BG: In early June of this year we sent a letter to more than 20 current and former prisoners at the State Correctional Institution (SCI) at Dallas, PA, soliciting reports of human rights violations. Since then we have received thousands of pages in reports from dozens of prisoners detailing a wide range of gross and deliberate human rights violations.
The highest concentration of reports come from the Restricted Housing Unit (RHU), which is PA's own acronym for the solitary/control units, and these conform to the broad characteristics outlined above regarding solitary confinement, although certain depredations have been more prevalent at SCI Dallas. These include high incidence of sexual harassment by RHU staff and even reports of guards encouraging prisoners to sexually assault and rape other prisoners; frequent incitement to suicide, which was fatally successful in a case I'll discuss below; guards arriving to work drunk "we have had a shocking number of reports regarding this, particularly concerning Correctional Officer Jimmy Wilkes; no effective ventilation, which was exacerbated by the plastic "spit shields placed on prisoners' doors in the RHU and a source of extreme misery in the stifling heat of summer; brown drinking and washing water from excessive amounts of iron, which was confirmed in a letter from the Department of Environmental Protection to a prisoner in the RHU that HRC/Fed Up! has obtained.
The assaults, racism, denial of adequate or even any medical care in solitary or general population, especially mental health treatment, denial of due process in internal grievance and misconduct procedures, obstruction of access to the courts via the destruction of legal documents and arbitrary restrictions on usage of the law library are commonplace at SCI Dallas as they are throughout the control units of PA with varying degrees of intensity.
During the course of our still ongoing investigation, on August 24, 2009, a prisoner in the RHU named Matthew Bullock committed suicide. The PA DOC issued a press release, as is their legal obligation, on 25 August 2009 announcing his death. Only two days later we received the first report that guards were involved in encouraging and enabling Mr. Bullock's death. Since then we have learned through more than half-a-dozen eyewitness reports, several of which were submitted as affidavits, that Mr. Bullock was extremely mentally ill and according to his family had attempted suicide on at least six separate occasions while confined in the PA DOC. Guards repeatedly kicked on the door of his cell and taunted him, telling him to kill himself, and calling him a child molester and rapist, despite his having no record of any such crimes. Mr. Bullock told guards he was going to kill himself on the morning of August 24. Guards encouraged him to do so and subsequently moved him from cell #50, which was/is a psychiatric observation cell with a camera, to cell #48, which had no camera. Guards on the afternoon shift then reportedly failed to make rounds. Mr. Bullock was found hanging in his cell at 6:15 pm.
Because our investigations involve advocacy and are pursued with the explicit aim of abolishing control unit torture and other human rights violations in the prison system, we have earned the trust of many prisoners, and this is the reason that so many have come forward with reports of torture and human rights violations in SCI Dallas and elsewhere. As a result of their courage in speaking out we were able to break the story of the Bullock suicide in the local newspaper, the Wilkes Barre Times Leader. Mr. Bullock's trial lawyer read the story and contacted our office. We have provided a lot of documentation and witness statements to them, and they have recently opened an estate on Mr. Bullock's behalf, which is the first step in an eventual lawsuit.
Despite the negative publicity and small measure of exposure, conditions have not improved in the slightest, and acts of retaliation have in fact escalated recently. Reports of assault and instances of days long starvation continue to come into our offices multiple times each week.
HRC/Fed Up! has compiled the evidence we have accumulated and periodically notified those in positions of power with attendant requests for transparent investigations so as to ensure accountability and enforce the rule of law in the administration of the criminal legal system. In early July, over 70 state representatives and senators were put on notice of our preliminary findings, along with the PA DOC, the PA Attorney General and Governor Rendell (who it must be noted has a sordid history of criminal conspiracy and human rights violations himself, stemming from his role as the District Attorney of Philadelphia during the city's war against the MOVE organization and the frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal). Further notices were sent in September, with even more copious documentation. To date no action has been taken by the PA DOC, the Attorney General of PA, or the Governor. Nor has the District Attorney of Luzerne County "notorious site of the kids-for-cash judicial scandal "taken any action regarding criminal complaints regarding the Bullock incident or the acts of assault and starvation and intimidation against Andre Jacobs, a brilliant 27 year-old jailhouse lawyer who was recently awarded $115,000 in a case against the PA DOC.
Our strategy has been to grant PA state authorities the opportunity to do the right thing while simultaneously preparing for the predictable reality that they will not. Our next steps are the filing of formal criminal complaints with the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and the issuing of a major human rights report detailing our findings regarding SCI Dallas. The basic idea is to methodically link state authorities at every jurisdictional level into a chain of notice and liability and to reflect the failure of the government to enforce the rule of law and uphold basic human rights onto the public consciousness in order to create the degree of exposure necessary for enabling mass movements and coherent, collective action against the injustices of the police-security state.
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