Mineral Wells Investigation, Pt. 3

Mr. Hudson, I have read your paper with due interest, and I have some (I hope helpful) suggestions – since almost all of what you say seems to be based on the paperwork you have requested and I assume carefully perused, I have to wonder if you’ve ever been to this particular prison, and if so, when? I would like to double-check these facts, as well as the facts you’ve presented so far. I will say right up front that I do not have first-hand knowledge of many of these incidents, and can only speak with an eye to common sense, however far I may stray from it in fact. I will try to answer/suggest in a chronological order based upon your three part essay. My first question is how many reports constitute a steady stream? My second question is what counts as corroborated? My third question regards your sources, insofar as I don’t want you to reveal your sources, but at the same time, I would like to know if they were inmates, staff, family of inmates or staff, or a little of each, or a category altogether not mentioned. Finally, what counts as unsafe? You don’t list very many sample reports/allegations of abuse or neglect – I believe in fact for the whole three part essay you list two reader comments during the third installment, a slew of excerpts from the use of force et al paperwork, and some quotes from some officials. The first comment deals with the nephew that requires counseling. It’s a shame that such a fragile child with such a frail psyche needs counseling, but that such a mental valetudinarian turned to the rough-and-tumble life of crime. Surely, the nightmares are part of a tax-free life, no? The second is my favorite because it says little by saying much. The husband was in fear for his life during a riot that other inmates started and that was brought into peace and unity by the corrections officers a short time later. He felt like he was going to die, he says, but he didn’t. I did find it strange that you didn’t come across any unwarranted deaths actually on the facility, it being a hell-hole and all, but the wife, alluding to the current comment she made, then says that “they have nothing productive to do at this facility.” We may have to debate on the semantics of “productive.” I believe that for something to be productive, it may either produce something tangible, like a factory produces a car or a table kit from IKEA, but it may also produce something intangible, like an education is commonly produced by a school, or public safety is produced by incarcerating dangerous people. The given comments don’t tell me much about the facility, except that inmates weren’t happy there, which I believe is the point of a prison… which would mean that they are productive insofar as they aim at lowering recidivism by making it an undesirable place to be and keeping dangerous people outside of society for the sake of public safety. My first three questions, unfortunately, aren’t answered in your report, but I am inclined to believe that it was mostly inmates or the families of inmates that constituted this steady stream, and specific events were corroborated only so far as they were big events that were spoken of by many inmates after the event happened, most inmates probably didn’t see them anyway, but knew about them because people told about them… for instance: a teacher was assaulted by an inmate – sucker punched six times in the head from behind by an inmate, and when the teacher turned around, the inmate put his hands behind his back and was handcuffed. After that, inmates that never saw what happened swore that the teacher was knocked out immediately. The inmate himself who did the sucker-punching later said that the staff member hit him first. The teacher never swung a punch at all, and other inmates corroborated this. So my question is how do you separate the myth and the bullshit from the facts? The use of force papers would be your best bet, but even better than that is to use some degree of common sense when you read the use of force papers. Regarding the incident with the Warden and Assistant Warden, I would beg you to use your common sense while reading it. Imagine you have just heard that an inmate was put into cuffs and taken to transient housing for assaulting a staff member. You approach the inmate and ask for his side of the story (bearing in mind that you are in the same room with this inmate and there are no bars or glass between you) and he moves in close to you and spits in your face. You don’t know what he’s going to do next. He has assaulted you. You do not know if he has bit his tongue and then spat at you in an attempt to infect you with something, or if it is merely a gesture of defiance. Either way, it is still assault, and using your open hand to move the inmate’s head aside so that you can neutralize the inmate’s current means of attack. You have to figure in the surprise of an inmate spontaneously spitting in your face. Add to that, that the way you characterized the incident, it’s as if the warden was spit upon and hit the guy, then the assistant warden suddenly grabbed him by the throat while the warden was behind the guy. You make no mention of the time that may have gone by, or that any time went by at all… very irresponsible. That kind of summarizing – not reporting – is sloppy. I’ve read more professional articles on indymedia about the Radical Encuentro Camp. They didn’t beat him or break out batons or take turns punching him, they used precisely the amount of force necessary and proper. I am sorry you can’t think of a professional setting where reacting to someone assaulting you by spitting at you is not tolerated. I’ll throw some examples out and see if you can see it with me: policeman – you spit on a police officer, they consider it assaulting a police officer and they arrest you. You spit on an activists while they protest and they press assault charges. To tell you the truth, I can’t imagine a setting where someone spitting on you is tolerated, even in polite society. It is a major case inside and a crime outside. I don’t understand why you think it’s okay. Perhaps you could clear that up for me. You can start by telling me the redeeming social characteristics of getting someone’s spit in your face, and the last time you got shot in the face with someone else’s spit that you didn’t know, and how well you took it. Even if someone accidentally spits in your face, it is taboo and not appreciated – unless you’re into that sort of thing. When someone does it accidentally, it’s annoying; when they do it intentionally, it’s inflammatory. By now, I’m sure you can guess what my tone toward your report is. I won’t lie and tell you that I like what you’ve written, nor will I say you don’t know what you’re talking about, because you have the reports in front of you – I do not. I don’t want you to misunderstand anything I have to say, so I won’t try to use difficult language, complex sentence structures, or sophisticated arguments to run logical circles around you. My goal here is to provide you with an alternate viewpoint that is trying very hard to be thoughtful and open-minded. I welcome any criticism from Mr. Hudson or any readers, because if my views are misinformed, I would welcome the correction. You don’t tell us how many family members gave you these stirring comments that prompted you to investigate, but surely you would have prized and flaunted, or at least mentioned direct corroboration from inmates or even ex-staff? Certainly there must be disgruntled employees out there dying to let the world know of the unspeakable horrors that drove that pitiable nephew into counseling. I am also concerned about the diction you use, or abuse as the case may be. You change certain nouns that really shouldn’t be used interchangeably. Is there a difference between a riot and a disturbance? I would image there would be. A riot would be something that got out of control, while a disturbance seems to indicate that control was never lost, just disturbed. You do this often enough to make a reader think you’re doing it on purpose. Your choice of phrasing things in certain ways also puzzles me, as when you said in part 1 “One large disturbance in August of 2007… and ended only after CCA staff used chemical agents.” “Only” is a very tricky word. It leads me to believe that you believe that gas was simply too much force to quell the disturbance. The guards should have asked nicely for the offending offenders to be nice and stop the nonsense. Guns weren’t used, dogs weren’t used, nor were heavy clubs, and no one was killed. So you are telling me that chemical agents were just too much? Has enough time passed since July 23rd and now for you to publish your findings on the disturbance in July, 2008, if indeed there was one? There may well have been, but surely enough time has passed between then and now for you to have looked into it at put your mind, no – all our minds at ease. It leads a reader to suspect that you are intentionally not mentioning something because it may be damaging to your case. Although, after reading the second and third installments, I have to confess that your case has me stumped – are you condemning or applauding CCA Mineral Wells? I’ll point out what I mean later. At this point, however, your essay can only be said to be a biased and loaded summary, not a report. You mention that you “weren’t provided with any information on how the case proceeded” (regarding sexual assault between inmates lasting nearly six months, allegedly), and I have to wonder why these facts weren’t provided to you, but more especially how you know you weren’t provided with any information if it wasn’t provided to you! How can you know you don’t know something if you don’t know it? As for staff-on-inmate sexual assault, I can only say – and I think you’ll agree – the very thought of staff having sexual contact with inmates is appalling. It breeds mistrust amongst the staff, tension among the staff and inmates, and gives the inmates bargaining/blackmailing material. The most monumental concern, though, is the fact that these inmates are in legal fact being raped. They are assumed to be unable to give consent, so any sexual contact with them must be considered rape. Now, I have to applaud your realism when you say that it is ostensibly consensual, but you aren’t going far enough – it may not be just consensual, it may be asked for by the inmates. Suppose there is an attractive corrections officer of the desired gender, and one is randy as hell… it doesn’t take too much imagination to see that an inmate may in fact have an itch that others of the inmate’s own sex can’t scratch. I don’t want to appear to trivialize this matter – it is of the utmost seriousness and urgency that correctional facilities find some way to remove this temptation from inmates, or at least see to it that it is an impossible temptation to realize. Fear of legal retribution doesn’t seem to hinder the offending officer, nor does the title of “rape survivor” deter felons from seeking sex from C/Os. I am curious, though, as to how “sexual contact” is defined for your purposes. In the second installment, you mention an inmate being “disciplined, ‘for discourteous conduct of a sexual nature.’” I believe you say the inmate seized the guard. So, can we assume this is the standard definition that involves any touching of yourself or others where such touch is meant to arouse one or more persons sexually? I won’t be naïve and say that this opens a huge can of worms casting doubt upon your whole piece, just saying that these are helpful things to define. I’m reasonably sold on the idea that the sexual contact was at the lightest heavy petting or digital penetration and going so far as to include full-blown sexual intercourse and perhaps even sodomy. May even have been a train. I don’t have the facts. But let’s sum up: You’ve told me that you’re going to do a report in three parts, that there were riots and a disturbance/riot (you’re not sure which), which you’ve heard about because inmates’ families told you, and these same people and others told you it was a bad place. There have been reported sexual assaults, including one inmate-on-inmate rape, 8 guard-on-inmate sexual assaults; all nine of these over a period of nearly three years, and some haven’t been closed. That summed it all up, yeah? And you say you’ve saved editorializing for the third part. Bah! Listen, I’m all about using the appropriate amount of words for the task at hand: use few if you’re summarizing, use few and be careful with pronouns for a report, use lots for comedy, satire, discrediting, treatises, etc. Don’t go for bulk unless it’s necessary. Regarding part two: The usual criticism applies, only more so. Technically, your use of quotation marks leads one to believe your unquoted things are not official at all and your quoted bits are taken from the reports you were given. If that was your intent, then why aren’t there quotes around the major use of force explanation? It sounds like a definition, but has no quotes or a citation, so it must be your interpretation. If that’s the case, you should have said something to your trusting readers. You say that prisoners were “subjected” to uses of force. This choice in diction is very loaded. To maintain objectivity, you would certainly have chosen a less loaded phrasing – unless you aren’t objective and are in fact publishing this “report” to further an agenda. Seems kinda shady to me… But, I have to admit, you got them. They documented cases of unnecessary force and actually called it unnecessary! The fools! You have them now! Those rat bastards actually slipped up and said it was unnecessary… oh, wait, no… that would make them honest and appear to any reasonable person that they were in fact interested in clearly documenting these instances and disciplining the parties responsible. In the first paragraph under “2006 Major Use of Force Reports” you have a very odd and potentially misleading way of ordering your sentences. You mention one use of force used to stop a fight in May, another in November, and then go on to talk about the instance in November, and finish with May. Now, surely, you aren’t intending to confuse the reader, but why bother with all that when you could have easily said “The first, in May… is unclear, but it resulted in minor injuries to both inmate and officer… and the one in November where a chemical agent was used.” The way you phrased it, if someone were going through it quickly, they may think that first a chemical agent was used, and then months later a chemical agent wasn’t used and there was no attempt to document it. The way I have it at least preserves the chronology and isn’t nearly as misleading. Now, technicalities aside – isn’t it a good thing that over those 5 or 6 months they learned not to get in the middle of a fight themselves between inmates, but rather to stand a safe distance away if two inmates or more are fighting and use non-lethal gas to make them stop fighting so that none sustain any physical injury, and then document it? It sounds like it’s getting better… not worse. For the 2007 section, you wording caused me much grief. I am not sure if these seventeen cases are individually dealt with or not. You don’t break them all down and deal with each, you don’t tell me a complete breakdown at all, even in summary, you just say that a certain number of the 17 said this and had this in it, and another number had these things in it, which may in fact include some you’ve already mentioned or not. Seeing if they add up doesn’t cut it. Again, I’ve seen better reporting in indymedia. Most of these reports show that the guards were doing their job, which is why I wonder about your agenda. Si Khan is obviously against what he perceives to be the prison industrial complex, and you word it as though you’ve caught them doing something naughty, but you haven’t. So, again, I wonder, are you just so much smarter than I am that I am missing something, or are you so out of touch with reality that reality itself is a no-no for you? When an offender has something he should not have (contraband, cell-phones, drugs, alcohol, etc.) it is the duty of the corrections officer to take it from him, or her as the case may be. If an inmate has a cellular phone, he could make unmonitored phone calls to people on the outside to get things done on either the inside or outside, such as dropping or smuggling, or putting a hit on someone, and no one would know because they can’t monitor cellular phones. In prison, it is widely hoped that people will begin a recovery process, and very retrograde to that recovery process is alcohol or drugs. Do you see? If an inmate is caught with such things, privileges are taken away, the inmate is disciplined and punished. If the corrections officer can’t prove the inmate had the things by confiscating them, it makes punishment and therefore discipline very difficult, and correction is virtually impossible… Pardon my anachronism, criminal justice is virtually impossible under those conditions. So, why do you object to inmates being disciplined for contraband? Further, if a guard orders the inmate to surrender the contraband, do you think the inmate will always do this? Of course not! But the contraband must be taken away immediately. So what is a corrections – criminal justice officer to do? You’ve already made it clear in these summaries: their jobs. Now, a staff member not reporting a use of force for 11 days… that is serious. I cannot think of any defense for that if the person wasn’t comatose for those eleven days, and you reported that there were no injuries. But here again you show us that the staff did it’s job by firing this person. Again, the staff, as a whole, did its job. An inmate threatening to kill himself can’t kill himself if he’s gassed, nor can he cut you if you try to take the thing away. The staff did its job. The rest of these for 2007 are unclear. What we need is someone who worked or still works there who is an eye-witness to these things. Inmates may or may not be telling the truth, so a staff member would be needed. But I fail to see why a use of force is unnecessary if an offender will not obey orders to do or stop doing something. They are required to obey all legitimate orders, are they not? Who is to say that the inmates themselves won’t haul off and attack a guard – bearing in mind that some of these guards are possibly small-framed, less strong than an inmate who spends his or her time working out every day on the field or in his room, or outnumbered. You yourself mentioned that they are understaffed. Please explain to me how you would have had these incidents turn out. You also mention something about an omission in the report’s summary, but not in the report… so again I ask you how do you know about it not being there if it wasn’t there? I mentioned the use (abuse) of quotes, so tell me why it is that you put in larger font these allegations of other instances, because I see only the one in March that you referenced, and then this totally new case regarding a shower and a shirt, but no quotes, except to mention “placed” and “concealed contraband”. So I wonder why you are picking and choosing your uses of grammatical mechanics in such a way as to portray this Mineral Wells facility as corrupted. I mean, this is the kind of thing we don’t allow junior high students to get away with. Part three is pretty brief, so I’ll just mention a few things. If an offender doesn’t follow the rules, he or she must be punished and disciplined, because if one gets away with it, others will try, and the system will break down. If the inmates were given an order or directive to wear shirts, then they must wear shirts. It is a legitimate order with which they must comply. If they do not, they must be either made to do so or be punished. You mention the understaffing concerns, and I must agree with you. If a prison is understaffed, it must be staffed. Borrowing from prisons is misleading… were the borrowed corrections officers on leave, on vacation, off that weekend or day, or were they ripped away from their posts at that very instant and taken to the riotous facility, leaving everything unguarded? Surely you’ve thought of this. It doesn’t stand to reason that just because they borrowed that they must have borrowed from active and on-duty guards at other facilities, but that they could have borrowed active off-duty officers as well. But you wouldn’t jump to conclusions, would you? In sum, I have to say that the quality of the activist-reporter has gone down. Where is the responsibility to the truth, despite your personal preferences? Where is objectivity? Don’t pull the Rush Limbaugh argument that you are equal time – that’s a cop-out and you know it. If anything, I’m sad to see what could be a valid attack on a possible problem of society (I mean privatized and public prisons in general, not this specific one) degenerate into a silliness that seeks only to stir up controversy. I can’t think of any redeeming aspect of this loaded summary other than the possibility it might expose the problems in prisons – problems that aren’t mentioned here but do exist, such as guard safety, discipline problems, routes to more effective discipline and punishments, and better laws with which to govern. It also shows stratification, because if a guard were called by an inmate on a cell-phone, I doubt anyone would notice or care, but if a senator is called, well, we can’t have that, by God. Perhaps you should look into Cuba’s prisons. The Bottom Line: There is a real problem with crime in our midst, and it won’t be solved by blaming individuals or the system, but by how we raise and educate our children.