KGBT Action 4 News via YouTube Police and corrections officers placed the Willacy County Correctional Center on lockdown on Friday in response to the prisoner uprising.
Law enforcement officials and a private contractor are negotiating with a group of pipe-wielding inmates who took over parts of the Willacy County Correctional Center in south Texas on Friday in an effort to reestablish full control of the federal facility.
About 2,000 offenders of the nearly 3,000 housed in the Kevlar tent prison in Raymondville declined to start their work duties on Friday morning in a protest over the facility’s medical care, according to the Associated Press.
The offenders set three of the prison’s 10 housing units aflame, but local authorities surrounded the facility and prevented any inmates from escaping over the prison’s fence, the AP reported.
The U.S. Bureau of Prisons announced Saturday that the agency would move 2,800 inmates to other facilities as a result of damage from the prisoner uprising, and a spokesman for the agency told the AP that agency officials are working with other authorities to “regain complete control” of the prison.
KGBT Action 4 News via YouTube Inmates living in the facility’s Kevlar tents set fire to three of the facility’s 10 such housing facilities, according to the prison’s private operator.
“The situation is not resolved, though we’re moving toward a peaceful resolution,” FBI spokesman Erik Vasys noted, according to the AP.
Offenders “broke through” the prison’s housing structures and streamed into a recreation yard on Friday afternoon, leading authorities to use non-lethal force and tear gas in an attempt to quell the demonstrators, according to a statement on the incident from the prison’s operator, Utah-based Management and Training Corporation, the local Valley Morning Star reported.
Two officers and one inmate are receiving treatment for minor injuries, the statement says.
KGBT Action 4 News via YouTube No prisoners escaped and only minor injuries were reported.
But the mutiny follows earlier accounts of the shortcomings of medical care at the facility, which mostly holds inmates who have been detained because they are undocumented immigrants.
Willacy County inmates’ basic medical problems “are often ignored or inadequately addressed by staff,” according to a 2014 report from the American Civil Liberties Union. The advocacy group interviewed one toothless inmate who hadn’t been given dentures after his teeth were removed at another prison and another offender whose Hepatitis C hadn’t received treatment for two years.
Prisoners went on strike in 2013 to protest the overflowing toilets that had leaked sewage throughout one of the prison’s tents and protested in 2012 when prison officials shut off the facility’s water for two days without providing any drinking water or usable toilets, according to the report.
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