Former prison guard shares concerns for proposed ICE facility in Leavenworth
KANSAS CITY, Kan. (KCTV) - William Rogers sat in his living room surrounded by papers. He’d been reading through a 2017 U.S. Department of Justice audit on the place where he once worked in Leavenworth.
The Leavenworth Detention Center (LDC) was run by CoreCivic, one of the nation’s largest private corrections companies. For 30 years, they had a contract with the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) to house people charged with but not yet convicted of federal crimes. Rogers was a corrections officer there from 2016 until 2020.
CoreCivic now wants to open a detention center for ICE in the same building.
“I was assaulted seven times in that four and a half years, three of which required emergency room visits,” he said.
In 2018, an inmate sliced open the back of his head. Later, he said, he was stabbed and couldn’t get help immediately because they were understaffed.
He described numerous attacks on staff and detainees and said his opposition to the proposed ICE detention center is not an immigration issue.
“If we need to detain people in these kinds of facilities, I’m not going to argue that law with you,” he said. “What I am going to argue is that while they’re there, we have to treat them humanely.”
Rogers described staffing shortages that forced them to stop allowing detainees in the yard, an outdoor break they relished, and left counselors unable to alleviate stress.
“So now you’ve taken that away from them because they’re going to have to post up somewhere else. They can’t do that. They’re posted now,” he said of the counselors.
READ MORE: City officials consider proposal for ICE detention in Leavenworth
What he described was people without training as corrections officers filling in for them.
The 2017 DOJ report spoke to that very thing. It said vacancy rates in 2015 ranged between 11 and 23 percent.
“The vacancies also led LDC managers to reassign staff who were not correctional officers to cover security posts instead of performing their normal jobs,” a news release summarizing the 129-page report said.
It also described triple-bunking detainees without approval from the Marshals Service, then hiding it.
“LDC staff uninstalled the third beds bolted to the floor of several cells designed for two detainees and removed the beds from the facility in advance of a 2011 American Correctional Association (ACA) accreditation audit,” it read.
CoreCivic replied that reports critical of their performance represent only “a handful of isolated issues that occurred during a brief period of time.”
“The fact is we operate with significant oversight and ability from our government partners and always have,” a CoreCivic spokesman wrote in a statement.
He noted that CoreCivic’s contract with the Marshals lasted 30 years, until they closed in 2021 due to a Biden order that no federal contracts with private detention companies be renewed.
“The fact that the USMS chose to partner with us at Leavenworth for so long is a testament to the quality of service we provided there,” it continued.
Rogers is skeptical.
“At the end of the day these people deserve to be housed in a safe, respectful, humane way,” Rogers said. “And Core Civic did not do that prior, and I do not believe that they can come back and perform at a higher level now, at that facility. It’s that simple for me.”
KCTV5 asked CoreCivic how they plan to stay fully staffed this time.
They cited a competitive wage of $28.50 per hour. That’s more than the $21 per hour Rogers recalls. They also listed benefits that include medical, dental, vision, a 401 (k) match, an EAP and a tuition assistance fund.
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