Features > May 10, 2006
No Room in Prison? Ship Em Off (cont’d)
“Our women have been moved around like chess pieces,” says Brady, who has stayed in close contact with many of the female prisoners from Hawaii. “Most of these women would be better served in community programs to directly address their needs: drug addiction, PTSD resulting from various forms of abuse and anger management.” Instead, the Hawaii DPS settled on the CCA-run Otter Creek Correctional Center.
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Located in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, Wheelwright (population 1,048) was once a successful coal-mining town with a Nashville Steel plant that employed 3,000 people. That all changed in 1970, when the plant shut down; the town quickly dwindled in both population and resident income. Building a prison in 1993 on the site of a former coal camp seemed to be a great solution to this town’s intractable problem of unemployment. Indeed, when CCA bought the facility in 1999, the corporation quickly became the town’s biggest employer.
Private prisons know the advantages of moving into economically devastated rural communities: generous tax incentives, low construction costs and a cheap labor market are key among them. Once built, the private prison companies strive to keep their facilities at maximum capacity.
“Whenever these bed counts go below 10 to 20 percent of maximum capacity, these corporations can’t make it. They need to import prisoners,” says Frank Smith, field director for PCI.
And that’s what CCA did with Otter Creek, initially bringing in male inmates from Indiana to fill the available cells. In July 2001, the Indiana prisoners staged a nine-hour riot, which was brought under control only after 100 outside law enforcement officers had been brought in to subdue the prisoners. By 2005, Indiana had transferred the last of its state prisoners out of the facility, after which CCA converted Otter Creek into a 656-bed women’s prison.
Past riots weren’t the concern of Hawaiian authorities—CCA was offering a great deal. According to the contract, each inmate would cost the state only $56 per day—compared to an average of $108 in Hawaii. (According to Smith’s research, costs are kept this low at Otter Creek because entry-level guards make $7.60 per hour.) CCA also agreed that Hawaii could send out a new group of higher-security “close-custody” inmates. Approximately 40 such prisoners were promptly shipped out.
Today, Otter Creek houses 120 Hawaiian women alongside Kentucky state prisoners. Half of the Hawaiian women are serving crystal methamphetamine-related sentences, and most of them are incarcerated on nonviolent charges. Ninety-five percent of these women are mothers, and according to Brady, not a single woman has gotten a visit from a child or other family member since the September 2005 transfer. Collect phone calls from the prison to Hawaii can run more than 60 cents per minute.
Since arriving at Otter Creek, women at the facility have complained consistently about cold temperatures in cells; loss of property during their transfer; racial and sexual harassment; bizarre medical care and commissary hours (at 2 to 4 a.m.); and “drinking” water that has caused widespread diarrhea and vomiting. In separate letters and phone calls, prisoners have echoed each other’s concerns of being threatened with administrative segregation if they complain about medical conditions.
Correspondence from Otter Creek prisoners—received by the Community Alliance on Prisons—has pointed to at least two other serious medical situations in the recent past.
In one situation, a Hawaiian inmate, who asked to remain nameless, was coughing up blood and asked for medical assistance repeatedly. When she was finally seen by the medical unit at the prison, she was given a nasal moisturizer and told she had a sinus infection. The prisoner’s condition worsened, and she was eventually rushed to the Hazard Regional Medical Center—in leg shackles and at gunpoint. The inmate had to have emergency surgery; one lung had completely filled with blood. Prison officials ignored a follow-up appointment scheduled by the surgeon until Brady intervened on the woman’s behalf.
Another female inmate, who also requested anonymity, told prison staff about severe chest, arm and leg pain for several months, only to be told that she would be placed in administrative segregation if she continued to complain. When she was eventually taken to the hospital in critical condition, a triple heart bypass surgery had to be performed.
DPS did not respond to a request for an interview on the medical care and general conditions facing state prisoners at Otter Creek. The state agency announced earlier this year that it was sending its own investigative medical team to Kentucky to determine the actual cause of Ah Mau’s illness and death, but has yet to release its findings.
“This is inhumane,” Brady insists. She and others have called for an independent investigation, stressing that Ah Mau’s death is unlikely to be the last tragedy to befall this group of female prisoners.
Postscript from the author: After this story went to press, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported that Eldon Tackett, a 43-year-old guard at Otter Creek, had been accused of providing food and candy to a female prisoner in exchange for oral sex. In addition, the Kentucky-based Floyd County Times reported that Otter Creek’s drug counselor, Tanya Crum, 32, had been arrested for trafficking in methadone. Employees of privately-run prisons often take on second (or third) jobs to subsidize their low prison wages earnings. For the former CCA employee, methadone delivery appears to have been one of those jobs.More information about Silja J.A. Talvi
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