Margaret Herrington is in charge of federal Accreditation of the Cummins Unit, which almost exclusively deals with implementing safety and security measures of every sort in the effort to better protect society, the officers, and then the inmates, from the inmates of the ADC. Herrington's job is to make sure that all the safety and security regulations and policies are strictly adhered to and enforced.

In addition of her accreditation duties, Herrington is also in charge of an inmate panel that regularly addresses various groups of children, juvenile offenders, high school and college students, and professionals from several disciplines in the human sciences and criminal justice fields. The panel operates as a kind of "Scared Straight" program, whereby it is hoped that youths will be deterred from a life of drug abuse and crime. The panel also addresses general tours to the Unit.

An average group of 15 to 30 people is addressed by the panel three or four times a month. The panel sessions take place in the unit Visitation Center, which opens directly to the promenade that leads out the main gate. One Security officer generally attends panel sessions, along with Herrington and perhaps one other non-Security staffer.

As part of its "spiel", the panel engages in graphic depictions and intimidating actions before each group to demonstrate how cheap life is in prison, and how easily someone can be raped, beaten or killed here. Four of the inmates on the panel had been sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility for parole for capital murder, and two had life terms for sex offenses. Panel members typically have long sentences for violent crimes because it makes them more convincing and effective when they have actually lived what they tell the groups about.

For some months into early 1999, Herrington would leave the Visitation Center for a few minutes and return to the panel with a brown paper sack. At an appropriate moment she would then empty the contents of the sack onto the nearby desk. Inmate panel members would each grab one or two of the knives of every description that she had dumped out - some homemade, some manufactured - and then use them to thoroughly instill fear in and to intimidate the audience during the panel's graphic accounts about prison violence.

In case someone may think that they misread what I just wrote - I mean exactly what I said: at some point in each panel session at least four capital felons and two rapists with absolutely nothing to lose, would be armed with actual deadly weapons by Herrington herself - and THAT in a low security area of the prison within only a few feet of the main gate; in the presence of no more than one security officer with keys to several gates in his possession, including to the front door of the Visitation Center (which was seldom locked anyway); and with up to 30 free world hostages ready for the taking!

On the day that I was present and myself watched this happen, I also held two knives in my own hands while the others brandished theirs. At first I also thought that the knives were perhaps a prop made of cardboard or balsa wood; but no, they were real. Too real.

Even as a convicted criminal I was shocked over the utter stupidity of this. I found even more unfathomable that it actually did not seem to "resister" in anyone's brain what kind of situation existed with this! Four capital killers and three others with life terms and nothing to lose - who had already demonstrated both the willingness and capability to take human life or to violate a person in the most violent and despicable of ways imaginable - were all given real and deadly weapons by the very person most responsible for security under the Accreditation program; and with a ready-made group of mostly female hostages...and nothing between them and freedom but an unlocked door and the front gate! Absolutely unbelievable! Truly, this could only have happened in Arkansas!

(I took steps to stop the danger by sending a threat to Herrington that I was planning to expose her with the media, and the insanity was stopped. The knives are now exhibited only inside a secure display case).



On July 17, 1999, Briana Reynolds was assigned to guard duty in one of the armed perimeter towers because of her fraternization with the Cummins inmates. She could not be permitted to continue working inside the main building because she was suspected of selling sex to more than one prisoner.

A week later, while still assigned to the armed tower, she had a "lover's spat" with one of the inmates with whom she had had an affair and they cursed at and argued with each other at the top of their voices for well over an hour. All the inmates and guards in the Recreation yard listened in. A construction crew supervisor finally had to break up the squabble by ordering the inmate back into the building.

On August 1, 1999, Reynolds was still assigned to the towers. Against all security directives, she decided to allow a trustee inmate, Carl Curry #84737, inside the tower with her. She lowered the keys to him from the tower platform so that he could let himself in. A few minutes later the inmate had allegedly come upstairs, grabbed her from behind and began to sexually fondle her by holding her breasts and rubbing himself against her.

The grapevine carried word that Reynolds had agreed to sell sex to Curry for $50, but when he came up short she changed her mind and took the $40 he had handed her and threw the bills down the tower stairs. According to her, Curry then tried to force her to the ground but she managed to escape down the stairs and out of the tower.

Curry remained alone in the tower with at least one loaded high-powered automatic rifle. If he had been of a mind, he could have shot the guards inside the other towers since those locations were well within range. Fortunately, however, Curry had no thoughts about taking over the prison or assisting the escape of other prisoners with protective gunfire. Instead, he decided to pursue Reynolds outside - where they then continued to argue until other security arrived.

Reynolds had not been trained in the type of security or the use of weapons required of someone responsible for the armed towers. She had not been mentally evaluated for her suitability for such a serious responsibility. She was later dismissed from the employ of the ADC. There was no report of this incident on the local news, even though, under the ADC's version of events, a female guard had almost been raped.

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A couple of weeks later, another female guard, Laretha Bailey, became angry at Inmate Troy Tucker #86899 because he had questioned her authority when calling for the Shift Lieutenant to allow him to proceed to an Infirmary lay-in, even though Bailey had decided that Tucker "had not moved fast enough" for her when she first called for him. The Lieutenant ordered her to let Tucker out of the barracks, which she at first refused to do. She then began cursing both Tucker and the Lieutenant, and then suddenly attacked Tucker by spraying him repeatedly with mace. She then wrote Tucker a disciplinary report wherein she accused both him and the Lieutenant of threatening her in some unspecified manner. She said that the use of the pepper spray was justified because she felt that her life was in danger from the both of them.

Bailey was thereafter assigned to duty in one of the armed perimeter guard towers. She had not been trained in the use of weapons, nor in the kind of security expertise needed for such a job. She had not been psychologically tested for her suitability for placement in the towers.

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The Herrington, Reynolds and Bailey incidents are merely two of the most recent - but constantly recurring - examples of the kind of "security" personnel that the ADC assigns to the armed guard towers or otherwise makes responsible for prison security. At the Cummins Unit, the guard towers are generally not manned by competent, trained, and professional correctional officers. Instead, they are often used for assigning the incompetent officers who are sent to tower guard duty as punishment because they cannot be trusted to do their routine jobs inside the building.

Many of the "guards" assigned to the towers or that are hired in general are immature, and emotionally and mentally disturbed. The inmates know these officers (from a psychological point of view) fairly well and have a fair measure as to whether they are even capable of firing weapons at them in the event of an escape, or how they might best be persuaded to "turn the other way" when any kind of trouble or illegal activity is underfoot. A bag of potato chips and a soft drink usually takes care of most anything.

In other articles on these sites I made the comment several times that society really should quit believing the lie that ADC prisoners are being kept confined as a result of the good training and professionalism of the ADC's correctional staff. No. The inmates are staying locked up only because of the basic decency that remains in most of them and the fact that they know that escaping will most probably lead to a "point of no return" for them - a line that they do not wish to cross. Most of the remainder stays confined only out of some odd and acute "cattle" psychology that afflicts Arkansas prisoners in particular. However, the face of prisons is radically changing and the type of prisoner that is being confined is not as benevolent or passive, or dumb, as ADC prisoners historically have proven to be, and when this new breed of inmates sees what we all see about the ADC's lackadaisical and laughable security - communities surrounding the prisons all around the state will have a serious problem on their hands with the safety and welfare of their citizens. Indeed, just a few weeks ago I made the statement in another article that if the security breaches that have been commonplace here continued much longer, some serious consequences would inevitably result. Less than six weeks later, the prediction came to life. Case in point:

The Escape of Capital Killer Williams

On October 3, 1999, Cummins Unit inmate Kenneth Williams #107948 decided that he had served enough of his life without parole sentence for capital murder. He had been confined at the Cummins Unit on that sentence for all of three weeks. Last December he had kidnapped two teens from a Pine Bluff restaurant and then shot them both. The boy survived; but his girlfriend and popular school cheerleader, Dominique Hurd, was dead after being shot in the head.

After the trial for Dominique's murder this September, Williams cruelly taunted the girl's family and told them that he would be free again soon. He apparently knew what he was talking about, and the arrogance and confidence with which he made the remark is itself an indictment regarding what he already knew about the joke that the ADC tries to pawn off as prison security.

Williams had otherwise demonstrated his proclivity for violence when, in 1995, he and another juvenile attacked a guard, overpowered him, took his vehicle and escaped. Still later he was sentenced to prison for another brush with the law and served much of that sentence at Cummins.

Some time early Sunday morning on October 3, Williams decided to leave. The "official" account is that the ADC really does not know how he left, but it is "suspected" that he may have hidden behind some piles of dirt inside the compound from the construction going on, and that he then used a bed sheet to climb over the double cyclone, and razor wire-tipped fences on the northwest corner of the compound.

This escape scenario was painted on the evening news by Prison Spokeswoman, Dina Tyler. The hypothesis was constructed from the alleged fact that "footprints" were found in the dirt alongside the northwest fences, and from the fact that a single bed sheet was found at the Cummins Chapel. Williams was last "confirmed seen" inside the compound around 10:20 that morning on his way to lunch. So say officials.

In contrast to the official version, the "inmate grapevine" signaled word among the prisoners that Williams simply walked out the front gate - something that could in fact be accomplished by virtually anyone any day of the week. Anthony Thrasher had escaped that way a couple of years ago, and on every occasion that ADC officials have sent a prisoner through the gate on a mock escape - just to see if he would be permitted to simply walk away - the Armory Tower did in fact let him out. The "test escapes" were soon stopped because it would be difficult to keep the Armory Tower staffed if virtually everyone assigned to it had to be fired for letting prisoners walk out. That kind of publicity also could not be permitted to reach the public.

The grapevine said that Williams was also to have been given a change of clothes by a guard, and Williams then additionally camouflaged his walk through the gate in the guard's company. The guard then drove him to Grady using as "cover" for the trip that he was going to pick up "take out" lunches from one of the fast food places at Grady, as guards at the Cummins and Varner Units otherwise routinely do. Since Williams would not be missed until 6:30 p.m. that evening, the guard's trip that morning would be obfuscated by the normal activity of a full day.

The grapevine account is strengthened by the fact that since Williams had lived Pine Bluff, it is very likely that he had befriended at least one of the many guards who work here and who are also from Pine Bluff, long before he was ever confined. In fact, because the ADC is so lax in its hiring procedures, several of the gangs nowadays instruct members to apply for jobs with the ADC precisely for times such as these, or to otherwise assure open supply lines for drugs and other contraband. It is rumored that Williams later contacted a friend, Sylvester Brown, who is also wanted by the police, but the significance of this is not yet clear.

The grapevine account is also corroborated by that fact that Williams did not likely make it the several miles to the Boren residence on foot, and certainly not within the time frame of 10:30 a.m. to perhaps 12:00 or 1:00 p.m., when Cecil Boren's body was found. More, had Williams had a free world accomplice that did NOT work here, it seems unlikely that he would drop Williams off enroute to Grady or anywhere short of Pine Bluff and there force him to have to steal new transportation - when his familiar turf of Pine Bluff was only a few miles further away, and where there was a much larger population.

On the other hand, assistance from a guard who could not afford to be seen further west than Grady if he was going to pick up lunch orders does explain both how Williams got to Boren residence so quickly, and why he would have been dropped off somewhere en route to Grady in the first place.

Several other elements indicate that the grapevine account is true. Further, it is likely that any official versions reconstructed by the ADC may be deliberately false and intended simply to shift blame to the cunning and treachery of a criminal inmate, and away from the incompetence of ADC "professionals." After all, heads must roll, and the easiest heads to roll will be those of other inmates.

A third version of events is the scuttlebutt exclusively among the guards. They surmise that Williams escaped by hiding himself in the trash wagon or slop wagon. However, the trash wagon has open sides all around and is thoroughly checked before it is allowed out the gate; while the slop wagon has a wrought iron grill welded permanently across its only opening at the top - and the slop is steam heated to 120 or more degrees Fahrenheit, to keep bacteria from contaminating the slop and insects from laying eggs in it before it is fed to livestock or wildlife. However, to explain away the obvious discrepancy with the sealed slop wagon scenario, one version of the guards' facts says that the usual wagon had a bad wheel or flat tire and the replacement wagon did not have a grill over the opening and was not heated with steam.

It is possible that these scenarios are rumored because Williams was for a time assigned to the slop wagon when he served time here before. It would be a convenient fact from which the ADC could contrive a plausible story, and especially to people who otherwise would not know any qualifying facts; i.e. the public.

However, neither of the guards' versions could likely be correct, since both wagons had passed out the Salley Port well before 9:00 a.m., while Williams was said by Dina Tyler to have been "confirmed sighted" at 10:20 a.m., still inside the compound. Further, neither of these versions explain how Williams would have made it to the Boren residence undetected, in broad daylight. Even if he had 2 or 3 hours of time on foot to get to the residence, I simply do not find it plausible that he could have done it. Moreover, had Williams been hiding in the slop it is not possible to describe or imagine how he would have looked and reeked from that slimy gook, to which water is also added to make it less viscous. What a stench must have been made from the beet juices, the bean juices, the stewed tomatoes , and just the endless MUSH that is fed at every meal. If Williams changed clothes at the Boren residence as stated on the news, there could not possibly have been ANY doubt how he had escaped - instantly.

No, Williams had transportation and his speculated escape via the trash or slop wagon does not explain several critical elements. Of course, several inmates who work on those wagons have already been locked up for "investigation" - so it is a scenario that will allow for a lot of heads to roll if it is officially adopted by the ADC, and no one will likely question it because they are only inmates. Case solved. More important, it will prevent the untenable embarrassment and exhibition of utter incompetence if the ADC still "does not know how he escaped" even into an indefinite future; never mind what this would mean if the victims' families decided to sue.

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