Published: May 19, 2008 10:53 pm         

Corrections head says smoke-free ban works

CHARLESTON — Inmates inside West Virginia prisons have joined the unhooked generation, but is the Division of Corrections in sync with county health board bans on smoking?

Sen. Randy White, D-Webster, pondered that issue Monday in directing the Legislative Oversight Committee on Regional Jail and Correctional Facility Authority to find out.

In a motion passed without dissent, the panel wants to learn if there is any conflict with letting correctional officers and other staff smoke on state-owned property in counties that have disallowed tobacco usage on public land.

Fayette County, home of Mount Olive Correctional Complex, where the smoke-free initiative was launched March 1, is one such county.

“Has your office been in contact with county health boards of counties where institutions are located?” White inquired.

“We get inspected by the health department,” Corrections Commissioner Jim Rubenstein told him. “They walk through the entire facilities. Nobody has made a contact with a warden or administrator in my office from any health board that we’re in noncompliance.”

Aimed at lower health care costs among inmates, the new policy took tobacco products out of the hands of convicts, but permits officers and other staff members to smoke in designated areas on the grounds. One panelist, Sen. Jon Blair Hunter, D-Monongalia, wondered why employees can still smoke, since nicotine presumably would affect their health as well.

In defense of this new policy, Elaine Harris, representing the Communications Workers of America, suggested lawmakers pull a shift as officers, often asked to work overtime to plug a vacancy.

“You need to step inside these persons’ shoes that work at these facilities,” Harris said. “I’m not a smoker. Never have been. But these are folks that work 12-hour shifts, sometimes work 16-hour shifts. Areas have been designated and I thought everything was in compliance. We look around here at the Capitol complex. People are going outside the building to smoke.

“If you look at the other state offices across the state, the same thing is happening. They’re going out to designated areas.”

Harris said employees have to go to the front of MOCC, which means their entire break is consumed when smoking.

“It’s a very difficult thing,” she said of employment in state prisons. “These are jobs that are stressful. You need to put yourselves in their shoes whenever they go into work. If everybody could quit, it would be a perfect world. But not everybody can.”

Rubenstein said the cessation, with Huttonsville’s medium security prison the last to be embraced March 31, has come off without a hitch.

The commissioner couldn’t say how many inmates sought patches or lozenges to assist with withdrawal, but insisted that all were aware the smoke-out was coming.

“Every inmate in our division knew by writing or by word of mouth that March 1 would be the tobacco-free initiative, how they could go to the medical unit or sign up for smoking cessation, and where they could find that information as well as the brochures or how to sign up for the class,” he told Sen. Shirley Love, D-Fayette, a committee co-chairman.

Rubenstein assured Love that he had never heard from any Fayette County authorities that MOCC was not in compliance with its tobacco ban.

And Love pointed out that any patches or lozenges inmates used were covered by West Virginia’s annual payout from a multi-state settlement with cigarette manufacturers.

“This wasn’t taxpayer dollars,” Love said. “This is money that is appropriated each year from the tobacco settlement.”