The Justice Department’s internal watchdog said Tuesday that a privately-run federal prison in Mississippi is still plagued by the same systemic problems that preceded a deadly riot at the site in May 2012.
An investigation published by the agency’s Inspector General concluded that the Natchez-based facility, run by a company now called CoreCivic, has neglected to address the prisons’s shortcomings, since the incident.
“Four years after the riot, we were deeply concerned to find that the facility was plagued by the same significant deficiencies in correctional and health services and Spanish-speaking staffing,” the inquiry concluded.
Auditors noted, for example, that “only four of 367 staff spoke fluent Spanish,” despite the Adams County Correctional Center’s population including “approximately 2,300 aliens, predominately Mexican-nationals [sic].”
“By February 2016, CoreCivic officials told us the number of fluent Spanish-speaking staff actually dropped to three people,” the IG added.
CoreCivic was known, until October, as the Corrections Corporation of America. It changed its name the month after the Justice Department issued a directive, ordering federally-operated prisons to “substantially reduce” their reliance on private sector contractors. CCA stock plummeted after the decree.
The order was preceded by another Justice Department IG report, which found that federal prisons run by entities seeking to maximize profit tend to engender more violence than their public sector counterparts. The disturbances at Adams, which were featured in that study, left one prison guard dead and 20 injured.
The August directive against privatization is now under threat, with Donald Trump set to assume control of the White House in January. As a feature-length Intercept story published Saturday on the 2012 uprising noted, CoreCivic saw its stock mushroom by 49 percent, in the weeks following the election.
Investors were walking back their confidence in the company only somewhat in the wake of Tuesday’s release by the Justice Department IG. CoreCivic stock dropped by a net of about about 0.80 percentage points, in the hour after the investigation was published.
As the Intercept’s account of the 2012 riot at the Adams County site noted, before the violence, prisoners had vigorously attempted to communicate with staff their complaints about the jail. Grievances included “medical neglect, excessive use of segregation [e.g. isolation; solitary confinement], a lack of interpreters, and mistreatment by staff.”
While Tuesday’s report did not directly address staff use of segregation or mistreatment, it did note that Adams’ “inmate grievance program….affords inmates many fewer rights and protections than are available to inmates at [Bureau of Prisons]-managed facilities.”
The system remains insufficient, the IG said, as it only seeks to adjudicate issues “considered to be BOP-related.”
“All other grievances at the Adams County facility are only addressed at the institutional level, which means that the Warden, who is a CoreCivic employee, is the final decision-making authority,” the study said.
It also detailed healthcare deficiencies, noting that more than three years after the riot: “the Adams County facility was staffed with only a single physician for 434 days (43 percent of the time) and a single dentist for 689 days (69 percent of the time).” The study said this was twice the ratio of inmates-to-healthcare providers “specified in BOP program statements.”
