\u201cIf you notice these two incidents were people of color. They (the guards) let it be known they are white supremacist,\u201d the\u00a0inmate Jamaal Reynolds wrote<\/a>. \u201cThe Black officers and white officers don\u2019t even mingle with each other. Every day they create a hostile environment trying to provoke us so they can have a reason to put their hands on us.\u201d<\/p>\n Both incidents occurred in view of surveillance cameras, he said. Reynolds\u2019 neatly printed letter included the exact times and locations and named the officers and inmates. It\u2019s the type of specific information that would have made it easier for officials to determine if the reports were legitimate. But the inspector general\u2019s office did not investigate, corrections spokeswoman Molly Best said. Best did not provide further explanation, and the department hasn\u2019t responded to The Associated Press\u2019 August public records requests for the videos.<\/p>\n Some Florida prison guards openly tout associations with white supremacist groups to intimidate inmates and Black colleagues, a persistent practice that often goes unpunished, according to allegations in public documents and interviews with a dozen inmates and current and former employees in the nation\u2019s third-largest prison system. Corrections officials regularly receive reports about guards\u2019 membership in the Ku Klux Klan and criminal gangs, according to former prison inspectors, and current and former officers.<\/p>\n Still, few such cases are thoroughly investigated by state prison inspectors; many are downplayed by officers charged with policing their own or discarded as too complicated to pursue.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve visited more than 50 (prison) facilities and have seen that this is a pervasive problem that is not going away,\u201d said Democratic Florida state Rep. Dianne Hart. \u201cIt\u2019s partly due to our political climate. But, those who work in our prisons don\u2019t seem to fear people knowing that they\u2019re white supremacists.\u201d<\/p>\n The people AP talked to, who live and work inside Florida\u2019s prison system, describe it as chronically understaffed and nearly out of control. In 2017, three current and former\u00a0Florida guards who were Ku Klux Klan members<\/a>\u00a0were convicted after the FBI caught them planning a Black former inmate\u2019s murder.<\/p>\n This summer, one guard allowed 20-30 members of a white supremacist inmate group to meet openly inside a Florida prison. A Black officer happened upon the meeting, they told The AP, and later confronted the colleague who allowed it. The officer\u00a0said their incident report about the meeting\u00a0<\/a>went nowhere, and the guard who allowed it was not punished.<\/p>\n The officer spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not cleared to discuss official prison business. They told The AP that, after the report went nowhere, they did not feel safe at work and are seeking to leave.<\/p>\n ___<\/p>\n Officers who want to blow the whistle on colleagues are often ostracized and labeled a \u201csnitch,\u201d according to current and former officers.<\/p>\n Mark Caruso, a former sergeant with Florida corrections who was twice fired and reinstated after blowing the whistle on fellow officers, described the department as a \u201cgood old boy\u201d network.<\/p>\n He said that senior officers-in-charge have the power to censor any allegations of corrupt behavior that occurs on their watch. This keeps reports inside prison walls.<\/p>\n Caruso worked at three prisons in central Florida and reported inmate beatings and officer misconduct multiple times. Being a whistleblower did not work out well for him. He was fired after reporting on a colleague at the first prison where he worked as a sergeant, he said.<\/p>\n He was reinstated after the officers\u2019 union challenged the firing, and he moved to a new prison. There, he again reported an officer\u2019s use of force and was later fired and reinstated after the union challenged it again.<\/p>\n In 2019, he reported for duty at another new post, the Central Florida Reception Center. He was soon greeted with signs on an employee bulletin board where his name had been crossed out and \u201cSNITCH\u201d scrawled instead, according to testimony at a union grievance hearing. Another officer spit on his car windshield, he said.<\/p>\n Despite the intimidation, Caruso continued reporting inmate abuse and other illegal activity by fellow officers.<\/p>\n \u201cI have reported people when physically seeing them abuse inmates,\u201d he testified in another grievance hearing earlier this year. The AP obtained video of the hearing at which multiple officers and leadership testified in detail about the system\u2019s reporting structure and culture.<\/p>\n Corrections officers are required to file \u201cincident reports\u201d if they see a co-worker acting inappropriately. In some Florida prisons, supervisors often tell them not to email the reports, according to officers who testified at Caruso\u2019s hearing. Instead, they\u2019re told to tell their supervisor verbally what happened or write it longhand. A superior officer then types it up, choosing the language and framing the event.<\/p>\n A sergeant testified that the reason he typed up his officers\u2019 incident reports was because most struggle with writing. Also, most do not have computer access at the prison.<\/p>\n Caruso said he refused to report incidents of corruption verbally because it left no record, and he worried that prison leadership would censor his reports. So he emailed them to create an electronic record, a decision that, he says, irked prison leadership.<\/p>\n After seeing his reports go nowhere, he finally went over his superior officers\u2019 heads. Caruso made contact with an investigator in the Office of Inspector General and emailed Florida Corrections Secretary Mark Inch directly. Inch responded to him expressing concern, Caruso said, and referred the matter to the IG\u2019s office. That did not end well, either.<\/p>\n \u201cFor at least two years I reported to (the IG\u2019s office) all of the corruption I saw. He didn\u2019t respond or follow up,\u201d Caruso said of the inspector general\u2019s investigator.<\/p>\n Caruso was eventually fired again after officials said he\u2019d failed to report an inmate beating \u2014 one Caruso said he did not actually witness. It was a baffling charge given his active campaign of reporting others throughout his corrections career. He claimed, unsuccessfully this time, that the firing was retaliation.<\/p>\n If the inspector general were motivated to aggressively investigate reports of abuse by white supremacists or other gang members working as correctional officers he would face barriers, the former investigators told AP.<\/p>\n That\u2019s because state law limits the use of inmates as confidential informants, they said, and guards are reluctant or afraid to snitch on their colleagues.<\/p>\n For an inmate to act as an informant, the FBI would have to take over the case because Florida law limits the inspector general\u2019s office\u2019s interactions with inmates, the former investigators said. \u201cWe don\u2019t have the authority to do anything,\u201d one said.<\/p>\n Officers, meantime, fear retaliation.<\/p>\n \u201cOfficers are saying their colleagues are members, but they can have me killed,\u201d one former investigator said.<\/p>\n Florida White supremacist Prison Guards Work With Impunity!___<\/p>\n After the three guards in Florida were captured on FBI recordings\u00a0plotting a Black inmate\u2019s murder<\/a>\u00a0upon his release, Florida corrections spokeswoman Michelle Glady insisted there was no indication of a wider problem of white supremacists working in the prisons, so the state would not investigate further.<\/p>\n After the statement, an AP reporter in April visited the employee parking lot of one facility in the state\u2019s rural north and photographed cars and trucks adorned with symbols and stickers that are often associated with the white supremacist movement: Confederate flags, Q-Anon and Thin Blue Line images.<\/p>\n Florida has grappled with this issue for decades. In the early 2000s, the corrections department was forced by a St. Petersburg Times expose to investigate a clique of racist guards who all carried rope keychains with a noose. The Times reported that the noose keychains were used to signal a racist officer who was willing to inflict pain, particularly on Black inmates.<\/p>\n The state investigated the keychains and complaints from Black guards of workplace discrimination. Department inspectors interviewed the white guards who were known to carry the noose keychains and eventually cleared them all.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a pattern all over the country,\u201d said Paul Wright, a former inmate who co-founded the prisoner-rights publication\u00a0Prison Legal News.\u00a0<\/a>Wright helped expose Ku Klux Klan members working in a Washington state prison in the 1990s. He and Prison Legal News have since reported cases of Nazis and klan members working as correctional officers in California, New York, Texas, Illinois and many other states.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s an institutional acceptance of this type of racism,\u201d Wright said. \u201cWhat\u2019s striking about this is that so many of them keep their jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n Most state prisons and police departments throughout the U.S. do very little background checking to see if new hires have extremist views, said Greg Ehrie, former chief of the FBI\u2019s New York domestic terrorism squad, who now works with the Anti-Defamation League.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are 513 police agencies in New Jersey, and not one bans being part of outlaw motorcycle gangs. A prison guard who is the patched member of the Pagans, he can be out about it and tell you about it (with no punishment) because it\u2019s not stipulated in the employment contract,\u201d Ehrie said. The ADL lists the Pagans among biker gangs with white supremacist group affiliations.<\/p>\n This dynamic can lead to what the former Florida prison investigator described as \u201ccriminals watching over criminals.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf you have a heartbeat, a GED and no felony conviction you can get a job. That\u2019s sad,\u201d said Caruso, the former Florida correctional sergeant.<\/p>\n Florida state Rep. Hart and Caruso have called for a thorough investigation of the issue and a federal takeover of the prison system.<\/p>\n The FBI said it would neither confirm nor deny if such an investigation had been launched, but Ehrie said it is likely.<\/p>\n \u201cI would be extremely surprised if this wasn\u2019t an open bureau investigation,\u201d he said of Florida\u2019s prison system. \u201cIt\u2019s almost impossible that they\u2019re not investigating.\u201d<\/p>\n ___<\/p>\n Meanwhile, reports of racist behavior by correctional officers continue, according to inmates and current and former Florida corrections employees.<\/p>\n In late September, at another Panhandle prison, a 25-year-old Black inmate reported being beaten by a white officer who said \u201cYou\u2019re lucky I didn\u2019t have my spray on me, cuz I would gas yo Black ass.\u201d The inmate\u2019s lip was split open and his face swollen.<\/p>\n The inmate\u2019s family requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.<\/p>\n His mother reported the incident to the Inspector General\u2019s office on Oct. 1 and requested a wellness check on him. The office sent an investigator to the facility to interview her son, according to emails provided by the family.<\/p>\n After the interview, the IG refused to investigate the officer\u2019s conduct. The mother was told it was her son\u2019s word versus the officer\u2019s, and there was nothing they could do. The IG\u2019s office referred the matter instead to the prison warden.<\/p>\n The officer continued working in the inmate\u2019s dorm and threatened him, the inmate said in letters home.<\/p>\n \u201cAll them is a click (sic), a gang. Ya feel me, they all work together,\u201d the inmate wrote in October. For weeks, he sent desperate letters saying he was still being terrorized. He urged his mother to continue fighting.<\/p>\n \u201cDon\u2019t let up Mom. This has extremely messed up my mental. Got me shell shock, feel less of a man, violated ya feel me? But I love you.\u201d<\/p>\n She eventually helped him get transferred in early November to a facility with a reputation for being even more lawless and brutal, according to the family and a current officer. He is four years into a 12-year sentence for attempted robbery with a gun or deadly weapon.<\/p>\n \u201cI do look forward to seeing my son one day and I can only pray,\u201d the mother told AP. \u201cI\u2019m overwhelmed, tired and doing my best to hold on for my son\u2019s sake.\u201d<\/p>\n ___<\/p>\n Michael Balsamo in Washington contributed to this report.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Florida White supremacist Prison Guards Work With Impunity In June, three Florida prison guards who boasted of being white supremacists beat, pepper sprayed and used a stun gun on an inmate who screamed \u201cI can\u2019t breathe!\u201d at a prison near the Alabama border, according to a fellow inmate who reported it to the state. The Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14887,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[860,1241,40,6,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14885"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14885"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14885\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14888,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14885\/revisions\/14888"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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