Brutality at county jails?

Electrified batons and shields, beatings, and a concrete ``bed'' with steel rings for shackling at the corners: These are the instruments that a group -- detainees of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service's Miami District -- allege were used on them at the Jackson County Jail in Marianna, northwest of Tallahassee.

Their allegations shed light on an unfortunate practice: INS's shuttling of detainees to contract jails as its own facilities are overrun by the growing numbers of people mandated deportable and locked up under 1996 laws. To its credit, Miami INS moved its 34 detainees out of the Jackson jail within days of complaints surfacing.

Documented in sworn statements, 17 of those INS detainees claim that they were singled out for abuse, from ethnic insults to solitary confinement. Alberto Vera, a Cuban refugee recently released by the INS, described his experiences to The Herald's Andres Viglucci. As punishment for intervening in a fight, Mr. Vera was taken to a ``little hole,'' he said, shocked with an electric shield, sprayed with Mace, and left there for nine hours.

Without an investigation, the extent of brutality cannot be known. But abuse would not be surprising given the INS's practice of sending detainees to county jails. Inmates at the INS's Krome Detention Center have complained of being transferred abruptly, at times in the middle of the night, or without their belongings or legal papers. They are shipped to jails far from lawyers and family, where few speak Creole or other foreign languages. Arbitrary shuffling, poor tracking, and shoddy supervision of such jails are well documented in Florida County Jails: INS's Secret Deten
tion World, a November 1997 report by the Miami-based Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center.

The INS contracts out simply because it doesn't have space for all whom it must detain. In Florida alone, yesterday the INS held 881 detainees total -- 553 more than capacity at Krome, its only facility in the state. Who gets moved when ``is based on bed availability,'' says Miami INS spokeswoman Maria Elena Garcia. So INS detainees in county jails include not only those with criminal convictions, but asylum seekers and people awaiting deportation, too.

The Jackson-jail allegations cry for a thorough investigation by the Department of Justice's inspector general. Moreover, they point to a need for an overhaul in how the INS monitors and uses contract jails. The INS may farm out its detainees, but not its responsibility for their safety and treatment.