Why did it take so long for N.J. to close the door on women’s scandal-ridden prison - NJ.com

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It took a long time for Gov. Phil Murphy to decide to shut down the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility, New Jersey’s troubled women’s prison.

But once a scathing report into the continuing sexual violence at the century-old complex was released, the decision came quickly.

Senior administration sources, speaking on background, said closing the prison had been discussed long before the governor ultimately took action Monday. The decision to shut it down took on added urgency after the detailed look into years of abuse and sexual assaults, and criminal charges against guards, one source said in offering a behind-the-scenes perspective of what sparked the move.

“This was something on everyone’s mind for a while,” a source noted. But after the governor’s staff and others got their first look at the highly critical independent report by former state comptroller Matthew Boxer, he said the governor made the call to close the site in rural Hunterdon County.

“There was an inflection point. The recommendation (in the report) that stood out to us was to close the facility and we decided to embrace the recommendation,” said another administration source, describing the discussions among members of the governor’s leadership team, Murphy himself, and top officials in the state Department of Corrections.

Embattled state Corrections Commissioner Marcus O. Hicks, who resigned under pressure on Tuesday morning, had not been in on those discussions, the source said.

Read the full investigative report on Edna Mahan here

The report concluded corrections officials were slow to enact reforms, didn’t follow their own policies, and that officers used excessive force and filed false reports after a series of violent cell extractions in January.

Problems at Edna Mahan have been well documented over the years, despite it being a relatively small facility that holds approximately 372 prisoners, including 94 women in the minimum-security complex and 278 in the maximum-security area.

Some of those issues had been repeatedly raised in reporting by NJ Advance Media in 2017 and 2018, with horrific stories of inmates who claimed they were beaten or sexually abused by a guard who was fired but never criminally charged. The allegations, which went back as far as 2008, included charges of staff members abusing prisoners and exchanging contraband for sex. Inmates said officers and administrators were complicit in covering it up.

A criminal probe by county prosecutors and an independent investigation ordered by the state attorney general followed in 2017.

Former state Corrections Commissioner Gary Lanigan, who had been appointed by then-Gov. Chris Christie and asked to stay on under Murphy, was ousted amid the ongoing inquiry. He would be replaced by Hicks, his chief of staff.

When Hicks was being reconfirmed as commissioner early last year, he told lawmakers his “number one priority” would be fixing the problems at Edna Mahan. Yet he wasn’t even clear on who ran the facility in the months leading up to the alleged attacks, according to a stunning revelation in the Boxer report.

An ongoing federal inquiry put additional pressure on the state.

Last year the U.S. Department of Justice concluded that prisoners at Edna Mahan had been victims of sexual abuse by officers for years and that abuse persisted even under new and heightened scrutiny.

Despite reforms ordered in the wake of the federal inquiry, however, multiple women prisoners were attacked by officers in January — an incident that was not publicly disclosed until NJ Advance Media reported later that month that dozens who worked at the prison had been suspended for their roles during a night of violence in a special unit.

Two days later, Murphy tapped Boxer, an attorney with the law firm of Lowenstein Sandler, to conduct an investigation into the incident.

High fences surround buildings on the grounds of the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women in Clinton. Gov. Phil Murphy said Monday the state would shutter its long-troubled and only women's prison.AP

In releasing the 73-page report by Boxer on Monday, the governor said he decided after reading it that “the only path forward is to responsibly close the facility.” At a later news conference, Murphy noted the litany of problems over the years and said he had had enough. It was time to shut the place down.

“We are turning the page,” he said.

But even before Boxer report, turning out the lights at the state’s only prison for women had been under discussion.

Last month, Hicks told the state Assembly Budget Committee the state might consider shutting down Edna Mahan in the wake of continuing allegations of abuse.

“That is on the table,” the former commissioner said, without offering further details. But Hicks said closure was just one of many changes being explored by an outside consultant.

The report put before the governor last week, though, cited experts who had doubts whether the prison could be “saved in a reasonable amount of time,” and recommended the prison be closed and relocating its inmates to another facility, citing the age of the buildings as well. It also noted the difficulty the Department of Corrections has encountered recruiting female staff to Edna Mahan, which is located in western New Jersey.

“A different, more centrally located facility has the potential to address these issues,” the report said.

However, some have criticized the decision to close Edna Mahan and others asked what took so long, while questions were raised over why it had come now, in an election year.

“I’m sorry it took this much to get to today,” said state Sen. Loretta Weinberg, D-Bergen. “They had the Department of Justice report. I don’t know why we needed to get to the horror of the January cell extraction to make some real changes here.”

Republican state Sen. Kristin Corrado of Passaic County, a critic of the administration’s response at the prison who opposes its closing, suggested it was all a political move in advance of the governor’s re-election campaign.

“Gov. Murphy has a repeat pattern of ignoring allegations of abuse by women he had a duty to protect,” Corrado said. “It’s only when the press starts swarming that he rushes to take action. He’s likely worried that women he’s depending on this November have gotten wise to his repeated failures and is overcompensating by announcing plans to close the facility unnecessarily.”

Still, the governor’s decision to shut the place down and start anew gives him a chance to wipe the slate clean, said several policy experts, despite the possibility that he might be doing nothing more than kicking the can down the road.

New York City has announced a 10-year-plan to shut down its infamous Rikers Island jail and replace it with satellite facilities in several boroughs at a cost of $8.7 million, but that timetable has already slipped. Murphy might be well out of office before any plan to close Edna Mahan actually comes to fruition.

When combined with the change in the leadership of the department, though, it does give Murphy the ability to point to actions he is taking to in fact turn the page, said Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University. He asked, though, whether simply moving women prisoners will, by itself, solve the problem.

Rasmussen said the failures outlined in the Boxer report focused primarily on the management and operation of the facility, suggesting that Murphy’s decision to simple close the facility was “a bit of a mismatch.”

But the report does recommend closing the facility and he said governor’s decision moves the attention on the physical facility and away from its mismanagement.

That attention had zeroed in directly on the former corrections commissioner, with both Democratic and Republican lawmakers in recent months calling for Hicks to be fired. The state Senate voted overwhelmingly for his ouster and articles of impeachment had been filed in the Assembly before his resignation this week.

Former state Corrections Commissioner Marcus O. Hicks, who resigned on TuesdayMichael Mancuso

Administration officials, meanwhile, denied there was any political calculus in their decision on Edna Mahan, arguing that the idea of taking an analytical approach, asking for an independent review, and taking action did not smack of politics.

A spokeswoman for Murphy said the administration had repeatedly and publicly discussed the possibility of closing Edna Mahan.

“Matt Boxer’s comprehensive report recommended serious consideration of this step, in order to break a historical pattern of abuse,” Alexandra Altman said. “By embracing the recommendation of an independent investigation that thoroughly examined the facility and its deficiencies, the governor reached the decision to close Edna Mahan through a prudent, analytical, and fact-based approach.”

For whatever the reason, Matthew Hale, a professor of political science at Seton Hall University, said the governor’s action to shut down the prison was a rare instance where good politics was actually good policy.

“The report paints a scary picture of a culture of violence at Edna Mahan. That doesn’t change easily, so closing it makes policy sense,” Hale said. “But it is also good politics, the governor looks strong and decisive. That is always a good political look.”

He said the governor can now say he didn’t shy away from dealing with an ugly issue, he acted, and acted strongly.

“Any other decision would have left him open to attacks that he ignored problems at the prison because he was beholden to the prison guard unions,” Hale remarked.

Ben Dworkin, a political scientist and the director of the Institute of Public Policy and Citizenship at Rowan University, said the danger for Murphy was that the problems at the prison continued on his watch, and under his commissioner.

“He stopped the bleeding with his announcement and it won’t be allowed to fester,” Dworkin said. But whatever political fodder the Edna Mahan scandal might have been, he said “it’s less of one now. He’s dealt with the issue.”

NJ Advance Media staff writer Matt Arco contributed to this report.

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Ted Sherman may be reached at tsherman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TedShermanSL.

Brent Johnson may be reached at bjohnson@njadvancemedia.com.

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