Fluvanna Contract Not Renewed? 40 Women Shipped Back to Tallahassee in Pitiful Condition

July 1, 2002: A message received last week from a Drug War prisoner in the federal women’s prison in Tallahassee reports that a shipment of 40 women from the state prison in Troy, Virginia has reached Tallahassee with a second shipment expected soon. The women are federal prisoners incarcerated in Tallahassee until the mass transfers to the state prison in Virginia which began last year. These women are part of a flow in the reverse direction.

Viewers may remind themselves of the fears of Tallahassee women as the day of shipment to the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women approached – and the reality they found upon arrival. “Conditions at Fluvanna Correctional Institute” reprints in part Appendix 11 of “The Tallahassee Project,” a synopsis of reports reaching Tallahassee from women belonging to shipments to the Virginia facility previous to December, 2000. It concludes with a newspaper report of sexual abuse by Fluvanna guards from the year before. The newspaper report was circulating in the Tallahassee prison and was forwarded to this web site for posting.

Lorilee Leckness, featured in “The Tallahassee Project” and herself part of the December shipment, describes the ordeal of the bus journey to Virginia in “Feeling the Past in the Present”. She writes a letter to an official of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, complaining of the degradation suffered by federal prisoners transported under terms of the contract between the Bureau and officials of Virginia’s Department of Corrections, dated March, 2001 and reproduced here as “Fingernails Appeared in the Food”. Part Two of this letter has not yet been posted.

A satirical report by an anonymous prisoner transported from Tallahassee is written the following month: "Welcome to Prison Lifestyles of the Not-So-Famous, Featuring Hotel Fluvanna”.

"Fluvanna POWs Attacked by State Inmates: August 2, 2001" details the attack on federal women prisoners by state prisoners that occurred in July the same year.

At issue throughout is the morality, if not the legality, of a contract between the Federal Bureau of Prisons which permits the transfer of prisoners sentenced by a federal court to the jurisdiction of a state government. Certainly the prisoners affected regarded the transfer as a violation of their federal rights. Stripped of federal identification and treated as state prisoners, they suffered depredation unknown by women POWs in a federal environment. The contract was signed at least by the summer of 2000, since transfers from two of the five federal prisons for women began in August of that year. It is said to have been renewable annually on proof of satisfactory performance by the state officials. Now that prisoners from Fluvanna are returning, the same presumably being true of prisoners transported from the other four federal women’s prisons, chances are that the contract between the Federal Bureau and Virginia’s Department of Corrections has not been renewed a second time. This is the conclusion now circulating in Tallahassee.

Proof, if any were needed, of the callous treatment accorded women in the Fluvanna facility is visible in the Tallahassee compound. According to the message referred to above, women returning to the Tallahassee prison are in bad shape. Thin, gaunt faces and stringy hair, bad teeth, and massive loss of weight are characteristic of the shape women are arriving back in. Some women have broken down in tears of relief to find themselves back in federal hands, no matter how unresponsive to the needs of kindness and affection those hands may be. A request has gone out for photos to document the state of returning prisoners, and these will be posted here if they arrive.

It will be interesting to learn, to the extent that information becomes available, on what grounds renewal of the contract was refused and which party refused it – if indeed the contract has now lapsed. It is hoped that prisoner energy and the work of families persuaded parties to the contract that renewal was not in their best interests. The hope is also that portrayal of the indignities suffered by federal POWs at the hands of the state authorities as posted on this web site – there was no other public record of the horror – played a part in terminating the shameful episode. The latter hope may not be unrealistic. Reports came in from prisoners of resentment expressed by Fluvanna staff, up to the level of the warden, at the “unfair”treatment they were getting on the web site. The women who supplied information knowingly put themselves at risk, but it is evident the information they provided was being tracked.

The Committee on Unjust Sentencing, July, 2002