Our jails are a scandal

The New York Times, having recollected for an instant that it is a newspaper, has been publishing a remarkable series of investigations into Rikers Island, which is a pit of infamy: beatings, rapes, torture, a dozen correctional officers at a time taken in a drug sweep. And the villain of the Times account is Seabrook, the president of the jailers’ union. Like all union bosses, he has fought for more money and less work for his members. Unlike most other union bosses, he has fought measures to impose more meaningful penalties on corrupt and abusive guards, as well as more robust screening methods designed to keep his members from bringing drugs and other contraband into the jails. Politicians and wardens alike fear him — he is the jailer in the prison of official cowardice.

Seabrook says that Murdough died because old and defective equipment makes it difficult to regulate cell temperatures. The Times reports that under Seabrook’s leadership, jailers have enjoyed “large gains in salary and pension benefits.” There’s plenty of money for the union goons — Seabrook pulls in some $300,000 a year — but not enough money to keep New York from roasting to death a vulnerable man remanded into its custody.

The New York jailers and their leaders are horrifyingly ordinary. A 2004 federal investigation into systematic abuse of prisoners at California’s Pelican Bay prison found that the correctional officers’ union punished whistleblowers, enforced a mafia-style code of silence, protected and rewarded abusive officers, and was a powerful political brake on reform efforts. Meanwhile, conditions written into the union’s collective-bargaining agreement made internal investigations “almost impossible.” The union is a political powerhouse that in some elections outspends the mighty California teachers’ union — which has ten times the membership. The jailers’ union made major donations to Governor Jerry Brown, Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, and Attorney General Kamala Harris. The National Institute on Money in State Politics reports that Democrat Gray Davis’s successful 1998 gubernatorial campaign enjoyed $1 million in support from the penal union.