted by cuts to the state's corrections budget, two prisons remain at the site: Kinross Correctional, under the management of Warden Woods, and another that is the merger of two facilities, Chippewa Correctional and Straits Correctional, now known as Chippewa, under Warden Greg McQuiggin.

At Kinross Correctional, where the digging took place in the prison yard, the prison is near its full capacity of 1,876 beds, but in all but one housing unit, "they are still four to a room as they were previous to the closure," said Mr. Sibbald.

At that housing unit, known as K Unit, seven-man cubicles now each house eight men. There are now 320 beds in K Unit. These are the lowest security, Level I, prisoners, and they make up public works and custodial labor crews. The housing unit is outside the main perimeter of prison fencing.

Putting the extra men in K Unit was the biggest impact the Hiawatha closing had on Kinross Correctional, Mr. Sibbald said. Staffing was not increased when the population of K Unit went up.

When the day shift begins each morning, 48 officers take over control of the prison from the night shift. The later shift typically has slightly higher numbers, because there will be more activity among the prison population, with not as many attending classes and other daytime pursuits, said Mr. Sibbald.

"The exact manning on any given shift is a function of what's going on on that shift," he said.

Ratio of Guards to Prisoners:

About 80 to 1, Indoors

The ratio of prison guards to prisoners depends on the security level of the prison, its structure, and whether prisoners are inside the facility or outdoors in the yard, said John Cordell of the state Department of Corrections.

A typical staffing ratio for a Level II security prison (describing all of the remaining facilities at Kincheloe, besides K Unit), would be about 80 prisoners to one guard, inside a housing unit, Mr. Cordell said.

"In an open yard situation, there might be 700 or 800 prisoners on a yard, and two to four staff officers covering that," he said.

In a maximum security prison, the ratio would be closer to one guard for each 20 prisoners, indoors, he said.

The yard at Kinross Correctional is open for most of the morning and afternoon, and prisoners can use it when they are not working, in school, or being sanctioned for past behavior, Mr. Sibbald said.

Staffing levels are "based on the staff it takes to maintain control, based on the physical structure of the facility, and the prisoners," he said. Minimum staffing levels for each facility in the state are set by

the Department of Corrections in Lansing, in negotiations with the prison guards' union.

The prisoners are counted four times a day at Kinross Correctional Facility, and "housing officers are expected to know where prisoners on their floor are at any given time," Mr. Sibbald said. Formal counts are taken at 11 a.m., 4 p.m., 9 p.m., and once on the midnight shift, and informal head counts are taken frequently, as needed.

"We have a pretty good staff," Mr. Sibbald said. "They're aware of what to watch for inside, and they do a pretty good job. We've got a lot of prisoners, and ideally we wouldn't have this many. That's the budget situation in Michigan at this point. That's the way it is."

He said the ample outdoor yard at the prison gives prisoners a chance to experience more personal space for at least part of the day.

"We do have a lot of space outdoors and we're lucky in that regard," he said. "We haven't experienced significant problems here. We've had our fair share of assaults and all the rest of it, but that's part of the business."

The fences at Kincheloe enclose 113 acres, the largest fenced area of any state prison in Michigan. Two perimeter chain link fences are topped with razor ribbon wire and are monitored electronically.

To save the state money on staff overtime costs, the Kincheloe prison is now being used as a dropoff site for transportation runs between prisons downstate and in the western Upper Peninsula. One of the gymnasiums is set up as transient housing for prisoners who are passing through and stay for just a night or two. The system saves money because staff who drive the prisoners can make the first leg of the trip, dropping the men off at Kincheloe, and return home without incurring overtime hours, while a second driver makes the second leg of the trip another day, rather than one driver traveling for 15 or so hours on a shift, Mr. Sibbald explained.

"It all comes back to budgeting," he said.

Two Prisons Consolidated Into

One at Chippewa

Nearby at Chippewa Correctional Facility, prison populations have gone up since Hiawatha was closed in August and the Straits and Chippewa buildings were merged into one prison. Overcrowding played a role in a prisoner protest that took place here on the same weekend as the digging at Kinross Correctional Facility.

At Chippewa, eight prisoners now live in each barracks-style cubicle that housed seven men before the consolidation. They were designed to house six.

"Basically, you understand, they took two prisons and made it into one," said Acting Deputy Duncan MacLaren of Chippewa. Mr. Mac- Laren used to be the deputy at the Hiawatha facility before it closed.

Friday morning, September 25, the prison transferred out 40 prisoners in a first step toward downsizing the population back to seven men per cubicle, he said. To reach that target population, 160 prisoners must be moved from Chippewa.

They are going "all over," he said. "They are all going to different prisons and different levels."

When it was open, Hiawatha was a Level I (lowest) security prison, and some of those prisoners have been temporarily housed in Chippewa's Level II facility. A goal is to move each prisoner back to his appropriate security level, through transfers.

The original target date to close Hiawatha was October 1, but that date was moved up when California and the federal government showed an interest in moving terrorist detainees to the Kincheloe facilities. Because the open-bay, barracks-type design of the Kincheloe prisons was not secure enough for these prisoners, the focus turned to housing them at the maximum-level security Standish prison, then set to close in August. To accommodate that possibility, "we switched closure dates with Standish," Mr. MacLaren said. The consolidation process of Chippewa and Straits was rushed.

Crowding, Yard Closure Cause

Unrest at Chippewa;

Investigation Continues

Although he said staffing levels have not suffered at Chippewa since the prison consolidation, the crowded conditions for prisoners played a part, Mr. MacLaren said, in a prisoner protest that was quelled without injury when extra guards were called in Saturday, September 19. Prisoners ran a demonstration lap around the "big yard" and refused to go back in their barracks for about 40 minutes. About 75 to 100 inmates were involved.

"A lot of things that have happened are a piece of the puzzle," he said of the unrest, "depending on

who you talk to."

Prisoners were also upset that day by the closing of the "small yard," he said, one of two yards at the prison. They didn't realize, he said, that it was closed because there were "a number of prisoner-onprisoner assaults in the small yard. There were a couple of problematic areas in the small yard that we're having trouble monitoring because of the number of people. If there had been a way to educate the prison population about why we're taking the small yard away, there may not have been a problem."

The yard has since been opened again during the daytime, and prisoners have been informed about the reason it's closed at night. They also have access to the big yard.

An investigation into the protest is ongoing.

"We haven't had any more issues out of the ordinary since then," Mr. MacLaren said. "We continue to identify prisoners who were involved in the incident and deal with them appropriately. The problem is when the facility was built it was designed for six to a cube. It is a little harder for prisoners who aren't used to [crowding] to adjust to it."

The protest and investigation are not taken lightly by the union representing the state's 8,400 prison guards, said Mel Grieshaber of the Michigan Corrections Organization in Lansing.

"We are very concerned about this protest," Mr. Grieshaber told The St. Ignace News Friday. "This is the type of dangerous thing that can escalate or spread."

It's appropriate, he said, that prisoners leading the unrest have been transferred, or "ridden out, " to other prisons, breaking up the troublemaking group, a process that began at Chippewa Monday, September 21.

His group supported the closing of the Chippewa small prison yard as a population control measure, where he said stabbings and other problems took place, and security cameras were becoming ineffective to spot problems as darkness comes earlier on fall evenings. He also supports breaking up the protest leaders right away.

"We don't want to empower prisoners," Mr. Grieshaber said, speaking of all prisons in the state. "Officers are vastly outnumbered in there. Prisoners cannot take control of things. All the officers have to depend on is each other. With their teamwork and authority, they have to be able to manage those prisoners."

Consolidating the prison at Kincheloe, and two other places in the state, Carson City and Adrian, is something his organization has opposed for years, he said, and the current situation does cause concern.

"That now-consolidated prison has 2,400 prisoners," he said of Kincheloe. "That's a huge facility now. There are open cubicles with plywood dividers, built for six beds, now at eight beds, with lockers for property, too, so it's crowded. There's no way to lock that down. There's an exponential effect on the problems when you're cramming them in there. It does create a danger for officers and they have to protect themselves, the Kincheloe community, and the other inmates."

He credited the Chippewa staff with handling the recent protest well.

"The staff did a tremendous job in quelling this disturbance. It was bad. It could have been very, very bad. Shotgun squads were authorized and at the ready. It could have been very ugly. I give them an A+ in facing a hostile situation."

Overcrowding in Michigan's prisons as a whole is soon likely to get worse, Mr. Grieshaber says, with five prisons closed so far this year, and all of the state's prison camps eliminated. With staffing costs making up more than half the corrections department budget and the state's dire financial picture, he feels corrections jobs are vulnerable and he anticipates more cuts to prison staffing as the state must balance its budget this week.

Mr. Grieshaber's job is to protect working conditions for the prison guards. Staffing numbers equates to safety for people working in prisons, he said.

"We used to have one of the largest prisons in the world at Jackson, up to 7,000 inmates," he said. "The whole momentum in the '70s and '80s was to have prisons with less inmates, so you can manage things. It looks like we're going the wrong way now."

Mr. Grieshaber is in daily contact with prison administrators and guards and their families from across Michigan. What does he hear about conditions from prison workers themselves?

"We're hearing it from all over - - they're worried," he said of prison workers. "We're holding our breath."

Facilities at Standish, Muskegon, and Camp Lehman near Grayling (the last camp in the state) are the next slated to be closed.