Frustrated federal judge imposes fines, monitor on Georgia prison

ATLANTA — In a blistering 100-page contempt order, a federal judge has found Georgia Department of Corrections officials willfully disregarded requirements to improve deplorable conditions inside the high-security Special Management Unit prison.

Judge Marc T. Treadwell, chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Macon, said GDC officials, over several years, violated every requirement he has placed on the prison system, and when officials asked for more time and promised to do better, they continued to ignore the requirements.

It became clear, the judge wrote, that prison officials had no desire or intention to comply. They were simply stalling, hoping the case would end before they had to make changes, he wrote.

“The Court can no longer tolerate the defendants’ misconduct and, for the reasons discussed below, holds the defendants in contempt,” Treadwell wrote.

Treadwell ordered the appointment of an independent monitor, at the prison system’s expense, to keep watch on compliance with the requirements. He also imposed a $2,500-a-day fine for failure to comply with his order to improve conditions at the Special Management Unit, which is Georgia’s version of a “supermax” high-security prison, located at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson.

“Because of the defendants’ longstanding and flagrant violations of the Court’s injunction, the Court finds that coercive sanctions are necessary to compel compliance,” Treadwell wrote.

GDC Commissioner Tyrone Oliver, SMU Warden Joe Williams and GDC Director of Field Operations Stan Shepard are among the named defendants. A spokeswoman for the Georgia Department of Corrections said Monday that the agency would not comment on a legal matter.

The case began in 2015 when Timothy Gunn, who was then incarcerated at the Special Management Unit, filed a lawsuit challenging the conditions of his solitary confinement. He had been confined to a cell for years, without regular time outside or human contact with anyone except a correctional officer who delivered his food trays, according to his suit. The case grew to cover other others, and attorneys from the Southern Center for Human Rights were called in by the court to represent an entire class of prisoners.

In 2017, a top expert on solitary confinement described the SMU as “one of the harshest and most draconian” solitary confinement facilities he had ever seen. The judge’s order quoted Dr. Craig Haney’s observation of one area of the unit that he described in his evaluation. “The atmosphere inside E Wing was bedlam-like, as chaotic and out-of-control as any such unit I have seen in decades of conducting such evaluations. When I entered this housing unit I was met with a cacophony of prisoner screams and cries for help. The noise was deafening,” Haney observed.

Haney also found that the number of prisoners with mental illness housed at the SMU was “shockingly high” and there was no justification for incarcerating so many mentally ill inmates in such harsh conditions given the potential damage that would likely result.

...continued

swipe to next page