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The staff of the Pennsylvania state prisons do a lot of stealing.
They steal not just from the taxpayers,
but even from the inmates.
In an effort to quantify just
how bad the stealing was, we made a
Right-to-Know law request for inventory documents for
a prison commissary.
Prison commissaries are not a taxpayers'
operation.
They sell necessaries such as toothpaste, deodorant,
underclothing and food to the prisoners.
The profits go into
a special fund, the Inmate General Welfare Fund (or "IGWF").
The IGWF uses the money to buy things such as library books and
recreational equipment for the prisoners.
When the prison guards
steal from the commissary, they are stealing from the prisoners.
We were interested in getting exact figures of how much the staff's looting was costing the prisoners. Our cofounder made a request under the Right-to-Know law, 65 PS 66.1 et seg., for the results of the physical inventories of the commissary at the Frackville prison in East-Central Pennsylvania. Our educated estimate based on observations of actual thefts was that at least $800 a year was being stolen by the guards from that single commissary. After a considerable delay the Department of Imprisonment granted the request for access to the documents. Our cofounder, Sandra Feigley, was told to contact one Joseph Dorzinsky. Supposedly he was the business manager for the Frackville prison, but his office and the records we wanted were at a different prison; Mahanoy. Joseph Dorzinsky failed to act in good faith to provide the documents. In fact, he proved to be obstructionist. We surmise that he and/or the prison had a lot to hide in the financial records. The Auditor General might do well to scrutinize Joseph Dorzinsky's books. Joseph Dorzinsky wouldn't release the documents to anyone except our cofounder. He pretended to be ignorant of the legal use of an agent to obtain Right-to-Know records. Under the law, "anyone" may inspect the records. Joseph Dorzinsky disregarded that provision of the law. The law at section 66.2(a) also specifically provides that "a public record shall be accessible for inspection and duplication," but Joseph Dorzinsky went so fat as to refuse photocopying. We can only conclude that this kind of brazen violation of the law reflects a conscious cover-up of the scope of the staff's stealing. It appears that business manager Joseph Dorzinsky knows about the theft and is intentionally obstructing our obtaining the information. One must wonder why. Since a suit is pending about these thefts and other irregularities, our cofounder will get the records by means of legal discovery. You, a taxpayer, may wonder, however, who is covering-up what. How much is the prison staff stealing from you and who's concealing the evidence?
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