Armstrong County officials say they want to regain the public trust after a prison inmate escaped and killed a woman three weeks ago. They have a long way to go.

Last week the Armstrong County’s prison board suspended Warden David Hogue without pay and hired a private firm to investigate what responsibility the warden and prison staffers might bear in the escape of a Robert E. Crissman Jr.

There have been some complaints that the prison board should have handled the investigation itself, but that’s far from appropriate.

The board — made up of the Armstrong County commissioners, district attorney, sheriff and controller — should be another subject of the investigation, which needs to be shared in-full with the public once it’s complete.

Members don’t oversee day-to-day operations at the prison, but they are the ultimate decision-makers on policy and the stewards of a $2.7 million operation that last year spent less money per inmate per day than all but five of Pennsylvania’s 70 county-run jails and prisons.

Expense reports alone won’t tell the tale, but information already has been released that offers a disturbing assessment of policies and procedures at the facility.

In written statements to a private investigator, two inmates said that the prison’s “trustee” program routinely left prisoners unsupervised, and that the facility lacks drug and alcohol screening procedures and a detox unit.

If that’s true, the warden and board members have some questions to answer.

Warden Hogue will need to address why prisoners were allowed outside unsupervised. That’s a stunningly irresponsible practice.

Hogue, who was elevated to warden in 2006, has presided over enough unpredictable and violent encounters to know that even inmates under supervision can cause havoc. In 2008 an Armstrong County inmate wrestled a guard’s gun away while in a hospital, escaped and later shot himself to death with the weapon.

Prison board members will need to explain why they allowed the facility, which under-spent its 2014 budget by nearly $700,000, to skip drug and alcohol screenings for incoming inmates. Again: Irresponsible and counter-productive.

A 2000 report by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 70 percent of local jail inmates had used drugs or committed a drug offense before being locked up — and that was in 1998. With the region in the throes of a heroin epidemic, that number is unlikely to have shrunk.

Failing to screen inmates undercuts the prison’s in-house drug and alcohol treatment programs and puts administrators at a disadvantage when they’re determining who is fit for something like a “trustee” program.

It also deprives guards of vital information. They need to know who may be high and who’s desperate for a fix in order to keep themselves and prisoners safe.

One inmate, who said he watched Crissman run from his job retrieving food trays from a van outside the prison, said he believed Crissman was “withdrawing from drugs,” when he walked away from the prison on July 30. Later that day Crissman allegedly killed Tammy Long, 55, and stole her truck. He was captured the following morning.

Perhaps prison board members have already told Corporate Security and Investigations, the firm hired to conduct the investigation, to include them in the review.

So far, the board hasn’t said so explicitly. They need to submit to the investigation and promptly share its results with the public if they truly want to begin repairing the breach of the public’s trust.