A video shows a man left for dead in the yard of a South Carolina jail

April 17, 2019, 22:09 GMT

By Laura Strickler, Gabe Gutierrez, Bianca Seward and Natalia Abrahams

COLUMBIA, SC – C & # 39; was December 31, 2017. Allen "AJ" Capers, aged 32, was lying in a pool of blood outside a cell in Turbeville Prison, in South Carolina. According to prison-related incident reports, he was allegedly stabbed several times by two detainees.

According to reports, two guards dragged Capers out into the prison yard and left it while they were working to control the chaos inside. The temperature was 39 degrees.

Reports say the guards radioed the "main control" to say "that medical assistance was needed as soon as possible", but the surveillance video obtained exclusively by NBC News shows Capers on the ground and writhing for half an hour while many guards crossed it.

Twenty-four minutes after the start of the video, another inmate appears on camera and comes to help him. A few minutes later, other inmates arrive with a stretcher, but at this point, Capers has stopped moving.

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At 7:37 pm that night, the South Carolina Department of Corrections tweeted"Following an altercation between detainees in Turbeville, one detainee was killed and eight detainees were sent under off-site medical supervision."

A year and a half later, no one has been charged with murder – a critic of death, according to critics of death, would be the symptom of a penitentiary state system beset by the violence and corruption.

Capers' mother, Debra Dickson, said she would never watch the video of her dying son in the prison yard. "I do not encourage mothers who gave birth to her child to see her child tortured," she told NBC News. "I want to remember my child as I knew him."

Dickson, who lodged a complaint against the state's prison system, said officials had never told him what had happened.

"I want justice for Allen," she said. "I want change by anyone who has the ability to really change it."

The attorney representing the Capers family, Justin Bamberg, is also a member of the state House of Representatives and is campaigning for a comprehensive reform of the penitentiary system.

"There is no excuse for breaking the law," Bamberg said. "But it's not because you're going to prison that you've been sentenced to death."

Following an altercation between detainees in Turbeville, one detainee was killed and eight detainees were sent under offsite medical supervision.

– Service fixes SC (@SCDCNews) January 1, 2018

South Carolina Correctional Services Manager Bryan Stirling admits the system has failed with Capers. "We should have done more to help," he said.

A disturbed system

The South Carolina penitentiary system, which has more than 20,000 inmates in 21 institutions, has made the wrong headlines in recent years.

A riot last April at the Lee Correctional Institution in Bishopville was the biggest riot in a US prison for 25 years. Seven people were killed.

According to state data, at least 21 murders have been committed in the past two years in South Carolina jails and 10 suicides were reported last year.

Lawyers suing on behalf of family members of men killed during Lee's riot told NBC News that guards present during the riot had not been questioned by investigators, leaving some families questioned about the depth of the investigation.

The US prosecutor's office in Colombia said the prison officials' investigation had just ended last week and the charges were not ready. The office said it would participate in any lawsuit, but that the case would be tried by a county attorney.

"It's worse in these southern prisons and, frankly, nobody takes the investigation. [into the Lee riot] seriously, "said historian Heather Ann Thompson, who wrote a book on the uprising of Attica Prison. Prisoners have neither voice nor defenders, and it is really very easy to sweep these stories under the carpet. "

A few weeks after Lee's riots, 14 guards from South Carolina's prison system were charged with accepting bribes and smuggling. Prison officials say that to be safe, the system needs 609 new correctional officers but can only hire 225 more.

According to a correctional system spokesperson, the average starting salary for being a caretaker is $ 34,000, with an average of $ 5,000 for overtime.

"The turnover rate is so high because people do not feel safe," said Stan Burtt, a former guard at the Lieber Correctional Institution, in Dorchester County, northwest of Charleston. He added that the situation worsened when longer sentences came into effect: "Controlling this individual becomes very difficult because he has nothing to live on."

A recently retired Lee Correctional Institute officer who did not want to be identified told NBC News that she did not even know if more guards would make a difference, "Really, to be honest with you, I can not say there was more [correctional officers] there, the problem could have been avoided. She said: "The detainees who enter the system are very aggressive. "

And she said the guards were often outnumbered: "There is sometimes an officer working on both sides of a dorm and it's very dangerous."

Lawyers who sued the DOC said that prior to Lee's riots, most prison doors had individual keys instead of a more modern electronic lock system.

Incident reports from the Turbeville Correctional Institution on the day of Capers' death describe a chaotic and disturbing scene with "criminals running with improvised guns, hocks, seats, fire extinguishers". While an officer was crossing the wing near the place where Capers had been stabbed, he wrote that he had seen "bloody handprints on the shower doors and blood." on the walls entering the unit ".

The reports include the testimony of a guard stating that a confidential informant would have told him the name of someone who could have unleashed the violence, but did not say that the person had attacked Capers. and also indicates that prison officials confiscated what they considered to be the murder weapon. The reports also show that all of Capers' belongings were stolen after his death.

Prison officials said that an investigation into Capers' death at Turbeville Prison was underway and that the incident had been postponed to a disciplinary investigation.

Contraband mobile phones

Bryan Stirling, director of the state's penitentiary department, said the video of Capers' death was disturbing to watch and that the prison should have better helped injured prisoners. "I do not know if he should have died," Stirling said. "I know we should have done more to bring help."

Stirling attributes violence in state prisons, in part, to the proliferation of contraband cell phones.

A survey conducted by NBC News in 2017 revealed that South Carolina's prisons dominated the country through fraudulent cell phones confiscated from prisoners. Across the country, contraband phones have been used for a wide range of crimes, ranging from extortion to the drug trade and murder.

Stirling says that in South Carolina's facilities, smuggled cell phones extorted money from people outside the prison and shot other prisoners.

Stirling has hired the US Department of Justice to test a new technology to block all mobile phone signals in the prison, according to a spokeswoman for the South Carolina Department of Corrections. The first test was earlier this month.

He described the jamming of cell phones as "gamechanger".

Stirling says that in general, South Carolina's correctional system is improving. According to Stirling, recidivism is at its lowest historical level. It also highlights the increase in the number of electronic locks on the prison gates and the increase in guards' salaries. "[Better pay] One of the aspects of hiring or retaining agents is "Stirling said." The other thing they want to know is if they are safe at work. I think if we show them that we are doing these steps and we are doing these steps, I think it is very important. "

"But you can not overthrow a department that, you know, has not received the funding it should be receiving more than a decade or so in a few years," Stirling said.

He asks companies to recruit detainees after their release. "If they do not have work, it will lead them back directly to prison at a very high cost to taxpayers."

Meanwhile, the headlines continue to come.

An inmate committed suicide in November in a prison. Toilet clogged with sewage and flooded cells at another facility in December. In January, one inmate strangled another with a bed sheet. In February, an inmate attempted to kill two guards with a knife.

Debra Dickson says that when she was visiting her son at Turbeville Prison, she would say, "I want to put you in my pocket and take you home with me." She said that her son, who was serving an armed robbery sentence, told him, "Mom, you know I can not do that."

Capers was to be published in 2026.

"I do not want a mother going through what I live," Dickson said. "Do not expect this to happen to another inmate. Do not expect another mother to be sitting on this chair."

Laura Strickler, Bianca Seward and Natalia Abrahams have been reported to Washington, D.C.