By Jeremy Kohler
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
ST. LOUIS — Inmates beaten by guards.
Guards sneaking in drugs.
A female inmate ordered to sleep nude for 15 days.
Supervisors falsifying reports and punishing whistle-blowers.
The American Civil Liberties Union painted a bleak picture of life in St. Louis city jails Tuesday, in a blistering 74-page report that mostly hangs on the word of six unnamed guards.
Suspicious of the timing - two weeks before the mayoral election - a top aide to Mayor Francis Slay questioned the use of six anonymous voices among 350 guards.
“The whole report so lacks in credibility and is so biased and is so based in rumor or innuendo, that it just doesn’t justify a comment,” said Patricia Hageman, the city counselor.
Hageman said she forwarded the report to the U.S. attorney’s office and said the city welcomes a review of its jails.
The report’s author, the
ACLU’s Redditt Hudson, said he worked on the investigation for two years but didn’t try to corroborate the accusations or seek explanations from the half-dozen or so jail guards and supervisors accused of serious misconduct and crimes.
He said that was for the authorities to do.
He said the St. Louis ACLU originally had planned a news conference on its findings last week to let three guards speak publicly about their claims. But, fearful of retribution, the guards changed their minds, and the ACLU canceled, promising to protect their identities, Hudson said.
“I understand it,” he said of their reticence to come forward.
Hudson’s report said a jail supervisor, Maj. Russell Brown, did document some of the wrongdoing but that administrators, including Superintendent Eugene Stubblefield, sent the reports back as “too detailed.” Neither Brown nor Stubblefield could be reached for comment.
Hudson’s office provided the newspaper with a phone number for one of the unnamed guards who, according to the report, had told administrators that overcrowding in the Justice Center downtown was so severe that inmates were sleeping under beds and toilets, sometimes in vomit and feces. He also alleged there had been cover-ups of beatings of inmates in February 2006 and February 2007.
A man who answered the phone said he was fired after he started providing information to the ACLU, but that the firing was for unrelated reasons that he refused to discuss.
He said he didn’t think city officials would figure out who he was, but later conceded that his accusations were so detailed they probably would.
“At some point in time, I will probably come forward,” he said. “The way things work in the city - and this is with the whole city government - I would be blackballed.”
He backed away from one of the accusations attributed to him in the report - that several officers had sexual contact with a female inmate.
“I really can’t put my finger on that one to substantiate it,” he said.
A second unnamed guard is quoted in the report as having witnessed a brutal attack on a female inmate by a high-ranking supervisor, named in the report, who later ordered 15 guards to attack several inmates and “crack their (expletive) heads open.”
The guard - identified as “CO 2" - said inmates at the Medium Security Institution on Hall Street commonly had clothes taken and had to sleep naked on cold, bare floors while guards wore sweaters and wrapped themselves in blankets. That lockup is commonly called the Workhouse.
That guard and a third unnamed guard - “CO 3" - are quoted as having witnessed guards bringing crack cocaine into the jail - for use by guards and inmates. CO 2 was quoted saying some guards were given advance warning before drug tests.
The report said CO 2 claimed that inmates are denied medicines if they do not move quickly enough to claim them.
Another guard - CO 5 - is quoted alleging that a lieutenant, also named in the report, repeatedly beat a female inmate and ordered her to sleep nude for 15 days. After medical staff said the inmate had to have a gown, the lieutenant ordered the inmate stripped again.
Hudson, a former St. Louis police officer, left the force in 1999 “to focus on addressing systemic problems in the criminal justice system, abuse of police authority, and improving the police/community relationship,” according to the report. The ACLU says he sits on the U.S. Attorney’s Hate Crimes Task Force in St. Louis.
“Hudson has compiled a body of material that can serve as a guide for discovery for government officials aware or unaware of what goes on when they are not looking,” ACLU executive director Brenda Jones wrote in the forward. “It is a call for accountability by officials under whose watch the abuse occurs and who are obliged to repair a brutal, broken system.”
Copyright 20009 St. Louis Post-Dispatch