The stabbing of Derek Chauvin: What we know

Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted of killing George Floyd during a 2020 arrest, was stabbed Friday at a federal prison in Arizona, according to the office of Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general.

No details were immediately available on his condition, but one of the people with knowledge of the incident said Mr. Chauvin, 47, survived the attack.

The stabbing was the latest in a series of high-profile security breaches at federal prisons, which have suffered from security and staffing problems for years. Here’s what we know about the attack so far.

Who is Derek Chauvin and what was his sentence?

Mr. Chauvin 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. Before Mr. Floyd’s death, he was an officer with the Minneapolis Police Department for more than 19 years.

In May 2020, Mr. Chauvin, who is white, knelt on Mr. Floyd, who was Black, for nine and a half minutes as Mr. Floyd lay handcuffed and face down on a street corner in South Minneapolis. Mr. Chauvin arrested Mr. Floyd on suspicion of passing a counterfeit $20 bill at a convenience store. Officials determined that Mr. Floyd’s heart and lungs had stopped functioning while officers restrained him.

The killing of 46-year-old Mr. Floyd, a security guard and former rapper, was captured on video and widely seen. The death sparked nationwide protests against police brutality and racism. Three other officers who were at the scene where Mr Floyd was killed were also later convicted of violating Mr Floyd’s rights.

In 2021, Mr. Chauvin was convicted in state court of Mr. Floyd’s murder and sentenced to 22 and a half years in prison. He was also sentenced to 21 years in prison in a separate federal civil rights case in which he pleaded guilty, severely limiting his right to challenge the sentence.

Where did Mr. Chauvin serve his prison sentence in Arizona?

Part of Mr. Chauvin’s plea deal with prosecutors in his federal case was that he would be allowed to serve his sentence in a federal prison, which is generally considered safer than a state prison.

Mr. Chauvin was in a medium-security prison in Tucson that held nearly 400 inmates. The facility is part of a federal correctional complex that also includes a maximum security prison. The complex has a total of almost 1,800 prisoners.

While the prison where Mr. Chauvin was stabbed is run by federal officials, state prisons in Arizona have also had problems.

This year a subdistrict judge issued an order That required the state corrections department to make changes to medical and mental health staffing and conditions did not meet constitutional standards.

What other recent high-profile cases of violence have occurred in federal prisons?

In recent years, the chronically understaffed Federal Bureau of Prisons has seen a series of suicides and violent attacks involving some of the most notorious inmates in its facilities. That includes the stabbing earlier this year of Lawrence G. Nassar, the doctor convicted of sexually abusing young female gymnasts. Mr. Nassar was stabbed multiple times in the chest, back and neck this summer at a federal prison in Florida, where he is serving a 60-year sentence.

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.

In 2018, James Bulger, a Boston mobster known as Whitey, was beaten to death in a federal prison in West Virginia after several management errors and protocol violations left him unattended and vulnerable to attack, the Justice Department’s inspector general found .

A similar environment of dysfunction was pervasive at Manhattan federal prison, where financier Jeffrey Epstein hanged himself in 2019, the inspector general said in a report this summer.

What’s Behind the Staff Shortage at the Bureau of Prisons?

Federal, state and local law enforcement agencies across the country, especially corrections departments, are struggling to hire and retain employees, many of whom have left to take higher-paying, less demanding jobs. That struggle is especially pronounced at the Bureau of Prisons, which houses about 160,000 inmates in 122 prisons and camps, with a workforce of about 34,000 people who often earn less than state and county corrections workers.

The Bureau of Prisons has often relied on teachers, case managers, counselors, facilities staff and secretaries to fill shifts.

About 21 percent of the 20,446 federal corrections officer positions funded by Congress — amounting to 4,293 guards — were unfilled as of September 2022, according to a report in March by the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Justice.

Union officials argue that some recent incidents of violence between inmates could have been prevented with greater staffing levels. They say the depleted workforce has played a role in attacks on staff members, including in 2021, when a Florida prison guard responsible for overseeing more than 100 inmates was attacked with a metal shaft.

The federal prison agency has long been plagued by health and safety problems, physical and sexual abuse, corruption and high turnover in top management.

Colette S. Peters, who took over as director of the Bureau of Prisons in August 2022, has said filling those vacancies was the agency’s top priority. In a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee in September, she discussed steps she had taken to overhaul the system and urged Congress to provide more funding. But Senate lawmakers criticized Ms. Peters for not providing more information on how to fix the system’s problems.

Julie BosmanKatharine Q. Seelye, William K. Rashbaum, Jay Senter, Shaila Dewan and Danielle Ivory contributed reporting.