This case is a poster child for why inmates shouldn't be sent to for-profit prisons.Management and Training Corporation (MTC) understaffed this Kingman prison with employees being, according to the warden, "80% new or newly promoted."
It was built on the cheap by Dominion of Edmund, OK, and like most or all of their speculative prisons, was grossly substandard. The state claimed it would only send minimum security offenders there, mostly those doing short terms for drunk driving offenses.
The alarms hadn't worked properly in years, some seven yard lights were burnt out, staff had no control over inmate identification and basic security procedures.
It happened because state regulators were uninterested in professional operation.
It grossly failed to oversee its operations and sent hordes of inappropriate prisoners to a place that could never expect to hold them securely. This included many lifers incarcerated for homicides, escape risks, members of security threat groups (STGs) such as neo-Nazis, and those with parole holds from other states.
As long as the campaign contributions kept rolling in, supposedly conservative legislators, executives and bureaucrats championed the nonexistent "savings" they provided. As long as the revolving door spun at a dizzying pace, no department of corrections official was likely to insist on delivery of anything remotely near the level and quality of contract performance that the state required.
Not that long afterward, Arizona did a research study that estimated that contract prisons cost the state 16% more, per prisoner, than did professionally managed state prisons handling matched populations.
On the evening of July 30th, 2010, the chickens came home to roost.
Three long-term inmates broke out with the assistance of the ringleader's girl friend, who reconnoitered the prison, then drove to its rear after sundown and threw small bolt cutters and other tools to breach the fence, as well as bags of pistols.
She had been arrested not two months earlier, for bringing drugs and other contraband into the prison. However, the Mohave County sheriffs offered her a deal: She could give up her suppliers, whom they said she claimed were neo-Nazis, and they would let her go free.
Of course, had she followed through, her fiancée would have been targeted after he got out of solitary for being on the receiving end of the smuggling.
On the fateful night, she had forgotten where she had parked the ringleader's Chevy Blazer, out there in the desert, so the four split up to search for it. One, Daniel Renwick, who was doing 44 years for a particularly cruel robbery-murder, quickly found the SUV and absconded with it, abandoning his confederates in the desert.
The accomplice and other two, John "Charlie" McCluskey, who was doing two 15-year sentences for attempted murders and who was a white supremacist, and Tracy Province, who was doing life for two murders, began walking through the desert like Moses, looking for a vehicle to steal or hijack.
It took over 100 minutes for the staff to discover the inmates missing from their dorm, but they weren't sure who was gone. Instead of reporting the escape to outside law enforcement and the Department of Corrections, they fiddled around, looking for them for another hour. Their motorized guard who had been making regular rounds, somehow repeatedly missed the huge hole in the outside perimeter's single fence.
The fugitives had by then walked miles before a helicopter showed to try to locate them in the sparsely vegetated desert. Unfortunately, it was operated as incompetently as the prison, and just circled the prison in tight circles, far from the escapees' location.
At last they arrived at an eastbound 18-wheeler that had stopped for a brake check miles south of Kingman at an I-40 exit. They took its East Indian drivers with them and drove to Flagstaff, stopping to call for assistance from friends and relatives along the way. Eventually, the ringleader's ex-wife agreed to pick them up and drove to meet them in Flagstaff.
At that location, they waited for their ride and the drivers agreed to wait 15 minutes after it arrived before sounding an alarm. They had taken $60 from one and $40 from the other, but rejected more, leaving each with more than half their cash.
McCluskey even turned down an offer by the owner/operator to go to an ATM to furnish them with more money.
The ex-wife dropped them off after stopping in Payson, then went on to Mesa. There they got another car and took off for a hideout in Southeast Arizona, only to find it occupied. They continued on toward their destination, Gentry, Arkansas, stealing a license plate from a car in Moriarity, New Mexico, on their way east. Unbeknownst to them, their fellow escapee who stole the getaway car, had gotten into a shootout with a Garfield County sheriff's deputy and City of Rifle police, and spilled the beans on his erstwhile companions.
He is now doing 60 years for that shootout, at Colorado taxpayers' expense.
The three remaining fugitives heard news of his capture and squealing on them on the radio as they were going through Texas. Knowing their plans had been revealed, they quickly reversed direction. When they arrived at the New Mexico I-40 welcome station, they picked up maps and then noticed a couple who were pulling an RV with a crew cab pickup. They approached them and warned the driver not to go for one of his many handguns that was within reach.
That, unfortunately, sealed the fate of the hapless couple who were kidnapped.
Now a two-car convoy, they continued, going west toward Santa Rosa, when they were ordered to pull off on a frontage road. They were forced back into their trailer, allegedly by the ringleader, while the lifer drove the pickup and his girl friend followed in the beat up grey sedan they had bought in Arizona.
According to his indictment, the ringleader shot the couple, then when the truck stopped for gas, they noticed that the victims' blood was pouring out of the trailer onto the ground. They sped off, then exited to an unpaved country road, where the trailer was unhitched, splashed with liquor and set afire.
Eventually, the lifer, intent on suicide, changed his mind, going to a church in Meetetse, Wyoming and singing with the congregation. The minister gave him a jacket and $40 for mowing the church lawn, and he cadged a motel room floor to spend the night. The next morning, after a church member saw his picture on TV news and called police, he was captured while hitchhiking to Casper.
The fleeing couple had already gone on to Billings, Montana, then to Gentry, Arkansas, a week later. There they held up a beauty salon, but thanks to law enforcement dithering, the pair continued on their nationwide flight.
A week after that, they were spotted by an alert forest service employee at a campground and a swat team descended upon them to capture the pair.
Now the federal government is prosecuting the ringleader, hoping to get a death penalty conviction from a jury that will have to endure a four month trial. Federal, Arizona and New Mexican taxpayers will be footing the bill for millions for this search, apprehension, Arizona and New Mexico trials, and continued imprisonment.
McCluskey, being 48 years old, suicidal and in poor health, is not likely to ever be executed. There have only been three federal executions in the last 50 years and three Virginians have been on death row for over 20 years. Appeals of death sentences cost the public fortunes.
If McCluskey makes it that far, he will join Sherman Lamont Fields, who promised a bribe to a Texas for-profit prison guard in exchange for a key to his prison, escaped and promptly kidnapped and murdered his ex-girl friend.
The U.S. Attorney who decided to seek the death penalty, Kenneth J. Gonzales, was perhaps awarded a federal judgeship for this sort of grandstanding, and was sworn in last week.
Unfortunately, no one seems to be really talking about the whole picture.
Somewhere, just as they did in Kansas five to ten years ago, corrupt officials are no doubt meeting with industry executives and cooking up more plans to expand their leaky, for-profit American gulag.
Who will tell the people?
