Abuse Behind Bars

In the series “Florida Prisons,” reporters Jo Becker, Adam C. Smith, and Sydney P. Freedberg of the St. Petersburg Times comprehensively exposed the corruption, racism, physical abuse of inmates, accountability gaps, and other problems plaguing Florida’s criminal Justice system. The series led to the launching of an investigation of racism in the Florida Department of Corrections, a public apology from Gov. Jeb Bush to the mother of an inmate who died from shoddy medical care, and increased legislative scrutiny of Florida prisons. The following article is one of several on guards’ use of excessive force against inmates.

The prisoners at Gulf Correctional Institute had every reason to fear Shannon Ward. Standing 5 feet 9, the 33-year-old former prison sergeant wasn’t as physically intimidating as some. But the self-described “catchdog” was a man who could be counted on to rough up inmates who didn’t toe the line—inmates who, in prison lingo, “showed their butts” by acting up or complaining about their civil rights.

“A catchdog,” Ward matter-of-factly explained, “is someone that don’t mind going in the cell and taking care of business—it’s like a hit man.” Ward said it worked like this: The warden would enter a cell block to “counsel” a troublesome inmate. Sometimes the colonel would accompany him. “And as he’s walking out, he’d say, ‘Sarge,’ real loud, in a distinct voice, and he’d wink at you,” said Ward, who is facing a misdemeanor battery charge for alleged inmate abuse. “That was your green light to take care of business. That means you slap ’em around.”

In the wake of an ongoing criminal investigation into allegations that guards at Florida State Prison fatally beat death row inmate Frank Valdes this summer, Department of Corrections Secretary Michael Moore has announced a series of reforms designed to better detect and prevent abuse. Nevertheless, he has repeatedly assured state lawmakers that the Valdes incident was an “aberration.”

But interviews with current and former guards from prisons around the state suggest that the real aberration is that Valdes died.

In a rare series of disclosures that pierce the wall of silence, these guards say that in at least some Florida prisons, excessive and unprovoked violence is a tool used by some guards to remind inmates who is in charge. Prison wardens or top officers openly condone or at least ignore the abuse, these guards say, and officers who go along are rewarded, while those who refuse or decide to reveal the abuse find their careers at a standstill or worse.

Earlier this month, the St. Petersburg Times disclosed evidence of racism among guards at several Florida prisons. The Department of Corrections launched an investigation into a clique of white guards at Lancaster Correctional Institution who wear knotted key chains to allegedly signify that they are willing to cover up improper use of force on inmates.

Debbie Stephenson, a nine-year veteran officer at Lancaster who two years ago led an effort to win a regional pay raise from the Legislature, said she estimates that a group of officers she calls “the goon squad” uses improper force about 25 percent of the time. She explained her decision to speak out this way: “A lot of us are going to get our ass-whipped because the good ol’ boys are out there doing this,” she said. “Until we the good people say we ain’t going to let you do this no more, I see us going in a worse direction.”

From Ward’s perspective, being a “catchdog” had a lot of plusses. It meant good days off and the best shifts. Until recently, he says it meant inmate abuse allegations disappeared.

From 1992 to 1998, Ward was investigated for inmate abuse and cleared at least 26 times. Only once, in 1993, was an abuse case substantiated. He kept his job then, and he kept it again after a 1996 investigation found he threatened another officer who reported an inmate’s abuse allegation. Ward admitted telling her that if she ever “snitched him out they were going to have a parking lot call-out.”

Ward said he made sure that abuse was kept off the books. When “taking care of business,” he said, he rarely bothered to follow department policy by filling out use-of-force reports. He said he personally shredded inmate grievances and watched others do the same. He knew how to cover his tracks.

“You don’t go in there and start kicking him with your HiTec boots and leave marks,” Ward said.

But late last year, something changed. Ward said Warden Henry Alford started getting heat from Department of Corrections officials in Tallahassee: From June 1997 to June 1998, only six other prisons out of 58 statewide had more abuse allegations than Gulf.

Suddenly, Ward found himself more thoroughly investigated. He quit in December 1998, and now faces a misdemeanor battery charge based on allegations that he and another officer punched and kicked an inmate while forcing him to crawl on the floor and bark like a dog.

He is angry at the turn of events. “Your superiors tell you to do it,” he said. “But when something happens, you are on your own.”

Alford referred all questions to Department of Corrections spokesman C.J. Drake. “He said, ‘I’ve never been involved in anything remotely to do with inmate abuse—I don’t condone that’,” Drake said.

But Charles Eford, a former Gulf Correctional Institute inmate who now lives in Tampa, said Alford knew full well what was going on. Eford is one of the men Ward said he roughed up at the warden’s behest. Eford reported the abuse, but Ward said, “I wasn’t even questioned about it.”

Eford independently confirmed the names of the men who guards privately said make up the prison’s “hit squad.” He said that Alford would pay visits to inmates such as himself who complained about abuse by Ward or one of the squad’s other members.

“He’d say, ‘Boy, you writin’ grievances against my officers? You gonna stop writin’ grievances, and if you do it again, we’re gonna gas your ass,’” said Eford, 29, who served time for drug and aggravated battery charges. “Ain’t no way he couldn’t know what was going on. He participated in it.”

 

Each year, thousands of men and women train to become correctional officers. They are taught that inmates are human, that force is to be used against them only when necessary and that it should be truthfully documented.

Then they get their first job. They are paid a minimum of $23,024, and they learn that the unwritten code of silence is part of being a prison guard.

Ward, hired in 1988, described how other guards would indoctrinate newcomers: “I’ve been around where, especially a new person, they’d say, ‘You’re seeing it, but you’re not seeing it, and if you know what’s best you won’t say nothing.’ Some were skittish, but they were between a rock and a hard place because they didn’t want to be labeled a snitch.”

Gulf isn’t the only prison where officers feel this way. At Brevard Correctional Institution, former Officer Cynthia Holcomb said sergeants ordered her to embellish disciplinary reports “so they would fly.” She said she saw members of the “goon squad” take inmates to a building called “Complex 2.” When they emerged, she said, it was clear the inmates had been beaten.

“These guys would brag about it,” said Holcomb, who quit in June after a prison investigation found that she was having a personal relationship with an inmate at another institution.

Holcomb remembers one inmate in particular. She said Kristian Mitri was hurt so badly he had blood in his urine, but a nurse told him to “change his story” when he alleged guards beat him. Mitri, who is serving a two-year auto theft sentence at Avon Park Correctional Institution, confirmed Holcomb’s account in a letter to the Times, and said he was threatened until he agreed to say he had lied.

James E. Cooke, a former corrections officer at Charlotte Correctional Institution, said chronic staff shortages and the inherent stresses of prison work can push people into abuse. “We had an area at Charlotte where the grass was real high and the mosquitoes were real bad,” said Cooke, who resigned after allegedly participating in a cross-burning at the prison in 1993. “We’d strip an inmate down to his shorts and put him out there to swat mosquitoes for a few hours.”

In 1998, ten Charlotte officers were indicted on federal civil rights charges for allegedly beating a handcuffed inmate. Inmate John Allen Edwards later committed suicide. Seven of the officers eventually were acquitted and three took plea bargains.

Violence by officers has subsided since the Edwards death, but until then it was common, said Sgt. Paul Patton, an officer at Charlotte since 1992. Edwards “was just an unlucky that died,” said Patton, noting that even by-the-book officers rarely report wrongdoing by fellow guards.

“How do you report that kind of thing? You depend on these people to protect you. You’re working in a very dangerous place, and you need to know people will back you up when you need it. The guys that do report these things, they’re shunned like they have leprosy.”

Sgt. Barbara Hodge agrees. Although she said she has never personally witnessed abuse at Lancaster, she said she is known as someone who “won’t falsify anything.”

She decided to speak out even though she fears that retribution can take many forms. “The other day, three sergeants were supposed to be feeding the inmates,” Hodge recalled. “They left me at the chow all alone with 500 inmates.”

Stephenson, Hodge’s colleague at Lancaster, recently found out the price of speaking up at the Gilchrist County prison. In September, she and Officer Nadine Broughton turned in two of their colleagues for tackling an inmate and striking him on the side of the head.

To date, she said nothing has happened to the officers who allegedly struck the inmate. But someone sent an anonymous e-mail to an underground corrections web site calling Broughtin and Stephenson “nothing but down right out cowards and liars.” Copies of the e-mail were then passed around the prison, Stephenson said. Now, Broughtin and Stephenson have been asked to take polygraph tests.

“The colonel, the major, the captain—they all know who their gung ho officers are, and when I say gung ho, I mean you don’t give a s— who you knock the s— out of,” Stephenson said. “They’ll have the good positions and have the most numbers of use of force. The high-up people control it all.”

C.J. Drake, the department’s spokesman, said that if a corrections officer witnesses misconduct, “that officer has an obligation to report it, not to the press, but to the authorities. If they fail to do that, they are violating department rules.”

 

But proving abuse can often seem an exercise in futility, which is another reason officers say they are reluctant to talk.

Last year, a series of memos shows that the warden, a prison inspector, and the department’s inspector general all were troubled by the high number of abuse allegations at North Florida Reception Center. Prison officials even wrote to the state attorney, asking for help. The request was declined. One of the solutions then offered by Inspector General Fred Schuknecht was to transfer “known thumpers” to other prisons.

This year, North Florida inmate John Russell claimed three sergeants took him into a room and hit him until his nose bled. The officers denied taking Russell into the room.

When traces of blood were found on the wall, the warden and inspector requested that the state’s crime lab do a DNA test. The blood matched Russell’s. Russell, however, failed a polygraph when he was asked if all three officers hit him.

Warren Holmes, the former president of the Florida Polygraph Association and an expert who lectured at the CIA, said the question was phrased in such a way that Russell couldn’t help but fail. “You can’t ask multiple names in one question—that’s absurd,” Holmes said.

Nevertheless, the inspector general’s office cleared the three officers in May. Schuknecht, who heads all department investigations, said the blood on the wall could have been months old. The department, he said, often finds itself in a Catch-22: without officers who are willing to testify, abuse cases can be very difficult to prove.

The agency has taken several steps that will help, Schuknecht said. Front-line prison investigators no longer report to individual wardens. The agency is in the process of mounting cameras in prisons throughout the state. Still, Schuknecht said officers need to trust that the department will follow up if they come forward.

“The employees you are talking to about this perhaps are discouraged by actions that have been taken in the past,” he said. “But they need to know that this administration will investigate any allegation of abuse made by anyone.”

 

Update: The Story Today

Since this article was published, dozens of African-American corrections officers have come forward attesting to the torture of inmates and discriminatory treatment of guards who refuse to cover up abuse.

On May 6, the Times published the diary of a corrections officer, Capt. Willie Hogan, who died of liver disease from the effects of alcoholism at the age of 43. Hogan, a 20-year veteran of the Department of Corrections, had become isolated and demoralized from witnessing the brutal treatment of prisoners at Lancaster Correctional Institute. One entry in his diary told that an “inmate was beaten so badly his tooth was knocked out, kicked in the kidneys until he was urinating blood and kicked in the groin.”

Earlier this year dozens of black corrections officers filed a federal class-action lawsuit against the Florida Department of Corrections charging systematic discrimination. One guard, Sgt. Roosevelt Paige, testified in a deposition that he was punished by white guards for not going along with the regime of brutality. He said he was left alone in the North Florida Receptions Center prison yard with 500 to 600 inmates while white guards slept. Other plaintiffs told of “KKK” graffiti being used to intimidate them.

The testimony of these whistleblowers sparked a group of black Florida lawmakers to break from their legislative schedule to visit North Florida Reception and two other prisons. Sen. Betty Holzendorf, (D-Jacksonville) said that black guards “appear to be fearful for their lives and fearful for their security.”

The Florida NAACP, whose vigorous voter registration drive was thwarted last year by election irregularities and intimidation at the polls, filed a court order for Corrections to “stop the imminent infliction of irreparable injuries.”

In response, Corrections Secretary Michael Moore promised an internal investigation, but warned, “We are not polarizing the employees at these institutions because the offenders will manipulate the environment.”

Not surprisingly, the Florida Department of Corrections has cleared itself of all wrongdoing. On August 28, Moore concluded that the allegations of discrimination were “anecdotal” and lacked sufficient evidence to merit state action.

— Jordan Green