Prison Abuse,Police Shootings,Curruption And Big Settlements

May 30, 2012 Suit Alleges Placer County Sheriff's Deputy Shot Man In Back As He Ran Away "A man who admits he stole seven lottery tickets claims Placer County Sheriff's Deputy Van Bogardus shot him three times in the back as he ran away, in Superior Court." Pautov v. Placer County Civil Complaint, 5/25/12, No. 12-cv-1424-KJM. Courthouse News, 5/29/12 ------------------------------------------- Sacramento County Cuts Funding On Inmate Rehabilitation Sacramento County officials voted unanimously Thursday to further reduce spending on rehabilitation for inmates sentenced under a new state law. The Community Corrections Partnership amended the Sheriff Department's budget for the fiscal year by reducing expenditures for inmate services from $500,000 to $122,000 and put the difference toward jail costs. The shift further tilts the county's budget for handling new offenders from the state toward incarceration instead of rehabilitation. Sacramento Bee, 5/4/12 ---------------------------------------- Sacramento County Pays $150,000 To Settle Jail Lawsuit Even though he was a regular, Marvin Orr was never able to get a bottom bunk when he checked into the Sacramento County Main Jail. Now, it has wound up costing the taxpayers $150,000 to make his federal lawsuit against the county go away. According to the legal action, Orr suffers from arthritis and attendant joint problems so severe that he gets disability benefits, uses a cane to ambulate and is on a variety of pain medicines and other medications. At the time of the incident, his degenerating hips needed to be replaced, and he was a diabetic taking medicine to hold off seizures. He checked into the jail on Dec. 8, 2008, and took a spill from his upper bunk that same day, causing head injuries and loss of consciousness for a time. A jail special-needs form dated the next day reiterated the importance of a lower bunk and tier, and noted that Orr had to have a cane to get around and a wheelchair for transportation to court. But the system is entrenched, so he remained on a top bunk, and less than a week later took the header that broke his leg and led to the lawsuit. This time he hit his head on the metal toilet. Rather than immediately taking Orr to the hospital for proper evaluation and treatment, he was instead propped up in a wheelchair, the suit alleges. He spent several days in the wheelchair in the so-called medical wing sitting in his own waste. His frequent pleas for urgent medical attention were ignored. After other inmates and at least one correctional officer aggressively lobbied for action, Orr was transported on Dec. 16 to the UC Davis Medical Center, where he had surgery on his broken leg and remained for 10 days. Planned hip replacement surgery had to be postponed. After Orr fell last month while climbing the stairs to his cell on an upper tier, his attorney, Stewart Katz, says he spoke to a ranking Sheriff's Department officer at the jail, to the county counsel's office, and the county's outside litigation counsel in an effort to assure Orr a bottom bunk and lower tier. After Katz spoke to a jail watch commander, Orr was moved to a lower tier, but nothing else changed, the attorney said. His client occupied a top bunk during his stay last month, even as the county was cutting a $150,000 check. --------------------------------------------------------- March 31, 2012 Is Real Change Coming To California's Use Of Long-Term Solitary Confinement? Today's New York Times has a piece about potential changes to California's policy of using long-term solitary confinement in prisons to isolate suspected gang members: Ernesto Lira is not a murderer. He has never participated in a prison riot. The crime that landed him behind bars was carrying three foil-wrapped grams of methamphetamine in his car. But on the basis of evidence that a federal court later deemed unreliable, prison officials labeled Mr. Lira a gang member and sent him to the super-maximum-security unit at Pelican Bay State Prison, the state’s toughest correctional institution. There, for eight years, he spent 23 or more hours a day in a windowless 7.6-by-11.6-foot cell, allowed out for showers and exercise. His view through the perforated steel door — there were 2,220 holes; he counted them — was a blank wall, his companions a family of spiders that he watched grow, “season by season, year by year.” Mr. Lira insisted that he was not a gang member, to no avail. He was eventually vindicated and is now out of prison, but he still struggles with the legacy of his solitary confinement. He suffers from depression and avoids crowds. At night, he puts blankets over the windows to block out any light. “He’s not the same person at all,” said his sister Luzie Harville. “Whatever happened, the experience he had in there changed him.” California has for decades used long-term segregation to combat gang violence in its prisons — a model also used by states like Arizona with significant gang problems. Thousands of inmates said to have gang ties have been sent to units like that at Pelican Bay, where they remain for years, or in some cases decades. But California corrections officials — prodded by two hunger strikes by inmates at Pelican Bay last year and the advice of national prison experts — this month proposed changes in the state’s gang policy that could decrease the number of inmates in isolation. Depending on how aggressively California moves forward — critics say that the changes do not go far enough and have enough loopholes that they may have little effect — it could join a small but increasing number of states that are rethinking the use of long-term solitary confinement, a practice that had become common in this country over the past three decades. ----------------------- Aug, 03, 2012 Women In Alleged Assault By Modesto Officer Files Claim An attorney has filed a claim against the city seeking $4 million in damages for the woman who alleges she was sexually assaulted by a Modesto police officer in January. The tort claim filed last week says the Jan. 5 incident caused the woman to suffer bodily injury and extreme emotional distress, and that the victim is entitled to damages for economic and noneconomic losses. This type of action typically is a forerunner to a lawsuit. Modesto City Attorney Susana Alcala Wood confirmed the claim was received at City Hall on Wednesday. "We are reviewing it and will proceed accordingly," she said, declining further comment. Fresno attorney Jacob Rivas, who specializes in civil rights cases, filed the claim against former officer Lee Freddie Gaines II, the Police Department and the city. He said he is seeking multimillion dollars in damages because of the severity of the claimed offense against his client. As you can imagine, when you have a sexual assault, it takes a heavy toll on the victim emotionally and physically," Rivas said. City officials have 45 days to decide whether to accept or reject the claim. If it's rejected, Rivas said he expects to bring a lawsuit on behalf of his client, most likely in federal court. Modesto Bee, 4/2/12; Claim for Damages. -------------------------------------------------- Sacramento County Pays $75,000 To Settle Jail Beating Lawsuit For full story with photos and video, see Denny Walsh's story in the Sacramento Bee, 8/12/12.

Kan. women's prison violates inmates' rights Inmates Were Being Sexually Abused

Feds: Kan. women's prison violates inmates' rights
If Kansas officials don't take remedial action in less than 50 days to address Eighth Amendment violations at the prison, the Justice Department issued notice of intent to file a federal lawsuit to compel reform

Inappropriate sexual behavior goes unreported due to flawed TCF staffing and supervision, a heightened fear of retaliation, a dysfunctional grievance system and weak investigative processes.

Barry Grissom, U.S. attorney for Kansas, said the federal prosecutor's office stood ready to work with state government officials to resolve glaring problems outlined by the department's investigators.

"The report has identified a very serious and troubling situation at the facility," Grissom said. "Action needs to be taken immediately."

Since 2001, TCF has served as the lone state prison for women in Kansas. On average, more than 500 women ranging from work-release to maximum-security inmates are housed there.

The Capital-Journal's sex-abuse stories in 2009 detailed problems at the prison with impropriety among inmates and corrections officers, including a plumbing instructor charged with rape after an inmate became pregnant.

The stories described how inmates were driven in state vehicles by a corrections officer to a Topeka cemetery or other remote areas and forced to engage in sexual conduct. In June, Brownback and top legislators approved payment of $30,000 in state funding to a former inmate involved in these assaults.

Other stories in The Capital-Journal documented use by the state corrections department of inmate labor in abatement of cancer-causing asbestos from TCF buildings. The state was reprimanded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
In 2010, the National Institute of Corrections and the Kansas Legislative Post Audit Committee issued reports stipulating dangers faced by TCF prisoners in regard to sexual abuse. The 2010 Legislature amended Kansas law to increase the penalty for unlawful sexual relations between prison staff members and inmates. TCF's warden at that time was removed from his job.

Roberts, hired by Brownback as secretary of the Department of Corrections in 2011, vowed to correct inadequacies at TCF by installing more cameras at the prison and improving training standards.
However, the Justice Department said findings of their investigation "mirror those found" two years ago by NIC and Kansas auditors.

Federal officials concluded TCF failed to employ routinely accepted correctional practices, including gender-responsive training of the staff. TCF had no early-warning system to identify problem employees or a method of tracking potential misconduct, the Justice Department said.
By Tim Carpenter
The Capitol-Journal

TOPEKA, Kan. — An investigation by the U.S. Justice Department made public Thursday contained findings of rampant, widespread sexual abuse at Topeka Correctional Facility among state employees and inmates in violation of the constitutional rights of women incarcerated at the facility.

The Justice Department's report to Gov. Sam Brownback declared Kansas Department of Corrections officials "still have not acted" to correct "repeatedly documented" misconduct and "grossly deficient systemic practices" at TCF despite a series of stories in The Topeka Capital-Journal in 2009 and two independent audits in 2010 pointing to employee-on-prisoner and prisoner-on-prisoner sexual abuse.

Daycare worker admits abusing 23 kids

Prosecutors: Daycare worker admits abusing 23 kids
Joshua Ritchie is charged with lewd conduct with a child and is being held on $2.5 million bond


Associated Press

NAMPA, Idaho — Prosecutors say a 23-year-old daycare worker in Idaho has confessed to sexually abusing 23 children.

Joshua Ritchie is charged with lewd conduct with a child and is being held on $2.5 million bond.

Ritchie was arrested Aug. 21 after a 5-year-old boy reportedly told his parents that he was sexually abused.

Ritchie worked at Cornerstone Childcare in Nampa about 20 miles outside of Boise and was also a kitchen staff substitute for the Nampa School District and at the Idaho Arts Charter School.

Prosecutors told Judge Brian Lee during a hearing Wednesday that Ritchie told investigators he's sexually abused 23 kids between the ages of 5 and 12.

Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Ritchie's attorney, public defender Bill Schwartz, did not immediately return a phone call from The Associated Press

http://www.correctionsone.com/corrections/articles/5956661-Prosecutors-Daycare-worker-admits-abusing-23-kids/

Robert Leone Brutally Beaten By Pennsylvania State Police

Robert Leone Brutally Beaten By Pennsylvania State Police: ...
A handful of Pennsylvania State officers are under fire this month as attorneys review video ...
07/05/2012 2:46 pm Updated: 07/05/2012 6:36 pm ... family believes authorities want to keep their
son imprisoned for the .... I mean they made it way too difficult for prisoners to complain about ...


www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/05/robert-leone_n_1651829.html
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Oregon's prison for women accused of failing to stop inmate abuse

Oregon's prison for women accused of failing to stop inmate abuse
Published: Tuesday, June 26, 2012, 3:13 PM


SALEM -- A lawsuit accuses Oregon's prison for women of failing to stop the sexual abuse of an inmate during a period when the state was paying $1.2 million to settle the sexual abuse claims of 17 current and former inmates.

The suit alleges two male employees targeted an inmate at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility from 2008 to 2012, the Salem Statesman Journal reported Tuesday. It claimed the abuse included orders to perform oral sex, kissing and groping her, and watching her shower.

One employee in the lawsuit, 38-year-old Shawn Jacob Riley, was arrested in April and charged with official misconduct and custodial sexual misconduct. The second employee is a corrections officer only named as Mr. Jacques.

The lawyer who filed the suit last week, Brian Lathen of Salem, said the first name isn't known.

Riley, a maintenance worker, was the second physical plant employee at the Wilsonville prison to be arrested this year and charged with sexual misconduct with an inmate.

Department of Corrections officials said steps have been taken to prevent such abuse. Each of the department's facilities now has a sexual assault response team, as well as a hotline number that inmates or their families can use to report abuse, said agency spokeswoman Anita Nelson.

Lathen, who represented many of the 17 earlier victims, said that has not been enough to stop the abuse.

"When I heard these new incidents were fairly recent, I was really surprised, because they were swearing up and down that they had made changes so it wouldn't happen again," he said.

-- The Associated Press

http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2012/06/oregons_prison_for_women_accus.html?fb_action_ids=381005958631748&fb_action_types=og.recommends&fb_source=aggregation&fb_aggregation_id=246965925417366

County Admits To Abuse While Kids Were In Lock-Up

Government admits to child abuse in Secure Centers
By Paul Sullivan, from insidetime issue August 2011

Whenever the Government tries to conceal a document it is most likely that it contains information that would be ‘embarrassing’ rather than a security threat; and never more so than the manual detailing the institutionalised abuse of children in privatised secure accommodation which has just been prised from the Government’s grasp.



It is no wonder it took 5 years to force the Government’s hand when it contains what Phillip Noyes, of the NSPCC, called ‘shocking revelations graphically illustrating the cruel and degrading violence inflicted on children in custody’. Behaviour which would see a parent prosecuted and their children removed.

The Government fought to the end to keep it secret; even after the Information Commissioner said that public interest was so grave the document should be released.

It is hard to imagine a situation, in a juvenile centre, so serious that it would warrant the violence sanctioned by the report. The Ministry of Justice say, ‘staff need to be able to intervene effectively, to protect the safety of all involved.”

What many people who have witnessed the prison system at first hand could point out is that most ‘interventions’ are not about ensuring safety but more about graphically demonstrating who has the power and who is in control. ‘Control’ is an overused word in the prison industry. There are very few situations where immediate or violent action is required because, by the very nature of the establishments, every door has a lock.

The population of the juvenile estate are legally children and one would expect them to behave like children with the outbursts and tantrums that are part of being a child. We have long been told that being truculent and rebellious is a part of adolescence that is important to the healthy maturity to adulthood.

In most cases, de-escalation of an incident can be achieved either by withdrawing or by counselling. This may be a good use of female staff, who are not seen as a threat and can use gentle reason to achieve the desired outcome.

If a prisoner, juvenile or adult, is smashing their cell; most of the damage is to their own property - there is very little damage that can Government admits to child abuse in Secure Centres actually be done to prison property other than a smashed TV. Rather than a testosterone drunk riot squad, with shields, smashing their way in, it would be more sensible to quietly observe until the person has calmed down; and then someone who the person trusts goes in for a chat.

That word ‘trust’ is important. How could anyone trust a group of people who abuse them. Trust is the thing that feeds compliance and rehabilitation, and trust is one of the most powerful tools in de-escalation but is also the easiest thing to lose. Violence to achieve power and compliance actually achieves nothing but hatred and distrust. You only have to look at wartime resistance movements to see that forcefully demonstrating power achieves nothing except, sometimes, a more determined opposition.

There are very rare occasions when intervention might be critical; in the case of immediate self-harm or a violent attack on another person but in a juvenile centre where the staff bulk, strength and training outweighs the residents manyfold there should never be a need to resort to the violence described in the report. Such violence demonstrates failure and anarchy.

Because these are ‘closed’ establishments nobody sees what goes on; they are surrounded with secrecy. After 14 year-old Adam Rickward hanged himself at Hassockfield Secure Training Centre it was revealed that, shortly before his death, he had been restrained using ‘unlawful force’: yet nobody has been held to account.

Assuming these staff are adults, and possibly fathers, it is hard to imagine how they justify to themselves the violence they inflict on the children.

Custody staff are trained not to see prisoners as individual people and this can cause the weaker ones, who may have been bullied as a child, to use force and ‘power’ to counter their own feelings of weakness and guilt. Once again, a better system of staff recruitment, better training, and absolute supervision by people who are held to account is long overdue.

It’s a sad day when the state has to admit to institutionalised violence against the vulnerable people in their custody; sadder still, possibly, because this violence is contracted out to private companies to make profit for their shareholders. How do those shareholders now view their holdings in these companies?

Paul Sullivan was formerly resident at HMP Wakefield.

Carter's death followed a violent "cell extraction" in which corrections officers used pepper spray and stun guns,

Death in Pennsylvania Solitary Confinement Cell Raises Questions
by Hannah Taleb

On April 26 of this year, John Carter died in his solitary confinement cell at State Correctional Institution (SCI) Rockview in central Pennsylvania. According to accounts by other men imprisoned on his cell block, Carter's death followed a violent "cell extraction" in which corrections officers used pepper spray and stun guns, though the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections makes no mention of such actions in its official statements, and state police have yet to interview inmate eyewitnesses.

In 1995, John Carter took part in a robbery that resulted in the murder of one man in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was sixteen at the time, and was convicted of second-degree felony murder. In Pennsylvania, which has more juvenile lifers than any other state, his conviction meant a mandatory life sentence without the possibility of parole. (Under the Supreme Court's June 25 ruling, in Miller v. Alabama, that mandatory life sentences without parole for juveniles were unconstitutional, Carter would likely have had his sentence reconsidered, had he lived to see the day.)

At some point during Carter's sixteen-year imprisonment, he was placed on what's called the Restricted Release List, a form of indefinite solitary confinement that can only be ended with approval by the Secretary of the Department of Corrections. Jeffrey Rackovan, the Public Information Officer at SCI Rockview, admitted that this designation meant John could have "spent the rest of his life in solitary confinement." Before his death Carter had spent the last ten to eleven years in solitary. According to prisoner reports he had been known to break the rules of his unit in order to share food, hygiene items, and writing utensils with newcomers to his block, and adamantly used both the grievance process and legal system to challenge acts of abuse and retaliation by prison staff.

On April 27, the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections issued a press release announcing that John Carter had been found “unresponsive in his cell” the day before. Reports from the unit soon began to reach Carter’s family and the Human Rights Coalition, a Pennsylvania-based prisoner advocacy and abolitionist organization. The reports explained that Carter had been subject to a cell extraction on the day of his death after a dispute with guards who refused to issue him a food tray instead of nutraloaf, a dense, unpalatable substance issued as punishment in place of meals. The cell extraction was the second Carter had been subjected to that week, during which guards entered his cell in full riot gear, armed with OC spray and electroshock weapons.

The statements from prisoners explained a brutal scene, with excessive amounts of pepper spray being pumped into Carter’s cell so as to flood the whole tier with the choking gas. According to prisoner accounts, guards then broke down the door to the cell and proceeded to shock Carter seven times with electroshock shields and guns. Many of the reports end with Carter being dragged from his cell, paramedics arriving 10 to 15 minutes later, and an unresponsive Carter being removed from the block. He was pronounced dead at Mount Nittany Medical Center a short time later.

Andre Jacobs, a jailhouse lawyer housed on the same block as John wrote a five page declaration detailing the events of that day. Many others sent in the story as they heard and saw it, all of them asserting that John Carter was “murdered . . . here in this RHU torture zone, where guards come on the tier calling people racial slurs.”

The press statement released by the Department of Corrections made no mention of a cell extraction, or any confrontation at all occurring on the day of Carter’s death. Reports from inside the prison claimed that superintendent Marirosa Lamas came to the Restricted Housing Unit tier the night of John Carter’s death alleging that he had committed suicide, an assertion never made to the public. But officials first claimed that no cell extraction took place the day of Carter’s death, then that there was an extraction but no video footage, and finally that an extraction took place but the footage may have been “damaged.”

Because Carter died from what was considered unnatural causes, the Pennsylvania State Police were brought in to investigate his death. By May 10th the police had released a statement that notes John Carter was found “unresponsive in his cell,” but goes on to describe that he had “barricaded himself in his cell and refused numerous orders” which precipitated “the DOCs response to the inmate’s cell.” The statement goes on the say that autopsy reports were “inconclusive” and evidence had indicated “no foul play” in Carter’s death. Once again no mention was made of the use of pepper spray or electroshock weapons.

Calls to the state police were met with the assurance that a “thorough” investigation would be carried out. However, according to statements from prisoners held on John Carter’s block, not one of them was ever questioned as to the events of April 26.

Jeffrey Rackovan told Solitary Watch that the prison had “done its part” in the investigation, handing over video footage and allowing investigators to enter the prison. Rackovan noted that investigators surely spoke to those they “needed to”--the “officers involved in the extraction.” He also assured that John Carter’s cell had been inspected, though numerous prisoner reports claim that it was thoroughly cleaned shortly after Carter was removed.

According to advocates at the Human Rights Coalition, the investigation carried out by the state police fits within a general pattern of refusal by state authorities to investigate and prosecute the alleged crimes of prison guards and officials against the prisoners in their care. No statements have been made by the State Police since May 10. Toxicology reports from the coroner's office are still forthcoming more than two months after John Carter’s death.

John Carter’s family is not satisfied with the investigation thus far and are resolved to find justice in his death. They arranged for a second autopsy, and filed a criminal complaint with the Center County District Attorney, Stacy Parks-Miller, in June. As a response the DA’s office is now overseeing the investigation carried out by the State Police, but has released no further information on its progress. When contacted, Ms. Parks-Miller's office would not respond with any comment on the investigation.

John Carter’s sister, Michelle Williams, explained in a May 7 interview with me for Rustbelt Radio that she wants justice not only for her family but for all of the other families with loved ones inside of Pennsylvania prisons. “Just because they are in jail," she said, "doesn’t mean you can treat them as anything else but human.” Listen to the full radio report here.

http://solitarywatch.com/2012/07/20/death-in-pennsylvania-solitary-confinement-cell-raises-questions/
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We need to support this family and mention this incident in all of our actions/presentations/etc.

On April 26 of this year, John Carter died in his solitary confinement cell at State Correctional Institution (SCI) Rockview in central Pennsylvania. According to accounts by other men imprisoned on his cell block, Carter's death followed a violent "cell extraction" in which corrections officers used pepper spray and stun guns, though the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections makes no mention of such actions in its official statements, and state police have yet to interview inmate eyewitnesses.

This link and following text came out at the time of John Carter's murder and following is a current article on the follow/cover-up that needs to be challenged.

http://www.prisonradio.org/media/audio/breaking-prison-news-reports-hrc/hrc-breaking-news-murder-john-carter-sci-rockview-pa

In the weeks since the death of John Carter, the Human Rights Coalition and Carter’s family have both received numerous letters attesting to John’s good character and strong spirit. John had been held in solitary confinement in several different prisons for the last ten-to-eleven years, but continued to help others. A prisoner at SCI Rockview wrote of Carter: “He was a person of integrity. He did not believe in abuse of others, especially the abuse of prisoners from prison guards. If he could help someone in understanding the law, he was there. And he had a lot of patience with others, especially the mentally impaired.” Another prisoner from SCI Camp Hill stated: “Its no question in my mind. He died fighting against oppression. His name and memory will not be forgotten.” Carter’s death has been a shock to many prisoners, and they want justice for him; “Why isn’t there a big investigation, an outrage about John Carter’s death like there is about Trayvon Martion? John Carter was black, he was someone’s son and he died senselessly. Let not his death go in vain,” said an SCI Frackville prisoner. Many of the letters received simply shared memories of Carter, who was sentenced to life in prison at the age of sixteen and spent half of his life there, but continued to be a strong and loving person. Another prisoner said there were three words for John; “Loyalty, intelligence, fearless.” A man incarcerated at SCI Huntingdon wrote to his departed comrade: “You’ve made that transition to the other side, wherever that may be. But what I say shall come to pass, for it is written J-Rock, that children of the night shall forever find each other in the dark.” He will be missed.
HRC Breaking News Murder of John Carter at SCI Rockview PA | Prison Radiowww.prisonradio.org

Tarrant County jailer brutalized inmates

Tarrant County jailer brutalized inmates, lawsuits say
Posted Friday, Jul. 06, 2012

BY DEANNA BOYD
dboyd@star-telegram.com

FORT WORTH -- Six Tarrant County Jail inmates have filed federal lawsuits saying they were brutalized by a jailer who is now the focus of a criminal investigation by the Sheriff's Department.

Deputy Joseph Thornhill, who had been with the department since January 2007, resigned abruptly April 26, not long after sheriff's officials say they began investigating the allegations.

The lawsuits, all filed last month, say Thornhill forced inmates housed in 59C, a pod reserved for mental-health and mental-retardation clients, to degrade themselves and other inmates between February and April.

"For many reasons, some inmates in 59C can not fend for themselves," the inmates say in several of the suits. "Officer Thornhill knew these weaknesses and he would prey on their impairments."

The lawsuit says Sheriff Dee Anderson, who is also named as a defendant, allowed the "wanton infliction of pain" on the inmates.

Anderson confirmed Friday that a criminal investigation is under way.

"Whenever the allegations surfaced, we started internal and criminal investigations because obviously some of the allegations were criminal in nature," he said.

He said, however, that he could not discuss the case because of the pending suits.

Thornhill, 29, could not be reached for comment Friday. Federal court documents do not indicate whether he has retained an attorney.

The suits were filed by Christopher William Thomas, David Linn Robertson, Matthew Cotton, Stephen Walker, Randall Harr and Bradley Andrews. All remained in the jail Friday on charges ranging from parole violations to drugs and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

The suits say that over three months, Thornhill violated the inmates' civil rights by inflicting "severe emotional, mental and physical pain."

Some of the suits include a letter dated April 26 and signed by 17 inmates detailing abuse that the suits say Thornhill inflicted.

The letter says Thornhill, through intimidation, made inmates do "sexual type acts" to one another, sexually touched inmates and kicked inmates in sexual areas. Some inmates reported being locked in broom closets and ordered to defecate on the floor and in other inmates' sinks. Other inmates say Thornhill struck them with rubber bands, soap packages and glass cleaner and placed items including spray bottles, broom handles and soda bottles into their buttocks.

Thornhill would threaten corporal punishment or discipline if inmates did not comply with his demands or tried to tell other officers about his actions, the letter says. The inmates say the jailer bribed other inmates to keep quiet by giving them extra food and other items.

The inmates say they have done all they can through the jail's inmate grievance system, "and the jail has done nothing to secure our fear of retaliation from Officer Thornhill, Sheriff Dee Anderson or any other officer."

The inmates, who sued on their own behalf, ask that the federal court facilitate sanctions and provide monetary relief for their suffering and injury.

Deanna Boyd, 817-390-7655

Twitter: @deannaboyd

Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/07/06/4083820/tarrant-county-jailer-brutalized.html#storylink=cpy

Voices from Solitary: Exiled In Purgatory

Voices from Solitary: Exiled In Purgatory
by Voices from Solitary

The following is a chronicling of inmate M.O.'s entry into a now 16 years in Oregon's various isolation units. Convicted of murder, he later assaulted a codefendant he claims wrongly pinned the blame on him and testified against M.O. in exchange for a reduced sentence. M.O. spent nine years in Oregon's isolation units before being transferred to Oklahoma and New Mexico, where he has remained in solitary confinement. An earlier piece on his recent struggles with PTSD was published by Solitary Watch. --Sal Rodriguez

Exiled in Purgatory: Six in One Hand a Half Dozen in the Other

As I sat in my Black Box cell it wasn’t hard taking in the surroundings. There is a solid cement bunk. A ceramic sink that is encased in cement. A ceramic toilet encased in cement. The light is a bulb set into the wall with an opaque cover, which is in turn covered by a grill. It gives the cell a dark dim look. If you had a book you would hardly be able to read it. But you don’t. In the Black Box it is you and the voice in your head.

The first door is bars. Just a regular old cell front; but it extends another three feet to a second door. Solid, thick and sound proof. The guards shut it 24-7. They are supposed to do checks every 15 minutes but they don’t. You have no way to signal for help. No emergency call buttons. You’ll only see a guard when they open that door to give you a food tray. That’s when they’ll know if some ones dead, cut up or has some emergency.

I pace around my cell thinking about the assault on Dave. I don’t feel satisfied. A deep hate grows in me. A deep resentment. That feeling would continue to grow over the years, but the mustard seed of the incident with D is a root of it all. The Black Box becomes a comforting friend where I can talk to myself, reassure myself I did the right thing. Hate becomes an easy emotion. It can give you an energy, an outlet, a comfort. It is a blanket that wraps you warm in isolation.

By age 14 I was diagnosed with ADHD and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I was put in an inpatient Drug and Alcohol facility. By the time I had entered the military at 17 I had been in in-patient treatment centers twice and out-patient several times. One psychiatrist diagnosed me with “organic brain damage” before my murder trial. A term to this day I am not sure what it is. Nobody knew, or possibly didn’t care, that a person with a mental health background like mine could get worse by isolation. That is, in fact, what eventually did happen (but that’s my story to come).

After pacing back and forth in my cell (three steps forward, turn around, three steps back, turn around, repeat) I grew tired and thought of my girlfriend (who had just had my daughter only a few months before). I lay on my bunk and think about the last time I held her, made love to her. As the years went on even those memories fade and isolation holds only memories of other days of isolation.

I lay down to sleep. No sooner am I asleep than staff wake me up and tell me to “cuff up” I’m going out on an “emergency transport.” They hustle me to the intake area to put shackles on for the transport. As they are putting the shackles on the officer tells me if I “fucking move wrong” he’ll smash my head. He then brags to the other officers how the warden has got him off three prior excessive force allegations and is sure he’ll be beat the next one too.

As they walk me out to the van I am told I’m being transported to the Oregon State Penitentiary (OSP) with other “assholes.” OSCI wasn’t used to weapon assaults. Just gladiator fights. OSP didn’t care. The guards talk back and fourth. The excessive force bragger tells the other that next week he’s going to OSP’s hobby shop to have one of “the pieces of shit” make him a belt. The “pieces of shit” are the prisoners working in the hobby shop making leather goods. I know quickly guards see me as less than shit. My hate grows. I hate this guy’s voice, I hate the way he walks. I just hate. I picture smashing him in the face and smile to myself. Maybe even cut him up like D. Hate makes me smile.

The transport from OSCI to OSP is short. Just a few minutes across town. It’s late, after midnight. When we arrive at OP the guards there tell me they don’t have a cell open in Disciplinary Segregation right now so they had to put me in Special Management Unit (SMU) over the weekend. SMU is the isolation unit for the mentally ill. It is a fresh new Hell.

My experiences in SMU would fuel my hate, fertilize my contempt, and cut the last thread of sympathy I had.

Exiled in Purgatory: The Psych Ward

Within 24 hours of assaulting my codefendant I had gone from the Black Box Disciplinary isolation cell at OSCI to an after midnight transfer to the Psych Ward, better known as the Special Management Unit (SMU) at the Oregon State Penitentiary. The SMU was called Smoo (a pronunciation of the letters). If you were crazy you went to Smoo. I wasn’t in the unit for mental health needs but because OSP Disciplinary Segregation Unit (DSU) was full and didn’t have a cell available. As “overflow” I went to SMU.

You learn in prison that there is always a shortage of beds. In fact, it is one of the primary excuses prison administrators put forward in building new isolation units and ‘supermax’ facilities – the existing ones are full and they need more space for the new “hard core” felons who just can’t learn to behave…or so they argue. Isolation and the overall poor prison conditions are, in my opinion, the largest contributing factor in negative prisoner behavior.

In Smoo, it is a new kind of Hell. The cell is approximately 6½ feet long and 4½ feet wide. There is no place to walk or pace. You either stand at the door or window at the back of the cell or lay on your bunk. The toilet and sink are so close to the bed there are only inches from the bed. It is encased in cement. The prison loves encasing everything in cement. It is not sealed with a cement sealant. Lacking a sealant the cement has soaked up years of urine, feces, spit, puke, and whatever else finds its way to the cement thrown. The prison, every few years, paints the cement. It’s never cleaned, just painted over. Every time you squat over it you fear if your ass touches down it may not come back off.

I wasn’t given any blankets or pillow. Just two sheets and a mattress. The room has an old ancient heater. The window is covered with a thick metal screen which is open. Despite being mid-December and the window being open, I’m warm. For that I am grateful. I have no books or magazines, no other property, no hygiene (no toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, shampoo, etc.) It’s me, my two sheets, and time. I’m doing life, all I have is time.

I go back to my bunk and lift the mattress to put a sheet on it and it peels away like Velcro. The metal bunk is a “full restraint” bed used to restrain psychotic and suicidal prisoners. Usually they are left there for hours or days to urinate and defecate themselves. The bunk reeks of urine and looks as if the “yellow blob” is growing across it. I ask for cleaning supplies but in response the officer puts a piece of cardboard over my window – something I’d learn is routine when they don’t want to be bothered with things like sanitation or prisoner complaints. The cardboard would come off and on over the days following.

I lost track of time. I don’t know how long I was in that cell. No other prisoners were near me, empty cells on both sides. Across the hall was a female. I could hear her voice. Back then they brought the psychotic females to the Special Management Unit. She was yelling and screaming a lot talking incoherently at times. Sometimes a guard would talk to her, sometimes they just put cardboard over the window.

On one day she begins banging her head on the door. The cops rush her cell, strip her of all her clothing and four point strap her to the bed. One guard is on duty to watch her. Usually he sits in the office out of sight. This time he goes to her cell after all the other guards leave. I hear her talking in sexual tones, not to the guard but to “God,” she’s not praying, but telling God they want to fuck her in the ass. That they’re sinful. I look out my window and the guard has his hand in his pocket clearly masturbating.

I yell, “You sick fuck!” It scares him. He marches over to my door and without a word puts up the cardboard over my window. I go back to bed.

I’ve been isolated for days or weeks. You loose track of time in isolation. Some day’s fly by, others drag with no end. With no books I live in my mind. You loose track of time but in your mind reality blurs. I think of suicide. I have no voice. No one to hear my pain…

Exiled in Purgatory: The Walls

The walls. That is what they call the Oregon State Penitentiary (OSP). In less than 30 days I had gone from the assault on my codefendant, to the OSCI hole’s “Black Box,” to the OSP’s psych ward, to OSP’s hole. It was the beginning of a journey in isolation that would last for the next two decades.

I was in OSP’s old Disciplinary Segregation Unit (DSU). The walls, back then, was where hard cases were. This was my first time incarcerated. And I’d get “schooled” by the older cons, not the gladiators in the “kid camps.”

In the OSP hole there was both single and double cells. I was initially put in a double cell and given a cellie. During that time I met C, a guy only a few years older than me who had been down several ears and in the Intensive Management Unit (IMU), Oregon’s “supermax”. He would prepare me by explaining what to expect and how to cope with isolation.

Shortly after I got there C’s hole time was up and he went to general population. My next cellie wouldn’t prove to be so friendly and I grew tired of him within days which grew into open hostility. It was with him I learned how much fear a person can have if they believe they’ll be stabbed. I had a newly minted reputation of being a lifer with the willingness to hurt someone. That can have a lot of power in prison.

I didn’t know it then, but that reputation was a single brink in developing an “institutional personality”. In prison people often adopt and develop personalties, beliefs, and morals, such as the so-called “convict code,” that they never had prior to prison as a way to survive the hostile prison environment. More often than not prison administrators promote these attitudes. Being young and never having been incarcerated I was especially vulnerable to adopting institutional personality characteristics.

My new cellie constantly complained about paroling in three months and how his girlfriend is probably cheating on him. All the usual “short-timer” gripes. Serving a life sentence for a crime my codefendant committed, I wasn’t trying to hear some guy whine about a lousy three months in prison. I told him he had to get out of the cell or I’d end up stabbing him and he wouldn’t have to worry about parole.

In situations like this a prisoner would usually throw their tray on the tier and the cops would usually make them move to a single cell isolation cell for a disciplinary violation. Obviously throwing a tray is something the cops don’t like. The following morning after breakfast he takes his tray, throws it on the tier, and then crawls back into bed. When the cop comes by he tells me to pick the tray up and kicks it to my door. I tell him it’s not my tray so I’m not going to pick it up. He picks it up and moves on.

I berate my cellie as a coward, tell him he better stay up and claim the tray and get out. He assures me he will. Lunch comes, he throws the tray, and the cop, again, orders me to pick it up. When I refuse and tell him it’s not my tray he leaves. When he returns there are four guards with him. He asks what the problem is. My cellie tells him that it’s his tray. They order us both to back up and be handcuffed. We complied. At that point I’m thinking my cellie will be taken out. It never works out that way.

Rather than move my cellie they move me. The officer points at me and tells them to take me to the “Black Box”. One more time I find myself in the isolation of isolation. This time, however, it would last much longer than a few hours, and I’d be introduced to a New Hell called “Nutra Loaf.” But there are more vivid Hells ahead…

http://solitarywatch.com/author/voicesfromsolitary/

Lawsuit Expose Barbaric Conditions at For-Profit Youth Prison in Mississippi

http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframe.php?linkid=149920
05/03/2012
Investigation, Lawsuit Expose Barbaric Conditions at For-Profit Youth Prison in Mississippi
By Booth Gunter
Michael McIntosh couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He had come to visit his son at the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility near Jackson, Miss., only to be turned away. His son wasn’t there.
“I said, ‘Well, where is he?’ They said, ‘We don’t know.’”
Thus began a search for his son Mike that lasted more than six weeks. Desperate for answers, he repeatedly called the prison and the Mississippi Department of Corrections. “I was running out of options. Nobody would give me an answer, from the warden all the way to the commissioner.”
Finally, a nurse at the prison gave him a clue: Check the area hospitals.
After more frantic phone calls, he found Mike in a hospital in Greenwood, hours away. He was shocked at what he saw. His son could barely move, let alone sit up. He couldn’t see or talk or use his right arm. “He’s got this baseball-size knot on the back of his head,” McIntosh said. “He’s got cuts all over him, bruises. He has stab wounds. The teeth in the front are broken. He’s scared out of his mind. He doesn’t have a clue where he’s at – or why.”
Though he had found his son, McIntosh still had no answers. He said prison officials wouldn’t allow him to see his son again for months. No one would tell him what happened – that is, until he received a phone call from a Southern Poverty Law Center advocate who was investigating Walnut Grove.
“When I was at my wit’s end and couldn’t get anywhere, an advocate from the SPLC actually found me,” McIntosh said. “She said, ‘Your son was in a riot.’ They [SPLC] just took bits [of information] and started putting this puzzle together. Without them, we wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.”
Mike suffered brain damage. A U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) report about the conditions at Walnut Grove later noted that after weeks of hospitalization, his “previously normal cognition resembled that of a two year old.”
In the dry language typical of such reports, the DOJ investigators wrote that on February 27, 2010, “a youth melee resulted in the stabbing of several youth, as well as other types of physical injuries necessitating treatment at an outside hospital. One of the injured youth … suffered irreparable brain damage and sustained a fractured nose, cuts and stab wounds.”
And no one bothered to tell his father.
Others were hurt, too – stabbed, punched, kicked, stomped and thrown from an upper floor to a lower one. Mike and his cellmate, who was stabbed in the head, were both nearly killed. A dozen others were hospitalized.
There was another shocking detail: A female guard had “endorsed the disturbance by allowing inmates into an authorized cell to fight,” according to the March 20, 2012, DOJ report. She was fired but not charged with any crime.
The guard’s involvement wasn’t uncommon. Investigations showed that guards frequently instigated or incited youth-on-youth violence. Often, they were the perpetrators.
What happened to Mike was symptomatic of a youth prison – one run for profit by a private corporation – that was completely out of control.
The initial investigation, which began in 2006, turned into a federal civil rights lawsuit, with the ACLU and Jackson-based civil rights attorney Robert McDuff as co-counsels. It was settled in March with a sweeping consent decree designed to end the barbaric, unconstitutional conditions and the rampant violations of state and federal law that were documented separately by both the SPLC and the DOJ.
The Walnut Grove story is a cautionary tale that raises alarming questions about the treatment of youthful, mostly nonviolent offenders in Mississippi and elsewhere. And it calls into question the wisdom of turning over the care of these youths, some as young as 13, to private companies that exist solely to turn a profit – companies that have no incentive to rehabilitate youths, that thrive on recidivism, and that increase their profits by cutting corners and reaping ever more troubled souls into their walls.


‘Deliberate Indifference’
On March 26, U.S. District Judge Carlton W. Reeves issued a blistering court order approving the settlement of the lawsuit. He wrote that the GEO Group Inc., the company that runs Walnut Grove, “has allowed a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts and conditions to germinate.”
Violence by youths and guards wasn’t the only problem. Neither were the gang affiliations of some guards. Or the grossly inadequate medical and mental health care. Or the proliferation of drugs and other contraband. Or the lack of educational and rehabilitative programs. Or the wild overuse of pepper spray on passive youths.
Indeed, the DOJ found that sexual abuse – including brutal youth-on-youth rapes and “brazen” sexual misconduct by prison staffers who coerced youths – was “among the worst that we have seen in any facility anywhere in the nation.”
What’s more, both the prison staff and the Mississippi Department of Corrections, which pays GEO $14 million each year to run the prison, showed “deliberate indifference” to these problems.
In other words, nobody cared. Nobody cared that the bottom line – private profit, secured in part by dangerously understaffing the prison – was more important than providing humane conditions and services that would protect youths from violence and help get them back on the right track.
They should care – if not out of basic human decency then because these young men will eventually get out of prison. They will re-enter their communities, many lacking an education, many lacking treatment for their disabilities, many severely scarred both physically and psychologically by their experience.
GEO Riding Privatization Wave
Mike was three weeks shy of his 20th birthday when he arrived at Walnut Grove to serve a four-year sentence in October 2009. After growing up with his mother in California, he had been living for the previous two years with his father in Hazlehurst, a small town about a half hour’s drive south of Jackson. He was an active, athletic kid who liked to fish and was good with his hands. He had begun studying at a local community college, hoping to become a welder.
But now, after running afoul of the law, he was just another number in prison garb, living in a facility that housed young men ages 13 to 22 who had been tried and convicted as adults.
In August 2010, six months after Mike was injured, GEO purchased the company, Cornell Companies Inc., that had been operating the prison since 2003. GEO, which was born as Wackenhut Corrections Corp. in 1984, is the second-largest prison company in America, with 66,000 beds at 65 prison facilities across the U.S. and another seven overseas. With a total of 4,000 beds in three prisons, including Walnut Grove, the company houses about a quarter of Mississippi’s prison population.
Built with $41 million in taxpayer subsidies, Walnut Grove has generated about $100 million in revenue for the companies operating it since the doors opened in 2001.
With the acquisition of Walnut Grove and its other prison projects, GEO is riding a wave of privatization efforts.
Across the U.S., the number of inmates in such private facilities grew by 80 percent between 1999 and 2010 – from 71,208 to 128,195 – as states and the federal government bought the industry’s pitch that it could save taxpayer money by operating prisons at a lower cost, according a January 2012 report by The Sentencing Project. Thirty states now have partially privatized their prison systems.
For GEO, more privatization means greater profits. In 2011, the company produced $1.6 billion in revenue, a 27 percent increase over the previous year, and net income of $98.5 million, the best performance in the company’s history, according to its 2011 annual report.
The company’s business model depends, at least in part, on tough sentencing.
With 1.6 million people living behind bars, the U.S. already has the world’s largest population of prisoners – and the highest per-capita rate of incarceration. But the prison industry wants more. GEO’s annual report is clear about that – noting that “positive trends” in the industry may be “adversely impacted” by early release of inmates and changes to parole laws and sentencing guidelines.
Walnut Grove Population Triples
In the decade before Mike came to Walnut Grove, the prison’s population had soared – more than tripling from 2001 to 2010, from 350 to 1,200 inmates.
That was part of the problem. When the facility opened in 2001 with 500 beds, it was authorized to only accept “juvenile offenders” between the ages of 13 and 19.
There are important public policy reasons to keep children and teens separate from adult prisoners. The juvenile system was created to protect children from the harsh, punitive environment of adult prisons and to rehabilitate youths, recognizing that they are still developing and can greatly benefit from educational and other services.
Research has shown that youths who stay in the juvenile system are less likely to be arrested again than those who are transferred into the adult population. Further, youths are far more likely to be sexually assaulted in adult prisons and are more likely to commit suicide.
Even so, the Mississippi legislature, under lobbying pressure, periodically raised the maximum age of those who could be housed at Walnut Grove – now at 22 – while also steadily increasing its capacity.
The staffing levels, however didn’t keep pace with the rapidly growing population. In fact, a prison auditor reported to the legislature in 2005 – and again in 2010 – that staffing had actually decreased. When it acquired the facility in 2010, GEO did nothing to correct the imbalance. In fact, the SPLC lawsuit says GEO “has a policy … of understaffing the prison.”

Brutality the Norm
It was a brutal place. Mike told his father that he was locked in his cell for 23 hours a day. He spoke of pervasive violence. “It didn’t seem like there was much being done to curtail anything going on,” McIntosh said. Guards frequently doused young men with pepper spray as a first response, rather than a last resort. Youths were routinely sprayed simply for refusing verbal commands, such as failing to remove their arms from food tray slots while locked in their cells – something they sometimes did to get attention for medical emergencies. Most commonly used was the “Fox Fogger,” a chemical weapon that discharges as much spray as possible per burst. Some inmates described instances in which entire cans of pepper spray were emptied into a cell, after which guards locked the door with the inmate inside. Typically, youths were not given the opportunity to wash away the pepper spray or decontaminate their clothes or bedding.
When DOJ investigators asked about the use of pepper spray, some guards were less than forthcoming. One lieutenant told them he couldn’t recall the last time he had used it. A video taken by one of the prison’s many cameras told a different story, showing him wielding it a mere two weeks earlier.
Pepper spray wasn’t the only hazard.
Fights were common, occurring almost daily. Cell doors could be easily rigged to remain unlocked, allowing youths to leave their cells and enter others at will. Guards were often complicit in attacks. Weapons were readily available. Emergency call buttons in the cells didn’t work.
In addition, guards “frequently and brutally react to low-level aggression” – such as using profanities or reacting too slowly to an order – by “slamming youth head first into the ground, slapping, beating, and kicking youth,” the DOJ found. In one such incident, a youth said he was ordered out of his cell by a supervising guard, who then jumped him and kicked him in the back four times. Another guard stomped on his leg. Investigators later observed a bruise on his leg in the shape of a boot print.
“We also found that youth were assaulted for the way they allegedly looked at officers or for absolutely no given reason at all,” the DOJ report says.
Some guards apparently saw their charges as sexual prey. Sexual misconduct between staffers and youth occurred on a monthly basis – “at a minimum,” the DOJ found. But GEO did little or nothing to prevent it, other than firing those caught in the act – like the female guard who yelled “close the door” at another guard who saw her engaged in intercourse with a youth in a medical department restroom.
Between July 2009 and May 2010, 13 staffers were fired and two arrested for sexual misconduct. No one knows how many other incidents went undetected.
In addition, youths were “routinely” subject to sexual assaults by other youths, the result of “grossly inadequate staffing” in the facility’s living areas, the DOJ found. Some youths told horrific stories of rape or attempted rape by cellmates who beat them or wielded “shanks,” the prison term for knives fashioned from ordinary metal objects.
Shanks, the investigators discovered, were far too common – and often used in assaults. During one 11-month period ending in November 2010, 91 youths were transported to outside medical facilities for treatment of injuries due to inmate violence. Many had cuts and stab wounds.
One youth, who was referred to as J.D. in the lawsuit, was tied up, brutally raped and beaten over a 24-hour period by a cellmate who had been the subject of multiple prior complaints involving sexual misconduct. The victim tried to summon guards, but the emergency button in his cell didn’t work.
Medical Care Lacking
Nothing, perhaps, illustrates the inhumane, callous and unconstitutional treatment of the youths at Walnut Grove more than the provision – or lack thereof – of mental health and medical care.
New inmates were not properly screened when they arrived; in fact, the facility appeared to lack even the most basic equipment needed to check arrivals for common conditions such as asthma, kidney disease or urinary infections. Exam rooms did not even contain examination tables or chairs.
Youths who were sick or injured often had to make multiple requests to see a nurse and sometimes waited weeks for treatment. Many with chronic conditions were not always given their medicine on time, if at all. The administration of medication was “grossly deficient,” the DOJ found. And though some inmates were as young as 13, none of the physicians who provided care at Walnut Grove were trained in pediatrics or family medicine.
For all those problems, the mental health care may have been worse.
The facility is not supposed to house inmates with serious mental health needs – but it does.
A number of inmates “have a history of prior psychiatric illness or treatment and/or are presently exhibiting symptoms of suicidal behavior or serious mental illness,” the DOJ report says. “The Facility, however, is not providing adequate mental health care to those youth. Instead, the Facility fails to adequately assess and treat youth at risk of suicide.”
In December 2008, a youth was found hanging from a noose attached to a light fixture but was revived. He was not placed on suicide watch. In October 2009, another youth with a history of depression and suicidal thoughts was found dead in his cell. Hours earlier, he had told a nurse that he had cut himself and planned to do it again. Ten days earlier, a guard had seen him with a rope around his neck.
In one six-month period in 2010, 285 youths – nearly a quarter of the population at the time – were placed on suicide watch. A psychiatrist evaluated only about 8 percent of them.
But many youths were placed in isolation as punishment, on the pretense they were suicidal. They were typically stripped, given a thin paper gown and forced into a cell with only a single blanket and a steel bed frame without a mattress. They stayed for 24 hours a day with little or no human contact.
For those who needed mental health crisis services, there were none – no therapy, no access to acute or chronic care, no special needs unit. Instead, medication and “therapeutic lockdown” were the only options available. Some youths, the DOJ found, “languish for years at a time without receiving evidence based mental health services that are routinely used to treat serious mental health conditions.”
A possible reason for the lack of care was the “shockingly low” level of psychiatric staffing. One psychiatrist, who was on call for just 14 hours per month, was responsible for providing care to 1,200 inmates. Additionally, a psychologist was available once a week for five hours.
The DOJ report came with a warning: “It must be noted that most of these youth with their untreated or inadequately treated mental health problems are eventually going to be released in worse condition, and often times more dangerous, than when they entered WGYCF [Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility].”


Mike McIntosh enjoys a day of fishing prior to entering the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility in Mississippi. In February 2010, he suffered brain damage and other severe injuries during a melee that the U.S. Justice Department says was facilitated by a guard at the privately run, for-profit prison.


A ‘Sea Change’
Today, Mike is 22 and no longer at Walnut Grove. After spending some time at Parchman, the state’s only maximum security prison, he was transferred to the Alcorn County Correctional Facility.
After two years, he’s still recovering. It took a year before he could twist the top off a soda bottle. Some days, Mike can remember things about his life, like the fact he owns a car. Some days, he can’t.
As far as McIntosh knows, his son never received any kind of therapy for his injuries.
“Believe it or not, he still talks about the welding,” McIntosh said. “That’s exciting. That gives me some hope.”
As for the youths at Walnut Grove, the settlement agreement offers hope – hope for educational and rehabilitative services, hope for better health care, hope for common decency and freedom from harm.
The settlement requires the state to remove all boys under the age of 18 and certain teens who are 18 and 19 from the prison and house them in separate facilities governed by juvenile justice, rather than adult, standards. In his March 26 order, the judge wrote that the evidence in the case, along with the DOJ’s findings, left him with the “unshakeable conviction” that the settlement agreement must be entered immediately.
“Those youth, some of whom are mere children, are at risk every minute, every hour, every day,” the judge wrote. “Nothing has curtailed actions of the staff and indifference of management officials to the constant violations, even though the parties and their experts have been monitoring, investigating and conducting on-site visits constantly since before the lawsuit was filed and during the pendency of this action.”
As a result of the agreement, pepper spray will no longer be used to punish youths and can be deployed only to prevent serious bodily injury. Guards won’t be allowed to rely on inmates to enforce rules or impose punishment on others. Youths will not be subject to solitary confinement. Physical exertion used to inflict pain or discomfort won’t be allowed. Regular rehabilitative, educational and recreational programs will be available. Mental health and medical care will be required. And, “at all times,” youths will be provided with “reasonably safe living conditions and will be protected from violence” and sexual abuse.
“This represents a sea change in the way the Mississippi Department of Corrections will treat children in its custody,” said Sheila Bedi, deputy legal director for the SPLC. “As a result of this litigation, Mississippi’s children will no longer languish in an abusive, privately operated prison that profits each time a young man is tried as an adult and ends up behind bars.”
Soon, the Department of Corrections will be seeking another company to run the three prisons currently in GEO’s hands. A month after the Walnut Grove settlement, the company announced it was discontinuing its $21 million contract to operate the East Mississippi Correctional Facility, perhaps in anticipation of another SPLC lawsuit. GEO said in a press release that the facility had been “financially underperforming.” Corrections Commissioner Christopher Epps then revoked GEO’s remaining contracts, saying the state would seek another company to manage all three prisons.
But questions remain. Will the future of private prisons elsewhere be affected by the abuses uncovered at Walnut Grove – many of which were blamed on severe understaffing, a lack of accountability and other shortcomings that appear related to profits? Will states rethink the idea of trying children as adults and housing them with older prisoners?
In its report “Too Good to be True: Private Prisons in America,” The Sentencing Project questions the private prison industry’s claim that it can safely and humanely operate prisons for less money than the government. Prisons run by the government are not exactly extravagant, so where do the savings – and profits – come from?
“[P]rivate prisons must make cuts in important high-cost areas such as staffing, training and programming to create savings,” the report says.
Walnut Grove seems to be a case in point.
“Deliberately indifferent.” It’s a phrase used throughout the DOJ report to describe the mindset of both the staff at Walnut Grove and the prison officials who were supposed to ensure constitutional conditions there.
McIntosh believes the evidence is sufficient to show that the profit motive isn’t a good fit for prisons.
“I think it’s terrible,” he said. “Our children’s lives shouldn’t be at risk because corporations cut corners in order to increase their profits.
“They rob the kids of hope. They rob the kids of dignity. I think that’s probably the worst thing you can do to them.”

© 2012. Southern Poverty Law Center.

AUTISM - CHILDREN BEATEN FORCE FED ABUSED!

AUTISM - CHILDREN BEATEN FORCE FED ABUSED!
www.youtube.com

Montana Youth With Mental Disabilities, Locked In Solitary

Montana Settlement Limits Solitary Confinement for Juveniles, Prisoners with Mental Illness by Jean Casella and James Ridgeway One of our very first posts, when we started the Solitary Watch blog, concerned a suicidal Montana teenager locked in solitary confinement because he was deemed a discipline problem after he damaged prison property. It's a story so gut-wrenching that we still often tell it as an example of how isolation becomes torture for many people in prison. As the Helena Independent Record reported the story in December 2009: A 17-year-old boy suffering from mental illnesses was so traumatized by his deplorable treatment in the Montana State Prison that he twice attempted to kill himself by biting through the skin on his wrist to puncture a vein, a lawsuit filed Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union of Montana alleges. The lawsuit filed in Lewis and Clark County District Court claims that the boy, “Robert Doe,” has been treated illegally and inhumanely and has been detained for about 10 months in solitary confinement. Doe was Tasered as part of a “behavior modification plan,” pepper-sprayed and stripped naked in view of other inmates, the complaint states…. His available mental health treatment consists of a prison staff member knocking on his door once a week and asking if he has any concerns, according to documents, and then he must answer by yelling within earshot of other inmates. Since March, he has been locked in a solitary cell all but five to six hours a week, and he is not allowed personal visits or telephone calls. In 2010, the teenager--who was identified as Raistlen Katka once he turned 18--told a federal judge that he had tried to bite through his veins because he was so desperate to get out of solitary: “My thought process was if I don’t die, at least I’ll get out of my cell for 30 seconds,” Katka testified. The case epitomized the plight of two groups of inmates–juveniles in adult prisons, and prisoners suffering from mental illness. Members of both these groups are disproportionately likely to end up in solitary confinement, even though they are even less equipped than other prisoners to tolerate the effects of long-term isolation. This week, the American Civil Liberties of Montana has reached a settlement with the Montana State Prison over the case, Raistlen Katka v. State of Montana. According to a press release: [The settlement] limits the amount of time juveniles can be placed in isolation and provides for better treatment of mentally ill inmates in solitary confinement, protecting our state’s most vulnerable prisoners. “I am glad the prison is changing how it treats young offenders,” said plaintiff Raistlen Katka. “I brought this lawsuit so no one else would have to endure the torture I endured.” “The effects of solitary confinement on any inmate are profound, but are even more pronounced for adolescents whose brains are still developing and for persons with mental illness,” said ACLU cooperating attorney Andree Larose. “On top of that, experience nationwide shows that solitary really does not work. This settlement is a step in the right direction toward making sure inmates are treated humanely and consistent with the Montana Constitution, and are incarcerated in conditions that promote successful reintegration when they are released.”... “Once Raistlen was released from solitary confinement and given mental health treatment, he began doing far better than he did under the prison’s ‘behavior management plans,’” said attorney Jennifer Giuttari who filed the case on behalf of the ACLU of Montana, and has continued working on it at her new law firm, Montana Legal Justice, PLLC. “Raistlen’s story shows that prisoners can successfully re-enter into society when given proper treatment during their incarceration.” The settlement mandates several new policies at the Montana State Prison. Juveniles cannot be placed in solitary or so-called behavior management programs for longer than 72 hours without the approval of the director of the Department of Corrections or warden. Classification of teen inmates "Will take into account their unique needs for education and mental and medical treatment and their lack of full maturity." In addition, "mentally ill prisoners cannot be placed into solitary confinement if it is determined it will harm their mental health, and those who are placed in solitary confinement must receive private treatment sessions with a mental health professional as often as necessary." Finally, "suicidal inmates cannot be placed in behavior management programs." http://solitarywatch.com/2012/04/18/montana-settlement-limits-solitary-confinement-for-juveniles-and-prisoners-with-mental-illness/

Distraction techniques’ just plain brutality

Distraction techniques’ just plain brutality
By John Bowden – HMP Shotts (Scotland), from insidetime issue March 2012

John Bowden questions why the care of already damaged children is left to profit-seeking companies?



After more than a decade of unlawful abuse and brutality within child prisons run by private security companies it took the deaths of two young people and the inquests into those deaths to finally expose the sort of violence routinely inflicted on children held in such institutions. A subsequent legal action brought by the Children’s Rights Alliance for England (CRAE) laid bare completely what had been going on in these places, and on the 11th January the High Court delivered a judgement that was absolutely damning of the privately owned and run ‘ Secure Training Centres’ (STC) and the brutality of their regimes.

In his judgement Judge Justice Foskett said that in bringing the case CRAE had shone ‘a light into a corner which might otherwise have remained in the dark’, and indeed it was a corner of the penal system where the brutalisation of already damaged children in the name of so-called ‘restraint’ was endemic and institutionalised and actively encouraged and promoted by the government’s Youth Justice Board. It was also revealed that none of the statutory agencies charged with monitoring the care and treatment of children in the STCs did anything to stop the unlawful treatment. Clearly the human rights of such powerless working class children counted for nothing.

What the ruling finally exposed were places where a culture of abuse had been allowed to flourish and where the victims were too terrified to complain and accepted such treatment as an inevitable part of their captivity. In his judgement Justice Foskett said, ‘I do not think there can be any doubt that in the vast majority of cases the detainees made the subject of an (unlawful)) restraint technique would simply have accepted it as part and parcel of the routine in the STC. There is, of course, also the inevitable reluctance that there would have been on the part of the young detainee to ‘rock the boat’ by making a complaint’. Too frightened to complain on their own behalf, the children subjected to abuse and ill treatment were given absolutely no protection by social workers or prison inspectors who knew exactly what was going on. Justice Foskett said in this regard, ‘It is a legitimate comment that until the deaths of Gareth Myatt and Adam Rickwood, and the investigations and inquiries that resulted from these deaths, none of the agencies in place to monitor what took place within an STC had identified and/or acted to stop the unlawful nature of what was happening’. In fact, so called monitors from the Youth Justice Board actively encouraged restraint techniques (which were often injury inducing) that were criticised by the United Nations, the European Torture Committee and Parliamentarians on the Joint Committee on Human Rights. These techniques included the ‘nose distraction’ technique, which involved members of staff punching non-complying children on the nose; other ‘restraint’ techniques included punching children in the ribs and yanking their thumbs back. 14 year old Adam Rickwood was subjected to the ‘nose distraction’ technique hours before he hung himself.

The extent of the abuse was also revealed in the judgement. The number of violent ‘restraints’ on children ran at over 350 per month across the 4STCs up until July 2008. Hassockfield STC seemed to use an almost gratuitous amount of violence against its child inmates and during a six month period in 2004 applied violent ‘restraint’ approximately 570 times.

The widespread use of unlawful violence over such a prolonged period was allowed and encouraged to take place because those employing it operated without any accountability and because an environment of frequent staff brutality was obviously considered appropriate for difficult and rebellious working class children.

Despite delivering a scathing condemnation of the STC regimes, Justice Foskett refused to make a judgement requiring the state to identify victims and notify them of their right to seek compensation. He claimed that such a judgement might have a ‘springboard’ effect in creating a mass of compensation claims from both children and adults abused in state institutions. There was no suggestion either that a police investigation should be conducted into what took place in the STCs over such a prolonged period, nor any inquiry into the culpability of senior management at G4S and Serco or why both companies are continuing to run and operate penal facilities for children. In effect, everyone involved in the unlawful abuse of children in the STCs for over a decade got off scot free.

An important question that emerges from this case is why the care and custody of already damaged children is still being entrusted to profit-driven private companies like G4S and Serco, who have clearly shown by this case a total disregard for the human rights of those in their custody? Running jails for profit is always morally dubious, but when it has been clearly established and proven that children have been so brutalised by regimes operating in privately owned child jails that some of them have been driven to kill themselves, then the whole corrupt business needs to be fundamentally questioned.

http://www.insidetime.org/articleview.asp?a=1152&c=distraction_techniques_just_plain_brutality

A former juvenile corrections officer has been jailed after being accused of sex

Former juvenile corrections officer jailed
Associated Press
March 15, 2012

A former juvenile corrections officer has been jailed after being accused of sex
crimes.

The former employee, Ardith Brown, faces charges of felony child molestation and
sexual assault against persons in custody, the Georgia Department of Juvenile
Justice said in a statement late Wednesday.

Brown was a former staff member at the Regional Youth Detention Center in
Gainesville. She was fired on Feb. 2, after an internal investigation into
allegations of an inappropriate relationship with a 14-year-old in the
department's custody, authorities said.

Brown was being held in the Hall County Jail. Jail records did not indicate
whether she had an attorney.

The Gainesville case is the latest in a series of investigations involving the
Department of Juvenile Justice, which began a system-wide review after the
beating death of a 19-year-old at an Augusta facility.

"As a result of our surprise inspections at all 27 Georgia juvenile detention
centers, we've observed many of our Juvenile Corrections Officers become more
diligent in monitoring youth activity at all our facilities," Commissioner Gale
Buckner said in a statement.

The agency recently named a new director of the Augusta Youth Development
Campus, which has been at the center of several investigations involving its
staff after the beating death.

Nine workers at the Augusta youth center have been fired since November. Two
others were demoted and offered positions at different facilities.

http://www.ajc.com/news/former-juvenile-corrections-officer-1386082.html?cxtype=\
rss_news_82001

Kids In Mississippi Held In Solitary And Abused

New Ban on Solitary Confinement for Child Prisoners in Mississippi
by Jean Casella and James Ridgeway

The United States, alone among industrialized nations, incarcerates thousands of juveniles in adult prisons, after trying and sentencing them as adults. We also lead the world in the practice of solitary confinement. These two facts have come together to create a horrifying reality: hundreds of children languishing in isolation cells.

This week, the American Civil Liberties Union and Southern Poverty Law Center announced that after years of litigation, they had reached an agreement with the state of Mississippi that will end juvenile solitary confinement in its prisons. According to a post on the ACLU's "Blog of Rights":

On March 22, 2012, a federal court in Jackson, Mississippi, will enter a groundbreaking consent decree, believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, banning the horrendous practice of subjecting kids convicted as adults to solitary confinement...While in solitary, the youth are held in almost complete isolation and sensory deprivation with virtually no human contact, without books, paper or pens, radios, pictures, access to television or any kind of recreational activity, and are denied all visits, telephone calls and even mail from their families. If prison staff tags a kid as suicidal — which they often do with punitive motives — that kid is stripped naked except for a paper gown and denied a mattress.

It's been known for a long time that prolonged solitary confinement inflicts intense suffering, worsens pre-existing mental illness and causes psychiatric breakdown even in mature healthy adults — let alone in emotionally vulnerable kids. International law recognizes that solitary confinement can rise to torture and, furthermore, that kids under the age of 18 are particularly vulnerable to the damaging effects of solitary. These effects are so well understood that international law now prohibits solitary confinement of any person under the age of 18, strongly condemning it as a form of cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment.

According to the Jackson Clarion Ledger, the groups' lawsuit, filed in November 2010, challenged what it called "brutal, unconstitutional conditions" at Mississippi's Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility. WGYCF, which houses male prisoners ages 13 to 22, is operated by the GEO Group, America's second largest private prison company. In addition to placing kids in solitary confinement, the suit alleges that "guards beat inmates, smuggled drugs to the youths and engaged in sexual acts with them," as well as allowing older inmates to prey on younger ones. In an incident two years ago, 14 young inmates were injured, including one who suffered brain damage. The consent degree announced this week will also ban the placement of juveniles at WGYCF.

It’s been known for a long time that prolonged solitary confinement inflicts intense suffering, worsens pre-existing mental illness and causes psychiatric breakdown even in mature healthy adults — let alone in emotionally vulnerable kids. International law recognizes that solitary confinement can rise to torture and, furthermore, that kids under the age of 18 are particularly vulnerable to the damaging effects of solitary. These effects are so well understood that international law now prohibits solitary confinement of any person under the age of 18, strongly condemning it as a form of cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment.

According to the Jackson Clarion Ledger, the groups’ lawsuit, filed in November 2010, challenged what it called “brutal, unconstitutional conditions” at Mississippi’s Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility. WGYCF, which houses male prisoners ages 13 to 22, is operated by the GEO Group, America’s second largest private prison company. In addition to placing kids in solitary confinement, the suit alleges that “guards beat inmates, smuggled drugs to the youths and engaged in sexual acts with them,” as well as allowing older inmates to prey on younger ones. In an incident two years ago, 14 young inmates were injured, including one who suffered brain damage. The consent degree announced this week will also ban the placement of juveniles at WGYCF.

http://solitarywatch.com/2012/02/29/new-ban-on-solitary-confinement-for-child-prisoners-in-mississippi/

Injustices Behind Bars Describes what Women In Prison Endur

February 14, 2012
Injustices Behind Bars
Occupy Prisons by VICTORIA LAW


“Manhandled, arrested, cuffed, searched, and locked away in the Tombs” is how AlterNet described the story of protester Barbara Schneider Reilly, who spent 30 hours in jail after being arrested at an Occupy Wall Street-related protest in October 2011.
Terrina describes what the process is like for those entering the prison system:
When someone arrives at DW, you’re stripped, photographed, poked, prodded, asked a bunch of questions that seem to have no bearing on your actual crime or personal situation (although the answers do chart out a path for your life in DOC), and given a piece of dry stale cake to eat. Yes cake. And that is it for the day. When you take into account that the prisoners are awake and traveling before 6am, without food or drink, from the county jail, and scared, anxious and unsure of the upcoming events, not being fed until 6pm is an awfully long time.

The women are placed in the first living unit. Although it is called a LIVING unit, you would think it is more like a kennel. The women are allowed out of their cell for one hour a day. At that time, they have to shower, use the phone, and try to learn the rules and regulations of their new surroundings without any guidance from the officers. Yes, it is true that there are “Posted Operational Regulations” (PORs) but … Lord forbid that the officers tell the new inmates how to use the telephone, when they are allowed to shower, how to get their medication, if needed, and, if they are pregnant, they are lucky if they are allowed to receive prenatal treatment for the first month that they are here. The women live like animals for at least a month before moving to the next “living” unit. Once they move, they are allowed TWO hours out a day. No classes, one hour a week at the gym, a minimal church, and hopefully by now the new girl has found a decent “old number” that can explain the way of her new world. If not … she’s still shit out of luck.
Unfortunately she still has to deal with the same offices that she’s been around for the first month. At this time, her telephone system should be working. However, the case managers that are supposed to be there to help are not able to explain the phone system, the classes that are available, the jobs that are attainable, or even the canteen that should be purchasable. Three to four weeks later and the confusion begins all over with another “living” unit move. Previously, contact with the other offenders was restricted altogether. Now you are thrown into a space set up like the monkey exhibit at most zoos. It is so overwhelmingly loud and disorganized that many women shut down, get angry, fight, and begin to behave like the animals they are being treated like.
In this new building, the inmate is supposed to automatically know the rules they were never taught, they’re expected to know where to go and when, which sidewalks to walk on at specific times, who they are and aren’t allowed to talk to, and are expected to show up to work on time, usually without knowing that they have even been assigned a job…
Let’s take a moment and discuss the jobs: labor crew, kitchen, laundry … those are the first jobs available. DOC pays 60 cents a day to do the work that keeps the facility running. The majority of inmates MUST pay restitution, which is, of course, taken out of their state pay … so after a full month of working hard, they are able to spend approximately $10.63. The only thing that is free in DOC is one roll of toilet paper a week and one pack of sanitary pads per month. If the inmate has a heavy menstrual cycle and needs more pads, she has to pay $4 to get them. Toothpaste, toothbrush, body soap, a brush or comb, lotion, shampoo, conditioner, hair grease, floss, any hygiene besides one roll of toilet paper a week, the inmate HAS to pay for. Since I have been in prison, the prices of canteen have gone up at least every two to three months. Why hasn’t the rate of our pay? The state is allowed to charge more for the toothpaste, but unable to pay us enough to purchase it? Don’t get caught giving away any hygiene if you are lucky enough to have it because then you can get a write-up for loaning and bartering or unauthorized possession if you don’t have a receipt for the items in your room.
These inhumanities are of the everyday variety for women behind bars. Then there are the other injustices that are all too common in women’s prisons nationwide:
Health care: Women in prison are more likely to be HIV+ than either men in prison or women who are not in prison. In 2000, women in prison were 60% more likely to have HIV than men in prison. Women in prison are 36 times more likely than women outside to have HIV. In addition, prisons are not likely to have female-specific health care (pregnancy, breast and cervical cancer screenings, GYN services, etc) and so women’s health needs often go untreated.
Parenting: More than 80% of women in prison are mothers to children under the age of eighteen. Because of the ways in which parenting is gendered, when a mother goes to prison, she is far less likely to have a co-parent, partner or family member who is willing and able to take care of her children. As a result, children of imprisoned mothers are five times more likely to end up in foster care than children of incarcerated fathers. This statistic became even more devastating in 1997 when Congress passed the federal Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA). Under the Act, if a child has been in foster care for fifteen of the past 22 months, the state has to automatically begin terminating legal custody. Only three states make exceptions for parents who are in prison. If a mother is fortunate enough to maintain the legal rights to her child(ren), the distance of the prison from her home community makes it less likely that she will ever receive a visit from her child. More than 50% of mothers in prison reported never having received a visit from their children.
Sexual Assault: In 1996, Human Rights Watch released All Too Familiar, a report documenting sexual abuse of women prisoners throughout the United States. The report, reflecting the organization’s two-and-a-half years of research, found that sexual assaults, abuse and rape of women prisoners by male staff members were common and that women who complained incurred write-ups, loss of “good time” accrued toward an early parole and/or prolonged periods in disciplinary segregation. Little has changed in many prisons since the report’s release in 1996. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits gender discrimination in employment, giving both male and female guards the right to gender-neutral employment in prisons housing prisoners of the opposite gender. Male staff members have been placed in female facilities with little to no training on cross-gender supervision and no procedures for investigating or disciplining staff sexual misconduct. In Michigan and other states, untrained male officers were asigned to positions in which they were able to walk, unannounced, into areas where women dress and undress, shower, and use the toilet. Male guards have also been given the task of performing body searches on prisoners, which includes patting down women’s breasts and genital areas. They also transported women to medical care and were required to observe gynecological and other intimate medical procedures. It was not until incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women won a class-action lawsuit were restrictions on male access put into place.
Abuse and battering: More than half of women in state prisons and jails report having experienced physical and/or sexual abuse. Women are three times more likely than men to have been physically and/or sexually abused prior to incarceration.

In 1964, peace activist Barbara Deming spent 27 days in jail in Albany, Georgia. Deming and a group of activists had embarked on a Peace Walk from Quebec to Guantanamo, the American army base in Cuba. When the walk reached Georgia, the Peace Walkers found it impossible to demand peace without also demanding the right of all people — black and white — to walk together down any street in any city. In Albany, where the police chief had boasted that he had defeated Martin Luther King non-violently, the group twice attempted to walk through the White section of town; each time, they were arrested and brought to the county jail. Deming was among the group of fifty-four women arrested the second time. Her fellow Peace Walker Yvonne, who spent first 24 days in jail and 27 days the second time, wrote: “If there is anything I have learned by being in jail, it is that prisons are wrong, simply and unqualifiedly wrong.”

Nearly fifty years later, in 2011, Barbara Schneider Reilly ends her account of jail on an optimistic note: “Society must be changed. They insist on it, and, I hope, will continue to insist. And, not withstanding the difficulties ahead, we will fight for it.”

One hopes that these fights also recognize and include the struggles of people in prison. As RJ states,

“When we hear and tell our stories, we must think of the abuse that is churning behind the razor wire at that moment. When we are released, or when we greet our friends outside the gates, we must think of the person who is already waiting to fill the vacant bed. We must imagine what it will take to disable this corrupt industry with its devastating methods that are carried out under the lie of ‘bettering society.’ We must not turn our backs on each other!”

Spurred on by prison justice organizers, people in the various Occupy movements are beginning to realize this and are calling for a National Occupy Day in Support of Prisoners on Monday, February 20, 2012. There will be actions across the nation. To find out about the nearest one, go to: http://occupy4prisoners.org/actions/.

Victoria Law is a writer, photographer, mother, and Contributing Author for New Clear Vision. She is the author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles Of Incarcerated Women(PM Press, 2009), the editor of the zine Tenacious: Art and Writings from Women in Prison, and a co-founder of Books Through Bars — NYC. She is currently working on transforming Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind, a zine series on how radical movements can support the families in their midst, into a book.

Notes

[1] Human Rights Watch, All Too Familiar.6.

[2] Jennifer Bagwell, “Barred from View: How Michigan Keeps the Lid on Allegations of Widespread Sexual Abuse Against Female Inmates,” Metro Times: Detroit’s Alternative Weekly, March 24, 1999.

[3] Beth E. Richie and Kay Tsenin, Female Offenders, Pornography and Prostitution, Child Abuse and Neglect, research forum on women and girls in the justice system for the Department of Justice, 1999.

[4] Caroline Wolf Harlow, Prior Abuse Reported by Inmates and Probationers, special report for the U.S. Department of Justice, April 1999, 1.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/14/occupy-prisons/

Department of Justice Investagates Police Brultality

Department of Justice
Office of Public Affairs
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASETuesday, December 20, 2011
U.S. Bureau of Prisons Employee Pleads Guilty in Florida to Sexual Abuse of a Ward
WASHINGTON – Bureau of Prisons employee Jack Chris Jackson, 45, pleaded guilty today to the charge of sexual abuse of a ward, announced the Department of Justice.



During the plea proceedings, Jackson admitted to having a sexual relationship with an inmate at the Federal Correctional Institute (FCI) in Miami. This inmate was in Jackson’s custodial and supervisory authority at FCI.



“We will not tolerate corrections officers engaging in this behavior with institutionalized persons,” said Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. “The Justice Department will vigorously prosecute individuals who abuse their position and authority in this manner.”



U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Wifredo A. Ferrer added, “This correction officer abused his official position. This conduct is an intolerable breach of trust that not only endangers the safety of inmates but also compromises prison security. Our office will prosecute all official corruption cases to the fullest extent of the law.”



Jackson faces a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison. Sentencing has been set for March 19, 2012.



This case was investigated by the FBI and the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General, and is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Susan Rhee Osborne of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida and Trial Attorney Henry Leventis of the Civil Rights Division.

11-1686Civil Rights Division
http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2011/December/11-crt-1686.html
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Department of Justice
Office of Public Affairs
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEFriday, January 6, 2012
Two Former Alabama Sheriff’s Office Deputies Sentenced to Prison for Assaulting Handcuffed Man in Custody
WASHINGTON – The Justice Department announced today that Kirby Dollar and Timothy Watford, former deputies with the Russell County, Ala., Sheriff’s Office, were sentenced in federal court in Montgomery, Ala., for their participation in the beating of a handcuffed man who had been taken into official custody. U.S. District Court Judge Mark E. Fuller sentenced Dollar, 37, to 46 months in prison and Watford, 42, to 34 months in prison.



Dollar pleaded guilty on Aug.11, 2011, to willfully depriving the victim of his constitutional right to be free from the use of excessive force. Watford was convicted of the same charge by a federal jury sitting in Opelika, Ala., on Sept, 1, 2011, following a three day trial.



Evidence presented during the court proceedings established that Dollar and Watford, while acting in their capacity as law enforcement officers, punched, kicked and slapped the victim, who was lying on the ground in handcuffs and offering no resistance. The victim suffered multiple lacerations, facial fractures and a ruptured eardrum. Dollar admitted, and witnesses during Watford’s trial confirmed, that the attack was entirely unprovoked.



“These convictions and sentences demonstrate that the use of excessive force cannot be tolerated,” said Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. “The vast majority of police officers do an outstanding job in protecting both the community and the rights of the accused, even in stressful situations. But when police officers use excessive force to punish arrestees, they will be held accountable.”



“As well intended as some officers may be, police activity must remain within constitutional bounds,” said George L. Beck Jr., U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Alabama. “Let these two convictions and sentences serve as examples of bad conduct that will be prosecuted by this office. Emotions cannot overcome good judgment. Zealousness cannot overcome good training. And brutality can never be a substitute for effective law enforcement.”



FBI’s Special Agent in Charge Lewis M. Chapman stated, “Today’s sentencing of former Russell County Deputies Kirby Dollar and Tim Watford brings some closure to a breach of trust by law enforcement officers. Law enforcement officers must always act within the bounds of the law under any circumstance and particularly while safeguarding our communities and citizens. The investigation of Civil Rights violations continues to be one of the FBI’s top priorities; and, these sentences reaffirm our commitment to enforcing those standards on ourselves and the law enforcement community.”
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Department of Justice
Office of Public Affairs
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEThursday, January 12, 2012
Deputy US Marshal in Chicago Indicted for Civil Rights Violations
WASHINGTON - A federal grand jury in Chicago returned an indictment today charging Deputy U.S. Marshal Stephen Linder, 36, with violations of federal criminal civil rights law related to two separate incidents in which Linder assaulted a handcuffed civilian.



The indictment charges Linder with a criminal civil rights violation for punching and choking a handcuffed man on July 8, 2010, and with obstructing justice for attempting to persuade another law enforcement officer to withhold evidence of the assault. Linder was also charged with a criminal civil rights violation for head-butting a handcuffed man on May 13, 2008, and with obstructing justice by persuading another law enforcement officer to withhold evidence of the assault.



Each of the civil rights counts carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. Each of the obstruction counts carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Each count in the indictment also carries a maximum fine of $250,000.



An indictment is merely an accusation and the defendant is presumed innocent unless proven guilty.



This case is being investigated by the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General and is being prosecuted by the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.