The stabbing of Derek Chauvin raises questions about prisoner safety

The stabbing Friday of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted in 2020 of killing George Floyd, in a special unit at a prison in Tucson, Arizona, is the latest in a series of attacks on high-profile inmates in the troubled, the federal Bureau of Prisons understaffed.

The attack comes less than five months after Larry Nasser, the doctor convicted of sexually assaulting young female gymnasts, was stabbed multiple times in federal prison in Florida. It also follows the release of Justice Department reports detailing the incompetence and mismanagement at federal detention centers that have led to the deaths in recent years of James Bulger, the Boston mobster known as Whitey, and Jeffrey Epstein , who was accused of sex trafficking.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons confirmed that an inmate at the Tucson jail was stabbed Friday around 12:30 p.m., although the agency did not name Mr. Chauvin, 47. The agency said in a statement that the inmate required “life-saving measures” before being rushed to a nearby hospital emergency room. The office of Keith Ellison, the Minnesota attorney general who prosecuted the former police officer, identified the inmate as Mr. Chauvin.

He is likely to survive, said two people with knowledge of the situation who were not authorized to discuss the incident publicly.

On Saturday, the jail remained on lockdown while law enforcement agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, investigated the crime scene and interviewed witnesses. Family visits to the prison have been suspended indefinitely, according to the prison’s website.

The Tucson facility where Mr. Chauvin was stabbed is called a “dropout yard,” one of several special protection units within the Federal Bureau of Prisons system where informants, people convicted of sex crimes, former gang members and former law enforcement personnel are accommodated. , including according to Joe Rojas, who retired earlier this month as president of the union representing workers at the Federal Correctional Complex near Coleman, Florida.

These specialized facilities – including units in Tucson, Coleman (where Mr. Nasser was stabbed) and Terre Haute, Indiana – should provide an additional measure of security for high-profile prisoners. In turn, such inmates tend to avoid conflicts and disciplinary infractions common in the broader prison population for fear of losing their protected status.

“These places have a different prisoner code,” Mr. Rojas said.

It was not clear how Mr. Chauvin, who is serving a sentence of just over 20 years in federal prison after being convicted of state murder and a federal charge of violating Mr. Floyd’s constitutional rights, came to be attacked. It was also unclear why prison officials failed to protect one of the most hated and vulnerable inmates in the 160,000-person federal prison system.

A spokeswoman for the agency did not respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Chauvin, who is white, killed Mr. Floyd, who was black, by kneeling on his neck for nine and a half minutes as he lay handcuffed in the street. The incident sparked the largest protests in a generation and led to calls to reform or dismantle the police.

Mr. Chauvin struck a plea deal with prosecutors in his federal case, in part to serve his sentence in a federal prison that his legal team deemed safer than a state prison. Before his federal deal, Mr. Chauvin served a state sentence in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day in Minnesota.

State prison officials said at the time that Mr. Chauvin was isolated because of concerns about his safety.

Mr Ellison raised concerns about the level of protection for the former officer.

“I am saddened to hear that Derek Chauvin was the target of violence,” Minnesota’s attorney general, who was notified of the attack by federal officials late Friday, said in a statement. “He has been rightly convicted for his crimes and, like any inmate, he should be able to serve his sentence without fear of retaliation or violence.”

Although the specific details of the attack on Mr. Chauvin are not yet known, they appear to fit a pattern of other attacks documented by Michael E. Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general, who has issued two reports in the past year released calling on the Bureau of Prisons to improve procedures and supervision of high-profile prisoners.

Last December, Mr. Horowitz released a scathing 65-page report on Mr. Bulger’s death at the federal prison in Hazelton, W. Va., detailing “deficiencies in staff performance and management; bureaucratic incompetence; and flawed, confusing and inadequate policies and procedures,” allowing inmates to fatally beat the 89-year-old with a padlock hours after he was transferred to the general population.

In June, the inspector general concluded a yearslong investigation into the death of Mr. Epstein, a well-connected financier who was found dead in a cell in 2019 with a sheet tied around his neck, revealing a similar pattern of lax management and missteps came to light.

While the inspector general’s office affirmed the department’s determination that Mr. Epstein committed suicide, the report described a remarkable, sometimes unexplained, sequence of circumstances that made it easy for him to commit suicide. For example, prison staff let Mr. Epstein hoard extra bedding and clothing even though he had previously tried to hang himself.

“The combination of negligence, misconduct and outright shortcomings in job performance documented in this report all contributed to an environment in which perhaps one of the BOP’s most notorious inmates was given the opportunity to commit suicide,” the report said from Mr. Horowitz.

Theodore J. Kaczynski, the man known as the Unabomber who killed three people and injured 23 in a bombing between 1978 and 1995, died by suicide in June at a federal prison medical center in North Carolina.

Mr Nasser, who is serving a sentence of up to 60 years, was attacked by an inmate wielding a homemade weapon in a common area of ​​a specialized protection unit at the US prison Coleman II.

Mr. Bulger, Mr. Epstein and Mr. Nasser were all assigned to the federal prison complex in Tucson at one time or another.

Bureau of Prison officials are struggling to cope with an exodus of personnel — especially among corrections officers and medical staff — who can find higher-paying, less-stressful jobs in the private sector, a factor Mr. Horowitz acknowledged in the Bulger and Epstein reports. In many cases, prison officials are forced to monitor shifts with teachers, case managers, counselors, facilities staff and even secretaries.

Colette S. Peters, the director of the Bureau of Prisons, said in an interview earlier this year that filling vacancies “is our number one priority,” even as she handles a host of other issues, including the sexual abuse of female prisoners and staff, the overuse of solitary confinement and an increase in suicides.

It is not clear whether these issues played a role in the attack on Mr. Chauvin. But Richard Hernandez, a corrections official who is president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3955, which represents Tucson’s workforce, said chronic staffing problems have “had an impact on the overall functioning” of prisons, including in Tucson.

Targeting Mr. Chauvin is likely to increase scrutiny of the agency, even as the national debate over police reform continues to play out.

Shaila Dewan contributed reporting from New York.