Her father “spent more time in [prison] for drugs in her childhood than he spent out,” said Michelle Miller, whose agency, Choose Your Future, is trying to help the woman stay out of jail.


Despite a family history of drug involvement and instability, she has never had inpatient treatment for her addiction and mental health problems.


If you wonder why Lancaster County Prison is bulging at the seams, this story may give some clues.


The prison, with 1,252 beds and an inmate average of 1,137 in 2005, is overwhelmed with people like her.


The 1852 prison on East King Street, which was enlarged in a 1991 expansion that cost $25 million, has nearly maxed out, partly because of the county’s growing population, partly because it’s easier to catch offenders with modern technology and partly because of changes in society’s approach to crime.


Unless something is done to thin the population, the county faces the expensive and politically fraught prospect of building yet another addition in the near future.


So, from a professor’s study of the prison to an in-house review team to a new organization aimed at helping inmates return home, Lancaster County is seeking alternatives to making the prison bigger.


“If you build it, they will come,” said Dr. Gary Heinke, the county’s chief services officer, “and they have.” Much attention is being focused on the most sizable chunk of the prison population: Parole violators. More than 60 percent of the inmates are in prison for failing to meet court-ordered terms of their probation or parole.


From the standpoint of people who work with inmates, too many are “violated,” or put in jail for breaking terms of their parole, too quickly.


Deon Roth, director of the county’s Adult Probation and Parole Services, said that’s just not true: Probation officers give parolees multiple chances to stay on track before jailing them.


Warden Vincent Guarini said it’s difficult to gauge the local recidivism rate, the measure of how many inmates come back to prison, because of the nature of a local jail like his — where inmates may be in and out repeatedly in the course of the judicial process.


But he estimates recidivism at 61 percent. Women are the fastest-growing segment of the population, and the group the prison has the fewest resources to house and treat. Agencies working with ex-offenders say the biggest problem is a haphazard approach to what’s called “re-entry,” or making the transition back into society.


By next year, a new council aiming at coordinating all the groups trying to help ex-offenders hopes to have a new system in place to improve inmates’ odds of success. In the meantime, the prison’s walls continue to bulge. A spike over the summer resulted in 32 women being boarded in the gym until the county was ordered to make other arrangements.


Overcrowding produces short tempers, stress and unpleasant working conditions for corrections officers and medical staff. Dr. Robert Doe, the prison physician, said six of 10 of his nurses quit over the summer.


Temperatures in the summer can soar to 100 or 120 degrees on the cellblocks, said Tom Zeager, president of the prison reform group Justice & Mercy.


“Our prison,” he said, “is a train wreck waiting to happen.”




Filling up




When the Lancaster County Prison’s addition opened in 1991, the population was 600 inmates.


Tuesday, Guarini checked his computer and reported the current count: 1,184.


With 1,252 beds, the prison’s “operating capacity,” the maximum that allows staff to work most effectively with the inmates, ought to be 1,129.


“We have no welcome mat at the door,” Guarini said, “and we don’t have a no-vacancy sign at the door” — the prison has to take whoever is sent there.


Even in 1991, county officials were expressing concerns about building more prison cells. Now the pressure is on to do something about crowding.


The county is expecting a report by Oct. 1 from Temple University professor Alan Harland, who is analyzing the prison population and making recommendations on how to improve operations. Another study is expected from the state county commissioners’ association.


Task forces and committees in county government and the courts are weighing options such as shortening the time between a parole violator being taken to jail and his court hearing, a day reporting center for violators and even the use of global positioning technology to monitor some parolees.


The county prison board is looking for alternatives to reduce the population nearer to 800, said Zeager. But while the scope of the problem is easy to see, it’s not as simple to figure out why so many people are locked up. One easy reason: There are more people in Lancaster County — although the county population didn’t nearly double in the last 14 years, as the prison population has.


Another is that society has taken a tougher position on crime and punishment, starting in the 1980s. But Lancaster County Court President Judge Louis Farina pointed out that little impact from mandatory sentencing is felt at the county level because the offenders getting longer sentences are mostly in state prisons.


Women are the fastest-growing group in the prison population, but their numbers are still low — 141 in August. Technology plays a role too. Guarini, Roth and Farina all noted that police armed with computers in their patrol cars are far more able to track down parole violators and others wanted on warrants than they used to be, which puts more people behind bars.


It costs $38.61 a day, or nearly $14,100 a year, to jail one inmate.




Treatment issues




And the average inmate is far sicker than the average citizen.


“There’s a lot of extremely ill people being put in prisons today ... for relatively minor offenses,” Doe said.


AIDS, diabetes, heart disease and illnesses resulting from drug and alcohol abuse are all problems. Guarini said inmates registered 12,593 visits with medical staff so far in 2005.


At least seven cases of methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, a bacterial infection, were diagnosed in recent months at the prison, causing much consternation but, Guarini said, no long-term problems.


Probably 80 percent of the inmates have some kind of drug involvement, Guarini said. They go through detox at the prison but often relapse soon after being released.


More people with mental illness or mental retardation are ending up in jail too, particularly with mental hospitals closing or overburdened. Guarini quoted a recent magazine article calling prisons “the new asylums.”


Doe said that over the summer, he had two patients who were jailed after striking their caregivers in nursing homes. One man was sentenced to a year in jail, even though he has mental illness and is “a total-care patient,” meaning he can’t even use the bathroom without help.


Crowding produces violence and stress, said Jean Bickmire, a Justice & Mercy board member.


And Guarini said eight other prison employees are on military duty in Iraq, putting more stress on corrections officers trying to cope with the burgeoning population. The warden said he can’t comment on the case of Jon B. Eichelman, the West Lampeter Township man who was beaten in the prison after being arrested — wrongly, it turned out — in the road-rage shooting of a 2-year-old. Lawsuits are expected.


Rehabilitation is difficult in a prison like the county’s, where the average stay is 89 to 100 days. As Guarini noted, many inmates “never habilitated. They never had the skills to begin with.”


“Some of these guys, quite frankly, do not want to change. A number of prisoners probably could be dealt with in a much more economical and efficient manner.”


“The problem is, the [public] does not want to hear about making these people better,” Zeager said. “They want to hear about punishing them.”




Technical violations?




Parole violators, who are at least 60 percent of the inmate population, are a topic of some debate.


Guarini said about 80 percent have some kind of parole violation or bench warrant. Not all of those are what are called “technical” violations — meaning breaking one of the terms of probation or parole set by a judge, but not committing a new crime.


He said the total of parole violators has risen over the years, but the percentages have remained the same.


Only about 20 percent of the jail’s inmates are serving their original sentences — up to five years — there. Other inmates are held at the jail until their trials.


Doe recently treated an inmate with “five major system failures in her body.” She also had MRSA as a complication of surgery.


“They violated her parole for not taking her medications,” Doe said, but the woman didn’t have insurance to afford the medications.


“This is not unusual. I see this frequently. People come to the front door in terrible medical condition — for minor ... violations of their parole.”


Others who work with prisoners agree with Doe. But “there’s a perception that we’re quick to violate,” said Roth, of Adult Probation. “It’s wrong. It’s our last resort.”


He said his staff, which has about 8,400 clients now, does not send violators to jail for just one misstep.


Relapse into drug or alcohol use and moving without notifying a probation officer are two common violations.


“They have a hot urine [a positive drug test], we don’t lock them up immediately,” Roth said. But two or three times means the person is on a “downward spiral” and needs to be jailed before she commits more crime to finance a habit.


Those who don’t come to meetings with probation officers get similar breaks, Roth said. “The reason they’re not reporting is they’re up to no good.”


He pulled one case file off a 6-inch-high stack on his desk as an example: The 25-year-old man, convicted in 2001 for assault, had been in court 12 times; was paroled in July 2004; missed three appointments in August; went missing and accumulated five violations before finally being picked up in July 2005.


“They’re technical violations,” Roth said. “Do I call that minor? No.”


Parole violators spend an average of 57 days behind bars before getting a court hearing.


Miller, of Choose Your Future, said people often violate parole because “they have no chance to succeed.” It takes a month to get women coming out of jail with drug problems into treatment.


“If you get a woman with that kind of history, and she’s out on the street that long, what are her chances?” Miller asked.


One ex-offender told her, “I feel like a tiny mouse being held by the tail over a cage of very hungry cats, and which one’s going to get me?”




Re-entering smoothly




Most agencies involved in the criminal justice system agree that cutting down on recidivism is key to reducing the prison population.


And the best way to do that is to do a better job of helping inmates return to life outside. They need housing, jobs, medical care, drug treatment, counseling, mentoring, and, in many cases, spiritual support.


There’s a patchwork of government, community and faith-based groups serving ex-offenders, but those services have never been coordinated.


By next year, that should change.


A new “re-entry management organization” headed by the Transition to Community agency is on the drawing board, along with a community council that will provide policy guidance.


Re-entry management is a hot topic in corrections circles nationwide. “What is not being done is reintegrating the offenders,” said Calvin Lightfoot, a former Allegheny County Jail warden who now runs a consulting firm and serves on the Justice & Mercy board.


From about 80 government and community agencies in the re-entry partnership, a smaller council of 19 members was chosen in elections over the summer, said Scott Sheely, executive director of the Lancaster County Workforce Investment Board and ex-officio council member.


The council has eight representatives from government, eight from faith-based and community groups and three with ties to the project — Weed and Seed, Justice & Mercy and the Spanish-American Civic Association.


Sept. 29 is the first council meeting. A community-wide summit is planned in the spring, with most of the programs in place by next summer.


In addition to providing a “one-stop shop” for inmates leaving jail, the RMO will help to train people working with ex-offenders.


Sheely said that research done on the RMO showed one of the obstacles to inmates’ success is that “when people get out, they often don’t have driver’s licenses.” That’s an employment problem, and, as Roth of Adult Probation noted, employability is a major factor in predicting whether an ex-offender returns to jail.


“We have to step up to the plate and provide them with a better measure of safety net,” Roth said.


The success stories are a trickle, Michelle Miller of Choose Your Future said, but they are happening.


The 23-year-old woman, for instance, with 17 prison stays. “She finally said,” Miller remembered, “‘You know what? I want to get help.’”