Tag: prison

Animal-Grade Prison Food Indicts US Society

I’ve written in the past about an awful experience I had in prison a decade ago while serving 23 months in prison after blowing the whistle on the CIA’s torture program.  I was doing my time at the Federal Correctional Institution at Loretto, Pennsylvania, a low-security prison in the Appalachian Mountains.  One of the very first things I found, on my very first day, was that the food was bad. Very bad. 

I arrived in prison on a Thursday.  The next day, Friday, was “fish day.” A fellow prisoner warned me to skip the fish. “We call it sewer trout,” he said. “you don’t want to put that in your body.” Sure enough, when I got in line in the cafeteria, I saw boxes stacked behind the servers. Every box was very clearly marked, “Alaskan Cod.  Product of China. Not for human consumption. FEED USE ONLY.” That’s what the servers were slopping onto our trays. 

Things only got worse from there. I won’t go into detail about the rat that drowned in the Kool-Aid dispenser. I suppose things like that will happen from time to time. But one incident still makes me angry 10 years later. Every Wednesday evening was “taco night.”  This disgusting concoction was ground beef, some sort of “sauce,” and a little onion. It was truly inedible and I threw it away more often than I ate it.

One day, guards posted a memo from the warden in every housing unit saying, “Sorry. Through no mistake of our own, the company that sends us the ground beef for tacos accidentally mismarked a shipment of dog food as ‘ground beef’. That dog food was served to inmates. The Bureau of Prisons will fine the company.”

I later read in Prison Legal News magazine that the company was fined and the BOP kept the money.  But the real shame here isn’t even that we ate dog food.  The real shame is that we didn’t even realize that it was dog food because the food is so bad every day. I can’t tell you how many expired foods we were served, still in the packaging, and how many years-old frozen bagels, dyed green for some previous St. Patrick’s Day, we were served every Sunday for a year.

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Prison officer Joanne Hunter who sent X-rated photos to inmate she was having affair with and smuggled cannabis and mobile phone into his cell is jailed for three years

A former prison officer has been jailed for three years for having an inappropriate relationship with an inmate.

Joanne Hunter, 28, conducted the relationship with Connor Willis while working at HMP Forest Bank in Salford.

Hunter – described as ‘naive’ and ‘vulnerable’ in court – believed Willis was ‘in love’ with her and agreed to smuggle packages, including cannabis, into the prison for him. She also sent him explicit photographs, which were later found on her phone.

Manchester Crown Court heard how Hunter, who has a master’s degree in Childhood and Youth studies, began working at the prison in December 2018.

In December 2020, prison authorities received information that she was taking items inside and when she was interviewed by security managers she admitted having a relationship with Willis.

Rachel Widdicombe, prosecuting, told the court how Hunter had agreed smuggle packages into the prison for Willis, one containing a juice carton and another coating a Red Bull can.

Hunter received the packages from an unnamed woman after meeting her at a Tesco supermarket, the court heard. She then smuggled them inside the prison before passing them on to another prisoner – whom she knew as a ‘big player’ and member of crime gang – for Willis. Willis offered to pay her £200-300 for each package, but she refused to take the money.

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Federal Prison Guards Confessed to Rape and Got Away With It

Ron Berman agonizes over how to tell this story, where even to start, because the short version doesn’t capture the full travesty and the long version is overwhelming. But here’s the crux of it: A group of federal prison guards raped his daughter and got away with it. Not only did they get away with it, but they got away with it even after they admitted they did it.

Berman’s daughter, Carleane, was one of at least a dozen women who were abused by corrupt correctional officers at FCC Coleman, a federal prison complex in Florida. In December, a Senate investigation revealed that those correctional officers had admitted in sworn interviews with internal affairs investigators that they had repeatedly raped women under their control.

Yet thanks to a little known Supreme Court precedent and a culture of corrupt self-protection inside the prison system, none of those guards were ever prosecuted—precisely because of the manner in which they confessed.

Most of the guards retired before they could be fired, meaning they walked with their retirement benefits intact. Over the last five years, Berman’s daughter and the rest of those women were failed by nearly everyone around them at every level of government.

Berman has been emailing and calling everyone he can think of—his congressional representatives, the FBI, federal prosecutors, local prosecutors, the county sheriff, reporters—trying to get justice for his daughter.

“It’s not the system that failed her,” he says. “It’s the people.”

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50% of trans-identifying biological males in Wisconsin prisons convicted of sex crimes

It has been revealed that half of the trans-identifying biological males currently serving out sentences in Wisconsin prisons have been convicted of at least one sex crime.

The statistic was uncovered by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project during its analysis of Wisconsin Department of Corrections data obtained via an April 2022 public records request.

According to the report, of the 161 trans-identifying biological males in prisons across the state, 81 have sex crimes on their record. 

There are a wide range of acts deemed sex crimes under Wisconsin law. They include adultery, incest, sexual exploitation of a child, forced viewing of a sexual act, rape, sexual intercourse without consent, sexual intercourse with a child, indecent behavior with a child, enticing a child, public fornication, and more.

The report did not divulge exactly which crimes the 81 inmates had been convicted of, though details of certain cases have been previously reported on.

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‘This Is Not an Emergency’

Documents uncovered in a civil rights lawsuit show Florida prison officials and medical staff allowed an incarcerated man’s prostate cancer to spread untreated until he was left paralyzed, terminally ill, and afflicted with infected bed sores that rotted to the bone.

When he wrote desperate pleas for help, one official concluded, “This is not an emergency.”

In a federal civil rights lawsuit filed last year, former Florida inmate Elmer Williams alleges that corrections officers and nursing staff denied and delayed medical treatment for months after he filed a grievance against them. The complaint argues these delays were not just bureaucratic incompetence but retaliation “intended and designed to prevent [Williams] from receiving a timely diagnosis.” The lawsuit alleges violations of the Eighth Amendment and the Americans with Disabilities Act; it names several Florida Department of Corrections (FDC) officials and medical staff employed by Centurion, a private health care provider that contracts with the FDC.

Williams, 56, spoke to Reason from the hospital bed where he has spent most of his time since the FDC granted him medical release last October, and where he will in all likelihood spend his final days.

“Slowly, slowly, slowly, they just let me fall apart,” he says.

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I SPENT OVER A YEAR IN SOLITARY BECAUSE OF ONE MAN’S IMAGINATION

I spent much of 2009 in One North, a solitary confinement wing at the Washington State Penitentiary, in Walla Walla, Washington. We were on a 23-and-one schedule: Once each day my cell door would roll open, controlled remotely. I would step out alone, given an hour to pace the empty tier or use a pay phone. Back in my cell, I’d be confronted by more emptiness. A steel sink and toilet, a bunk, a battered paperback, and my own thoughts for company.

What you notice first about One North depends on what time of day you enter the unit. Earlier in the day, it’s the smell—an overpowering mélange of feces, urine, pepper spray, and industrial-grade cleaning solution. The smell is so pungent it seems to have weight to it, like a physical substance. The air seems to pool in your lungs, weighing them down.

Should you arrive later in the day, from midmorning on, the noise is loud enough to disorient you. The stench hits you only after your mind recovers from the clamor. The sound of screaming and clanging bars being rattled by a hundred prisoners at once. People jumping up and down on metal bunks, mule-kicking the steel sinks and toilets. Guards shouting over the PA system. Prisoners shouting at the guards and each other. The entire cacophony plays through rattling, off-key acoustics. It feels like living inside an amplifier with a hole kicked in it, cranked up to full volume.

It took only a few days in this environment for my entire psychology to shift. My mind wandered. I was restless, getting up from my bunk and going to the window in the cell door to stare out at nothing, walking back and forth for hours with no clear thoughts. My mood was darkening. All around me, based on the things they would say or scream or, more disturbingly, their deepening silence, other prisoners were obviously undergoing the same process.

As outrageous as these conditions were, the prison administration’s justification for keeping me in solitary was worse, revealing an obscenely arbitrary process through which officials wield this inhumane punishment against people in their custody. Two prisoners who violate the same facility rule—or no rule at all—can spend radically unequal periods of time in the hole. As I would find out, everything depends on the whims of whichever administrator is randomly assigned to your case.

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Dem bill in California would mandate judges to consider race when doling out prison sentences

A Democrat-backed bill making its way through the California Legislature would require judges in the state to consider a convicted criminal’s race when determining how long to sentence them to prison.

Assembly Member Reggie Jones-Sawyer, the Democratic chair of the California Assembly’s Public Safety Committee, quietly introduced Bill 852 in February. The Assembly went on to pass the little-known legislation in May, and the measure is currently being considered in the state Senate. 

The bill would add a section to the Penal Code of California requiring courts, whenever they have the authority to determine a prison sentence, to “rectify” alleged racial bias in the criminal justice system by taking into account how historically persecuted minorities are affected differently than others.

“It is the intent of the Legislature to rectify the racial bias that has historically permeated our criminal justice system as documented by the California Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans,” the proposed new section to the Penal Code reads. “Whenever the court has discretion to determine the appropriate sentence according to relevant statutes and the sentencing rules of the Judicial Council, the court presiding over a criminal matter shall consider the disparate impact on historically disenfranchised and system-impacted populations.”

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US Prison Allegedly Tortured Prisoners In Retaliation

A new report documents civil rights abuses, including torture, that allegedly occurred at a United States prison in Illinois. It contains several examples of retaliation against prisoners who challenged their abusive treatment and confinement conditions.

Prison staff are accused of creating a “culture of fear and intimidation that systematically suppressed the use of the grievance process,” which effectively emboldens and shields the people who are supposed to be held accountable.

“This report is dedicated to the brave individuals who, despite facing retaliation, physical danger, and psychological trauma, spoke out about the conditions in the Special Management Unit [SMU] at the United States Penitentiary in Thomson, Illinois,” the first page declares.

The Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs, Uptown People’s Law Center in Chicago, and Levy Firestone Muse LLP in Washington, D.C. conducted “at least 100 interviews and legal calls, and reviewed over a thousand pages of correspondence and institutional records.”

“We uncovered a widespread culture of abuse involving officials up and down the chain of command,” the report states [PDF]. “Thomson staff assaulted people in the SMU almost daily—for personal reasons, retaliation for grieving prior abuses, and sometimes for no reason at all.”

“Five individuals imprisoned at USP Thomson died unnatural deaths between 2019 and 2022, the most of any BOP [Bureau of Prisons] facility. Countless other individuals suffered serious injuries and unquantifiable psychological trauma, and many risked grave retaliations just to stand up for their rights.”

As the report makes clear, prisoners who challenge their treatment by filing grievance forms do so at great risk.

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Allison Mack, actress convicted in NXIVM case, released from prison

Former television star Allison Mack, who provided “slaves” to NXIVM leader Keith Raniere for his secret group that blackmailed calorie-starved and sleep-deprived women into sex acts and subjected them to physical branding on their pelvic areas, has been released from federal prison.

The 40-year-old Mack, formerly of Halfmoon, pleaded guilty to racketeering and racketeering conspiracy in 2019 in a deal that required she cooperate with federal prosecutors in Brooklyn. She was released from custody on Monday, according to the website of the federal Bureau of Prisons. 

Two years ago, Senior U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis sentenced Mack to three years in prison, calling her “an essential accomplice” to Raniere. One female victim likened Mack’s role assisting Raniere in the secret group — Dominus Obsequious Sororium, or DOS, which translates in Latin to Lord/Master of the Obedient Female Companions — to that of convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell in her assistance to late sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.

Mack is the first NXIVM defendant who received a prison sentence to complete their term. Former NXIVM president Nancy Salzman, 68, of Halfmoon, who pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy and received a three-and-a-half year sentence, is scheduled to be released in July 2024. NXIVM operations director Clare Bronfman, 44, the Seagrams’ heiress who lived in Manhattan and Clifton Park, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to harbor illegal immigrants for financial gain and fraudulent use of identification and received an 81-month sentence, is expected to be released in June 2025.

Two other defendants — NXIVM education director Lauren Salzman and bookkeeper Kathy Russell, both of whom lived in Halfmoon — received probation.

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Prison Ministry Group Sues Indiana Jail for Banning Amazon Books

A nonprofit prison ministry is suing an Indiana Jail after it instituted a policy that effectively banned the organization from sending books to incarcerated individuals. In their lawsuit, Unshackled Hearts argues that the policy, which prohibits books from being sent through Amazon and online distributors, violates their First Amendment rights.

Unshackled Hearts Ministries is a nonprofit organization that sends religious literature and provides spiritual counseling to prisoners in Indiana. Unshackled Hearts typically uses Amazon to order and deliver books, which the group says is an ideal way to minister to the incarcerated. 

“For the facility, a book sent by a large distributor such as Amazon is far less likely to contain contraband than a book sent by an incarcerated person’s friends or family members,” reads the complaint. “And for Unshackled Hearts, not only does Amazon offer an incredibly large selection of books on virtually every topic under the sun but it also offers free returns if, for instance, a book is rejected by a facility or a person is released or transferred prior to the book’s arrival at the facility.”

However, one jail’s policies have effectively prevented Unshackled Hearts from sending books to inmates. According to the complaint, over the past several years, the Howard County jail has made it increasingly difficult for Unshackled Hearts to carry out its mission. 

Last year, the jail enacted a policy that completely banned book donations, with narrow exceptions for “holy scripture” donated by a “verified religious organization,” educational material from a “verified education center,” and information on rehab sent by a rehab center. 

Unshackled Hearts quickly informed jail officials that the policy was unlawful. In April 2023, the jail instituted a new policy with other major issues. Howard County inmates can receive books only if they are sent directly by the publisher. Books sent through distributors and retailers, like Amazon, will no longer be accepted.

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