Pugsley

Once known as Camp Pugsley, this prison is a long way from camp

The 38-year-old convict was several years into a 5-to-30-year sentence for running a downstate meth lab, keeping his head down as chance for release approached. Then, the unthinkable happened at Correctional Facility, the low-level security prison near Kingsley.

Alfred Anthony Carson Jr. was celebrating on the night of Feb. 13, 2014. He’d been drinking a lot. While the 38-yearold convict tried to sleep, Carson used half a pair of scissors to force him to perform oral sex. Later, Carson crawled into his bunk and attempted to rape him.

“He was known as one of the second from the top of the group that he ran with and, so people knew, you know, that he had a lot of pull and he wasn’t somebody that you just wanted to blow off or take light, so I went along with what he said,” the inmate testified.

JUST ONE OF MANY ASSAULTS

The Carson case was extreme, but it was just one of many inmate-on-inmate assaults that have occurred at Pugsley in recent years.

Thirteenth Circuit Court Judge Philip Rodgers Jr., who presided over Carson’s trial, is worried that things have gotten out of control at Pugsley.

“It became evident during that trial that this couldn’t have happened if the guards had been doing their rounds,” Rodgers said.

After that 2015 trial, Rodgers called for the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) to investigate the state of security at Pugsley. The MDOC had failed to achieve its core mission: to keep the prison safe and secure. He urged the department to install video surveillance in housing areas and to ensure guards make regular rounds, but a year later, Rodgers said, if there was an investigation and report, he doesn’t know about it.

“In fairness, I wasn’t promised a copy of it, but I haven’t been offered a copy of it,” he said.

Chris Gautz, MDOC’s public information officer, said Rodgers did receive a report, he just may not have realized it. Last year, then- MDOC Director Dan Heyns wrote Rodgers a letter intended to address his concerns.

“That was considered to be the extent of the report that was done,” Gautz said.

DEFINITION OF LEVEL 1

Over the past year, disturbing events at Pugsley have stacked up. Rodgers said he’s learned about them through court cases and letters from inmates. He believes Level 1 doesn’t mean what it used to and that Pugsley now houses the kind of dangerous, hardened criminals that, in the past, would not have been allowed.

“I’ve seen some people with records that I didn’t think were consistent with being in a Level 1 facility,” Rodgers said.

Rodgers said he expects someone to be punished when he sends him/her to prison, but he doesn’t believe the punishment should include rape or assault.

“I’m not expecting them to be cut,” he said. “I’m not expecting them to have a lockin-a-sock bashed up against their head.”

Philip Settles, a Traverse City attorney who has defended Pugsley inmates, also said Pugsley has changed.

“When it was a camp, you never really heard any complaints out of there,” Settles said. “To take a camp and make a prison out of it — they’re putting in real offenders there now and it wasn’t built for that purpose.”

Gautz denied there has been a policy change to enable more dangerous criminals to get into Pugsley.

“We haven’t had any change in our standards or how we classify what’s a Level 1 or what’s a Level 2 or higher,” he said.

SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS INSTALLED

Prison officials may not have responded to Rodgers’ satisfaction, but they have taken action on at least one of his suggestions. Following the Carson case, Pugsley spent $13,100 to purchase housing-unit surveillance cameras as a stopgap, Gautz said. A much larger surveillance upgrade is planned for later this year as part of a systemwide overhaul. Bids are supposed to go out in the spring.

Gautz said assaults at Pugsley are down and he credits the increased surveillance. There were 60 inmate-on-inmate assaults in 2013, 64 in 2014 and 34 in 2015, he said.

“We saw a large reduction in the number of incidents as soon as we put those up,” he said. “That seemed to calm the situation quite drastically.”

At the same time, arrests for assaults have gone up because it’s easier to bring charges with video evidence.

Rodgers still has questions. “Is it digitally recorded? Are they checking the recordings? Does it have the capacity to be reviewed to show whether guards are doing their rounds or not?” Rodgers asked.

Gautz said the idea that conditions have deteriorated might be a matter of perspective. It may appear that things are now worse because, historically, crimes committed at the prison were not prosecuted.

When Grand Traverse County Prosecutor Robert Cooney took office in 2012, he decided to aggressively pursue violations.

“The previous prosecutor did not prosecute any crimes that happened at the facility,” Gautz said. “Your new prosecutor does, and goes after just about everything that happens at that facility.”

HOW PEOPLE EXIST OUT THERE

In the rape case, the assaulted inmate didn’t report the crime, another inmate did. The victim wanted to take care of it himself.

“I wanted to harm him, make it so he wouldn’t wake up the next day,” he testified.

A jury found Carson guilty of one of two charges and Rodgers added 12 to 40 years to his sentence, making the 26-year-old’s earliest release date Nov. 19, 2027.

Things work out better for inmates when the system can take care of their troubles; prisoners can get into trouble when they take matters into their own hands.

Frederick Morris Waldroup stands 5-feet-4-inches tall and weighs 122 pounds. At Pugsley, Aryan gang members noticed a thunderbolt “SS” tattoo he got as a kid in Detroit and wanted him to join their gang.

“And all he wanted was to do his time and get out of there,” said his attorney, David Clark. “He’s a criminal, you have to say that about him, but he’s very small and, in order to protect himself from being recruited, he felt, in his own defense, he had no other choice.”

The 23-year-old fashioned a shank out of a 4-inch piece of chain-link fence wire. He’d lift his shirt and show it sticking out of his waistband to get gang members to back off. A guard witnessed this and Waldroup faced another felony.

“You know, I guess it’s not good to be the smallest guy in the lockup,” Rodgers told Waldroup in May, when he sentenced him to an additional 15 to 30 months for possession of a weapon. “I don’t really know what advice to give you, but if you were to keep your head down and your mouth shut, you might actually get paroled some day.”

Rodgers added, toward the end of the hearing, “How people exist out there, guards and prisoners, I don’t believe it’s safe for either.”

PRISON-COMMUNITY MEETINGS

Prison officials and community members — officials from nearby townships, the local ambulance service, the sheriff ’s department — get together for quarterly meetings.

“It’s not really a board. It’s a community group to keep the public informed about what’s going on at the prison,” Cooney said. “You’ve got 1,300 prisoners there that are, most of them there for some pretty serious offenses, so it’s natural that the community would be concerned about what’s going on there.”

At the October meeting, Cooney asked about the impression that Pugsley had become more dangerous. Deputy Warden David Pratt gave a more nuanced answer to that question than the one Gautz provided to the Express, according to the minutes from that meeting. Pratt apparently said placement at Pugsley is determined by how much time an inmate has left to serve.

“Screening of prisoners has changed,” Pratt told the board. “It was based on how we thought a prisoner would act. It is now based on screening forms/formulas. Most have earned their way to Level I with an average of two to three years left on their earliest release date.”

Pratt said there is “much more gang activity” at the prison these days, but he said cameras have helped reduce violence. Pratt said, through an assistant, that he was not allowed to talk to the media.

Cooney believes things have gotten better since Rodgers’ complaints spurred the installation of more surveillance. For example, fewer inmates request protection.

“When you turn those cameras on, all of a sudden, a lot’s going to come to light,” he said.

Cooney agreed that his decision to prosecute crimes in the prison has also shed more light on conditions there. People v. Carson was the rare prison case that didn’t end in a plea.

“It may be that we hadn’t had a prison case go to trial in a long time and that, when Judge Rodgers saw what was going on, he had some strong feelings about it, obviously. As did I,” Cooney said.

What life is really like at Pugsley is known only by inmates and the MDOC staff.

Members of the public are not allowed to take tours. Journalists are not allowed inside unless invited to attend a specific event or program.

Cooney and Rodgers have taken tours. Cooney said that, once inside the razor wire, Pusgley is a surprisingly open place.

“I remember, the first time I visited Pugsley, I was kind of surprised because, you know, I’m expecting bars and cells and it’s almost like the office cubicles here in my office; you’ve got two bunks on one side and two on the other, there’s a TV over in the corner. The prisoners can come and go out of these bunkhouses at will,” he said. “It’s not what you expect if you’re thinking of a prison — not like the movies.”

'OBVIOUSLY, BASICALLY, HE SQUEALED'

Rodgers still gets letters from prisoners and, while he’s skeptical, he said it is notable how consistent the complaints are from inmate to inmate. One letter concerned an inmate who transferred to Pugsley this February and immediately feared for his life.

Inmate Brian Reeves was in Jackson when he was assaulted by another inmate with a lock-in-a-sock to his head over an argument about ramen noodles. He reported the incident, which got him branded a snitch.

Within minutes of his arrival at Pugsley, word spread that he was “a squealer,” said his mother, Cheryl Reeves of Plymouth. Reeves is serving time for drunk driving and failure to pay child support.

“In order to stay in protective custody, you have to tell them what happened, so obviously, basically, he squealed,” she said.

Reeves said she drove up to Kingsley to visit her son and learned that he had been sleeping on a floor with six other inmates who also feared for their safety amid the general population. The inmates were in an office area because there was no place to put prisoners who need protection, she said.

She said her son was in disgusting shape; he hadn’t bathed, shaved or brushed his teeth in a week. Reeves has since been transferred to another prison, though not before being issued a grievance for not following an order to report to his bunk.

Reeves said her brother served time at Pugsley a decade ago. Back then, her brother described a more secure place.

“You don’t expect to be beat up or whatever,” Reeves said. “My brother was there years ago and he said it was fine, you know? You didn’t have any of that going on.”

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