Inmates caught masturbating inside a federal prison in Florence were pepper-sprayed and placed in restraints, then ordered into a disciplinary program in which they had to wear jumpsuits without pockets and yellow cards on lanyards around their necks, according to a whistleblower case brought to the U.S. Department of Justice.
An employee of the U.S. Penitentiary in Florence, one of several federal prisons in a complex in south-central Colorado, reported the disciplinary policy to federal investigators, who uncovered a “lack of managerial oversight” and “failures to act in accordance with policy.”
The disciplinary program has since been discontinued, according to a report from the U.S. Attorney General’s Office to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel.
The investigation, which ended in September, did not uncover any rule or law violations. However, “corrective steps,” including additional staff training, were put in place “to avoid these issues in the future,” according to the federal report.
A spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons declined to comment on the disciplinary action the wardens received, citing safety and privacy concerns.
Supervisors at the prison initiated the new policy because inmates were frequently masturbating in front of guards and the “behavior was worsening,” according to the report. The supervisors, who were not named in the report, told prison employees to treat the masturbation as an emergency, including by pushing their body alarm and dousing the inmate with pepper spray.
They were also told to place them in ambulatory restraints, meaning their wrists were restrained but they could still walk, and send them to a restrictive housing unit. Surveillance footage, reviewed by investigators, showed that correctional officers repeatedly placed inmates in restraints when they were “compliant, under control, and not a threat to staff or others,” according to the report.
The offending inmates would then go into a “one-hour watch, high visibility program” that required them to wear yellow cards around their necks and report to a staff member every hour. The program identified the inmates as sexual predators and put them at risk of potentially violent retaliatory behavior from other inmates, the whistleblower said.
They also wore jumpsuits that had been altered by the laundry staff, which sewed the pockets shut.
☀️ READ MORE
Two supervisors, including the acting warden, reportedly told employees that they had “conducted a similar program at another location, and it was successful.” Supervisors described the new program during a May 24, 2022, staff meeting, and the program remained in place until federal investigators from the justice department’s Office of Internal Affairs visited the prison last summer.
The U.S. Penitentiary, with a capacity for 1,280 inmates, is inside the same complex as the Florence Supermax, where some of the country’s highest profile criminals are housed. The prison is only for men. The average age of the inmates inside the U.S. Penitentiary is 37 years and the average sentence is 14 years, according to the federal report. Some inmates housed at the penitentiary are placed in a unit that helps prepare them to transition from the Supermax prison to the general population.
The federal prison complex was short of at least 188 correctional staff, including 120 correctional officers below the authorized number, according to a letter U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen, a Colorado Democrat whose district includes Florence, wrote in January 2023 to the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Prison leaders suspended the masturbation disciplinary program after “being presented with the facts and circumstances surrounding the application of the program and its inconsistency with local policy,” according to the federal report, which is online in the public files of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel.
Under federal policy, a prison employee “may not use brutality, physical violence or intimidation toward inmates, or use any force beyond that which is reasonably necessary to subdue an inmate.”
The use of aerosol pepper spray is “designed primarily for immediate use of force in situations where there is a serious threat to the safety of staff, inmates, or others; to prevent serious property damage; and to ensure institution security and good order.”
Most U.S. prisons ban masturbation, according to a 2020 report published in the Journal of Positive Sexuality. Some policies ban it outright while others prohibit it only when it is intended to disturb others, according to the research from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Texas law, for example, allows masturbation within prisons only if no one else is aware of it.
Prisons have justified the bans saying they help prevent hostile work environments for female staff, but the bans “could potentially be linked with higher rates of violence, rape, exploitation, sex offender recidivism, insomnia, stress, depression, and suicide,” according to the research.
In one case, infamous Boston mob boss Whitey Bulger was placed in solitary confinement for a month after he was caught touching his genitals alone in his cell in at 3 a.m. when he was 83 years old. In another, Terry Lee Alexander, who was serving time in Florida for armed robbery, was sentenced to two additional months in prison after a female employee witnessed him masturbating in his cell from 100 feet away in a control tower.