Suicide reveals squalid prison conditions

[Anonymous]

A single slug to the temple works wonders and is painless.

[nimdA]

Yeah that works well also.

[Karass]

I guess I shouldn't have spoken up for human rights -- at least not those of convicted violent felons.

Of course, privately owned prisons are not like cultish BM programs for teens. But maybe there is something to the fact that both are privately owned, not too closely scrutinized by the state, staffed by employees with questionable backgrounds and qualifications, and are able to get away with lots of things behind closed doors that would be a lot tougher to hide in a state-operated or monitored facility.

We reap what we sow, which is kind of the point of my signature quote. Most convicts don't serve life sentences, so they will eventually be back out on the streets -- just like most teen program inmates. Think about that before you decide what level of inhumanity or illegal treatment should be allowed.

[Rachael]

I think we are talking about two completely different issues here. I agree that all prisoners regardless of offense have certain basic rights including protection from abuse whether sexual, physical or psychological. However, what was described in the article as the cause of this child molester's suicide is not abuse. Having water on the floor (no matter how frequently) and a smelly pillow is not abuse. From my perspective it's insulting to suggest that it is. And the fact is that all prison inmates in N. America have more protection from abuse than we ever did simply in that they can tell someone when it happens and make it stop.

[hanzomon4]

Having water on the floor (no matter how frequently) and a smelly pillow is not abuse. From my perspective it's insulting to suggest that it is. And the fact is that all prison inmates in N. America have more protection from abuse than we ever did simply in that they can tell someone when it happens and make it stop.

The water and pillow thing was just one thing mentioned, go back and re-read it. This guy's suicide drew the intention of the authorities which revealed more problems, like what happened to that lady.

It's not true that inmates in jail have more protection from abuse or that they could just tell some one. The article mentioned how complaints from inmates and their family were ignored. Check this out link, and also look at the stories of juvi prisons like the Texas Youth Commission. Inmate abuse is a big problem that largely gets ignored.

[Rachael]

I stand by everything I've posted, but I understand the greater issue at hand. Prison reform and the privatization of important public sector institutions are very important topics. However, they have nothing to do with "The Troubled Teen Industry" (except in the case of juvenile programs - which we were not discussing). Posting such a topic in this forum suggests a direct correlation. The implication that the systemically abusive "troubled teen industry" is in any way comparable to the occasional isolated case or pocket of abuse in the prison industry is virulently objectionable and I take offense. This discussion belongs in the "Open free for all" forum along with issues like the Rwandan genocide and other such genuine but unrelated issues.

We were not legitimate prisoners, and care should be taken to maintain that distinction as much as possible.

[hanzomon4]

Well we agree and disagree, due perhaps to a differing point of view. The legitimacy of the prisoner makes little difference to me in the way I view the issue of institutionalized abuse. The troubled teen industry issue shares much with other issues especially private prisons; troubled teen programs are private prisons minus due process prior to entry, Looking at one may provide insights into the other.

However I understand your objections and respect your opinion. We both agree that it's an important issue but we disagree in regards to any relation with the troubled teen industry. I cede nothing but will think hard about your particular perspective.

[Oz girl]

Rachael I can see the correlation.  I take the point extremely valid of program survivors who say that they have been incarcerated without charge or in many cases crime. However the link  between the issues is the idea that someone somewhere has decided that either prisoners or program kids have broken the social rules and so therefore it is acceptable to treat them in an inhumane fashion.

This is fundamentally morally wrong whether it be a suspected but not charged terrorist in guantanamo bay, an actual criminal who may legitimately belong behind bars, a POW in abu Gharib or a program kid. If someone has been  convicted of a reasonably serious crime in a proper court their penalty should be loss of liberty not denial of access to basic living standards.
Western societies are making a grave mistake in adopting the idea that harsh treatment is acceptable when they feel that the ends justify the means and I think that parents who send their kids to this industry are simply applying this on a micro level.

[java.gurl]

The private prison industry sounds a lot like the private 'troubled teen' industry. The warden at this GEO Group owned facility ruled “based on verbal and physical intimidation.” Sounds a lot like an adult version of many of the wonderful teen facilities profiled on Fornits.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19638219/

Good Article BTW...


These private prisons are popping up EVERYWHERE! And the individual states LOVE EM'!

Less money spent on the care of a prisoner in the state run facilities is music to everyones ears and wallets!

Plus the CO's have a shot to make a tad bit more money and get better benefit's.

Since they are not state funded and run, the quality of living standards is being compromised, to sat the least. In the state run prisons they have to keep everything in tip top shape or else the inmates will call "Amnesty International", "Jesse Jackson" or the illustrious "Reverand Al Sharpton"       Along with the obligatory lawsuits.

These inmates in state prisons think it is bad now just wait and see how bad it will feel in these private run prisons.

 No more cushy classrooms to get your GED in, no more money payed to your account for going to school everyday, no more hot breakfast, hot lunch and hot dinners. No more yummy juice with every meal, no more holiday meals consisting of turkey and the trimmings with pumpkin pie afterwards. Nada, zip, zilch, nothing. No more commissary, no more lifting weights, no more cosmotology, tv time, pictures on the walls, comfortability, Etc.

I feel a persons placement should be judged by the crimes. To send a 1st time shoplifting offender into a hard core prison camp may be a tad bit much. If I were to play "Devils Advocate" it may go something like this: Scaring the wits out of a person in that posistion may seriously guarentee a non repeat offender. It may help slow down the revolving door syndrome.

As with everything it has it's pro's and con's.

Maybe we need prisons like the one in "Midnight Express"...LOL....

[Covergaard]

I think that we should work on several fronts.

1) Use community service, foot bracelet compared with amount of time in a real job. Issue non-violent offenders with a GPS foot bracelet and let them service in community service program during the day. If they have a job, they get those days off when they work.

It is a cheap solution. It keeps them with their family. It keeps them in job where they pay taxes. In Denmark we have increased the amount of people, who can aviod time in jail, so we now have about 80 people out of 100,000 in prison. (The number for your country is about 800 people.) We do not commit less crimes, we simply deal with people in another manner.

2) Use night jail for those, who can not find out so stay away from bars, but have a job. Here they are called open jails. People can leave in the morning after some chores and breakfast. (They have to make it themselves as well as laundry etc.) They have to be back before dinner. They have to have a job and a deal is made with their employer, so he knows when the prisoner can come and has to leave.

3) Increase prison standards for the rest. You have good jails in your country. I saw this jail for moms at the infamous Dr. Phil site:
http://www.drphil.com/shows/show/917

And we have our new Supermax prison complete with family rooms and workshops so people can work in simple jobs inside, so they have some basic skills once they leave.
http://www.ostjylland.info/sitemap.php

4) Prevent children from dropping out of school due to crime. Create a dayprogram about their time in the local school with help from their parents. We are not talking Straight. Just basic exercise, mandatory time with the parents, community service and some group therapy (not exceeding our 2 hour limit defined by our authorities.)
http://www.retsreformnu.dk/Retsreform/rrn_usversion.htm

In order to save tax-payers for expenses, you have to invest in prevention and systems to keep people on the outside and in a job.

We have an old saying: Idleness is the root of all evil

We are just trying here in my country and we are far from done.

[java.gurl]

Covergaard: You make some good points and I like your examples. BUT (there is ALWAYS a but) not every prison in the USA operates like the one featured on "Dr.Phil".
 
There are lots of women giving birth behind bars and have the kids ripped out of their arms the next morning. IF they do not have a family member ready, willing and able to be there to pick up the baby come release time the state will intervene and the baby becomes a ward of the state and the foster home games begin.

The very lucky ones have a person  willing to take the innocent baby home until momma comes home to resume her role as a caretaker and mother. Hopefully.

I will speak of the prison in the state I live in.Connecticut. There is one prison for women. There is also a federal prison for women. So, that makes 2.

In the state prison you have women that are sentenced for life terms and those waiting for their sentences all mixed up together. There is no such thing as a county jail for women in Ct.

This prison will take care of the expectant momma medically. Come time to give birth she is brought to the hospital and has her baby while shackled by her ankle to the bed. No visitors, no balloons, no special after birth meals, no champagne toasts, nada.

You get a clean bill of health and 24 hours later your shackled up and sent back to the prison to "rest" in the "medical unit" for a few days.
 
IF you are lucky enough to of found a guardian for the baby then you will be allowed visits if you're eligable for them. Hopefully contact ones.

If the state became involved then your visits begin on their terms.

There is no breastfeeding BTW. No pumping the milk to give to baby. You need to dry up the reserve the way any woman not breastfeeding would.

It is a harsh, cold reality.

No one is overjoyed for the latest arrival into the world. No one is patting you on the back either.

You are considered irresponsible for getting pregnant while living a life where there is no room for an innocent child to grow and thrive.

God forbid you came in pregnant and hooked on drugs. You WILL be looked upon as low as the scum on the bottom of a fetid pond! The prison staff have no respect for you and will tell you so. It is a sad place to be in.

You are housed with women who have killed their own kids while you are nurturing one in your womb. You feel helpless and out of control. You want to protect the baby no matter the consequences around you. Given time in a protected environment you begin to think and make plans and have goals and dreams for you and your childs life.

As for ankle bracelets, they are passed out depending on you and your crime and your past record.

There is no such thing as a prison where you spend the night and leave the next day and turn yourself back in that night to repeat the process again. Not in this state anyways. One of the richest of the 50 and we still do not know how to deal with our inmate population and drug issues. Go figure.

The crowding makes it impossible to have parenting groups for expectant moms in prison, to have substance abuse counseling, anger management therapy, counselors that help you secure a roof over your head upon your release, etc.

There are women released in the middle of the winter with only a sweatsuit to their name and they are dropped off at the courthouse dowtown and then from their if they are "alone" in the world they start to panic for good cause. They need a place to go and are hungry at this point and they are looking around watching the snow swirl about them wondering what the fuck they are going to do now. The local shelter is full, they have no money so what to do? 9 times out of 10 they quickly resort back to old ways. A gals gotta live right? It is not about getting high either. It is about basic survival. How far can one get broke and wearing a sweatsuit in the dead of winter? It is a sad place to be. Very sad. This scenario plays itself out in different ways everyday a gal is released from the prison.

It sounds like Denmark is trying hard to help their inmates.

I'd need to research further to find out why Denmarks ways of dealing with criminals seems to be more successfull than Connecticuts way. It is not like Ct. can't afford it either. We have some very wealthy and powerful people residing here in their protected from the real world homes...Did I say homes? I meant to say "Uber Mansions".

[Covergaard]

The reason for our choices lied in the fact, that we have made things expensive and bureaucratic for our selves. It is odd, but that is the case.

We do properly have the highest amount of public workers compared to our population. If we were to jail 10 times as many people, our country would collapse.

Another issue is the lack of hands. Due to efforts to preserve our culture, we turn our backs on people coming from other countries. My mother is from Finland and have lived and worked here since she was 20, but even today after over 40 years as tax-paying citizens her accent is the first to be attacked if a customer has a bad day in her shop.

So every hand is needed. We can’t afford to loose very many to a life in crime, so we run an intense behavior modification program once you are convicted but does also control the amount of weapon very carefully in our society. Even knives outside the kitchen has to be registered and city centers are totally off-limit so I had to ride my bicycle around the city back when I was young when I came home from fishing trips late evening.

Another thing is the 1984-aspect of Denmark. We can a DNA-register of every newborn since 1980. Because over 90 percent of all children attend nursery, kindergarten and clubs after school (School-spare time-arrangement – a part of the school which is a after-school recreation center for children grade zero-3), records of children and their family exist at the City Hall - Even mine.

That means that we are more likely to catch problems within a family than in other countries. Sometime it is also a problem if there is an employee, who is over-ambitious, but our press is rather free and they are quick to interfere in such cases. But we catch a lot of troubles in the family before they become too big to handle for the single family, so we can live with the records.

We do however have one problem and it is a recent phenomenon as result of the double income society and our wealthy society. It seems that youth are less together with their family as they used to. Some cannot even speak good Danish because their rich parents have hired nannies from east-Europe. Others have formed gangs (Not with guns, but with knives).

In Denmark no youth below 15 can be charged with a crime – not even murder. And we lack day-treatment programs. So often those youth are allowed to make petty crimes until they become 15 and can be placed in front of a court. So day-treatment is something we are working on right now. Almost every town has now a SSP co-operation (School, social security, Police) and we are setting day-treatment up in various forms. It is not fully working yet.

http://www.cphpost.dk/get/99796.html

A month ago Aarhus (The next-largest town in Denmark) had to shut all spare time activities down for youth in the entire town for a week because two brothers has become violent. 2 persons in a town of 300,000 people could manage that. They should of course have been put in day-treatment the first time they had hurt someone.

Back to the behavior modification in our prisons. Here is an example: 12 years ago a female doctor traveled to other part of the country, where she murdered the wife of her lover and her two children aged 3 and 8. The wife and the daughter died in the fire the doctor started. The boy died after naming that the doctor had been there. She was sentenced to life. 11 years after she was released and married to a child-molester in the jail and is now living her life working in an ordinary job (Her license to be a doctor was revoked for life.)

So a triple murder ends up serving 11 years. Another case was a driver without license killing a girl while he was under the influence of drug: Prison term 1,5 year.

Does they commit crimes when they come out? Since WWII we only had 4 people killing again, so something indicates that you can release even killers back into society again without risking people getting killed.

At Christmas 1/3 of the prison population is home with their family. No increase in crime can be measured and the police do not need to find people. They return voluntary.

But we still find that our present system is too expensive and perhaps more people can be sentenced to community service than before.

I have found material in English about the Nordic countries, so you have something to compare with.

http://www.kriminalforsorgen.dk/Publika ... lepubl.pdf

This is the main page about our prison system in Denmark (For English look at the upper right corner):

http://www.kriminalforsorgen.dk

About newborns in Jail: By separating mother and child during the first 6 months of the life of the child, you are hurting it. It is not the child, who has committed the crime. Of course the mother needs to remain locked up, but why not use the time to educate the mother in parenting? Some of the mothers do not have any clues about being a mother and if the child is not helped, a new prison inmate would be at risk to be developed in 15-20 years.

What about your society? Have some tried to calculated on the numbers to find out what could be saved if you only jailed 10 percent of the people you jail today. Have someone tried to estimate if there would be an increase in crime if all non-violent or low-risk offenders only was jailed during the night and had to either work, attend school or do community service during the day?

[Karass]

What about your society? Have some tried to calculated on the numbers to find out what could be saved if you only jailed 10 percent of the people you jail today. Have someone tried to estimate if there would be an increase in crime if all non-violent or low-risk offenders only was jailed during the night and had to either work, attend school or do community service during the day?

The U.S. government doesn't care about such calculations. Apparently we have enough wealth as a nation, and enough taxpayers, that we can afford to write off the large numbers of Americans who end up in the prison system and are therefore more likely to get better educated in how to live a life of crime rather than a life of contributing to society. When they re-offend, we will deal with them even more harshly than before, and spend even more money to wearhouse them. The worst of them will be executed, saving the state vast amounts of taxpayer money.

The U.S. attitude seems to be that only a certain percentage of the citizen population actually matters -- actually has a meaningful contribution to make. For now, that might be a majority, but eventually may become a minority of the total population. The rest can go to hell, or go to prison, whichever comes first. We will eventually become like the society in the movie Gattaca, although with your DNA testing at birth, I think Denmark is ahead of us on developing that "perfect," genetically-engineered society.

[Anonymous]

Federal concentration camps have been built.  :scared:

[hanzomon4]

This company is definitely in the troubled teen business, it's the GEO Group(formerly known as Wackenhut) and they run private juvenile prisons  all over the US. Many have been shut down for horrific allegations of abuse and lawsuits. I found some links while trolling for  news on ISAC related to these bastards.

Texas' youth jail operators have troubled histories
GEO Group's facilities were closed in Louisiana, Michigan
Locked Inside A Nightmare



I also found more information regarding that women mentioned on page two of the msnbc article, LINK]

AUSTIN - A civil rights lawsuit announced Wednesday blames the private corrections system for the 2004 suicide of a South Texas woman found hanging in her cell after reporting that a male inmate raped her.

LeTisha Tapia, who died at the Val Verde County Jail in July 2004, was housed in the same cell block as male inmates and reported that guards allowed male and female inmates to have sex with each other, according to the lawsuit filed by the Texas Civil Rights Project on behalf of the woman's family.

"It's unbelievably outrageous what happened here. Sexual relations between inmates is just beyond the pale," civil rights attorney Scott Medlock said Wednesday. "When prisons and jails are privatized, the company's bottom line is placed above inmate health and safety."

The lawsuit, filed in the federal district court for the Western District of Texas in San Antonio, names GEO Group Inc., the nation's second-largest private prison company, among the defendants.

"We obviously haven't had an opportunity to review the lawsuit. So, at this point, I wouldn't have any comment," said GEO Group spokesman Pablo Paez.

Also declining immediate comment were the U.S. Marshals Service and several Val Verde County officials named as defendants in the civil action. The Marshals Service contracts with Val Verde County for jail space and the county, in turn, hires GEO Group to run the jail, which houses 784 inmates.

Tapia, who spent nearly six months in the jail before her death, was awaiting transfer to a federal facility after pleading guilty to a marijuana possession charge, Medlock said, adding that she had about a year left on her sentence.

While in the county jail, male inmates were moved into maximum-security, solitary confinement cells that are connected to the women's cells by a common day room, the lawsuit said, but jailers allowed the inmates to have contact with each other.

"Female inmates discovered they could open the cells of the male inmates using a toothbrush," the lawsuit alleged. "Guards would open the door between the hallways and tell the inmates to 'do what you want to do, or what you gotta do.' Some female inmates began to have sexual relations with male inmates."

The close quarters for male and female inmates continued for more than a month, the lawsuit said.

Tapia reported the sexual contact to the prison warden in April 2004, but he did not move the male inmates to another section of the jail, the lawsuit said.

Tapia was raped after female inmates forced her into a male inmate's cell as punishment for being a "snitch," the lawsuit said, and her mental state deteriorated.

Tapia later reported feeling depressed and anxious and asked to see a psychiatrist in a medical request marked "URGENT," according to the complaint, but she did not see a doctor for another 10 days.

After Tapia smuggled a telephone from the infirmary into her jail cell, an individual described only as "Lt. Duggar" physically and psychologically abused her and sexually humiliated her in front of others, the lawsuit alleges in graphic detail.

The next day, Tapia was found dead in her jail cell, hanging by a sheet.