Thanks to the work of lawyers from the ACLU’s National Prison Project, however, Arpaio’s deceit and inhumanity are being exposed to a degree never before seen. A ruling in an ACLU lawsuit that seeks to force Arpaio to be accountable to a federal consent decree mandating that he maintain conditions at the jail that meet constitutional minimums is expected any day. In seeking to prove that Arpaio must be subjected to federal court oversight, lawyers spent nearly two months in trial documenting a laundry list of egregious stories that crystallize just how callous and out of control Arpaio and his deputies are. Among the most horrific: the story of Juan Mendoza Farias, booked for a DUI-related probation violation who died in custody with blunt force injuries on his face, torso and limbs, according to the county medical examiner. Another: the death at the hands of officers of 33-year-old Charles Agster, a mentally retarded man who weighed 125 pounds. A jury awarded Agster’s family $9 million in damages in 2006 — one of over 2,500 inmate lawsuits against Arpaio that have cost the county more than $42 million.

What’s ironic about the NCCHC stripping Maricopa County of its accreditation is that the county had used that very accreditation as one of its primary defenses against the ACLU’s charges that there are grossly inadequate conditions in existence that need to be fixed immediately. Perhaps the NCCHC saw which way the wind was blowing in the ACLU’s case and couldn’t imagine accrediting an outfit that was found to be in violation of the Constitution by a federal judge. Either way, it is clear that Arpaio’s tough guy attitude is beginning to wear very thin.

Packed, heaving prisons that buckle under the weight of mass incarceration have made prisoners victims of significant and frequent Eighth Amendment violations. Many prisoners wait for dangerous periods of time before getting medical attention. At Ely State Prison in Nevada, a diabetic man died when his body rotted with gangrene after prison medical staff stopped giving him insulin. At the Maricopa County jail in Phoenix, Arizona, a prisoner experienced severe groin and stomach pain and was given fluids, Tylenol and a laxative rather than a medical examination. The next day he was found dead in his cell from an ulcer.

Mental health treatment is also a grave problem. Prisoners who are denied necessary medication, and act out as a result, are often placed in disciplinary segregation where they suffer from severe isolation and sensory deprivation for weeks, months, or even years at a time. Long term isolation exacerbates mental illness and has led numerous individuals to take their own lives. Domestic torture, such as this, should not be allowed to continue.

The coup de grace of prison injustice occurs when prisoners lose the right to file suit and hold states and prison officials responsible for these conditions. The Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA), enacted in 1996, contains a set of restrictions that often prevent prisoners from bringing their cases to court and that make the legal system nearly impossible to for them to navigate. The NPP has been taking action to fix the PLRA in order to ensure that meritorious claims of constitutional violations are heard. For more info, visit the SAVE Coalition website.

The NPP asks that the next administration will abandon the failed policies of over-incarceration. We don’t need more non-violent drug offenders jammed into our overcrowded cells. It is time for a new vision that promotes public safety by using alternatives to prison that actually reform rather than destroy lives.

Are you a Constitution voter? Prove it!

In March 2007 the DOC abruptly moved the women from Edna Mahan Correctional Facility to New Jersey State Prison, where they were held in lockdown conditions – confined in their cells for up to 22 hours a day and denied basic movement within the prison. Unlike the male prisoners, the women were denied access to the prison school and law library, and to basic hygiene and privacy.

While it is a victory that these women will no longer be subjected to the repressive and discriminatory treatment they suffered at NJSP, this is far from a satisfactory solution to the array of flaws in New Jersey’s criminal justice system challenged in our lawsuit. Edna Mahan has problematic conditions of its own, including overcrowding in the medium-security units, Stowe and Hillcrest, and insufficient transportation provided to family members wishing to visit their loved ones. Recently, even when visitors have been able to make the long journey to the prison, they have found that their visits have been shortened to only 45 minutes. Edna Mahan, the state’s sole women’s prison, is located in the northwest corner of New Jersey, and like women’s prisons in so many states, it is far from prisoners’ families.

In addition, transfers like these should not occur arbitrarily. Each time these women are shuffled back and forth at the DOC’s whim, they are uprooted and traumatized, and the few possessions they have are often confiscated or destroyed, or simply disappear. The DOC must create and implement a humane procedure for all transfers, including notices, hearings, and protocols for guards.

Although the DOC claims that Wednesday’s transfer was unrelated to the ACLU lawsuit, it’s clear that they hope to make the suit go away with this move. However, until the DOC provides a viable plan to house women prisoners and meet their needs, we will continue to stand up for women incarcerated in New Jersey and will challenge unconstitutional conditions and other rights violations.

For more information about this case, Jones v. Hayman, including statements from the women prisoners, visit our case page.

Today, we remember the anniversary of an event that showed this country how far we still have to go. It was three years ago today that Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and delivered devastation on a scale many Americans never would have thought possible. Close to 2,000 people lost their lives in the storm and awful floods that followed.

In the days, weeks and months after Katrina, it became shockingly clear that the storm was a human rights as well as humanitarian disaster. It exposed the deeply painful reality about how those who were poor and black in the wealthiest country in the world were literally left to fend for themselves.

The ACLU, particularly our affiliates in Louisiana and Mississippi, worked mightily in the period after the storm to document the full scale of the human rights tragedy, as well as to prevent ongoing civil liberties and civil rights abuses against those who were impacted by it.

On the first anniversary of the storm, the ACLU’s National Prison Project published Abandoned and Abused: Orleans Parish Prisoners in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina, which documented the horrors suffered by the thousands of men, women and children who were abandoned at the Orleans Parish Prison in the days after the storm struck.

Last year, the ACLU published Broken Promises: Two Years After Katrina, which exposed the civil rights abuses that had occurred in Louisiana and Mississippi since the storm, including reports of heightened racially motivated police activity, housing discrimination and ongoing prisoner abuses.

2008 has been marked by heartbreaking stories in the news about the plight of the homeless, many suffering from addiction and mental health problems, in New Orleans, as well as revelations about formaldehyde levels in FEMA trailers that, as was reported in the Washington Post, "may have triggered a public health catastrophe among the more than 300,000 people, many of them children, who lived in the FEMA homes."

The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina will go down in history as one of the most shameful episodes from one of the worst administrations ever to lead our nation. Whoever wins the election in November will have plenty of work to do along our Gulf Coast, which will be particularly urgent now that they are facing a looming affordable housing crisis.

As we mark this third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, a documentary has just opened that is getting amazing reviews and seems to present this event as I’ve never seen. It is called Trouble the Water. It definitely looks like something worth checking out when it comes to a theater or Netflix queue near you.

In March 2007, the DOC transferred approximately 40 women prisoners from the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women, New Jersey’s sole women’s prison, to the NJSP. As a result of this move, the women are deprived of the programming and services they received at Edna Mahan, and are subject to more repressive conditions than other prisoners incarcerated for similar crimes at either prison.

In December 2007, the ACLU Women’s Rights Project and the ACLU of New Jersey filed a lawsuit, Jones v. Hayman, charging that the oppressive conditions the women face at NJSP are unconstitutional and discriminatory based on sex.

While we’re thrilled with today’s decision, it didn’t come without some controversy. In March, we learned that James Drumm, Assistant Administrator of the NJSP, offered women prisoners sentence reductions in exchange for making false statements describing the conditions at NJSP as better than they were. After one prisoner told us about the offer, she was beaten by a prison guard. Women prisoners described a campaign of intimidation to punish and silence women who told us about what was going on.

The court’s decision will prevent the DOC from moving any more women into the men’s prison while our lawsuit proceeds. The court also granted our clients’ request to pursue their claims as a class action suit, and denied a motion by the DOC to dismiss the case.

The issue of deaths in immigration custody has gotten a good deal of press attention recently, and two weeks ago Congress held a hearing on the broader problem of poor medical care in immigration detention and the lack of transparency and oversight over U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the entity responsible for immigration detention. (You can read our testimony at the hearing.)

We spoke with Special Rapporteur Alston about the breadth of the problem, and offered some thoughts about what we believe might be done to address the problem. One important start is the Detainee Basic Medical Care Act of 2008, a bill that has been introduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) (H.R. 5950) and in the Senate by Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) (S. 3005). The Act would require ICE to create some important policies that would help to ensure that detainees receive basic medical services, and that Congress and the Inspectors General of both the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice have an opportunity to perform necessary oversight over in-custody deaths.

But while the Detainee Basic Medical Care Act is an important step in the right direction, it is certainly not a panacea. As we explained to Special Rapporteur Alston, the key problem is our country’s overreliance on detention in general, but more specifically with respect to vulnerable populations such as survivors of torture, asylum-seekers, and people with severe medical and mental health problems who pose no danger to society and clearly are not a flight risk.

For these individuals and others, they are alternatives to secure detention that are more humane, less punitive, and extremely effective at ensuring attendance at immigration proceedings. The bean counters out there will also appreciate how much taxpayer money the federal government could save by pursuing these superior alternatives.

Earlier in the week we blogged about medical care in immigration detention, and the government’s admission to some culpability in the death of detainee Francisco Castaneda. Rep. Lofgren’s bill is meant to prevent the type of gross neglect that led to Francisco’s death. By the time his cancer was diagnosed and treated, it had spread to other parts of his body, and ultimately killed him.

The bill also increases transparency for deaths in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody. Last June, after a New York Times article revealed ICE’s reporting of 62 detainee deaths in its custody since 2004, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking more information. Documents received as a result of that FOIA request have revealed that at least 71 detainees have died in ICE custody since fiscal year 2004.

The New York Times article told the story of Sandra Kenley, who died in immigration detention after repeated requests for medication to treat a hemorrhaging fibroid. Sandra’s sister, June Everett, testified before the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law last June. You can read her testimony, or listen to a podcast of her telling her sister’s story.

No joke.

Deficient care for the mentally ill was also the subject of hearing yesterday in Michigan, where the ACLU argued that Michigan prisons not meet constitutional standards for medical and mental health care. This problem came to light after a 21-year-old mentally ill prisoner died after being left unattended for four days in full, four-point restraints. The ACLU argued that case, Hadix v. Caruso, in district court yesterday.

CORRECTION: The previous version of this post misidentified the date of the New York Times article. The article was from Saturday, not Monday.

A lawyer…said Monday the admission followed a government physician’s sworn statements that she knew a biopsy was the only way to determine whether Castañeda had cancer but never authorized one - a decision that was approved by officials at the headquarters of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

 
While it’s a rare occurrence for the government to own up to negligence, this admission should be taken with a grain of salt. Tom Jawetz, a Staff Attorney for the ACLU’s National Prison Project who’s currently litigating a case against ICE for inadequate medical treatment at the San Diego facility, says:

The admission of medical negligence comes just six weeks after the federal judge who reviewed Francisco’s medical records said that those medical records ‘bespeak of conduct that transcends negligence by miles.’So while it’s great that the U.S. admitted to medical negligence, that doesn’t even begin to explore the deeply disturbing treatment that Francisco was subjected to.There are still several additional claims pending against ICE and the individual doctors who tremendously failed him.

Just last year, in a Washington Post article about health care in immigration detention, the medical director for the Division of Immigration Health Services (DIHS), Tim Shack, who reviewed Francisco’s case, said: “I don’t see this as improper care. I think this is good care…It’s just unfortunate that this had a bad outcome.”

The government’s recent admission, which contradicts Shack’s statements to The Washington Post, shows the need for greater scrutiny of Shack’s other statements in that article.

Shack spoke to The Post about the case of Martin Hernandez Banderas: “I have 173 pages of records showing that he was properly monitored…He was not among the general population.He was receiving 24-hour care.”

This characterization of the care received by Banderas was grossly wrong and perhaps willfully misleading. 173 pages or 173,000, the records show Banderas complained for weeks about increasing pain and a foul odor coming from a growing wound that was turning black and oozing. But from January 11 through 15, 2007, on-site medical staff described the wound as healing, with “a normal, healthy tissue type odor” and “no sign of active infection, pus or purulence.” When Banderas was finally rushed to the hospital on January 17 - just two days later - doctors diagnosed him with a large, gangrenous ulcer in his foot and ankle and a potentially fatal bone infection that nearly cost him his leg.

In addition, DIHS’s own medical records show Banderas was in general population throughout his detention, except for a brief eight-day period when he received intravenous antibiotics in the infirmary. After those eight days, he was returned to general population for four weeks, where he was not given 24-hour care, and was actually left to change his own dressings over the weekends.

The government’s recent admission of medical negligence in Francisco’s case is literally too little, too late.

Last October, Francisco joined our attorneys from the National Prison Project on Capitol Hill to testify on the issue of medical care in immigration detention before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law. You can read his testimony, or listen to a podcast, to learn more about what he endured while detained in ICE custody.

April 24th is the 12th anniversary of the Prison Litigation Reform Act, an important day far too few of us will even be aware of. At the time PLRA was passed, Congress felt the need to try and stem the tide of “frivolous” lawsuits being filed by prisoners over trivial issues like supplies of chunky vs. creamy peanut butter. (While often cited as an example by proponents of the law, no such lawsuit was ever filed).

In practice, after more than a decade on the books, the PLRA has effectively closed the courthouse doors on prisoners seeking a fair hearing on violations of their religious, due process, free speech, and other fundamental constitutional rights, as well as cases of serious physical and sexual abuse - hardly trivial matters. Surely blocking these types of lawsuits could not have been what Congress intended.

There are two major problems with the PLRA. The first is a very narrow definition of what constitutes “physical injury.” For example, a man was forced to stand in a two-and-a-half foot square cage for twelve hours, ten of which he was naked and in tremendous pain due to leg injuries from a previous accident exacerbated by the prolonged standing. Despite visible swelling in his leg, his repeated requests for a doctor were all denied. A court later found that the his suffering failed to rise to the level of physical injury required under the PLRA - talk about a John Yoo approach to prison abuses!

The second problem is the rigid requirement that prisoners wishing to bring a suit must first navigate and exhaust the prison’s own administrative grievance procedures, which can often be a baffling maze. Any mistake along the way by individuals who are too often mentally ill, barely literate, physically incapacitated, or children will forever bar even the most meritorious claims from moving forward.

In one case, the lawsuit of a young boy who corrections staff allowed to be raped and repeatedly assaulted while in detention was thrown out because he never filed a formal grievance, even though he feared further abuse if he reported the incident, and even though his mother repeatedly contacted prison and juvenile court officials to try to get them to stop the abuse. Again, Congress could not have had examples like this in mind when it passed the PLRA in 1996.

We will likely find out soon enough. Congress is holding a hearing today on a piece of legislation that would make necessary and desperately needed reforms to the PLRA - H.R. 4109, the Prison Abuse Remedies Act. The ACLU strongly supports this legislation to make sure that prisoners who experience serious abuses or violations of their fundamental constitutional rights are given their day in court. Please email your members of Congress and urge them to co-sponsor and support H.R. 4109 today.

You can learn more about the PLRA here.

It is so rare to find Congress considering positive prison reform legislation, don’t let the opportunity to add your voice slip you by. The just and fair society we are always striving for demands our action.