Prison life full of highs, lows - A Warden's Account

Warden Linda Sanders is leaving the U.S. Penitentiary in Lompoc after five years. Her picture will be placed in the spot on the past wardens’ wall after she leaves.

By Bo Poertner   bpoertner@lompocrecord.com

Sunday, July 8, 2012

When the position of warden at a federal prison in Springfield, Mo., was posted, it was an opportunity Linda Sanders couldn’t pass up.

After five years as warden of the U.S. Penitentiary, Lompoc, Sanders put in for the job and landed the assignment.

It wasn’t so much the job or the potential for career advancement that appealed to Sanders, but the prison’s location.

“It’s close to home,” said Sanders, who was born in Mount Vernon, Ill., and educated at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, and other schools. “It’s four hours from home — as opposed to a couple thousand miles.”

Sanders, Lompoc’s first female warden and first black warden, will finish her tenure at the end of this month and begin Aug. 12 as warden of the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners, a medical and psychiatric hospital.

Her successor at Lompoc will be Richard B. Ives, warden at the U.S. Penitentiary in McCreary, Ky. Ives served at Lompoc prison from 1987 to 1994.

Springfield will be Sanders’ last assignment before retirement, she said, ending a career in the Bureau of Prisons that began in 1987 as a correctional officer in a low-security facility in Sandstone, Minn.

“Springfield will definitely be my last,” she said.

The timing was right, not only from a professional point of view, but for her family, said Sanders, who has a 19-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter.

Most warden assignments last only two or three years — Sanders has moved frequently in the past 20-plus years — but she stayed longer at Lompoc so that her son could graduate from Cabrillo High School with a strong sense of belonging. He is now 19 and a sophomore at Sacramento State University studying psychology.

Her daughter is looking forward to being near her grandmother and cousins again, but her son is hooked on California, Sanders said.

“He’ll probably stay in California. He likes it,” she said.

Sanders’ assignment in Lompoc was to meld the minimum security prison camp and the low-security Federal Correctional Institution into a single complex — about 3,600 inmates and more than 500 employees under the leadership of one warden and one set of department heads. It was a task begun by her predecessor, Warden Bobby Compton, Sanders said.

The departing warden said it is the nature of prison management to have “highs” and “lows” on a daily basis, but she counted the successes of the prison’s re-entry program as among the most personally rewarding accomplishments.

Few prisoners in Lompoc will spend their lives incarcerated, so it is critical that they leave prepared to cope on the outside, Sanders said.

“We want them to get out and not come back,” she said, adding that the re-entry program, a Department of Justice initiative, gives them a “fighting chance of not coming back.”

“Most importantly, it’s the right thing to do.”

The successes of the prison’s 500-hour Residential Drug Abuse Program, for helping inmates beat drug addictions, was another rewarding program, Sanders said.

Among the low points was the shooting death of a guard from the Victorville Federal Correctional Complex in March by a Lompoc correctional officer in a Lompoc motel room. Timothy McNally has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder in the death of his friend, Gary Bent, who was in town for training.

A crisis support team was called in to help the prison staff cope with the tragedy.

“No group of people can take a hit like that for a long period of time,” Sanders said. “It was hard. It was very difficult. It’s hard to wrap your mind around it.”

Sanders said Lompoc was not only her longest tour of duty, but also one of her favorites — and one of the most unique.

Lompoc is one of only two federal prisons in the nation that still have farming operations. The other is the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution in El Reno, Okla.

“Lompoc is a unique institution,” Sanders said. “Nobody thinks they are going to be dealing with inmates and cows.”

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