John Kowalko, who spent roughly six years working at the CIC, believes the agency could still be effective under those constraints if it operated more aggressively. Pam Bailey, Barton’s fellow organizer at More Than Our Crimes, suspects this is what’s happened to the Thomson investigation, dubbing the CIC’s oversight efforts a “total sham” due to this dynamic. Consider that the BOP has the ability to review any report the CIC plans to issue before it’s published, a process that can delay their release indefinitely. agency that some activists doubt any changes will fundamentally alter this imbalance. But obstacles abound.įor one, the federal government holds so much power compared to the small D.C. The CIC is in the midst of renegotiating its memorandum of understanding with the federal government that allows for these prison inspections, so there is some hope for positive change (the existing agreement runs through Sept. 2 letter to the newly confirmed director of the BOP that argued for more authority for the CIC in the wake of the killings of two D.C. Eleanor Holmes Norton recently added her voice to that growing chorus, writing a Sept.
Activists watching the criminal legal system have begun pressing for the agency to gain a bit more muscle in its dealings with the BOP to try and bring such problems to light sooner. “It’s like, what do they even do?”īarton, who is currently being held at a federal facility in Central Florida, is not alone in wondering what’s gone wrong at the CIC. resident who has spent nearly 30 years in federal prisons and works with incarcerated people as part of the advocacy group More Than Our Crimes. “They saw all the problems that were going on, but never released anything,” says Rob Barton, a D.C. Even after the well-publicized NPR investigation repeated many of those complaints, the agency still hasn’t released a report on Thomson. The city had sent 88 inmates there as of February 2020, according to internal documents sent to Loose Lips, the ninth highest number out of the 117 facilities around the country where D.C. The CIC had a special interest in these problems because a particularly large number of D.C. The conditions have contributed to five killings and two alleged suicides since 2019, making it the deadliest federal prison in the nation. Prisoners complained of being shackled to beds and beaten by guards, or being held in cells the size of a parking space with another inmate for months at a time. The agency heard horror stories from inmates at Thomson, according to advocates working with D.C. The modest agency can’t demand changes of the feds, but it can publish reports to try and draw attention to issues at these facilities-and CIC investigators visited the Illinois prison in question, USP Thomson, in July 2021 for exactly that purpose. agreed to send local inmates into the Bureau of Prisons system, exists precisely to ferret out such problems at federal prisons and the D.C. agency could have scooped those veteran reporters by months, but never did.ĭ.C.’s dryly named Corrections Information Council, created back in 1997 as an oversight body just as D.C. In May, NPR and The Marshall Project published a major investigation of a federal prison in Illinois, uncovering evidence of multiple inmate deaths, frequent brutality complaints, and other deplorable conditions.
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