Indian Country Jails Receive Scrutiny
BILLINGS, Mont. – The condition of Indian jails facilities – after damning Department of Justice reports in 2001 and 2002 and a 2003 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report – are still dire.
The 2003 report, titled “A Quiet Crisis: Federal Funding and Unmet Needs in Indian Country,” concluded that “correctional facilities in Indian Country are more crowded than even the most crowded state and federal prisons.”
Native American law enforcement funding increased almost 85 percent between 1998 and 2003, but the amount allocated was so small to begin with that its proportion to the department’s total budget hardly changed.
At the Browning, Mont., Jail, cosmetic improvements last summer included new locks, new paint, new bunks and new security cameras. But Ed Naranjo, who retired in May as head of regional law enforcement for the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), oversees Indian jails spread across six states, including Montana. Naranjo says it didn't make a dent in the infrastructure needs. It was noted that crews patched the plumbing and poured acid on the concrete floors to eat away the chocking stench of urine and feces.
Reviews of Indian jails show half are in poor condition, a quarter are in fair condition, and the remainder are in good condition, according to Bill McClure, acting deputy director with the BIA, who until recently was BIA's program manager for detention.
Earlier this year, Naranjo hired a production company to make a videotape of jail conditions on Montana's reservations, which showed numerous safety and sanitation problems. He sent the tape to head officials at the BIA, where it landed in the hands of David Anderson, the assistant secretary for Indian Affairs in the Interior Department.
A recently released memo stated some of Anderson's immediate changes: Juveniles were no longer to be housed with adults; a new BIA detention office would be formed, taking the jailers' task out of the jurisdiction of local chiefs of police and placing it under the auspice of detention specialists.
Two million dollars was quickly secured for immediate repairs. Within another month he increased that to $6.5 million, augmenting the current $1 million annual Indian jails maintenance budget that covers 74 jails. In Montana, investigators have visited both the Crow and Northern Cheyenne reservations.
Moreover, some jails have been shut down. Teams from the Inspector General's Office of the Interior Department, which launched a full-fledged investigation, began their review in the American Southwest, and in May ordered jailers to close the Mesaclaro Reservation jail in New Mexico. Now, Mesaclaro police will have to contract with off-reservation jails to house inmates until a permanent solution is found.
There are safety issues related to facility conditions, said Darren Cruzan, chief of police on the Crow Indian Reservation near Billings, Mont. When Cruzan closed the doors of the Crow jail last July for three months for repairs, he shipped inmates to Bighorn County Jail and the Northern Cheyenne reservation jail for about $40 per day, or approximately $70,000 for the duration of the emergency repairs.
On July 7, the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs' Indian Country Leadership Summit in Law Enforcement and Corrections convened at the Hyatt Regency in Albuquerque, N.M. Officials said the conference was a significant step toward resolving the problem.
