The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

They broke out the windows of their cell, and when prison guards tried to extinguish the fire by sticking a fire hose through a port in the door, the two broke the sink off the wall and held it up as a shield. One brandished, but didn’t use, a “shiv,” a crude jailhouse knife. Meanwhile, the two men yelled for other inmates to join in the uprising. Soon, at 12:45 p.m., a lockdown order went out across the prison. Staff tried to hustle prisoners on their way to lunch or the recreation center back to their cells. Inmates in one of the housing areas refused, and they forced the guards to release friends from their cells. “Open the doors or we will take your keys,” the prisoners demanded, according to an FBI account. “We’ll see who has control in a bit,” one inmate told a guard.

The prison’s emergency-response team deployed an arsenal including rubber bullets, pepper spray, expulsion grenades and bean-bag guns. To little avail. The insurrection quickly spread to the other housing areas. The rioters assembled in the outdoor recreation yard armed with rocks, concrete, and steel poles as well as horseshoes, hammers and box cutters they had pilfered from the recreation building. Many of them, aware of the prison’s extensive surveillance system, hid their faces with T-shirts, hats and bandanas. Some wore sunglasses.

Two prison employees were taken hostage. (Neither was harmed.) With more than 1,200 inmates milling around outside and hordes of law enforcement officials, the prison must have looked like a war zone.

It was not mere anarchy, though.

By midafternoon, members of the FBI, Texas Rangers, DPS and the Odessa Police Department arrived at the prison. As the crisis negotiators quickly found out, the riot had not been prompted by gang infighting, racial tensions or a spontaneous outburst of violence. The men incarcerated at the Pecos prison are considered “low-security”; most are serving relatively short sentences for immigration violations or drug offenses. All are set to be deported at the end of their sentences.

Leaders of the rebellion were demanding a meeting with the Mexican Consulate, the FBI and the warden to discuss a number of grievances that they said GEO Group, the prison company that manages the 3,700-bed facility, had refused to address.

The evening of the uprising, the inmates sent a delegation of seven men—a Venezuelan, a Cuban, a Nigerian, and four Mexicans—to meet with the authorities.

They explained that the uprising had erupted from widespread dissatisfaction with almost every aspect of the prison: inedible food, a dearth of legal resources, the use of solitary confinement to punish people who complained about their medical treatment, overcrowding and, above all, poor health care.

The delegates pointed to a string of deaths (according to public records, five men died in Reeves between August 2008 and March 2009, including two suicides) they attributed to the prison’s inattention to medical needs. The riot had been sparked by the death of Jesus Manuel Galindo, an epileptic, who had been carried out of the prison’s Special Housing Unit in a body bag that same day. “Suspect(s) are talking about the guy being out of the shoe [SHU],” the Odessa Police Department report said. “Someone should have been there with him. Special housing was not the place for [him].”

The authorities jotted down the concerns and promised to take them seriously.

Twenty-four hours after it began, the uprising was over. More than $1 million worth of damage had been done to the prison. Less than two months later, on Jan. 31, the prison would be under inmate control again—and this time the rioting would last for five days and end with one building destroyed and some $20 million in damage.

To critics of GEO and other for-profit prison companies, the two huge riots in as many months—rare, especially in low-security prisons—were the logical consequence of the largest experiment in prison privatization to date.

The story of the death of Jesus Manuel Galindo is the story of a death foretold.

For weeks, Galindo, a 32-year-old epileptic Mexican citizen who had lived in the United States since he was 13, had been complaining to anyone who would listen that something terrible was going to happen to him because of poor medical care.

In May 2007, Galindo was found illegally crossing the border in El Paso. Galindo, nicknamed “Negro” for his dark complexion, was sentenced later that year to 30 months for illegal re-entry (crossing into the U.S. after being deported). Ten years ago, he would likely have been quickly deported, not prosecuted. But the Bush administration piloted a “zero-tolerance” policy in Texas that eventually spread across the border: All illegal border crossers would be arrested, detained and, if possible, prosecuted in federal court. Prosecutions surged, as did the need for detention centers, jails and prisons to hold the tens of thousands of newly minted criminals. The Obama administration has more than embraced the policy. The number of prosecutions for immigration crimes—almost 68,000—during the first nine months of 2009 is on track for a 14 percent increase over 2008. More than half of those prosecutions took place in Texas.

The result has been a system swamped with low-level immigration cases and prisons bursting at the seams with illegal immigrants. Rather than build and run the facilities themselves, federal agencies have turned in large part to private prison companies, such as Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group. In 2008, GEO reported more than $1 billion in revenue, an 80 percent increase over 2005.

Privatization has been less profitable for others. GEO’s Texas facilities have been plagued with suicides, filthy conditions, sexual abuse scandals, hunger strikes, riots and lawsuits.

Jesus Galindo became another case in point. According to his family, Galindo had had seizures before his incarceration but they grew worse and more frequent under the care of the Physicians Network Association, a Lubbock-based medical services provider that serves 17,000 inmates in 24 facilities across the nation. In 2002, Reeves County hired PNA to run the prison’s health care, attracted by its promise to improve services and cut costs. (The county pays PNA $6.03 per inmate per day, about $8 million a year at full capacity.)

Four months into their contract, then-warden Rudy Franco lauded PNA at a county commissioners meeting for drastically reducing the number of surgeries, X-rays, outside visits and other medical services, the latter of which had dropped from 3,148 to 222.

On Nov. 12, Galindo was locked up in the Special Housing Unit. The mostly Spanish-speaking inmates call it la celda de castigo, the punishment cell. Prisoners and others say the SHU was frequently used to isolate and punish men with health problems who complained about their medical care.

According to Galindo’s family, the prison authorities said they put him in the SHU to keep an eye on him. “That’s not true,” says Jesus Galindo Sr., his father. “It was to punish him.”

Galindo pleaded with prison officials to return him to the ­general population where he had friends who woke him up to take his pills and took care of him during his frequent seizures.

“He would say he was really afraid because if he got sick who was going to help him?” says his mother, Graciela Galindo. She begged officials to look after her son. “They told me he was in a high security place; that was what the warden said, and that I should not worry about him. They told me they were taking good care of my son.”

Galindo did what he could to reassure his family, singing love songs to his mother over the phone. “He had hope,” his brother Jesus Galindo Jr. said. “He was real strong. The only thing that bothered him was his condition. I saw him on his birthday [Nov. 29]. I said, ‘Hey, hang in there. Think of us like we think of you.’”

Judy Madewell, the public defender in charge of Galindo’s criminal case was so worried that she sent an investigator to the prison on Dec. 4. The investigator, Octavio Vasquez, urged the authorities to put Galindo back into the general population.

On Dec. 9, Graciela talked to her son on the phone. “He told me to tell Belinda [his daughter] to do a dance to the Virgin because he’s getting out of the SHU on Friday [Dec. 12] ... and that if he wasn’t, to contact the jail.”

The following day, Dec. 10, Galindo wrote a letter to his family saying that he felt bad and had asked the doctor and warden to do something. The letters begins in the morning, with Galindo noting that a nurse had promised him that she would return later that day to take his blood.

Two days later, on Dec. 12, Graciela called to see if her son had been released from the SHU. “I called and to my surprise he was dead. They kept me on the phone for an hour. They said we have to wait for the doctors. I told them please do something. But my son was already dead.”

“Mama, the day already passed and nothing,” he writes later that same day. “All they did was walk up and down but here, where I am, no one even stopped. We’ll see what happens tomorrow.”

When Galindo was found in his cell, rigor mortis had already set in. His body was purple and stiff. The El Paso County medical examiner ruled the cause of death as epileptiform seizure disorder. A toxicology report found “below-therapeutic levels” of Dilantin, a cheap anti-epileptic drug, in Galindo’s blood and urine. The drug is only effective at certain dosages, and a patient’s blood must be checked regularly to make sure it’s not too high or low, says Robert Cain, an Austin neurologist who reviewed the autopsy.

“With multiple seizures, inadequate levels of medication and left in isolation without supervision, he was set up to die,” Cain says.

Galindo’s experience was strikingly similar to those of other inmates under PNA’s care. In 2003, the Justice Department investigated the Santa Fe County Jail in New Mexico, which was then run by Management & Training Corp. (MTC). Just as it does at Reeves, PNA had a subcontract to provide health care there. The Justice Department found nearly non-existent medical and mental health care, and specifically noted PNA’s inattention to properly calibrating dose-sensitive medications, especially anti-epileptics.

“We found several instances in which PNA failed to monitor inmates on these types of medications, even when inmates reported experiencing side effects,” the report states. In one case, blood testing showed that an inmate with a seizure disorder did not have enough of the anti-seizure drug to be effective. The PNA medical staff did nothing, and seven days later the inmate attempted suicide and then suffered a seizure. “Even with all the attention from medical staff due to his suicide attempt, his seizure medication blood level was not measured until four days” later, the report says.

No such authoritative report has been done for the Pecos prison. But in interviews and correspondence, prisoners, their relatives, attorneys and immigrant rights advocates describe a facility overrun with corruption and dangerous cost-cutting measures. Prisoners writing to the Observer have made allegations ranging from physical abuse to tacit arrangements between guards and prisoners to traffic drugs and other contraband inside the facility. (GEO Group declined to comment.)

A prisoner we’ll call Juan, who asked that his real name not be used for fear of retribution, describes an environment of fear where hardened criminals serving long sentences live side by side with men who are there solely for crossing the border illegally. Juan says that prisoners in the jail are divided into groups based on their home state in Mexico with the tacit approval of the guards and the warden. Prisoners who have money and can buy influence and authority run these groups. These bosses dole out punishments and determine with the guards who gets sent to the punishment cell, Juan says. “We are threatened and beaten if we complain. While [the prison bosses] can have cell phones and other benefits that are forbidden.”

Another prisoner, Jose—who also asked that his name be changed—writes that he has hepatitis. “I begged for medicine and they sent me a bottle that was unsealed and only half full,” Jose writes. “I haven’t received treatment for my hepatitis since December 2008.”

“The problem with Reeves is that there are no medical services,” says Graciela Arredondo, the mother of a man who served part of his sentence at Reeves. “They won’t bring a doctor if you are sick. They don’t want to spend the money, but these are human beings and they deserve medical services.”

After the riots in December and January, the ACLU of Texas called on the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General to investigate the prisoners’ charges. This wouldn’t be the first time the OIG was asked to look into reports of abuse at the Reeves facility. In 2006, an investigation resulted in the arrests of five employees at the jail for smuggling drugs into the facility and having sex with inmates. Because it hasn’t received an answer from the OIG, the ACLU is starting its own investigation.

“Riots are relatively rare, and are an indicator of serious problems at a facility,” says Lisa Graybill, legal director for the ACLU of Texas. ”We continue to receive complaints that the Bureau of Prisons and its contractors, GEO and Physicians Network Association, are systemically failing to address life-threatening and chronic medical conditions of detainees.”

None of this is surprising to longtime prison activist Bob Libal, co-coordinator of Grassroots Leadership, an Austin nonprofit that fights private prisons. “Conditions at GEO facilities have been horrendous, and it stretches across every type of facility,” says Libal. “It’s case after case after case. Whether Coke County, Val Verde, Dickens County, Reeves, Pearsall, it’s one horrendous thing after another.”

In 2007, the Texas Youth Commission removed 197 youths from GEO Group’s Coke County Juvenile Justice Center after inspectors found deplorable conditions including filthy cells that reeked of feces and urine, insects in the food, and inmates only being allowed to shower and brush their teeth every few days.

A year before, the family of 23-year-old LeTisha Tapia sued GEO Group after Tapia killed herself at the Val Verde County Jail, which the company runs. Tapia had told her family that she was raped, beaten, sexually humiliated and deprived of psychological and medical treatment in retaliation for telling the warden about guards allowing inmates to have sex with each other. The suit was settled out of court.

In the past two years, the state of Idaho has pulled out of contracts at two GEO-operated jails—the Dickens County Correctional Center, near Spur, and the Bill Clayton Detention Center in Littleton—citing chronic understaffing, a lack of required treatment programs, and suicides linked to squalid conditions.

In a lawsuit set to go to trial in March, two detainees at the GEO-run South Texas Detention Complex in Pearsall claim that the company “intentionally and systematically violates the rights of mentally disabled detainees.” Echoing the Reeves County allegations, both of the plaintiffs, Miroslava Rodriguez-Grava and Isaias Vasques Cisneros de Jesus, allege that instead of treating them for their mental disabilities, GEO put them in segregation for extended periods of time.

“I think that any time you insert profit into the equation that care and also the rehabilitative elements of corrections goes out the window,” said Libal. “They try to do things as cheap as possible. You get what you’re paying for in a lot of ways.”

The Pecos prison, a remote, austere correctional campus flanked by farmland and a weirdly out-of-place cemetery, sprawls across several acres a few hundred yards from Interstate 30. To travelers zipping by at 80 mph, the facility is little more than a blur of barbed wire and guard towers. But to the people of Reeves County (population 13,137), it’s an engine of progress.

In the mid-1980s, with the regional economy devastated by the Texas oil bust, local business and government leaders decided to move into a recession-proof industry that was exploding in an increasingly criminalized America: prisons. In 1986, the county built a 300-bed prison. The prison filled rapidly with federal inmates, pumping revenue into the county’s budget and adding decent-paying jobs to the local work force. By 2002, Reeves had 2,000 beds. In 2003, the county completed ­construction on a $39 million, 960-bed unit only to find that the feds had no interest.

“They built a $39 million prison on speculation,” said Jon Fulbright, a reporter for the Pecos Enterprise. While the prison sat empty, payments on the bonds, reduced to junk status, were coming due. On the verge of default, county officials begged the Bush administration to send prisoners and hired Randy DeLay, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s brother, to lobby in Washington, D.C. That’s when Wackenhut Corrections Corp., now GEO Group, rode to the rescue. In November 2003, GEO agreed to take over management of the whole 3,000-bed prison complex and soon struck a deal with the Bureau of Prisons to fill the new unit.

Despite the troubles at the Pecos prison under GEO management, local officials are grateful.

“A lot of people criticize GEO but I don’t,” says Sheriff Arnulfo “Andy” Gomez. “We had a hard time and they pulled us out. They’ve got lobbyists and all that.” Besides, he says, “You’re going to have trouble in every prison.”

Some more than others. On Jan. 31, a month and a half after the first uprising, prisoners at the Reeves County Detention Center rose up again. Prison and law enforcement officials have released little information on the disturbance, but inmates, advocates and family members say it began when Ramon Garcia, 25, was forced into solitary confinement after complaining of dizziness and feeling sick.

“We spoke with the warden and we told him to take our countryman out of the punishment cell and take him to the hospital because he needs medical attention,” an inmate told Laura Rivas, an advocate with the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. “We told them that if they were not going to do it then we would do it, we would take him out, because we have more strength, and they laughed at us. And that’s when it all started.”

Lana Williams, a friend of Garcia’s family, told KFOX-TV in El Paso that Garcia had been put into solitary confinement whenever he complained of feeling sick. “He’s gotten to the point where he can’t walk down the hall without holding on to the wall, and this has been going on and getting progressively worse,” Williams said.

During the five-day takeover, the inmates drafted another list of demands: better medical treatment, adequate food (especially for those who are ill or have diabetes) and no guard retaliation against any person.

“To them, we don’t matter,” the inmate told Rivas. “If we die, it doesn’t matter to them. The only thing that interests them is money—nothing more.”

Melissa del Bosque contributed reporting for this story.

AND

http://borderlinesblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/talking-about-insurrection.html

via Border Lines by Tom Barry on 10/9/09

Getting into the federal building in Pecos, Texas takes political sophistication – something I was apparently lacking when attempting to enter the building for the trial of a couple of immigrant inmates indicted for their role in the Dec. 12-13 incident, let’s call it, at the immigrant prison in this far West Texas town.

It’s the same all over the country. After Sept. 11 the federal halls of justice have been on virtual lockdown status. To get into these buildings – which typically house the district courts and U.S. Marshals Service offices, you need to pass through metal detectors, present identification, and rid yourself of all electronic devices. As many as half dozen or more federal security guards – usually retired police officers and sheriff deputies – are usually in the courthouse foyer to block entry to criminals and terrorists.

In Pecos, which has a privately run, federally supplied, and locally owned immigrant prison on the outskirts of town, people are feeling jittery about the criminal alien business. It’s a business that has for the past two decades been a source of a steadily expanding number of local jobs and increasing county revenues, as the prison has gone through three expansions to accommodate the ever larger number of immigrant inmates under Bureau of Prisons custody.

I felt it as soon as I stepped pass the doorway: suspicion and outsider disdain. “What are you here for? Who are you,” one of the guards demanded.

“Well, I am here for the trial of the immigrant prisoners indicted for the disturbance at the prison last December,” I said, handing the questioning guard my business card (from Center for International Policy).

“Disturbance, there was no disturbance,” says he. (It wasn’t until later that I asked how HE was.) “There was a riot, and it’s costing us tens of millions of dollars.”

During several trips to Pecos since the second inmate news event of Jan. 31 –Feb. 5, I had been alternating between “riot,” “protest,” “mutiny,” and “disturbance.”

What happened at the Reeves County Detention Center in two separate occasions was that immigrant inmates – officially classified “criminal aliens” who will be processed for deportation upon completing their 1-5 year sentences – set fire to prison buildings to protest the deaths and untreated illnesses of fellow prisoners. In both cases, the main prisoner concern was that sick inmates were being placed in the Secure Housing Unit (SHU) assigned for “medical observation.”

The SHUs in modern prisons and detention centers are the modern equivalent of the old “solitary confinement” – intended as both punishment for disciplinary infraction and as deterrence to prevent unruly behavior. But, as the practice at the Reeves County Detention Center, SHUs are often used simply to better manage prison populations – to isolate and punish problem inmates whether they break the rules or not.

At the Reeves County Detention Center (RCDC) – which since 1985 has expanded from 300-bed prison to one that holds up to 3700 inmates – the SHU is systemically and routinely used to house severely ill inmates. That’s because there is no infirmary at what the prison giant GEO Group (which the county contracts to run the BOP prison) calls RCDC “the largest detention/
correctional facility under private management in the world.”

The first incident was precipitated by the death of Jesus Manuel Galindo, 32, who was serving a 30-month sentence for illegal reentry from Mexico. Galindo was picked up by the Border Patrol after an epileptic seizure at a convenience store near the borderland town of Anthony, NM, where he had lived with his family since he was in his mid-teens. The local police, who responded to the call for assistance from the clerk at the local 7-11, turned Galindo over to the Border Patrol after it was determined he was an “illegal alien.” Galindo, after being deported to Ciudad Juárez (about 20 miles from his home in the United States), attempted to return home to his extended and nuclear family (three children and second wife) – all of whom were legal residents or citizens -- two years ago after spending a month in the Mexican border town across from El Paso.

But increased border security and a new “criminal alien” policy that criminalizes and penalizes illegal border crossing combined to put Galindo into the federal slammer in Pecos, where an estimated 75% of his fellow inmates were also serving time for illegal border crossings and the balance for nonviolent crimes, mostly drug violations.

Another severe epileptic seizure in mid-November 2008 sent Galindo to an area hospital – and in the SHU. The greatest fear of inmates at the Reeves County Detention Center is getting sick and being consigned to the SHU – what they call “el hoyo” (the hole). It’s the hole not because it’s so dark or dirty, but rather because it’s where there is no relief from the walls, the loneliness, the emptiness.

Galindo corresponded frequently with his mother, Graciela Galindo. His letters from mid-November until the day before he died tell of his fear and despair at being kept in the hole without any company, without the friends he made in prison. He tells his mother of the inhumanity of most of the guards who didn’t seem to recognize the humanity of the immigrant inmates. He writes of the urgency to get the right medicine to prevent his seizures – medicine, his mother told me, for which he had a prescription before he was imprisoned but was replaced by the nurses at Reeves with sedatives that kept him sleepy and unable to stand up. On Dec. 5 he wrote of being “afraid” of what would happen to him if he stayed in the hold any longer, of how his was being ignored by the guards and nurses, of his bruises from thrashing around during unattended seizures.

The day before he died he wrote a letter to his mother that the family didn’t read until much later when they received his few personal belongings along with his body.

In his Dec. 11 letter he wrote: “I told them that I have been here (in SHU) for a month, and I’ve gotten sick twice, and let’s see if they move me or do something quickly. All they say is 'yes, yes.' and they don't do anything.”

What happened after two of his fellow inmates in the SHU saw his body being removed in a black body bag on the morning of Dec. 12 is a matter of interpretation and interests.

The Dec. 12-13 incident resulted in some damage – several hundred thousands of dollars -- to the SHU and in a badly burnt recreation building. Reeves County attributed the property loss at the RCDC III prison (the most 2005 expansion of the immigrant prison) to a “disturbance.” Calling it a “riot” would have precluded the insurance company from covering the losses, said County Judge Sam Contreras.

The inmates themselves referred to it as a “motín” or mutiny – a term that conveys the sense of an uprising against authority.

After the Dec. 12-13 incident in Pecos and after the second closely related incident of Jan. 31-Feb 5 (when inmates also rebelled and set fire to prison buildings in an incident also sparked by medical malpractice and mistreatment concerns involving the use of the SHU for “medical observation”), the criminal justice system, the insurance system, and the financial system are providing most of the follow-up.

Despite demands by the Texas ACLU and immigrant advocacy groups, the Office of Inspector General of the Justice Department has not initiated an investigation. But the criminal justice system did immediately kick in other respects. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Midland, Texas immediately began investigating the new crimes of the immigrant inmates who, in part out of solidarity with those sick fellow prisoners shut in the hole and in part out of fear that too would be released from prison in a body bag, took control of the two different sections of the prison to highlight their concerns.

Like the inmates, the U.S. attorney called the incidents “mutinies” and like the media and the security guards in the federal building lobby is also referring to the incidents as riots. Twenty six inmates from the first incident have been indicted. At first, they faced two counts – causing a riot or mutiny, or aiding and abetting in a mutiny or riot. The first count declared that the defendants “and other persons known or unknown to the grand jury, unlawfully, willfully, and knowingly, did combine, conspire, confederate and agree together and with each other and others to instigate, connive, attempt to cause, assist, and conspire to cause a riot at the Reeves County Detention Center, a federal penal, detention, or correctional facility.”

(Apparently, the U.S. attorneys are as confused as everyone else about what the Reeves County Detention Center really is, a prison or detention center. And while it does hold federal prisoners – all immigrants with orders for deportation – there is much confusion about whose prison is it. It is county owned – hence the Reeves County – but it is operated by GEO Group while the BOP contracts with the county to run it and the county subcontracts with GEO.)

The second count was the essentially the same but in this count the defendants purportedly “aided and abetted by each other and others did instigate, connive, attempt to cause, assist, or conspire to cause a riot.” In brief, the criminal indictment described the incident as a “mutiny or riot.” Those two counts were filed April 9 and May 12.

But they didn’t have the desired result. Not all the defendants were entering guilty pleas, thereby saving the U.S. attorney the trouble of presenting evidence and actually trying the case. Then, on July 14, the U.S. John Murphy came to the grand jury with a superceding indictment that includes a new charge: “the use of fire to commit a federal felony offense.”

Mary Stillinger, one of the court-appointed attorneys appointed to represent the immigrants, said the new indictment “really hammered” the immigrants, since it came with a mandatory ten-year sentence.

There was little hard evidence against the men, and even with the court-appointed defense attorneys, most of whom simply go through the motions of defending immigrants in the flood of criminal charges resulting from immigration violations that is overwhelming the judicial system along the border. As part of the prison reconstruction, GEO has insisted that the county install a comprehensive system of security cameras and video recording units so as to insure that the next time around, as was explained in a county commissioners meeting in Pecos by the architect directing the reconstruction: “Cameras and recording equipment are among the highest things on their list, because if say that if they had more security cameras, better recording equipment, when they had this disturbance, they would have been able to prosecute more, indict more people, if they had more proof of what everybody did.”

No one in a position of responsibility– not in county government, not in GEO, not in the correctional healthcare subcontractor Physicians Network Association (of Lubbock, Texas), not in the BOP , not in the U.S. Attorney’s Office – is apparently concerned of prosecuting, indicting, gathering evidence, or even investigating the conditions at RCDC that sparked the riots and the death of Jesus Manuel Galindo.

But the county has other concerns that involve high finance and keeping prison jobs in Reeves County.

Since 1985 the county has issued approximately $115 million in revenue bonds to finance the construction and maintenance of the RCDC immigrant prison complex. Going into the riots/mutinies/disturbances, the county had $92 million in outstanding prison debt. This debt is in the form of tax exempt municipal bonds called project revenue bonds that are issued by a specially established county public facility corporation to create a project that brings revenue to the county.

The county got off relatively easily from the first incident. The insurance companies paid by the county over the past couple of decades for the prison covered most of the rebuilding expenses. But then came the proverbial ‘fire next time.’

Less than two months after the first inmate protest, inmates renewed the Dec. 12-13 protest with a much larger incident – one that completely destroyed the oldest prison unit and resulted in reconstruction and upgrading expenses project to approach $40 million. This time the insurance companies are expected to come through with only $25 million, leaving the county $15 million short.

Here comes Barry Friedman of Carlyle Capital Markets, the bond underwriting firm that has been with Reeves County since the beginning of its prison enterprise. Friedman assures the county that he can sell another $15 million plus in bonds to cover the gap. “I have been on the side of Reeves County since 1986,” Friedman recently told the county commissioners, assuring them that he only wants what is good for the county.

Not only is Friedman underwriting the new bond issue but after the prison disturbances he was hired as a special financial consultant to the county for about $15,000 a month. In addition to his commission for bond underwriting, he is also advising the county on what is in their best financial interest, as he told the commissioners. “As financial adviser, my responsibility is to the county,” he explained, angrily and righteously dismissing a complaint raised by County Attorney Alva Alvarez. “Do you represent the bondholders,” he was asked. “No, I represent the county,” he replied.

Reeves County is angry, worried, and deep in debt – and going deeper. No wonder then the reaction of the elderly security guard at the federal building. After I asked who he was, he threatened to call the U.S. Marshals. Knowing about justice in Reeves County, I turned around and walked out. Just as well, the immigrants had all decided to plead guilty. The scheduled trial was cancelled.

Tempers are also flaring in the county building across the street with conflict-of-interest charges swirling around having Carlyle’s Friedman work two sides of the prison business and with fears that if the county doesn’t get the prison back together the BOP might, as one county official noted, “bring in the buses and bring the inmates out.”

That would leave Reeves County with massive prison bond debt, Pecos with any empty prison complex on the edge of town, and more than four hundred area residents without a job. It would be a near fatal blow to the county, where a quarter of the population lives in poverty and unemployment stands at 14.1%. Poor Reeves County.

And poor immigrants who still suffer the same medical conditions that sparked the incidents.

See related articles:

Tom Barry
February 24, 2009
“Medical Claims and Malpractice in Correctional Healthcare”
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/5895

Forrest Wilder
October 2, 2009
“The Pecos Insurrection”
http://www.texasobserver.org/features/the-pecos-insurrection