Tombstone of Catlin Carithers in Natchez, Mississippi. (photo: Janosch Delcker/The Intercept)
Fatal
Corrections: Inside the Deadly Mississippi Riot That Pushed the Justice
Department to Rein in Private Prisons
By Janosch Delcker, The
Intercept
18 December 16
Inside the Deadly Mississippi Riot That Pushed the Justice
Department to Rein In Private Prisons
For
nearly two decades, the Bureau of Prisons has contracted with a handful of
private companies to incarcerate thousands of non-U.S. citizens serving time
for low-level federal offenses. Held in a dozen so-called “criminal alien
requirement” prisons largely concentrated in remote, rural areas, the
inmates in private custody are, for the most part, locked up for immigration
offenses or drug violations.
CAR
facilities have been the target of sustained criticism from advocacy
organizations, which argue that their existence reflects a two-tiered federal
prison system that outsources a select population of inmates to contractors
with a track record of abuse and neglect. In August, it seemed that years of
pressure had finally paid off, when the Justice Department announced it would begin phasing out private
prisons.
Under
the DOJ directive, the facilities — which “do not maintain the same level of
safety and security” as their BOP-run counterparts, according to Deputy
Attorney General Sally Yates — would see their contracts reduced or allowed to
expire without renewal and the inmates in their custody transferred.
Within
hours of the announcement, the stocks of industry heavyweights Corrections
Corporation of America and the GEO Group plummeted more than 35
percent. The Department of Homeland Security pledged to undertake a
review of its own reliance on for-profit detention centers, and CCA and GEO
shareholders filed class-action
lawsuits accusing the companies of false or misleading statements about the
safety of their facilities. In October, CCA embarked on a re-branding campaign,
changing its name to CoreCivic.
While
advocates applauded the DOJ memo as a long-overdue step in the right direction,
the momentum was short-lived.
On
November 9, as it became clear that Donald Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton
in the race for the presidency, Fortune declared private
prisons “the biggest (stock market) winner in Trump’s victory,” noting a 49
percent surge in CCA stock. In the weeks that followed, Trump would tap Jeff
Sessions as his choice for attorney general. Not only could Sessions, a
famously hardline figure on issues of immigration and criminal justice, undo
the DOJ’s directive, but the plans promoted by Trump and his advisers threaten
to drastically increase the number of people held by companies that have
repeatedly demonstrated the conflict of profit motive when it comes to
depriving people of physical liberty.
“I do
think we can do a lot of privatizations and private prisons,” Trump said on the campaign
trail earlier this year. “It seems to work a lot better.”
As the
policies of the president-elect come into focus, it’s worth revisiting one of
the incidents that prompted the DOJ’s resolve
to cut ties with the industry in the first place — a deadly clash at
a low-security, CCA-run facility on the outskirts of Natchez, Mississippi, that
reflects how private prisons not only endanger inmates, but can also force
low-wage workers from economically depressed communities into perilous
circumstances.
In May
2012, inmates at Adams County Correctional Center staged a protest over a
litany of grievances, including claims that men had died in custody as a result
of medical negligence. Though CCA officials were forewarned that dire
conditions had bred a sense of desperation in the prison, they failed to
prevent the escalation that followed.
May
20, 2012, was supposed to be Deborah Temple’s last day at work before a
long-awaited vacation. A resolute 48-year-old with a blond Jane Fonda haircut,
Temple had worked in what she calls “men’s jobs” all her life. When the plywood
mill that employed her for more than 15 years closed down, she heard rumors
about a prison being built next to the highway leading out of Natchez.
By
2009, construction of the multimillion-dollar complex was complete, and CCA
secured a federal contract to house inmates at the facility. “A signature on
the dotted line hundreds of miles away Wednesday makes today a new day for
Adams County,” cheered a local newspaper,
the Natchez Democrat, noting the deal would “bring more than $1.2 million in
property taxes, $1.8 million in utilities, and 400 jobs to the Natchez area.”
CCA,
now CoreCivic, runs three of the country’s CAR prisons; seven are run by
the GEO Group and another two by Management and Training Corp. Like many of the
isolated areas where CAR prisons operate, Adams County had a poverty rate about
twice the national average. When CCA hosted its job fair in Natchez,
more than 3,000 people lined up for 409 jobs.
“We
thought it was a federal prison … and we were under the impression that they
would pay like $20 an hour,” Temple said when we met last year, in the closed
bar of a casino by the Mississippi River. She was hired as a correctional
officer in 2010, starting at $12.60 an hour. “Pretty good for here,” she told
me. Later, she was promoted to sergeant.
Until
relatively recently, migrants detained at the U.S. border could often
voluntarily return to their home countries without penalty. In the mid-2000s,
however, federal programs like Operation Streamline ramped up criminal
prosecution of unlawful border crossing, saddling people with jail or prison
time prior to deportation. Between 2005 and 2013, prosecution of border
offenses tripled; last year,
improper entry and re-entry made up 49 percent of all
federal prosecutions.
According
to federal investigations into the Adams riot, a group of Mexican inmates known
as the Paisas, or “countrymen,” exercised considerable influence inside the
facility, where only a fraction of the employees spoke Spanish. If inmates
had complaints, they would consult with their Paisa representatives, who
conveyed their concerns to prison management. In the weeks leading up to May
20, tensions had apparently risen within the group. “The Paisas felt their
leadership was ineffective at communicating their grievances to prison
officials since their complaints had gone unaddressed for so long,” stated an
FBI affidavit later filed in cases related to the incident.
The
Intercept reached out to former Adams inmates who are now serving time on
charges of rioting in a federal correctional facility. Responding in letters in
Spanish, several described the unrest as primarily the result of conditions
they felt had become increasingly dangerous and intolerable, including medical
neglect, excessive use of segregation, spoiled food, a lack of interpreters,
and mistreatment by staff. The Intercept is not naming the inmates who
responded because of concerns about possible retaliation in their present
facilities.
“The
inmates tried, though no one paid attention, to discuss the poor nutrition,
with food that had already expired and medical care that was scarce and so bad
prisoners were getting worse and worse,” one of the men wrote. He described COs
wielding time in the prison’s “special housing unit” as a threat against
inmates who spoke out or as punishment for minor disciplinary infractions:
“Whenever anyone complained, officers beat him and put him into segregation,
the SHU, and submitted a report it had happened because of disobedience or lack
of respect for an officer.”
Another
former Adams inmate complained of officers using slurs like “wetback” and said
inmates had died in custody because of medical malpractice. “I understand
that we are paying for our mistakes, but this doesn’t mean that we cease to be
human beings,” he wrote. “Here they want to treat us as animals simply for
being foreigners.”
“I
don’t understand why they separate us from the rest of the prisoners who are
citizens of this country,” a third inmate wrote in a letter. “If we commit the
same crimes and are judged under the same laws, I believe it would be just if
they did not make the distinction of putting us in different prisons.”
“At
our BOP-contracted facilities, every person is subject to the same rules and
disciplinary procedures, which conform to BOP policy,” CCA spokesperson
Jonathan Burns wrote in an email to The Intercept. Responding to the
allegations, he noted that CCA “employs a robust grievance process, including
an available toll-free number, through which inmates can share any concerns or
complaints. We work to address these claims quickly and appropriately.”
Burns
added that the company “is dedicated to providing consistent, high-quality
healthcare to the individuals entrusted in our care” and “meals in CCA
facilities meet or exceed required nutritional standards.”
Angélica
Moreno’s brother was imprisoned at Adams, and in her view, the facility’s
failure to address his deteriorating health contributed to his death. Though
her brother, Juan Villanueva, was born in Mexico, he grew up in Los Angeles,
where the family had moved when he was 4 years old.
In
2008, Villanueva was deported back to Mexico, a country with which he had
limited familiarity. It wasn’t long before he set out to return to Los Angeles.
“He was lonely,” Moreno explained. “The rest of our family is all [U.S.]
citizens.”
Villanueva
was arrested by a Border Patrol officer near San Diego and pleaded guilty to
being a “deported alien found in the United States.” He was sentenced to 41
months in federal prison, and though he requested placement in California, the
BOP sent him to the privately operated facility in Mississippi.
During
his time there, Villanueva called his mother and told her he was suffering from
shortness of breath. He was denied access to a physician, according to Moreno,
who says a prison nurse advised her brother he had the flu.
“My
mom said, ‘You should go to the doctor,’” Moreno told The Intercept. “And he
said, ‘Mom, I have been going, but they just give me pain medication for the
cold. But this is not just a cold, this is something else, I don’t feel good.’
So my mom was telling him, ‘Juan, please go tell them again.’”
“I’ve
been going, and they don’t care,” Moreno remembers her brother insisting. “They
say I am not the only one sick in there.” Only after Villanueva started
coughing up blood, Moreno said, was he finally taken to see a doctor in
Natchez.
Moreno’s
account of the lapses in her brother’s care is supported by BOP monitoring
records obtained by Nation journalist Seth Freed Wessler. Over a four-month
period, Villanueva went to the prison’s clinic on six different occasions, The
Nation reported, but was never
granted access to a doctor. His weight dropped 25 pounds during his
imprisonment. Even after nurses recorded Villanueva “vomiting up copious
amounts of blood,” an order was put in for anti-nausea medication and days
passed before he was finally taken to the hospital.
Villanueva
had been suffering from lung cancer, which eventually spread to his brain.
A
few days before the May 2012 uprising, he was transferred out of Adams to
a BOP medical facility in North Carolina. His family members flew out to care
for him, Moreno said, but they were prohibited from staying with him overnight
in the facility. When her brother died, early on the morning of July 11, 2012,
she was notified when the medical prison called their hotel room. “The cause of
death was determined to be non-small cell lung cancer with brain metastasis,”
the warden confirmed in a court filing.
“It
just went on and on and on,” Moreno said of the delays in her brother’s care,
“until he was really sick.”
Burns,
the CCA spokesperson, declined to comment on Villanueva’s case. “Medical
privacy laws and other conditions prohibit us from addressing specific inmates’
medical conditions,” he wrote in an email, adding:
The Adams County Correctional Center employs a wide range of
medical professionals including doctors, nurses, laboratory staff, dentists and
mental health professionals who see around 350 patients on an average day. As
was the case in 2012, the medical department is fully equipped for routine
visits and medical emergencies. The facility’s sick call system continues to be
open to all inmates who are not feeling well and is conducted on a daily basis,
similar to a walk-in clinic.
Burns
would not provide information on how many doctors the prison employed. “CCA
does not disclose specific staffing patterns due to competitive and secure
operational concerns,” he told The Intercept.
“Its
more serious than you think,” the informant wrote in a text message reviewed by
The Intercept. “Tomorrow will be 2 meetings at 1200 pm all heads of states with
his group, to [listen] to demands. At 6pm all states will meet at big [rec
yard] who don’t go will be punish we talk about 1600 inmates.”
The
informant later forwarded the exchange to Alex Friedmann, the managing editor
of Prison Legal News and associate director of the Human Rights Defense Center,
who provided the messages to The Intercept. Friedmann began work as an advocate
for prisoners’ rights after serving time in a CCA facility in the
1990s. The messages are also referenced in two federal investigations into
the riot, one conducted by the BOP and the other by the Department of Labor’s
Occupational Health and Safety Administration.
“They
will present to the warden all the changes to be make and if not [comply] will
burn the place down,” the informant’s text message continued. “I was in 3
meetings tonight and trust me is The real deal. I saw the paper with all demands
and goes from medical, kitchen food, programs recreations and laundry. The new
rep [said] warden dont accept the demands he will order all workers to stop.
Will be a pacific demonstration but if the staff [interfere] will get ugly. Get
ready is serious.”
The
informant’s messages also suggested that inmates had compiled a “black list” of
staff they no longer wanted to work at the Adams facility, including Catlin
Carithers, a 24-year-old correctional officer. FBI affidavits related to the
incident mention the existence of the alleged list, though they do not include
Carithers by name. In legal filings, CCA acknowledged only that “an inmate told
a facility employee that it was serious” and that “3 unnamed COs were on a
black list and any officer that disrespected an inmate would be punished.”
When
Warden Laughlin arrived on the morning of May 20, he spoke to several inmate
reps but did not find indicators that “a prison disturbance was brewing,”
according to the OSHA investigation. Around lunchtime, Carithers was asked to
report to the facility, though he had not been scheduled to work that day.
For
lunch that Sunday, typically called “chow,” the kitchen served chicken.
“Chicken is usually a crazy day, everyone wants chicken,” Temple recalled.
However, “chow went pretty smooth.” Afterward, she went out to the parking lot
to smoke a cigarette. Inside, a procedure called “open move” began, when
inmates could move freely between their housing units, the recreation yards,
and the gym. Upon entering the yards, the men broke into groups and began
holding meetings.
Out in
the parking lot, Temple heard the voice of a colleague, Peggy Stevens, on her
radio. “We had just gotten through chow,” Stevens told The Intercept, when she
noticed a group of inmates escorting one of the old Paisa reps, apparently
against his will. “I asked him what he was doing, and he said, ‘They’re making
me go to SHU,’” Stevens said.
According to the BOP after-action report, Paisa
members believed the reps had alerted the administration of their plans and
were trying to remove them from the yard. Stevens called Central Control and
asked the security systems operators to close the internal gates along the
facility’s central corridor, known as Main Street. When Temple returned from
the parking lot, she found Main Street crowded with men, many wearing
sunglasses or head wraps in an attempt to disguise their identity.
Sometime
later, a large group of inmates made their way to a gate below the
building that housed Central Control, where they demanded to speak to Warden
Laughlin. They did not comply with orders to disperse echoing over the intercom
system.
Though
Temple had not been trained to respond to high-risk situations, she said,
she joined a member of CCA’s “special operations response team,” or SORT, on
the roof of the Central Control building. Up there, she had a view of the
prison grounds. It was around 2:30 p.m., according to OSHA, when Carithers
arrived at the facility. He joined Temple on the roof, while their colleague
ducked inside to change into his tactical gear. “Don’t let Cat go crazy, play
gung ho,” Temple recalled the SORT member saying before leaving.
As the
temperature climbed to 88 degrees, Carithers, who had also received SORT
training, opened a bag and showed Temple different types of tear gas grenades.
They put on gas masks.
Though
accounts differ on what prompted the order to deploy tear gas, once the
officers on the rooftops began using gas against the crowd below, the
tenor of the protest changed. “After the deployment of tear gas is when the
disturbance became violent,” the OSHA investigation stated. Temple had the same
recollection. “That’s when it started going crazy.”
In
letters to The Intercept, inmates convicted of participating in the riot
accused administrators of escalating the situation by giving the order to
deploy tear gas. “It was the officials who initiated the dispute, attacking
prisoners on orders from the captain. That’s when the population rebelled,”
wrote one man. “The real culprits were the administration who did not give
importance to the complaints and suggestions of prisoners, creating a critical
situation for both inmates and officers.”
On the
roof, Temple realized the tear gas wasn’t doing much good. Men on the ground
were throwing the canisters back toward them, along with stones, soda cans, and
kitchen trays. “Cat looks like the guy from the Matrix,” she thought as she
watched Carithers dodge projectiles. Then, she remembers, she saw a head come
into view off the edge of the building. The FBI later concluded that
inmates had piled up lunch carts from the dining hall and used them to reach
the roof.
“The
next thing I knew was there were two inmates standing in front of us,” Temple
said. One man, holding a boat paddle the kitchen staff used to stir food, told
her to tell management “to give us what we want” and nobody would get hurt,
Temple recalled. Before she could reply, the second man started to hit her with
an industrial buffet pan. She said she tried to defend herself, but the younger
man outmuscled her. Temple blacked out, collapsing onto a grating on the roof.
They
unlocked the cage and had to use a hole under the fence to try to get to one of
the housing units along Main Street. “Central, please let us in, please
let us in,” Rebecca remembers screaming. But the gate remained shut. “On
the radio, they said, ‘We can’t open the gate,’” she told me.
The
next thing she remembers was her husband lying on the ground, his
head bleeding. Later, the FBI showed the Scotts a video recorded by a nearby
security camera. According to Robert, a group of inmates who gained access to
the area with a key hit him with a broom handle, a mop handle, and a commercial
cookie sheet. While Rebecca tried to defend her husband, the attackers broke
three of Robert’s ribs and fractured his skull. “It seemed like forever,” he
told me.
Peggy
Stevens, who had been stationed with another CO on the roof of a housing unit
when the chaos broke out, was among several officers held hostage during the
disturbance. She was taken to a recreation yard, where Stevens said that
inmates instructed her to relay messages over her radio to prison management.
She emphasized numerous times during our interview that there were inmates who
protected her during this time. Indeed, according to OSHA, “several of the
officers told stories of being protected from harm from other inmates by
inmates during the disturbance.”
“They
said the warden wouldn’t listen to them. Their complaints were mainly about
medical and the food,” Stevens recalled. “They said the warden had promised to
meet with them over and over and he wouldn’t meet with them. That’s what they
said: Maybe the warden would listen now.”
To her
right, Temple could see Carithers, lying with his head facedown.
“Catlin,”
she remembers calling out. “Just lift your hand up if you can hear me!”
No
response.
“Just
tell me something!”
Carithers
didn’t move.
Around
5 p.m., a reporter for a Jackson TV station received a call from a
man who said he was an inmate at the Adams facility. He sent her cellphone
photos from inside the prison gates. “They always beat us. We just pay them
back,” the TV station reported him saying. “We’re trying to get better
food, medical (care), programs, clothes, and we’re trying to get some respect
from the officers and lieutenants.”
Around
the same time, Temple and Carithers were extracted from the roof of the Central
Control building, according to the BOP report. Temple recalled the sound of
helicopters in the distance, then a large shadow that blocked the light. She
recognized the voice of a co-worker. “Cat is hurt real bad,” she said he told
her. “We have to get you down.” After Temple was transferred to an ambulance,
she overheard someone say that Carithers wasn’t going to make it.
A few
miles farther north, Josey Carithers, Catlin’s younger brother, got a call on
his cellphone. It was Catlin’s fiancée, who was frantic. She’d heard from an
acquaintance there had been a riot at the prison and Catlin was hurt.
Josey called the two hospitals he knew in Natchez. His brother wasn’t at the
first; when he reached the receptionist at the second, she told him it’d be
best if the whole family came in. Catlin had died of blunt force trauma.
“All
through these years, me and my friends at the bus stop … we would talk about
somebody losing a child and you just don’t know how they can deal with it,”
Brenda Carithers, the brothers’ mother, told me. “I have always said, I would
probably either kill myself or go to the nuthouse. … But by the grace of God
we’ve gotten through it.”
In a
wrongful death lawsuit later filed against CCA, the Carithers family argued
that the company “maintained a less than adequate staff,” “was underequipped,”
“did not properly train its officers,” and “created a dangerous atmosphere for
the correction officers by depriving the inmates of basic needs and treating
them inhumanely.” A district court judge dismissed the claim under
Mississippi’s Workers’ Compensation Act, which immunizes employers against
allegations of recklessness and negligence.
Temple
believes Carithers died saving her life. “That’s the hardest thing I’ve had to
deal with,” she told me. She went to the hearings of some of the men involved
in the riot, which ultimately left some 20 employees and prisoners injured. “I don’t have
any pity,” she said. “I think they should get the harshest sentence they can
get. But I am not the judge. God is the judge of all evil, so I’ll let him
handle it.”
Two men eventually
pleaded guilty to second-degree murder charges, and a third pleaded guilty
to voluntary manslaughter. Many others were convicted on charges
of rioting in a federal correctional facility.
Early
last year, I sat with Robert and Rebecca Scott at the kitchen table in their
trailer, under two crucifixes and a framed drawing of Jesus. The right half of
Robert’s face was paralyzed; he said his skull fracture went undiagnosed for
more than a year.
“They
complained about chow all the time,” he said of the inmates at the Adams
facility. “But we had no control over that. We had no control over medical.”
The Scotts believe the prison could have prevented what happened. “If they
actually cared anything about us and our safety and all they would have locked
it down,” Rebecca said.
Four
days later, John Vanek, the assistant chief of security, received a message
from his informant inside the prison. “Why you don’t hear me on friday night
when I tell you that situation are no good?” the man asked. “Saturday night I
send you a very serious and disturbe email, and I [expect] by that that you
have the swat ready and all in place.”
“I
[said] to you, all they want is talk to the warden to [listen] to they request
to help people that are very sick and can’t get treatment,” he continued. “All
it takes is to [listen] to them and have a calm and pacific talk, but no you
closed the yard and send exactly who I [said] are on the hit list to start the
mess.”
In the
BOP’s after-action report, officials offered similar admonishment of CCA’s
apparent disregard for warning signs inside the facility. “The specific
disturbance can be directly attributed to actions taken by the administration
leading up to the event,” the report’s authors concluded.
“ACC
[Adams County Correctional Center] administration did not grasp the severity
and degree of the Mexican national inmates’ intent to orchestrate a meeting
with approximately 1,700 Mexican national inmates and to escalate the situation
to include violence toward staff if their demands were not met,” the report
continued. “Had the ACC administration understood the inmates’ intentions, a
preventative lock down could have been initiated.”
When
asked about attempts by prisoners to raise their concerns with the
warden, CCA spokesperson Jonathan Burns responded:
Responsibility for the 2012 disturbance at Adams County
Correctional Center lies solely with the inmates who instigated and
participated in this disturbance. CCA professionals along with state and local
law enforcement responded bravely and maintained public safety, which was never
threatened during the disturbance.
Judith
Greene, the director of Justice Strategies, a nonprofit research organization
focused on criminal justice and immigration policy, offered a different
perspective. “When prisoners are not getting proper medical care, and when they
die, what would you expect to happen next?” she said. “Prisoners have only one
way of drawing attention to these kinds of severe problems, which is
uprisings.”
Villanueva
was not the only prisoner to receive inadequate medical care at the Adams
facility. In 2011, the year before the riot, two other Adams inmates
died in the wake of substandard care, according to The Nation. Between
2007 and 2015, the magazine reported, BOP monitors recorded the deaths of 34
inmates who had received deficient medical treatment at CAR prisons — 14
occurred at facilities operated by CCA.
Like
Adams, other CAR prisons have erupted in protest over poor medical services. In
2008 and 2009, men imprisoned at Reeves County Detention Center in Texas set
fire to the facility after an epileptic inmate suffered a fatal seizure in an
isolation cell. In 2011, inmates at Big Spring Correctional Center attacked
employees, reportedly distressed over their response to a medical emergency
that resulted in an inmate’s death. And in 2015, prisoners staged a
two-day riot at Texas’s Willacy County Correctional Center to
protest medical neglect, resulting in the prison’s closure.
According
to Greene, medical services and staffing are the two primary areas where
private prison companies tend to cut corners, because that is “where they can
squeeze money for themselves and their shareholders out of the contract.”
“These
prisons are chronically understaffed,” she noted, describing high turnover and
subsequent failure on the part of companies to fill open positions. “Both of
those problems lead to more violence in the prisons, more contraband in the
prisons, more escapes. All kinds of operational problems that go into the
staffing scheme.”
Staffing
was a common grievance among the former Adams correctional officers I
interviewed. “We were working so short-handed,” Peggy Stevens said. “It was
pretty bad. Because people were quitting left and right, you know — just not
satisfied and getting screwed around.”
Robert
Scott described CCA’s efforts to present a picture of professionalism when the
time came for BOP inspections. “Audits: That’s when you could do all the
overtime you wanted. They wanted to wax the floor, paint everything on the
outside and on the inside,” he said. “That was the only time that this prison
ran with any security personnel in place.”
While
several Adams COs assigned to work the day of the riot had called out on
unscheduled leave, according to OSHA, CCA met its minimum staffing
requirements, with 43 security staff on shift duty and 2,537 inmates.
This
past November, following the Justice Department’s announcement that it would
wind down private prisons, the Department of Homeland Security advisory council
subcommittee convened to assess the agency’s reliance on privately run
detention centers released its findings. Sixty-five percent of
Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees are held in for-profit
facilities, largely operated by the same cast of corporations responsible for
CAR prisons.
In the
lead-up to the report, rights groups submitted dozens of declarations from
immigrants held in for-profit facilities across the country. While ICE
detainees are not held for punitive reasons — they are awaiting the outcome of
civil immigration proceedings and include asylum seekers and families with
children — the declarations reflected similar patterns of neglect and lack of
accountability described by inmates and staff at Adams.
While
the DHS advisory council subcommittee recognized the concerns
raised, its report was premised on
the assumption that “fiscal considerations, combined with the need for realistic
capacity to handle sudden increases in detention, indicate that DHS’s use of
private for-profit detention will continue.” The broader DHS advisory council
actually rejected this conclusion, voting to move away from private
detention, but as is the case for federal private prisons, efforts toward more
publicly operated models have an uncertain future. Immediately deporting 2 to 3
million undocumented immigrants, as Trump has promised to do upon taking
office, would require a massive expansion of what is currently a strained and
inhumane detention apparatus. Already, in the months since the Justice Department’s
memo, news has emerged of two CCA/CoreCivic facilities closed by the BOP that
have sought new contracts with ICE to hold immigrant detainees.
The
one-lane road that leads to the house where Catlin Carithers grew up meanders
through hills overgrown with pine trees. It is lined with trailers, many of
them deserted, and small Baptist churches.
When I
pulled up the driveway, a low winter sun cast shadows across a pond next to the
house. Six cars, some decades old, were scattered across the yard. Josey Carithers was
living in a trailer on the property; inside, I sat around a table with
him and his parents.
His
father, Hugh Carithers, told family stories: how Catlin “never met a stranger,”
how he accidentally set his lawnmower on fire; how he adopted a dog Hugh found
in the woods (“must be half-coyote”).
Unlike
his brother, Josey is reserved. Born 10 months apart, the two were close
growing up; they attended school in a neighboring county and had only each
other for company. After Catlin’s death, Josey handled the funeral arrangements
and tried to take care of his parents.
A
short drive from the house, we visited the graveyard where Catlin was buried.
The door to the white chapel was bolted; the church had closed down weekly
service because there weren’t enough donations to keep it running. At the far
end of the cemetery, I could see a tall marble headstone.
“They
paid for his funeral expenses, which took a lot of the burden off of us,” Hugh
said of CCA. The company also held a memorial inside the prison. A band made up
of employees played and Damon Hininger, CCA’s president and CEO, flew in
from Tennessee.
About
a month after Catlin’s death, a Facebook user posted to the company’s page,
“What is CCA doing for Correction Officer Catlin Carithers Family?” CCA
responded quickly, posting a statement within a few hours. “We have been in
constant contact with his family. We are assisting them in every way that we
can.”
“They
said they would call and be in touch,” Josey said, “but after we buried him,
there was no contact.”
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Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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