The Justice Department inspector general on Monday continued its documentation of allegations of Islamophobia in the federal prison system, noting in a regular department-wide report that nine new accusations of civil rights complaints were leveled against its employees. Most complaints involved Bureau of Prisons (BOP) guards; most were lodged by Muslims.
Remarking that the sheer volume of complaints against DOJ employees makes it difficult for its office to pursue individual cases, the department IG said that all nine of the incidents were referred to the BOP for further review.
Two of those investigations have been completed, finding no evidence of wrongdoing by federal officials. One involved an inmate who charged that, after he told a Warden he was feeling suicidal, the prison overseer encouraged him to take his own life, saying “one less Muslim I have to deal with.” The other seven investigations remain open.
The watchdog’s bi-annual review, mandated by the Patriot Act, also noted that the BOP has closed investigations of six incidents documented in last year’s second review.
Like this year’s report, the vast majority of incidents reviewed in the second half of last year involved Muslims alleging Islamophobic abuses within the federal correctional system.
The incidents still under investigation by the BOP accusations in the latest report details all manners of accusations—some violent, others not. One was brought by a man who isn’t even Muslim.
One prisoner reported to the IG in the first half of this year that guards had kicked him in the side and stomach “while calling him a derogatory racial and religious name,” after he had initially refused to “cuff up.” He added that after the incident, he was “placed in the Special Housing Unit (SHU), where he was denied medical care and placed in restraints for an extended period of time.”
In another complaint, a an inmate alleged that correctional officer were “encouraging other inmates to attack him; depriving him of food, showers, and recreation; making threatening and derogatory comments about Muslims; pushing and tripping him so he would fall down the stairs; and applying restraints too tightly.”
Guards were also accused of making insulting comments about one inmate’s hijab during a medical trip, and threatening to transfer another to a facility farther away from his family for “reading the Koran in the prison library.”
A detainee also alleged that a prisoner staff member “accused him of being in ISIS and Al-Qaeda.” He noted that when he informed the staff that he was, in fact, a Sikh, the staff member “became more verbally aggressive towards him.”
The nine incidents reviewed by the IG represent a fraction of the 506 complaints that the office received in the first six months of this year. In the second half of last year, almost 90 percent of grievances filed were also dismissed outright.
The watchdog told lawmakers that the vast majority of charges either dealt with matters outside of its jurisdiction or “did not warrant further investigation.”
