Cruel and Usual: An Investigation into Prison Abuse at USP Thomson

By The Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs 

Hundreds of people held in the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ (BOP) Special Management Unit (SMU) endured years of unconstitutional and abusive conditions. Those abuses were particularly extreme during the more than three years the program was located in the United States Penitentiary in Thomson, Illinois (Thomson). Over the past 18 months, more than 40 lawyers and legal staff members from the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, Latham & Watkins LLP, Uptown People’s Law Center, and Levy Firestone Muse LLP, investigated the conditions in the SMU at Thomson. During that investigation we collected accounts of extreme physical and psychological abuse from more than 120 people. We also witnessed firsthand abusive and obstructive staff behavior, and saw with our own eyes injuries inflicted by Thomson employees. Guards regularly placed individuals in dangerous four-point restraints for hours, sometimes days, and often without food, water, or access to a toilet. Many individuals reported being beaten and sexually assaulted while in restraints. Guards fastened the restraints so tightly that they caused scars on individuals’ wrists, ankles, and stomachs. This happened so frequently that the resulting scars became known as a “Thomson Tattoo.” In addition to physical abuse, guards subjected people in the SMU to psychological trauma through the use of extended solitary confinement, referred to by the BOP euphemistically as “restrictive housing.”1 In the SMU, solitary confinement involved locking two people in a cell for up to 23 hours a day, a practice known as double-cell solitary confinement…

Washington, DC: Author, 2023. 29p.