Texas Prison Bid'ness

Karen Gleason from the Del Rio News Herald reported Saturday that a former GEO Group guard has been indicted on federal civil rights charges for twice striking a federal detainee while employed at the Val Verde Correctional Center in October of 2006.

According to the article, 20 year-old Emmanuel Cassio (meaning Cassio was a 19 year-old correctional officer at the time of the alleged assault) was indicted by a federal grand jury on one felony count of deprivation of rights under the color of law, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

Of course, this isn't the first incident at the Val Verde Correctional Center. As we've reported, the Val Verde Detention Center has been subjected to two well-publicized lawsuits. In a 2005 suit, an employee reported that his superior displayed a hangman’s noose in his office and took pictures in his prison uniform donning KKK garb. The second lawsuit was brought by a civil rights organization on behalf of the family of LeTisha Tapia, a detainee who committed suicide after reporting that she had been sexually assaulted and denied medical care. GEO settled both suits. The settlement from the Tapia suit included a full-time county monitor to the prison.

This summer, the facility was again rocked after four inmates came down with a mysterious illness. Three of the inmates later died, but a state investigation could find nothing at the prison linking the prison to the illnesses.

I attended a protest in October at the prison after the Texas Jail Project named the facility the "worst Texas jail" for the fall of 2007. The protest, sponsored by Texas Jail Project, Grassroots Leadership, and the Border Ambassadors was lively, and drew many family members and formerly incarcerated people at the facility who complained the that food was inadequate, and that drugs were readily available in the facility.

The protest was followed by a brief tour of the facility led by GEO's warden, John Campbell, and accompanied by the county monitor, Cody Wheeler. The tour was mostly uneventful, as one might expect with a planned prison tour given to jail advocates. Warden Campbell insisted that not much had changed in the facility over the past several years, because nothing had really been wrong in the prison to start with.

We'll keep you posted on news about Val Verde and other GEO Group prisons in Texas.