Category: prison violence

Johnny Cash, prison reformer

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By Alan Bean

This fascinating essay touches on Johnny Cash’s lifelong prison ministry.  (It was produced for the BBC, which explains the funny spelling). It may sound odd to hear songs about “kickin’ and a-gougin’ in the mud, and the blood and the beer” characterized as a ministry, but that’s exactly what they were.  I purchased Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison a few years ago thinking this was the only prison album he recorded and likely the only prison concert he performed.  Not so.  He recorded two prison albums and performed at prisons across the United State throughout his 30-year career. (more…)

The “unbelievable brutality” at Walnut Grove

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Michael McIntosh

In 2010, the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a federal class-action lawsuit against GEO Group when reports emerged of sexual abuse, improper medical care, extended prisoner isolation, and violence among inmates at the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility located near Jackson, Mississippi.  Earlier this year, a settlement in the case required the state of Mississippi to remove all youth from the Walnut Grove facility. 

Unfortunately, the damage was already done.

One of the kids at the facility, Mike, suffered from severe brain damage from youth-on-youth violence incited by a prison guard.  Dozens of other kids at the facility were also severely injured.  Last fall, Friends of Justice had the opportunity to meet with Mike’s father, Michael McIntosh, during a trip to Mississippi.  He told us the tragic story of his son’s experience at Walnut Grove.  You can read more about Mike’s story in the article below.  MWN

The Unbelievable Brutality Unleashed on Kids in For-Profit Prisons

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. (more…)

Private prison group ends contracts with Mississippi

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In the wake of the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional facility scandal, the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) announced that GEO Group — one of the largest private prison corporations in the U.S. — will no longer operate three correctional facilities in the state.  By July 20, the corporation will no longer manage the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional, East Mississippi Correctional, or the Marshall County Correctional facilities.

In 2010, reports emerged of sexual abuse, improper medical care, extended prisoner isolation, and violence among inmates at the Walnut Grove facility.  These reports sparked a class-action lawsuit filed by the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center.  The lawsuit resulted in the removal of youth from the Walnut Grove facility. According to the Associated Press, MDOC also had concerns about incidents that occurred at the other GEO Group facilities in the state.

This could be an opportunity for MDOC to re-think its practice of contracting with private prison corporations.  Unfortunately, it may be a lost opportunity.  It seems that Corrections Commissioner Christopher Epps is still interested in privatization.  Epps told the Associated Press that MDOC is “reaching out to those private operators” in their search for new groups to manage the three facilities.  See the article below for more details.  -MWN

Florida group to end Miss. prison contracts

BY JACK ELLIOTT JR.
ASSOCIATED PRESS

JACKSON, Miss. — The Mississippi Department of Corrections says GEO Group Inc., one of the country’s largest private prison operators, will no longer manage three facilities in Mississippi.

On Thursday, the Boca Raton, Fla.-based company said it was backing out of a contract to manage the East Mississippi Correctional Facility near the Lost Gap community by July 19. Company officials told The Associated Press on Friday that it had nothing else to say.

Corrections Commissioner Christopher Epps told the AP on Friday that the department felt it might get a better price if all three prisons were presented as a package to other corrections management companies.

Epps said he would expect GEO Group to end its ties to the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility in Walnut Grove and Marshall County Correctional Facility in Holly Springs by July 20.

“We feel this may be a golden opportunity to provide a better price for the taxpayers of the state and at the same time maybe do a better job in the operation of the facilities,” Epps said. “That’s what I would like to see.” (more…)

DOJ: Sexual misconduct at Walnut Grove youth facility among worst in nation

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By Melanie Wilmoth Navarro

After reports emerged of physical and sexual abuse, inadequate medical care, and extended isolation of youth at the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility (WGYCF) in Mississippi, the ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center filed a federal class-action lawsuit against GEO Group, the private prison corporation that operates the facility.

Last month, a settlement reached in the WGYCF case required the state of Mississippi to remove all youth from WGYCF and move them to another facility.  On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) released its report on the Walnut Grove investigation.  According to a DOJ press release:

“The United States conducted an in-depth investigation, including an on-site inspection of WGYCF, accompanied by expert consultants in the areas of corrections, medical care and mental health care.  Evidence reveals systematic, egregious and dangerous practices at WGYCF exacerbated by a lack of accountability and controls.  The Justice Department found reasonable cause to believe that a pattern or practice of unconstitutional conduct exists in several areas, including:

  • Deliberate indifference to staff sexual misconduct and inappropriate behavior with youth;
  • Use of excessive use of force by WGYCF staff on youth;
  • Inadequate protection of youth from youth-on-youth violence;
  • Deliberate indifference to youth at risk of self-injurious and suicidal behaviors; and
  • Deliberate indifference to the medical needs of youth.”

The DOJ found that sexual misconduct at WGYCF was “among the worst that we have seen in any facility anywhere in the nation.” (more…)

Victory for Walnut Grove

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According to a federal consent decree, the state of Mississippi will no longer house juveniles at the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility. The juvenile facility, located in Walnut Grove, MS, is run by GEO Group, the second largest private prison corporation in the U.S.

In November 201o, the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a federal class-action lawsuit against GEO Group when reports emerged of sexual abuse, improper medical care, extended prisoner isolation, and violence among inmates at Walnut Grove. According to the ACLU press release, youth at the facility were “forced to live in barbaric and unconstitutional conditions and [were] subjected to excessive uses of force by prison staff.”

The consent decree requires the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) to remove all youth under the age of 17 from the privately-run Walnut Grove facility and house them in a publicly-operated facility instead. The state is required to provide rehabilitative services for the youth and implement measures to protect them from sexual and physical abuse. Under this decree, the state of Mississippi is also prohibited from placing any youth in solitary confinement. MWN

Ground-Breaking Federal Consent Decree Will Prohibit Solitary Confinement of Youth Convicted as Adults, and Bar Their Incarceration in Violence-Ridden, For-Profit Prison Run by GEO Group

By KAREN WILSON

Children under the supervision of the Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) will no longer be housed in a privately run prison or subjected to brutal solitary confinement under the terms of a groundbreaking settlement of a federal class action lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union.

The lawsuit charged that conditions at the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility, which houses youth convicted as adults, are unconstitutional. The facility is operated by GEO Group Inc., the nation’s second largest private prison corporation.

“This represents a sea change in the way the MDOC 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.” (more…)

Major article on crime and mass incarceration in the New Yorker

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By Alan Bean

Adam Gopnik is an art critic, not an expert on mass incarceration.  But he has read widely on the subject and this major piece in the New Yorker offers an extended commentary on ideas recently shared by Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow), Robert Perkinson (Texas Tough), William Stunz (The Collapse of American Criminal Justice), and Franklin Zimring’s book on New York City (The City That Became Safe).  No book can say everything that needs to be said about the American Gulag, so a carefully-crafted piece that combines the best insights of leading authorities is extremely helpful.

Following Stuntz and Zimring, “The Caging of America” notes that major improvements can be enacted without revolutionary reforms.  The crime rate of New York City has fallen by 80% (twice the national average) without significant poverty programs.  People are no better off, by and large, they are just less likely to transgress.

If Gopnik had added the ground-breaking insights of David Kennedy (Don’t Shoot) to his mix, he would be less inclined to believe that crime, especially violent crime, falls of its own accord.  But Kennedy, like Stuntz and Zimring, isn’t waiting for the New Jerusalem to descend from heaven anytime soon.  These authors believe that utopian dreaming can be just an inimical to real reform as the tough-on-crime politics that created the problem in the first place.  

Gopnik’s piece concludes like this:

“Oh, I have taken too little care of this!” King Lear cries out on the heath in his moment of vision. “Take physic, pomp; expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.” “This” changes; in Shakespeare’s time, it was flat-out peasant poverty that starved some and drove others as mad as poor Tom. In Dickens’s and Hugo’s time, it was the industrial revolution that drove kids to mines. But every society has a poor storm that wretches suffer in, and the attitude is always the same: either that the wretches, already dehumanized by their suffering, deserve no pity or that the oppressed, overwhelmed by injustice, will have to wait for a better world. At every moment, the injustice seems inseparable from the community’s life, and in every case the arguments for keeping the system in place were that you would have to revolutionize the entire social order to change it—which then became the argument for revolutionizing the entire social order. In every case, humanity and common sense made the insoluble problem just get up and go away. Prisons are our this. We need take more care. (emphasis added)

Has common sense made our problems “just get up and go away?”

If the problem is violent crime, a case could be made.  Even so, as Kennedy demonstrates in Don’t Shoot, violent crime rages on in cities like New Orleans and Baltimore with no solution in sight.  Common sense isn’t all that common.

If the problem is mass incarceration, no big-time fix is in sight.  Prison populations have leveled out, and in some places incarceration rates have actually dropped; but America still locks up over 2 million people, and it will take more than common sense to change that fact.  As Michelle Alexander argues, when careers and corporate fortunes are dependent on the status quo, change requires something akin to a revolution.

Gopnik believes that a massive drop in the American crime rate means mass incarceration was a mistake.  Not everyone agrees.  In fact, it is frequently argued that crime rates have fallen because we have locked up so many criminals.  So long as the American mainstream believes this (and it does) mass incarceration, with all its attendant woes, will flourish.    

The Caging of America

Why do we lock up so many people?

by

Prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock. (more…)

Profiting from Prison

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by Melanie Wilmoth

Over the past decade, federal and state governments have increasingly turned to prison privatization. A report released this week by The Sentencing Project highlights the rise of private prisons in the U.S. and the consequences of privatization.

Private prisons now hold approximately 8% of the entire prison population in the U.S. This shift toward privatization, The Sentencing Project reports, began with public policies enacted in the 1970s and 1980s:

“The War on Drugs and harsher sentencing policies, including mandatory minimum sentences, fueled a rapid expansion in the nation’s prison population. The resulting burden on the public sector led private companies to reemerge during the 1970s to operate halfway houses. They extended their reach in the 1980s by contracting with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to detain undocumented immigrants.”

Private prison corporations are in the business of warehousing prisoners. They contribute to and profit from mass incarceration. With the help of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), for-profit prison companies have lobbied for mandatory minimum sentences, three strikes laws, truth-in-sentencing policies, and immigrant detention centers. As a result of increasing prison privatization, two of the largest private prison companies, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group, have combined annual revenues exceeding $2.9 billion. (more…)

A Life Not Lived

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By Olivia Lennox

A Life Not Lived

On January 3rd the campaigning organisation Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a report entitled ‘Against All Odds: Prison Conditions for Youth Offenders Serving Life without Parole Sentences in the United States’.  It is based on research conducted over a six year period, and it makes interesting and sometimes shocking reading.

The report deals with the plight of children incarcerated in adult prisons who due to the sentence they have received have no or at least very little prospect of ever seeing the outside world again.  They estimate there to be 2570 such young offenders in this position at the present time. HRW does not question the fact that the people their report deals with are offenders and that they should be punished for their crimes, but they do question the imposition of a life without parole sentence on such young people, and they also highlight the treatment and experiences those young people face.

Physical Violence

Building on previous studies it is established that under-eighteens in adult prison are, “twice as likely to be beaten by staff and fifty percent more likely to be attacked with a weapon than minors in juvenile facilities.”  Numerous examples are given of evidence provided by inmates that puts such statistics into a personal context.  Amongst them is that of Michael S., who was seventeen when he entered prison.  He wrote that:  ‘On several occasions I have been physically assaulted. I reported the first assault, but from that point forward I deduced that it was best to remain silent as I cannot afford to be labeled [an informant] in my current circumstances.’    (more…)