A year ago when a team of United States corrections officials agreed to put on bulletproof vests and brave gunfire to help rebuild Iraq's decimated prison system, they never guessed that their work in that country would come into question.

As news about abuse of Iraqi prisoners by military police and others at the Abu Ghraib prison has come to light in recent weeks, concerns have been raised about the backgrounds of those corrections team members who made recommendations about how Iraq should build and man its prisons.

"Our mission was to rebuild and help the Iraqis operate their own prisons to support an emerging criminal justice system," said Lane McCotter, a former head of corrections in Utah and Texas and a member of the team that was working for the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program in Iraq last spring and summer. "It was miraculous what we were able to complete in this short period of time in such a difficult working environment."

In a matter of a few short months the team, which was led by William Irvine of Great Britain and also included United States correctional consultants Lane McCotter, Larry Dubois, Terry Stewart, Gary DeLand, Gord Holloway of Canada and Kenneth Grant of Great Britain, was able to assess 21 of the country's 151 prisons, staff several of them and create a plan for bringing many others online under Iraqi supervision and control.

What made their work difficult was that the prisons had been looted, trashed and burned, documentation had been destroyed that would have indicated who ran the facilities and how they were operated, squatters had taken up residence in some facilities and on top of all that, the regions in which they were working were considered highly dangerous.

The military police in charge of securing these correctional facilities also worked under difficult conditions - especially those at Abu Ghraib, which is where much of the alleged abuse of prisoners by the 800th Military Police Brigade took place.

"There are some guys who got mortared every third night. These kids did a hell of a job. They were 72nd MP Company out of Las Vegas. Now these guys are taking some real hits. Now everyone seems to be painted with the same brush. It destroys the good work of the people who have worked very hard to turn Iraq into a working nation," said Gary DeLand, corrections consultant and former corrections director for Utah.

"One of the proudest things I ever did was going over there," he said.

Although questions have been raised about inmate lawsuits, investigations and other allegations against some of the team members before they ever stepped foot in Iraq, these corrections leaders are fiercely proud of what they were able to accomplish and at the same time realistic about what it is like to run a correctional department in the U.S. - or anywhere for that matter.

It is likely that good administrators can be caught in investigations and lawsuits in corrections, they say.

"If you've been in corrections for at least three weeks, you've had at least two lawsuits filed against you," said Larry Dubois, former head of the Massachusetts Department of Corrections and a former Bureau of Prisons regional administrator.

Dubois said he once had the distinction of being listed by a major Boston paper as being the individual with the most lawsuits filed against him in the state.

From this perspective, the team members recently clarified their role in Iraq last year and commented on the growing abuse scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad in interviews with The Corrections Connection.

Below are their thoughts on their work and the current situation.

Q: One of the team's main goals in Iraq was to set up the prison system. What were some of the difficulties that your team encountered?

DeLand: One of the biggest ones was force protection requirements. If you are in the U.S. and if you have to do something, you get in the car and [go]. There, to drive some place, force protection requirements were that you had to have two armed vehicles escorting you. If two of us wanted to get something done, one of us had to give up what we were doing to go with the other one.

I was shocked to look back and see how much we had accomplished.

We were stopped on the highway often. Once you were outside it was considered the red zone. It was 130 degrees weather and being under the gun to get things done, we worked seven days a week. We didn't take days off.

Dubois: The primary problem was that almost every institution we visited had been looted totally. They took plumbing, electric wires, fans, air conditioners. What you had was four walls. To bring the institution back, you had to rehabilitate the whole thing. The only institution that was secure was Abu Ghraib; it had some cells and cellblocks and steel doors and Folger Adams locks. Everything else was open dormitory style.

For Deland, who arrived in late June, just as two of the team members were leaving, the challenges also had to do with a change in mission.

DeLand: Originally they talked about having six people on the ground [in Iraq] with 60 to 90 support personnel. But, by the time I got there, they had five people and I would have been six. The Canadian member went home, then two of our team members went home, then it was me and Lane [McCotter]. Then all of a sudden I was the only person left who was responsible for prisons and I had 8-10 persons (MPs) under me. We worked on punch lists [for the reconstruction of prisons]. I had a clerk in the office and she handled our files. Then we had to set up a personnel system. They didn't know how to hire or keep track of people. I had an MP put that together for me.

The original plan was to do assessments of all facilities. But when we got there, they changed the game and said you need to get the facilities up. We have all these people out there and we need a place to put them. We were supposed to house those who committed crimes against Iraqis.

There was also confusion about who was being housed in these facilities.

Dubois: The problem was even when we started to try to rebuild the jail in Baghdad and got it online and Terry [Stewart] and Lane [McCotter] were working on Abu Ghraib, we couldn't determine what the population was made up of and who were political prisoners and who were felons. Saddam had let everyone loose. The only people who were being rounded up [when we were there] were looters and people carrying firearms.

Q: From your interview with The Corrections Connection in January, you mentioned the staff needed training. What was your team able to put together?

McCotter: Our team worked daily with the military to provide security at the prison sites as we stood them up; they provided convoy security escorts for us to get us to the prison sites we were assessing and standing up --- when we could get them.  Most of the time, in Baghdad, we were on our own.  They also helped us with training the Iraqi correctional officers we recruited to operate the prisons as we stood them up. These were great soldiers and they helped us tremendously. At no time, however, did our team train or supervise the military's detention operations they were involved in while we were trying to get Iraqi prisons, run by Iraqis, back into operation to lighten the military's detention load. 

DeLand: There was a police academy [in Baghdad] across from the Al Tasferat detention center. We talked them into giving us some rooms and we turned it into a corrections academy. I had two MPs with Bureau of Prisons experience [under me]. One was a captain in an MP detachment and the other was a first sergeant. Both had worked at Terra Haute [in Indiana] and were highly professional. I gave them the job of setting up the corrections academy. On my computer hard drive I had hundreds of lesson outlines. I told them to take these, pare them down to where they were useful to this country and then we had it converted to Arabic. We had two [training] books one written in Arabic and one in English. Then we found people with a training background to teach alongside an MP.

There was a lieutenant who agreed to loan us two sergeants and another [from their MP brigade] and they were our primary instructors. We had a great team. These MPs were our trainers and none of these people were involved in the Abu Ghraib [scandal.] They were from Indiana.

We had seven graduating classes [of Iraqi corrections officers] and four classes in progress due to graduate in the week I left.

Dubois: What we tried to do was get Iraqis inside the jail that we brought online in Baghdad, which held around 500 inmates. It was staffed at the start with American MPs and Iraqi staff. The institution at Al Hillah [south of Baghdad] was going to be all Iraqi staff. I was fortunate that the warden and all the staff at Al-Hillah had stayed in touch and had gone back to the institution even though it had been looted. They were able to protect it.

Training for other staff was done remotely.

DeLand: We did our training program on disk and with an Iraqi colonel. The MPs worked with him to train at Al Hillah; they were too far away [to come to the academy in Baghdad.]

At the time I left, Al Hillah, Al Tasferat and Russafa prison [in Baghdad] were supposed to have Iraqi staff, but MPs were still there [providing added security]. In Iraq you point your guns out to make sure people aren't shooting in at you. The Iraqi staff were doing all the heavy lifting.

We [also] took a busload or two of people we had trained in the academy who we were going to use to run Abu Ghraib for the dedication ceremony. (Days before the team left Iraq.) We look those who were supposed to be our new staff out there. But by the time [we] had left, none of them ever had the chance to work out there.

Q: Can you compare this training to the kind of training officers in the U.S. would receive?

DeLand: What we decided was they needed six weeks of training, but we didn't have that. We decided to work them for a month and then bring them back for three more weeks of intensive training. First they needed to know how to search a prisoner properly and what happens if a person takes a shoe off and waves it at you. (In Iraq this is a sign of disrespect.) In class, everyone's hands would go up and they'd say, 'You beat him up.' Then you'd say, 'What about another solution.' You had to teach them you have to give them humane treatment and how to use use-of-force without hurting someone. We did a lot of role-playing and practical training. It was necessary. If you demonstrated it and critiqued it, they would see. We'd lose people out of each class, but by the time we got to the end of the training, they were so devoted to the people who were training them.

Was it what you get at the Utah Department of Corrections? Were they getting 14 weeks [of training]? No. But, I just gave a deposition in a Florida case where they had a guy who worked in a [private] prison and hadn't been trained yet. There they can go so many weeks on the job before they had been trained. In Iraq we had more training than that.

Dubois: It was the same training for three days in a row. We concentrated on the rights of prisoners, the fact that they couldn't be beaten and tortured and on treating people as humanely as possible. Torture was common. Almost in every other facility and many of the jails they had a section that was used for torture or hanging.

We also had plans to reinforce that training - we were trying to centralize it at Baghdad.

Q: How did the time constraints and the volume of work that needed to be done affect the task of bringing these prisons up to par?

DeLand: Let's take Abu Ghraib for example. I was called to a meeting to complain because there was no medical facility there [for the inmates]. There were rooms for the doctors but no equipment. I was tasked with taking the "sewing area," which was a small courtyard with teeny rooms. We wanted, for $30,000 or $40,000, to refurbish that. I got the folks who helped do that building. 

We had three weeks to build it and we had stacks of cash. The Iraqi construction crew worked 24 hours a day and doubled the crew size [to do it.] We had crews that ranged from old men to 5 year-old boys. There was no OSHA and none of the things we have here. The 5 year-old's father was a welder. Two 12 to 14 year-old boys worked steel and the 5 year-old moved scrap. No matter where you went the Iraqis were fast workers. They have an incredible capability to make things work. I had a hard rule that [they were to be paid on time]. It was cash on the barrelhead.

There were 25 rooms in the wing. They were putting lead in the walls for the x-ray unit. A week later they had plastered the walls and when I left Iraq, it was 85 percent done.

Q: How close to American prisons did the Iraqi ones get?

Dubois: You are talking apples and oranges. At Al Hillah, we wouldn't have designed an institution like that. It was all open units. They only had 12 toilets and 12 showers; they were centrally located, not in units. There's no way we'd design something like that here.

We decided you could house two people in so many square feet. [Ranging from 6'x 8' to 9'x 9' per cell] That's how we determined how we would house the inmates. We decided that would be a humane square footage. We went through all the institutions we visited and used those figures to plug in numbers.

Q: What was the state of affairs with the prison system when the team left? Who was to be housed in these prisons? Who was in charge?

Dubois: It had come a long ways. You have to realize all the records were destroyed; every inmate record had been burnt or taken away. We couldn't make any heads or tails out of the old system because we didn't have anyone we could call on. No one would claim they had been in a position of authority. We were making it up as we went along.

What we were trying to do was create an overall Iraqi prison system with an official in charge. Our assumption was these would be Iraqis. We ended up coming up with a schematic with a person in charge [of each facility] and then people who reported to him or her. I gather it hasn't happened yet. But I know we had field facilities management with a prison director, a deputy director and on down. We gave them grades. We ended up staffing that department that would be centralized and then putting people in detention facilities themselves.

When I was leaving we had a person in charge of Al Tasferat and at Al Hillah. I had a person in charge that was an Iraqi and I was going to utilize the military to provide assistance around the clock. One or two military MPs would be overseeing [the institution] with an interpreter. That was necessary because people revert back to old habits very quickly.

Q: Can you talk about the recommendations the team made before you left Iraq?

Dubois: Our primary mission was to try to bring a few facilities on line as quickly as we could and then write a paper which went into [Coalition Provisional Authority Administrator] L. Paul Bremer and then to D.C. to say what we thought the system should look like. We tried to use existing facilities or those that had existed in the past and give cost estimates for what it would mean to bring them to manageable levels.

At Al Hillah, for example, when Saddam let everyone go it had 3,500 inmates in it. My recommendation was that we put 750 inmates in it.

We also recommended that at least two individuals be placed in each of the facilities to help supervise [and assist with] any of the problems they might have. They would be civilians like we were with some background in corrections. In many cases we would put ex-wardens in facilities. We have no idea if that happened. We asked for 53 positions, which included some medical people and other things. We covered all areas of the correctional environment.

McCotter: After we completed this report, we labored 7 days a week trying to make it all happen.  When Gary [Deland] joined us in late June (and Terry [Stewart] and Larry [Dubois] departed around July 1st) we were able to get things pulled together. 

The 61-page report outlines multiple recommendations that included centralizing the country's prison system under one department, selecting an Iraqi administrator of the department, instituting professional training for re-hired and new corrections officers that emphasizes human rights and a free society, creating a master plan for building new prisons and replacing old ones, creating operating budgets for each institution, and implementing a Correctional Advisor Program that includes advisors from other countries to assist the new correctional department. It also includes short-term, intermediate and long-term plans for bringing the country's facilities back in operation.

The team is unclear how much progress has been made to implement this plan. One part they know for sure has not been implemented is the plan for Abu Ghraib prison, which was the location of the military abuse scandal.

McCotter: Gary [Deland] and I held a ceremony at the Abu Ghraib prison with our bosses and our Iraqi counterparts on or about Aug 29, 2003, with the press and numerous VIPs to show and tour the first two cellblocks, 400 cell beds. These were the first and only prison beds we had stood back up that could house maximum-security dangerous inmates.  We had the cells prepared and on display that day with bunks, mattresses, health and comfort items, and even prayer rugs.  A lot of the footage you now see on TV of the Abu Ghraib prison was probably shot that day.

Under the old regime, inmates were not given bunks, or anything else, in their cells.  Our goal was to show the Iraqis how inmates should and must be humanely treated while incarcerated. 

Two days after this ribbon cutting ceremony, I took Gary [Deland] to the airport to return home.  I departed two days later. None of our replacements had arrived.  No inmates were housed in the Abu Ghraib prison [the 400 cells] when we departed.

The renovations on the remaining 2,700 beds, the food service area, and the medical infirmary areas were also still under way and not scheduled for completion until the end of the year, 2004. 

Our team had always intended the facility, once renovated, to be operated by Iraqis we recruited and trained, not the military. The 400 beds were part of our 'Intermediate Plan' and the remaining 2,700 beds were part of our 'Long Term Plan'.  Evidently, the military (800th MP Brigade) took the 400 beds over and moved their dangerous HVDs (High Value Detainees) into this area shortly after Gary [Deland] and I departed. Neither Gary nor I had anything to do with the military detainee operations.  Our mission was to rebuild and help the Iraqis operate their own prisons to support an emerging criminal justice system.

Q: Can you talk about the abuse scandal and its relation to your work and the custody culture?

DeLand: The only set of recommendations that would have any impact on what happened [had to do with the leadership of Abu Ghraib.] At the dedication ceremony I introduced an [Iraqi] general, General Juma Zamel, who I had promoted and announced he would run four facilities and when Abu Ghraib opened, he would run that too. I had him up on that stage. Then Lane [McCotter] had said we were going to promote the captain who was running the corrections academy to run it. Lane was told that that wouldn't happen.

With Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski (head of the 800th Military Police Brigade) not allowing the people we trained to be put in place, she took the people out who could have kept that [abuse] from happening.

I don't think the Iraqi presence ever got in. We knew they wouldn't be opening for a few weeks but we wanted them to participate in the ceremony; it was an honor for them.

Dubois: It boggles my mind that they would take pictures. What kind of thinking is that? Convict yourself? It appears maybe two things happened: they were given a green light to do that [but] who gave it to them, I have no idea or there was a total lack of supervision and they went off on their own and did what they felt like doing.

Abu Ghraib is in the middle of nowhere. The first time I drove there, I went with a military group. We had safari vehicles and military in front and behind us. We were all armed. We had to drive by this school and they started throwing rocks at us. [The prison] is not liked. Because we have gotten it up and running, they threw mortars in there on a daily basis. The military is living in an environment that is pure hell.

DeLand: When you are over there, it is a different world. It is a survival world. You probably have people over there that have never done these things here. When you live in that environment, your values are harder to hold onto. Just the driving instructions are indicative of this. They told us 'If you are in an accident, don't stop. Keep driving.' You are living in a survival mentality. When you live there it is very much us, or them. I'm sure a lot of those guys thought [this.]

The sad part is that maybe half of the people [Iraqis] in there weren't guilty of anything but were there because of the way they were picked up. You could get them in [to detention] but you couldn't get them out [as easily.] Add to that poor leadership of the 800th MP Brigade. The difference between them and others was palatable.
You need strongly enforced leadership. You have to be incredibly disciplined, have a command presence and with the absence of leadership at the top, what's left is the non-coms - noncommissioned officers.

Resources:

To read the team's previous interviews with The Corrections Connection go to:

http://database.corrections.com/news/results2.asp?ID=9184
and
http://database.corrections.com/news/results2.asp?ID=9298