JOHN KIRIAKOU: US System of Prison Injustice

As we bump up against the end of the Biden administration, here’s a look at this president’s final year in office and his criminal-justice legacy.

By John Kiriakou
Special to Consortium News

I wrote in October that Joe Biden, in his four years as president, did literally nothing to improve the situation in prisons and jails across the country, either through the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), over which he has direct authority, or through enlightened policies that might filter down or set the standard in state prisons and in local jails.  

As we bump up against the end of the Biden administration, I wanted to take a look at this president’s final year in office and at what legacy he’s leaving in criminal justice.

— California, at the demand of the Justice Department in September, paid $4 million to five victims of a former guard at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla and another $450,000 to a former prisoner at the California Institution for Women in Chino for rape and sexual assault at the hands of at least four guards. 

One of those guards, Greg Rodriguez, is facing 96 counts of rape, sodomy and sexual battery.  But because he resigned before being arrested, he has been allowed to keep his pension.

— The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that three prison guards working in an unnamed Pennsylvania prison had qualified immunity and could not be sued for spraying a severely asthmatic prisoner with pepper spray.  The prisoner was not the target of the officers’ actions; that was a prisoner in a neighboring cell. 

The asthmatic prisoner was just collateral damage.  But the court said “tough luck.”  Qualified immunity is qualified immunity.  And in most cases you can’t sue the cops. 

— The federal District Court for the Central District of California removed medical care from a federal monitoring order at the San Bernardino County Jail after the county paid the family members of three mentally ill prisoners a total of $150,000 after the prisoners died in custody. 

In one case, one prisoner was arrested on a minor vandalism charge, taken to jail, and put on suicide watch. Sure enough, he died nine days later, but not by suicide.  Instead, an autopsy found that he had likely been beaten to death.  In solitary confinement.

— The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reinstated a lawsuit brought by a federal prisoner who was beaten so severely by guards that he was found with “slurred speech, dilated pupils, and giving nonsensical answers to questions from the prison nurse.”  After his release, he was diagnosed with injuries so severe that he was unable to work.  

— In June, a Florida prison guard, Zephen Xaver, was sentenced to death for the murder of five women during a 2019 bank robbery.  He had earlier been thrown out of the U.S. Army for being “potentially homicidal” and was then hired by the state’s Department of Corrections. 

But the DOC never bothered to do a background investigation on him. He also never underwent a polygraph exam, a psychological exam, or a neighborhood background check, all of which are mandated by the state. 

If the DOC had done such an investigation, perhaps it would also have found that Xaver had been questioned by police in Indiana when in high school for threatening a mass shooting there.  

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— Eight West Virginia prison guards pleaded guilty to murder for their roles in the fatal beating of prisoner Quantez Burks.  Burks had one single day left in his sentence when the guards set on him and beat him in the head so severely that they killed him. What was it that triggered the eight-on-one beating? Burks had “attempted to leave his assigned pod without permission.”

— Four Missouri prison guards were charged with murder, and one with involuntary manslaughter, after they suffocated a prisoner, Othel Moore, by spraying him with pepper spray, putting a spit hood over his face, handcuffing him, shackling his legs and tying him down in a restraint chair. 

A prison spokesman later admitted that the guards did this despite the fact that Moore was cooperative and compliant. He was left choking in the chair for 30 minutes until he simply died.

— And the City of New York paid a settlement of $28.75 million to the grandmother of a prisoner who hanged himself while guards stood by and watched, doing nothing until Nicholas Feliciano had been hanging for eight minutes. 

Feliciano actually survived the attempt, but he is now so severely brain-damaged that he is unable to care for himself.  Feliciano had a long history of mental illness, and several of the guards said that they were just tired of dealing with him. 

Rikers Island is arguably the most notorious jail in America and, according to the Justice Department, has been the scene of 19 suicide attempts in the past 12 years where the guards neglected to take any action. And just to put a cherry on top of the story, the New York City Department of Corrections rehired Ned McCormick, the former warden there who had been forced to resign after a group of guards so badly beat a prisoner that he was left a quadriplegic.  That was just a year ago.  

Now it’s Donald Trump’s turn to take on and reform this debacle. Again.  Trump was great when it came to things like implementing the First Step Act, which saw the release of thousands of federal prisoners, and with pardons and commutations, mostly of people with drug offenses.  That was terrific.  But it didn’t change the system.  And at the same time, Trump’s several BOP directors were failures at best and incompetent boobs at worst.  

The best we can hope for is that the courts will do the right thing by ruling against prisons and prison systems, wardens and individual guards.  But that isn’t nearly enough. 

As I’ve said before, the entire system needs to be scrapped and rebuilt. That won’t happen, though, and it doesn’t matter who the president is. 

As a country, we’ve made a collective decision that we want our prisons to be more like those in Russia, Iran, or China than those in Sweden, Denmark, or Norway.  It’s something we should never stop fighting against.

John Kiriakou is a former C.I.A. counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act — a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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