RELEASE: Retaliation
escalates as human rights group files criminal complaints against SCI Dallas
guards
In two separate criminal
complaints submitted to the District Attorney of Luzerne County, Jacqueline
Caroll Musto, investigators for the human rights coalition have asked that
charges be brought against SCI Dallas staff for their role in the suicide of
Matthew Bullock and in acts of retaliation against Andre Jacobs.
“We have submitted over half-a-dozen
eyewitness reports to the DA’s office regarding guards tormenting Bullock,
encouraging him to kill himself, and subsequently boasting of their success,”
said Dominique Reed, an investigator with the Human Rights Coalition/Fed Up!
chapter, an advocacy organization that has recently exposed conditions of
control unit torture and criminal conduct on the part of staff at SCI Dallas.
A separate complaint describes
prison guards retaliating against 27 year old Andre Jacobs, a jailhouse lawyer whose civil actions against prison staff
and officials have led to four jury trials in the last few years and made him
the target of animosity and retaliation by the PA DOC all the way up to
Secretary Beard. Just last month, Andre
was awarded $115,000 by Federal Judge Joy Flowers Conti, a ruling which
lessened but upheld the decision reached by a jury in the Western District of
PA Federal Court in Pittsburgh last November.
In a letter received later in the
week after a visit human rights activist, Jacobs reported that five minutes
after returning from the visit, guards destroyed his legal documents and he was
placed on a series of restrictions. “Andre had his water turned off for
days, was denied yard and showers, issued death threats, and had his hand
slammed in the tray slot by guards,” reports investigator Bret Grote, who has
documented human rights violations committed against Mr. Jacobs throughout the
PA DOC during the past two years.
“Perhaps most cruel of all is the fact that Andre was placed on ‘food loaf’,
which is a policy whereby the PA DOC grants itself the right to use the
withholding of food as a form of coercion.
Prisoners on this restriction are given a processed, scarcely edible
loaf of indeterminate origin.” Furthermore, Andre was told
by Sgt. Buck and Lt. Bleich that he was being targeted for his affiliation with
the HRC. Andre and several other inmates have
reported receiving death threats in recent days and weeks due to their efforts
to resist and expose control unit torture.
Although HRC/Fed Up! continues to request that the
administration launch a public investigation and formally announces such in a
press release, criminal complaints are being prepared to send to the Department
of Justice as soon as next week.
“We will continue to press for accountability at every
level,” said Hannah Grace, an HRC member.
“Crucially, we will continue to expose the reality of illegal and
abusive conditions inside Pennsylvania prisons to the public so that people
understand the social and economic damage this system creates and demand
change.”
