Trouble in Private U.S. Jails Preceded Job Fixing Iraq's

This story is beginning to ripple. I first saw it, or one similar to it, in the Houston Chronicle. Now the New York Times is carrying it. Glad the media is picking up on the parallels.


SANTA FE, N.M. - Tyson Johnson was in the Santa Fe County jail here in January 2002, awaiting trial on charges of stalking and aggravated assault, when his longtime claustrophobia gave him anxiety attacks and he asked to see a psychiatrist.

But the jail, which is run by a private prison company, Management and Training Corporation, did not have a psychiatrist or a psychologist. So Mr. Johnson tried slitting his wrist and neck with a razor, and when that failed, he told the jail's nurse, Sheila Turner, "Today I am going to take myself out."

A guard, Crystal Quintana, told investigators that the nurse replied, "Let him." Ms. Turner denies this, her lawyer says.

Ten minutes later, Mr. Johnson, 27 and with no previous criminal record, was found hanging from a sprinkler head in a windowless isolation cell where he was supposedly being closely watched.

The account is taken from a lengthy Justice Department report, depositions in a civil lawsuit filed by Mr. Johnson's mother, Suzan Garcia, and statements by guards to investigators. And the Justice Department report prompts another question: Why did Attorney General John Ashcroft pick an executive of Management and Training, Lane McCotter, to lead a mission to Iraq to restore its prisons only a month after the report was released in the spring of 2003, charging unconstitutional practices in the jail?

http://nytimes.com/2004/06/06/national/06jail.html