WITNESS
Margaret Winter is Associate Director of the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. She has argued and won a prisoners' rights case in the United States Supreme Court (Young v. Harper, 520 U.S. 143 (1997)). For the past three years, she has been involved in the National Prison Project's special initiative to investigate and challenge conditions resulting in prisoner rape. She is lead counsel in a case involving sex slavery in a Texas prison, which resulted in the first federal appellate court decision recognizing the equal protection rights of gay prisoners not to suffer discrimination on the basis of their sexual orientation (Johnson v. Johnson, 385 F.3d 503 (5th Cir. 2004)). In collaboration with Holland & Knight, she brought a class-wide challenge on behalf of Mississippi Death Row prisoners to the conditions of confinement, resulting in a sweeping injunctive that was largely affirmed by the Fifth Circuit (Gates v. Cook, 385 F.3d 503 (5th Cir. 2004)).
She was the recipient in 2000 and 2001 of grants from the American Foundation for AIDS Research and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, to inform state policy in Mississippi and Alabama — the only two states that categorically segregated prisoners with HIV and excluded them from educational, vocational and rehabilitative programs. As a consultant to task forces in both states, she helped prepare reports and recommendations that resulted in an end of HIV prison-program segregation in Mississippi in 2001, and in Alabama in 2003.
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STATEMENT
"The pattern of rape and slavery, extortion and beating, continues unchecked because the public is still largely unaware of what goes on behind prison walls, while prison officials remain willfully blind. Instead of making it their job to know, too many officials in too many prisons make it their job not to know. They state with great assurance that rape is not a major problem in their institution — that it occurs only as sporadic, isolated, unforeseeable aberration from the norm — when in fact, as the inmates know all too well, the prison is under the control of predatory gangs…
"Not all prison officials are callously indifferent to violence and abuse in their prisons. Far from it: there are correction employees in every prison system, in every rank in the system from highest to lowest, who are deeply concerned about violence and abuse, who refuse to turn a blind eye to grave problems, and who do everything in their power to ensure that prisoners in their custody are treated with human dignity. One hallmark of such professionals is that they fully understand the importance of record-keeping, of accountability, of self-scrutiny and of scrutiny by outsiders. They understand that the staggering problems of our country's teeming prisons and jails…can be solved only if prisons cease to be a hidden world."
Excerpted from a written statement submitted to the Commission
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Note: Some witnesses submitted documents in addition to the written statement they prepared for the hearing. In most cases, those documents are not available on the Commission's web site.
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