"How is it possible that a human-rights crisis of this magnitude can carry on year after year with impunity?" asked James Ridgeway, a veteran journalist and co-founder of Solitary Watch, in a recent piece in the Columbia Journalism Review. The answer, sadly, is simple: Congress doesn't care. The Obama Administration won't spend political capital to protect prisoners. The federal courts have contorted the Eighth Amendment to avoid the topic. And the OIG, that self-described "guardian" of justice and integrity, has refused to shine a light on the darkness.

The Office of the Inspector General has been asked repeatedly to look into the claims of these mentally ill prisoners and to provide some measure of meaningful oversight and transparency to a federal institution, the BOP, which by its very nature operates in near-total secrecy. In January, for example, lawyers for one federal prisoner asked the OIG to look into:

[a] series of acts of misconduct by ADX staff, including the mishandling of a mental health crisis that resulted in a suicide attempt and assault while he was in an observation cell, and another assault during his transport to an outside medical facility for a procedure.

To date, there has been no direct response from the OIG to this specific request or to previous requests made by prisoners or their attorneys. (In January, Craig Trautner, an OIG employee, evidently traveled to prison to meet Mikeal Stine, the inmate who made the above allegation, but there is no word yet on the results of that visit.) Unsurprisingly, an OIG spokesman told me late Tuesday that he could neither confirm nor deny the existence of any such investigation(s) into the BOP's mental health practices and policies.

A review of the OIG's recent reports on the Bureau of Prisons does not offer any material information that is directly on point. In February 2008, the OIG audited the BOP's health care costs and identified several weaknesses in the BOP's monitoring of health care providers. In November 2005, the OIG reviewed and reported on the BOP's "pharmacy services." But these were tangential to the questions I raise here: are federal prisoners being deprived of medicine they need, and are they being abused and mistreated, and are the officials responsible for such conduct being held accountable by someone, anyone, anywhere?



Finding answers to these questions is consistent with the grand vision Horowitz laid out last Thursday. The OIG has jurisdiction over the BOP, and the mandate of Horowitz's office is broad enough to undertake a thorough review of these serious allegations. So what's stopping him from doing so? The treatment of these prisoners surely is worse than the treatment Clarence Aaron has received from the administration's clemency officials. It surely is worse than the petty partisanship expressed in emails by members of the Voting Rights section.