COLOMBIA – A series of new lawsuits accuse South Carolina prisons officials of negligence and violations of constitutional rights in a 2018 riot in which seven prisoners were killed and more than a dozen others injured.
In the lawsuits, filed in federal court this week and supplied to The Associated Press, lawyers for prisoners affected by the violence at the Lee Correctional Institution accuse senior officials of the Department of Corrections of knowing about security breaches in the maximum security male prison, but did not notice putting the lives of prisoners at risk.
The lawsuits specifically target a blocking system in Lee, which has been at the center of many of the criticisms of security breaches that existed before the insurrection.
At the time of the riot, lawyers wrote, “all cell doors” in one of Lee’s units “were easily compromised,” meaning that prisoners could manipulate them so that they could be opened or closed at any time. five years before the riot, they were acquainted with agency director Bryan Stirling and other officials, who, the lawyers wrote, “made absolutely no effort” to ensure that the doors function correctly, creating “a fundamentally unsafe condition for all inmates” .
Officials said the violence – the worst riot in US prisons in 25 years – started as a battle for smuggling and territory. Dozens of prisoners were charged with connection to the revolt, which lasted more than seven hours in Bishopville, about 40 miles (65 kilometers) east of Columbia.
Most of the dead were stabbed or cut; others appeared to have been beaten. One inmate described the bodies “literally stacked on top of each other, like a macabre pile of firewood”.
The lawsuits specifically mention senior officials, including Stirling, saying that their response to the knowledge that subordinates were involved in activities potentially harmful to prisoners was “so inadequate as to show deliberate indifference”.
These allegations correspond to complaints directly from Lee’s inmates. For several months before the confusion, the AP communicated with a prisoner of Lee who used a contraband cell phone to offer insight into life behind bars. Describing frequent gang fights with homemade weapons, he said that prisoners roamed freely, had easy access to cell phones and drugs and were often left to the police themselves.
“ALL cell doors are broken,” wrote the prisoner, who spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity because his cell phone was illegal and he feared reprisals from other prisoners. “At any time, I can get out of my cell.”
The video obtained by the same inmate corroborated the allegations about many homemade weapons and broken locks.
The lawsuits mention the lack of a system that would have allowed security officials to disperse chemical agents to help contain an uprising and also accuse several police officers of knowing that prisoners “were seen and heard sharpening shins / knives” before the riot, but failed confiscate weapons.
Stirling and other officials, the lawyers wrote, “knew or should have known that their conscious failure to provide adequate security measures would result in unsafe conditions for the prison population.” After the rebellion, they observed the cases, a national assessment team brought in by prison officials “concluded that the main factors that contributed to the insurrection” included a shortage of personnel, “defects in facilities” and an “atmosphere of fear and intimidation”.
The Penitentiary Department did not immediately comment on the new allegations, which join dozens of other state and federal lawsuits already pending against prison officials related to the riots.
Since then, improvements have been implemented. A year after the violence, authorities invited reporters to visit Lee, where they demonstrated a $ 1 million cell door locking system. Other measures included perimeter networks, scanning devices and drone monitoring to shut down cell phones. The authorities are not yet able to fully use the cell signal blocking technology that Stirling wants, however.
State Representative Justin Bamberg, a lawyer for some of the prisoners, said that so much information about the violence, and what led to it, remains unknown.
“It is a pity that people are still fighting for justice and the public does not yet know the real events of that day,” Bamberg told the AP. “These men accepted responsibility for the actions that originally sent them to prison, so why can’t our prison system accept responsibility for creating the horrendous conditions that caused this to happen in the first place? “
Carter Elliott, who also represents the inmates who are suing the agency, said Lee’s systemic issues, including security problems, should have made it clear to authorities that a violent explosion was imminent.
“The operations and administrative staff were legally obliged to take some measures to protect these human beings, serving their sentence properly, from extreme danger,” said Elliott. “Instead, nothing was done, which allowed a powder keg. to develop and explode on April 15, 2018. ”