Philadelphia School Closings

Where danger lives -- county prison

Early on the morning of April 16, Oscar Martinez, an 18-year-old McCaskey High School junior, traveled with a friend to a house on Old Dorwart Street.

Martinez, who had been charged with various crimes since the age of 14, fired a .380 -caliber pistol through the front door several times, according to a statement he gave police.

Police say those shots killed Diana Spencer, a 33-year-old mother of four, in a brutal, possibly gang-related assault.

Now Martinez is in Lancaster County Prison awaiting trial.

This sequence of events helps explain why assaults by inmates and use of force to restrain them are rising in the prison, according to Warden Vincent Guarini.

"We're getting a much more aggressive inmate into the jail," he says. "We're getting gang members, and these guys don't stop their behavior when they come in the door."

Chronic overcrowding that places inmates and guards in close quarters also contributes to a more violent atmosphere, the warden adds.

But other observers view the reports of an increasing number of assaults by inmates on guards and other inmates to charge the county jail and its management.

"Other prisons are dangerous prisoners in them too. Other prisons are overcrowded," said State Senator Mike Brubaker, a Republican who represents northern Lancaster County, and has recently taken an interest in the problems of prison .

"We should have a prison system in the county which, at worst, an average number of incidents of force [against other county jails]," he added. "Our incidents are elevated, and that should make us uncomfortable."

Guarini and Brubaker are commenting on an Inside Story analysis of "extraordinary occurrence" reports at county jails statewide. The reports were provided by individual jails and compiled by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.

Extraordinary occurrences include physical assaults by inmates on inmates, inmates on guards and guards on inmates. They also include use of physical force to restrain unruly inmates, as well as suicides and other deaths in prison.

These reports, provided to the state monthly and compiled annually, are incomplete, but they indicate that Lancaster County is among the state's top jails in number of extraordinary occurrences. Lancaster County Prison, with about 1,115 inmates this week, ranks about ninth largest in population among 69 county jails.

Why we published the leaked document | Philadelphia Public School ...

Recently made a sensitive judgment call to publish a confidential, draft District document that details more than two dozen school closing proposals.

Predictably, our decision to publish has led to criticism from some District and city officials over the past week.

Nevertheless, we stand by our call. Parents and community members, who know their schools well, should be involved early on in the planning about school closings.

Some people close to the process apparently agree, because on June 24, we received a photocopy of a confidential report from the School District’s facilities master plan (FMP) process. Titled “Preliminary FMP Options Report” and dated March 18, 2011, the 35-page draft document and accompanying charts lay out detailed proposals for a comprehensive plan to downsize the system’s enormous inventory of aging buildings. They include 84 specific examples of possible school closings, consolidations, boundary and grade changes, and new construction.

Before publishing, we took seriously our responsibility to come to an independent, ethical judgment as to whether publishing this confidential material would benefit the general good. We also authenticated the document with the District.

We published it along with an article extensively quoting District statements that the proposals are not final, do not reflect current thinking, and will look different when presented to the School Reform Commission in October.

Despite including those qualifiers, we heard objections to our decision from the District and even the mayor’s office.

During a recent appearance on Fox 29 News , District Deputy Superintendent Leroy Nunery dismissed our coverage as “literally speculation,” contending that the document was nothing more than “scratch thoughts.”

Read the detailed document for yourself and you’ll see that Nunery’s claim is, as he might say, laughable. The preliminary plan clearly reflects a year’s hard work by a team of District consultants from the URS Corporation on how to downsize the District’s inventory of buildings.

Yes, they do intend for their recommendations to eventually go through a round of community meetings this fall before any school closing decisions are made.

But we at the Notebook have repeatedly questioned whether the District is delaying the announcement of its specific recommendations for school closings for as long as possible. There is a school of thought that this is the best way to minimize controversy: by cramming public discussion of dozens of proposals into the narrowest timeframe allowable under the state law governing school closings – three months. We have never gotten any indication that the District intends otherwise.