States Swap Their Most Dangerous Prison Inmates

What do you do with a man like David Dunster?

He's 6 feet 4, weighs 240 pounds and doesn't mind killing.

After Dunster murdered a woman in Oregon, prison officials shipped him to Montana. But in Montana, he killed his cellmate by slashing his throat with a razor blade melted into a toothbrush handle.

So Montana sent him to Nebraska - where his cellmate turned up dead in May, his skull crushed - and now Dunster is again charged with murder.

Though extreme, Dunster's case illuminates a little-known arrangement that exists among prison systems: States often swap troublesome inmates, engaging in an elaborate game of convict musical chairs.

"It's easy to pick up the phone and say, `Look, I gotta get this guy out of here today,' " said Martin Horn, commissioner of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.

Horn's phone call is made possible by an agreement known as the Interstate Compact, which sets forth the rules for exchanging inmates.

Three states don't participate

Each year, about 1,500 inmates are swapped among 47 states. Only Mississippi, Louisiana and West Virginia keep their bad eggs at home.

West Virginia's constitution bars shipping inmates elsewhere without their permission, said William Whyte, deputy director of the state's division of corrections.

And in Mississippi, "It's just not the focus of this state right now," said Ken Jones, spokesman for the state's Department of Corrections.

In Louisiana, "We haven't seen the need to at this point," said Johnny Creed, assistant secretary of the state's Department of Public Safety and Corrections.

Creed said that Mississippi's prisons are full but that the state has entered into an agreement with sheriffs that allows housing of prisoners in local jails.

Hard-core cases, he said, are shipped to one of the state's three "level one" or super-maximum-security prisons. There, inmates are locked in cells 23 hours a day, often in a paper gown, sometimes with nothing to eat but a "food loaf" - the day's menu baked into one loaf.

Among the other states, inmates are transferred for a variety of reasons - they have testified against other inmates or are members of a prison gang. But typically, they are transferred because, like Dunster, they are behavior problems.

Diane Downs: two-for-one deal

States normally trade inmates on a one-for-one basis, said Al Chandler, who handles interstate transfers for the Oregon Department of Corrections.

But for a particularly tough inmate, said Perrin Damon of the Oregon DOC, "sometimes you have to do a special deal."

Such was the case with Diane Downs, who shot three of her own children in 1983, killing one, and then later escaped from prison and was recaptured.

To get rid of the notorious Downs, Damon said, Oregon had to agree to take two inmates in return. Downs was sent first to New Jersey, where she tried to escape twice, and then to Washington state. She is now in a California prison.

Dunster, 42, wound up in prison after killing a 39-year-old mother of eight in a Woodburn, Ore., store where she worked, just hours before he was to graduate from high school with the class of 1972.

In 1976, he was sent to a federal prison in Georgia "due to significant conduct problems," Chandler said. In 1978 he was sent to Montana. A year after the transfer, he killed cellmate Milton Rozier.

According to court records, Rozier's hands and feet had been bound, he had been tied to his bunk and his throat had been slit. At a hearing, the judge asked Dunster why he did it.

"I just flipped out," said Dunster, who told the judge he had "this problem" for a long time. "I could sit and talk to you right now and five minutes later cut your throat."

"Very well," said the judge, and sentenced him to 100 years at hard labor. "You are remanded to the custody of the warden."

Montana, though, didn't keep him long. It shipped him to Nebraska, said Linda Moodry, Interstate Compact officer at the Montana State Prison, "to help him get a new start and to get him involved in some programming."

Most states try to keep a rough balance between the inmates they ship out and those they take in. Pennsylvania, for instance, now houses 33 inmates from other states but has 44 of its own prisoners housed out of state, said Roger Baumgarten, spokesman for the state's prison system.

But most state prisons are overcrowded, making it difficult to maintain equilibrium.

At the Nebraska State Penitentiary, where Dunster was housed, 940 inmates are kept in a prison designed for 568. As a result, troublemaking inmates are frequently celled together, even when that is undesirable.

At Nebraska, Dunster's cellmate was 37-year-old Larry Witt.

Nebraska prison officials will not say why they chose to house the towering killer Dunster with Witt, who was in for attempted murder but was only 5-feet-6 and weighed 174 pounds.

Ron Limbeck, a prison spokesman, said both men had requested that they be placed in "protective custody," a status that generally indicates the inmate fears harm from other inmates. But Limbeck said he is barred by statute from saying why or from whom the men sought protection.

For the time being, he said, Dunster will remain in Nebraska.