Governor should make prisons account for deaths of inmates

By CHRIS POWELL

Criminally convicted people are generally not very healthy. Many have smoked, abused drugs and alcohol, and become mentally ill or close to it. So it’s to be expected that some will die in prison. But since prisons are government institutions largely concealed from the public, government should account fully for every death in prison.

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Connecticut is doing miserably in this regard. 

Katherine Revello of Connecticut Inside Investigator, an undertaking of the Yankee Institute, last week recounted her great difficulty extracting information from the Correction Department and state police about the deaths of three inmates at the prison in Newtown in July last year.

One inmate hanged himself. It took the department three months to answer Revello about the cause of the other two deaths: drug overdoses. Only this month did the state police provide documents Revello sought about the investigation of those deaths, and most pages of the reports were entirely redacted.

Revello writes that the state police attributed their redactions to four exemptions in the state’s freedom-of-information law: “investigatory techniques not known to the public, personnel or medical files that would invade personal privacy if released, logs that contain information on the movement of inmates and staff in prisons, and an exemption that prevents the disclosure of images of deceased victims.”

This is ridiculous. What techniques of investigating deaths in prison are so sensitive that the public must be kept ignorant of them? 

As for invasion of privacy, people in prison have little privacy and the dead have none at all. 

What is so sensitive about the movement of prison employees and prisoners? Of course they don’t stand still. 

As for images of the deceased, there may not always be a need for their release but there sure would be public interest in releasing them if death was attributed to a drug overdose when photos of the victim show a knife in his back.

And where did the drugs found in the bodies of the two overdose victims come from? The drugs seem to have been pharmacological drugs that are prescribed, not cocaine or heroin. So did the inmates get them properly from prison medical staff, or improperly from prison staff, other prisoners, or visitors?

These are fair questions about prison management, and if investigation can’t find answers, someone in authority should have said so by now.

Meanwhile Connecticut’s new prison ombudsman, an advocate for prisoners, DeVaughn Ward, has been trying to gain the release of Correction Department video showing the fatal subduing of a mentally ill prisoner by prison staff seven years ago — also at the prison in Newtown.

In a recent newspaper essay, Ward wrote of the prisoner: 

“As he awaited placement in round-the-clock observation, officers escorted him for a strip search, forcing him to bend over while naked on a cell bed, per Correction Department policy. Almost immediately a struggle erupted. 

“Officers pulled a spit mask over his face, struck him repeatedly, and sprayed him with chemical agents while the mask remained on. Pinned, he was injected with a combination of medications. When officers later tried to move him, he couldn’t walk. He was wheeled to another cell. By the time medical staff checked him, he was unresponsive.  

“Connecticut’s chief medical examiner ruled Jones’ death a homicide: ‘sudden death during struggle and restraint with chest compression.’ The autopsy documented a liver contusion; contusions and abrasions to the head, torso, and extremities; and internal bleeding along the back, sides, and shoulders caused by chest compression. Yet no one was charged with a crime, and some of the officers remain on the state’s payroll.”

The ombudsman blames state Attorney General William Tong for the withholding of the video. But Tong is just representing his client, the Correction Department, which doesn’t want the public to see what’s going on.

The ombudsman’s complaint should be directed to Governor Lamont, who appoints the correction and state police commissioners. The governor needs to understand that there is a chronic problem here and that he should do something about it. 

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Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)