By Julie K. Brown

Miami Herald

October 15, 2015

Excerpts from article

A coalition of 14 human rights groups on Thursday called for a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into Florida state prisons, contending that “immediate intervention” is necessary to stop the widespread abuse, neglect, torture and deaths of inmates in the Florida Department of Corrections.

In a letter to Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta, the group cited a list of suspected criminal and civil rights violations against prisoners, including: torture and death by starvation, excessive use of force, medical neglect, misuse of solitary confinement, suicide, sexual assault and death and torture by scalding.

The group, headed by Florida’s ACLU, expressed particular concern about the abuse and deaths of inmates who suffer from mental illnesses, citing several who have died in recent years under suspicious circumstances. One of those inmates, Darren Rainey, died in 2012 after he was left for more than two hours in a shower with temperatures in excess of 180 degrees. Rainey’s death is already the subject of a federal civil rights inquiry, as well as a state criminal investigation. Rainey, who suffered from schizophrenia, was allegedly forced into the shower by corrections officers at Dade Correctional Institution near Homestead and left there, as punishment, for bad behavior.

The Miami-Dade medical examiner has yet to release his cause of death, and the criminal investigation into his death is still pending.

#Loray Muhammad, Author

#Black Integration a Failed Social Experiment