Once known as Camp Pugsley, Grand Traverse County’s Pugsley Correctional Facility – operated by the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) – has long served as a minimum security prison for “Level 1” offenders. Yet a rising number of inmate-on-inmate assaults and an increase in reported gang activity in recent years have raised concerns about the prison’s security and screening conditions, according to an in-depth investigative feature by Patrick Sullivan in this week’s Northern Express.

Following a 2015 trial in which an inmate was convicted of sexually assaulting another inmate, Judge Philip Rodgers called upon the MDOC to investigate the state of security at Pugsley, urging the department to install video surveillance in housing areas and to ensure guards made regular rounds. “It became evident during that trial that this couldn’t have happened if the guards had been doing their rounds,” Rodgers said.

While many of Rodgers’ recommendations have yet to be addressed by the state, prison officials did install housing-unit surveillance cameras as a stopgap in 2015; a much larger surveillance upgrade is planned for later this year. Yet law enforcement officials continue to worry about how often video is being checked, if recordings are digitally saved and whether video shows guards regularly patrolling the prison.

Officials also express concern about the category of criminals being admitted to Pugsley. Rodgers believes Level 1 doesn’t mean what it used to and that Pugsley now houses the kind of dangerous, hardened criminals that in the past would not have been allowed. “I’ve seen some people with records that I didn’t think were consistent with being in a Level 1 facility,” Rodgers said.

Philip Settles, a Traverse City attorney who has defended Pugsley inmates, also said Pugsley has changed. “When it was a camp, you never really heard any complaints out of there,” Settles said. “To take a camp and make a prison out of it — they’re putting in real offenders there now, and it wasn’t built for that purpose.”

Read more about the conditions at Pugsley – including testimony from ex-cons about life inside and other recent criminal cases that have arisen from the prison – in this week’s Northern Express cover story, “Behind Bars: An Inside Look at Pugsley and Michigan Prisons.” The story can be found online here or in print in the Northern Express, available for free at more than 600 distribution spots across 13 counties in northern Michigan.