MoreyUnit | Audits give Arizona prison where 3 fled high marks

The state prison that housed the inmates who escaped on July 30 had more than 30 flaws in its security system, an audit conducted in 2007 found.

But by the time the state conducted its annual audit in 2010, the privately run prison near Kingman had only three relatively minor areas of non-compliance in its security system.

Both the level of compliance in the most recent audit, and the prison's willingness to address the problems found in 2007, depict a facility that operates within nationally accepted performance standards, and a prison system with above-average oversight, according to prison-security experts who reviewed the annual audits.

Those factors still were not enough to keep an accomplice from helping three inmates escape the prison near Kingman more than two weeks ago.

"These audits aren't necessarily helpful," said Thomas Rosazza, a former corrections official who operates a consulting firm in Colorado. "It doesn't even begin to answer how that perimeter could have been breached. That's really, really hard to do, to breach a perimeter."

Investigators believe Casslyn Welch walked up to a fence surrounding the prison on the evening of July 30 and threw cutting tools into the yard. John McCluskey, Tracy Province and Daniel Renwick used the tools to cut through the security fence and escape the facility, according to investigators.

Province and Renwick were recaptured. McCluskey and Welch remain on the loose with authorities concentrating the manhunt in Montana and combing through their personal histories to learn more about the fugitives including their experience as truck drivers and McCluskey's background in surviving outdoors.

Arizona Department of Corrections Director Chuck Ryan has blamed the escape on human error at the privately run facility.

The Department of Corrections provided audits for the privately operated facility conducted in the last five years, though no audit was conducted in 2008.

Both Rosazza and Ron Angelone, another corrections expert who reviewed the audits, said the recent escapes likely were attributable to a corrections officer failing to follow training orders, a situation that an audit conducted on a single day at the facility might not have caught.

"I'm sure there were mistakes made, but you wouldn't have found them in the audit," Angelone said. "It was human error. Someone did not follow the post orders."

Investigators have said they are unsure whether the door the inmates used to leave the facility was alarmed as it should have been, or whether a corrections officer checked the prison fence after an alarm went off indicating some disturbance.

The warden and security chief of the privately run facility resigned last week.

A review of the prison's security system is complete, according to a spokesman for the state corrections department, and the report is expected to be released this week. The annual audits of the nearly 6-year-old facility tend to support Ryan's claim that staff oversight is to blame for the escapes, said Angelone, former chairman of the American Correctional Association standards committee.

Angelone described the audits as detailed and thorough. He said the prison operator seemed capable of addressing the deficiencies identified from year to year.

"Both of them (the prison and the state corrections department) were doing what they were supposed to do," Angelone said. "But you can never measure the human element in there."

The audits are conducted in the spring by Department of Corrections staff members. They are part of the state's approach to oversight at the five privately run prisons in Arizona that house state prisoners. Another element is to station a Department of Corrections staff member permanently at each private prison.

The audits show numerous errors in the prison's security system in the years after the facility opened in August 2004. The 2007 audit found more than 30 areas of non-compliance related to security, including the lack of state approval for the facility operator's training materials, the need for certain officers to have cell phones, and the lack of first-aid kids.

But the prison addressed the shortcomings each year, according to the audits.

The areas of non-compliance found in this year's audit – including the need for a technical manual and more inmate access to recreation yards – should not have impacted the inmates' ability to escape, according to experts.

"You're talking about a very small number of situations that were not glaring," Angelone said.