Police Officer Ronald Vanrossum as a Rapist}Friendly Fire The Good, the Bad and the Corrupt,

Posted: 12/8/2003 10:14:37 AM Ex-cop, SBPD in conflict By GINA TENORIO, Staff Writer SAN BERNARDINO - It has been a long journey for former San Bernardino police Officer Stephen K. Peach and the Police Department. Throughout this year, Peach and the police have traded accusations of lying and misconduct that ended with Peach's termination in September. He is appealing the decision. Peach also is watching closely to see if his recently released self-published book, Friendly Fire The Good, the Bad and the Corrupt," will have an impact. Published by 1st Books, it claims to reveal secrets the department has tried to hide. "I just decided this was one of the only ways to do this," Peach said. "Society as a whole has lost respect for police officers. Some think the police are no better than criminals." He hopes the book shines a spotlight on the department and forces change, he said. "If they can do this to me, they can do this to anyone," he said. Police Chief Garrett Zimmon declined to comment on the case or the book, saying he couldn't because it was a personnel matter and because an appeal is pending. In the book, Peach details the start of what he claims was the downward spiral of his service with the department and the end of his dream. A native of Great Britain, Peach said he was hired Jan. 5, 1991. http://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/literature/books_in_PDF/Peach%20S.-%20Police%20Corruption.pdf Things were good for years, he said. But he began to take issue with some officers' behavior. Among those issues was what Peach described as the narcotics team's penchant for beating people up. He began to speak up at briefings and make enemies, he said. The book describes a 1998 shooting during which, he writes, he was shot by a supervising officer while serving a search warrant on Doug Domino, another former officer who also took legal action against the department. "So as this was warrant speed, as soon as the door swung open I was expecting to see (another officer) run into my field of view and I would follow his lead, but nothing happened, he didn't move," the book reads. "I even stopped looking at the potential threat from inside the residence to look at (the other officer) to see why he wasn't running into the doorway and as I looked towards him I was shot in my upper right leg, I did not know where the bullet came from and assumed that Domino had fired from inside the residence and the bullet had gone through the stucco wall prior to entering my leg. The gunshot did not seem loud at all and there wasn't a great deal of pain but I could see that the wound was very serious." He said the ordeal left him without a portion of his leg muscle and contributed to the end of his career. But the real collapse began after he tried to expose officer Ronald Vanrossum as a rapist, he said. Vanrossum was sentenced in October to 34 years in state prison on charges of rape, sexual battery and oral copulation by threat of authority to arrest. "An old informant had told me she'd been raped by Vanrossum," he said. Yet when he tried to tell his supervisor, nothing was done, he said. When he refused to drop the issue, the department began investigating him, he said. Law-enforcement officials paint a different picture of the facts behind Peach's termination in a civil-service board's findings report provided by the City Attorney's Office. His dismissal was a result of a sexual affair Peach had with Michelle Roan, a felon and prostitute, the report said. Officials accused Peach of lying to investigators about the relationship and a number of letters he allegedly wrote to Roan at the state prison in Chowchilla in 2001 and 2002. The documents state that Peach's actions were a violation of the department's core values. There is only one arrest which could be traced in any way to any contact that Peach had with Roan." Investigators denied that Roan was Peach's informant and said Peach was often vague with other officers about her identity. An excerpt from one of the letters he allegedly wrote to Roan in prison states: "So I've got to wait until Oct. '02 hopefully it will go by quickly and I'll come and visit you wherever you end up." Peach insisted the letters were taken out of context and were written to a source in a manner that would not identify her to friends or officials as being an informant, he said. "She had told me she had something important to tell me," Peach said. "I wanted to know what she had to say. I'd always been known to have informants."

5 Guards Beat Handcuffed Inmate

Judge says witnesses, evidence disagree in inmate beating case prisonmovement.wordpress.com The investigation concluded that five prison guards pinned down, kicked and stomped a handcuffed inmate so violently that one nearby onlooker wept, closed her eyes and began to pray. By Jon Ortiz A...

Texas Jailers Ran a 'Rape Camp' Behind Bars,

http://www.alternet.org/rape-texas-jail Texas Jailers Ran a 'Rape Camp' Behind Bars, Claim Two Women www.alternet.org This is unbelievable.

Records Show Excessive Use of Force at Colorado Supermax

Records Show Excessive Use of Force at Colorado Supermax by Lisa Dawson Records kept by the Colorado Department of Corrections show 61 instances from March 1, 2012 to March 1 of this year of corrections officers using force on men held at the Colorado State Penitentiary (CSP), where prisoners are held in administrative segregation on lockdown for 23 hours a day. The "use of force" log, obtained by Denver's Westword, documents varying levels of physical contact used in each incident, some of which required mild force, and others which prison officials deemed it necessary to use brutal control tactics, including restraint chairs and pepper spray. This story comes from Alan Prendergast, who writes for Westword and has reported on Colorado prisons for years: At Colorado's state supermax prison, inmates get into confrontations with guards over food, hygiene, privileges, a refusal to "cuff up" or whatever out of boredom, mental illness or plain orneriness. Some claim to be provoked by staff. Whatever the reason, it's a contest the prisoner is going to lose every time. Like many prisons throughout Colorado and across the nation, people with mental illness compose a large part of the population at CSP. Prendergast writes on the potential impact of solitary confinement on people with mental illness: Although proponents of supermax prisons claim that they act as a deterrent to violence elsewhere in the corrections systems, the facilities also become repositories of "problem" inmates, whose failure to follow the rules tends to prolong their stay in solitary confinement and possibly exacerbate any preexisting mental problems. (As we've previously reported, roughly a third of CSP inmates have been diagnosed with some form of mental illness.) http://solitarywatch.com/2013/06/15/records-show-excessive-use-of-force-at-colorado-supermax/

Lawsuit Filed Against Solitary Confinement of 800 Mentally Ill In Pennsylvania

Lawsuit Filed Against Solitary Confinement of 800 Seriously Mentally Ill In Pennsylvania by Sal Rodriguez RHU cell of prisoner Matthew Bullock, who committed suicide in 2009. The Disability Rights Network of Pennsylvania (DRNP) has filed a lawsuit against John Wetzel, the Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, charging that the confinement of prisoners in Restricted Housing Units (RHUs) amounts to cruel and unusual punishment of those diagnosed as seriously mentally ill. The suit seeks an end to long-term segregation of such individuals and seeks an order that DOC prisoners receive constitutionally adequate mental health care. According to the lawsuit, prisoners in the RHUs are locked in extremely small cells for at least 23 hours a day on weekdays and 24 hours a day on weekends and holidays. Typically, the lights are on in the cell all the time. The prisoners are denied adequate mental health care and prohibited from working, participating in educational or rehabilitative programs, or attending religious services. Prisoners in the RHU are generally held alone, notes the lawsuit, though even in cases when prisoners are assigned a cellmate, this may be "as deleterious to their mental health as solitary confinement" if the cellmate is "psychotic or violent." Placing people in such conditions, can create a Dickensian nightmare, in which prisoners are trapped in an endless cycle of isolation and punishment, further deterioration of their mental illness, deprivation of adequate mental health treatment, and inability to qualify for parole. The lawsuit provides profiles of 12 men housed in the RHU, which serve to illustrate the widespread use of solitary confinement against prisoners who have been diagnosed as having "serious mental illnesses." A man identified as "Prisoner #1" is described in the lawsuit as having been diagnosed with a delusional disorder with paranoid features and a borderline intellectual diability. Initially placed in a Special Needs Unit, in which prisoners receive psychiatric treatment, he was frequently placed in the RHU following incidents precipitated by delusions. Despite expressing suicidal thoughts before and during his confinement in the RHU, he remained in the RHU until he committed suicide by hanging on May 6, 2011. Prisoner #8 is a 28-year old man at State Correctional Institution-Green (SCI-Green) who has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, a psychotic disorder, a paraphilia, and a personality disorder. According to the lawsuit, he claims to receive "messages from the television and from dead people." The lawsuit states that he has expressed suicidal ideation and has been placed in the RHU after being deemed by the Department of Corrections a "danger to himself and others. The lawsuit charges that Wetzel knows or is deliberately indifferent to the fact that the DOC's treatment of prisoners with mental illness, including the practice of segregating them for long periods of time in RHUs, can cause grave harm to their mental health. While it is unclear what DSM-Axis I mental disorders fall under the scope of serious mental illness, the lawsuit argues that the current disciplinary system within Pennsylvania prisons fails to "consider a prisoner's serious mental illness and the impact of isolation in assessing whether to sanction the prisoners. Pennsylvania prisoner Ricardo Noble, who has spent over five years in the RHU, has written to Solitary Watch about the nature of life in the isolation units: In the RHU life is intense. Especially in the beginning weeks or months. As time passes your mind begins to become clouded with mixed emotions, anger, guilt, hate, paranoia, hopelessness, loneliness, and other frustrations. Some who fail to productively channel their frustrations tend to take it out on those closest to them (mainly other prisoners) or even themselves because they can’t lash out on the ones (the Administration) who can affect change of the physical aspects of their harsh condition. Approximately 1/3 of prisoners in the RHUs, which as of February 28th housed 844 prisoners in long term Administrative Custody and an additional 1,417 in shorter term Disciplinary Custody, have been described by DRNP as seriously mentally ill.The DRNP cited the position of the American Psychiatric Association, which in December 2012 declared that prolonged segregation of adult inmates with serious mental illness, with rare exceptions should be avoided due to the potential harm to such inmates. For more on solitary confinement in Pennsylvania, click here to read Solitary Watch's reporting. http://solitarywatch.com/2013/03/18/lawsuit-filed-against-solitary-confinement-of-800-seriously-mentally-ill-in-pennsylvania/

Nine state prison guards charged in inmate beating probe

MD - Nine state prison guards charged in inmate beating probe Nine state prison guards charged in inmate beating probe Federal indictment alleges officers at Hagerstown prison planned assault, covered it up By Carrie Wells, The Baltimore Sun 10:38 p.m. EST, February 27, 2013 Nine current and former guards at a state prison in Hagerstown were charged Wednesday in a federal indictment that alleges they conspired to assault an inmate and covered up the incident. The U.S. Department of Justice indictment refers to two separate beatings of an inmate, identified only as "K.D.," in the same weekend in March 2008. K.D. was beaten so badly that he had to be taken to a hospital, the indictment says. None of the current and former prison officers was actually charged with assault. The charges included obstruction of justice for one lieutenant at the prison who the justice department says used a magnetic device to destroy surveillance tapes that captured the beating. The beatings of the inmate at medium-security Roxbury Correctional Institution in 2008, coming at the same time as an alleged inmate beating at maximum-security North Branch Correctional Institute in Cumberland, led to a high-profile investigation and scrutiny of the state prison system that year. Two dozen officers at both prisons were fired or put on leave amid the investigation, though two guards were later reinstated. The Department of Justice says K.D. was assaulted first during the 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift at Roxbury on March 8, 2008. In one indictment, Correctional Officer Walter Steele and Lieutenant Jason Weicht face conspiracy charges related to covering up the assault. Former Correctional Officers James Kalbflesh and Jeremy McCusker face civil rights and conspiracy charges. Weicht was also charged with obstruction of justice. The justice department said his actions included "encouraging officers to get together to get their stories straight, providing home telephone numbers for the involved officers so that they could arrange for a cover-up meeting, and giving an officer books on interrogation techniques so that he would be prepared to mislead investigators." Steele faces two more counts of providing false and misleading information to investigators. A second federal indictment stems from a second assault on K.D. the following morning, during the 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. shift. It was after that beating, in which K.D. was kicked and punched in his cell "in order to punish K.D. for a prior incident involving another officer" that the inmate was sent to the hospital, according to the Department of Justice. Lt. Edwin Stigile and former Correctional Officers Tyson Hinckle, Reginald Martin and Michael Morgan were charged with conspiring to have officers assault K.D. during the day shift. Sgt. Josh Hummer and Hinckle, Martin and Morgan also were each charged with a civil rights violation, and Stigile was charged with obstruction of justice for allegedly destroying surveillance tapes that recorded the beating. The maximum sentences for the prison officers range from 25 years to 55 years. Dustin Norris, a former correctional officer at Roxbury, pleaded guilty to conspiring to assault the inmate and faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison, the justice department also announced Wednesday. cwells@baltsun.com twitter.com/cwellssun http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/blog/bs-md-prison-guards-conspiracy-20130227,0,6505284.story#sthash.ZD4dYQnR.dpuf

What Solitary Confinement Does to the Mind

Voices from Solitary: What Solitary Confinement Does to the Mind by Voices from Solitary The following was submitted to Solitary Watch by Michael Jewell, who was sentenced to death in Texas for capital murder in 1970 and spent three years in solitary confinement as a death row prisoner. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1973 following the 1972 Supreme Court ruling in Furman v. Georgia, which prohibited the death penalty nationwide until the decision was overturned in 1976 in Gregg v. Georgia. Over the next 30 years, Jewell spent two two-year-long terms in Administrative Segregation. In Ad Seg, he would spend 23 hours a day in a 5x9 foot cell alone, allowed only a 20 minute shower and one hour of exercise in a cage. The first term was a result of his leading a work stoppage at Ellis Unit in Huntsville, Texas, in support of the Texas civil rights case Ruiz v. Estelle, which ultimately led federal courts to rule that the conditions in the Texas prison system violated 8th Amendment prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment. His second term in solitary confinement was the result of an escape attempt at Ferguson Unit in Madison County. Since his parole, he has found that life after prison is not easy. "Hell, with my criminal history, I couldn't get a job as a speed bump at Kroger's," he writes. "If it were not for a loving wife with enough fixed income to support the both of us, no doubt I would have recidivated for something akin to throwing a brick through a bank window." Jewell has become active in prison reform with Citizens United for Rehabilitation of Errants (CURE), Amnesty International, the Texas Inmate Family Association, and the ACLU of Texas. With his wife, Joan, he founded Con-Care Services, which assists Texas inmates with problems prisoners routinely face, including visitation issues and appealing disciplinary cases. "We don't move mountains but we kick the shit out of molehills," --Sal Rodriguez I served 40 consecutive years on a life sentence in the Texas Department of Corrections, from 1970 to 2010. My first 3 years were on death row, which is much like Administrative Segregation and Solitary Confinement (S.C). I also did time in Ad Seg on two separate occasions, staying over two years each time. During that time I was confined to a 5 x 9 foot cell for 23 hours per day. I was allowed a 20 minute shower and an hour for outside recreation in a cage made of cyclone fencing, which resembled a cage you’d see at the dog pound. The cage measured about 10 x 10 square feet. S.C. is a form of sensory deprivation, in that your perception shrinks to the dimensions of the space and sensations of confinement. Visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, and even the sense of taste are dramatically deprived and constricted. Almost immediately upon being tossed into isolation, though many people may not recognize it for what it is, you begin to suffer from a form of “sensory withdrawal.” Soon, you begin to crave the broader liberty you’ve lost, even the limited freedom of a prison’s environment: the ability to move about and interact with other human beings. Such a radical deprivation of sensory perceptions has a ‘numbing’ effect. You feel ‘stunned.’ Removed from the distractions and diversions of the broader context, the mind is suddenly forced to confront itself. You begin to hear yourself think. When the mind is withdrawn from the experience of ‘perceiving’ and interacting with the complex activities of the broader environment, it is forced to switch to perceptions from within itself and draw upon self-consciousness, as well as the subconscious. Sudden subjection to S.C. is a painful and dreaded experience. Because it is human nature to seek pleasure and avoid pain, we have a tendency to withdraw from the physical and take refuge into the psychological. Different people will have different reactions to this phenomenon. But most will indulge in various memories and forms of ‘fancy.’ Alongside memories of good times come those of sad and bad times. It is my opinion that all prisoners, deep inside, have a poor self-image. In S.C. that fact becomes acutely self-evident, or at least it did in my case. I suffered profound feelings of guilt and shame for past actions and inactions. Hot on the heels of regret come recrimination. Again, it is our nature to seek pleasure and to avoid pain. We tend to escape from over-awareness of our faults and foibles by turning to ‘fancy.’ Over time: days, weeks, months, and years, imagination can verge on, and in many cases, into, hallucination. The next stage is often psychosis and irreparable psychological damage. Resech has shown an irrefutable link between S.C. and mental deterioration: http://solitarywatch.com/2013/02/16/voices-from-solitary-what-solitary-confinement-does-to-the-mind/