Catie Edmondson, and Patrick Marley

Milwaukee

Madison — Staff at the state’s problem-plagued youth prison were taught to use abusive techniques when interacting with teenage offenders under the decade-long tenure of the facility’s lead training officer, new records show.

Investigators with the Department of Corrections determined that Dustin Meunier’s failure to properly teach staff security techniques resulted in a “high volume” of injuries at Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls, including broken arms and wrists.

Meunier, who was fired in May, hung up on a reporter without answering any questions.

Documents released under the state’s open records law reveal that Meunier engaged in serious and sweeping misconduct at Lincoln Hills School — including showing a video of another officer using unjustified force to train workers, failing to stop staff he witnessed abusing teens, overlooking incidents where excessive force was used and falsifying records.

Those documents also show Meunier left a juvenile inmate unattended in a room full of pepper spray for more than five minutes and dragged a handcuffed inmate out of a van by his feet.

Meunier, who was supposed to be the prison’s sole use-of-force expert, was also unable to demonstrate an understanding of basic security techniques, investigators found.

The records are among the first to provide insight into why incidents of excessive force — correctional officers breaking inmates’ arms and wrists, putting their knees into youths and using pepper spray excessively — became common occurrences at Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake, which share a campus north of Wausau and are being investigated by the FBI regarding assault, child neglect and other crimes.

In recent months, top officials at Lincoln Hills and the Department of Corrections have been replaced and the vast majority of the institution’s staff has been retrained, said department spokesman Tristan Cook.

The superintendent of Lincoln Hills was responsible for ensuring staff got proper training, and the superintendent, security director and trainers were responsible for the curriculum, Cook said. People in those positions have been replaced in the past year and a half.

Wendy Peterson became superintendent in May and soon afterward fired Meunier for misconduct and negligence after an internal investigation comprising more than 5,000 pages of interviews and incident reports found that Meunier:

Failed to contact nurses to ensure inmates received medical attention.

Modified techniques for securing inmates without getting permission from his bosses and trained his fellow workers in his new techniques. He also trained workers how to use pepper spray even though he went years without getting certified for such training.

Reviewed incidents that “appeared abusive” but did not mark them as inappropriate. He told investigators he was too busy to properly review them.

Frequently did not make staff fill out required paperwork documenting incidents in which force was used.

Timothy Johnson, who worked for more than two decades at Lincoln Hills, said he had no idea Meunier had taught him improper techniques. Meunier never told him to be cautious with juveniles with the use of force because juveniles' bones are particularly fragile, as he was supposed to do, Johnson said.

“It was taught if you’re going to use an application of force, go as hard as you possibly can. Don’t hold back,” Johnson said in an interview.

“If he showed us a technique, we all assumed this is an authorized technique sanctioned by the State of Wisconsin,” he said.

Johnson resigned in January as investigators looked into his involvement in incidents where juveniles were injured. He said he didn’t do anything wrong and argued his bosses were negligent and tried to make him a scapegoat.

During training sessions, Meunier showed a video of Johnson putting his knee in the back of a young inmate and said it was the right way to control inmates. Johnson said he didn’t know what incident was depicted in the video and was not told it was being used for training.

Department of Corrections investigators found that between 2013 and 2015, putting knees into the backs of inmates was “repeatedly used by numerous staff during numerous incidents” even though the method “was not reasonable or necessary and was not justifiable under the circumstances.”

The probe of Meunier was sweeping, with internal investigators looking into 19 incidents that occurred between 2013 and 2015. They cleared him in three incidents but found he violated numerous work rules for the others.

Here’s a look at some of the incidents:

Broken wrist. In December 2014, Meunier supervised as Johnson and another officer handcuffed a disruptive juvenile inmate, who cried and screamed and told officers his wrist was broken, according to other inmates.

The incident occurred at 9:30 p.m. on a Sunday, when no nurses were on site. Meunier called and left a voicemail with the health services office, even though he knew no one would hear it until the next day, he told internal investigators in October 2015.

Doctors confirmed that the youth’s wrist was broken and treated it the next day — but Meunier downplayed its significance.

“There was no — no gross deformity, nothing looking out of place, nothing at all,” he told internal investigators of the injury.

He also said the incident was “nothing out of the ordinary” and “wasn’t that big of a deal at the time.”

The Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office reviewed the incident at the time, but found there was no evidence that Johnson intended to harm the inmate.

Pepper spray. In July 2015, after an inmate barricaded himself in his room, Meunier and others briefly opened his door and two of them each blasted pepper spray into the room for one second. Meunier told the inmate to lie on the floor when he was ready to be removed.

Several staff members exited the hallway because the pepper spray was so thick in the air. Others removed the inmate's roommate as the inmate lay on the floor.

The inmate stayed in the room unmonitored for 5 1/2 minutes and then crawled out when guards instructed him to leave, investigators found.

He later became noncompliant, and officers directed him to the ground and removed his clothes so he could be searched, even though one of the officers was female.

Meunier told investigators that he lost control of the incident, which he described as “being a cluster.” He said he didn’t know that two officers, rather than one, had used pepper spray and didn’t realize the inmate had been left in the room unmonitored.

A use-of-force review conducted by the Department of Corrections in April 2016 found the use of pepper spray was not justified. Leaving the inmate in the room for so long after pepper spray was used “is abusive since it appears he was intentionally left in the room for this period of time and that he was willing to cooperate with staff and exit his room,” the review said.

Use of force. Meunier conducted a use-of-force review of a September 2015 incident in which he was involved, even though such reviews are supposed to be independent. In that review, he wrote that all reports had been filed, but he and two others had not written required reports.

Meunier did not document that officer James Schmidt had placed his knee on the head and neck of a juvenile inmate as he broke up a fight. “I must have overlooked it,” Meunier told investigators.

His review said health officials had evaluated the inmate, however, there is no record of that.

A subsequent review done by the department in December 2015 using video of the incident found Schmidt’s actions were unjustified.

Investigators concluded that by conducting a review of an incident in which he was involved, Meunier “placed himself and the facility in a position of undue scrutiny."