Florida Inmate’s Death Calls Guards’ Practices Into Question

The first explanation for Frank Valdes’ death was suicide. After the inmate was found lifeless in his cell, guards suggested he had killed himself by repeatedly diving head-first off his bunk onto the cement floor.

An autopsy on Valdes--sentenced to the electric chair for killing a corrections officer--revealed a different story. His ribs were broken, his testicles swollen, and boot prints were found on his body.

“I’m told the crap was beat out of him,” said State Atty. Rod Smith. The death was ruled a homicide.

In the wake of the killing, nine Florida State Prison guards were suspended and the FBI was called in for what has become one of the biggest investigations into allegations of inmate abuse in Florida history.

But the inquiry has also focused attention on an issue plaguing California and other states: the use of force in controlling an increasingly aggressive inmate population in a prison system that grows more overcrowded by the day. California’s Corcoran State Prison, for example, came under investigation after prison guards shot dozens of inmates to stop fistfights.

“There is a certain tension in prisons that becomes a classic us-versus-them kind of thing,” said prison consultant Chase Riveland, a former state corrections chief in Washington and Colorado. “It’s a control issue that can lead to intimidation and abuse.”

Tensions are exacerbated, Riveland said, in rural prisons where the inmates are predominantly Latinos and African Americans from urban areas, the guards are largely white and the prison system is the area’s largest employer.

This woodsy section of north Florida, home to the toughest prisons in the nation’s fourth-largest state penal system, provides a textbook example of the economics of culture clash. “We got pine trees and prisons,” said Union County Sheriff Jerry Whitehead. “We’re thankful for that.”

There may be no region in the nation more dependent on the prison industry than the “iron triangle”--the area between Gainesville, Jacksonville and Tallahassee. Of the 38,000 residents of Union and Bradford counties, about one-fifth are locked up in five state prisons, and the livelihoods of most of the others are somehow tied to feeding those felons and keeping them off the streets.

Inmates in two California counties also make up high percentages of the overall population, although most are not housed at maximum-security levels: Del Norte County has an inmate population of nearly 12%; Lassen, about 30%.

The ties to the corrections community are so pervasive here that earlier this month a judge granted Smith’s motion to convene a grand jury in a neighboring county after the prosecutor argued that the prison system’s economic effect in the area--estimated at more than $180 million annually--made getting an impartial jury unlikely.

Even Gov. Jeb Bush has called for “a pretty dramatic change” in how the prison system polices itself.

“I’m pleased that the code of silence is being broken and there is greater light being shined on the very dedicated people who work to protect us from the very worst among us,” Bush said.

However, that light--and the suggestion that guards routinely cover up abuse of prisoners--has infuriated many of the 1,800 corrections officers who work in the two counties.

“Now we’re the bad guys,” said Al Shopp, an official of the State Police Benevolent Assn., which represents 76% of all guards and seven of the nine under suspension.

“We got a difficult job to do. We’re put in a hostile environment, we have to deal with these prisoners every day, and then, when they act up, you have to save them from themselves. And God forbid that the guy gets hurt.”

There is little sympathy here for Valdes. “What happened out there probably got out of control,” Union County Times editor Gail Livingston said during an interview in her storefront office on Main Street. “But I don’t think anyone in the community blames the guards. I think the feeling here is, ‘That’s one less person we have to feed.’ ”

Livingston has not printed one word about Valdes’ death or the investigation. “To be honest,” she said, “there’s been too big a deal made about this. Maybe he should have been killed long ago. He was on death row anyway.”

Added Shopp: “These aren’t kindergarten kids.”

Clearly, Valdes was no innocent--his attorney and his ex-wife admit that. At 36, he had a long rap sheet that included convictions for burglary, drug-trafficking and assault on a police officer. In the system, he was known as unruly and uncooperative.

Valdes landed on death row 10 years ago after the slaying of corrections officer Fred Griffis. Griffis was transporting an ex-prison mate of Valdes’ to a doctor’s appointment when Valdes and another ex-con ambushed the van. Griffis was shot three times in the head.

On July 17, the day he died, Valdes was being held in solitary at Florida State Prison on what is called X-wing, reserved for the most dangerous inmates.

A day after allegedly threatening a guard, Valdes refused to leave his cell so it could be searched. A five-member “extraction team” went in to get him. “He fights just like a madman,” said Bill Johnson, a lawyer for the guards. At least two chemical sprays were used to subdue Valdes.

When the melee was over, Valdes was given a medical examination and then placed in another cell. Guards who checked Valdes at 15-minute intervals reported that he was hurling himself head-first off the bunk. He was found dead four hours later.

The corrections chief appointed by Bush in January to reform the prison system as much as admitted that guards went too far. “We’ve got some people who have done something very abhorrent, and I want those people very badly,” Michael W. Moore told the Senate Criminal Justice Committee earlier this month.

Along with calling for a review of use-of-force policy, Moore ordered 26 cameras installed in X-wing and mandated that all confrontations between guards and prisoners be videotaped.

News of Valdes’ death unleashed a flood of abuse complaints from inmates at Florida State Prison and other lockups around the state. “We operate on the philosophy that where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” said prisoner advocate Randall C. Berg Jr. of the Florida Justice Institute. “And there’s been a lot of smoke coming from those institutions.”

Republican state Rep. Allen Trovillion, chairman of the House Corrections Committee, vowed to hold hearings on a long list of abuse allegations. The U.S. Justice Department said its civil rights division will monitor the investigation.

An attorney for Valdes’ family, in a letter to the state announcing his intention to sue, charged the Corrections Department with condoning “widespread torture and abuse” on X-wing. Stuart Goldenberg said the state “was negligent in the hiring, training and retention of the correctional officers involved in this beating.”

Prison officials responded to the scrutiny by throwing open the penitentiary gates for media tours. “We need to let people see what we do,” Warden James Crosby said last month as he led reporters into Florida State Prison. “We haven’t done a good job of that . . . so when something goes wrong, people think the worst.”

“That was a terrible incident out there,” Whitehead said. “But people here want to give the officers the benefit of the doubt. They hope those boys were not involved.”

The nine suspended officers have refused comment, and the Department of Corrections has told its employees not to talk to the media while the investigation is pending. But off the record, guards used similar words to describe their feelings and those of their families: “angry,” “misunderstood,” “under siege.”

Whatever the outcome of the investigation, Shopp said, “the public wants criminals off the street and in prison, and that means someone is going to have to do this difficult job.”

Indeed, except for millwork and driving a logging truck, there are few other jobs in this region. After 14 weeks of training, a high school graduate with a clean record can start at a salary that in January rises above $25,000 a year. Benefits include a health plan that pays 85% of medical costs, three weeks’ vacation, 14 days’ sick leave and, after 25 years, retirement at 75% pay.

But the prisoners are the toughest, the work is stressful and the turnover is high. More than one of every five guards quit in the first year, Corrections Department statistics show.

As the investigation into Valdes’ death drags on, the mood among corrections employees here darkens. “My concern is that, while they are waiting for the other shoe to drop, they will be reluctant to use force when absolutely necessary,” said Lake City Community College administrator Roger Peek, who directs the guards’ training curriculum. “And then a dangerous place to work becomes even more dangerous.”

Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.