By John Brummett

Last month two convicted murderers somehow got into prison guard clothing and walked right out of the Cummins Unit and into a waiting car. They made it all the way to New York before getting caught several days later.

And that’s probably the least of the three incidents.

Last weekend there was the matter of a parolee for whom a warrant had been issued because he hadn’t shown up for several scheduled visits with his parole officer.

He blithely delivered a relative to the Tucker Unit for a visit. He rolled casually to a contraband check point where they examined his license, figured out who he was and asked him to step out of the car.

He started driving maniacally, gearing up, gearing down, spinning and crashing an assistant warden’s car. Then he sped toward the prison gate. A prison officer shot through the back window and a bullet struck the parolee in the shoulder and killed him.

Deadly force sounds extreme for a parolee driving directly into the place he needs to be. But I wasn’t there. Anyway, state police are investigating the matter for referral to the prosecuting attorney. That’s the process prescribed by law.

In January there was the dreadful matter of an inmate at the Tucker Unit who was left lying naked in his own feces for a full weekend though officers knew about it. The inmate nearly died from septic poisoning.

A veteran lieutenant and a sergeant got fired over that one — as well they should have been — after a report by the prison’s internal affairs officer. A human being can’t be left to such a subhuman condition and a prison that employs two officers who permit it is a prison with problems in dire need of addressing. Actually, this matter strikes me as worthy of further criminal investigation for possible prosecution.

That internal investigation also turned up an inmate’s allegation, not confirmed, that, on another occasion, the offending lieutenant got a lap dance within sight of inmates from a contract nurse. The internal affairs investigator concluded only that there probably had been inappropriate male-female contact.

The Associated Press in Little Rock gathered these three matters and invoked for comparison the sordid history of the state prison system. Within the last half-century, corruption and outright evil were systemic, leading four decades ago to the state prisons getting declared unconstitutional and placed under federal compliance monitoring.

It’s a reference that provides historical context but is surely overly dramatic.

These are very bad things, especially in regard to the inmate nearly dying from poisoning by his own waste, and anyone who appears to minimize that one does so vulnerably. But there’s no reason to believe we’re back even remotely to the electro-shock punishment of the “Tucker telephone” or to profiteering by prison officials and favored inmates in a thoroughly and brazenly corrupted prison subculture.

On Tuesday an AP reporter asked Gov. Mike Beebe about these matters and quoted Beebe as saying there ought to be a thorough investigation though he did not suspect systemic failure or believe that the prison director, Larry Norris, warranted firing.

I asked Beebe’s office what kind of investigation he was talking about, since the State Police are deep into probes of the escape and the shooting and the prison’s own internal affairs officer did an unforgiving 17-page report, which I’ve read, of the feces horror. Beebe ended up putting out a statement that he wasn’t talking about a new investigation, only a thorough job on those already under way.

Beebe also said there needs to be legislative review. As it happens, a legislative prison subcommittee has a previously schedule meeting next week at the Capitol. That would be a good time and place for a transparent, comprehensive airing with no holds barred.

Ever the moderate, Beebe is trying to strike the appropriate balance between vigorous public probing of three horrible and wholly unacceptable incidents and fair context that does not overstate.

But it’s also important that the governor condone nothing and that he demand without equivocation that these episodes end forthwith.

If there’s fourth strike, somebody will need to be out.

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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.