A Death in a Florida Prison Goes Unpunished

A Florida state attorney has announced that no criminal charges will be brought against guards involved in the death of...
A Florida state attorney has announced that no criminal charges will be brought against guards involved in the death of Darren Rainey, an inmate at Dade Correctional Institution.PHOTOGRAPH BY VISIONS OF AMERICA / UIG VIA GETTY

In 2013, a Florida inmate named Mark Joiner sent a letter to the Forgotten Majority, a prisoners’-rights organization based in Jacksonville. In the letter, Joiner explained that he had recently been transferred to the Columbia Correctional Institution, in Lake City, from Dade, a state prison forty miles south of Miami, where, he wrote, “I witnessed starvation and other forms of torture being used to control or discipline mentally ill patients.” One method employed was “to place inmates under scalding hot water,” Joiner alleged, a punishment that, on June 23, 2012, “killed inmate Darren Rainey,” who suffered from schizophrenia and died after guards locked him inside a scorching shower for nearly two hours. Joiner indicated that, since his transfer, he had tried to contact Florida law-enforcement agencies, to no avail. “If I’m interviewed I’ll prove to law enforcement that this was intentional,” he went on, adding that guards had ordered him to remove from the shower pieces of skin that had peeled off Rainey’s body.

During the four years since Joiner sent that letter, the abuses inflicted on Rainey and other mentally-ill inmates at Dade have been amply documented, including in a story that I wrote for this magazine a year ago, which showed them being verbally humiliated, beaten, and starved. Last Friday, however, Katherine Fernandez Rundle, the state attorney for Miami-Dade County, announced that her office was ending its investigation into Rainey’s death, and that no criminal charges would be filed against any of the guards. The report, formally titled an “In Custody Death Investigation Close-Out Memo,” found that the cause of death was attributed to schizophrenia, heart disease, and “confinement inside the shower room,” and that “the evidence does not show that Rainey’s well-being was grossly disregarded by the correctional staff.”

In fact, evidence suggests that the well-being of mentally-ill inmates at Dade was grossly disregarded on a regular basis, and that staff members were intimidated into remaining silent about it. A year before Rainey’s death, George Mallinckrodt, a psychotherapist at the prison, was fired after complaining that a group of guards had stomped on a patient in the Transitional Care Unit (T.C.U.), Dade’s mental-health ward. (Mallinckrodt was told that he was dismissed for taking too much time on his lunch breaks.) After another counsellor, Harriet Krzykowski, expressed frustration that inmates in the T.C.U. were repeatedly denied access to the recreation yard, she said that guards started disappearing from the yard while she was on duty there, and delayed opening security gates for her, leaving her unprotected with the inmates. Krzykowski learned of Rainey’s death from nurses who told her that his body was covered in burns so severe that his skin came off at the touch, but, like many of her peers, she said nothing. The climate of intimidation that Krzykowski and other counsellors described is notably absent from the “Close-Out Memo.”

Buried in the report is a statement from a Florida Department of Corrections captain named Darlene Dixon, who, two days after Rainey died, found that the temperature of the hot water in the shower, which could be controlled from the outside, was a hundred and sixty degrees. Yet the guards who escorted Rainey to the shower and left him there for nearly two hours are portrayed as neither malicious nor negligent. They were merely concerned about Rainey’s hygiene, the report concludes, “allowing him to wash himself” after they spotted feces smeared on his body and on the walls of his cell.

State investigators did collect testimony from some critical witnesses, including Harold Hempstead, an inmate whose cell was below the shower and who claimed that, on the night Rainey died, he heard him scream, “I can’t take it anymore!” Hempstead was so distraught that, in 2014, he told the story to the Miami Herald, earning the wrath of several guards, he said, who threatened to place him in solitary confinement. Those threats are not mentioned in the report, which goes to considerable lengths to cast doubt on Hempstead’s credibility, highlighting inconsistencies in the details of his testimony and suggesting that he “tainted” the views of other inmates, including Mark Joiner, who levelled accusations at the guards.

It’s possible, of course, that Hempstead embellished his testimony. But there are also questions about statements made by others cited in the report, including Dr. Emma Lew, a medical examiner who told state investigators that “there were no burns on Rainey’s body.” The autopsy report that Dr. Lew prepared was not finished until January, 2016, and has still not been made public. Her assertion is difficult to square with the reports of Rainey’s peeling skin; as one forensic specialist told the Herald, “skin just doesn’t slough off by itself.” It is also at odds with what Harriet Krzykowski and others heard from nurses, and with an interim report that the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner filed immediately after Rainey died. “Visible trauma was noticed throughout the decedent’s body,” an autopsy technician observed. That report, too, goes unmentioned in the “Close-Out Memo.” (According to the report, Lew contends that the “skin slippage” occurred after Rainey died, which “was consistent with exposure to a warm environment at or around the time of the terminal event.”)

One could argue that a true reckoning of the circumstances of Rainey’s death requires apportioning responsibility more broadly. As I noted in my article, Florida ranks forty-ninth among the states in per-capita spending on community mental-health services. Meanwhile, the number of prisoners with mental disabilities in the state has grown by more than a hundred and fifty per cent during the past two decades. As throughout the country, prisons have become Florida’s dominant psychiatric institutions, warehousing mentally-ill people who often lack access to treatment, and who are frequently arrested for petty crimes. In 2012, Governor Rick Scott contracted out psychiatric services in the state’s prison system to two for-profit companies, whose main interest, many critics maintained, was cutting costs.

Rainey’s death drew national attention to the brutal treatment of mentally-ill inmates in Florida. In 2014, it was reported that the Justice Department would open an investigation, but it has not yet done so and is unlikely to under Attorney General Jeff Sessions. There is still a chance that the “Close-Out Memo” will not be the end of Rainey’s story, however, owing to a federal civil-rights lawsuit filed by his family.

Some time ago, I met Rainey’s older brother, Andre, at the house he once shared with Darren, a low-slung bungalow in east Tampa. They were extremely close, Andre told me. When he first heard that his brother had died, he talked to a prison chaplain and a detective; neither mentioned the possibility of abuse. “I thought he just collapsed in the shower,” he said. Later, when Peter Sleasman, an attorney at a disability-rights organization, told him more about the circumstances, Andre was stunned. Four years later, the shock is still palpable, as is his frustration with the lack of clear answers. “Y’all took him like some type of rat to be experimented on, and you didn’t have the heart to tell me how he died?” he said. “What really happened?”

Andre realizes, he said, that a lawsuit can never fill the hole that Darren’s death created. Nevertheless, he told me, “we need closure,” which, for him, means that whoever was responsible has to answer for their conduct—that someone be held accountable. “I’m like, they did the crime, they need to do the time.”