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J.A.I.L.
News Journal
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Los Angeles, California May 23, 2001
Rolling Torture Chambers
TENNESSEAN
Sunday, 04/01/01
Two lawsuits filed against local prisoner-transport firm
By Rob Johnson
Staff Writer
From the nation's highways, where the
extradition vans of Nashville-based TransCor America ferry thousands
of wanted men and women, come graphic tales of alleged civil rights
abuses committed by the people in the driver's seats.
Two female detainees in Texas say they
were sexually assaulted during a five-day odyssey by a driver previously implicated in a New Mexico
assault. In Colorado, a mother of four filed a federal lawsuit
alleging sexual assaults during a TransCor
journey across the West. A busload of Wisconsin inmates sued in federal court alleging the group endured a
frigid winter trip to Oklahoma on a TransCor bus awash in human waste.
State and local law enforcement
agencies, including the Tennessee Department of Correction, have embraced private extradition as a
cost-saving alternative to sending its officers to retrieve detainees
from faraway jurisdictions. TransCor, the self-declared giant in the
extradition industry and a wholly owned subsidiary of the Corrections
Corporation of America, says it safely and routinely hauls 77,000
detainees annually. The people moved by these companies range from
stone-cold killers to housewives accused of passing bad checks.
Prisoners call the trips ''diesel therapy.''
Regardless of the extradition firm,
hundreds of these trips pass routinely without incident. But in 1997,
a Memphis-based Federal Extradition Agency van exploded, and its six
caged prisoners were incinerated. In February, a federal jury in
Nashville awarded $9.5 million to one prisoner's daughter.
A plaintiff's attorney asserts that the
underlying facts in the burned FEA van incident are echoed in the
TransCor assault case now before a U.S. District Court in San Antonio,
Texas.
''The parallels between the cases are
eerily similar,'' said San Antonio attorney Tim Maloney. ''The
absolute and total disregard for the prisoners' rights, welfare and
safety. That the most important thing is the bottom line. That it is
nothing to transport these people for three or four or five days. That
they are absolutely and completely helpless and at the mercy of these
guards.''
The facts of the Texas case stretch
from New Mexico to Nashville. One of the plaintiffs, a 39-year-old suspect in a jewelry-store theft, says
she was shackled inside a TransCor van in October 1999. During three
or four days, while she was locked inside with its shotgun-wielding
agents, the lawsuit says, she was ''subjected to individual acts of
sexual assault perpetrated by two employees of defendant, TransCor.''
She says she was forced to perform
sexual acts and was penetrated with fists and a gun barrel. She says she was subjected to ''screen tests''
when the drivers stomped on the brakes, hurtling her face against the
van's wire mesh security screens.
After she was delivered to the Houston
jail, Harris County officials were able to collect evidence that
helped them build sexual assault cases against TransCor agents Michael
Jerome Edwards and David Jackson.
Jackson has agreed to plead guilty to
an undisclosed charge, according to the Harris County district
attorney's office. Edwards is in jail awaiting trial.
Women file civil rights
lawsuit.
A federal civil rights suit filed by the woman and another female
extradition passenger charges that TransCor did little to protect
female prisoners from its male agents after at least four allegations
of similar sexual assaults in the past five years. Those allegations
include a one-page statement that a female TransCor prisoner handed to
a company official during a stopover in Nashville. It described a New
Mexico assault perpetrated by the same agent, Edwards. Because it was
delivered a month before the alleged Texas assault, its existence
could constitute a potentially damning corporate oversight,
plaintiff's attorneys say.
Company officials repeatedly told a New
Mexico attorney general's investigator that they couldn't find the statement. When the
investigator arrived at TransCor's Nashville headquarters, she had a
plan to execute a search warrant, and she took a Davidson County
district attorney general's official with her. But before there was
any search, a TransCor attorney suddenly produced the long-sought
document. He said it had been misfiled.
It is now part of a continuing criminal investigation in New Mexico
and the civil litigation in San Antonio. ....
In Colorado, TransCor is the defendant
in a lawsuit filed by a married
woman of four who was picked up in Texas on a welfare theft charge.
The
all-male TransCor crew that delivered her back to Colorado, the
lawsuit
says, repeatedly assaulted her while she was wearing an agent's
shackles. ''When you are wearing my jewelry,'' he allegedly told her,
''you belong to me.''
In a Davidson County Circuit Court
case, a Texas state inmate charges that a TransCor driver raped and
repeatedly sexually assaulted her in a rest room. The 2-year-old case
was moved from state court to federal court and back again.
In Wisconsin, 39 prisoners have filed a
federal lawsuit protesting their transfer on a TransCor bus to a
private Oklahoma facility in frigid winter temperatures. They say
their feet and legs were splashed with waste from an overflowing
toilet. They say they vomited on one another because they were
sickened by the smell. Dressed only in jumpsuits for the 31-hour
journey, the prisoners claim some arrived in Oklahoma with frostbite
and hypothermia.
Company officials say that because of
the ongoing litigation, they cannot comment on those allegations. ....
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