Officials did little to determine whether drug pipe found at Wisconsin teen prison belonged to a worker

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

MADISON - Officials at the state’s troubled teen prison fired a guard after he took a little more than an hour to report he had found a drug pipe — but then waited a month themselves to tell law enforcement about the discovery.

Aside from the guard who found the pipe, prison officials did not interview anyone to try to determine how the pipe got on the grounds of Lincoln Hills School for Boys north of Wausau, state records show.

In all, Lincoln Hills leaders took two and a half months to turn over to law enforcement the pipe, which tested positive for amphetamine. The approach was in keeping with an arrangement between the prison and the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office that allows prison officials to conduct internal investigations before turning over evidence of crimes.

The incident is the latest sign that criminal investigations can take months to get started at Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls, which share a campus 30 miles north of Wausau.

The turmoil-racked prison complex is the subject of multiple lawsuits and an FBI-led investigation into prisoner abuse. Gov. Scott Walker and lawmakers are developing a plan to close the facility by 2021.

Former guard Ollie Hill said he thought he was unfairly fired over the incident and was alarmed that prison officials hadn’t done more to figure out who had been using the pipe. He said he did not think it had belonged to an inmate because it appeared to have been in the cab of a prison van, which inmates can’t access.

“If that was in the institution, there was somebody up there using drugs,” Hill said.

Prison officials found the glass pipe contained amphetamine on Nov. 5 but did not tell the Sheriff’s Office about it until early December, according to the Sheriff’s Office. Prison officials completed their investigation of Hill on Dec. 18 and fired him on Jan. 4 but did not provide their reports and the pipe to the Sheriff’s Office until Jan. 16, two and a half months after it was discovered.

Eugene O’Donnell, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said prison officials should have interviewed others who used the van and conducted drug tests of employees. That could have helped them determine who owned the pipe and prevent anyone from driving the van under the influence of drugs in the future, said O’Donnell, a former police officer and prosecutor.

“There should be some serious, searing review to get to the bottom of this,” he said.

“It’s very legitimate to point upward and ask whether people in command and control are doing everything they can to keep this a drug-free environment. … It should call for introspection and hard questions because it’s not a stretch to worry about weapons. If contraband can come in, can weapons?”

The incident began when Hill found the pipe as he stepped out of the van. He went to a supervisors’ office but no one was there at the time, he said. He got caught up in other duties and told supervisor Kyle Hoff about what he had found when he saw him an hour and 10 minutes later, according to Hill and reports released under the state’s public records law.

Hill discovered the pipe a few days after the prison had been on lockdown for an institution-wide search for contraband.

Hoff and supervisor Klint Trevino conducted an internal investigation of Hill. Video from one of the institution’s cameras showed the pipe appearing on the ground as Hill stepped out of the van, according to their report.

Hill said he rarely drinks alcohol, does not use drugs and would not ever do so because he wouldn’t want to risk losing his commercial driver’s license or credentials as a Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association official. Hill said he offered to take a drug test, but his bosses wouldn't agree to that idea.

“I’m so confident it’s not in my system, I could do a test on the 50-yard line at halftime of a Packers game,” Hill said. “I can’t even finish a bottle of beer at home.”

Prison policy requires workers to search vehicles when they receive them. Hill told the internal investigators he had looked over the van at the beginning of his shift but did not search under the front seat. Hoff and Trevino did not interview the guard who had had the van on the shift before Hill.

Hoff and Trevino concluded Hill was “negligent in his duties” because he took more than an hour to report finding the pipe.

Based on their findings and his past performance reviews, Deputy Superintendent Lori McAllister fired Hill for not conducting thorough vehicle searches and other reasons, including not responding positively to criticism and not using discretion.

Hill had worked at the prison for about a year and was on his probationary period when he was terminated. That gave prison officials broad latitude to fire him.

Hill said Hoff told him when he gave him his termination letter that it included trumped-up reasons for letting him go.

“His statement was, ‘You’re one of the better employees in here and all this stuff they’ve got written in there is there to make it easy to get rid of you,’ ” Hill said. “It was like a big punch in the gut.”

Through a spokesman, Hoff denied making those comments.

Employment attorney Aaron Halstead said Hill had few chances to challenge his termination because he was a probationary employee. But he noted there was little reason to think the pipe belonged to Hill because he had turned it in.

“Their claim in some ways doesn’t really pass the smell test for why they got rid of him,” said Halstead, who reviewed documents about Hill’s firing at the request of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “It seems like in some ways they weren’t too interested in finding out" who had used the pipe.

Hill, who was one of the few African-Americans to work at the prison, said he was concerned that race could have played a role in his firing. Department of Corrections spokesman Tristan Cook said that was not a factor in the decision.

Cook said the agency does not tolerate the use of drugs at its facilities. He noted the prison recently adopted a protocol that requires employees to put their belongings through an X-ray machine at the beginning of each shift.

Employees who find drug paraphernalia are required to immediately report it, he said.

“Failing to promptly report paraphernalia and careless handling of potential evidence impedes the department’s investigation and can result in disciplinary action,” he said by email.

Cook did not explain why the department took a month to alert law enforcement to the drug pipe. Both Cook and sheriff’s officials have agreed that matters such as this are to be investigated by prison authorities initially and then turned over to the sheriff’s department. Assaults and other serious matters are to be promptly reported so law enforcement can immediately respond, Cook said.

Cook and Nathan Walrath, the chief deputy sheriff, said they did not know why the Sheriff’s Office did not pick up the drug pipe and internal investigation report until Jan. 16, given that the report was completed on Dec. 18 and Hill was fired on Jan. 4.

Walrath said he was confident prison officials kept the pipe secure and that the delays did not compromise the quality of fingerprints that might be on the pipe.

“The quicker we get things, the better but it doesn’t work out that way always,” Walrath said.