A New Prison Locked In To Trouble

On a desolate hilltop in central Montgomery County, contractors have worked since March 1984 to construct a vast prison meant to end overcrowding at the county's 135-year-old stone prison in Norristown.

With an estimated price of $22.8 million, the 504-cell, medium-security complex covering five acres is the most expensive construction project the county has ever undertaken.

Yet a number of prison experts from across the United States say the new Montgomery County Correctional Facility certainly won't be the best: The detention equipment that is supposed to make the building secure may actually provide inmates with an easy avenue for escape. Cell windows can be cut through with a razor or burned through with a match; bars on the windows have been constructed of steel that can be cut through or bent relatively easily, and some of those bars have already begun to rust. Some sliding cell doors are so warped that they cannot be opened, and other doors have been delivered with no provision for locks at all.

"There are no two doors that measure the exact same dimension," said Franklin E. Skepton, the general contractor, in an interview last year. "And there is not a single door in the place that fits." The county commissioners fired Skepton from the project Feb. 22, after a series of disagreements.

John J. Maloney, who designed the doors, windows and locks - the very heart of the prison - is not an architect but a heating and plumbing engineer. He maintains no permanent office and no permanent staff. He had scant experience in prison work before this project, and he employed the superintendent of maintenance at the existing prison to provide his drawings.

What's more, the workers the county has hired to manufacture the security equipment for the prison are not specialists in the field, although they do have a form of expertise.

They are prisoners.

The result is a prison, now nearing completion, that experts have called ''ridiculous," "wild," "unworkable" and something like "a Rube Goldberg putting together a facility."

An Inquirer investigation of the prison, which involved reviewing thousands of documents and interviewing dozens of experts nationwide over the course of a year, shows that: