February 10, 2016
Black History Month
O PINION
Page 19
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Federal Prison Guards are Brutalizing Inmates
My witness to the
assault on justice
J Ohn K iriaKOu
Two federal pris-
on guards in Flori-
da recently agreed
to plead guilty for
beating a prisoner
and then covering it
up. One oficer faces
up to three years in a federal pris-
on, while the other is looking at a
year.
The Justice Department issued
a press release that cast the news
as a great victory over oficial
malfeasance. “The Justice Depart-
ment is committed to holding ofi-
cers who engage in such criminal
acts accountable,” insisted Van-
ita Gupta, who heads the depart-
ment’s civil rights division.
Good for the Justice Depart-
ment, right? Well, there’s a lot
more to this issue.
The federal prison system cer-
tainly hasn’t seen the levels of
inmate abuse that state and local
prisons have become infamous
for. New York’s Ryker’s Island,
for example, is notorious for vio-
by
lent crimes committed by guards
against prisoners — including
juveniles — who are sometimes
chained or handcuffed while
they’re assaulted.
But the federal system’s
record isn’t anything to be
proud of, either. The two Flor-
ida oficers are no anomaly.
About a year ago, I inished
a 23-month stay in a federal
prison for blowing the whis-
tle on the CIA’s torture program.
I couldn’t believe some of the
things I saw there.
A few months after I checked in
at the Federal Correctional Insti-
tution at Loretto, Pennsylvania, a
new prisoner arrived. He was a for-
mer prison guard who’d used his
steel-toed boots to stomp another
prisoner unconscious. The Loretto
guards were clear about the rules:
“This is his house,” they told us. “If
anybody even looks at him cross-
eyed, they’re going to solitary.”
It didn’t really matter. After
only a couple of months, the for-
mer guard was transferred to the
minimum-security work camp
across the street, despite the fact
that he’d committed a violent
crime. The ix was in.
I wish I could say that was the
worst of it.
One of my cellmates at Loret-
to, whom I’ll call “James,” was a
mentally ill homeless man from
Pittsburgh. He’d purposefully
violated the terms of his federal
probation so he could spend the
winter months indoors.
James was clear with both the
medical staff and his cellmates
that he was mentally ill and need-
ed to be medicated. We appreciat-
ed his candor.
But the medical staff’s primary
mission is to keep costs low, and
drugs for serious mental illness
are expensive. Since James was
supposed to go home in a few
months anyway, they didn’t give
him his meds. You can guess what
happened: James began to spiral
into insanity, and he was sent to
solitary coninement.
James’s struggles angered the
staff. After one incident in solitary,
he was stripped naked, beaten, and
thrown outside. It was January, and
the temperature in the central Penn-
sylvania mountains was 10 degrees.
An eyewitness told me that James
apologized and asked to be let back
in. He started crying after a couple
of hours in the cold. Then he curled
up into a ball and fainted.
No guards were punished for
what they did to James. Even
if he’d reported it to the federal
Bureau of Prisons headquarters,
who would have listened to him?
Would you believe a uniformed
law enforcement oficer or a men-
tally ill homeless man?
The guards got away with it.
Across the country, prison guards
get away with things like this ev-
ery day.
The solution isn’t to prosecute
two isolated abusers and then is-
sue a press release crowing about
it. The solution is to put cameras
absolutely everywhere in prisons,
and to vet and train guards much
more thoroughly. Moreover, in-
spector general ofices should in-
vestigate more oficial crimes, and
the Justice Department should be
willing to prosecute more guards
who abuse inmates.
No one should celebrate the
outcome of the Florida case un-
til the abuse of prisoners by their
guards becomes a thing of the past.
OtherWords columnist John
Kiriakou is an associate fellow at
the Institute for Policy Studies.
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