Jail should be unpleasant, but not torturous

Lt. Stephen Perkins, president of the corrections officers union at the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Detention Center, tells us that jail isn’t a great place.

And it’s not meant to be, it’s meant to hold people against their will.

But that doesn’t mean it’s a place where guards put a 4-foot-11-inch female inmate in a wrist lock and “twist her wrist until she shuts up and stops crying.”

To Perkins, it apparently is perfectly acceptable to use that kind of force — and let’s call it what it is: torture — to get an inmate, like Susie Chavez, to stop yelling, or howling in pain.

That pretty much says it all about the attitude of some MDC officers and their union leaders toward inmates, even those charged with minor crimes.

Chavez was in MDC in September on a drug charge and a warrant for a probation violation stemming from a 2011 case of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

If it wasn’t clear how inmates are treated at the county jail, a video released last week in response to an Albuquerque Journal request under the state Inspection of Public Records Act provides the shocking proof.

The video shows a distraught and crying Chavez being held against a wall while her cell is searched for potential contraband. She is then shocked with a stun gun when she asks the name of the officer behind her. After she fell to the floor, her wrist was twisted and she is sprayed in the face with MACE when she starts banging her head on the floor. The audio is sickening.

The video of the interaction with the guards goes on for at least 45 minutes. After the Journal posted it online, it received national attention.

The officer who gave the command to twist her wrist, Sgt. Eric Allen, is vice president of the jail employees’ union. He has been on paid leave since January, at least partly in connection with this incident.

This isn’t Allen’s first excessive-use-of-force rodeo. In 2008, the county fired him after an allegation of excessive force, but an independent arbitrator ordered the county to reinstate him. According to the arbitrator’s ruling, the county’s use-of-force policy at that time was too confusing, there were “gross discrepancies” in training and Allen’s actions were reasonable. This year, the county came up with a new policy and is training officers on it.

Clearly, that was overdue.

Union boss Perkins defended Allen and other officers in the Chavez case, saying they did nothing wrong. Basically, it’s us against them and there’s more of them, he said.

Being in jail shouldn’t be a picnic, but it shouldn’t be a torture chamber, either.

— Albuquerque Journal