| Prison Legal News, a monthly print publication that covers criminal justice issues, is a project of the Human Rights Defense Center, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. |
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Who Pays for Jail Rape? A federal appeals court issued a ruling earlier this month in a Texas case that helps explain why so many prison or jail inmates are sexually assaulted by their guards and why so little is done about it. It's not just lax training and oversight within facilities. It's not just poor recruitment practices. It's also layer upon layer of nearly insurmountable legal standards crafted over time by judges and legislators to protect corrections officers, their supervisors, and, ultimately, local budgets. Consider the case of Ezmerelda Rivera. In December 2014 she and her husband were arrested for public intoxication and driving while intoxicated. The car was pulled over around 1 a.m. They were taken to the Hale County Jail where they encountered Manuel Fierros, the officer in charge that night. Rivera first was taken by a female guard to change clothes - orange scrubs with no underwear. Then Fierros took over. Now it was about 2:30 a.m. He led Rivera to a room in the jail that he knew was not monitored by video surveillance - a room used by attorneys to talk privately with their clients - where he forced her repeatedly to perform oral sex on him. They were alone inside that room for nearly one hour. No one came to check on Rivera. She was released the next day. When she filed a complaint with the Texas Rangers she was told that Fierros had confessed to his misconduct. Within days he was arrested and charged with "violating the civil rights of a person in custody through sexual activity," a felony that carries a two-year maximum prison term. Fierros was promptly released on bail. Nine months later, in August 2015, he pleaded guilty. He was given three years of probation and was able to avoid the requirement to register as a sex offender. Fierros also was barred from serving again as a guard. Rivera, in the meantime, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Fierros and his bosses at the jail. What Rivera did not know when she was taken to that jail is that there were questions about Fierros' suitability to be a prison guard even before he was hired by Hale County in 2012. After he applied for the job prison officials learned that he twice had been arrested as a 15-year-old for "indecency with a child by sexual conduct." When they inquired of the local prosecutor they discovered no one knew anything about what had happened to the two cases. But no investigation ensued. Fierros was never tried or convicted nor even asked by jail officials to explain those two arrests. Instead, Fierros was hired and given the standard training all new guards receive - training that included warnings about not sexually assaulting inmates. Read More |
California: Man makes helping ex-inmates his mission, forms national database for tattoo removal For seven years, Mark Drevno has traversed America's jails and prisons, talking to thousands of inmates about how to build a better life on the outside. Drevno is the CEO of Jails to Jobs, a Lafayette-based nonprofit that's dedicated to helping those former inmates build job skills and find work. Drevno authored a how-to book that's gained widespread praise as a template for formerly incarcerated people seeking work. But the group's biggest hit, according to criminal justice experts, is the creation of a comprehensive database of places that offer cheap, accessible tattoo removal services.
"I'd go in and do these job search workshops, and see all these visible, neck, face, and head tattoos," Drevno said. "That's such a barrier to employment."
Jails to Jobs' database covers 43 states and more than 250 locations. It took many years to compile, and a lot of the locations were near-impossible to find online, Drevno said. He's also building a network of local tattoo removal practitioners with the hopes of being the go-between for people with offensive tattoos and those who can take them off for cheap. "For me, this is a contribution to try and help somebody," said Dr. Shahin Javaheri, a plastic surgeon whose office recently joined Jails to Jobs' network. "My philosophy in life is that everybody deserves a second chance." Read More |
PETITION: Gov. Kasich: Please don't resume executions in Ohio. It has been three and a half years since the botched execution of Dennis McGuire took place in Ohio on January 16, 2014. Since that time, three innocent men have been released from death row in Ohio after their wrongful convictions were finally exposed. Ohio has freed a total of nine innocent men from death row, but we have no idea how many more still sit on death row. One estimate by the National Academy of Sciences suggests that as many as 4% of death row prisoners could be innocent. Despite these unsettling developments, Ohio has announced 27 new execution dates through 2021, beginning with Ronald Phillips on July 26, 2017. With the state's history of wrongful convictions and botched executions, this rush to resume executions is risky, unnecessary, and it is bad for business. Please tell Gov. Kasich to stop these executions. Read More |
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From the PLN in Print Archives Wrongfully Arrested for Murder, Prisoner Dies in California Jail; Corizon Loses Contract When police were notified about the death of Terry Cameron, 58, in March 2016, they quickly arrested her husband, Melvin Stubbs, 65. Stubbs was a diabetic amputee who used a wheelchair. Nonetheless, police said there were signs of a struggle, Stubbs and Cameron both had defensive wounds, Cameron's face was covered with a pillow and the answers that Stubbs gave during police questioning were inadequate - sufficient evidence to justify his arrest, they claimed. But ninety minutes after Stubbs was booked into jail he was dead. The Alameda County Coroner's Office later determined the cause of Cameron's death was not homicide but rather acute bacterial meningitis. "What they did to him was horrible," stated Manuel Primas, Stubbs' former brother-in-law. "His last thought must've been, 'My wife just died and I'm in here for murder.' And then he died. That's a hell of a way to go." Oakland police said Stubbs had not been answering questions about Cameron's death very well, "due to what looks like a medical condition." The symptoms of meningitis, a contagious disease, include mental confusion. But it wasn't until they received the coroner's report on Cameron's death that Stubbs' behavior began to "make sense," said Oakland police Lt. Roland Holmgren. By then it was too late. Stubbs had been taken to a hospital, where he was stabilized, prior to being transported to the Santa Rita Jail. He then died in the facility's medical unit. Alameda County Sheriff's Department officials, who operate the jail, refused to comment on his medical condition. But Lt. Holmgren defended his officers' handling of Cameron's death, noting that Stubbs had admitted in the hospital to having a physical altercation with his wife. "The evidence was there," he said, "there was more than enough reasonable suspicion" to justify Stubbs' arrest. At the time, Tennessee-based Corizon Health had a $237 million annual contract - the largest single contract awarded by Alameda County - to provide medical services at the Santa Rita Jail and Glenn E. Dyer Detention Facility. But the quality of Corizon's health care was already under question at the time of Stubbs' death. Read More |
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California: He blew the whistle when an inmate died. Then he was fired, and his lawsuit tossed out Two years after state corrections officials fired a psychologist for exposing the death of a mentally ill inmate at Mule Creek State Prison, a federal judge has tossed out the whistleblower lawsuit he filed over his dismissal. U.S. District Judge Troy L. Nunley dismissed the lawsuit Eric Reininga filed against state officials, writing in an eight-page order that he could not "find any cases that prohibit a government employer from firing an employee who allegedly violated Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) disclosure laws." Reininga and a spokesman for the corrections department declined to comment. The dismissal comes 15 months after Reininga filed his suit charging that corrections officials routinely covered up how inmates died and operated under a "code of silence." The dismissal also comes one year after state officials agreed to pay out $750,000 to the parents of inmate Joseph Damien Duran, 35, who died after being blasted in the face by pepper spray because he refused to remove his hands from the food port in his cell door. Duran breathed through a tube in his throat and was left in his cell until he was later found dead, despite requests from medical staffers that he be removed and cleaned up. Seventeen days after his death on Sept. 7, 2013, prison officials had Duran's body cremated and the ashes dumped at sea, despite the fact that they had not notified his parents he was dead. Officials say they tried calling the Durans and sending a telegram to an old address before disposing of the remains.
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Pennsylvania: Flooded with drug K2, Huntingdon prison disciplines inmates One of the thousands of letters in the daily mail pile early this month at the state prison near this town was crayon-bright and faintly stained, as if a messy child wrote it during breakfast. Its odor, though, was neither Crayola nor spilled milk, and upon opening it corrections mail processor Dawn Jackson got a terrible headache. Tests revealed that the letter was impregnated with a drug called K2, which can be mixed with tobacco and smoked. Hardly known in Western Pennsylvania even a few years ago, the synthetic K2 "is a huge problem," said Lt. Walter House, a member of the security team at State Correctional Institution Huntingdon in Huntingdon County, some 30 miles east of Altoona. Dealers "are trying everything in the world to get it in here." Inmates have written in letters to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that they don't like seeing their neighbors passed out from drugs they buy in the prison yard. Even more, they resent being caught up - they say falsely accused - in the prison's zero-tolerance response to the problem. SCI Huntingdon has filled its harsh restricted housing unit largely with prisoners whose belongings tested positive for K2. Read More |
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New York: NYC to pay $380G to family of Rikers inmate who hanged himself after being taken off suicide watch The city has agreed to pay $380,000 to the family of a Rikers Island inmate who hanged himself in his jail cell after being taken off suicide watch, court records show. Aris Hiraldo, 24, killed himself with the drawstring from his nylon sweatpants in February 2011 - just 10 days after a social worker canceled his suicide watch and correction officers returned him to a regular cell. His family filed a lawsuit against the city and the Department of Correction in 2012, accusing them of negligence. Their lawyers found records showing that, even after the suicide watch ended, Hiraldo exhibited signs that he was a threat to himself. Phone calls that Hiraldo made at the jail - which the Correction Department monitored - showed he still suffered from suicidal ideations, according to court records. The family of Hiraldo filed a petition last month in Brooklyn Surrogate's Court asking a judge to sign off on the settlement amount.
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Beyond Bars: One man's journey from inmate to law professor In 1999, Shon Hopwood's life changed forever. As the judge's gavel fell, the then-22-year-old was sentenced to more than a decade in federal prison for his role in five bank robberies. Last month, Hopwood became a professor at Georgetown University Law Center. The intervening years are an exceptional story of redemption and rehabilitation rarely seen in a criminal justice system in which more than 75 percent of released inmates are rearrested, according the Bureau of Justice Statistics. "I had resources that other people did not," Hopwood said. "It wasn't just all me. People tend to view my story as pick yourself up by the bootstraps, but it's really the opposite of that. I had a former solicitor general of the United States as my mentor when I came out of prison. Most people don't have that. I had a smart and beautiful woman who drove me around to job interviews for three weeks after I got out of prison. Nobody in the halfway house of 80 some guys had that." Candidly, and despite his accomplishments, Hopwood said most of the people he was in prison with would likely have similar success if they had been afforded the same opportunities. As he said, most are not. Read More |
How the Stanford Prison Experiment Worked Nine men shuffle through the hallway of a drab prison, each wearing nothing but a skimpy smock. Nine guards watch lazily, insulting the prisoners and thinking up bizarre humiliations to inflict on them. Prisoners are subjected to pushups, group chants, isolation in a tiny closet and bags over their heads. With every passing hour, the guards seem to become more depraved, and the prisoners more defeated. Some of the prisoners crack under the dehumanizing treatment. The twist ending to this bleak prison story is that it did not occur in a prison - it took place in a hallway at Stanford University in California. The men were not guards and prisoners; they were young men who agreed to take part in an experiment. None of them had committed crimes. None of them realized they were part of an experiment that would become infamous, even legendary, in the annals of the social sciences. Psychology professor Philip Zimbardo had planned to run the Stanford Prison Experiment for two weeks, long enough to explore how humans react to authority and the conditions inside a prison. Instead, he called the experiment off after just six days. The result of his experiment is sometimes shrouded in its own mythology, the truth it revealed about human psychology obscured by its disturbing story of cruelty and submission. What really happened during those six days in 1971? Let's delve into what the experiment taught us about human nature and about how society analyzes experiments studying behavior. Read More |
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