BUREAUCRACY BEHIND BARS
http://www.law.com/jsp/dc/PubArticleDC.jsp?id=1166090719519Golden has spent more than 18 months trying to navigate the BOP bureaucracy to help Tony. It has been a frustrating endeavor that hasn’t produced results. Meanwhile, Tony continues to pinball through maximum-security prisons, trying to stay one step ahead of his reputation as a snitch. More than 6,600 D.C. inmates are housed in BOP facilities across the country.
“The Bureau of Prisons is very large and growing by the day, but it is very small when it comes to rumors,” Golden says. “Information is one of the only sources of power.”
In the pressure-cooker environment of prison, sex can be a commodity or a weapon. Rape is a tool used by both inmates and corrections officers to exert power, deliver punishment, or obtain sexual gratification.
Tony’s case illustrates the difficulty in proving sexual-abuse allegations in prison, where corrections officers control almost every aspect of inmates’ lives.
Golden says Tony, who is gay, felt coerced or exploited into having sex at least eight times with the Atlanta corrections officer, who bribed Tony with smuggled contraband, including a cell phone, tennis shoes, and a radio.
Internal-affairs officers learned about the sexual relationship and told Tony he would be transferred to a medium-security facility if he wore a wire in February 2004, but they reneged on the deal when Tony couldn’t get the officer to confess to the sexual acts on tape, Golden says.
The officer no longer works for the BOP, but a BOP spokeswoman would not say if he resigned or was fired. The officer was never charged.
Under federal law, consent is not a defense for BOP officers who have sex with inmates. Because of the level of control officers exert over inmates, officers often can coerce inmates into having sex without threats or violence. Such an act is a federal crime that was increased from a misdemeanor to a felony this year.
Tony says he has suffered further threats and attacks from fellow D.C. inmates and corrections officers while he has been transferred to prisons in Alabama, Louisiana, Florida, Colorado, California, Georgia and Kentucky.
J.L. Norwood, warden of the U.S. penitentiary at Victorville, Calif., stated in a July 14 memo that Tony’s central file contains documentation supporting his claims about the sexual-abuse investigation in Atlanta. In response to a complaint from Tony, Norwood stated a request would be made for “a lesser security transfer to a facility more commensurate with your custody and security needs.”
That transfer to protect Tony never happened. Instead, Tony was sent last month to the Big Sandy maximum-security penitentiary in Inez, Ky., where two D.C. inmates have been killed in assaults over the past two months, triggering a lockdown of the entire facility that was lifted last week. A prison spokeswoman said last week that Tony had declined an interview request from Legal Times.
BOP spokeswoman Felicia Ponce says an inmate’s central file is not public, and she would not comment on Tony’s case. She says BOP officers receive initial and ongoing annual training on sexual-abuse reporting procedures, and all sexual-abuse allegations are taken seriously and are investigated either internally or by external law-enforcement agencies.
Golden has filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain Tony’s central file and any details of the FBI investigation, but she has not yet received any records. Tony needs to be transferred to a medium-security facility or to a state prison or placed in a BOP witness protection program, Golden says. If the BOP keeps refusing those options, Golden plans to file a preliminary injunction request in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
“It’s frustrating, but I’ve gotten used to it,” Golden says about the unresponsiveness of the BOP bureaucracy. “It’s their standard operating procedure.”
Current standards vary on how state and federal prisons handle rape allegations, and policies that sound great on paper may bear little resemblance to the reality faced by rape victims.
“There’s no place to take these complaints,” says Brenda Smith, an American University law professor and commissioner on the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission. “It’s more the exception than the rule that they are dealt with expeditiously, confidentially, and that discipline occurs.”
Inmate overcrowding, poor training and supervision of corrections officers, shoddy sexual-abuse investigations, and a persistent failure to prosecute rapists all contribute to sexual assaults, says Smith, who has devised sexual-abuse training for corrections officers.
Prisons and jails also must improve classification systems for identifying inmates who are likely to be rapists or victims, Smith says.
Rape victims often are nonviolent first-time offenders or may be young, small, weak, mentally ill, gay, or transgendered.
Under its mandate from Congress, the commission cannot propose national standards that would impose substantial additional costs on corrections facilities. Some endemic problems, such as overcrowding or poor prison design, may not be addressed by the commission because of the funding restriction, Walton says.
Prosecution of prison rape has been a low priority for state and federal prosecutors faced with limited resources and no public outcry for action, Walton says.
From fiscal years 2000 to 2004, the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) investigated 351 BOP staffers who allegedly sexually abused inmates. OIG presented 163 cases for prosecution, but federal prosecutors tossed more than half of the cases because of a lack of physical evidence, the charges were only misdemeanors, or the cases “lacked jury appeal,” according to an OIG report.
Sometimes the cases trigger bloodshed, including a June 21 shootout among federal officers at the federal prison in Tallahassee, Fla. BOP corrections officer Ralph Hill opened fire on federal agents who came to the prison to arrest him and five other corrections officers indicted on charges of trading smuggled contraband for sex with female inmates. OIG Special Agent William Sentner was mortally wounded but was able to return fire and kill Hill.
http://www.law.com/jsp/dc/PubArticleDC.jsp?id=1166090719519
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