Video Sparks National Outrage and Questioning
Exasperation and outrage. There can be few other reactions to the video "training" tape of Missouri prisoners being pounded and kicked by private COs and attacked by dogs in September 1996 at the Brazoria County Detention Center in Texas.
The video surfaced in August 1997 as a result of a $100,000 civil rights lawsuit brought by one of the inmates against the Brazoria County sheriff. The county owned the facility, but hired Capital Correctional Resources Inc. (CCRI) to operate it. Images from the tape were soon splashed across the nightly news and the front pages of newspapers across the country.
Certainly such images do not help the public perception of COs. But much of the coverage focused on the fact that these events had taken place in privately managed facilities.
The state of Missouri responded almost immediately by canceling its contract with Brazoria County and repatriating all 415 of its inmates who had been housed there. Soon afterward, it canceled $12 million in contracts with three other Texas counties, all of which had facilities being managed by CCRI. Missouri officials said the contracts were canceled because CCRI was trying to defend the actions taken by its employees in the video.
Brazoria County is also having second thoughts about its relationship with CCRI. County Commissioner Jack Patterson stated that he favored canceling the contract with CCRI in part because he wondered if the liability insurance CCRI was required to purchase to cover the county would be adequate for any judgments that might be issued. This comes in the wake of a recent Supreme Court ruling that "qualified immunity" from lawsuits applies only to public COs — not to private COs.
In any case, the Brazoria County Sheriff’s Department will have to face tough questions about its dealings with CCRI, including its approval of CCRI’s hiring of two former Texas prison system officers who had been previously convicted of brutality charges in the beating of a state inmate. More civil rights lawsuits are expected on behalf of Missouri inmates housed in Brazoria County.
This video is just the latest piece of evidence in a series of allegations about mistreatment at private facilities in general, and CCRI facilities in particular. Recently, Oklahoma officials began repatriating the state’s inmates from the CCRI-managed Limestone County Detention Facility in Groesbeck, Texas, because they were concerned about the frequency with which prisoners were being controlled with pepper spray.
We haven’t heard the last of this tape. It has sparked an FBI inquiry into possible civil rights violations. It has also provoked discussion in Geneva, Switzerland, where the United Nations 149th Subcommission on Human Rights met to discuss inmate mistreatment in Brazoria County and other privately operated prisons in the United States. The United States houses over 90 percent of the world’s private prison inmate population.
