Posted on 04/15/2008 10:54:57 AM PDT by SmithL
SAN FRANCISCO -- A federal appeals court has upheld $600,000 in damages to a state prison guard who said she was fired after complaining that she was being harassed by naked male inmates.
The complaints by Deanna Freitag led to an investigation by the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's inspector general, who found in 2000 that maximum-security inmates at Pelican Bay State Prison had regularly subjected female guards to "lewd exhibitionism and exhibitionist masturbation" and that the warden and other officials were doing little to stop it.
Freitag, who had worked at the prison in Del Norte County since 1996, was fired by Pelican Bay officials shortly before those findings were issued. Her bosses accused her of fabricating incidents in the reports she had been filing since September 1998.
In her lawsuit, Freitag said officials brushed off her complaints and disciplined the prisoners mildly, if at all.
A federal court jury in San Francisco awarded Freitag $500,000 for lost wages and $100,000 for emotional distress in a March 2003 verdict against the department, the warden and other prison officials.
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2006 that the corrections department had failed to protect Freitag from sexual harassment. But the court returned her case to the trial judge to consider the effect of a new U.S. Supreme Court ruling that limited government employees' protection from retaliation for criticizing workplace conditions.
In a 2-1 ruling Friday, the appeals court upheld Freitag's damage award, agreeing with U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Most of the scumbags at this prison will never be let out, hence, there is no motive for civility. However, this crap should never be tolerated.
You forgot the sarcasm tag.
You are familiar with Pelican Bay aren't you?
The worst of the worst.
I wasn't until I saw a TV program on the place several months ago.
Whoa!! The name sounds serene, it's hell.
An ex girlfriend of mine told me about being flashed by a stranger one time...her response: "That looks like a penis, only smaller."
Threaten them w/ solitary? Almost all cells at Pelican Bay are.
Only thing I can think of is point and laugh or hit it w/ a night stick, and I'm sure that's a no-no.
Amazing, women want 'just the same', until something like this happens. Then suddenly it's, 'but I'm a woman'.
Yep, it's called being a divorced mother, trying to make enough money to raise your two kids. I worked over 23 years in uniform in all-male facilities in New York State. The money was good, a lot better than what I was making working as a Food Stamp Examiner (in 1980) for the County. I retired as a Sergeant in 2003.
Since there are less female facilities the option of only working with female inmates is limited. And, don't forget, male officers work at female prisons, and from what I've heard, the females are even worse.
As a rookie in a maximum security facility, I had some experiences with convicts who deliberately exposed themselves or masterbated when I'd walk down the gallery to take the count. If the guy was in his cell, I ignored him. If he decided to expose himself while he was in the yard or some other place in the prison, I'd write his ass up. It didn't happen very often. And of course, as I got more time on the job, and eventually became a Sergeant, it never happened.
Every female officer handled the situation differently. Some overreacted and made it worse on themselves. It's possible that the female officer in this lawsuit handled the incidents inappropriately, or even fabricated many of them. It's also possible that the facility administration didn't discipline the inmates who violated the rules and regulations. This didn't appear to be a class-action suit, which tells me that none of the other female officers joined her in her suit. Is that because none of them experienced the same problem? But then, did any of them testify on her behalf during the original trial? You'd think that if any were taking the witness stand to uphold her complaints, that they'd be a part of the lawsuit themselves.
My question is where was the Union in all of this? If the females, or this female had a problem getting the facility administration to properly discipline the inmates for alleged offences, how come the Union wasn't involved? The article doesn't mention if the female officer exhausted her Union's grievance process. I'm assuming, this being in California, that she did belong to a Union.
There's a lot of unanswered questions in this case. Personally, I don't think she should have gotten any money.
Don't laugh. It's a real government program. It's how your tax dollars were used to bring you a photograph of a crucifix submerged in a jar of urine and a painting of Mary (of the Bible) smeared with feces.
The ACLU would call the behavior of the inmates "performance art."
By law she can't. She can only report the misbehavior in a report. There are guidelines for all of this. In New York State, the reports are reviewed by a Lieutenant before the inmate is served and a hearing is held. All Tier 2 and Tier 3 hearings had to be recorded. Tier I hearings were lesser infractions, and Sergeants (which I was) held the hearings. Your options for discipline in Tier I hearings was limited. We used to get pi$$ed when the Hearing Lieutenant tossed out tickets (misbehavior reports) we'd written on convicts, in return for them giving him info. They'd also dismiss tickets to keep the number of misbehavior reports down. It didn't look good for the administrators in Albany if the officers were writing too many tickets.
I was laughing because of the double-entendre haha
The sad thing is I hadn’t even noticed the double-entendre when I posted...
:-/
How do you stop an inmate from doing what they did?
If they are in their cells 23 hours per day and no guard can control them what does a woman expect “someone” to do to protect her?
I just don’t understand why anyone would give her the money.
Usually ignoring an inmate masturbating in his cell works. If they don't get a reaction from you, they usually stop. Some females made sarcastic comments, like "You call that a D*ck?" They'd say it loud enough for the rest of the inmates to hear, which in turn would set them all off laughing. It was enough humiliation for the guy to stop the behavior. Most of the time the inmates who exposed themselves or masturbated were doing it to see what your response was going to be. It always seemed that the rookie female officers were the ones who were tested by the convicts.
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