Guards, inmates a volatile dynamic

Bertell Porcher's son, Hakeem Obba, died at MCI-Cedar Junction. (JONATHAN WIGGS/GLOBE STAFF)

Last of three parts

This story was reported by Globe Spotlight Team members Jonathan Saltzman, Michael Rezendes, Beth Healy, Francie Latour, and editor Thomas Farragher.

It was written by Saltzman and Farragher.

On a damp Saturday last fall, Scott A. Flaherty collected a stack of papers and notebooks that chronicled his decade as a state correction officer and set them ablaze in a cemetery near his home in Randolph.

Flaherty had liked his first eight years at MCI-Cedar Junction in Walpole, but his last two had turned hellish. He hoped the graveyard bonfire would exorcise memories of his work behind the walls of the state's toughest prison.

Especially his memory of what happened there one night in late 2000.

Shortly before 10 that November night, a deeply disruptive inmate lay shackled to a concrete slab in a cramped cell. As Sergeant Flaherty stood watch, a captain and three other officers swept in, the captain grabbing, as he went by, a foam cup that Flaherty had been using to catch tobacco juice and sunflower seeds.

Flaherty said he watched as the captain tilted the cup over the mouth of the prisoner. Sickened, he turned away. But he could hear the parting admonition to the 33-year-old inmate, Hakeem Obba: If you don't behave, my officers will pour [excrement] down your throat.

"Because I can do anything I want to you," Captain Ronald R. Picard told Obba, according to a four-page complaint Flaherty filed with supervisors.

Two months later, Obba hanged himself with elastic from his underpants and bed sheets.

Flaherty, now an investigator for the State Police in Bristol County, said it would be wrong to draw a straight line from the alleged abuse of Obba - which Picard was punished for, but denies - to his suicide. But the larger point was hard to miss: Some correction officers, he said, are unfit to deal with the mentally ill or deeply troubled inmates who are increasingly their charge. The result is an incendiary dynamic between inmates and officers, a climate ripe for abuse.

"The inmate was restrained. He had no way to defend himself," said Flaherty, 37, one of two officers who reported the incident. "It would be akin to a police officer raping somebody. There's no gray area there."

The treatment of Obba - who was in four-point restraints for nearly 40 hours over four days - is one of the most flagrant of the cases examined by the Globe of abuse of inmates whom prison officials or prisoner advocates say had acute mental problems.

But it is hardly an isolated example. A Spotlight Team investigation into a recent surge in prison suicides and suicide attempts found other cases in which correction officers, with scant training in how to handle the burgeoning number of mentally ill in prison, brutalized, mistreated, or neglected inmates.

Indeed, as prisons increasingly become the asylum of last resort for the mentally ill - with the closure of state hospitals and the deinstitutionalization of their residents - desperation, frustration, and violence are rising on both sides of the cell door.

About 50 times a month, according to department statistics, members of its staff are assaulted by inmates. And, at the same time, the correction department has disciplined scores of officers for assault and other misconduct involving inmates.

As the number of inmate suicides has soared to roughly three times the national rate, prison officials say correction officers deserve credit for saving dozens of inmates who attempt suicide. Still, it is not hard to find cases where officers abused mentally ill prisoners.

In a 2004 episode at MCI-Cedar Junction, a correction officer twice punched a handcuffed inmate in the head as the prisoner lay face-down on the floor, giving him a bloody eye. The incident was captured on videotape, and the state fired the correction officer. But a civil service panel reduced the punishment to a 90-day suspension, in part because the prison superintendent was merely demoted for using excessive force in an unrelated incident. The prison system is appealing the reduced punishment in the courts.

In September 2006, prison officials sustained a complaint by an inmate that correction officers at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center locked him in a shower cell overnight in 2004 and shoved feces and urine into the stall with a mop. The prisoner -who suffers from panic disorder, depression, and possible bipolar disorder, according to medical records - has cut his own Achilles tendon and repeatedly swallowed razor blades, batteries, and push pins.

"I understand that when people do bad things, they have to go and pay for them," said Amelia Bargoot, the sister of the inmate, Eric R. Bargoot, a convicted bank robber. "But there's a difference between torture and rehabilitation."

Well-trained correction officers are crucial for recognizing suicidal inmates and preventing many deaths, according to Lindsay M. Hayes, a national specialist in prison suicide prevention hired by the state in 2000 to study Bridgewater State Hospital. Because many suicides take place at night and on weekends, when mental health clinicians have gone home, correction officers are the only ones who can intervene.

However, when Hayes returned to the prisons late last year for a follow-up study, he found that the state had ignored his recommendation to increase suicide-prevention training for new officers from two and a half to eight hours. Prison officials said they have since complied.

Still, the volcanic cellblock dynamic scares relatives and friends of prisoners.

"Between mental illness and the fact that these people have committed crimes, they're going to throw them away," said Kathleen Connolly, who worries that her boyfriend and father of her two children, mentally ill inmate John Nowell, will never make it out of Walpole alive.

"We'll take his dead body out of there," she said. "He's not going to make it. He does not belong in there. Either someone is going to kill him or he's going to kill himself."

The DDU

The place where Hakeem Obba died and where John Nowell now lives, sits at the extreme end of the gone-to-seed Walpole complex, just minutes and a world away from Gillette Stadium, the gleaming home of the New England Patriots.

It is a walled-off, cinder block bunker where inmates are locked up 23 hours a day. From a glass-paneled, high-tech silo at its inner core, correction officers monitor the inmates' every move on video screens. Prisoners can leave their cells for an hour of exercise in cages that are the human equivalent of small, fenced-in dog runs.

Prison officials call the bunker the Departmental Disciplinary Unit, or DDU for short.

The solitary confinement inmates who live there have a nickname for it, too: the hole.

Its 124 cells are reserved for "the worst of the worst," inmates who earn their spot in the system's most secure unit by assaulting correction officers or other inmates, or by committing other serious misconduct. It is a place, some officers say, where inmates feel they have nothing to lose by lashing out, because there is no place worse to go.

Correction officers who spoke to the Globe under the condition of anonymity, citing department rules that restrict their ability to speak to the media without permission, said a thick emotional callous is a virtual job prerequisite.

"It's a survival tool," one officer said. "That's exactly what it is."

But the officers did not hesitate to confirm what many maximum-security prisoners in solitary confinement told the Globe: Sometimes, in anger and frustration, they taunt inmates who threaten to kill themselves, telling them: "Hang it up!"

"You can't help it, it just comes out," said one Walpole officer who guards prisoners in an isolation block. His message to inmates he feels are using threats of suicide to gain leverage? "You know what? Do it!"

Or, said a Cedar Junction colleague assigned to a segregation unit where some of the toughest cases are confined, frustrated officers will respond to a threat of imminent suicide this way: "I'll be back in 10 minutes. Twenty maybe."

The officers, three 20-year veterans from a medium-security facility in Bridgewater and two relative rookies who work at MCI-Cedar Junction, said they are easy scapegoats when something goes wrong. They said they have become marginalized by mental health clinicians who no longer listen to what they have to say. They do stressful work that, they said, almost nobody wants.

"Morale has never been this low," one veteran officer said in an interview. "I've never seen guys despise coming to work. . . . They treat you like you're a guard at a mall."

A good night at Walpole, they said, is when everyone on the cellblock is breathing when they walk in, and everyone is breathing when they walk out.

Given the frustrations and dangers the correction officers confront, there is little reservoir of empathy for inmates who arrive with or descend into psychosis.

"We do have a lot of frequent fliers who swallow nails, spikes, glass," said Steve Kenneway, president of the 5,000-member Massachusetts Correction Officers Federated Union. "If you leave a light bulb laying around, they'll eat that, too. I mean they will just put everything in their system and then they'll tell you because it's their way of manipulating where they're going to be housed. There are definitely some inmates who are crazy, and they need help. They need treatment."

But treatment is not the responsibility of Kenneway's union members. They are trained to maintain safety and security.

"Let's think about why the person's sitting in the cell for 23 hours a day locked down," he said. "Because he murdered somebody. Stabbed an officer. Did something so egregious inside the prison system that now he has to be locked away even from the inmate population. So I'm never going to sympathize with the inmate. That's not my job."

Lack of sympathy is one thing. Urging self-destruction is something else.

Prison officials said such conduct is not tolerated and would be met with swift discipline if substantiated. Staff members have been suspended for making "derogatory comments" to inmates, they said. But the department could not supply an instance in which action was taken against an officer for encouraging an inmate's suicide or expressing glee after a hanging.

Correction officials say they do want to know who posted a jubilant message on a website used by MCI-Cedar Junction officers after a former inmate was found dead of a drug overdose shortly after he left prison earlier this year.

"Released last Thursday and found dead in Somerville Saturday. Hooray!" the Aug. 14 anonymous message read.

Prison management has disciplined staff for a wide array of other offenses.

From January 2003 to June 2007, the prison system's Office of Investigative Services investigated 1,126 allegations of serious misconduct by employees, some of which remain open cases, department statistics show.

Most of the cases involved correction officers. The alleged offenses ranged from 73 assaults - on inmates, employees, and civilians - to 98 cases of sexual misconduct with inmates, female and male.

Prison investigators sustained 312 allegations, more than a quarter of the 1,126. Because of the gravity of the offenses, the vast majority of those cases then went to hearings before the commissioner, who has the authority to issue significant punishments, ranging from an unpaid suspension of more than a week to termination.

The prison system ultimately fired 112 correction officers from January 2003 to June 2007, according to department statistics. But correction officers often appeal firings to the state Civil Service Commission or arbitrators - and some win back their jobs.

Sometimes correction officers have been found to be neglectful rather than abusive.

In 2005, for example, prison investigators found that correction officers failed to make required checks on three inmates who killed themselves at prisons in Walpole, Concord, and Shirley. Two of the inmates were severely mentally ill, and the third was undergoing withdrawal from a heroin addiction.

In two of the deaths, officers said they had made required checks but were contradicted by prison videotapes.

One of the suicides was that of Andrew Armstrong, who was serving 15 years for assault with intent to murder after a home invasion, and who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He had made two previous suicide attempts and was discharged from Bridgewater State Hospital four days before his death.

Before he hanged himself, he used a bar of soap to scrawl a message near the stainless steel mirror in his cell.

"Dust in the wind," it read.

'I'm not an animal'

No episode more starkly illustrates the toxic relationship between seriously troubled inmates and correction officers than the encounter between Obba and Picard.

And none more boldly underscores what can happen when the officers' cellblock code of solidarity is violated than what happened later between Picard and Flaherty.

Obba was one of the most disruptive prisoners at Cedar Junction, records show. He urinated on the floor. He spread feces on his walls. He was cited 210 times for misconduct in the hole.

But he never received a thorough mental health evaluation in prison, a psychiatrist retained by his family to advise them on a wrongful death suit said. He said Obba's behavior was so extreme it should have raised red flags for prison mental health staff.

Once, when a correction officer was passing out coffee to inmates in solitary confinement, Obba reached through the grill of his cell and stabbed him in the neck.

"There, deal with that, mother [expletive]," he said, according to department records. For that attack, he received 13 to 15 years on top of his sentence, three to five years for breaking and entering.

On Nov. 12, 2000, after officers said they saw Obba smear the door and window of his cell with feces, they received permission to shackle his wrists and ankles until he agreed to stop his disruptive behavior.

"This is cruel," he said in comments captured on videotape provided to the Globe by the correction officers' union. "This shouldn't be for a dog. . . . I'm a human being. . . . I'm not an animal."

Flaherty came on duty at 3 p.m. on Nov. 14 and volunteered to relieve an officer who had Obba on an "eyeball watch." Flaherty said his job was to monitor Obba through the window of his cell and to note his condition in a log every 15 minutes.

Flaherty, a Randolph native, had joined the department in 1992 at the age of 21. Like many correction officers, he hoped to use the job as a stepping-stone to a career as a police officer. But he said he ended up enjoying the rigors of the work - it required a combination of firmness, common sense, and fairness - and the camaraderie with other officers.

His view of correction, he said, was influenced by his granduncle, George F. McGrath, who was former governor John A. Volpe's correction commissioner in the early 1960s.

"He believed that inmates are going to get out some day, and you've got to give them programs to prepare them for when they get out," Flaherty said. "He was progressive, and I wanted to be like that."

Instead, what Flaherty found at Walpole, he said, was a bureaucracy that crushed idealism and muzzled dissent. Officers who cozied up to top prison officials enjoyed choice job assignments and got away with abusing inmates and staff, he said. Those without influential benefactors struggled for years to get off the night shift.

"We used to call it the Department of Corruption and Favoritism," he said.

Picard joined the Department of Correction in 1987 after working about a year as a part-time Bellingham police officer. He was ultimately promoted to captain, a job in which he oversaw about 20 officers.

Around 9:50 p.m., the captain and three other officers entered the observation ward, according to the incident report Flaherty filed. As the three underlings surrounded the inmate, Flaherty said, Picard tipped the cup of spit over Obba's mouth.

"It actually sickened me," Flaherty recalled in a sworn deposition he gave in April in the wrongful death lawsuit filed by Obba's family. "I turned away. I couldn't look."

The four officers left the cell, and Picard handed the cup back to Flaherty. One of the officers bragged, "You could hear [Obba's] jaws clenching," Flaherty wrote in his complaint to supervisors.

After Picard and his coterie were gone, Obba shouted to Flaherty, "Tell the Captain if he pours [expletive] in my mouth, I'll kill him and his family," Flaherty recalled in his complaint. He could have disciplined Obba for the threat but opted not to. "I probably would have said the same thing," he said in his deposition.

Flaherty said he agonized about whether to report the alleged abuse.

He had filed a complaint about Picard only four months earlier because the captain accused him of faking an illness when it turned out that Flaherty had a fever of 103 and strep throat, he said. Picard retaliated by giving him lousy assignments, leading scores of shackled inmates to showers and mopping the hallways, Flaherty said.

Flaherty got so uneasy that he began carrying a small notebook to record any problems with Picard and his allies.

But Flaherty said he felt he had no choice but to report the treatment of Obba.

"Picard was just sadistic," Flaherty said in an interview. "He thought this was the way to rule. Sometimes you have to use force in the prison. It's just the dynamics. But the way I was schooled, once you're in restraints, it's over."

In response to Flaherty's complaint, prison officials began an internal investigation. Picard and two officers who accompanied him into the cell, Lieutenant Edward Marvelle and Sergeant Edward Mack, denied that anyone threatened Obba or poured anything on him. Marvelle told the investigator that Flaherty had been overheard in the past saying he was out to get Picard, according to the investigator's report.

But another officer, James E. McParlin Jr., who was assigned to the control room and said he could see Obba through the window, backed Flaherty's account. He said in his own incident report that he saw Picard extend his arm and tilt a foam cup over Obba's head.

"What happened that day was totally wrong," McParlin told the Globe. "You're in four-point restraints. You can't do anything. That's torture."

The department, citing internal records, said Obba confirmed Picard's threat but told investigators the cup's contents did not enter his mouth.

Before the Department of Correction completed its internal investigation, Obba hanged himself in his cell on the observation ward in the DDU.

Not long afterward, the inquiry into the alleged abuse concluded that Picard had threatened Obba and interfered with the investigation, and that Marvelle and Mack had also interfered, according to prison records. Picard was suspended for three days without pay. His two subordinates got one-day suspensions.

Picard said recently that all he did with Obba was ask whether he intended to stop misbehaving if unshackled. When Obba said he would not, Picard said he and the other officers left the room. He said he does not recall having a cup in his hand, but if he did, it probably contained coffee.

He said he never threatened Obba.

"I think it's tragic that any man would take his own life," Picard said. But, he said, "There was no physical force used against him whatsoever."

Flaherty said that after he filed his complaint, his job grew miserable.

A captain who liked Flaherty told him in the parking lot to watch his back because allies of Picard were out to get him. Flaherty said he found himself assigned to places in the prison where cameras were always trained on him, as if to try to catch him doing something wrong. There were whispers that other officers planned to jump him and wrest away his little notebook.

He left the department in March 2002 to join the State Police.

Three months later, Picard was in trouble again. This time, he was fired after the department concluded he used excessive force on another inmate with a history of suicide attempts and engineered what it described as his second cover-up.

Correction officials referred the allegations of Obba's abuse to Norfolk District Attorney William Keating, but no charges were brought.

And last fall, in the cemetery in Randolph, State Trooper Flaherty watched as the fire devoured his notes on his final harrowing days as a correction officer.

A dangerous spiral

Just hours after Miguel Velasquez, a 33-year-old prisoner from Lawrence, hanged himself in late July in his segregation cell at MCI-Cedar Junction, DDU inmate James J. Burns II - in chains and handcuffs - was led by two correction officers into a nearby visiting room.

Burns, freckle-faced and missing four upper teeth, wore a tan jumpsuit with "DOC" stenciled across the back. Because the unit's air conditioning had failed amid a summer swelter, sweat dripped from his brow. And he had no time for small talk.

"Did you hear there was another suicide yesterday?" Burns urgently asked a reporter as soon as he picked up the telephone receiver for an interview from behind a thick panel of glass. "Everybody's all on edge because they don't feel like anybody's listening to them."

Burns, 28, himself was clearly on edge, and had been for some time.

For nearly two decades, specialists have been calling for alternatives to extended periods of solitary confinement for inmates like Burns whose psychosis only worsens behind the steel doors of their closet-size cells. But little happened.

Without the option of sending inmates like Burns to a high-security unit designed for those needing treatment, mentally disturbed prisoners languish in places like the DDU, where a dangerous spiral often takes hold.

"I don't think they understand what this place is doing to me," Burns said. "It's made me more of a sociopath. I'm just so angry. I'm ready to flip out now."

In fact, he already had.

He sliced his wrists in 2004. A year later, he tightened a noose around his neck. By early 2006, after prison clinicians weaned him off the Ritalin medication they said he no longer needed, he grew abusive toward staff. In one instance, he threatened a psychiatrist with bodily harm; in another he hurled racial epithets, prison records show.

Like many troubled inmates sent to prison segregation units, Burns carried with him a lifetime of abuse and addiction, neglect and violence that, in some ways, made his consignment to solitary confinement seem nearly inevitable.

"We get the people that are broken," said James R. Bender, deputy correction commissioner.

Today Burns, sentenced to prison for assault with intent to murder after he stabbed and badly injured a patron in a Bourne barroom in the summer of 2001, is considered too dangerous for the general prison population.

A lifetime ago, his medical records show, he was a fragile boy who once told a psychiatrist he intended to jump in front of a car on this 11th birthday to kill himself as his father watched.

"An angry, confused, sad, and lonely child," one psychologist concluded.

Still another clinician made a prediction: If young Jimmy did not get consistent supportive and individual therapy to address his feelings of anger and abandonment he would "likely be involved with the penal system."

Indeed, the state Department of Correction is now responsible for James Burns. It is, to say the least, a tumultuous relationship.

He filed formal complaints about being assaulted while handcuffed by a correction officer in his DDU cell in September 2006. He charged that the same officer, in retaliation, threatened to withhold mental health services because he reported the alleged attack.

"I don't care if you are swinging from a rope or bleeding to death you will die in that cell," Burns said the officer told him.

The correction department said it investigated Burns's allegations but could not sustain them.

"He usually goes by the rules," said Peter St. Amand, MCI-Cedar Junction's superintendent. "It's at the point that he gets self-injurious that he gets disruptive."

Burns has reached that point at least twice this year.

In May, after learning of his grandmother's death, he sliced his wrist and later reopened the wound, puncturing major blood vessels. "I was bleeding for a long time," he said. "I wanted to die."

During his transfer to Bridgewater State Hospital he "regurgitated a razor blade he had earlier swallowed and cut himself," a hospital report states. "After cutting himself with the regurgitated blade, he swallowed it again."

When they discharged him in June, Bridgewater clinicians concluded that Burns did not have the symptoms of a major mental illness and did not pose a significant risk of harm to himself or others.

Nonetheless, they worried about what would happen if he went back to the hole.

"If returned to the same situation in the DDU from whence he came, Mr. Burns will continue to pose a significant risk of harm to himself as a result of his apparent inability to adequately cope with the stresses he reports experiencing in that setting," the clinicians wrote in Burns's discharge papers.

"In my clinical opinion, staff may be able to reduce his risk of engaging in self-injurious behavior if he is able to be maintained in an environment . . . where he does not feel unsafe."

It is a clinician's roundabout way of describing secure segregated units for mentally ill inmates. But, despite repeated calls over many years, it is an option that still does not exist.

Kevin M. Burke, the state's public safety secretary, said there is no political constituency for reform even in the face of a suicide spike and a pending federal lawsuit that accuses the state of cruel and unusual punishment for locking up mentally troubled inmates 23 hours a day.

Earlier this year, his office secured about $1 million in state funding for new high-security treatment units. But Burke acknowledged that it would pay for token improvements, and that more is needed.

"It's a Band-Aid," Burke said.

So Burns went back to the DDU, where in July he told the Globe: "I'm really, really depressed. The only way they'll listen to me is if I cut up."

And a month later, he did just that.

On Aug. 31, prison officials filed court papers to return Burns to Bridgewater. They said he was suicidal. He had cut major arteries deep enough to require a blood transfusion, they said.

"He cannot cope with segregation and is [in] need of further evaluation at [Bridgewater State Hospital]," the commitment papers read.

In a telephone interview from Bridgewater in early November, Burns said his treatment there was helping. He was thinking clearly again. He was attending groups, doing chores, spending time in the hospital's art room.

Not everything is going well -- he said he is facing discipline again for alleged misconduct. But he is trying hard not to think about another trip to the hole.

"I can't do it anymore," said Burns, "My mind, my body. I can't do it. I'll flip my lid. The animal that's inside you comes out because of the way they treat you.

"If they send me back there, I'll kill myself. I'll try to, anyway."