Investigation, Lawsuit Expose Barbaric Conditions at For-Profit Youth Prison in Mississippi.
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Investigation, Lawsuit Expose Barbaric Conditions at For-Profit Youth Prison in Mississippi
05/03/2012
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.
After more frantic phone calls, he found Mike in a hospital in Greenwood, hours away. He was shocked at what he saw. His son could barely move, let alone sit up. He couldn’t see or talk or use his right arm. “He’s got this baseball-size knot on the back of his head,” McIntosh said. “He’s got cuts all over him, bruises. He has stab wounds. The teeth in the front are broken. He’s scared out of his mind. He doesn’t have a clue where he’s at – or why.”
Though he had found his son, McIntosh still had no answers. He said prison officials wouldn’t allow him to see his son again for months. No one would tell him what happened – that is, until he received a phone call from a Southern Poverty Law Center advocate who was investigating Walnut Grove.
“When I was at my wit’s end and couldn’t get anywhere, an advocate from the SPLC actually found me,” McIntosh said. “She said, ‘Your son was in a riot.’ They [SPLC] just took bits [of information] and started putting this puzzle together. Without them, we wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.”
Mike suffered brain damage. A U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) report about the conditions at Walnut Grove later noted that after weeks of hospitalization, his “previously normal cognition resembled that of a two year old.”
In the dry language typical of such reports, the DOJ investigators wrote that on February 27, 2010, “a youth melee resulted in the stabbing of several youth, as well as other types of physical injuries necessitating treatment at an outside hospital. One of the injured youth … suffered irreparable brain damage and sustained a fractured nose, cuts and stab wounds.”
And no one bothered to tell his father.
Others were hurt, too – stabbed, punched, kicked, stomped and thrown from an upper floor to a lower one. Mike and his cellmate, who was stabbed in the head, were both nearly killed. A dozen others were hospitalized.
There was another shocking detail: A female guard had “endorsed the disturbance by allowing inmates into an authorized cell to fight,” according to the March 20, 2012, DOJ report. She was fired but not charged with any crime.
The guard’s involvement wasn’t uncommon. Investigations showed that guards frequently instigated or incited youth-on-youth violence. Often, they were the perpetrators.
What happened to Mike was symptomatic of a youth prison – one run for profit by a private corporation – that was completely out of control.
The initial investigation, which began in 2006, turned into a federal civil rights lawsuit, with the ACLU and Jackson-based civil rights attorney Robert McDuff as co-counsels. It was settled in March with a sweeping consent decree designed to end the barbaric, unconstitutional conditions and the rampant violations of state and federal law that were documented separately by both the SPLC and the DOJ.
The Walnut Grove story is a cautionary tale that raises alarming questions about the treatment of youthful, mostly nonviolent offenders in Mississippi and elsewhere. And it calls into question the wisdom of turning over the care of these youths, some as young as 13, to private companies that exist solely to turn a profit – companies that have no incentive to rehabilitate youths, that thrive on recidivism, and that increase their profits by cutting corners and reaping ever more troubled souls into their walls.
The Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility near Jackson, Miss., was known for a culture of violence and corruption.
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‘Deliberate Indifference’
On March 26, U.S. District Judge Carlton W. Reeves issued a blistering court order approving the settlement of the lawsuit. He wrote that the GEO Group Inc., the company that runs Walnut Grove, “has allowed a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts and conditions to germinate.”
Violence by youths and guards wasn’t the only problem. Neither were the gang affiliations of some guards. Or the grossly inadequate medical and mental health care. Or the proliferation of drugs and other contraband. Or the lack of educational and rehabilitative programs. Or the wild overuse of pepper spray on passive youths.
Indeed, the DOJ found that sexual abuse – including brutal youth-on-youth rapes and “brazen” sexual misconduct by prison staffers who coerced youths – was “among the worst that we have seen in any facility anywhere in the nation.”
What’s more, both the prison staff and the Mississippi Department of Corrections, which pays GEO $14 million each year to run the prison, showed “deliberate indifference” to these problems.
In other words, nobody cared. Nobody cared that the bottom line – private profit, secured in part by dangerously understaffing the prison – was more important than providing humane conditions and services that would protect youths from violence and help get them back on the right track.
They should care – if not out of basic human decency then because these young men will eventually get out of prison. They will re-enter their communities, many lacking an education, many lacking treatment for their disabilities, many severely scarred both physically and psychologically by their experience.
GEO Riding Privatization Wave
Mike was three weeks shy of his 20th birthday when he arrived at Walnut Grove to serve a four-year sentence in October 2009. After growing up with his mother in California, he had been living for the previous two years with his father in Hazlehurst, a small town about a half hour’s drive south of Jackson. He was an active, athletic kid who liked to fish and was good with his hands. He had begun studying at a local community college, hoping to become a welder.
But now, after running afoul of the law, he was just another number in prison garb, living in a facility that housed young men ages 13 to 22 who had been tried and convicted as adults.
In August 2010, six months after Mike was injured, GEO purchased the company, Cornell Companies Inc., that had been operating the prison since 2003. GEO, which was born as Wackenhut Corrections Corp. in 1984, is the second-largest prison company in America, with 66,000 beds at 65 prison facilities across the U.S. and another seven overseas. With a total of 4,000 beds in three prisons, including Walnut Grove, the company houses about a quarter of Mississippi’s prison population.
Built with $41 million in taxpayer subsidies, Walnut Grove has generated about $100 million in revenue for the companies operating it since the doors opened in 2001.
With the acquisition of Walnut Grove and its other prison projects, GEO is riding a wave of privatization efforts.
Across the U.S., the number of inmates in such private facilities grew by 80 percent between 1999 and 2010 – from 71,208 to 128,195 – as states and the federal government bought the industry’s pitch that it could save taxpayer money by operating prisons at a lower cost, according a January 2012 report by The Sentencing Project. Thirty states now have partially privatized their prison systems.
For GEO, more privatization means greater profits. In 2011, the company produced $1.6 billion in revenue, a 27 percent increase over the previous year, and net income of $98.5 million, the best performance in the company’s history, according to its 2011 annual report.
The company’s business model depends, at least in part, on tough sentencing.
With 1.6 million people living behind bars, the U.S. already has the world’s largest population of prisoners – and the highest per-capita rate of incarceration. But the prison industry wants more. GEO’s annual report is clear about that – noting that “positive trends” in the industry may be “adversely impacted” by early release of inmates and changes to parole laws and sentencing guidelines.
Walnut Grove Population Triples
In the decade before Mike came to Walnut Grove, the prison’s population had soared – more than tripling from 2001 to 2010, from 350 to 1,200 inmates.
That was part of the problem. When the facility opened in 2001 with 500 beds, it was authorized to only accept “juvenile offenders” between the ages of 13 and 19.
There are important public policy reasons to keep children and teens separate from adult prisoners. The juvenile system was created to protect children from the harsh, punitive environment of adult prisons and to rehabilitate youths, recognizing that they are still developing and can greatly benefit from educational and other services.
Research has shown that youths who stay in the juvenile system are less likely to be arrested again than those who are transferred into the adult population. Further, youths are far more likely to be sexually assaulted in adult prisons and are more likely to commit suicide.
Even so, the Mississippi legislature, under lobbying pressure, periodically raised the maximum age of those who could be housed at Walnut Grove – now at 22 – while also steadily increasing its capacity.
The staffing levels, however didn’t keep pace with the rapidly growing population. In fact, a prison auditor reported to the legislature in 2005 – and again in 2010 – that staffing had actually decreased. When it acquired the facility in 2010, GEO did nothing to correct the imbalance. In fact, the SPLC lawsuit says GEO “has a policy … of understaffing the prison.”
Michael McIntosh testifies before the Mississippi House Juvenile Justice Committee about the horrible conditions at the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility. -
Brutality the Norm
It was a brutal place. Mike told his father that he was locked in his cell for 23 hours a day. He spoke of pervasive violence. “It didn’t seem like there was much being done to curtail anything going on,” McIntosh said.
Guards frequently doused young men with pepper spray as a first response, rather than a last resort. Youths were routinely sprayed simply for refusing verbal commands, such as failing to remove their arms from food tray slots while locked in their cells – something they sometimes did to get attention for medical emergencies. Most commonly used was the “Fox Fogger,” a chemical weapon that discharges as much spray as possible per burst. Some inmates described instances in which entire cans of pepper spray were emptied into a cell, after which guards locked the door with the inmate inside. Typically, youths were not given the opportunity to wash away the pepper spray or decontaminate their clothes or bedding.
When DOJ investigators asked about the use of pepper spray, some guards were less than forthcoming. One lieutenant told them he couldn’t recall the last time he had used it. A video taken by one of the prison’s many cameras told a different story, showing him wielding it a mere two weeks earlier.
Pepper spray wasn’t the only hazard.
Fights were common, occurring almost daily. Cell doors could be easily rigged to remain unlocked, allowing youths to leave their cells and enter others at will. Guards were often complicit in attacks. Weapons were readily available. Emergency call buttons in the cells didn’t work.
In addition, guards “frequently and brutally react to low-level aggression” – such as using profanities or reacting too slowly to an order – by “slamming youth head first into the ground, slapping, beating, and kicking youth,” the DOJ found. In one such incident, a youth said he was ordered out of his cell by a supervising guard, who then jumped him and kicked him in the back four times. Another guard stomped on his leg. Investigators later observed a bruise on his leg in the shape of a boot print.
“We also found that youth were assaulted for the way they allegedly looked at officers or for absolutely no given reason at all,” the DOJ report says.
Some guards apparently saw their charges as sexual prey. Sexual misconduct between staffers and youth occurred on a monthly basis – “at a minimum,” the DOJ found. But GEO did little or nothing to prevent it, other than firing those caught in the act – like the female guard who yelled “close the door” at another guard who saw her engaged in intercourse with a youth in a medical department restroom.
Between July 2009 and May 2010, 13 staffers were fired and two arrested for sexual misconduct. No one knows how many other incidents went undetected.
In addition, youths were “routinely” subject to sexual assaults by other youths, the result of “grossly inadequate staffing” in the facility’s living areas, the DOJ found. Some youths told horrific stories of ? or attempted ? by cellmates who beat them or wielded “shanks,” the prison term for knives fashioned from ordinary metal objects.
Shanks, the investigators discovered, were far too common – and often used in assaults. During one 11-month period ending in November 2010, 91 youths were transported to outside medical facilities for treatment of injuries due to inmate violence. Many had cuts and stab wounds.
One youth, who was referred to as J.D. in the lawsuit, was tied up, brutally ? and beaten over a 24-hour period by a cellmate who had been the subject of multiple prior complaints involving sexual misconduct. The victim tried to summon guards, but the emergency button in his cell didn’t work.
Medical Care Lacking
Nothing, perhaps, illustrates the inhumane, callous and unconstitutional treatment of the youths at Walnut Grove more than the provision – or lack thereof – of mental health and medical care.
New inmates were not properly screened when they arrived; in fact, the facility appeared to lack even the most basic equipment needed to check arrivals for common conditions such as asthma, kidney disease or urinary infections. Exam rooms did not even contain examination tables or chairs.
Youths who were sick or injured often had to make multiple requests to see a nurse and sometimes waited weeks for treatment. Many with chronic conditions were not always given their medicine on time, if at all. The administration of medication was “grossly deficient,” the DOJ found. And though some inmates were as young as 13, none of the physicians who provided care at Walnut Grove were trained in pediatrics or family medicine.
For all those problems, the mental health care may have been worse.
The facility is not supposed to house inmates with serious mental health needs – but it does.
A number of inmates “have a history of prior psychiatric illness or treatment and/or are presently exhibiting symptoms of suicidal behavior or serious mental illness,” the DOJ report says. “The Facility, however, is not providing adequate mental health care to those youth. Instead, the Facility fails to adequately assess and treat youth at risk of suicide.”
In December 2008, a youth was found hanging from a noose attached to a light fixture but was revived. He was not placed on suicide watch. In October 2009, another youth with a history of depression and suicidal thoughts was found dead in his cell. Hours earlier, he had told a nurse that he had cut himself and planned to do it again. Ten days earlier, a guard had seen him with a rope around his neck.
In one six-month period in 2010, 285 youths – nearly a quarter of the population at the time – were placed on suicide watch. A psychiatrist evaluated only about 8 percent of them.
But many youths were placed in isolation as punishment, on the pretense they were suicidal. They were typically stripped, given a thin paper gown and forced into a cell with only a single blanket and a steel bed frame without a mattress. They stayed for 24 hours a day with little or no human contact.
For those who needed mental health crisis services, there were none – no therapy, no access to acute or chronic care, no special needs unit. Instead, medication and “therapeutic lockdown” were the only options available. Some youths, the DOJ found, “languish for years at a time without receiving evidence based mental health services that are routinely used to treat serious mental health conditions.”
A possible reason for the lack of care was the “shockingly low” level of psychiatric staffing. One psychiatrist, who was on call for just 14 hours per month, was responsible for providing care to 1,200 inmates. Additionally, a psychologist was available once a week for five hours.
The DOJ report came with a warning: “It must be noted that most of these youth with their untreated or inadequately treated mental health problems are eventually going to be released in worse condition, and often times more dangerous, than when they entered WGYCF [Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility].” -
Mike McIntosh enjoys a day of fishing prior to entering the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility in Mississippi. In February 2010, he suffered brain damage and other severe injuries during a melee that the U.S. Justice Department says was facilitated by a guard at the privately run, for-profit prison.
A ‘Sea Change’
Today, Mike is 22 and no longer at Walnut Grove. After spending some time at Parchman, the state’s only maximum security prison, he was transferred to the Alcorn County Correctional Facility.
After two years, he’s still recovering. It took a year before he could twist the top off a soda bottle. Some days, Mike can remember things about his life, like the fact he owns a car. Some days, he can’t.
As far as McIntosh knows, his son never received any kind of therapy for his injuries.
“Believe it or not, he still talks about the welding,” McIntosh said. “That’s exciting. That gives me some hope.”
As for the youths at Walnut Grove, the settlement agreement offers hope – hope for educational and rehabilitative services, hope for better health care, hope for common decency and freedom from harm.
The settlement requires the state to remove all boys under the age of 18 and certain teens who are 18 and 19 from the prison and house them in separate facilities governed by juvenile justice, rather than adult, standards. In his March 26 order, the judge wrote that the evidence in the case, along with the DOJ’s findings, left him with the “unshakeable conviction” that the settlement agreement must be entered immediately.
“Those youth, some of whom are mere children, are at risk every minute, every hour, every day,” the judge wrote. “Nothing has curtailed actions of the staff and indifference of management officials to the constant violations, even though the parties and their experts have been monitoring, investigating and conducting on-site visits constantly since before the lawsuit was filed and during the pendency of this action.”
As a result of the agreement, pepper spray will no longer be used to punish youths and can be deployed only to prevent serious ? injury. Guards won’t be allowed to rely on inmates to enforce rules or impose punishment on others. Youths will not be subject to solitary confinement. Physical exertion used to inflict pain or discomfort won’t be allowed. Regular rehabilitative, educational and recreational programs will be available. Mental health and medical care will be required. And, “at all times,” youths will be provided with “reasonably safe living conditions and will be protected from violence” and sexual abuse.
“This represents a sea change in the way the Mississippi Department of Corrections 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.”
Soon, the Department of Corrections will be seeking another company to run the three prisons currently in GEO’s hands. A month after the Walnut Grove settlement, the company announced it was discontinuing its $21 million contract to operate the East Mississippi Correctional Facility, perhaps in anticipation of another SPLC lawsuit. GEO said in a press release that the facility had been “financially underperforming.” Corrections Commissioner Christopher Epps then revoked GEO’s remaining contracts, saying the state would seek another company to manage all three prisons.
But questions remain. Will the future of private prisons elsewhere be affected by the abuses uncovered at Walnut Grove – many of which were blamed on severe understaffing, a lack of accountability and other shortcomings that appear related to profits? Will states rethink the idea of trying children as adults and housing them with older prisoners?
In its report “Too Good to be True: Private Prisons in America,” The Sentencing Project questions the private prison industry’s claim that it can safely and humanely operate prisons for less money than the government. Prisons run by the government are not exactly extravagant, so where do the savings – and profits – come from?
“[P]rivate prisons must make cuts in important high-cost areas such as staffing, training and programming to create savings,” the report says.
Walnut Grove seems to be a case in point.
“Deliberately indifferent.” It’s a phrase used throughout the DOJ report to describe the mindset of both the staff at Walnut Grove and the prison officials who were supposed to ensure constitutional conditions there.
McIntosh believes the evidence is sufficient to show that the profit motive isn’t a good fit for prisons.
“I think it’s terrible,” he said. “Our children’s lives shouldn’t be at risk because corporations cut corners in order to increase their profits.
“They rob the kids of hope. They rob the kids of dignity. I think that’s probably the worst thing you can do to them.”
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/news/splc-investigation-lawsuit-expose-barbaric-conditions-at-for-profit-youth-prison-i -
Gangs Ruled Prison as For-Profit Model Put Blood on Floor
By Margaret Newkirk & William Selway - Jul 11, 2013 11:18 PM CT
In April, court-appointed monitors said that while gains at the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility had been made in staffing and management, assaults with weapons continued "at alarming levels" in the first two months of 2013.
In the four privately run prisons holding Mississippi (BEESMS) inmates last year, the assault rate was three times higher on average than in state-run lockups. None was as violent as the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility.
The for-profit detention center, surrounded by razor wire and near the forests and farms of central Mississippi, had 27 assaults per 100 offenders last year, more than any other prison in the state, according to an April court filing. Staff shortages, mismanagement and lax oversight had long turned it into a cauldron of violence, where female employees had sex with inmates, pitted them against each other, gave them weapons and joined their gangs, according to court records, interviews and a U.S. Justice Department report.
“It was like a jungle,” said Craig Kincaid, 24, a former inmate. “It was an awful place to go when you’re trying to get your life together.”
Fencing surrounds the Walnut Grove Correctional Facility in Walnut Grove, Mississippi, on April 17, 2013.
More than 130,000 state and federal convicts throughout the U.S. -- 8 percent of the total -- now live in private prisons such as Walnut Grove, as public officials buy into claims that the institutions can deliver profits while preparing inmates for life after release, saving tax dollars and creating jobs.
No national data tracks whether the facilities are run as well as public ones, and private-prison lobbyists for years have successfully fought efforts to bring them under federal open-records law. Yet regulatory, court and state records show that the industry has repeatedly experienced the kind of staffing shortages and worker turnover that helped produce years of chaos at Walnut Grove.
Former Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility inmate Craig Kincaid said the detention center "was an awful place to go when you're trying to get your life together."
Saving Money
“There is a systematic failure to provide the level and competency of staffing necessary to run facilities that are safe not only for the people on the inside, but the public,” said Elaine Rizzo, a criminal-justice professor at St. Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, who studied prison privatization for a state advisory board. “It comes back to saving money.”
In Texas (BEESTX) and Florida (BEESFL), which hold about a third of all privately detained state inmates, employee turnover rates were 50 percent to more than 100 percent higher in private prisons than in public ones, according to data from the Texas Criminal Justice Department and the Florida Law Enforcement Department. In Mississippi (BEESMS), Tennessee (BEESTN) and Idaho (BEESID), company-run prisons have had higher assault rates than public ones, state data show.
Michael McIntosh, father of a former inmate at the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility who was severely injured during a prison riot, stands for a photograph in his office in Pearl, Mississippi, on April 17, 2013.
Geo’s Response
Boca Raton, Florida-based Geo Group Inc., the second-largest U.S. prison company, ran the Walnut Grove prison for about two years, from August 2010 until July 2012.
Pablo Paez, a spokesman for Geo, said focusing on troubled institutions such as Walnut Grove “yields an unfair, unbalanced, and inaccurate portrayal of the totality of our industry’s and our company’s long standing record of quality operations and services which have delivered significant savings for taxpayers.”
The Mississippi prison “faced significant operational challenges for several years” before Geo took over, and the company invested “significant resources, time, and effort” to improve conditions at the facility, Paez said by e-mail.
The for-profit prison industry has encountered staffing issues in other states. Idaho Corrections Department officials voted last month not to renew a contract with Nashville, Tennessee-based Corrections Corporation of America, the largest U.S. prison company, after it admitted billing for hours that weren’t worked.
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Dangerous Situation
State and federal officials have reported dangerous conditions at understaffed privately run prisons in Ohio, Colorado and in Mississippi. New Mexico fined Geo $2.4 million in 2012 for excessive staff vacancies at three prisons in 2011 and 2012, according to Jim Brewster, general counsel for the state corrections department.
The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration last year sought $104,000 in penalties against Geo, including $70,000 for worker shortages, faulty cells and inadequate training at a prison in Meridian, Mississippi, that the agency said put workers at risk of being attacked. Geo is contesting the matter.
In May, inmates at the prison, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, sued the state in U.S. District Court in Jackson alleging “barbaric and horrific conditions” at the facility, now run by a different company.
A 2004 report by the Colorado Corrections Department blamed a riot at a Corrections Corp. prison on chronic understaffing and high employee turnover: The attrition rate was double that of state-run facilities. Inexperience and lack of staff cohesion isn’t lost on rioting inmates, according to the report.
Public Difference
In Colorado’s public prisons, “offenders know that attempts to defeat security” will be met by “a confident and experienced staff,” according to the report.
“No corrections system -- public or private -- is immune to incidents,” Steven Owen, a Corrections Corp. spokesman, said by e-mail. “In Colorado, our dedicated, professional employees are required to meet or exceed the same training requirements as their public counterparts.”
The private corrections industry has delivered for investors. The number of inmates in for-profit prisons throughout the U.S. rose 44 percent in the past decade. BlackRock Inc. (BLK) and Renaissance Technologies LLC are among dozens of money-management firms that have invested in the business.
As of March 31, BlackRock reported holding stakes worth more than $254 million in Geo and $236 million in Corrections Corp. (CXW), while Renaissance disclosed owning about $39 million of Geo shares and about $36 million in Corrections Corp. stock, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Geo has more than doubled since December 2011, while Corrections Corp. has risen 87 percent, both outpacing a 33 percent gain for the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. Representatives of BlackRock and Renaissance declined to comment.
Low Pay
Pay and staffing ratios are lower in private prisons than in public ones, state and federal data show. The median annual pay in company-run facilities was $30,460 in 2010, according to the U.S. Labor Department, 21 percent less than for correctional officers employed by states.
In Texas, wages and benefits are “generally lower” in private prisons than in public ones, according to a 2008 legislative report. Nationally, private prisons had one corrections officer for every 6.9 inmates in 2005, compared with one for every five in public lockups, according to the Justice Department’s most recent statistics.
Geo took over Walnut Grove after it acquired Houston-based Cornell Cos. Under its new management company, the prison now holds only inmates 18 and older, and Youth is out of its name.
Big Bonus
In 2012, Geo (GEO) had revenue of $1.48 billion, up from $569 million 10 years earlier, with net income of $135 million. George Zoley, its chairman and chief executive officer, received almost $6 million last year, including a $2.2 million bonus for profit surpassing targets, according to company filings.
The company has drawn repeated scrutiny and criticism from regulators and lawyers for inmates, faulting it for dangerous or derelict care.
Geo lost civil wrongful-death lawsuits in Texas and Oklahoma, including a $47.5 million jury award in Texas state court in 2006 to the family of an inmate beaten to death with padlock-stuffed socks four days before his release, according to court documents. The company appealed that verdict before settling. The company said it would appeal the Oklahoma ruling. Geo’s contracts to house Idaho and Texas inmates at two prisons in Texas were canceled after state reports of unsafe conditions.
Inmates Sue
In November 2010, inmates at Walnut Grove sued Mississippi and Geo in federal court in Jackson over conditions there. In an order last year, U.S. District Court Judge Carlton Reeves, who oversaw that lawsuit, said what happened at Walnut Grove “paints a picture of such horror as should be unrealized anywhere in the civilized world.”
Geo’s Paez said the judge based his order partly on the Justice Department report about Walnut Grove, which related to events that largely took place either before Geo took over or in the first few months after it assumed management of the prison.
As few as two corrections officers worked units with 240 inmates during the day, or one for 120 prisoners, according to a 2011 report to the state by MGT of America Inc., a Tallahassee, Florida-based consulting firm. That ratio is more than 10 times what’s typical at youth facilities, said Ned Loughran, executive director of the Council of Juvenile Correctional Administrators.
“I’ve never seen ratios that risky in terms of supervising kids,” he said.
The Walnut Grove prison sits on the edge of a town of about 500, where the downtown has a gas station, two diners, a city hall and a bank. It had lost one of its biggest employers, a glove factory, when community leaders decided to pursue a private prison in a quest for jobs and revenue. -
Dying Town
“The town was dying,” Mayor J. Brian Gomillion said. “We struggled even after we opened. But it re-invigorated the community.”
State Representative Bennett Malone, a Democrat whose district included the area and who led the corrections committee in the Mississippi House, championed the prison. It was originally authorized to hold 500 inmates as old as 19.
The prison would be the biggest economic boon the area had ever seen and give troubled boys a second chance, with teachers, counselors, spiritual advisers, psychologists and training, Malone and other backers told the Jackson Clarion Ledger newspaper at the time.
Expanded Capacity
The prison opened in 2001. Cornell took over about a decade ago, predicting annual revenue of $11 million. By 2007, through legislation pushed by Malone, Mississippi had expanded Walnut Grove’s permitted capacity to 1,500 inmates as old as 22.
“It never pleases me to see young people locked up, but it does please me to know the custody and care will be provided by the dedicated people of my district,” Malone said at a groundbreaking for the expansion.
Malone got campaign contributions of $2,000 from Cornell and $1,000 from Geo in 2006, accounting for 30 percent of what he raised that year, state campaign-finance reports show. Malone didn’t respond to e-mails and telephone calls seeking comment.
When Geo bought Cornell in August 2010 for $730 million in cash, stock and debt, the prison was showing signs of strain. A riot had hospitalized six young inmates. A 2010 legislative audit showed that staff levels had failed to keep pace with the expanding population.
By then, the town depended on the prison, which now pays it $180,000 a year, or a quarter of its budget.
Merchants saw little of the economic boom once promised, said Carl Sistrunk, owner of the gas station where the prison fuels transport vehicles.
Hurting Community
“It has helped and it has hurt, if you ask me,” Sistrunk said. “You hear about some of the things going on in there and that hurts us all.”
Caleb Williams was 12 when Malone introduced the legislation creating Walnut Grove -- and already headed there.
One of 11 children of a single mother on welfare in Starkville and in foster care since age three, Williams was about to be kicked out of school, was stealing and dealing drugs and could barely read or write, he recalled.
“I wasn’t a bad child,” he said. “I was just misguided. I had my heart set on having things that weren’t there.”
Williams landed in Walnut Grove after he was arrested at age 16 for stealing a car’s compact-disc player, then stabbing an officer with a pen while trying to flee. Williams admits all except the stabbing.
Honors Student
Ross Walton was on a different path. An honors student, he played the piano, volunteered with Habitat for Humanity and had a third-degree Karate black belt, activities he said were pushed by a mother determined to keep him from becoming another locked-up black man from the Mississippi Delta.
Walton entered Walnut Grove at 18, convicted of aggravated assault after a fight in a bowling alley, his first brush with the law.
The prison was nothing like its backers once promised, former inmates said.
Gangs ruled the 60-inmate, 30-cell housing units, Williams and Walton said. There were at least 13 present in the facility, according to the 2010 audit. Corrections officers sometimes slept while prisoners fought, the inmates said. Assaults were common. Officers often did nothing. Some provoked fights and then used pepper spray and other deterrents, said Williams.
“You saw blood on the floor, everywhere,” he said.
‘Inappropriate Relationships’
Their accounts are echoed in the 2012 Justice Department report and the ACLU-backed lawsuit, which was settled last year. The federal report found “numerous inappropriate relationships between staff and youth,” with corrections officers giving inmates personal mobile phone numbers, wiring money to their commissary accounts and providing them with banned items, including weapons.
State oversight was minimal. The 2011 MGT report found no evidence the state ever surveyed inmates, reviewed their records, or did annual checks of prison operations, as required under the contract. A state monitor received no training and relied on the company running the facility for data, which the state never attempted to verify, it said.
Staff shortages were chronic, according to inmates and Cleveland McAfee, a former corrections officer. The prison struggled to retain workers, with many quitting within weeks of starting work, McAfee said. After he was promoted to lieutenant, he frequently had to fill in on the front line.
“I just got burned out because they just didn’t have the staff,” McAfee said.
Delayed Releases
The shortages led to lockdowns, according to Walton and the inmate lawsuit that was also backed by the Southern Poverty Law Center. That meant they couldn’t go to school, slowing the release of those who had to complete high-school equivalency degrees to get out, Walton said.
“The longer the stay, the more money the prison makes,” he said.
Corrections officers were eager to make more money and smuggling was rampant, said Williams.
“If they’ll bring in a pack of gum, they’ll bring in a pack of T-shirts,” he said. “If they bring in a pack of T-shirts, they’ll bring in a knife.”
In fiscal 2010, officials confiscated 137 weapons at the prison, according to the audit by the Mississippi legislature. There were 80 assaults with weapons on staff and inmates, a rate of one every five days.
Seventy percent of Walnut Grove’s security staff was female, according to the 2011 consultant’s report. Sexual tension ran high. In one incident, a female corrections officer stripped off her shirt in a housing-unit control center and danced “provocatively” over four hours in front of inmates, touching one “inappropriately,” the Justice Department said.
Sexual Tensions
Inmates flirted with the female officers and fought over them. They got propositioned by them and punished if they rebuffed them, with written reprimands that added months to sentences, Walton said.
“Because you would not perform a sexual act with them, they make you stay longer,” he said. “We would have brand new guards come through, doing a walk-through right out of training. They would come through telling us they were looking for boyfriends, looking for a man, before they even started their jobs.”
“They were just hiring anybody to fill those spots and that made it worse, because they didn’t know what they were doing,” he said. “I had one guard -- I was older than her.”
Safety depended on staying out of the common areas in each 60-inmate cell unit. -
Avoiding ‘Sharks’
Williams spent his first two years confined to his zone, unable to attend school or go outside. He stayed in his cell 23 hours a day, teaching himself to read and writing in journals. He learned to lip read to anticipate fights and avoid violence that corrections officers were too few or too scared to prevent.
He didn’t have to worry about food or shelter, Williams said. “All I had to worry about was being around these sharks, these lions and tigers and bears, in this poisonous world, where people are waking up with madness on their minds,” he said.
Berl Goff, a former captain at Walnut Grove, was hired to improve security in November 2009 by then-warden Brick Tripp. Goff, an experienced corrections officer, said the prison was having three or four bloodshed-causing fights every week.
“It goes back to the fact that these folks were not trained right,” he said of the staff. “They had never worked in a real prison.”
After four months on the job, Goff said he’d made progress. Then he intercepted a ballot inmates were passing between cells. A gang called the Vice Lords was voting on whether to attack a rival group’s leader. Goff’s bosses rebuffed his request for more help: “They told me to handle it,” he said.
? Riot
Eighteen corrections officers were at the prison the day of the assault, he said -- one for every 60 prisoners. One, a gang member herself, walked through the cellblock freeing Vice Lords, then left. When the beatings and stabbings stopped, six inmates were rushed to the hospital, one with permanent brain damage.
“You got 60 inmates there and it’s just me,” said McAfee, the former guard and one of those who responded to the melee. “You just had to sit there and wait while people are fighting. It was a horrible experience.”
The worst hurt was Michael McIntosh, then 20. Six weeks after the incident, his father found him in a hospital three hours away in Greenville. The younger McIntosh’s eyes were red and blinded by blood. He had a baseball-sized lump on his head, multiple stab wounds and brain damage. He made noises like a small child.
Blinded Son
“He couldn’t see me,” said his father, Michael McIntosh Sr. “He was just reaching, saying ‘Daaa.’”
Geo bought Cornell in August 2010, adding Walnut Grove to the two other prisons it ran in Mississippi. The three delivered $44.9 million in revenue the next year, according to Geo’s 2012 annual report.
Paez, the Geo spokesman, said the company inherited the prison’s troubles.
“Any reasonable party would agree that significant resources, time and effort would be required to turn around a facility that had faced significant operational problems for several years,” Paez said in a the e-mail. “That is in fact what Geo did.”
Walnut Grove received an accreditation score of 100 percent in an audit conducted in early 2012 by the American Correctional Association, an Alexandria, Virginia-based organization that represents public and private prisons, Paez said.
Substantially Unchanged
The 2012 Justice Department report said key personnel, policies and training at the prison “did not change substantially, despite Geo’s claim that it made corrective reforms.”
Goff, the former prison captain, said staffing got worse under Geo, which kept 5 percent of positions vacant. For weeks at a time, he said he had 13 to 15 officers on the night shift, instead of the 23 he needed.
“There were nights when I was captain when I walked all night long, all night by myself,” Goff said. “There was no one in the control centers. They kept saying we had to economize.”
At a March 2012 hearing at the federal courthouse in Jackson, where the settlement of the civil lawsuit against the prison and the state was reviewed, Walnut Grove inmates described continuing violence behind the facility’s walls.
One 15-year-old said the advice of a judge, who wanted him to have special protection, was ignored. “He didn’t want me in the cell with nobody smarter than me and nobody older than me,” the inmate said. Prison administrators gave him a 19-year-old cellmate who had ? him days earlier.
Bloomberg News doesn’t identify victims of sexual assault. -
Perpetrators Unpunished
“I just have not heard anything that says to me that any of these perpetrators, any of these people, have paid the price for what they have done to some of these children,” said Reeves, the federal judge presiding over the hearing.
There are five privately run prisons in Mississippi, though one houses only inmates from California, according to the state Corrections Department. Three other prisons are run by the state. In fiscal 2012, Walnut Grove had 284 assaults, the April court filing shows, more than in any of the three other private prisons with Mississippi inmates. It also exceeded the most violent state facility, which had three times the population.
Mississippi replaced Geo as Walnut Grove’s operator a year ago. “We moved them out, because that’s just totally unacceptable,” said Governor Phil Bryant, a Republican elected in 2011, referring to the troubles at Walnut Grove. “We just won’t tolerate that type of behavior, and we’re working with the Justice Department to be sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Isolated Situation
“Private prisons have worked well,” he said. “For years, we’ve had a lot of success with them. This was one bad incident, we got rid of the player involved, and we got another company in that we think will do a better job.”
Geo’s Paez said it has a long-standing record of “adhering to industry-leading standards set by independent accreditation entities” and rehabilitating prisoners with programs to help them re-enter society.
“Our company is proud of the incredible dedication and effort of our more than 18,000 employees worldwide, who strive every day to make a difference in the lives of the more than 60,000 men and women who are entrusted daily to our care,” he said.
Walnut Grove is now run by Management & Training Corp., a closely held company based in Centerville, Utah.
Brick Tripp, Walnut Grove’s former warden, runs another Geo prison in North Carolina. Through Paez, he declined to comment.
Goff, the former captain, now works for another private prison company he says is better run.
McIntosh will be released in September and only sometimes remembers life before his injury, his father said.
Walton is a 28-year-old accounting student at Mississippi State University in Starkville. He says Walnut Grove “scarred me; I will never be the same.”
Williams owns a barber shop in Greenville, where he sleeps at night on a cot in a storage room. It’s the same dimensions as his cell in Walnut Grove.
To contact the reporters on this story: Margaret Newkirk in Atlanta at mnewkirk@bloomberg.net; William Selway in Washington at wselway@bloomberg.net;
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jeffrey Taylor in San Francisco at jtaylor48@bloomberg.net; Stephen Merelman at smerelman@bloomberg.net;
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-12/gangs-ruled-prison-as-for-profit-model-put-blood-on-floor.html
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