“A $1.3 million verdict exposed prison brutality. Now DOC wants to hide the evidence.”
Last October, a federal jury in Connecticut sent a resounding message, awarding $1.3 million to an incarcerated person who suffered a brutal assault at the hands of a prison guard. The verdict was a rare moment of accountability for our state’s troubled Department of Correction, which for too long has operated with impunity, shielded from meaningful public scrutiny.
The jury’s decision should have been a wake-up call, a catalyst for change and reform within the DOC. Instead, what we’ve seen from prison officials in the aftermath of the trial is more of the same – a doubling down on secrecy, a desperate attempt to conceal from public view the very evidence that led ordinary citizens to conclude that the DOC had violated Constitutional rights.
The latest salvo in this campaign of opacity is an affidavit from Deputy Commissioner William Mulligan, potentially drafted by the Office of the Attorney General, imploring the court to block the release of videos that were played during the trial. Mulligan’s affidavit is a masterclass in fearmongering, a parade of horribles detailing the purported “irreparable harm” that would befall the DOC if the public were allowed to see with their own eyes how the department operates behind prison walls.
But Mulligan’s doomsday prophecy rings hollow. The videos he seeks to suppress were already played in open court. The jury saw them, and awarded the prisoner a $1.3 million verdict. The idea that releasing them now would somehow jeopardize prison security is as risible as it is disingenuous.
As the ACLU notes in a recent court filing, Mulligan’s affidavit “frets that the people residing [at Garner Correctional Institution] will watch the videos to learn the location of ‘metal detectors, supervisor[‘]s offices, medical locations,’ and other features of a building in which they spend twenty-four hours a day for years at a time.” This is laughable —if it didn’t serve government secrecy that is absolutely dangerous.
As the ACLU rightly points out, “The DOC’s purported harms are greatly blunted by the reality that the people who live at Garner are not blindfolded as they move through the prison every day.” The prisoners are intimately familiar with every nook and cranny of the facility. They don’t need a video to provide some revelation about the layout or routines of the place they live.
No, the real reason the DOC wants these videos buried is not some genuine concern for institutional security. It’s because those videos lay bare the culture of brutality and dehumanization that pervades our prison system. It’s because those videos show in graphic, uncensored detail how readily DOC personnel resort to violence against those in their custody. It’s because the videos make them look bad. The videos are a threat not to security but to the DOC’s already battered public image. And image control, not safety, appears to be the department’s paramount concern.
But the importance of transparency, of public oversight and accountability, cannot be overstated. The jury’s verdict in this case was a significant step towards reining in a department that for too long has been allowed to operate in the shadows. The DOC’s immediate resort to suppression in the wake of that verdict only underscores the necessity of dragging their conduct into the light.
The federal court must not aid the DOC in its efforts to evade accountability. The court must release these videos and send an unequivocal message that no government agency, least of all one entrusted with such awesome and easily abused powers, is above the law or beyond the reach of public scrutiny.
Better yet, Attorney General William Tong and his deputy Terrence O’Neil could simply order release of the videos to the ACLU. Transparency, not concealment, is the way forward if we are to have any hope of reforming our broken prison system. The people have a right to know, and no amount of bureaucratic obfuscation from the DOC should be allowed to infringe upon that right.
Alexander Taubes is a civil rights attorney in New Haven.