Boot Camp

In an effort to bolster participation in $6.7 million worth of prisoner rehabilitation projects, the state plans to require inmates who qualify to enroll in its boot camp and addictions programs beginning Saturday.The decision is partly to help fill vacant beds in the state's military-style boot camp for inmates. Fewer than half of the 458 beds at the $5.5 million boot camp are occupied, and on average, 25 percent of those who enroll drop out, according to Division of Correction officials.

Councilman David G. Boschert last night introduced a resolution in the County Council opposing Gov. William Donald Schaefer's proposal to move the state prison boot camp to Tipton Army Airfield in western Anne Arundel.Mr. Boschert, a Crownsville Democrat, favors turning the airfield, which must be disposed of by September 1995 under the federal Base Closure and Realignment Act, into a privately run aviation facility. The county is conducting a feasibility study to determine whether it wants to request transfer of the airfield to its ownership, which it would then lease to a private concern to operate.

Since Jessup's Herman L. Toulson Correctional Boot Camp opened a year ago, dozens of street toughs facing hard time in prison have opted for the rigorous way of life behind its barbed-wire fence.For some, life there is even tougher than the crime-ridden streets where a youth can make a fast and easy living selling drugs and stealing. Some quit, and others are thrown out of the program. Both groups return to prison to serve sentences of up to five years.But most -- more than 350 in the past year -- complete the training.

Two weeks after finishing a rigorous, Marine Corps-style boot camp for convicted criminals, 20-year-old David Boynton was out on the streets of Baltimore still searching for a job.Yesterday, he was one of 16 young men who showed up at a meeting called by Delegate Elijah E. Cummings, D-Baltimore, to start a self-help group for the Baltimore-area graduates of the state-run camp, the Herman L. Toulson Correctional Camp in Jessup.The innovative correctional program begun in August 1990 is intended to promote self-discipline, self-esteem and a work ethic among the inmates.

JESSUP -- The hollering, the screaming, the insults of the drill instructors -- those are Alissia Miller's memories of her first days at Herman L. Toulson Boot Camp.By the end of her first 15-hour stint in the military-style program for first-time inmates serving time for non-violent offenses, she quit. Spending four years at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women for heroin possession, she reasoned, would be easier than enduring the drill instructors, the calisthenics, the marching and shouting and sweating for six months.

Gov. William Donald Schaefer, apparently intent on moving the state prison boot camp to the Tipton Army Airfield, has asked President Bill Clinton to expedite the transfer of the federal land to the state.In a two-page letter sent to Mr. Clinton yesterday, Mr. Schaefer wrote that "I know you are serious about making boot camps a priority in your crime package and I hope you will help me."Mr. Schaefer first discussed the Herman J. Toulson Correctional Boot Camp with Mr. Clinton in August, when the two men met privately during an event at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Moving the Herman L. Toulson Correctional Boot Camp from Jessup to Fort Meade could destroy Odenton's economic comeback, elected officials and residents said last night.A dozen elected officials from the county, state and Congress stood before 300 people at the Odenton Fire Hall to express displeasure with the state proposal.Residents said that a boot camp does not fit in with Fort Meade's plan to create an educational complex on the post and that it could ruin Odenton's rebounding image.

Authorities were searching yesterday for two of three inmates who escaped Wednesday from a minimum-security boot camp in Jessup. Police captured one of the escapees from Herman L. Toulson Boot Camp early yesterday in Baltimore, but had no reported sightings of the other two fugitives. At large yesterday were Aaron Wolfkill, 24, of the 8000 block of Armiger Drive in Pasadena and John Wilker, 19, of the 600 block of Arsan Ave. in Baltimore, authorities said. Wolfkill is serving a nine-year sentence for theft and was due to be released in 2006, state corrections officials said.

The county and the District of Columbia are close to reaching an agreement that would give county police greater authority to stop juvenile and young-adult offenders who walk away from the district's boot camp program near Fort Meade.The agreement would end the county's Board of Appeals challenge to the program, said assistant county attorney Sally Iliff. The county Friday received a postponement in the case, which was to have come before the board at a hearing June 20."The object of our negotiation is community safety," Iliff said.

One of the first graduates from the state correctional system's boot camp for non-violent, first-time offenders was slain last week in Prince George's County, authorities said yesterday.Nathaniel Austin, 23, who graduated from the program Jan. 17, was found with a gunshot wound in the head last Thursday night at the corner of Fire House Road and Hawthorne Street in Landover, said Cpl. Mark A. Polk, a spokesman for the Prince George's County police.Corporal Polk said Austin, who lived in the 3500 block of Hubbard Road in Landover, died Friday afternoon at Prince George's Hospital Center in Cheverly.