What happens when the guards go to jail?
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The irony seemed lost on no one this week when six guards at Pittsburgh's state prison and another from the Allegheny County Jail passed through the jail themselves, this time on the other side of the bars.
Nor were the safety concerns of handling inmates who are accustomed to handling inmates lost on their attorneys, who tried unsuccessfully to convince a district judge to grant them nominal bonds or release them on their own recognizance.
Three of the six suspended guards from State Correctional Institution-Pittsburgh charged with conspiring in a wide range of prisoner abuse spent a night in jail before they were granted conditional release, as did a county jail guard who police said tried to smuggle marijuana to an inmate. Their stay posed challenges for jail officials.
"Most of the inmates are there for violent crimes. If one of them gets word that these are corrections officers, who knows what could happen?" said attorney Casey D. White, who is representing Kevin Scott Friess, 31, of Bellevue, charged with 20 counts of simple assault, conspiracy, official oppression and other crimes in the SCI Pittsburgh case. District Judge Nathan Firestone set his bond at $100,000.
Mr. White said his client was kept apart from the general population, where he might have been recognized and subjected to harm. "There was a close eye watching to make sure they were OK."
Citing "security issues," Allegheny County spokeswoman Judi McNeil, who spoke on behalf of Acting Warden Trevor Wingard, would not describe the specifics of the guards' accommodations in the jail, only that "they were treated consistently with all the other inmates while they were there."
While in some ways the guards are inmates like any other, their status makes them a target, a concern jail officials can't ignore, said former jail warden Ramon Rustin, who resigned in January to head the similarly sized Bernalillo County Metropolitan Detention Center in Albuquerque, N.M.
First Published November 20, 2011 12:00 am
