Prison cutbacks: less is less

I called Kim Nichols to say: "You were right." But she wasn't happy in the least to hear it.

"That's a sorry truth," she said.

Nichols is the wife of a corrections officer at the state prison in Monroe. Last year, she began getting ugly reports back from inside the walls.

Staff was being cut. Drug and alcohol treatment slashed. The prison started doing temporary lockdowns, the idea being if you keep all the cons locked in their cells you can run it with a skeleton crew. Morale seemed down, hostility up.

To save money it was proposed that officers cut back on patrolling the kitchens, which struck Nichols as particularly crazy.

We're going to leave offenders unwatched, she thought, where the knives are?

"He would describe what was going on in there and I just thought — somebody's going to get killed," Nichols says.

So she spoke out, writing open letters to the governor and lawmakers. She organized rallies to interest the press (one headline, from the Monroe paper in November, read: "Staff, program cuts could spark prison violence, Teamsters fear.")

In December, 400 Department of Corrections workers went to Olympia to protest that the cuts had made their jobs more risky.

"We either got ignored, or ridiculed," Nichols says now. "The public feedback was: 'All you state workers care about is money.' Or: 'You're overpaid union members.'

"I kept saying 'No, no, this is about safety,' " she said. "It didn't feel like anybody was listening."

I bet she'll have better luck getting people to listen now.

Department of Corrections officials have insisted that cutbacks have nothing to do with the murder Saturday night of corrections officer Jayme Biendl, who was strangled in the Monroe prison chapel. The prisons are as safe as ever, they have said. This was a fluke.

Maybe so. It's difficult to draw bright-line connections between something as distant as a state budget and something as immediate and senseless as this killing.

Yet in November, when Kim Nichols made enough noise about the budget cuts to score a meeting with Corrections Secretary Eldon Vail, he was quoted in the Everett Herald as saying:

"I don't like the decisions being made. They scare me ... The moves we have made do increase risk."

I talked to Kim's husband, Doug Nichols, who works inside Monroe. He says the prison lost staff in 2009 when the main unit was shifted from maximum security to medium. The most dangerous offenders were supposed to be sent elsewhere.

So why was Byron Scherf, a brutal, serial rapist and lifer who once set a victim on fire, still there?

"We gave him a measure of freedom that we obviously shouldn't have," Doug says.

Adds Kim: "It's cheaper to have these guys in medium security. Does that have anything to do with how such a sadist ended up in the chapel alone?"

The current plan in Olympia is to cut $100 million more from the state prisons, including 400 more staff and the entire on-the-job training program for correctional officers.

"What's that going to do over the long term?" Doug says. "We're dealing with the worst of the worst in here, as everybody now knows. How will that budget make things better?"

We all know the answer: It won't.

It's the story of our times — with schools, roads, prisons, you name it. We are cutting back. So we tell ourselves that less can be more. But less stubbornly insists on being what it is.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.