Changes Pledged At N.C. Prison

D.C. Concerns Aired at Hearing

The private North Carolina prison where about 1,000 D.C. inmates are held, the most in any single place nationwide, has substandard drug treatment and vocational training programs compared with most federal facilities, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons said yesterday.

Harley G. Lappin, the bureau's director, said he is revising the federal government's contract with the Rivers Correctional Institution to make the facility "mirror as close as we can the programs offered in other prisons."

The acknowledgment came after years of complaints from inmates, their families and prisoner advocates about Rivers, which is about 200 miles from the District in Winton, N.C. Lappin promised the changes during a hearing convened by Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), who has been pressing the Bureau of Prisons to make reforms.

Norton has contended in recent months that the 7,000 D.C. inmates in 75 institutions nationwide get "second-class" treatment compared with the rest of the 200,000 inmates under federal control. She recently visited Rivers and a federally run prison in Cumberland, Md., to compare the way inmates are treated. Activities at the two places were as different as night and day, she said.

At Rivers, Norton said, inmates had too much unproductive free time. At Cumberland, programming was more organized, with inmates shuttling from one event to the next.

D.C. inmates at Rivers are held alongside immigrants who have committed crimes and are serving their time before being deported to their home countries. Those inmates often are not offered the same programs in prison as U.S. citizens.

"If you're a District resident, you get tired of not having rights, even when you go to jail," said Norton, who at times grew testy with prison officials.

Nonviolent federal offenders get a year off their sentences if they complete a 500-hour drug treatment program. But prisoners serving time for D.C. offenses get no such consideration, even though the D.C. government passed a law two years ago that said they deserved the time off. Lappin said he expected the disparity to be changed soon.

The congressional hearing was the first in the decade since the District asked the federal government to assume control of its prisoners. Norton said the scrutiny was long overdue because inmates were hundreds or thousands of miles away, out of sight and out of mind of most residents.

But their families never forgot that their loved ones, once sequestered at the Lorton prison complex in Northern Virginia, needed more attention. Hundreds, in fact, showed up at a recent meeting to voice their concerns.

Yesterday, two former inmates appeared on Capitol Hill.

Douglas Robinson, 52, has been incarcerated for 16 years, 11 at Lorton and the rest in Bureau of Prisons facilities. At two of the institutions, he said, he often could not enter programs he wanted because they were full or canceled. But he credited a 500-hour drug treatment program at Butner Federal Correctional Institution in North Carolina with helping to save his life.