![]() ![]() ”It seems almost there was a decision not to credit what an inmate says,” said Justin Loughry, a lawyer representing some Bayside inmates. Often, the investigators’ reports said cases boiled down to inmates’ words against guards’, or inmates could not clearly identify the guards in question. But in nearly every case, investigators said they could not substantiate the charges against guards. Some inmates passed those tests when they reported abuse by guards. ![]() Internal affairs investigators conducted hundreds of interviews and gave lie detector tests to several inmates. In the end, the investigation fell to the Department of Corrections’ internal affairs unit. Both the United States attorney and the F.B.I. file also noted that the United States attorney’s office in Newark had subpoenaed records about the lockdown, but the Justice Department said it closed the case in August 1999, for lack of evidence. Because internal affairs was already on the job, and because some inmates had hired lawyers, the agent concluded no further F.B.I. Over the phone, the file says, the agent learned that internal affairs planned to conduct its own investigation. But the investigator’s case file, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, showed that the agent handling the case made only one telephone call: to the internal affairs division’s office at Bayside State Prison. began to investigate after receiving written complaints from several inmates. Newspapers reported the stories, and the Department of Corrections promised a thorough investigation. As John Sullivan reported in the New York Timesin 2003, in a long investigative article on the lockdown:Īfter the lockdown ended in September 1997, complaints of abuse began to leak from the prison. What happened next is an extreme version of a typical story–a series of half-hearted “investigations” and widespread coverups. More than three dozen inmates told The Inquirer in 1997 that they had been repeatedly beaten, dragged, forced to sit handcuffed in the prison gym for hours, threatened with dogs, and paraded through a gauntlet of SOG officers who beat them with nightsticks. When the lockdown was lifted, inmates began to report stories of abuse to the Department of Corrections. The SOG officers dressed in riot gear, carried batons and mace, and did not wear name badges. Prisoners were confined to their cells, visitors were prohibited, and a Special Operations Group (SOG) consisting of 57 corrections officers from across New Jersey interrogated inmates and searched cells for weapons. 3, 1997, after guard Fred Baker was stabbed in the back by an inmate with a makeshift knife. ![]() Bissell, clears the way for inmates to sue the state.Ī detailed report by Mike Newell in the Philadelphia Inquirer describes what took place at the prison in the summer of 1997.īayside, a medium-security prison with nearly 2,400 inmates in Cumberland County, was put on lockdown between July 30 and Sept. But last month, a retired judge, who was appointed by the federal courts to be a fact-finder in the case, determined that the New Jersey Department of Corrections is liable for their abuse. Their complaints languished for a decade. It lasted more than a month, during which hundreds of Bayside prisoners say they were beaten and otherwise abused. These 24-hour lockdowns are routinely instituted in response to perceived threats to prison safety or authority. On occasion, they can extend to days, weeks, or even months, during which the prison is under a kind of martial law even more extreme than its normal conditions.Īt Bayside State Prison in southern New Jersey, this kind of lockdown was instituted after the murder of a guard in 1997. prisons can take many forms–including the temporary lockdown of units, buildings, or entire prisons. ![]()
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