PRISON NATION U$A
BY JEFF MARTIN, KEVIN McGILL and ALANNA DURKIN
Updated Tue, October 1, 2024
Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, center, of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division speaks about a new Department of Justice report about the state of Georgia's prisons at a press conference at the Richard B. Russell Federal Building in Atlanta, Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024. On her left is U.S. Attorney Ryan K. Buchanan for the Northern District of Georgia and on her right are U.S. Attorney Peter D. Leary for the Middle District of Georgia and U.S. Attorney Jill E. Steinberg for the Southern District of Georgia. (Arvin Temkar/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)More
ATLANTA (AP) — Georgia prison officials are “deliberately indifferent” to unchecked deadly violence, widespread drug use, extortion and sexual abuse at state lockups, the U.S. Justice Department said Tuesday, threatening to sue the state if it doesn’t quickly take steps to curb rampant violations of prisoners’ Eighth Amendment protections against cruel punishment.
Prison officials responded with a statement saying the prison system “operates in a manner exceeding the requirements of the United States Constitution” and decrying the possibility of “years of expensive and unproductive court monitoring” by federal officials.
Allegations of violence, chaos and “grossly inadequate” staffing are laid out in the Justice Department's grim 93-page report, the result of a statewide civil rights investigation into Georgia prisons announced in September 2021. The system holds an estimated 50,000 people.
“In America, time in prison should not be a sentence to death, torture or rape,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who oversees the Justice Department’s civil rights division, said Tuesday as she discussed the findings at an Atlanta news conference.
In its response, the Georgia Department of Corrections said it was “extremely disappointed” in the accusations. The Justice Department’s findings “reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the current challenges of operating any prison system,” the agency said.
Who's in control?
The report said large, sophisticated gangs run prison black markets trafficking in drugs, weapons and electronic devices such as drones and smart phones. Officials fight the flow of contraband through the arrest of smugglers and mass searches. “However, the constant flow of contraband underscores that these efforts have been insufficient,” the report said.
Inmate gangs have allegedly “co-opted” some administrative functions, including bed assignments, said Ryan Buchanan, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia. “The leadership of the Georgia Department of Corrections has lost control of its facilities."
Death behind bars
The number of homicides among prisoners has grown over the years — from seven in 2018 to 35 in 2023, the report said. The report said there were five homicides at four different prisons in just one month in 2023.
And the homicide numbers are often hard to nail down in Georgia Department of Corrections statistics, according to the report.
“GDC reported in its June 2024 mortality data that, for the first five months of 2024, there were 6 homicides, even though at least 18 deaths were categorized as homicides in GDC incident reports, and GDC assured us these suspected homicides were under investigation," the report said.
Sexual abuse allegations
Multiple allegations of sexual abuse are recounted in the report, including abuse of LGBTQ inmates. A transgender woman reported being sexually assaulted at knifepoint. Another inmate said he was “extorted for money” and sexually abused after six people entered his cell.
“In March 2021, a man from Georgia State Prison who had to be hospitalized due to physical injuries and food deprivation reported his cellmate had been sexually assaulting and raping him over time,” the report said.
Again, the true number of such assaults may be higher. Victims are often reluctant to report sexual abuse, the report noted. And the report alleged that investigations of such abuse are sometimes questionable, as in the case of an Autry State Prison inmate who reported being raped at knifepoint. “A chemical examination of a rectum swab indicated the presence of seminal fluid, and the man was found to have bruising to his anal area. Despite this, the final OPS investigative report incorrectly determined that no seminal fluid was detected, and the allegations were not substantiated.”
In pursuit of racial justice
Clarke said Tuesday that efforts to stop the violence, suffering and chaos in the Georgia prison system also figure into the pursuit of racial justice.
“We know that across the country, Black people are disproportionately represented in the prison population," she said. "And Georgia is no exception — 59% of people in Georgia’s prisons are Black, compared to 31% of the state’s population.”
What's next?
Included in the report are 13 pages of recommended short-and long-term measures the state should take. The report concludes with a warning that legal action was likely. The document said the Attorney General may file a lawsuit to correct the problems in 49 days, and could also intervene in any related, existing private suits in 15 days.
“We can’t turn a blind eye to the wretched conditions and wanton violence unfolding in these institutions,” Clarke said. “The people incarcerated in these jails and prisons are our neighbors, siblings, children, parents, family members and friends.”“
However, Clarke did not discuss possible legal action during the news conference in Atlanta. She said the Justice Department looked forward to working with Georgia officials to address the myriad problems.
“Certainly, severe staffing shortages are one critical part of the problem here,” Clarke said. “We set forth in our report minimal remedial measures that include adding supervision and staffing, fixing the classification and housing system, and correcting deficiencies when it comes to reporting and investigations.”
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McGill reported from New Orleans; Durkin, from Washington.
Georgia prisons 'horrific and unsafe' with homicides rampant: Justice Department
Bart Jansen, USA TODAY
Tue, October 1, 2024
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WASHINGTON – The Georgia Department of Corrections houses inmates in “horrific and unsafe conditions” in violation of the Constitution’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment, a Justice Department report released Tuesday alleges.
The report found the state “deliberately indifferent to these unsafe conditions” for nearly 50,000 prisoners. The constitutional violations, which the state has known about for years and failed to remedy, resulted from staffing deficiencies, the physical condition of the buildings, the management of gangs and the control of weapons and other contraband, the report found.
"Our findings report lays bare the horrific and inhumane conditions that people are confined to inside Georgia's state prison system," said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. "People are assaulted, raped and killed or left to languish inside facilities that are woefully understaffed. Inmates are maimed and tortured, relegated to an existence of fear, filth and not-so-benign neglect."
Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Kristen Clarke speaks during a news conference where she announced that the Justice Department will file a lawsuit challenging a Georgia election law that imposes new limits on voting, at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., on June 25, 2021.
Clarke said federal officials looked forward to working swiftly with state officials to remedy the constitutional violations. But state officials denied constitutional violations and said all prison systems have problems with staffing and violence.
The Georgia Department of Corrections was “extremely disappointed” to learn about the federal accusations about the system, spokesperson Joan Heath said. Correctional staffing, violence and gang activity are problems at all prisons, including the federal Bureau of Prisons, she said.
“Contrary to DOJ’s allegations, the State of Georgia’s prison system operates in a manner exceeding the requirements of the United States Constitution,” Heath said. “Hence, DOJ’s findings today reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the current challenges of operating any prison system.”
Georgia’s prisons would cooperate with federal authorities, Heath said. But the Justice Department’s “track record in prison oversight is poor,” including monitoring Riker’s Island in New York for eight years despite employing one guard for each inmate there, she said.
The report identified hundreds of serious incidents of “systemic violence and chaos” in the prisons. In December 2023, the prisons experienced five homicides at four prisons, and other serious incidents, including numerous deaths after altercations between inmates, and a Central State Prison inmate dying from cardiac arrest after being stabbed, treated at a hospital and returning to prison.
The investigation found 142 inmates were killed in Georgia's prisons from 2018 to 2023. That homicide rate was three times the national rate during the same period.
In April 2023, Smith State Prison had two brutal assaults with one resulting in a man’s death. On April 5, an inmate was discovered dead, possibly strangled by his roommate. The local coroner noted the body was badly decomposed and had likely been dead for over two days.
Sexual violence also is a systemic problem, according to the report. Inmates reported 635 sexual-abuse allegations in 2022, the most recent year available, 639 in 2021 and 702 in 2020.
In August 2020, an inmate at Phillips State Prison was held hostage and tortured for four days, having been stabbed from behind with his eye pierced and suffering a traumatic brain injury, the report said.
“Individuals incarcerated by the Georgia Department of Corrections should not be subjected to life threatening violence and other forms of severe deprivation while serving their prison terms,” said U.S. Attorney Ryan Buchanan for the Northern District of Georgia.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Georgia prisons 'horrific and unsafe,' violate the Constitution: DOJ
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Georgia prisons ‘deliberately indifferent’ to abuses: DOJ
Juliann Ventura
Tue, October 1, 2024 at 1:40 PM MDT·2 min read
The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Tuesday released the findings of its probe into the conditions of prisons in the state of Georgia, which it said were “inhumane” and in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.
“Our findings report lays bare the horrific and inhumane conditions that people are confined to inside Georgia’s state prison system,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in the statement.
“Our statewide investigation exposes long-standing, systemic violations stemming from complete indifference and disregard to the safety and security of people Georgia holds in its prisons.”
Clarke added the department is “committed to using its authority to bring about humane conditions of confinement that are consistent with contemporary standards of decency and respect for basic human dignity.”
Georgia has the fourth highest state prison population in the U.S. According to the nearly 100-page report, the state violates incarcerated peoples’ rights by failing to protect those in medium- and close-security facilities from “widespread physical violence and subjecting incarcerated persons to unreasonable risk of harm from sexual abuse across its facilities.”
The report specifically notes that it fails to protect lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex individuals from sexual violence or abuse.
The report said that from 2018 to 2023, 142 people were killed in the state’s prisons. There were seven homicides in the prison system in 2018, 13 in 2019 and more than 20 every year since, according to the probe.
Within the first five months of this year, there were 18 confirmed or suspected homicides in the state’s prisons, the DOJ’s report said.
The national average homicide rate in state prisons in 2019 was 12 per 100,000 people, the report said. In Georgia’s state prisons, the rate was more than double that year, at 34 per 100,000 people, the investigation noted.
The investigation also found that in nearly all of the interviews conducted at Georgia’s state prisons in 2022 and 2023 — 16 of the 17 total — incarcerated individuals had “consistently reported that they have witnessed life-threatening violence” and that weapons are “widespread.”
The DOJ noted that it believes that “many violent incidents often go unreported when they occur in unsupervised housing units or other areas with inadequate staff supervision.”
The Hill has contacted the Georgia Department of Corrections for comment.
Copyright 2024 Nexstar Media, Inc.
Georgia prison conditions 'horrific and inhumane': US Justice Dept
AFP
Tue, October 1, 2024
A Justice Department report says conditions in Georgia's prisons are 'horrific and inhumane' (Stefani Reynolds) (Stefani Reynolds/AFP/AFP)
Prisons in Georgia are plagued by assaults, murder and sexual violence and officials in the southern US state are "deliberately indifferent" to the horrible conditions, the Justice Department said Tuesday.
"Time in prison should not be a sentence to death, torture or rape," Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said at a press conference releasing the findings of an investigation into Georgia's prisons.
Prisoners are confined in "horrific and inhumane conditions," Clarke said. "People are assaulted, stabbed, raped and killed or left to languish inside facilities that are woefully understaffed."
The Justice Department report said "the State is deliberately indifferent to these unsafe conditions" and while it has known about them for years it has "failed to take reasonable measures to address them."
Georgia has the fourth-largest incarcerated population in the United States with nearly 50,000 people behind bars in 34 state-operated prisons and four private prisons.
Georgia's prison population has more than doubled since 1990. Fifty-nine percent of the inmates in state prisons are Black while Blacks make up 31 percent of the state's population.
The report detailed a number of harrowing incidents including two brutal cases in April 2023 within days of each other at Smith State Prison.
In one incident, an inmate was found dead in his cell, possibly strangled by his roommate, the report said.
"The local coroner noted the body was badly decomposed, and the man likely had been dead for over two days," it said.
Four days earlier, an inmate was assaulted by multiple other prisoners and a video of the assault was uploaded on social media, where the victim's family saw it, the report said.
In the video, the man is seen sitting on the floor with his hands tied behind his back while a group of men punch, kick and stab him.
The Georgia Department of Corrections reported a total of 142 homicides in its facilities between 2018 and 2023.
The Justice Department probe exposed "long-standing, systemic violations stemming from complete indifference and disregard for the safety and security of people Georgia holds in its prisons," Clarke said.
Peter Leary, US Attorney for the Middle District of Georgia, said he hopes the report serves as a "wake-up call" and the department can "work collaboratively with the State of Georgia to improve these deadly conditions."
Justice Department finds unconstitutional conditions in Georgia prisons
Natasha Young
Tue, October 1, 2024
SAVANNAH, Ga. (WSAV)—The Justice Department announced Tuesday that it found that conditions of confinement in Georgia’s prisons violate the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution.
“Our findings report lays bare the horrific and inhumane conditions that people are confined to inside Georgia’s state prison system,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “Our statewide investigation exposes long-standing, systemic violations stemming from complete indifference and disregard to the safety and security of people Georgia holds in its prisons. People are assaulted stabbed, raped and killed or left to languish inside facilities that are woefully understaffed. Inmates are maimed and tortured, relegated to an existence of fear, filth and not so benign neglect.”
The department’s 93-page report details its findings from a thorough investigation of Georgia’s state-operated and private correctional facilities, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of Georgia said. Georgia has the fourth-highest state prison population in the country, with approximately 50,000 people incarcerated.
U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of Georgia said that the report concludes that:
The State of Georgia engages in a pattern or practice of violating incarcerated persons’ constitutional rights by failing to protect individuals housed in medium- and close-security facilities from widespread physical violence and subjecting incarcerated persons to unreasonable risk of harm from sexual abuse across its facilities.
Specifically, Georgia fails to protect incarcerated persons, including persons who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI), from harm caused by sexual violence or abuse.
Critical understaffing and systemic deficiencies in physical plant, housing and classification, contraband control, incident reporting and investigations all contribute to the widespread violence.
Georgia allows gangs to exert improper influence on prison life, including controlling entire housing units and operating unlawful and dangerous schemes in and from the prisons, harming both incarcerated people and the public.
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“These dangerous conditions not only harm the people Georgia incarcerates — it places prison employees and the broader community at risk,” Clarke said. “The Justice Department is committed to using its authority to bring about humane conditions of confinement that are consistent with contemporary standards of decency and respect for basic human dignity.”
The findings announced Tuesday are the result of the Justice Department’s civil investigation and are separate from any criminal cases brought by the Justice Department, the release said.
The Civil Rights Division’s Special Litigation Section and U.S. Attorneys’ Offices for the Northern, Middle and Southern Districts of Georgia conducted the investigation.
Comments of Georgia U.S. Attorneys on the findings of the Justice Department:
“Individuals incarcerated by the Georgia Department of Corrections should not be subjected to life threatening violence and other forms of severe deprivation while serving their prison terms,” said U.S. Attorney Ryan K. Buchanan for the Northern District of Georgia. “Our constitution requires humane conditions in prisons, that, at a minimum, ensure that people in custody are safe. The findings of the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act investigation of the Georgia Department of Corrections reveal grave and diffuse failures to safeguard the men and women housed in its facilities, including disturbing and increasing frequencies of deaths among incarcerated people. We expect the State of Georgia to share our sense of urgency about the seriousness of the violations described in this report and to work cooperatively with the Justice Department, our office and our U.S. Attorney partners in the Middle and Southern Districts to remedy these systemic deficiencies in Georgia prisons.”
“We hope these findings are a wake-up call. Incarcerated people and staff in the Georgia Department of Corrections face unacceptable, systemic risks, and the impact affects all of our communities,” said U.S. Attorney Peter Leary for the Middle District of Georgia. “We hope to work collaboratively with the State of Georgia to improve these deadly conditions; indeed, the Constitution requires it.”
“The safety and security of Georgia’s prisons are inescapably linked to the overall safety and security of our communities,” said U.S. Attorney Jill E. Steinberg for the Southern District of Georgia. “The long-term dysfunction in the management of the prison system has led to the proliferation of criminal networks inside those facilities that endanger private citizens, staff and incarcerated people and directly lead to unacceptable and avoidable violence and abuse against incarcerated people. We are committed to working with the Georgia Department of Corrections to create a safer environment inside and outside Georgia’s prisons.”
Copyright 2024 Nexstar Media, Inc.
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