The Place Where Psychological illnes Combined With Brutality Revealed

After being arrested on a misdemeanor charge following a family dispute last year, Jose Bautista was unable to post $250 bail and ended up in a jail cell on Rikers Island.
A few days later, he tore his underwear, looped it around his neck and tried to hang himself from the cell’s highest bar. Four correction officers rushed in and cut him down. But instead of notifying medical personnel, they handcuffed Mr. Bautista, forced him to lie face down on the cell floor and began punching him with such force, according to New York City investigators, that he suffered a perforated bowel and needed emergency surgery.
The assaults on Mr. Bautista and Mr. Lane were not isolated episodes. Brutal attacks by correction officers on inmates — particularly those with mental health issues — are common occurrences inside Rikers, the country’s second-largest jail, a four-month investigation by The New York Times found.
But The Times uncovered details on scores of assaults through interviews with current and former inmates, correction officers and mental health clinicians at the jail, and by reviewing hundreds of pages of legal, investigative and jail records. Among the documents obtained by The Times was a secret internal study completed this year by the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which handles medical care at Rikers, on violence by officers. The report helps lay bare the culture of brutality on the island and makes clear that it is inmates with mental illnesses who absorb the overwhelming brunt of the violence.
The report cataloged in exacting detail the severity of injuries suffered by inmates: fractures, wounds requiring stitches, head injuries and the like. But it also explored who the victims were. Most significantly, 77 percent of the seriously injured inmates had received a mental illness diagnosis.
What emerges is a damning portrait of guards on Rikers Island, who are poorly equipped to deal with mental illness and instead repeatedly respond with overwhelming force to even minor provocations

The report notes that health department staff members interviewed 80 of the 129 inmates after their altercations with correction officers. In 80 percent of the cases, inmates reported being beaten after they were handcuffed.

The study also contained hints of efforts to cover up the assaults. More than half of the inmates reported facing “interference or intimidation” from correction officers while seeking treatment after an altercation.

In five of the 129 cases, the beatings followed suicide attempts.

Many of the cases were similar to Mr. Bautista’s and Mr. Lane’s, in which several guards ganged up on a single inmate. At times, a slight aimed at a correction officer set off a chain of events that ended savagely.

 

While it was often hard to know what precipitated the altercation or who was at fault, the severity of the inmates’ injuries makes it clear that Rikers guards regularly failed to meet basic professional standards.

Even so, none of the officers involved in the 129 cases have been prosecuted at this point, according to information from the Bronx district attorney’s office. None have been brought up on formal administrative charges in connection to the cases so far either, though that process can sometimes be lengthy, and the Correction Department does not comment on pending investigations.

The assaults took place as guards have been struggling to contain surging violence at Rikers. The number of fights between inmates has increased year by year since at least 2009, according to Correction Department data. Assaults on correction officers and civilian staff members have also risen.

The growing numbers of mentally unstable inmates, with issues like depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, are a major factor in the violence. Rikers now has about as many people with mental illnesses — roughly 4,000 of the 11,000 inmates — as all 24 psychiatric hospitals in New York State combined. They make up nearly 40 percent of the jail population, up from about 20 percent eight years ago.

The jail is not equipped for them. Inmates are housed on cellblocks supervised by uniformed men and women who are often poorly trained to deal with mental illness, and rely on pepper spray, take-down holds and fists to subdue them.

At Rikers, inmates with mental health problems are especially vulnerable, often the weakest in a kind of war of all against all, preyed upon by correction officers and other inmates. The prolonged isolation, extremes of hot and cold temperatures, interminable stretches of monotony punctuated by flashes of explosive violence can throw even the most mentally sound off balance and quickly overcome those whose mental grip is already tenuous.

Surrounded and overwhelmed, some withdraw into themselves. Others lash out. Almost daily, correction officers and civilian staff members are splashed with urine and other bodily fluids. And sometimes they are attacked. This year, two interns working in mental health units were assaulted. One suffered a broken nose, eye socket and jaw.

Inmates with mental illnesses commit two-thirds of the infractions in the jail, and they commit an overwhelming majority of assaults on jail staff members.

Yet, by law, they cannot be medicated involuntarily at the jail, and hospitals often refuse to accept them unless they harm themselves or others.

Shakima Smith-White drew a sharp contrast between how her son Michael Megginson, who has bipolar disorder, was treated during the three years he was committed to state psychiatric hospitals and the year he has spent at Rikers after being jailed on a robbery charge. “The hospital gave him a shot in his backside to knock him out, and then put him in a padded room for a few hours until he was calm,” she said.

At the jail, on Oct. 8, after a violent encounter with guards, he was found by clinicians curled up on the concrete floor of a holding cell, his wrist fractured, an eye swollen shut and bruises all over his body.

The violence continues to worsen, even as Mayor Bill de Blasio and his new reform-minded correction commissioner have vowed to bring Rikers Island under control. Correction officers used force on inmates 1,927 times in the first six months of 2014, an increase of more than one-third compared with the same period last year, according to Correction Department data. Use of force by officers is up nearly 90 percent over the last five years, even as the jail population has declined.

Gunmen assassinate election candidate in Pakistan,Terrorist Islamic suspected for the attack

A government official says gunmen have killed a politician running for a provincial assembly seat in southwestern Pakistan.

Saeed Ahmad says Abdul Fatah Magsi was gunned down on Tuesday in Jhal Magsi, about 350 kilometers (220 miles) southeast of Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan province.

Ahmad says the candidate's supporters fired back and killed two of the gunmen. He says the attack seemed to be the result of a political rivalry.

Ahmad says the election in the constituency has been postponed, which is mandatory whenever a candidate is killed. National and provincial assembly elections are scheduled to take place across the country on May 11.

Baluchistan is home to both Islamic militants and separatists who have been waging a bloody insurgency against the government for decades.

Explosion shakes central Prague

An explosion in central Prague on Monday, probably caused by gas, injured as many as 40 people, officials said, and neighboring buildings - including the National Theatre - had to be evacuated.

The explosion, in a building facing the Vltava river just a few dozen meters (yards) from the 19th-century theatre, was heard as far away as Prague Castle about a mile away.

A police spokesman said the blast was probably caused by gas and that there had been about 15 people in the building, which included an office of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) and an art gallery.

"We estimate up to 40 people were injured," Zdenek Schwarz, the chief of Prague paramedics, said on Czech Television.

"These are mostly light injuries, cuts, bruises, injuries from glass. We estimate no more than four seriously injured, but this is preliminary information," he said.

An emergency services spokeswoman said some people may have been trapped in the building, which belongs to the Czech Air Navigation Services company.

A Reuters witness at the site saw about a dozen people being treated by emergency services.

"I was sitting quietly in my flat, making coffee. Then there was an incredible explosion. I thought the building would collapse. I looked out the window, and there was only dust everywhere," Venceslava Sehnotkova, a pensioner living in a nearby house, told Reuters television.

The blast blew out some of the windows in neighboring buildings, including Prague's landmark Cafe Slavia. The building where blast occurred also includes the Prague FAMU film school and the social sciences faculty of the Charles University.

A fire department spokeswoman said there were no reports of fatalities.

Several streets around the site were cordoned off by police.

On Sunday, part of a five-storey residential building collapsed - possibly because of a gas explosion - in the northeastern French city of Reims, killing three people and injuring 14, officials said.

Pakistan Taliban bomb politicians' offices, kill 9

 Pakistani Taliban detonated bombs at the campaign offices of two politicians in the country's northwest on Sunday, police said, killing at least nine people in an escalation of attacks on secular, left-leaning political parties.

In first attack, on the outskirts of Kohat city, a bomb ripped through the office of Syed Noor Akbar, killing six and wounding 10 people, police official Mujtaba Hussain said.

A second bomb targeted a campaign office of another candidate,Nasir Khan Afridi, in the suburbs of Peshawar city. That attack killed three people and wounded 12, police official Saifur Rehman Khan said.

Both politicians, who were not in the offices at the time of the blasts, are running as independent candidates for national assembly seats to represent constituencies in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas, where scores of militant groups operate including some with links to al-Qaida. The general elections will be held on May 11.

Pakistani Taliban spokesman Ahsanullah Ahsan claimed responsibility for both attacks, as well as two others against secular political parties in the southern port city of Karachi.

"We are against all politicians who are going to become part of any secular, democratic government," he told The Associated Press by telephone from an undisclosed location.

The Taliban previously announced a strategy to target three political parties, including the Awami National Party (ANP), the Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM) and the Pakistan People's Party (PPP). All three are perceived as liberal, having earned the Taliban's ire by opposing the insurgency and extremism during their time in the outgoing government.

The onslaught has forced many of the parties to change their campaign strategy and has raised questions about whether the vote can be considered valid if some mainstream parties can't properly take part.

Such attacks have killed at least 28 people in just last four days.

One of the most serious attacks occurred on April 21, when a suicide bomber blew himself up outside a meeting of the ANP in the northwestern city of Peshawar, killing 16 people. The Taliban said the target of the attack was Haroon Ahmad Bilour, whose father, a senior party leader, was killed in a suicide bombing in Peshawar in December. He escaped unscathed, but his uncle, Ghulam Ahmad Bilour, suffered minor injuries.

In the capital, Islamabad, Pakistani officials said they planned to seal the border with Afghanistan and restrict the movement of Afghan refugees on election day.

Officials at the Interior Ministry and the election commission have said that the measure is aimed at preventing terrorist attacks during the vote. However, officials did not say how they would restrict the movement of hundreds of thousands of people spread out across the country or block crossings along the porous border. Pakistan announced similar measures in the past but failed to take action.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief reporters.

The Islamist and center-right political parties have been spared by the Taliban and have been holding big public rallies without fear of being attacked. They largely support peace talks with the Taliban instead of military offensives.

The leaders of the political parties under Taliban attack have said the violence amounts to election rigging. But they have, so far, decided not to boycott the vote.