Officials said that dangerous conditions inside the special management unit in the Thomson federal penitentiary warranted “immediate” action.
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The prison in Thomson, Ill.
WASHINGTON — The Bureau of Prisons is shuttering a troubled special detention unit in Illinois that has been plagued by inmate deaths, suicides and the reported sexual harassment of guards.
On Tuesday morning, staff members at the special management unit in the Thomson federal penitentiary in the rural northwest part of the state were told that the 350 prisoners under their supervision would be transferred to other prisons. They had been moved to the unit after committing disciplinary infractions in facilities around the country.
Bureau officials “recently identified significant concerns with respect to institutional culture and compliance with B.O.P. policies” at the high-security facility, which houses about 800 inmates, Randilee Giamusso, a bureau spokeswoman, wrote in an email.
“We believe these issues are having a detrimental impact on facility operations and the B.O.P. has determined that there is a need for immediate corrective measures,” she added.
It is the most significant move yet undertaken by the new director, Colette S. Peters, the former leader of Oregon’s state prisons, who has pledged to overhaul a deeply dysfunctional federal system responsible for about 160,000 inmates.
Bureau officials have privately said that the move was part of a systemwide review of the use of solitary confinement and special units, as required under an executive order signed by President Biden in May. The number of prisoners in restrictive settings has increased since Mr. Biden took office.
But most of the inmates at Thomson were not likely to be released into the general population of other facilities and instead would be placed in restrictive areas, known as “special housing units,” elsewhere, according to a senior Justice Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The bureau is not shutting down a minimum security camp nearby, currently used to house about 130 inmates, according to officials. And about 300 prisoners housed in the general population unit will remain at the facility.
Prison officials vowed to protect the approximately 500 workers currently employed at the facility. The state’s two Democratic senators, Richard J. Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, said in a joint statement that administration officials assured them the reduction of the prison’s population was temporary.
“We are still concerned about losing our jobs, about staff being forced to transfer to different institutions,” said Jonathan Zumkehr, the president of Thomson’s local union branch. “People have bought houses, our members are people who live in the community, and closing would have a devastating effect.”
The decision to shutter Thomson’s restrictive unit comes a few weeks after Justice Department officials visited to investigate claims that the prison’s new warden was not doing enough to safeguard employees, especially women, from lewd and abusive behavior of male inmates.
In January, officials with the union representing the prison’s staff, the American Federation of Government Employees, called for the removal of the warden, Thomas Bergami, claiming he had failed to protect guards and other employees, by taking steps like installing shutters on the portals of cells.
In a letter to senior bureau officials, the union cited 321 episodes last year of “sexual misconduct against staff,” including ones in which inmates exposed themselves or masturbated in front of employees.
“Employees are being subjected to this criminal behavior repeatedly yet are getting no support from their employer in putting an end to this cycle,” Everett Kelley, the union’s president, said in a statement. “This failure of leadership must be addressed.”
Bureau officials would not say whether Mr. Bergami would remain as warden.
Thomson has had a long and troubled history. It was built starting in 1999, at a cost of $140 million, by the state of Illinois, but never housed state prisoners. The prison was then bought by the federal government for $160 million a few years later and was briefly considered as an alternative for detainees housed at Guantánamo Bay.
The prison can accommodate more than 2,000 inmates in eight cell blocks — but it has averaged less than half that number over the years.
The special unit opened in June 2018 to house about 400 prisoners transferred from an overcrowded and outdated restrictive unit in Lewisburg, Pa., known within the system as “The Big House.”
But Thomson’s unit — which restricts prisoners to their cells, many in pairs, for around 23 hours a day — has faced problems from the start.
An investigation last year by The Marshall Project and NPR found that five inmates had been killed in possible homicides and two others were believed to have died by suicide since 2019.
The Marshall Project and NPR interviewed dozens of men who said they lived under the constant threat of violence from cellmates — in cramped and uncomfortable conditions — and were often abused by staff members. Some reported being shackled in handcuffs so tight they left scars and being chained by each limb to their bunks for hours.
Source: nytimes.com
