Kids In Prison
Second in a two-part series
Young inmates report highest rate of assault
By Ronnie Greene and Geoff Dougherty
Originally published in The Miami Herald, March 19, 2001
Florida's youngest prison inmates are also its most likely victims of reported assaults.
Some attacks come at the hands of adults, others by juveniles. The weapons of choice: locks stuffed in socks used to smash faces, broom sticks, scalding water, food trays, toilet brushes, handmade knives, bare hands.
"The skin was hanging off my face," said David Bray, badly burned when inmates doused him with boiling water at Hillsborough Correctional Institution, a prison for juveniles and young adults near Tampa. Some assaults occurred out of eyesight of correction officers, records show, raising security questions at Florida's prisons for young criminals.
Michael Moore, secretary for the Florida Department of Corrections, downplayed the level of prison violence and questions of lax security. He declined to be interviewed but responded to written questions.
"Incidents will occur in any prison system, but the number of serious incidents in the Florida system is extremely rare," Moore wrote to The Herald. "No prison system can monitor the activity of every inmate every minute of the day."
A Herald review of prison records covering 1995-1999 found:
- Juveniles are four times as likely as adults to report being assaulted in DOC facilities.
The DOC logged 362 assault complaints involving juvenile victims in the five-year period—one for every two juvenile inmates. Among adults, there was one complaint for every seven adult inmates. The alleged attackers included adults, corrections officers, juveniles and visitors.
After inquiries from The Herald, the prison system conducted its own analysis of abuse complaints and came to generally similar results. But the department noted that its analysis showed that adult-on-adult cases were of a serious nature more often than adult-on-juvenile assaults.
A December audit by Florida's Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability reported that, overall, inmate-on-inmate batteries were up 39 percent last year, and inmate batteries against staff up 7 percent. "Violence within the prisons is on the rise," it found.
- Children in the adult prison system are nearly 21 times as likely to be assaulted or injured as teens in Department of Juvenile Justice facilities.
Authorities logged one assault complaint for every two youthful DOC inmates, but one such complaint for every 35 youths in juvenile facilities.
The DOC believes it tracks allegations more aggressively than the DJJ, and that comparisons across the juvenile and adult systems are invalid. Moore cautioned: "Comparing assault allegations across two different agencies is problematic because of the high likelihood that … how the data is captured are very different."
But Mike Forche, assistant chief of investigations for the DJJ inspector general's office, said that if anything, children in adult prisons complain less often than those in juvenile facilities, because they fear being labeled as snitches.
- Two prisons for young felons, Hillsborough Correctional and Indian River Correctional, have security set-ups unlike any other Florida prison. Some wings are patrolled by fewer than one officer per dorm. Prison officials say that's because the prisons have small dorms of no more than 24-32 inmates, allowing officers to rove easily.
Inmates say assaults occur in one dorm while an officer patrols another, and that many fights go undetected. Cons serve as lookouts.
- The DOC unwittingly helps arm attackers by selling locks to inmates—at $6.92 apiece—for lockers. With more than 70,000 inmates in the system, there are about that many locks circulating. After a spate of locker break-ins at Hillsborough Correctional, prison officials there provided a bigger lock for a while—nearly 12 ounces, up from the normal 6.
One teenage Hillsborough inmate lost an eye in an attack in 1999. In 1998, a Fort Lauderdale teen was assaulted with a lock by a 20-year-old, also at Hillsborough. Last year at Desoto Correctional Institution, an adult prison, a Miami-Dade 16-year-old was attacked with a lock while sleeping.
"There is a simple explanation for why locks are sold to inmates: so they can secure their personal property in lockers," C.J. Drake, until recently a DOC spokesman, e-mailed The Herald in the course of interviews involving assault cases.
"No locks at all would result in more serious problems than locks being used as weapons. A rock, bar of soap, shampoo bottle filled with sand or other heavy object in a sock is equally effective as a weapon. A broom, mop handle, toothbrush, paper clip or other common object that inmates have access to can also be made into weapons."
Why not provide locks that can't be used as weapons, such as combination locks that are permanently attached to lockers?
Prison officials say inmates would merely find other means to attack and that switching to another method would be costly.
Other states do some things differently. North Carolina and New York, both with hundreds of juveniles in the adult prison system, say they have at least one officer per dorm. North Carolina does not provide locks to the majority of juvenile inmates, since most can lock their room doors and don't need locker padlocks. New York, like Florida, sells locks.
INMATES' SECURITY
Teen was attacked with scalding water
Locks aren't the only weapons.
Bray, then 17, suffered first- and second-degree burns when inmates threw boiling water on him at Hillsborough in 1998. Bray, who has a lengthy juvenile record, said he had been in a gang-related fight with one of the attackers earlier that day, and this was revenge.
For a month, one side of his face was covered with bandages, removed daily so cream could soothe his burn. His burn has faded, but not his memory. After the attack, he filed a grievance against the prison.
"You don't even have enough officers to put in every dorm," Bray, now 20, said from his new prison, Gulf Correctional Institution in Wewahitchka in deep North Florida. "It was completely undermanned."
He was attacked in a wing of Hillsborough with a minimum staffing of one officer for every three dorms, each with 24-32 inmates.
On the night of the attack, the DOC said there were two officers, "which exceeded the minimum complement."
DOC officials contend that the security is adequate and say Hillsborough's staffing is "equal to or better than" that of other prisons for the young.
"It's sort of a stretch to say, 'If we had an officer in each of these dorms, those things wouldn't have happened,'" said James Upchurch, the DOC's chief of security operations.
He said attacks can occur in a flash, and sometimes right before officers' eyes. "I don't think there's any doubt that the kinds of inmates we're getting nowadays are more violent."
Moore noted that allegations are not always sustained, but said reported assaults are "taken seriously" and thoroughly investigated.
However, the DOC could not provide the number of reported assaults sustained between 1995 and 1999, saying the data are not computerized. The DOC's legal office turned over a database of reported prison assaults during that period only after a legal effort by The Herald lasting several months.
Prison officials said they aggressively prevent assaults, seizing contraband that could be used as weapons 2,400 times last year.
FATAL ASSAULT
Teenager strangled by older cellmate
But they couldn't prevent the murder behind bars of Michael Myers, a teenager from Broward County, despite warnings that his cellmate was planning violence.
At 15, Myers was arrested for sexually assaulting a relative, 79, who suffered from Alzheimer's and was "confused and crying about why Michael had hurt her," records show. After the latest in a series of horrific acts, the spindly teen came before Broward Circuit Judge Mark Speiser. Speiser felt strongly that Myers had to be put away, and just as strongly that he needed mental-health counseling. But the judge's options were limited.
"It was like butting your head against the wall," Speiser said. "I wanted to place him in a locked facility for a juvenile offender. But they had no facility. He wasn't mentally incompetent, so I couldn't place him in a forensic facility."
That left adult prison. He gave Myers 18 years. He went to Martin Correctional.
In 1997, he roomed with six-foot-three Chris Soule, then 20, who was in for robbery, burglary and grand theft in Pinellas County. Soule also had an "extensive and violent" prison disciplinary record, records show. He was requesting protective custody because his father was a police officer and other inmates wanted revenge, he said.
When the DOC said he needed specific proof of threats, Soule made his own. "I will do my best to injure any roommate I may receive in the future," he wrote May 8, 1997.
Two weeks later, Myers, then 17, moved in. Two weeks after that, he was killed. "I want to be straight with you," Soule, later convicted of second-degree murder, said at the time, records show. "I choked him."
