The Specter Initiative
Gourley, Jay
The Specter Initiative by Jay Gourley Except for the foundation that caved in, the GAO audit, and the Department of Justice investigation, everything went fine. It was a $48 million government...
...Nolan says, "It was ludicrous...
...On that occasion, Specter released a terse statement: "It is very discouraging to see the District government fail to make proper use of federal funds for an important pilot project for prisoner education and rehabilitation...
...But Palmer's management style came under unusually harsh attacks from a number of quarters...
...She chose texts they couldn't read...
...If the Specter Initiative needed a file cabinet, Abramowitz's firm bought it and billed DCDC for it...
...A graduate of Yale law school, the former prosecutor from Philadelphia had served for eight years until voters turned him out in 1974...
...The 32 percent solution The contract with Elizabeth Abramowitz became a multi-million-dollar channel through which DCDC paid for everything from office equipment to salaries for teachers and principals...
...They did not audit DCDC, which spent the lion's share of the money...
...That might have saved the taxpayers the $45,000 originally allotted for the supervision...
...In fact, most of the classrooms were almost empty...
...one mentioned payroll fraud...
...Palmer's only comment is the one mentioned above...
...His obsessive secrecy left his staff unable to find him one night in 1986 after a riot at the Lorton penitentiary had ended with a shotgun fusillade that wounded 13 inmates...
...Several high officials say they fed documents to Nolan of the corrections foundation, who said she told Specter that he faced a potentially serious embarrassment...
...The materials just sat there unused ." Nolan and others said Labat submitted a staffing authority request for 29 new teachers at one prison, Occaquan III, when the closest thing to a classroom there was a small trailer barely big enough for three people...
...They account for less than $4 million of the $36 million that went through DCDC...
...It's difficult to determine who actually chose Labat, because no one claims the dubious honor...
...I'm here to help...
...Abramowitz is the sister-in-law of Ron Dellums, a California congressman who is chairman of the House District Committee and a man with enormous influence over the District...
...They said the Specter Initiative would be a "guide to prison systems around the nation ." Indeed, it will be a guide—of what not to do...
...Patricia Taylor says spare male teachers (of which there were many) doffed their coats and ties to be cast as interested students...
...The Pennsylvania Republican wanted to spend $100 billion to rehabilitate salvageable lives now lost in America's prisons...
...I told him so...
...On March 21 of this year, after extensive interviews with both Nolan and Robinson, the two wrote me a joint letter, cautioning me not to "attribute any libelous remarks relative to anyone involved in the Initiative to either one of us...
...And I think at this point we are really on the threshold of getting a program implemented which will indeed be a model" But later that day, the public got a hint of the behind-the-scenes drama when Mayor Barry told Arthur Brisbane of The Washington Post that Margaret Labat, "is on her way out by mutual agreement" A few months later in February, 1986, the Federal Bureau of Prisons loaned Gwen Sizer Washington to DCDC to take over Labat's position...
...By November 1983, with only four months to plan, the spigot opened and the unexpected money began to flow into a bureaucracy woefully incapable of handling it...
...And it gets worse...
...He was informed by subordinates that afternoon that tear gas had been used to try to disperse the inmate demonstrators, he said, but he did not believe that a major disturbance had occured that would require his presence...
...And in what today sounds almost funny, city administrator Downs told Specter, "We recognize now that without your insistence, without your enthusiasm, and in many cases, your demanding support for this program, we would not be where we are today in the District" Six months later, on December 5, 1985, the appropriations subcommittee met again to review the progress of the Specter Initiative...
...Seven months later, the Specter money started flowing...
...The differential was approved both by DCDC director Palmer and by Mayor Barry's office...
...According to the The Washington Post, "Palmer had spent much of the day attending a retreat for city officials and another meeting at the convention center...
...According to a senior official at GAO, Gene Dodaro, the agency originally planned to look at the whole Specter Initiative...
...Of the 1,171 inmates in Central Facility, 1,457 supposedly were enrolled in educational programs...
...The numbers sound like election results in Haiti...
...But she didn't last long...
...He couldn't trust anyone...
...In Labat's case, the approved salary differential started out at about $100/week in 1984 and grew to $600/week in 1985...
...Also, in May 1984, Abramowitz paid Labat $4,700...
...Friction is common between career civil servants and newly appointed bosses from the outside...
...So Specter's idea was not easy to sell in 1983, while Reagan and the Congress were liquidating national assets to minimize already record deficits...
...Downs says he was only encouraging Taylor to expedite matters, and the idea of using Abramowitz came from Specter himself...
...The way I was taught, 415 divided by 644 is only 64 percent...
...But that may not matter because Hyman's records show that even if you combined totals for both years (1984 and 1985) since the Specter Initiative had gotten underway, you would have only 500 inmates taking the test and only 331 passing...
...Hubert Robinson, who later worked for an advisory committee monitoring the program on behalf of the Appropriations Committee, says the decision was made in a roundabout way by then-school superintendent Floretta McKenzie...
...The same for airline tickets, consultants' fees, hotel bills, and a host of other goods and services...
...City administrator Downs says the mayor's office had little to do with it: "That was Palmer's idea...
...The whites are out to get us: Palmer especially had problems with that kind of paranoia...
...I was willing to bend over backwards to be of help...
...The story begins in 1983 with Senator Arlen Specter...
...Palmer, invoking confidentiality in what he said was a personnel matter, declined to discuss his whereabouts later that night, when subordinates said they were trying to reach him...
...DPW had been responsible only for capital construction, but DCDC spent the money Congress allotted to operate the program...
...One hundred billion dollars is an enormous sum...
...So when he talked, we listened ." Again, Specter has declined comment...
...He was not called to testify...
...It was a $48 million government initiative...
...prisons were the responsibility of Delbert Jackson...
...For example, in 1984, the year Labat took over, DCDC's official annual report listed "student enrollment" and inmate "population" in separate tables...
...Palmer's style of management did more than simply alienate...
...I think they panicked and they brought in the Labat regime where they were spending money for the sake of spending money...
...Down the drain!' " The minutes of the advisory group's meeting on October 25, 1985, during which Ben-Veniste directed some pointed questions at Labat, demonstrates that the group was aware that the Specter Initiative had problems...
...That was four months before Labat even assumed formal control...
...DCDC gave me what were represented to be the most complete records available...
...The GAO's announcement that its investigation had been turned over to the U.S...
...Its chief proponent in Congress wanted to demonstrate once and for all that, despite the dismal record of America's prison systems, criminals in fact could be rehabilitated...
...By comparing them, it appears that of the 511 inmates in Maximum Security, 514 were enrolled in class...
...It's equal to the budget of a government agency called the United States Air Force...
...Taylor says her orders to approve the contract came from City Administrator Tom Downs, Mayor Barry's chief of staff...
...Palmer didn't trust anyone," says Chuck Lindsay, a career administrator who is now retired and who also is black...
...But if he had been, he would have told the committee that the passing rate for 1984 was only 63 percent, roughly the same as it's been for many years...
...Every dime of our budget comes from that subcommittee...
...At the other end teachers tell of one colleague who spent much of his time sleeping because he did not have the necessary equipment to teach his course in small appliance repair...
...I went in to talk to Labat and Palmer," says Robinson, who like Labat and Palmer, is black...
...Specter strongly suggested that we use these kinds of people," Downs says...
...One administrator at Central Facility says a secret audit was conducted over several weeks and could not find any class, not even the most popular, with more than seven inmates in attendance...
...But Golightly and others at DCDC were not ready for what came next: A few weeks later, Specter dwarfed DCDC's wildest dreams by reporting out an appropriation of $22 million with a promise of more to come—$48 million in all—for teachers, classrooms, books, equipment, and job placement counselors...
...When he told her her plan was illegal, he says she threatened to use her influence with Specter to get him fired...
...She says Palmer and the mayor's office wanted her to give a large sole-source contract to a woman named Elizabeth Abramowitz who ran a small psychological consulting firm...
...Mayor Barry, on the other hand, ordered at least some of the public documents which DCDC had failed to produce be released to me...
...In June 1984, Specter asked former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste to head a special advisory committee on a pro-bono basis...
...Richard said, 'We don't want to get in politics...
...DCDC sources say Palmer was accompanied by a female assistant...
...According to a report by the GAO, the project ground to a halt when the new foundations didn't match the architectural plans...
...residents, handicapped citizens, and workers who are non-white or female...
...Staff meetings were a joke...
...So I passed my information on to Richard...
...Following Barry, Ben-Veniste testified...
...Information Resources Management Administration (IRMA), says Labat showed him a plan to buy Apple computers from a vendor not on an approved list...
...They turned their findings over to then-U.S...
...To conceal the absence of students from visiting VIPs like Mrs...
...The proposal I saw touted things like the firm's "Knowledge of Washington, D.C...
...Specter's first chairmanship was the Juvenile Justice subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee...
...They always ended with someone being threatened and Palmer warning everyone that he was the mayor's best friend...
...The teachers didn't know their subjects," Nolan says...
...George Bush, program officials staged classes using volunteers from the prison yard by offering special dinners from the culinary school in exchange for posing as regular students, according to an inmate...
...The sad irony is that when Barry and Ben-Veniste presented their testimony to the subcommittee on December 5, 1985, they spoke the truth...
...It was a farce...
...It's five times what NASA spent over the 10 years of the Apollo program that took man to the moon...
...Marshals Service but had no direct experience in prison administration...
...They were saying everyone was spying on them and sabotaging them...
...Leeth says he doesn't remember, but the General Accounting Office (GAO) reports that in July 1983 he placed a call to the D.C...
...Not only was Abramowitz's firm allowed a 32 percent mark-up on the expenses run through it, but the city also paid at least part of the salaries of Abramowitz's own employees...
...She ordered $350,000 in graphics arts supplies...
...But he insisted that he was wearing his pager...
...He had known Dr...
...government is saying that we are trying to dictate how to run the department : " Robinson says he told Ben-Veniste in detail about program failures and about the efforts to conceal them...
...Peggy Nolan was a leader of the Washington Correctional Foundation, a group of mostly white dogooders who wanted to contribute time and/or money to the city's rehabilitation programs...
...Golightly called back to say the department had reexamined its requirements, and—whaddya know?—discovered it could use $8 million to "substantially expand" its prison education program...
...He'd spent 24 years in the U.S...
...Taylor says that the contract was designed to circumvent the bureaucracy's complex purchasing and civil service requirements...
...A May 24, 1984 letter from Elizabeth Abramowitz's husband, Michael, addressed, "To Whom It May Concern," authorized Palmer to use Michael's American Express card for 10 days beginning May 27, 1984...
...Palmer, 59, is a tall, gray-haired, black man who lives with his wife in southeast Washington...
...And Labat declines to say anything about the program...
...But such facts were not reaching the public...
...Of the 244 women in jail, 327 were in class...
...But sources familiar with the investigation in the early stages cite examples of theft...
...She did not return phone calls...
...Lindsay says Palmer never filed a report explaining the purpose of the trip...
...He estimated her plan would cost the city an extra $100,000...
...She didn't even have a graphics arts instructor...
...But they did not specifically disavow any of the statements quoted in this article...
...Williams won't comment, but city administrator Downs defends Williams's action, saying IRMA is just an "advisory" agency...
...According to the invoices, Palmer, the head of corrections, used the Abramowitz contract to spend Specter Initiative funds on a 10-day trip to California...
...Asked about the trip, Palmer did not answer directly, saying only that, "Anything I did about the Specter Initiative was legal and approved ." The woman who reportedly accompanied him still works for DCDC...
...But she was still one royal pain in the ass to McKenzie...
...Department of Corrections (DCDC...
...GAO did not audit the larger expenditure because it says auditors found evidence of criminal wrongdoing...
...Tumbling down Of the $48 million, $12 million went to the D.C...
...The woman who replaced Taylor was Margaret Labat, who was then a D.C...
...public school official who administers GED tests for DCDC...
...public school official in charge of adult education...
...Afterward, Specter thanked him, saying, "I am glad to have that very positive assessment on your part, Mr...
...But GAO also blamed DPW for "inadequate oversight" and for a procurement system crafted less for efficiency and competition than to protect nonwhite contractors, D.C...
...What's more, Specter wanted quick results, according to The Washington Post, which wrote that Specter had put DCDC "officials on notice...
...At one end of the spectrum were those who were grateful for the chance to work with only two or three really interested inmates...
...We repeatedly told you that neither of us had any evidence of corruption whatsoever...
...Palmer's first appointment to head the Specter Initiative was Patricia Taylor, one of those who'd worked under former director Jackson...
...But when auditors finished in October 1987, their report dealt only with the $12-million construction debacle at DPW...
...In other words, if the Specter Initiative needed a $100 file cabinet, Abramowitz's firm would write the $100 check to the supplier, then bill the city $132...
...In addition several critics say Labat hired dozens of incompetent and unneeded teachers...
...As St.John recalls, Williams said he'd take care of it, but a few weeks later the sale went through, just as Labat had wanted...
...To date, 644 persons have taken that examination and 415 have obtained passing scores" It's doubtful His Honor could pass the GED test himself, if this is his idea of division...
...The inmates were on a fourth-grade reading level...
...Neither the auditors nor the federal prosecutors will describe the evidence they say they found...
...Abramowitz charged 32 percent of this amount too...
...I was unable to obtain all the invoices, but the ones I have show that at least $2.6 million was paid to Abramowitz for goods and services that originally cost only $2 million...
...Labat for 35 years...
...Another $4.3 million will be needed to finish them, according to the District's 1988 budget...
...However Labat may have been chosen, there is little dispute that she faced a formidable task—to create at nine different correctional facilities, a huge model program in prison education, complete with curriculums, faculty, administration, supplies, classrooms, and students...
...Labat and Abramowitz both refused to answer any of my questions about their public service during those years...
...Attorney Joseph diGenova...
...I told him, 'Richard, the program is going down the drain...
...That much we know...
...We were at 64 percent in March, 1984, and I am happy to report in October 1985 the GED passing rate was 83 percent...
...Almost 100 Specter Initiative teachers received their paychecks from Abramowitz's firm...
...Invoices show the contract also was used to pay Labat and some of her top people a "salary differential" over and above their regular pay from DCDC...
...There was a racial thing...
...The number varied from month to month...
...After that interview, they avoided me like the plague...
...Williams, who is Downs' former assistant, is now director of DCDC...
...One indicator of the program's success is the GED passing rate...
...According to her proposal and the bills she sent the city, her fee equalled 32 percent of the goods and services she bought...
...It was coming to an end by the end of 1986...
...Three months after Ben-Veniste accepted the assignment, he hired Hubert Robinson, an old friend and retired officer of the Federal Probation Service, to be his liaison to the DCDC...
...In closing remarks, Barry said: "I think when we finish these programs and look at them, it will be a guide to prison systems around the nation" When problems were mentioned they were phrased in a way that was definitely not calculated to cause alarm...
...Palmer won't say if that's true...
...Over the years, this black administrator became highly regarded by many of the assistants he picked, many of whom still hold influential DCDC positions today...
...So do several key participants in the program...
...Mayor Barry testified that the Specter Initiative was a proud success: "Before we started the program, we had about 863 inmates who had some exposure to educational programs within the prison . . . . Since this program has started, we have touched 3,398 persons, some more intensively than others...
...If a teacher was paid $100 by Abramowitz, the city paid Abramowitz $132...
...Leeth said that the Appropriations Committee was considering a much larger sum...
...Nowadays, the senator uncharacteristically shies away from interviews on this subject...
...Palmer saw all these white faces, and he got scared," she says...
...Perhaps because the hopeful program that proudly came to bear his name, the "Specter Initiative," produced a "track record" of little more than waste and incompetence, providing a classic illustration of how a bureaucracy responds when Congress tries to get it to do too much too fast...
...But he had learned to enjoy public life, and in the years that followed he sought statewide office three times before winning a United States Senate seat in 1980...
...In the same June 6, 1985 hearing, Ben-Veniste told the committee: "In the year or so that I have been involved in the program we have seen, I think, a steady curve that has not always been as sharpwardly [sic] upward as we might like, but I think we are in good shape now...
...And as chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on the District of Columbia, which helps control the District's large federal payment, he had the clout to make a start...
...After Jackson's death from a heart attack in 1982, Mayor Marion Barry appointed an outsider, Barry's long-time friend James F. Palmer, to head the agency...
...GAO concluded that congressional pressure was partly to blame for the calamity since it resulted in inadequate planning time...
...In other words, the city not only paid Abramowitz a 32-percent markup but it also paid to have its bill prepared...
...He spoke to William D. Golightly, a career administrator at DCDC, then in charge of Administrative Services...
...Abramowitz declined to comment...
...The upshot was that city officials were being paid by a contractor under their supervision...
...That's a passing rate of 66 percent...
...Subsequently, on August 8, 1984, Abramowitz billed DCDC for $2,600 for "Travel/Transportation" for James Palmer...
...Attorney came in December 1987...
...The near absence of real students held advantages for the teachers in the program...
...I think they went to public school together...
...I think we have seen a period of learning by all who have been involved in this program from the administration side as to the problems and challenges presented by prison education and vocational training...
...Today the Specter Initiative is over...
...Golightly called back a few weeks later to say that DCDC did in fact need an extra $750,000 for that purpose...
...Alex Hyman is the D.C...
...So when Barry asked about someone for the new corrections job, McKenzie gave Labat a glowing recommendation just to get rid of her...
...Whatever the motives for Specter's ideas on rehabilitation, his aide on the Appropriations Committee, Tim Leeth, tried to make them a reality...
...More than three years after the original design contracts were awarded, DPW had spent more than half of its $12 million for the project without finishing any of the seven buildings...
...And a few days before Christmas, 1985, Labat collected $39,481 from Abramowitz...
...and predisposing factors contributing to being known to the courts...
...This was two years after the money began to flow, 18 months after BenVeniste had joined the advisory committee...
...She had too much money and too little time to spend it...
...As chairman of this subcommittee, I have tried to add funds to Washington, D.C., which, on a pro-rata basis, would be the equivalent of that kind of a massive federal attack, and if we are able to show success here . . .we can show a track record on results" Like most of what we know about the program, the quote is from a document, in this case the transcript of a three-year-old subcommittee hearing...
...McKenzie won't comment...
...At one point we found computers, typewriters stored everywhere...
...But the combined weight was too great for the soil, and the whole mess had to be pulverized and hauled away...
...This according to Abramowitz's invoices...
...For example, Ben-Veniste— who in the first segment of his testimony had said that there was room for "substantial improvements" with "pre-release counseling," "an integrated program of potential job identification" and other problems—ended the hearing with these words: "I do not want to leave any misimpression in terms of the substantial progress that this program has made...
...That's how it ended up, a total farce...
...At some point along the way Sen...
...I'm not here to hurt you people...
...Dellums also declined to discuss Abramowitz...
...None were finished on time, three were finished late, and to this day four are not finished at all...
...Similar assessments were offered by other long-time corrections officials who are reluctant to speak openly because they still work there...
...that he expects to see concrete results within months...
...Until 1982, the D.C...
...St.John says he took the problem to Hal Williams, then in Mayor Barry's office...
...We don't want to get into a position where the D.C...
...Palmer declined to be interviewed...
...And Hyman says it didn't change much from year to year anyway...
...Bold programs tend to attract the kind of publicity to which Specter's Jay Gourley is a Washington writer career has demonstrated he is not averse...
...But by then, the vast majority of the $48 million was gone...
...Labat declined to comment...
...The GAO says Leeth raised the possibility of a special appropriation for prison education...
...But Specter seemed determined to have his way...
...They refused to take my advice...
...From that perch, he held hearings on, of all things, Joseph Mengele, Hitler's socalled "Angel of Death ." His hearings entitled, "Pornography and its Effect on Women and Children," which ran from August to November of 1984, brought porn stars to the Senate and headlines to Specter...
...What could make a Republican senator (and a former district attorney to boot) want to spend $100 billion on the kind of crime measure usually preceded by the word "coddling...
...The Palmers that be Such was the state of DCDC's leadership when the Specter windfall began...
...It may be that the Congress ought to have a GAO study on all the funds which we make available to the District to determine what safeguards should be built into the system to see that federally appropriated monies are properly used ." Recently, I filed written requests to DCDC for access to records showing how Specter funds had been spent...
...In December 1986, Mayor Barry announced that Hallem Williams, 39, former assistant to Thomas Downs, would replace retiring director Palmer as head of DCDC...
...Quite the contrary, testimony solicited by Specter from high city officials, as well as reports published directly by the city, described a Specter Initiative that was heading for success...
...Labat] had been put in a meaningless job more or less to keep her out of the way...
...It allowed Palmer to pay for two hotel rooms and for rental cars, first in San Francisco, then Lake Tahoe, then San Diego...
...However, the one full-time city inspector assigned to the seven projects, reports the GAO, was absent when much of the work was done...
...The money—all of it—went to the District of Columbia...
...Two years later, in 1985, Specter explained his actions: "I have urged, as you know, that there be a national commitment for $10 billion a year for 10 years to deal with this problem of violent crime...
...And that included $7,800 a year for an "accounts receivable contract manager...
...Chris St.John, a former analyst for D.C...
...Department of Public Works (DPW) to build seven new prison school buildings by October 1985...
...Taylor says she rejected Abramowitz's proposal because it was pointless gibberish...
...On June 6, 1985, the city administrator Tom Downs, with Labat at his side, testified that the percentage of those passing the General Education Development (GED) test had risen from 52 percent to 73 percent in 1985...
...He was paranoid . . . . It wasn't just me...
...I said, 'Listen, this is a great program...
...BenVeniste, in terms of a very careful analysis which you and your committee have made...
...Exactly where it ended up is a mystery, the ending yet to be written by the United States Justice Department...
...The contractor who laid the foundations tried to correct the problem at one site by laying a good foundation on top of the bad one...
...We wanted to help, but he came to think of us as an enemy...
...That was the year Congress passed the last federal payment, $7 million...
...Nearly all the problems of the Specter Initiative developed while Specter's subcommittee supposedly was watching its progress closely...
...Her explanation was, 'It's good to have them on board ' " Lindsay says, "Department of Corrections had never gotten a windfall like that...
...DPW had originally planned to pay the architects to oversee the construction, then it decided to supervise the construction itself...
Vol. 20 • July 1988 • No. 6
