State prisons told to stop abusing disabled inmates
Since 1996, federal courts have ordered California prisons to stop abusing inmates with physical or mental disabilities. A federal appeals court issued the latest order Thursday after hearing gruesome accounts of inmates being punched, pepper-sprayed or bodyslammed when they complained of mistreatment or asked for help.
So what will it take to change things?
The latest rulings could finally make a difference, said Gay Grunfeld, a lawyer for disabled prisoners who first sued the state in 1994. Particularly orders, first issued by a federal judge in 2020, that prisons install surveillance cameras that can record guards’ interactions with inmates, and body cameras for all prison staff who encounter disabled inmates. Prison officials say they are complying with the judge’s orders, while asking the appeals court to overturn them.
“I believe that cameras can be a game-changer,” Grunfeld said. “Cameras are necessary because we need to break the code of silence” about state prisons’ treatment of the disabled.
Beyond that, she said, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation must “change the culture and change the way it investigates and disciplines those who do not comply with the rules.” Those changes are also required by the most recent rulings, Grunfeld said, and “I believe that these orders will take us a long way towards what needs to happen.”
The department, in fact, announced new policies last March to install the cameras, add new training requirements for prison staff and tighten standards for internal investigations of staff members accused of abusing inmates. CDCR spokesperson Vicky Waters said Thursday the department is “committed to ensuring accountability and results-driven changes to address the issues raised” by the court rulings.
In Thursday’s decision, however, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals noted that U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken of Oakland has been ordering CDCR for decades to improve its treatment of the disabled and punish abusive employees. Her first ruling, in 1996, rejected the state’s argument that the federal law banning discrimination against the disabled did not apply to prisoners. Wilken then issued injunctions in 2007, 2012 and 2014 requiring stronger department rules and staff accountability before her September 2020 order mandating cameras and a crackdown on abusive prison staff.
That order, which the appeals court upheld, focused on conduct at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego, whose inmates included nearly 1,000 with disabilities, and also applied, for the most part, to five additional prisons in Southern and Central California. But Grunfeld said the same conditions exist at all 34 California prisons, and the department’s new policies apply to all of them.
In one incident cited by Wilken at the Donovan prison, the court said, an inmate asked a guard not to cuff his hands behind his back because he used a cane and a walker. In response, the court said, the guard “slammed (the inmate) to the ground, causing him to hit his head on the concrete floor and lose consciousness for several seconds”; when he awoke, the guard put his knee on the man’s throat, “then kneed him in the face.”
When a guard at another prison refused to help a disabled inmate lift a heavy package of mail, the court said, the inmate told the guard he would file a complaint, and in response, “the officer pepper-sprayed the (inmate) in the face, hit him in the face with the pepperspray canister, and then kicked him.” An inmate at Donovan with vision problems asked a guard to stop shining a flashlight in his eyes, then asked to speak to a sergeant after the guard refused, and another guard punched him in the jaw, the court said. And when another Donovan inmate told a guard he would report him for calling the inmate a “retard,” the guard pepper-sprayed him, threw him out of his wheelchair and stomped on his back.
The court said more than 150 inmates presented sworn declarations to Wilken that amply supported her September 2020 orders. Besides the surveillance and body cameras and additional staff training, Wilken ordered the department to curb retaliation against those who complained of misconduct, submit to monitoring by a court-appointed expert, limit its use of pepper spray and overhaul its practices of investigating and disciplining staff members.
The department formerly refused to investigate inmate complaints unless officials had a “reasonable belief” they were well-founded. Under the new policy, all complaints must be investigated by the CDCR’s Office of Internal Affairs, replacing past investigations at individual prisons.
“If prison staff are not held accountable when they unlawfully fail to accommodate disabled inmates — or when they retaliate against inmates who report such misconduct — disabled inmates will stop speaking up,” Judge Michelle Friedland wrote in the appeals court’s 3-0 ruling. “And if prisoners do not speak up, there is less opportunity to hold officers accountable.”
And while the prisons’ investigators have often accepted staff members’ denials of abuse, Friedland said, “with more direct evidence showing what happened during an incident, it will matter less whether investigators are inclined to credit officers’ accounts of incidents over inmates’ accounts.”