By Ana Ley
Las Vegas Sun
LAS VEGAS, Nev. — Accusations of poor oversight at a Las Vegas area prison came as no surprise to former corrections employees and relatives of inmates who spoke out against officials this week as lawsuits citing unreported shootings at the facility began to emerge.
“The Department of Corrections is out of control,” said Mark Clarke, who retired from the agency about a decade ago after a 15-year stint as a corrections officer. “(Governor Sandoval) needs to get rid of these people, and (prisons director) Greg Cox is the first one that needs to go.”
The criticism follows media reports of the shotgun slaying of Carlos Manuel Perez Jr., who was handcuffed when a corrections officer trainee fatally shot him in a shower hallway last November at High Desert State Prison. News of that shooting — which corrections officials disclosed five months later in a sparse press release — has since brought to light additional accounts of unreported shootings at a facility where guards have fired guns more than 200 times in a recent five-year period.
Data from the corrections department shows guards at the prison fired 215 shots from 2007 to 2011, nearly twice the 124 shots reported in Nevada’s 21 other prison facilities. The statistics list a total of 605 use-of-force incidents at High Desert and 1,103 incidents at the other prisons combined.
A request for comment from the agency’s public information office was not answered late Wednesday. The department routinely declines to comment about litigation and investigations.
Mercedes Maharis, who became a vociferous advocate for prison inmates in the late 1990s after working as a chaplain for the Department of Corrections, obtained the data by asking Sen. Tick Segerblom to request use-of-force records from Cox directly. A similar request submitted March 25 by the Las Vegas Sun through the agency’s public information agency has not been fulfilled.
“I’m glad all this has come out,” said Maharis, who often accuses the agency of discouraging public scrutiny. “The state’s prison system is totally broken.”
Critics blamed the spate of shootings at High Desert on low pay, high turnover and poor training for employees. Inexperienced corrections officers, whose numbers grew during the recent economic downturn, are more likely to panic and fire lethal rounds at misbehaving inmates, Clarke said.
One Las Vegas woman says her mentally ill son — serving a sentence for second-degree murder since 2005 — has twice been shot by employees at High Desert and treated with only aspirin and a bandage.
“They didn’t take out the gunshot from his hands,” she said. “When I went in to see him, his hand was swollen up blue and purple. They don’t treat the prisoners humanely.”
She declined to be named for fear of retaliation against her son, who was placed in solitary confinement for six months after being shot in the hand in 2012. He was shot in the leg last May after he got into a fight with another inmate.
Prison officials have since begun charging the family fees for costs associated with both shootings, she said.
The unnamed woman is getting legal counsel from C.J. Potter, son of prominent civil rights attorney Cal J. Potter III.
“We’re learning more than anything through the media than through the Department of Corrections,” C.J. Potter said. “We have to promote transparency and hold them accountable.”
Nevada state Attorney General Adam Laxalt is investigating and evaluating a report on the November shooting, spokeswoman Patty Cafferata said Wednesday. She declined to comment on the other shootings.
Maharis, who over the years has advocated for the rights of dozens of shot and beaten inmates before legislators and prison officials, called the series of shootings “a crisis.”
“People have spoken out about this for years and years and years,” Maharis said. “The only way to fix this is by changing the department’s leadership.”