SALT LAKE CITY — Franklin Carroll called FOX 13 News with an update: He was finally being admitted into programming that could help him be paroled from prison before his sentence expires in 2029.
Utah Department of Corrections administrators have “been getting me into everything they can, and that’s a major improvement,” Carroll said.
And what of the departure this week of Brian Redd, who had been the executive director at the Utah Department of Corrections and has left to be Salt Lake City’s police chief?
“He was a good guy for this place,” said Carroll, who has been in prison for sex offenses since 2020. “And hopefully it stays that way. Hopefully, it doesn’t backfall now that he’s gone.”
The FOX 13 Investigates team has reported on problems at the Utah Department of Corrections in recent years. One of the biggest problems was low staffing at the $1 billion prison that opened in Salt Lake City in 2022. Its design makes it more labor-intensive than its predecessor.
Two years ago – just before Redd took over Corrections – the department needed 372 new corrections officers, the preferred term for guards. The department paid 9,000 hours in overtime for that pay period.
Wednesday, a Corrections spokesman reported officer vacancies have declined to 104; overtime in the last pay period was about 2,700 hours.
The Utah Legislature has raised pay for Corrections workers in recent years, but Redd has put an emphasis on recruiting officers and other employees. Utah’s two prisons – Salt Lake City and Gunnison – have also lacked counselors, teachers, and other professionals who can provide programming to inmates like Carroll.
The Utah Board of Pardons and Parole typically requires some sort of therapy before allowing inmates to exit prison early. FOX 13 News reported last year on how inmates, through no fault of their own, were missing scheduled parole dates because the prisons hadn’t provided programming.
And, in recent years, auditors have explained how the prisons often failed to provide adequate medical care and disposed of medications and medical records in trash bins accessible to the public.
Molly Prince, one of the co-founders and directors of the Utah Prisoner Advocate Network, a voice for inmates and families, said communication with Corrections has improved.
“Brian Redd this last 21 months has been the best relationship that UPAN has ever had with an executive director,” Prince told FOX 13 this week.
Besides creating avenues to advocate for inmates needing healthcare, Prince said Redd and his staff fixed two issues UPAN lobbied for.
“To get additional phones installed in both prisons,” Prince said in the first case, “because all of the housing units did not have enough phones to really accommodate. They would have three or four phones to accommodate 60 to 80 people.”
The second item? It was allowing inmates who qualify for in-person visits to take photographs with their families. Prince said there were teenage or grown children of inmates who had no pictures with their parents since the kids were babies.
Prince says not everything is fixed, especially with inmate healthcare. UPAN has already worked with the new Corrections director, Jared Garcia, and looks forward to him taking over the department.
Carroll still needs to be admitted into sex offender treatment to help his parole cause. He is nervous about the director change.
“I’ve heard everybody’s nervous,” Carroll said of his fellow inmates. “That is the consensus is a lot of people are nervous.”
“Some people are saying the new guy that is stepping in was under Redd and he’s going to try and keep pushing things, but we don’t know, you know. It’s kind of a shot in the dark.”