Violence increased sharply at high-security federal prisons last year, a trend prison officials blame on overcrowding, harsher sentencing and a tougher class of inmate.
Prison guards, those most at risk other than inmates themselves, also cite budget cuts they say have left prisons dangerously under-staffed."Nobody is listening to us," said Donald Tucker, president of the council of prison locals of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents over half the federal prison guards.
"Congress is not listening, the Senate is not listening, (Attorney General) Janet Reno is not listening," he said. "Nobody wants to hear the truth; and the truth is, we need more staff."
Tucker said a recent spate of violence at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary - including the first killing of a federal corrections officer in seven years - should draw attention to the increasingly dangerous conditions inside federal prisons.
The Atlanta guard, D'Antonio Washington, was beaten to death Dec. 23 by an inmate who had smuggled a hammer into the prison. Several days later, a female guard at the same prison was beaten unconscious. Last week, three inmates were knifed in a fight that resulted in a prison lockdown.
Greg Bogdan, a spokesman for the Bureau of Prisons, said the outbreak of violence in Atlanta involved unrelated incidents, but he acknowledged the bureau's own records document an increasingly violent atmosphere at the five U.S. penitentiaries in Atlanta; Leavenworth, Kan.; Lewisburg, Pa.; Lompac, Calif.; and Terre Haute, Ind. Two new federal prisons opened last year, but statistics were not yet available for them.
Ten inmates were slain in the five prisons last year, compared with a total of nine during the previous two years.