DV Journal

(This article first appeared in Broad + Liberty.)

Thirteen former correctional officers at the Delaware County prison on Thursday filed a federal lawsuit alleging the county improperly fired them and dozens of others shortly after the county assumed full managerial control of the prison back in April 2022.

The filing comes as prison employees have been vocal about evaporating morale and what they say are increasingly dangerous conditions at the George W. Hill Correctional Facility (GWHCF), alleging that the county’s management has been worse than the last private contractor, GEO Group.

The lawsuit’s main thrust is that the county, through its new warden Laura Williams, “systematically targeted roughly sixty-eight individuals who they terminated absent any notice hearing, charge, or due process whatsoever.”

Most of the plaintiffs were members of the Delaware County Prison Employees Independent Union, and say that the last contract in force when the prison was still under private management was still the ruling force in employment matters even though the union contract had lapsed.

They say they “possessed a legitimate claim of …continued employment” unless the county could show just cause why the officers should be fired — something they say the county did not do.

The county did not immediately return a request for comment. The county’s standard position is not to comment on pending litigation, but if a comment is provided, this article will be updated.

Thursday’s filing merely formalizes a dispute that has continued to percolate behind the scenes after the county’s takeover of the GWHCF in 2022.

The lead plaintiff, Frank Kwaning, remains the president of the union, and has publicly accused Williams of trying to break the union by firing so many of its members at her first opportunity.

The filing says Kwaning was a fourteen-year veteran of the facility, and “did not have any violations of rules…until the very end of Geo’s administration of the jail, when he was disciplined for inadvertently bringing headache medicine” into the jail.

Kwaning went before the Delaware County Council in December to complain publicly for a second time in as many years about conditions at the prison.

“The [union] members are as frustrated as they could be. So through the members, I am told to let you know that the council should step in,” Kwaning said. “Go to the facility. Talk to the members. The morale is at its lowest level. One may have thought that with this interim agreement that we have with the $3 raise that we have gotten — and we thank the council for agreeing with the union for the $3 raise — we were of the view that with the $3 raise, the morale was going to be up. But because of the treatment that has been meted out to the members, the morale is at its lowest, at best.”

Councilmember Kevin Madden, who chairs the county’s Jail Oversight Board, rebuked Kwaning.

“Mr. Kwaning, I recognize your position as head of the union. Given the fact there is an open negotiation over an agreement, I will, as always, refrain from engaging in a back-and-forth about such things. But I will certainly remind you and others that I am regularly at the facility and I am regularly interacting with the workforce. So, you know, any suggestion that council is not involved regularly with our facility would be inaccurate.”

Councilmember Richard Womack said at that meeting he would go to the prison and do an inspection and talk with correctional officers. Sources have indicated to Broad + Liberty that Womack’s tour did happen, but Womack has not offered any public comment about his assessment.

Just two months earlier, the union and the county announced they had agreed in principle to a temporary agreement.

The Inquirer reported at the time that Kwaning, “and the union’s vice president, Ashley Gwaku, were among those whose employment was terminated by the county. The pair filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the state’s Labor Relations Board, saying they were unfairly targeted because of their work with the union. A judge recently ruled against them, saying the county was justified in its decision not to retain them.”

A Broad + Liberty report from January noted that many sources close to the prison indicated that the largest issue contributing to low morale was the decision by Williams to remove “split shifts.”

Previously under GEO management, when an employee was given a mandatory 8-hour overtime shift attached to the end of the regular shift, the officer could split the overtime shift by taking four hours and finding a coworker to take the other four hours. But sources say Williams nixed that.

As a result, sources said many new hires began to quit after having their first mandatory overtime shifts placed on them, realizing that they would sometimes have to work sixteen-hour days with only eight hours to recover before being right back at work.

Meanwhile, the prison has witnessed one death in January and one in February, although those fatalities may not end up being counted on the prison’s annual statistics to the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.

In each of those cases, the inmate had a medical emergency that began at the prison. Prison officials, however, appear to have been able to get courts to technically release them such that when they passed, they were not technically in the custody of the GWHCF.

The plaintiffs are represented by the Derek Smith Law Group of Philadelphia.

(This article first appeared in Broad + Liberty.)

Two correctional officers at the Delaware County prison were arrested Thursday and have been charged with smuggling into the prison a substance that tested positive for fentanyl , court filings and affidavits show.

Adham Diab, 43, and Lina Tarrad, 35, were both arrested by the Delaware County Criminal Investigations Division (CID). Both face three charges: drug possession, possession of contraband, and conspiracy to commit a crime with contraband and/or a possession of a drug. The arrest affidavits say Diab and Tarrad are married.

Magisterial District Judge Wendy B. Roberts set bail at $300,000 for both, requiring a ten percent deposit for release. The court docket says neither was able to post bail.

According to Diab’s arrest affidavit, a prison investigator went into a bathroom that is off limits to the incarcerated population. Diab had been in that bathroom moments before.

The investigator noticed a baggy of a substance that looked like a drug that had apparently been left behind. Investigators then sequestered both Diab and Tarrad and began to question them.

“Diab was then searched and in his pants pockets were one small baggie containing a white substance, stamped ‘waverunner,’” and a similar bag was found on Tarrad, according to the affidavits.

“The narcotics was field tested…and tested positive for Fentanyl,” the CID detective said in the affidavit.

A spokeswoman for the county declined to comment, citing an ongoing investigation.

The website vinelink.com, which tracks inmates all across the country, indicated that both suspects had been transferred to a different prison, most likely so the two would not be residents among the same prison population they had been policing just days before.

Fentanyl acts similar to opioids like heroin, but is “a synthetic opioid that is up to 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine,” according to the Centers for Disease Control. The CDC also estimates that “[o]ver 150 people die every day from overdoses related to synthetic opioids like fentanyl.”

Court records also show the pair were involved in a landlord-tenant dispute last year in which the plaintiff, NOPG Owner LLC, was awarded over $9,000 in damages of unpaid rent.

The arrests come just weeks after the president of the prison employees union, Frank Kwaning, publicly went before the Delaware County Council to tell the five-member board that employee morale at the George W. Hill Correctional Facility was dangerously low.

“The [union] members are as frustrated as they could be. So through the members, I am told to let you know that the council should step in,” Kwaning said on Dec. 13. “Go to the facility. Talk to the members. The morale is at its lowest level. One may have thought that with this interim agreement that we have with the $3 raise that we have gotten — and we thank the council for agreeing with the union for the $3 raise — we were of the view that with the $3 raise, the morale was going to be up. But because of the treatment that has been meted out to the members, the morale is at its lowest, at best.”

Councilmember Richard Womack told Kwaning the county “would likely try and see if we could fix that in some kind of way.” Councilman Brian Madden, who heads the county Jail Oversight board refuted Kwaning’s notion that the council had been hands-off in its management style.

“Mr. Kwaning, I recognize your position as head of the union. Given the fact there is an open negotiation over an agreement, I will, as always, refrain from engaging in a back-and-forth about such things,” Madden said. “But I will certainly remind you and others that I am regularly at the facility and I am regularly interacting with the workforce. So, you know, any suggestion that council is not involved regularly with our facility would be inaccurate.”

The GWHCF was the last privately managed prison in Pennsylvania until 2022. In February of that year, the county installed its own handpicked warden. In April, the facility shifted back to government control.

Since then, the annual budget of the prison has gone up, recidivism has not been reduced, deaths per year at the facility are up, even though the daily population has been down by about nineteen percent.

Update: This article has been modified from its original version to include information about the 2023 landlord-tenant dispute involving Tarrad and Diab.