NEW YORK, NY March 31, 2003 — Bar and restaurant patrons have the option of stepping outside for a smoke, once the city's tough new smoking ban goes into effect Sunday. But inmates in the city's jails won't have this kind of outlet for their habit. And that has some worried that inmates would rather fight than quit. WNYC's Amy Eddings reports.

Alfonso Stevenson: Smoking plays a big part in jail. You have people that um, that that's all that they have. They have nothing, say, cigarettes and coffee.

Alfonso Stevenson, who smokes, was an inmate in a state prison. Many New Yorkers who end up doing hard time upstate pass through one of the city's 14 jails first.

Alfonso Stevenson: It's just like if you was to try to take a piece of crack from a crack addict. You're gonna have problems.

Starting Sunday, inmates will not be able to smoke at all. Cigarettes and matches will be confiscated. Ex-inmates say this will upset prison life in many ways.

Gerrard MacLaine: Cigarettes is hard currency in jail.

Gerrard MacLaine spent 40 days in Rikers, and got out in February.

Gerrard MacLaine: If you're gay, you can get sex with cigarettes, you know what I'm saying? If you need a shirt, a pair of underwears, an extra pair of pants, a haircut whatever you need, you can get with cigarettes in jail.

MacLaine says inmates were stocking up on cigarettes, in preparation for the ban. How they were doing that wasn't clear. The city's jail commissaries have been phasing out cigarette sales in the past month, allowing inmates to buy only a certain number of packs a week.

Officer Tillary (pounding on counter): Paz, let me see your ID card again.

Officer Latrice Tillary runs the commissary register at the Otis Bantum Correctional Center on Rikers Island. She says smokers are buying other items.

Officer Tillary: They are purchasing a lot of the food items more, like the tuna fish, the bread, are more in demand.


But ex-inmates say, if prisoners want to smoke, they'll find a way to do so .and that worries Norman Seabrook, president of the Correction Officers' Benevolent Association.

Seabrook: If an inmate is smoking, the correction officer, I'm hopeful, will instruct the inmate to extinguish the cigarette. But I surely do not want to be responding to hospitals in the middle of the night for injured corrections officers who got into physical altercations with inmates over a pack of Newport.

Seabrook quickly adds that the law is the law, and his members will do whatever it takes to enforce the no smoking ban. Corrections Commissioner Martin Horn says they'd better. As for the inmates, Horn dismisses their concerns.

Horn: I think you can't always believe inmates. I think often times, people who have been in custody overblow the drama of prison. //And so I really think that this is really going to be less of a problem than people would have us believe.

At least 17 state prison systems have banned smoking and cigarettes, and their officials say inmate altercations did not increase. The same was true for the large municipal prison system of Philadelphia, which went smoke-free in 1998. Retired commissioner Tom Costello, who oversaw the implementation of the ban, says the policy even reduced another problem: cell fires.

Costello: The last year that we allowed smoking throughout the facilities, at least most of them, we had 50 fires. And after the first year, we had one. So I think it's important from a health and safety point of view, not even a medical point of view, to eliminate smoking from corrections.

But Costello says going smoke-free isn't easy. He says anything can tip the delicate relationship between inmates and guards, let alone a dramatic change such as a cigarette ban. He was brought in to advise the city on how to go smoke-free, and says the city's adopted many of his recommendations. It's phasing out cigarette sales ..providing medical help for inmates in withdrawal .even offering free candy for the first month. But former inmate Gerrard MacLaine still thinks the worst will happen.

Gerard MacLaine: It's a political faux pas, it's going to cause havoc. And if it doesn't cause havoc, God was in the midst of it, that's all I can say.

For WNYC, I'm Amy Eddings.