May 23, 2004 4 min read

WASHINGTON (AP) – Interior Department officials say they believe that several recent deaths in American Indian prisons are the result of natural causes and suicide, not alleged abuses and poor conditions that are the subject of an internal investigation. Dave Anderson, head of the department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs, dismissed a comparison between the allegations involving American Indian prisons under investigation by Interior’s inspector general and the U.S. military’s mistreatment of Iraqi detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison.

“I don’t think there’s any comparison at all,” said Anderson, who said the number of deaths ranged up to fewer than a dozen.

“From what I understand, it’s nothing out of the ordinary compared to what goes on in any other jail system,” he said Friday in an interview with The Associated Press.

“My understanding is that these are all either natural causes or attempted suicide. It isn’t because of some type of abuse, from what I understand.”

Anderson said the Bush administration moved quickly to deal with any problems once he learned of a BIA-funded investigative videotape of the prisons prepared by Ed Naranjo, a retired law enforcement official with the bureau.

“This administration has taken this seriously, and we have reacted immediately on the things that were brought to our attention by this tape,” he said. “What you have here is nothing out of the ordinary, none of which had been done by guards.”

“In any prison environment, you’re going to have a certain amount of improprieties,” he said. “Those are all things that are being investigated.”

Anderson said the videotape came to his attention three weeks after he became BIA administrator on Feb. 2. It showed deteriorating prisons, some more than 30 years old, that had disorganized evidence rooms containing guns, lacked running water or heat and had broken plumbing, he said.

Within a week, Anderson said, BIA created a task force and assigned 100 people to investigate.

It also redirected $6.5 million in its budget to immediate repairs on plumbing, windows, locks and other structural problems.

In 1999, the Clinton administration announced a major tribal law enforcement initiative to improve detention and enforcement on reservations. At least 16 tribes began to build or plan new detention center facilities under the program.

The BIA’s budget for prisons and other detention facilities has since grown from $25.6 million to its current level of $58 million, BIA officials said. President Bush is requesting $65.8 million for the 2005 budget.

The budget for all BIA law enforcement, including the prisons and other detention facilities, grew during the past five years from $95 million to $170 million.

Yet even those budget increases haven’t been enough to meet the growing needs.

“The tribes are growing, and what has happened out there is the aging infrastructure has not kept up with the growing tribes,” Anderson said.

The Interior inspector general, Earl Devaney, is handling the independent investigation into the prison deaths as part of a nationwide look at deteriorating conditions in prisons on tribal lands. The office was tightlipped.

Scott Culver, a senior investigator for Devaney’s office, said Friday, “We’re conducting an assessment on Indian country jails,” but he did not elaborate on the details.

Jails on tribal lands have been operating well beyond their capacity for the past several years.

One jail in six held twice its recommended maximum of prisoners as of mid-2002, according to the latest figures available from the Justice Department.

In all, 2,080 people were being held in 70 Indian jails, detention centers and other correctional facilities.

That marked a 2-percent increase in the number of inmates from the year before.

The jails were operating at 92 percent capacity on average during June 2002. On a peak day that month, 44 jails exceeded their capacity. Thirteen had twice the recommended number of inmates, and three were at four times their capacity.

The Tohono O’odham Detention Center in Arizona was under the most severe strain. On average, the center held more than three times the number of inmates it was designed to accommodate.

Tribal jails were running at 16 percent of capacity, on average, as recently as 1998. But the growth in the number of inmates has outstripped the increase in jail capacity since then.

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On the Net:

Interior Department: http://www.doi.gov

Justice Department: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/jic02.htm