Recent News Exposure of Colorado Prison System

Recent News Exposure of Colorado Prison System

 

On the evening of March 19^th Colorado Executive Director of Corrections, Tom Clements was shot and killed at his relatively remote home in Monument, (a residential town just north of Colorado Sprigs, - 45 miles south of central Denver).  This is a big deal.  Executive Director is a governor’s cabinet position and often a stepping stone to attorney general.  I originally suspected a disgruntled employee – a la Christopher Dorner – would be the assassinator.   The Director sets policy far above the concerns of most inmates and has more impact on employment and contracting services.

 

I was surprised to hear on the 20^th that suspicion had fallen on a Saudi Arabian inmate who had been denied an international transfer by someone authorized to print the director’s signature on a patterned denial letter.  This should bring to light the deficiency in Colorado Corrections’ posture toward foreign governments; just as the Christopher Dorner rampage should have illuminated gratuitous police violence employed against mentally handicapped.  Did you know that was the seminal issue?  [See the Daily Kos, Feb 9^th, 2013, “Did Cris Dorner get a Raw Deal from LAPD, Read the Courts Opinion in his Disciplinary Appeal”]

 

Prison systems have provisions for interstate and international transfers called compacts – analogous to treaties.  When I entered the system in late 2001 DOC officials had declared that there would not be any returns of foreigners to their home countries.  That refutation of treaty was likely targeted at Mexico.  It is entirely ineffectual, whether restricted to one “problem” country or extended to all treaty nations.  Since all foreign felons are deported upon completion of their sentence one must ask:  What is the point of keeping them for a full period of punishment and supposed rehabilitation ( US prisons have not been rehabilitative for over 25 years) when they can be in a home country prison and be pre-deported?!  The retributive effects of a prison sentence – dislocation from and disability to re-enter society – are complete after five years.  There is no reason to spend US money on foreign inmates beyond this time.  [If you disagree with this then write me a mock letter from a Saudi Arabian prison cell on the day a random government sheik tells you that you cannot transfer your sentence back to the U.S.]  Colorado disagrees; they went so far as to fly a functionary to Saudi Arabia to rationalize to a corresponding functionary why Mr. Arab sex-slave-holder is too valuable to transfer.  Every fraud, waste, and abuse hot-line to the governor’s office should have lit up when the tidbit hit the national news.  The Colorado DOC budget is 10% of the state budget and should not be used for international travel by employees to ostensibly obviate and rationalize the circumvention of rational policy.

 

In fact the rationale for subverting the treaty for international transfers is simply incarceration hubris.  The U.S. prison/industrial complex is so refined that no other system will do for U.S. convicts.  No other country can be trusted to incarcerate as well as the U.S. does!

 

[Further development of this premise can be found in a Reproof article I wrote about Bernard Kerik.  When he could not be confirmed for homeland security chief under George Bush he traveled the world peddling maximum security prison designs, with financial enslavement schemes for construction (see any book by John Perkins about the World Bank, private wealth funds and CCA/corporate partnerships) to every third world country that would accept U.S. style incarceration as a valid addition to their culture!  Please send me follow-up info on his fraud prosecution  ;) ]

 

I digressed - back to the CDOC Commissioner.

 

Around mid-day on the 21^st the driver of a car of a color and style suspected to be involved with the director’s assassination was killed in a shootout in north central Texas.  There was little doubt that this was the trigger man.  It took a day for an ID to be made:  Evan Ebal, a white prison gang parolee.  Quite diametric to my estimate of disgruntled staff; although disgruntled is a good starting point to analyze this rage junkies psycho-pathology.  His beef with the prison system most likely arises from his stay at the maximum security Colorado State Penitentiary (CSP).

 

When CSP was built it was only the eighth administrative segregation (ad-seg) facility in the country.  It represented the hippest way to bury alive less than human homo sapiens.  (see above comment about selling maximum security prison plans around the world. )  It is an ugly permanent lockdown facility that represents the highest form of pissing contest stalemate in our U.S. of A.  What else can you do with an unmanageable inmate…a person who knows they are living a pointless existence with nothing to lose and ready to take it out on anybody in range?  Put them in a box.

 

MEP’s comment:  Why not, they are doing it to grade school children in certain locations around the U.S. and the U.S. Dept. of Education has no rulings regarding this kind of treatment!

 

At CSP a shower stall rolls up to your door 3 times a week and you are permitted to cross the cell door threshold to indulge in hygiene.  You are also permitted to cross the threshold when staff decides a cell extraction is appropriate.  CSP duty is terribly boring so when six staff members get suited up in riot gear and charge a cell they maximize the experience.  These events are supposed to be documented but the camera battery routinely dies or the extractee somehow knocks it out of the videographer’s hands – thus ensuring replacement cost of another video camera without a wrist strap.  The greater cost is the continued beat down after the extraction.  The torture in the cells involves knees to the thighs, ribs, neck and balls accompanied by the arms rotated 90° posteriorly to dislocate shoulder rotator cuffs) and hogtie cuffs applied with excessive force to the wrists and ankles -  then to the beat-down room – euphemistically called the “strip-out” or “cool – out” room.  Here your clothes are cut off and medical staff declares you are not dead.  Then you are kicked and punched until any ability to swing your numb feet and hands upon being unrestrained is lost.  Then, depending on the shift commander’s opinion of you, you may or may not be unrestrained for a two hour naked concrete cool down.  [If this seems exaggerated please contact Louis Buenabenta CDOC inmate # 99096 and ask about how his leg was methodically broken in a cell extraction.]

 

MEP comment:  Mr. Buenabenta is one of thousands suffering from long term effects of these types of injuries.  The U.S. pays out x amount of dollars in disability… The irony!

 

How often would this malice have to be deployed against you before you would feel inclined to kill whomever is responsible for this system of treatment?

 

By morbid irony Tom Clements was sensitive to the numerous issues of ad. seg. prisons.  All the operational protocols and their concomitant abuses, were established in the prison boom of the 90’s and can be ascribed to prison directors near to a full generation before Mr. Clements took the post.  Most often the executive director of corrections post is filled by politically motivated banker/lawyer types as a cabinet level stepping stone to higher ambitions.  Thus they fill the position as a sinecure and work to do little more than minimize public scrutiny. [E.g. the video of an abusive cell extraction in Maine was leaked and the response of corrections officials was anger at the public exposure with no concern nor comment on the content.  Please note that being angry at getting caught with no concern for the offense is a hallmark of sociopathic criminality that judges cite as grounds to aggravated sentencing.]

 

Clements, I am led to believe, had undertaken measures to redefine how inmates were staged out of and released from CSP.  This small consideration is absolutely enlightened in contrast to previous status quo directors.  I believe that had Ebel understood the politics and the evolution of penology in Colorado he likely would have sought out people responsible for the current ad-seg system to exercise his extreme vengeance upon instead of Commissioner Clements.

 

Post –script:

1.)    Regarding international prison transfer - Italian prosecutors want to retry Amanda Knox.  If she is reconvicted:  Should she be allowed international transfer?

2.)    Get involved with civil and activist organizations.  Rid the U.S. of solitary confinement (ad-seg/administrative segregation).