DENVER—An attorney alleging mistreatment of mentally ill inmates at the Supermax prison in Florence, Colo., says federal authorities are moving mentally ill inmates in the wake of his lawsuit.
Attorney Edwin Aro told The Denver Post () that the U.S. Bureau of Prisons staff has moved some inmates to a prison in Atlanta.
A spokesman for the Bureau, Ed Ross, told The Associated Press on Monday that a mental health unit in Atlanta was recently activated, but he didn’t know specifics about prisoners who have been placed there.
The Florence prison is dubbed “Alcatraz of the Rockies” and houses Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, Atlanta Centennial Olympic Park bomber Eric Robert Rudolph and many terrorists.
As many as half of the 425 inmates at Supermax are severely mentally ill, said Aro, who is seeking class-action status for a lawsuit filed by seven mentally ill prisoners.
“It’s the worst horror show I’ve ever seen,” said Aro, who is representing a group of inmates. “If you put someone who is already gravely ill in solitary confinement it wrecks them. It turns them into animals.”
U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch has denied a government motion to dismiss the lawsuit. The inmate plaintiffs are in settlement negotiations with prison officials.
Aro said the transfer of some of the mentally ill inmates improved circumstances at Supermax, but he said the agency is far from righting chronic treatment gaps.
In some cases correctional officers are accused of placing sandbags in front of the cells of inmates handling and eating their own feces—trying to block the smell rather than providing medications or treatment, the lawsuit says.
Jack Powers spent nearly 10 years in the “control unit” of Supermax. Powers testified in a prison murder case and has been threatened for doing so, the Denver Post reported.
While at Supermax, Powers repeatedly rammed his head into a metal door frame, bit off both pinky fingers, severed his earlobes and cut off a testicle and his scrotum, Aro said. Powers tattooed his entire body with “avatar stripes,” using a razor blade and carbon paper dust and tried to inject bacteria into his brain by boring a hole through his skull. He slashed his wrists severely enough to fall into unconsciousness.
In 2009, a prison psychological evaluation concluded that Powers did not require inpatient psychiatric treatment. “Considerations that he has some form of psychosis, thought disorder or mental illness are unfounded,” an evaluation said.
Powers was transferred to a prison in Tucson last month.
Aro told the newspaper Powers now receives anxiety and psychotropic medicine, and “it’s almost impossible to describe how much better off he is today.”
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Information from: The Denver Post,
