Mistreatment of Prisoners Is Called Routine in U.S.

New York Times

May 8, 2004

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/08/national/08PRIS.html?pagewanted=print&position=

By FOX BUTTERFIELD

Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what
has been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American
prisons with little public knowledge or concern,
according to corrections officials, inmates and human
rights advocates.

In Pennsylvania and some other states, inmates are
routinely stripped in front of other inmates before
being moved to a new prison or a new unit within their
prison. In Arizona, male inmates at the Maricopa County
jail in Phoenix are made to wear women’s pink underwear
as a form of humiliation.

At Virginia’s Wallens Ridge maximum security prison,
new inmates have reported being forced to wear black
hoods, in theory to keep them from spitting on guards,
and said they were often beaten and cursed at by guards
and made to crawl.

The corrections experts say that some of the worst
abuses have occurred in Texas, whose prisons were under
a federal consent decree during much of the time
President Bush was governor because of crowding and
violence by guards against inmates. Judge William Wayne
Justice of Federal District Court imposed the decree
after finding that guards were allowing inmate gang
leaders to buy and sell other inmates as slaves for
sex.

The experts also point out that the man who directed
the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last
year and trained the guards there resigned under
pressure as director of the Utah Department of
Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled
to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who
suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole
time.

The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an
executive of a private prison company, one of whose
jails was under investigation by the Justice Department
when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison
officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked
by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the
country’s criminal justice system.

Mr. McCotter, 63, is director of business development
for Management & Training Corporation, a Utah-based
firm that says it is the third-largest private prison
company, operating 13 prisons. In 2003, the company’s
operation of the Santa Fe jail was criticized by the
Justice Department and the New Mexico Department of
Corrections for unsafe conditions and lack of medical
care for inmates. No further action was taken.

In response to a request for an interview on Friday,
Mr. McCotter said in a written statement that he had
left Iraq last September, just after a ribbon-cutting
ceremony to open Abu Ghraib.

"I was not involved in any aspect of the facility’s
operation after that time," he said.

Nationwide, during the last quarter century, over 40
state prison systems were under some form of court
order, for brutality, crowding, poor food or lack of
medical care, said Marc Mauer, assistant director of
the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group
in Washington that calls for alternatives to
incarceration.

In a 1999 opinion, Judge Justice wrote of the situation
in Texas, "Many inmates credibly testified to the
existence of violence, rape and extortion in the prison
system and about their own suffering from such abysmal
conditions."

In a case that began in 2000, a prisoner at the Allred
Unit in Wichita Falls, Tex., said he was repeatedly
raped by other inmates, even after he appealed to
guards for help, and was allowed by prison staff to be
treated like a slave, being bought and sold by various
prison gangs in different parts of the prison. The
inmate, Roderick Johnson, has filed suit against the
Texas Department of Criminal Justice and the case is
now before the United States Court of Appeals for the
Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, said Kara Gotsch, public
policy coordinator for the National Prison Project of
the American Civil Liberties Union, which is
representing Mr. Johnson.

Asked what Mr. Bush knew about abuse in Texas prisons
while he was governor, Trent Duffy, a White House
spokesman, said the problems in American prisons were
not comparable to the abuses exposed at Abu Ghraib.

The corrections experts are careful to say they do not
know to what extent the brutality and humiliation at
Abu Ghraib were intended to break the prisoners for
interrogation or were just random acts.

But Chase Riveland, a former secretary of corrections
in Washington State and Colorado and now a prison
consultant based near Seattle, said, "In some
jurisdictions in the United States there is a prison
culture that tolerates violence, and it’s been there a
long time."

This culture has been made worse by the quadrupling of
the number of prison and jail inmates to 2.1 million
over the last 25 years, which has often resulted in
crowding, he said. The problems have been compounded by
the need to hire large numbers of inexperienced and
often undertrained guards, Mr. Riveland said.

Some states have a hard time recruiting enough guards,
Mr. Riveland said, particularly Arizona, where the pay
is very low. "Retention in these states is a big
problem and so unqualified people get promoted to be
lieutenants or captains in a few months," he said.

Something like this process may have happened in Iraq,
where the Americans tried to start a new prison system
with undertrained military police officers from Army
reserve units, Mr. Riveland suggested.

When Mr. Ashcroft announced the appointment of the team
to restore Iraq’s criminal justice system last year,
including Mr. McCotter, he said, "Now all Iraqis can
taste liberty in their native land, and we will help
make that freedom permanent by assisting them to
establish an equitable criminal justice system based on
the rule of law and standards of basic human rights."

A Justice Department spokeswoman, Monica Goodling, did
not return phone calls on Friday asking why Mr.
Ashcroft had chosen Mr. McCotter even though his firm’s
operation of the Santa Fe jail had been criticized by
the Justice Department.

Mr. McCotter has a long background in prisons. He had
been a military police officer in Vietnam and had risen
to be a colonel in the Army. His last post was as
warden of the Army prison at Fort Leavenworth.

After retiring from the Army, Mr. Cotter was head of
the corrections departments in New Mexico and Texas
before taking the job in Utah.

In Utah, in addition to the death of the mentally ill
inmate, Mr. McCotter also came under criticism for
hiring a prison psychiatrist whose medical license was
on probation and who was accused of Medicaid fraud and
writing prescriptions for drug addicts.

In an interview with an online magazine,
Corrections.com, last January, Mr. McCotter recalled
that of all the prisons in Iraq, Abu Ghraib "is the
only place we agreed as a team was truly closest to an
American prison. They had cell housing and
segregation."

But 80 to 90 percent of the prison had been destroyed,
so Mr. McCotter set about rebuilding it, everything
from walls and toilets to handcuffs and soap. He
employed 100 Iraqis who had worked in the prison under
Saddam Hussein, and paid for everything with wads of
cash, up to $3 million, that he carried with him.

Another problem, Mr. McCotter quickly discovered, was
that the Iraqi staff, despite some American training,
quickly reverted to their old ways, "shaking down
families, shaking down inmates, letting prisoners buy
their way out of prison."

So the American team fired the guards and went with
former Iraqi military personnel. "They didn’t have any
bad habits and did things exactly the way we trained
them."

Mr. McCotter said he worked closely with American
military police officers at the prison, but he did not
give any names.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company