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Judge: Time For Prison Clean-Up Is Now

June 2, 2009 — After years of operating on promises, it's now time for the government to get into gear and clean up the territory's prisons, visiting District Court Judge Stanley Brotman said Tuesday.
More than a decade ago, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on behalf of several inmates, charging widespread rights abuses in prisons on St. Thomas. A settlement agreement was reached in 1994, and Brotman said Tuesday that he is giving the government one year to come into compliance with its conditions.
"You've got one year to get this all wrapped up — no ifs ands or buts," he said at the end of a nearly five-hour evidentiary hearing filled with testimony from national prisons expert Steve Martin on ongoing security violations at the Criminal Justice Complex (CJC) and Alva Swan Annex in Sub Base. At an evidentiary hearing last week, psychiatric expert Dr. Jeffrey Metzer said that despite court orders, the prisons' health care systems also haven't improved.
Brotman said Tuesday he would like to see the ACLU and the government file a joint motion laying out exactly what the major issues are in both facilities and how they can be fixed.
"I've had so many promises made in this case, it's amazing," he said. "Now I want action, real action." It's clear that local officials — CJC's new warden and Bureau of Corrections Director Julius Wilson among them — are committed to making things better. But the government has to put some real money behind the problems, eliminate the bureaucratic red tape and recognize that it's dealing with human beings, Brotman said.
Brotman said his main concern was that there's no standard operations manual being used in the bureau — no documentation that outlines what procedures officers should follow in any given situation. While on the stand, Martin said that when he checked CJC Monday, some sort of voluminous notebook had been distributed, but the officers had not been told to review it. The book also had no index, preventing items from being referenced quickly, he added.
As of Monday, post orders — written guidelines or sets of instructions generally given to each shift of corrections officers — were also not being distributed at CJC, Martin said.
"This is a big, big, big flaw," Brotman said later. "How do Corrections officers know what to do if there isn't a manual telling them what to do?"
The lack of standard procedures has contributed to improper investigations and reporting processes — particularly when it comes to documenting and looking into incidents of excessive force between officers and inmates, or even between inmates. Under questioning from ACLU attorney Eric Balaban, Martin recounted stories of inmates being restrained for hours without any supervision, of inmates being locked down for months without a proper review of the circumstances, of obvious injuries on prisoners' faces and bodies that did not appear to have been investigated.
Martin's testimony focused at one point on an account related by one inmate who got into a verbal confrontation with another inmate at the shower. The second inmate told a corrections officer that the first man had attacked him with a shank.
"There was no injury and the officer didn't find a shank, but still the man was put on lockdown, and was on lockdown for four months, with no documentation as to how long he would remain on lockdown," Martin said.
Government attorney Carol Thomas-Jacobs later asked Martin if he knew whether or not the inmate was telling the truth.
"Of course not," Martin responded. "Nor do your officials know, because they don't investigate. That's my point."
The officers are also not being trained regularly, Martin testified. Brought in by ACLU last year to do what he called a "cursory" inspection of the prisons, Martin said that all the officers he talked to had not received any form of training within at least the past 12 months. Manpower shortages, faulty equipment — locks on cell doors for example, are frequently "popped" by prisoners — and the lack of a proper inmate classification system has made the situation worse, he added.
Meanwhile, inmates can wander in and out of critical areas, such as CJC's main control room, unsupervised, Martin said.
The Bureau of Corrections is expected to become a standalone agency later this year, and there really is no comprehensive transition plan in place — only a one-page memo with various "random" items strung together, he added.
But there's still hope, Martin said later. When asked by Brotman what "good" he found in the system, Martin said he was impressed by the dedication exhibited by some corrections officers and officials.
"That's probably the grandest thing you can have," Martin said. "They have ideas they want to implement beyond the minimal security measures." The local inmate population, while a bit rough, could be susceptible to treatment if proper rehabilitation programs were available, he added.
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