- 3 years ago
Patrol dogs are being used to attack prisoners in the US, leaving some scarred for life. Exclusive reporting from Insider reveals that the same people who introduced dog programs at several US prisons went on to advise at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
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00:00 This dog is being trained to attack.
00:04 "Get your dog!"
00:05 "Good job, buddy. Good boy."
00:07 "We want to train a dog to where we can take out people."
00:13 "Hands behind your back!"
00:15 These kinds of dogs often go on to work with police.
00:19 Or they end up in jails and prisons.
00:22 "Get your dog!"
00:24 "Get your dog!"
00:26 The dog going into a cell, to me that's a human rights violation.
00:39 All I could hear was a crunch.
00:42 And the dog was on my leg, just chewing on it.
00:45 And all I could do was just lay on my stomach and continue to be attacked.
00:49 Linwood Mattias was bitten inside his cell.
00:53 In what's believed to be the only country in the world that uses attack-trained dogs this way.
00:59 The United States.
01:01 "Dog bites to the leg and upper torso and arms."
01:06 "File O-7."
01:08 "Replacing the offender in five-point restraints and ISO."
01:11 Some prison staff told us they need dogs.
01:17 They provide unbelievably positive impact to staff and inmate safety.
01:23 I never fully recovered.
01:25 I mean, I spent five years in a wheelchair.
01:29 Five years in a wheelchair.
01:32 These things are very ferocious.
01:35 They see anybody except that handler as a threat.
01:37 You're not the handler, so you know, you're fair game.
01:41 You feel them like shaking you.
01:44 The only thing they do is what they're trained to do.
01:47 You know what I'm saying? Like chew you up.
01:49 We looked at some of the U.S.'s highest security prisons.
01:54 We heard from bite victims,
01:56 former correction officers,
01:59 and people who have called the shots.
02:02 Hi, this is Hannah Beckler calling from Insider. I'm a reporter.
02:06 And we pored over thousands of documents and images.
02:10 I found this really shocking connection between U.S. state prisons
02:13 and the abuse that occurred in Abu Ghraib in 2003.
02:16 We wanted to figure out what is the true cost of using dogs in prisons.
02:21 Call them.
02:23 And why are so many states still doing it?
02:26 [phone ringing]
02:31 Hello, this is a prepaid debit call from Red Onion State Prison.
02:37 To accept this call, press zero.
02:40 They use it to rush you.
02:43 They use it to intimidate you.
02:45 They use it to do everything.
02:47 It's animalistic.
02:48 It makes you look at that animal totally different.
02:52 It's always on my mind.
02:53 My skin was just tearing and tearing and tearing.
02:57 I was in so much pain.
02:58 Your legs just start to go numb.
03:00 It's ugly, to be honest with you. I wish I could scream.
03:04 Dogs in here do become savages and weapons to hurt us.
03:10 Michael Edwards was attacked by dogs twice on November 27, 2018.
03:19 He introduced this footage in a court case that was settled in January 2023.
03:25 Can you walk?
03:26 Yeah, I think so.
03:28 Michael can't discuss it, but he did give Insider permission to share these videos.
03:33 Which show staff tending to his bite wounds.
03:36 Are you it?
03:37 Michael struck an officer just before the first dog bit him.
03:43 He said in his complaint that officers beat him and called him the N-word.
03:49 Soon after, another officer commanded a second dog to attack.
03:54 You're going to be placing the five points in front of you.
03:58 The dogs bit him in at least four places, including on his back.
04:03 And for the next 16 hours, Michael was strapped down and held in this cell.
04:11 Using dogs to attack or intimidate incarcerated people is legal in at least 12 states.
04:21 Insider confirmed that eight have used them in recent years.
04:26 So there were two high-profile lawsuits that came out of Virginia.
04:29 I wanted to figure out how often this was actually happening,
04:32 because they must be documenting these attacks.
04:34 Like in this video.
04:36 Officers in Oregon are actually snapping pictures.
04:40 But Virginia wasn't handing over any bite reports.
04:45 So Insider decided to sue for them.
04:48 Turns out Virginia recorded hundreds of attacks over six years.
04:53 That's far more than any other state.
04:56 Arizona ranked second in number of attacks, and had only 15 over the same period.
05:02 Out of all the places we looked at, we tracked the most bites at this high-security prison in Virginia, Red Onion.
05:10 On March 15, 2017, a fight broke out around dinner time.
05:18 Officers ordered everyone to the ground.
05:22 Everybody complied.
05:23 And I'm the only one that got attacked.
05:26 And the dog was on my leg.
05:28 With my leg way up in the air.
05:31 With his mouth wrapped around, right here.
05:34 And the police said, "Yee-haw, get him boy, get him boy."
05:39 And bad enough, they already treated us like animals in cages.
05:43 We're a bunch of sheep in there.
05:45 And the dogs keep us in line.
05:50 In the end, Linwood needed three surgeries and 42 stitches.
05:55 I was handcuffed and shackled to a bed.
05:59 The surgeon kept telling me, "You're not going to be able to walk again."
06:03 And I'm telling him, "Yeah, I am."
06:05 He was released from prison in 2022.
06:09 You know, a lot of times I don't even want to look at my leg.
06:12 It's like reliving it every day all over again.
06:16 According to court records and medical reports,
06:19 many bite victims suffer from panic attacks,
06:22 depression, and PTSD for months, even years after.
06:27 I still ain't getting no sleep.
06:30 I spend more time thinking about what happened to me in prison
06:33 than I think about the real world.
06:35 Most prisons that use dogs today began doing so in the 80s and 90s.
06:44 At the time, the war on drugs was heating up.
06:47 Sentences were getting harsher.
06:50 Officers were using more modern weapons against prisoners,
06:54 like tasers and pepper spray.
06:57 And increasingly, something with a much longer history.
07:02 Dogs.
07:03 This is not a new thing that's happening.
07:06 Tyler Perry traces the history of weaponized dogs
07:09 all the way back to colonial times.
07:12 He explained how the practice was later adopted on plantations.
07:16 Many people did believe that dogs could see race
07:20 and that they could be trained to solely hunt and attack Black bodies.
07:25 So the dogs are both psychological terror,
07:29 but they're also a very literal presence upon the plantations
07:32 to remind people to not even think about attempting to run away
07:36 because if they're caught, the dog could either significantly injure them
07:41 or in some cases maul them to death.
07:43 That mentality of the use of dogs for racialized terror
07:48 is reverberated even after slavery ends.
07:51 Dogs are being used in prisons that are being built throughout the South.
07:56 Songs become written about dogs.
07:58 There's actually one song that's directly called the "Bloodhound Blues."
08:02 ♪ Bloodhound, bloodhound ♪
08:05 ♪ Bloodhounds are on my trail ♪
08:09 You keep going within all of these different areas of history
08:14 to where you get to 1963 with Birmingham.
08:17 In one notorious episode,
08:20 officers used dogs on Black teenagers who were protesting segregation.
08:25 The struggle in the states between the races has always been bloody,
08:30 but it has been one-sided.
08:32 The Negro has been doing most of the bleeding.
08:36 A hundred years ago, they used to put on a white sheet
08:39 and use a bloodhound against Negroes.
08:41 Today, they have taken off the white sheet and put on police uniforms.
08:44 They've traded in the bloodhound for police dogs,
08:47 and they're still doing the same thing.
08:49 You know, up in these mountains, there's a lot of racism up there.
08:54 What you read in the internet about Red Onion was actually happening.
08:59 Racism and dogs attacks.
09:03 They use racial terms even when the dog is not present.
09:07 They'll walk past your door, call you the N-word.
09:10 In a number of cases we looked at,
09:13 men reported being racially abused during or after their attacks.
09:18 I've spoken with current or former inmates in Virginia facilities,
09:22 including five at Red Onion,
09:24 who said they were subjected to racist abuse.
09:27 They said that the N-word was used,
09:29 or a handler referred to dogs liking, quote, "dark meat."
09:32 Do you have any response to these allegations?
09:35 I'm not aware of any situations of that nature.
09:39 All of our canine handlers wear body cameras,
09:42 so this video and audio is recorded,
09:44 and, you know, that's certainly a protection for them
09:48 and for the inmates as well.
09:50 We made a public records request for those body cam videos,
09:55 but the Virginia Department of Corrections denied it.
09:59 Rick White runs Red Onion State Prison.
10:02 Prior to 2011, that's when the canine program began at Red Onion.
10:06 Inmates were largely held in individual settings.
10:10 We now have 11 general population pods.
10:12 The canine programs allowed that to happen
10:15 so we could safely move groups together.
10:17 I wasn't able to find any academic studies
10:21 that assess the efficacy of using patrol dogs in correctional settings,
10:25 so I'm curious what information or training informs
10:29 your use of patrol dogs at Red Onion State Prison.
10:31 I also am not aware of any academic studies.
10:33 Just my professional observations and workings of the prison.
10:39 There have been inmates fighting, assaulting each other.
10:42 That won't stop with staff presence, with staff commands.
10:46 Can you tell me what specifically the patrol dogs do
10:49 to facilitate this level of safety?
10:51 Obviously, staff and inmates know that they're there.
10:53 You can see them.
10:55 And it provides them an element of safety,
10:58 knowing that the canines are there to intervene
11:01 or to reduce a person's thoughts of maybe participating in unwanted behavior.
11:07 Almost a decade before Red Onion introduced its program,
11:13 the U.S. was internationally condemned for torturing prisoners,
11:18 sometimes with dogs.
11:20 Hundreds of photographs surrounding the incident of abuse at Abu Ghraib.
11:26 The abuse was far more widespread than we were initially led to believe.
11:30 MP dog handlers were subjecting two adolescents to terror from the dogs
11:41 for the purposes of playing a game.
11:44 The U.S. military decided to introduce dogs at Abu Ghraib in 2003
11:49 because they had proven effective at Guantanamo Bay.
11:53 And the eight private contractors the U.S. hired to help set up the prison at Abu Ghraib
11:59 were all high-level prison officials who had started or supervised dog programs
12:05 in U.S. state prisons.
12:07 There was Lane McOtter.
12:10 He started the New Mexico prison system's first patrol dog program
12:14 as the cheapest security the state will ever buy.
12:17 Gary DeLand started the Special Operations Unit in Utah
12:20 that used dogs for cell extractions.
12:23 Terry Stewart authorized the pilot program that started using attack-trained dogs
12:29 for cell extractions in Arizona in 1997.
12:32 The list goes on.
12:34 Dogs were used for interrogations to "exploit the Arab fear of dogs,"
12:40 according to government reports.
12:42 But unlike at Guantanamo, dogs here were often un-muzzled,
12:47 which the military later said was against protocol.
12:51 These two dogs seen here bit a prisoner right after these photos were taken.
12:58 Eventually, two military dog handlers were found guilty of abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib.
13:04 The private contractors denied any knowledge of abuse.
13:09 And most of them went right back to work at prisons in the United States
13:14 or as prison consultants.
13:16 Steve Kennaway, a commander of an army unit stationed at Abu Ghraib,
13:22 eventually became the superintendent of this maximum-security prison in Massachusetts.
13:28 He was in charge when a dog attacked a man named Dionisio Paulino outside his cell.
13:34 [dog barking]
13:39 The incident is now being investigated by a federal grand jury.
13:43 [dog barking]
13:45 It was a sharp turn for a state that had ended this kind of dog use years earlier,
13:51 back in 2006.
13:53 "Yeah, come on."
13:54 "I am absolutely opposed to the use of dogs."
13:59 When Dr. Kathleen Dennehy became commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Correction,
14:04 she banned the use of dogs for attacking prisoners.
14:08 "It's like lighting a flame. It's like throwing a match on a situation.
14:12 The reality is the potential is always there for the dog to attack,
14:16 to do some serious injury to muscles, to nerves,
14:20 to literally rip flesh off of someone's body."
14:24 Dr. Dennehy left her post in 2007.
14:28 And it wasn't long before Massachusetts began using dogs inside cells again.
14:35 The state's Department of Correction told Insider they use the dogs for intimidation, not attacks.
14:42 "Please can't act on us in the dog in your fine-tuned bite-tube."
14:45 [dog barking]
14:48 This video shows a cell extraction at a jail in Oregon.
14:52 It was released in 2018.
14:55 [dog barking]
15:04 Public outrage followed, and Oregon banned the use of dogs in cell extractions.
15:10 "Relax! Stop resisting!"
15:16 Insider reached out to all eight prison systems that we've confirmed still actively use dogs.
15:23 Virginia told us its operating procedures are authorized by Virginia law.
15:31 Arizona said it plans to review its protocols.
15:38 And New Jersey said it's been more than a decade since a dog was physically deployed on a prisoner.
15:45 Iowa and Connecticut did not respond to our requests for comment.
15:50 Indiana and Delaware defended the usefulness of dogs and canine industry training standards.
15:56 [dog barking]
15:59 All of these prison systems get their dogs from trainers, like Tri-State Canine Services in Ohio.
16:05 [dog barking]
16:08 Dave Blosser used to be a police dog handler.
16:11 "Hook him, Daddy. I'm gonna have him. Slide out, slide out, slide out. Boom! Let him carry it.
16:15 Move him, move him, move him, move him, move him. Good boy!"
16:19 "This is where the handler is gonna look for opportunity."
16:23 Today, he trains dogs and their handlers to do things like detect drugs.
16:28 "Just like that. Good job. That's heroin. Mark it down for your notes."
16:34 Or track people and take them down.
16:37 "You're gonna come up here with your dog on harness. Your announcement."
16:40 "Police canine! You need to make your presence known! I will release my dog. He will find you and he will bite you!"
16:47 "Decoy is gonna step out of the tree line. He's gonna do the yell, oogie boogie woogie. He's gonna step back in.
16:56 We'll do a three, four count. Boom!"
17:01 And then, there's what Blosser calls "bite work."
17:05 [dog barking]
17:09 "We're trying to build a dog up that's gonna take out a human being, not just a 5'5".
17:15 It's gonna be a 6'5" individual who's jacked up on a drug or something.
17:21 And he ain't afraid of nothing.
17:23 And you can scare the police, but we want it to where you're not gonna scare the canine.
17:29 My dog would take down Satan if he could.
17:33 [dog barking]
17:36 "Good boy. Re-bite. Calm him. Good. Calm him."
17:42 We would advance the dog from a suit to a human by adding what we would call "civil agitation."
17:48 [dog barking]
17:53 The decoy, the bad guy who's being the perpetrator, coming in and agitating the dog.
17:58 So we're constantly frustrating the animal to encourage it.
18:01 [dog barking]
18:03 This dog, named Pablo, is ready to run through a prison scenario.
18:08 But first, his target has to suit up in 35 pounds of padding.
18:14 It's made out of ballistic nylon fabric, thick enough to stop a chainsaw.
18:19 "Soft announcement, then unhook him."
18:21 "Police Department canine, you need to come out and talk to me.
18:25 I will release my dog, he will find you and he will bite you.
18:29 Final warning."
18:31 "Send him."
18:32 "Send him!"
18:33 "Let the dog go work. Praise him."
18:37 "Do we compare the dog as a weapon? Yes, I do. It's an animal. Every dog has teeth."
18:44 [dog barking]
18:47 "Suspect stopped. Pablo, los. Pablo, los."
18:52 U.S. prisons require dogs be trained to bite once and hold to minimize flesh tears.
18:59 But the bite reports Insider obtained through a legal settlement show that dogs often readjust,
19:05 meaning they clamp down a second, third, or fourth time.
19:11 "I got puncture wounds up the top and at the bottom, like closer to my ankle."
19:18 A prison dog bit Xavier Goodwin at Red Onion State Prison on December 17, 2015.
19:25 "It feel like your heart in your leg. That's how it felt. That's the closest I can explain it.
19:29 Like they throbbing like that. Boom, boom, boom, boom."
19:33 Today, he's visiting his therapist, who's helping him deal with PTSD.
19:39 Xavier says he keeps reliving the attack.
19:43 "I still think about it. A lot. A lot of anger. You know what I mean? A lot of anger."
19:52 Officers were breaking up a fight and ordered Xavier to the floor.
19:56 "So I lay down on the ground in a prone position like an airplane.
19:59 My arms flat out to my side on my stomach. I got my chin on the ground. Like this, I'm looking up."
20:07 Then they sprayed him with pepper spray.
20:10 "Once you comply, all that's supposed to stop. They engaged the K9 after I was sprayed.
20:15 I can't see, I can't breathe. And I got him on me, all on me.
20:20 Then I feel him lift the dog up and pin him on my back. And he was just shaking.
20:27 He had all this right here, he was shaking."
20:29 Officers eventually took him to get his wounds treated and started walking him back to his cell.
20:35 That's when Xavier was attacked again.
20:38 "They slammed my head into the steel frame of the door.
20:42 And he's holding my head up against the door. I still can't see.
20:45 And he bring the dog in while in handcuffs and shackles and pin him on my right leg."
20:52 According to Xavier's medical records, in the second attack, the dog left multiple deep puncture wounds on his right leg.
21:00 "They engaged on my right leg more than once. So I got one, two, three, four, and five."
21:10 He says officers left him bleeding for 24 hours before getting his second wound treated.
21:17 "So it was hard to let that go, doing it one day at a time.
21:23 So that's what we're doing now, working on pinning them pieces back together, then we move forward."
21:29 Most of the dogs that end up in U.S. prisons are imported from Europe.
21:38 As puppies, many are trained for sport.
21:42 They compete in elite patrol competitions, like this one.
21:46 Prisons also prefer German Shepherds and Belgian Malinois because they're considered strong and easy to train.
21:54 They score points for attacking a person in a bite suit on command.
21:59 But activists have sounded the alarm on how brutal some other training programs can be.
22:06 A Finnish animal rights organization released this video of a training school in Germany.
22:15 We saw documented evidence that dogs are trained to be so aggressive that they harm themselves sometimes, too.
22:23 And even correction officers say they're scared.
22:28 "They call it primal. It's a real brutality that they're witnessing, and then they have to try to recover for months or years afterwards."
22:42 We visited Brian Mitchell, who worked in two of Virginia's highest security prisons, Red Onion and Keene Mountain.
22:50 "As a staff member, I've come close several times to getting bit by one of those canines.
22:55 It looks at you the same as an inmate, and it just takes a second for that to happen."
23:01 He says he saw dogs bite people at least five to seven times a year at Keene Mountain.
23:07 "I think they're definitely over-dependent on them. These things are very ferocious, very loud.
23:12 From my perspective, I mean, I worked 22 years in the department, there are other ways of handling things.
23:19 They weren't active. They were there to monitor and kind of provide oversight.
23:25 And because of the staff shortages, the canine officers became more deployed, I guess.
23:33 They were utilized in multiple ways, and it just increased.
23:37 The challenges in the facilities, it's just a very tight place.
23:42 Everybody's packed in there. The chances of someone getting bit are really high."
23:52 Insider tracked more than a dozen bites on correction officers in three states over the past couple of years.
24:00 "Correctional staff are conditioned to dismiss a lot of human feelings.
24:05 You have to be wired a certain way, I guess. Thick-skinned.
24:09 But when a dog engages, it's very violent. I mean, it's very traumatic.
24:16 Screaming, fighting, blood. It's just not something you forget."
24:23 "Today you'll never forget. Today you'll never forget."
24:30 In 2017, Xavier filed a lawsuit against the correction officers who were present at his attack.
24:38 "What they did was wrong. I'm going to make them honor what they did to me."
24:45 He says he couldn't get a lawyer, so he had to represent himself.
24:50 "The reality is that the vast majority of these lawsuits, they lose them.
24:56 So inmates rarely are able to seek any justice for the attacks that happened to them."
25:02 "It's hard because I went in prison healthy and came out not healthy.
25:12 But I should never be punished after I've already been punished.
25:18 I'm not saying that being in prison should be a cupcake because we're sent there for our crime or to be punished.
25:25 But we're still human at the end of the day. Treat me like a human."
25:31 [MUSIC]
25:59 [MUSIC]
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