CAÑON CITY — A three-star general who waged war against the Russian army occupying northern Afghanistan in the 1980s now runs 210 jails and prisons across the country, using methods learned at the International Correctional Management Training Center in Cañon City.
Through an interpreter in a recent interview, Mazare Sharafi said the prison system has changed little in hundreds of years.
But he and a dozen of his wardens and staff were in Colorado for three weeks in August and September, learning lessons including why it’s safer to separate goat thieves from murderous bandits in prison.
The program, funded by the U.S. secretary of state’s office of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, and operated by Colorado Correctional Industries, a division of the Colorado Department of Corrections, has been running for a year at an old women’s prison.
Six other nations, including Brazil, Lebanon and Morocco, have sent prison officers to the center to learn U.S. tactics, said Steven Kraft, who oversees the program’s Asian operations.
The center receives a $1.6 million federal grant. Airfare costs for Sharafi’s visit were also covered by the federal program, he said.
“It’s widely acknowledged as a very successful program,” Kraft said.
That success comes even though Colorado’s prison system is vastly different from those of participating nations, he said.
Sharafi’s guards are more likely to find contraband in the form of cave-forged gold ingots than swallowed cocaine balloons. Instead of sleeping on cell bunks, 180 of his inmates lie on floors in giant halls. He doesn’t deal with gang shot-callers, only Taliban warlords and 5,235 of their minions.
Sharafi said his men learned a lot at the meetings even though his prisons will likely never resemble the fortresses of steel bars and modern security electronics in Colorado prisons.
They come to Colorado to learn a new mind-set in dealing with an age-old dilemma: how to safely hold society’s most dangerous scofflaws, said training-program director Bill Claspell.
Ancient customs
Many of the countries seeking training have ancient customs that prove dangerous to nonviolent criminals, Claspell said.
Prisoners are segregated by social status rather than by the gravity of their crimes. The wealthy, including rapists and white- collar crooks, are often housed together while impoverished goat thieves share space with killers, Claspell said.
In Cañon City, Claspell’s staff teaches the foreign visitors DOC’s inmate-classification system, which is based on risk factors including a matrix of six levels of felonies for crimes ranging from theft to murder. Histories of violence, mental illness and sexual crimes are factored.
Evaluators scrutinize an inmate’s background. He may be a gang or Taliban leader.
“The threats are different; the cultures are different,” Claspell said. But the strategies for neutralizing a cartel kingpin, a white-supremacist recruiter or a Taliban jihadist are the same: isolation.
A Taliban leader can’t order an uprising if all his communications with adherents are severed.
As part of the program, U.S. correctional consultants stationed in Afghanistan will help Sharafi’s men implement new programs. He said the U.S. has already given millions of dollars for a new prison wing in Kabul that included individual cells. The cells can be used to isolate Taliban leaders who might incite prison uprisings.
Danger from outside
Keeping prisoners safe, providing educational and vocational opportunities and providing humane conditions helps keep order in Colorado prisons, Claspell said.
When he takes wardens from other nations on prison field trips, they are amazed when they go into prisoner living areas.
“‘They must be less dangerous prisoners than in our prison,'” Claspell said he often hears. They would be attacked if they did so in their prisons, they add. Sharafi’s own son, a 22-year-old prison guard, had been murdered in prison, he said.
There is danger from outside too. Sharafi
recalled how the concussion from a suicide bombing killed 13 of his prison guards and shattered the windows of his fifth-floor office in northern Afghanistan.
But in Colorado, the guards toured cellblocks occupied by rapists, gang members and killers. It’s safer because of Colorado’s reward-based system, Claspell said.
The system is based on moving inmates as quickly as possible from higher- to lower-security prisons with more privileges and eventually to parole. Many foreign prisons keep inmates for set sentence periods whether they learn a new trade or shank another inmate.
Colorado has many rewards, including educational and vocational programing and getting to hit a softball on a grassy prison baseball diamond. Inmates can also lose privileges by rioting and go to a tiny cell in 23-hour-a-day lockdowns.
Kraft said he admires Sharafi, who risks his life by coming to America for any type of training.
“I took notes. This has been very good for me,” Sharafi said. “We’ll make changes. The people who came here will become trainers in my country.”
The Afghans flew to the U.S. thinking New York City is America, Claspell said.
They left realizing it’s also Cañon City, where friendly trainers barbecued buffalo burgers on a grill at the entrance of the training center, he said.
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206, or
