U.S. Seeing Squalor and Unconcern in Southern Jail By ERICA GOODEJUNE 7, 2014 JACKSON, Miss. — Open fires sometimes burn unheeded in the solitary-confinement units of the East Mississippi Correctional Facility, a privately run state prison in Meridian, 90 miles east of here. Inmates spend months in near-total darkness. Illnesses go untreated. Dirt, feces and, occasionally, blood are caked on the walls of cells. For years, the prison, the state’s primary facility for inmates with mental illnesses, has been plagued by problems. When a previous private operator, the GEO Group, left in 2012 after complaints to the state about squalor and lack of medical treatment, hopes rose that conditions would improve. But two years later, advocates for inmates assert that little has changed under the current operator, Management and Training Corporation, a Utah-based company. Civil rights lawyers and medical and mental health experts who toured the facility recently painted a picture of an institution where violence is frequent, medical treatment substandard or absent, and corruption common among corrections officers, who receive low wages and minimal training.Photographs taken during the tour and obtained by The New York Times showed charred door frames, broken light fixtures and toilets, exposed electrical wires, and what advocates said were infected wounds on prisoners’ arms and legs, offering an unusual window into a prison at the center of a legal controversy. “Photographs don’t lie,” said Margaret Winter, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, which joined with the Southern Poverty Law Center to file suit a year ago over conditions at the prison. “I’ve been doing this for more than 20 years, and I’m pretty convinced that there is nothing out there that has been made public that is this shocking.” The Mississippi corrections commissioner, Christopher B. Epps, who won praise several years ago for reducing the use of solitary confinement in the state, and the other defendants have denied the lawsuit’s allegations. Mr. Epps declined to answer questions about the prison but said by email that conditions there had “improved tremendously” since Management and Training Corporation, or M.T.C., began running it. “I have toured the facility and have seen the improvements firsthand,” he said. “We are committed to running a constitutionally sound prison and look forward to communicating that point in court.” But current and former inmates described an atmosphere in which prisoners lived in fear of attacks by gang members allowed to move freely through prison units and were forced to beg for basic medical treatment. They said some set fires — using contraband matches or loose wires, according to advocates — to get the attention of guards, who sometimes ignored the flames, simply allowing them to burn out. Christopher Lindsey, 28, who was released from East Mississippi in July, said in an interview that he had gone blind after months of not receiving appropriate treatment for the glaucoma he has had since childhood. “I was crying in the cell, my eyes were hurting, bloodshot red, and I was slowly losing my eyesight,” he said. Willie Hughes, 49, who was released in December, said in an interview that an infected sore on his leg had become gangrenous from neglect while he was in prison, and that a doctor had told him after his release that he narrowly escaped needing amputation.The 1,362-bed facility is one of five private prisons in the state system; Mississippi, like other states, has turned to private operators to cut costs. But advocacy groups that oppose the trend say the for-profit companies often economize at the expense of inmate and public safety. They point to private prisons in several states that have had problems with violence, abuse or escapes that official reports attributed to understaffing, lax security and poorly trained corrections officers. In a deposition given in March to the lawyers for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Matthew Naidow, a shift captain at East Mississippi, said that conditions at the prison had improved since M.T.C. took over the contract from the GEO Group, but that low wages and high staff turnover contributed to the persistence of security problems and corruption, which he said were more prevalent than at other prisons where he had worked. Corrections officers at the prison, he said, are paid around $10 an hour. “If you’re getting people off the streets from McDonald’s,” Mr. Naidow said, “you’re going to have a long road ahead of you to retain staff.” Issa Arnita, a spokesman for M.T.C., said the company could not comment because of the pending litigation. LaGrand Elliot, senior vice president at Health Assurance, a Jackson-based company hired to provide medical and psychiatric services for the prison, also declined to comment. Dr. Terry Kupers, a psychiatrist in Oakland, Calif., and an expert on the psychological effects of solitary confinement, toured East Mississippi with the plaintiffs’ lawyers in late April. He said the mental health treatment he saw at the prison was severely deficient. Inmates were given little therapy and had few activities, and interviews with prisoners and a review of records indicated that many were forcibly injected with Haldol, a tranquilizing antipsychotic drug, even though “a lot of those people were not acutely psychotic at the time of the injection,” Dr. Kupers said. Record keeping was spotty or nonexistent, with a “complete absence” of accurate diagnoses and no evidence of informed consent for treatment, Dr. Kupers said. Mental health exams were sometimes conducted when inmates were asleep, and self-injurious behaviors like cutting were an almost daily occurrence.Medical care was also deficient, with inmates receiving delayed or inappropriate treatment, according to a medical expert who reviewed inmate records and was not supposed to discuss them publicly until a formal report was released. One patient had a documented history of a slow-growing brain tumor, but the tumor was not included on his list of medical problems at the prison. A nurse noted that the inmate had reported having a brain tumor — the prisoner “has a wild story to tell,” the nurse wrote — and ordered a muscle rub, ibuprofen and shampoo for him. At the time of the review, the inmate had not been referred to a neurosurgeon, the expert said. M.T.C., the third-largest private prison operator in the country, runs 24 correctional institutions nationwide and holds the contracts for three other prisons in Mississippi. Ms. Winter, the A.C.L.U. prison project associate director, said the Mississippi Department of Corrections bore the ultimate responsibility for the inmates at the East Mississippi prison. Mr. Epps, the corrections commissioner, and other department officials are named as the defendants in the lawsuit. A judge will consider later this year whether to grant the plaintiffs class-action status. Current and former inmates said security was also an issue. They said corrections officers were complicit in or turned a blind eye to contraband trading, and ignored inmate-on-inmate violence. Mr. Hughes, who served time for a drug offense, said lockdowns were frequent, as were stabbings and fights. Corrections officers, he said, often kicked food trays out of the hands of mentally ill inmates and did nothing to stop prisoners from roaming the units or carrying on a brisk trade in cigarettes, whiskey, cellphones and other commodities.“That was big money,” he said. “They wasn’t going to stop it.” He said he was once sent on a cleanup detail to one of the solitary-confinement units — known to inmates, according to the lawsuit, as the “dead man’s zone” or “dead area” because corrections officers did not often go there. “Guys was throwing fire, setting trays on fire, flooding the cells, and the guards were just sitting there like that’s normal, that’s O.K.,” he said. A version of this article appears in print on June 8, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Seeing Squalor And Unconcern In Southern Jail. Order Reprints|Todays Paper|Subscribe
Posted on: Sun, 08 Jun 2014 05:06:58 +0000