Over the last few years I've closely followed what's been going on inside the federal government's only maximum security prison, officially titled the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility. Located in the small valley town of Florence, Colorado, the "Alcatraz of the Rockies" houses a long list of notorious inmates, including convicted al-Qaeda terrorists and "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski. Even today, the federal Bureau of Prisons agency that manages the facility will not disclose a full list of the more than 400 inmates that are detained there.
I remember traveling recently to the quiet mountain town, which sits near the base of the Sangre De Cristo Mountains, to meet with many of the guards who worked in the facility as employees with the federal Bureau of Prisons.
Florence has a population nearing 4,000 people, and a lot of guards who work in Supermax have grown up together and went to high school together. We would meet at all hours of the day, huddling around various restaurant and diner tables in the town, to discuss what it was like working inside a prison that has now become a potential candidate for locking up inmates from Guantanamo.
The guards had to be careful. If they were seen talking to a journalist they would very likely lose their jobs. The Bureau of Prisons has a strict policy baring employees from talking to the press, while the agency itself is very secretive and often issues generic press statements that say nothing when it comes to questions surrounding prison safety. To this day, not one interview with an inmate has been granted with the press inside Supermax. Recently the prisons bureau gave a tour of the prison to a small selected group of media reporters for what guards at the prison would describe to me as a "dog and pony show" put on by the warden. Suffice to say I wasn't invited.
Those who were working inside the prison were risking their jobs to talk with me because things were not right inside Supermax. In March 2005, under the Bush administration, the prisons bureau implemented a directive called "mission critical," where all agency institutions were ordered to come up with staffing plans that listed the bare-minimum needed to run each prison safely. But by 2007, when I first began talking with the guards, the bureau wasn't even staffing the prison with enough people for what the agency itself described as the "bare-minimum," and the workers had the staffing roasters to prove it. Time and time again, I was able to see days when units in the prison, including the "terrorist" holding section, went completely unmanned for for as long as 16 hours, meaning that employees were not available to provide consistent checks on the inmates in the area.
The problem according to the guards was that the Bush administration was not adequately funding federal prison system, opting instead to focus on privatized facilities. The employees weren't concerned about anyone escaping from the prison, but they were more worried about their own safety due to the staffing shortage. Instead of doing one job, guards had to take on four or five other jobs. Sometimes younger kids working there would cut corners to get good evaluations and put themselves at unnecessary risk. One veteran told me, "Either a correctional officer is going to have to get hurt or an inmate’s going to die before it gets corrected."
Routinely guards are forced to use "less-than lethal: weapons on inmates to quell disruptions that should never happen in the first place in an adequately staffed prison. According to bureau documents I was given from a source inside the prison, in April and May of 2008 alone correctional workers inside the Supermax fired the following:
--40 pepper balls, two 2-second OC burst and Six sting ball rounds discharged while doing a calculated use of force on a disruptive inmate.
--37mm 3760 Hornets Nest rounds fired and 3-5 Pepperballs fired from the Pepperball launcher for disruptive inmates in [prison unit redacted] who were fighting.
--Six rounds, .60 Hornets Nest fired during a calculated use of force on a disruptive inmate.
Presently, workers tell me they are hopeful that the new administration will fund federal prisons with the staffing levels that are needed for guards to safely walk away from an 8-hour shift. In March, the American Federation of Government Employees, the body that represents workers in the Supermax, said that Obama's plan to fund the prisons bureau was encouraging.
But one thing is clear when it comes to the issue of whether inmates from Guantanamo should be detained in Supermax. While the guards are up to the task and are confident in their abilities to get the job done, there also needs to be additional funding to the facility in order the guarantee the safety of not only the workers, but also the inmates that would be transferred there.
(Cross-posted at Gabacha.com)