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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Sunday, August 12, 2012
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
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
Friday, August 3, 2012
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.
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.
Sunday, July 22, 2012
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/
-----------------------------------------
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
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/
-----------------------------------------
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
Sunday, July 8, 2012
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
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
Thursday, June 7, 2012
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/
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/
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
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.
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.
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