Massachusetts Department of Correction hit with lawsuit alleging brutal violence against inmates

Flint McColgan, Boston Herald on Oct 9, 2024

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BOSTON — There’s even more trouble brewing at the Massachusetts prison where an attack last month left five officers injured: a class-action lawsuit for what inmates say was a brutally violent retaliatory campaign by guards.

A “Retaliatory Force Campaign” in January and February of 2020 at Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center, plaintiff attorneys allege, “consisted of officers attacking more than 100 prisoners using extreme, malicious, and cruel methods of force designed not to restore order, but to inflict pain, fear, and trauma.”

The violence included “beating and kicking prisoners; gouging eyes; grabbing testicles; smashing faces into the ground or wall; deploying Taser guns, pepper ball guns, and other chemical agents; ordering K9s to menace and bite prisoners; and excessively tightening handcuffs and forcing prisoners’ arms into unnatural and painful positions, among other positional torture tactics.”

The lawsuit targets Massachusetts Department of Correction Commissioner Carol Mici, some of her chief administrators during the time period the violence is alleged to have occurred as well as several specific DOC captains, lieutenants, sergeants and officers who the lawsuit alleges participated in the campaign in January and February 2020 against inmates.

The campaign came after “long simmering tensions between a small group of prisoners and officers in the N1 Unit at (the prison) culminated in an altercation, during which several officers were injured.” The trouble inmates were removed from the prison, the complaint filed in 2022 states.

“It was under control very quickly,” David Milton, of Prisoners Legal Services of Massachusetts and one of the plaintiff attorneys, told the Herald. “Nevertheless … there was a weeks-long campaign we called the retaliatory violence campaign in which 100 prisoners were brutalized and subjected to all manner of extreme and malicious force not for any legitimate security purpose but to punish everyone for the actions of a couple people involved in assaulting the officers.”

U.S. District Court Judge Margaret R. Guzman last week certified the lawsuit as a class action. She ruled that the class is to be defined as “all individuals who were incarcerated at SBCC who were subjected to uses of force from January 10, 2020, to February 6, 2020” — which is more narrowly defined than the plaintiff’s requested definition of “all individuals who are now, or who will be in the future, incarcerated” at the prison.

Her ruling also grants a subclass of “all Black and Latinx individuals incarcerated at Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center who were subjected to uses of force” during that time period.

This subclass is seeking damages for racial discrimination. The complaint claims that these prisoners were targeted for “especially brutal and degrading treatment, such as yanking and ripping out dreadlocks and braids and shouting racist comments and slurs as the officers assaulted them. Some officers wore a white supremacist logo on their helmets.”

“Class certification is a crucial step toward accountability for the violence inflicted on incarcerated people at Souza-Baranowski,” said plaintiff attorney Kayla Ghantous, of the Boston law firm Hogan Lovells.

“The importance of making it a class is that now everyone who was subject to unlawful force is able to have their day in court instead of just the nine people who brought the lawsuit,” Milton told the Herald.

Milton added that the type of allegations contained in the complaint is “not brand new” for the prison.

“Since this sort of culture of violence at Souza-Baranowski has been the case since it opened in the late 90s and there have been a number of lawsuits over the years,” he said.

Both sides request a jury trial. A trial date has not yet been set.

A DOC spokesman told the Herald, “We have no comment on pending litigation.”

A spokesman for the Massachusetts Correction Officers Federated Union told the Herald, “The union is aware of the lawsuit against the DOC administration and will support its union members in the legal process.”

Violence at SBCC

The class action lawsuit was certified shortly after three inmates were charged in the brutal attack at the prison last month that injured five correction officers, including one who was stabbed 12 times and suffered a punctured lung.

Investigators at the end of last month filed criminal complaints in Clinton District Court against Jose R. Crespo, 39; Heriberto Rivera-Negron, 36; and Jeffrey Tapia. They are each charged with mayhem, armed assault to murder and assault to murder.

The correction officers’ union says the DOC has not done enough to correct troubling developments at the prison, which had included the discovery of dozens of “shivs,” or makeshift knives, at the prison just in the month before the attack.

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