FEDERAL PRISON OFFICIALS KNEW OF MISCONDUCT, CORRUPTION, AND ABUSE, SENATE INVESTIGATION FINDS
This article features Government Accountability Project clients Dr. Erika Ramirez and Ms. Terri Whitehead, and was originally published here.
THE FINDINGS PRESENTED at Tuesday’s hearing came from thousands of pages of internal BOP documents and dozens of interviews with current and former BOP staff, whistleblowers, federal judges and defenders, and former senior BOP leaders.
An August 2020 security assessment by the BOP Central Office, obtained by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and referenced in reporting in late 2021, found pervasive and extensive security failures — including inside the facility — and identified USP Atlanta as a security threat to Atlanta and the southeast region of the U.S. Carvajal testified that he had not seen the security assessment and said that “normally would not rise to my level.”
Federal prisons and detention facilities have a long and documented history of abuse, neglect, and violation of constitutional rights reported by detainees, staff, and current and former officials. The Covid-19 pandemic brought renewed attention to deteriorating conditions inside jails and prisons across the U.S. that have persisted for decades, but received more media coverage as the number of infections and deaths from the virus spiked in 2020. But federal officials have known about ongoing patterns of gross misconduct since well before the pandemic, according to the subcommittee investigation.
At least six people detained at USP Atlanta died by suicide during the tenure of the facility’s former chief psychologist, Erika Ramirez, who is now BOP chief psychologist at FCI Seagoville in Texas. Ramirez worked at the Atlanta facility from 2018 to 2021, when she was involuntarily transferred to the Texas facility as part of what she described as illegal retaliation for reporting “ongoing and uncorrected gross mismanagement of suicide prevention practices which I believe were allowing needless inmate suicides to happen,” she testified Tuesday.
“To put this into perspective, federal prisons typically see between one and three suicides over a five-year period,” Ramirez said. “Any loss of life is tragic and unacceptable, which is why it is particularly devastating to see such disregard for human life at USP Atlanta.”
Testimony from Ramirez and another retired BOP official, Terri Whitehead, former jail administrator at USP Atlanta, detailed unsanitary and inhumane conditions, neglect of suicide prevention efforts, and retaliation for their efforts to report them. Carvajal said he visited the facility in April and observed that staff were addressing issues. He said that as a result of corrective actions taken by BOP, the facility had “increased staff training; enhanced security measures, internal controls; improved internal auditing, and strengthened inmate and staff accountability.”
Whitehead started working at the Atlanta facility in August 2020 and retired in December, earlier than she had planned. She testified that during her time at USP Atlanta, “there were so many rats inside the facility, dining hall, and food preparation areas, that staff intentionally left doors open so that the many stray cats that hung around the prison could catch the rats. It is never a good idea to leave prison doors open.” The facility had no professional pest control service in place, Whitehead said, “because management officials could not work together and determine which departmental budget was responsible for the cost.”
Ossoff entered into the record a January letter obtained by the committee written from federal Judge Timothy C. Batten, chief judge at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, to the warden at USP Atlanta. In it, the judge asked for answers regarding conditions at the facility’s jail, which holds people pretrial, “with respect to reports of rats in the building; roaches in the food; poor nutrition and emaciation of inmates; lack of access to hygiene products; lack of access to medication; lack of access to mail, limited access to tooth brush and toothpaste; no change of clothes for several weeks; a month of 24-hour solitary confinement with only a bible for entertainment or reading; a week, as you mentioned, with only a paper jumpsuit and paper blankets for an inmate on suicide watch without mental health treatment; only being permitted 15 minutes out of a cell every day to bathe, make phone calls, and use the library; blockage of written and other communications between attorney and client; difficulty arranging interview between inmate and psychologist.”
Carvajal told Ossoff he had not been aware of Batten’s letter until Tuesday’s hearing.
Carvajal testified that the bureau “continually strive[s]” to improve suicide prevention efforts, and that the rate of suicide by people detained by BOP “historically run lower than those of the general public.” He was BOP’s assistant director for correctional programs from August 2018 to February 2020, when he was named director. During that time, he received reports investigating each suicide at the facility. Ossoff repeatedly asked if Carvajal was aware of the issues at the facility prior to 2021 — including reports he received directly via email.
Carvajal said he wasn’t “aware specifically” of each individual issue, but he claimed he had reviewed the reports on investigations into the suicides and took appropriate action. He repeatedly blamed his ignorance of issues at USP Atlanta on the sprawling bureaucracy at BOP, siloing of top officials, and a failure of other staff and senior officials to follow policies for documenting and reporting misconduct and neglect.
Later in the hearing, Carvajal acknowledged that he had not taken appropriate action to address known issues at the facility.
“You took no action, and the buck stops with you, correct?” Ossoff asked. Carvajal responded: “Correct.”