Trouble in Private US Jails Preceded Job Fixing Iraq’s

By Fox Butterfield

SANTA FE, N.M. - Tyson Johnson was in the Santa Fe County
jail here in January 2002, awaiting trial on charges of
stalking and aggravated assault, when his longtime
claustrophobia gave him anxiety attacks and he asked to see a
psychiatrist.

But the jail, which is run by a private prison company,
Management and Training Corporation, did not have a
psychiatrist or a psychologist. So Mr. Johnson tried slitting
his wrist and neck with a razor, and when that failed, he
told the jail’s nurse, Sheila Turner, "Today I am going to
take myself out."

A survey by James Austin, a criminal justice researcher based
in Washington, found there were 49 percent more assaults on
guards per capita and 65 percent more assaults on other
inmates in privately run prisons than in government-operated
prisons nationwide.

A guard, Crystal Quintana, told investigators that the nurse
replied, "Let him." Ms. Turner denies this, her lawyer says.

Ten minutes later, Mr. Johnson, 27 and with no previous
criminal record, was found hanging from a sprinkler head in a
windowless isolation cell where he was supposedly being
closely watched.

The account is taken from a lengthy Justice Department
report, depositions in a civil lawsuit filed by Mr. Johnson’s
mother, Suzan Garcia, and statements by guards to
investigators. And the Justice Department report prompts
another question: Why did Attorney General John Ashcroft pick
an executive of Management and Training, Lane McCotter, to
lead a mission to Iraq to restore its prisons only a month
after the report was released in the spring of 2003, charging
unconstitutional practices in the jail?

Justice Department officials have repeatedly declined to
answer questions about how Mr. McCotter was picked, including
a series of written requests from Senator Charles E. Schumer,
Democrat of New York. But the department’s findings about
Management and Training’s operation of the jail were so
severe that the United States Marshal’s Service withdrew more
than 100 inmates it was housing there.

It was Mr. McCotter, by his own account in Corrections.com,
an industry online magazine, who selected Abu Ghraib to be
the main American prison in Iraq and then directed its
reconstruction after the major fighting ended. (Mr. McCotter
left Iraq in September 2003, before the worst abuses by
American guards there took place, and no one has suggested he
bears responsibility.)

Mr. McCotter, who is director of business development for
Management and Training, has declined all requests for
interviews.

Experts say the troubles in the Santa Fe jail are emblematic
of the problems that often happen when cities and states turn
to private companies to run their jails and prisons. Private
prison companies are in business to make money, for their
owners or shareholders, and the only way they can do that is
to operate at a lower cost than city- and state-operated
jails and prisons, said Judith Greene, a criminal justice
policy analyst in Brooklyn who has written extensively about
private prisons. In practice, Ms. Greene said, this has often
meant private prison companies pay their guards less, provide
less training and skimp on services like medical and mental
health care.

"This goes to the heart of the problem in the private prison
business," Ms. Greene said. "You get what you pay for."

Carl Stuart, a spokesman for Management and Training, in
Centerville, Utah, said he could not comment on questions
raised by the Justice Department report about the size of the
jail’s staff or its medical personnel "because there is still
pending litigation."

But Mr. Stuart said that after the Justice Department issued
its critical report last year, "we’ve worked hard to remedy
their concerns and we feel like we have gained a lot of
ground."

The Justice Department investigation of the Santa Fe jail,
conducted by four experts for the department’s Civil Rights
Division, cataloged a series of problems that seemed to stem
from an effort to keep costs down.

The nearest doctor on contract was in Lubbock, Tex., a two-
hour plane flight away, and he visited the jail on average
only every six weeks, seeing only a few patients each time,
the report found. The nurse had an order in her file to spend
no more than five minutes with any inmate patient, which the
report said was not enough time.

There was no psychologist or psychiatrist, and although the
nurse had no mental health training care, she was
distributing drugs for mentally ill inmates, the report said.

The jail did have a mental health clinician, Thomas Welter,
who was employed by Physicians Network Association, a
subcontractor. But he never did any evaluations of mentally
troubled inmates, the report said. Instead, he boasted to
them about his own history of drug use, according to a recent
deposition by Cody Graham, who was then warden of the Santa
Fe jail. Not long after Mr. Johnson hanged himself, Mr.
Graham escorted Mr. Welter to the gate and told him not to
come back.

Asked to comment, Mr. Welter’s lawyer, Robert Corchine, said
Mr. Welter "categorically denies the allegations in the suit
filed by Tyson Johnson’s estate as well as the findings in
the Justice Department report."

In his deposition, Mr. Graham also said there was no increase
in guards or supervisory staff even though Mr. McCotter
arranged a sizable increase in the number of inmates, to 580
from 180 in a matter of months, Mr. Graham said. But Mr.
McCotter and other officials of Management and Training
ignored his requests for a bigger staff. Another former
official at the jail, Gregory Lee, a major who was second in
command, said in his deposition that he grew frustrated
because the pay for guards was so low - $8.50 an hour with no
benefits - that the jail constantly lost staff members to a
New Mexico state prison across the street.

Management and Training was spun off from the training
division of Morton Thiokol, the defense contractor, and at
first concentrated on training low-income youths for the Job
Corps, said Mr. Stuart, the spokesman. But in the late
1980’s, as the number of prisoners exploded around the nation
and private prison companies began to boom, Management and
Training, known as M.T.C., branched off into running its
first prison, in California.

The company says on its Web site that it now guards 7,500
inmates in 11 jails and prisons. Until the recent publicity
surrounding Mr. McCotter, it was less well known than its
larger competitors like Corrections Corporations of America
and the GEO Group, formerly Wackenhut Corrections
Corporation. Both have been criticized for understaffing,
inmate escapes and their medical care.

In the Justice Department report on the Santa Fe jail, Manuel
Romero, a prison consultant, wrote that the jail was so short
staffed that one guard was expected to monitor 120 inmates
for a 12-hour shift, with no relief for meals or going to the
bathroom.

"This indicates that the staff are not in sufficient quantity
to adequately supervise inmates," Mr. Romero wrote.

The Justice Department report also found that some inmates
had to go two or three weeks without being given a pair of
underwear. In addition, the report said, the jail’s
mattresses were old and cracked and some inmates were not
given sheets.

The booking area was so crowded that some inmates lay on
mattresses on the floor next to each other for up to five
days, the report said. Some cells had no light, either from
windows or electric lights.

Last December two inmates were stabbed and bludgeoned to
death and seven others were injured in a riot at the
company’s Eagle Mountain Community Correctional Facility in
the desert east of Los Angeles. After the riot, California
closed the prison. In early May, an inmate was stabbed to
death at the company’s supermaximum-security prison in
Penetanguishene, Ontario.

A survey by James Austin, a criminal justice researcher based
in Washington, found there were 49 percent more assaults on
guards per capita and 65 percent more assaults on other
inmates in privately run prisons than in government-operated
prisons nationwide.

Mr. Johnson’s mother, Ms. Garcia, said her son had called her
often after being put in jail to complain about how his
claustrophobia was bothering him. "He called and told me he
couldn’t breathe, that he was getting more and more
claustrophobic," she said.

"I called the jail and asked to speak to a doctor, but they
said they didn’t have a doctor," Ms. Garcia said. "When I
asked to speak to the warden, they just put me on hold and
then the phone would disconnect."

In the end, said Jeffrey Haas, another lawyer for Ms. Garcia,
when a guard noticed Mr. Johnson had hanged himself, the
officer on duty first went looking for a camera to record the
scene, rather than cut him down.

"The response of the jail was to protect themselves by taking
pictures rather than to save his life," Mr. Haas said.

June 6, 2004, The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/national/06jail.html?pagewanted=print&position=