A review from the Department of Justice has uncovered rampant sexual abuse in Illinois’ youth penal system.

According to the report, approximately 15 percent of youth inmates were sexually assaulted by other inmates or staff, markedly higher than the national average of less than 10 percent. Just four states — Ohio, South Carolina, California, and Georgia — have higher levels of assault than Illinois.

The Chicago Tribune has more on what may be contributing to the systemic problem of abuse among Illinois’ incarcerated youth:

Juvenile justice advocates said Illinois’ high rate of sexual assault in the survey may be a result of the isolation of offenders in the system, said Elizabeth Clark, director of the Juvenile Justice Initiative.

Illinois’ youth prisons are larger than in other states and tend to be located far from the urban centers where inmates’ families live. Unlike adult prisons in the state, there is no ombudsman or inspector general to follow up on complaints from juveniles, Clark said.

As ProPublica notes, one of the most pervasive problems is assault committed by prison staff. Indeed, 1 in 5 youth who had been sexually assaulted by staff had been abused on at least 10 occasions.

The report may prompt action to curb abuse in Illinois. “I’m extremely concerned, extremely upset about the findings of the report,” Department of Juvenile Justice Director Arthur Bishop said. He also announced that he will form a panel to review the findings and figure out what can be done to improve Illinois’ six youth detention facilities.

A federal court order issued last week portrays unfathomable conditions at a New Orleans prison that a sheriff has for years defended against charges of mismanagement. The judge’s ruling portrays in gory detail the gang rape, sexual misconduct, chaos, and total medical neglect that have resulted from mismanagement and abysmal supervision.

In his 104-page order, U.S. District Court Lance Africk approved a consent decree that will aim to curb a prison crisis that has been festering since at least 1970, when a judge held that conditions at the prison would “shock the conscience.” Among the most shocking findings from the latest court order:

1. In one of several vicious rapes, 10-14 inmates forced a tied-up fellow inmate to dance in a thong while performing sexually invasive acts on him. The hours-long incident, an example of the “extraordinarily high level of rapes and sexual assaults” overall, is described in harrowing detail [WARNING: graphic content follows]:

One night, … E.S. was attacked by a group of 10-14 inmates. … After they hog-tied E.S. with the fabric, they sexually assaulted him. E.S. testified that one inmate “stuck his finger into my anal area,” another inmate “stuck a toothbrush into my anal area,” and another inmate“ actually stuck his tongue in my anal area.” … At some point, the assailants picked up E.S. and carried him to a new location at the back of the dormitory, where they released him from the hog-tied position and tied him to a post, with his back to the post. At this point, four to six inmates began punching him repeatedly. … The attackers threw hot water and possibly urine on E.S., and beat him so severely with a mop stick that the skin was ripped from his back and buttocks. At some point during this phase of the attack, a guard performed a routine check, but he did not walk far enough down the hall to notice E.S., naked, bound, and beaten. E.S. reported that he did not cry out because he was certain that he would be killed if he did so.

In the final phase of the attack, the inmates fashioned “some type of thong, like a woman’s thong” from strips of uniform fabric. They forced E.S. to put it on and, E.S. testified, in an attempt to be “comical” or to“ embarrass me or something in front of the dormitory… they made me dance. … E.S reported that “90% of the crowd had knives in their hands visible.”

Oversight of security was so limited that reports of a high-ranking guard who “regularly observed a female [inmate] showering and escorted her to a private office after hours for ‘prolonged periods of time’” went unaddressed, even though two staff members and several inmates confirmed witnessing the accounts.

2. Video captured rogue inmates gambling, shooting up heroin, and “brandishing a loaded gun” behind bars, while others walked out of the prison and “went cavorting on Bourbon Street.” The court explains:

These videos appear to have been filmed at the now-closed House of Detention (“HOD”), in part to highlight the absence of supervision and the poor environmental conditions. Whatever the history behind the videos, inmates were able to blatantly engage in criminal conduct, which they literally announced was occurring, without showing any concern for staff intervention. There was no suggestion that the staff members responsible for supervising these inmates were ever identified, much less disciplined. The conduct in the video may have occurred several years ago, but the policies, practices, and culture that enabled the outrageous conduct remain relevant.

3. Known suicidal inmates were placed in isolation and treatment was neglected. Once there, one man hung himself with his t-shirt. Overall, mental health treatment is grossly inadequate. There is just one psychiatrist and social worker for some 2,500 inmates, in spite of a mental illness epidemic in prisons. “Inmates, including inmates on suicide watch, have easy access to shards of broken tile, which may be ingested, thrown, or used as a weapon,” the court noted.

4. Environmental hazards include sewage seeping into cells where inmates eat, feces on the walls, and clouds of gnats that yield skin problems. These hazards and strong smells of urine and feces were particularly acute in mental health units, where inmates were smearing feces on the walls and food was left for days.

5. Staff members are known to take out “hits on inmates, either by ordering other inmates to arrange a hit or sometimes by “placing the inmate in an area where known enemies make violence likely.”

As shocking as these conditions seem, this is far from the only prison with this sort of inhumane conditions. Overcrowded prisons around the country struggle to meet basic staffing needs, which led the U.S. Supreme Court to find in 2010 that California’s prison health care was so deficient that it violated the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Another just-filed lawsuit by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union alleges that a Mississippi private prison not only allows rampant rape, stabbings, and beatings, but that staff coerce prisoners to have sex in exchange for food and phone privileges.

An investigation by the Department of Justice found that a Pennsylvania state prison had been unconstitutionally holding inmates with serious mental illness in solitary confinement for months or years at a time. The practice, which has been deemed torture, cruel and unusual, and worse than being held hostage in Iran, involves holding prisoners in isolation for 23 hours a day in a small, often windowless cell with a steel door. When prisoners are let out of the cell for showers at least 3 times a week, they are taken to another small, isolated space where they are sometimes locked for extended periods of time.

While the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections now plans to close the offending facility, The State Correctional Institution at Cresson, the Department of Justice concluded there is reason to believe the practice could be state-wide and has expanded its investigation. DOJ explains in a statement:

In addition to finding that Cresson routinely resorts to locking prisoners with serious mental illness in their cells for 22 to 23 hours a day, for months or even years at a time, the department also found that Cresson often denies these prisoners basic necessities and subjects them to harsh and punitive conditions, including excessive uses of force. The department concluded that Cresson’s misuse of solitary confinement on prisoners with serious mental illness leads to serious harms, including mental decompensation, clinical depression, psychosis, self-mutilation, and suicide.

The department also found that Cresson came to rely on solitary confinement as a means of warehousing many of its prisoners with serious mental illness because of deficiencies relating to its mental health program. Those systemic deficiencies include a disorganized and fragmented mental health program, marginalization of mental health staff, and disciplinary procedures that result in the punishment of disability-related behaviors and the placement of actively psychotic prisoners into harsh solitary confinement. The department also found an oversight system that does not analyze suicides and other critical data.

“We found that Cresson often permitted its prisoners with serious mental illness or intellectual disabilities to simply languish, decompensate, and harm themselves in solitary confinement for months or years on end under harsh conditions in violation of the Constitution,” said Roy L. Austin Jr., Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. “These practices have serious public safety consequences because many of these individuals are returned to the community.”

The findings reflect a nationwide epidemic of warehousing mentally ill individuals who should be receiving treatment in bloated U.S. prisons. And data show that growth in the prison population has tracked a decline in the number of Americans institutionalized at mental health hospitals.

What is particularly noteworthy about the Department of Justice’s findings is its determination that the confinement of the mentally ill violates not only the Americans with Disabilities Act, but also the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. While a handful of courts have deemed solitary confinement an Eighth Amendment violation, most lawsuits have resulted in settlement, and the Justice Department does not appear to have taken a prominent position on this issue before. Because the practice remains rampant, particularly as applied to the mentally ill and to children as young as 13, the Federal Bureau of Prisons initiated an investigation into the practice earlier this year.

Teenage inmates in adult prisons endure higher rates of sexual abuse by staff members than adult inmates do, according to a new study from the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. Because of the vast under-reporting of such abuses, the true number is likely to be much higher.

 

While 1.8 percent of 16- and 17-year-olds in adult prisons reported being assaulted by another inmate, 3.2 percent were abused by staff. Gay and bisexual inmates were abused at even higher rates. Inmates diagnosed with serious psychological distress were also prime targets for victimization by staff members and inmates alike.

The Prison Rape Elimination Act, passed in 2003, created the first national standards to curb sexual violence in prison. Because teenagers are considered prey in adult prisons, PREA stipulated that minors should be removed from all adult jails and prisons. Ten years later, the October 2013 deadline for state and local prison facilities to certify compliance with PREA is just a few months away. Yet inmates, primarily those who are 16 and 17 years old, continue to live under constant threat of rape in adult prisons. Three-quarters of sexually victimized youth in the DOJ study reported they were abused more than once, and nearly half said staff used force to get what they wanted.

One former juvenile inmate who was raped and abused in prison explains that the horrors they experience spill over into society at large:

Placing juveniles in adult facilities has devastating consequences not only for the youth but also for the communities from which they came. Eighty percent are released before their 21st birthday, and 95 percent are released before they turn 25. They’re coming back into society indelibly marked by what they’ve experienced — either traumatized by sexual assault, or hyper-violent from having learned to fend off the threat.

Critics of PREA note that the bill has no way to enforce its standards to curb sexual assaults and is completely dependent on self-reporting by the agencies holding the prisoners. Anecdotal evidence suggests the true number of assaults is suppressed by youths who are afraid to report. It’s no wonder many choose not to report, as a 2005 DOJ study found that few prosecutors are willing to prosecute cases that cannot prove staff members threatened overt physical force to rape inmates because the penalty is so low. Staffers who are charged will often be released on low bonds or receive short sentences because their victims were inmates. Even when staffers were clearly caught sexually abusing prisoners, only about 56 percent were referred to prosecutions.

Even when Jeffrey Skilling was first sentenced for conspiring in one of the largest corporate fraud schemes in modern history, he received less jail time than some low-level drug offenders sentenced to harsh mandatory minimums. But this week, Skilling reached a deal with the Department of Justice to cut his 24-year sentence to as little as 14 years, in exchange for abandoning the onslaught of appeals he has launched at his own expense. Reuters reports:

The agreement … could result in Skilling’s freedom in late 2018, with good behavior.

In exchange, Skilling, 59, who has long maintained his innocence, agreed to stop appealing his conviction. The agreement would also allow more than $40 million seized from him to be freed up for distribution to Enron fraud victims.

A resentencing became necessary after a federal appeals court upheld Skilling’s conviction but found the original sentence too harsh.

Once ranked seventh on the Fortune 500 list of large U.S. companies, Enron went bankrupt on December 2, 2001 in an accounting scandal that remains one of the largest and most infamous U.S. corporate meltdowns.

Thousands of workers lost their jobs and retirement savings, and images were beamed around the globe of staff carrying possessions out of Enron’s downtown Houston office tower, past the company’s “crooked E” logo.

Even in 2006, when Skilling was first sentenced, his legal defense was deemed one of the most expensive in history at $65 million, and in the years since he has taken his case to the Supreme Court and back on appeal after appeal. By settling, the Department of Justice not only saved itself the considerable expense of continuing this legal battle; it also gets access to the more than $40 million in seized assets Skilling had previously not agreed to surrender. As a consequence of these negotiations, Skilling’s sentence is even more disparate from the 25-year-plus sentences of drug defendants charged for low-level offenses like selling their own pain pills to an undercover informant.

If Skilling’s reduced sentence is approved by a judge during his June hearing, as is likely, Skilling will nonetheless not have had an ideal run with the criminal justice system. His lawyers made a persuasive argument that the statute initially used to convict him was overly broad. And his sentence was disproportionately high relative to alleged Enron scandal mastermind Andrew Fastow, who got only six years in prison after he testified against both Skilling and Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay. But more severe versions of these problems plague countless criminal defendants, who, rather than having the leverage to shorten their sentence or the legal resources to take down a statute, are coerced into plea deals under threat of draconian prison terms.

A major U.S. private prison operator known for inmate abuse, violations, and disregard for the truth reported a 56-percent spike in profit in the first quarter of 2013, due in part to its new strategy for drastically reducing its taxes, the Associated Press reports. During a conference call touting its success, representatives at GEO Group boasted that the company continues to have “solid occupancy rates in mid to high 90s” and that they are optimistic “regarding the outlook for the industry,” in part due to a “growing offender population.” GEO Senior Vice President John Hurley assured investors during the call:

We have a longstanding partnership with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the United States Marshal Service and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE. … We continue to see meaningful opportunities for us to partner with all three of these federal agencies, notwithstanding the various issues with the federal budget, which we believe will have no material negative impact on our business. The federal bureau of prisons continues to face capacity constraints coupled with a growing offender population.

The federal prison population has swelled 790 percent since 1980, in large part due to draconian drug and immigration laws. And the United States maintains the title of the world’s number one jailer. Private prison operators nonetheless remain enthusiastic about the prospects of high incarceration rates for business. Representatives on this call shied away from the strong language fellow prison firm Corrections Corporation of America used during its investor call in February, when CEO Damon Hininger assured a strong “continued demand for beds” even after immigration reform. GEO executives explained that they are now taking the position that “discussing our approach and strategies about any particular procurement is really not in the best interest of our company or our shareholders.”

Following a trend of corporations achieving dramatic tax reductions by becoming a real estate investment trust (REIT) – a mechanism historically reserved for firms holding real estate as an investment — both GEO and fellow prison operator Corrections Corporation of America successfully persuaded the Internal Revenue Service recently that they are essentially holding real estate, analogizing prisoners to renters paid for by the government. In reality, the job of running a prison is only nominally about the facility where it’s housed, and primarily about ensuring humane prisoner treatment, inmate rehabilitation, and public safety. But private prison corporations charging “rent” to house prisoners make no more or less money depending on whether they achieve these goals, particularly not when immense political spending to lobby for incarceration and privatization outweighs the public pressure from widely reported abuses at private facilities.

Leading the movement to fight back against the private prison industry, New Hampshire rejected all bids last month to house private prisons in the state, and passed a bill in the House to prohibit the private facilities that profit from incarceration. But the bill died in the Senate Thursday along party lines, with opponents saying they wanted to retain the flexibility to contract with private facilities in the future. The New Hampshire Union Leader reports:

Supporters of the bill said private prisons often maximize profits at the expense of prisoners who are separated from their families. They said private prisons focus on driving costs down while paying scant attention to rehabilitating inmates, which the state has an incentive to do to keep them out of corrections system once they are released.

But opponents say the state should not tie its hands and it needs the flexibility in the future, particularly in an emergency if a prison burned.

Senate Finance Committee Chair Sen. Chuck Morse, R-Salem, said there are no contracts on the horizon for using private prisons or turning the state’s prison system over to a private company to manage.

The bill is not needed, he said, adding that the discussion began two years ago when former Gov. John Lynch proposed looking into prison privatization.

Opponents also said they wanted to have the option to use private prisons in the event of an emergency, even though the bill contained a provision that explicitly allowed the state to transfer inmates to a private facility in an emergency. New Hampshire’s new governor has been vocal in her opposition to private prisons, and under her leadership, the state recently rejected every proposal to site private prisons in the state, citing their insufficient understanding of court-mandated standards of inmate care. A legislative change, however, would have prevented new proposals from being solicited and considered next year.

Private prisons have a perverse incentive to lobby for imprisonment in a country that already has the world’s highest rate of incarceration. In 2012, both GEO Group and Management & Training Corp. contributed to the campaigns of Republican state officials whose agency commissioned studies of private prison proposals. And Corrections Corporation of America had in the past contributed to the campaigns of then-Gov. John Lynch, who had solicited the private prison bids. As of April 2012, all three private prison firms had at least two lobbyists in the state.

 

 

Under a new law signed Thursday, Georgia will stop locking up most young offenders. Instead, they will be directed into community-based rehabilitative programs meant to address underlying problems.

After January 1, young people arrested for minor offenses will enter social service programs, skipping the criminal justice system entirely. Those arrested for low-level crimes like drug possession will be diverted into community-based rehab programs. Teenagers who have committed felonies in which no one is hurt will face a maximum of 18 months in prison plus intensive probation for a year and a half. If someone is harmed, the juveniles could be sent to prison for up to 5 years.

The youth law is expected to save $85 million over five years and reduce the juvenile prison population by 640 teenagers, at a rate of $91,000 a year per bed. Currently, there are 1,820 minors in juvenile facilities in Georgia. The youth recidivism rate, now at 65 percent, is also supposed to drop.

Georgia’s school to prison pipeline is among the worst in the nation, with schools frequently using the criminal justice system to discipline kids for minor infractions. A juvenile court judge from Georgia testified last year that one-third of the cases before him were school-related minor offenders who had been arrested by campus police. He also noted an “appalling” racial disparity in the arrests, which were 80 percent African American. As arrests increase, high school graduation rates have plummeted.

The youth law follows another prison reform last year that diverted adults arrested for minor offenses from prison. The adult law establishes alternative program options for people arrested for non-violent crimes. As of July 1, judges will be given more discretion over drug-related cases, which often have mandatory minimum prison sentences. Instead, expensive prison beds will be reserved for the most violent criminals, while less serious offenses like drug possession, burglary, forgery, or shoplifting will have less severe penalties depending on the scale of the crime.

Gov. Nathan Deal (R) has made a more humane and effective prison system a top priority. At the bill signing, Deal choked up as he described how families have “been cast aside by the system that was in place.” Now that he has signed these two cornerstone bills into law, the governor is already working with community groups on legislation to smooth the transition of inmates back into society and reduce recidivism rates. He has also pledged $10 million in funding for “accountability courts” to make sure defendants work, seek treatment and stay sober.

Sentencing reform has attracted rare bipartisan support all over the country, as conservatives look for ways to cut costs while liberals oppose excessively harsh and ineffective sentencing. In the past two years, 35 prisons have shuttered in 15 states. However, other states have embraced the private prison industry, which has an abysmal record for security and inmate abuse, and may actually increase incarceration rates.

Poor management of a federal “Compassionate Release” program is clogging federal prisons and causing inmates to die behind bars who should have been considered for at-home care, according to a new audit from the Department of Justice’s Inspector General. The report identified “multiple failures” in the program, noting that prisons are not even required to inform inmates that a policy exists for releasing low-risk inmates who are severely ill or have other “extraordinary circumstances” such as a dying family member or a child destined for foster care. Of the 208 inmates approved for the program, 28 died in custody before their release due to delays, according to the report.

Earlier this year, a review by advocacy groups found that compassionate release is exceedingly rare, turning sometimes short stints in prison into life sentences. While even tough states like Texas let out about 100 people per year on medical parole, the entire federal system releases on average around two dozen people, out of a population of more than 218,000 inmates. The report provided jarring examples of inmates with compelling stories who died in prison, in spite of the pleas even of the judge who sentenced them. Releasing severely ill low-risk inmates is not only humane and poses very low risk; it also saves prison systems the significant medical costs they carry.