Carlo Steven Krakoff
Here's the moving slideshow of prisoners put together by the AZ Republic for this series...check it out at the source.
-------from the Arizona Republic--------
Arizona Prisons Struggle With Drugs
Bob Ortega
Arizona Republic
June 3, 2012
Orion Wilkins was a drug addict, hooked on painkillers he'd begun
taking to fight the pain of an old high-school football injury.
In 2008, he used a wrapped block of Velveeta cheese, claiming it was a
bomb, to rob several Valley pharmacies of pain pills to feed his
addiction. He was convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to 101/2
years in prison.
Three years later, on Dec. 7, 2011, Wilkins, 35, died of a drug overdose inside the Arizona state prison in Florence.
The presence of illegal drugs inside what are supposed to be the most
secure buildings in the state has led to the deaths of at least seven
inmates from overdoses, all involving heroin, over the past two years.
The state Department of Corrections classified the deaths as accidental.
The Arizona Republic investigated these deaths as part of a
broader look at the high rates of suicide, homicide and accidental
deaths in Arizona's state prisons. The ability of inmates to get drugs
and hypodermic needles while behind bars suggests that the Department of
Corrections has its own drug problem: a porous security system that
allows a steady flow of drugs to be smuggled into the state prison
system by inmates, visitors and prison staff.
Department inspections in the year after three inmates escaped from
the Arizona State Prison-Kingman in 2010 repeatedly revealed that
officers at most prisons failed to properly search and screen staff and
visitors. The department says it has improved security procedures.
Late last month, a multi-agency investigation, including Corrections,
initiated by the Chandler Police Department, made 44 arrests and seized
32 pounds of heroin and 5 pounds of cocaine and uncovered a drug ring
connected to a state prison.
A spokesman for the Arizona attorney general said one woman arrested
had planned to take 10 ounces of heroin to the state prison's Lewis
Complex in Buckeye. A family with three brothers inside state prisons
operated the ring and had smuggled heroin in several times before, she
said.
The Attorney General's Office did not release details of how the drugs were smuggled in.
Corrections officials say that drugs, cellphones and other contraband
can enter prisons via visitors, incoming mail, off-site inmate work
crews and staff. Corrections director Charles Ryan noted an incident two
years ago at the Lewis unit in which a corrections officer was caught
bringing in burritos stuffed with two cellphones and a package of
marijuana. But he says that inmate visitors are the biggest source of
drugs.
"We have visitors who may secrete contraband in a body cavity, and
then pass it to an inmate who will secrete it in his body cavity," Ryan
said. To combat that, he says, the department uses drug-detection and
cellphone-detection dogs. "We also search visitors through a screening
device where a fan blows across the visitor, the dog sits on other side
of a wire-mesh fence, and the dog will alert if there is contraband,"
Ryan said.
Whether smuggled in by visitors, as Ryan says, or staff, as inmates
and some corrections officers allege, drugs continue to get through.
Internal incident reports for 28 days in May obtained by
The Republic
show that every day, correctional officers find heroin,
methamphetamine, marijuana and spice, along with syringes and contraband
cellphones that inmates can use to communicate with drug suppliers on
the outside. During cell searches, officers frequently catch inmates
hurriedly flushing objects down their toilets.
Examples from the incident reports:
On May 6, an officer at the state prison's Manzanita Unit in Tucson
spotted a balloon, apparently filled with drugs, that fell out of the
pants of an inmate who was being visited by his brother and sister. On
the same day an inmate in solitary at the Eyman Complex in Florence was
taken to Anthem Hospital with an apparent drug overdose.
On May 9, an assistant deputy warden at the state prison's Cheyenne
Unit in Yuma was caught bringing a cellphone into the prison in her
lunch bag. Corrections officials have not responded to queries about
this incident, which was not publicly disclosed.
On May 23, a Tucson city employee spotted someone tossing a package
over a fence to an inmate work crew. Inside the package were four
bubble-wrapped cellphones.
On May 26, in separate incidents at four prisons, corrections
officers found two packets of drugs, two syringes, a cellphone and, at
the Florence prison's central unit, four gallons of alcohol in an
inmate's cell.
Three-quarters of arriving inmates have significant substance-abuse
histories, according to Corrections records, yet only one in 13 received
substance-abuse treatment last fiscal year. A spokesman for the
department said inmates usually don't receive treatment until they
approach the end of their sentence.
The heroin-overdose death of Anthony Braun at the Lewis Complex on
Nov. 14 has raised other questions about the problems of drugs in state
prisons.
Tony Braun
An anonymous May 1 e-mail to prisoner advocate Peg Plews alleged that
two correctional officers assigned to Braun's housing unit failed to do
their security checks for at least four hours before inmates notified
them Braun was having problems. The e-mail alleged one officer was
asleep in the control room, and questioned whether Braun might have been
saved if officers had done their jobs properly.
Corrections spokesman Bill Lamoreaux confirmed that one officer was
dismissed, another resigned and a sergeant was demoted as a result of
the incident, though he could not confirm whether it was for failing to
conduct security checks. He said the case was referred to the Maricopa
County attorney for possible charges against other inmates.
The mothers of two dead inmates blame the availability of drugs behind bars for the deaths of their sons.
Roberta Wilkins, the mother of Orion Wilkins, said her son became
addicted to pain pills he started taking for back injuries from playing
football. In an interview, she wept over his death but didn't excuse his
crime. "It doesn't matter; he threatened and terrified people. We
discussed his crimes and how stupid and idiotic they were."
But she said he had seemed to be drug free and was gaining weight for several months before his death.
Cynthia Krakoff's son, Carlo Krakoff, died of a heroin overdose in
prison in Tucson on July 31, 2011. A former child actor who played the
young Spock in "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock," he became addicted
to the pain medication Oxycontin after his jaw was damaged in a
tonsillectomy, says his mother. As the addiction progressed, it changed
him, she said.
"He was always so levelheaded and loving," Cynthia said, especially
toward his son, now four. "Then at a detox facility in Phoenix, they
treated him with Methadone. He met some low-life people there, and all
of sudden he was stoned all the time."
Cynthia said she was shocked when Carlo was arrested in 2009 on
suspicion of robbing several Phoenix-area pharmacies with a gun. But she
was more shocked when he died 15 months into his 13-year sentence.
"Nobody ever told me he could die in prison of illegal drugs," she
said. "If they can't clean up the prisons, they need to find a different
way to treat the drug addicts."
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