WITNESS
Glenn A. Fine was confirmed by the United States Senate as the Inspector General of the Department of Justice on December 15, 2000. He served as the Acting Inspector General since August 2000. Mr. Fine has worked for the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (OIG) since January 1995. Initially, he was Special Counsel to the Inspector General. In 1996, he became the Director of the OIG's Special Investigations and Review Unit.
Before joining the OIG, Mr. Fine was an attorney specializing in labor and employment law at a law firm in Washington, D.C. Prior to that, from 1986 to 1989, Mr. Fine served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Washington, D.C., United States Attorney's Office. In that capacity, he prosecuted more than 35 criminal jury trials, handled numerous grand jury investigations, and argued cases in the District of Columbia and U.S. Courts of Appeals. Mr. Fine graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1979 with an A.B. degree in economics. He was a Rhodes Scholar and earned B.A. and M.A. degrees from Oxford University. He received his law degree magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1985.
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STATEMENT
"…In fiscal years 2003 and 2004, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) received 508 allegations of unnecessary force or physical abuse of inmates; 658 allegations of inappropriate relationships or sexual abuse of inmates; 331 allegations of threatening behavior or verbal abuse; and 273 allegations of civil rights or civil liberties violations.
"The laws criminalizing certain prison abuses are critical to deterring such conduct. If the law does not provide sufficient penalties to punish those who commit such abuses, efforts to deter the abuses are undermined. I make this comment with the federal laws regarding sexual abuse of inmates in mind. The OIG has investigated hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse of inmates by BOP staff. In fact, cases involving staff sexual abuse of BOP inmates annually comprise approximately 12 percent of the OIG's total number of investigations.
"However, the current federal laws criminalizing staff sexual relations with federal prisoners are deficient in two critical ways. First, the crime of sexual abuse of an inmate is only a misdemeanor punishable by a maximum sentence of one year, unless the staff member uses force or overt threats to sexually abuse the inmate. See 18 U.S.C. § 2243-44. Because prison employees control many aspects of inmates’ lives, in most cases prison employees obtain sex from inmates without resorting to the use of force or overt threats. Misdemeanor penalties do not adequately punish prison employees who commit this crime. In addition, the OIG has found that many federal prosecutors are not interested in prosecuting many sexual abuse cases, regardless of the strength of the evidence, because the crimes are not felonies."
Excerpted from a written statement submitted to the Commission
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Note: Some witnesses submitted documents in addition to the written statement they prepared for the hearing. In most cases, those documents are not available on the Commission's web site.
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