Private Prisoner Vans : Extradition: Is the Ride Too Rough?

Marilyn Cantrell’s life changed so fast it could almost give a person whiplash.

One day she’s cruising in a Hollywood world: a personal secretary for actors, going to parties at the Playboy Mansion, living a life that didn’t give her and her two children all that much to complain about. The next day she looks out her window and the police are coming to her door.

After a two-week stint in a crowded jail cell in Bakersfield, Cantrell--wanted on a year-old check fraud charge in Missouri--was put in a van with eight male prisoners. For the next five days, she says, she was verbally harassed, groped, humiliated and finally raped--not by her fellow detainees, but by her guards, who were employed by a private extradition company.

Zigzag Journey

At one point on her zigzag journey from California to Missouri, the guards took her across the Arizona border into Nogales, Mexico. There, she says, they tried to sell her sexual services to Mexican law enforcement officers, who begged off once they realized the guards were serious.

“I do realize that I made a mistake with writing a bad check,” Cantrell wrote in notes to herself while awaiting trial in Missouri. “But . . . this was a hell of a price to pay for it.”

Hellish road trips such as the one described in lawsuits by Cantrell and others, and a number of alarming prisoner escapes, have caused law enforcement officials across the country to question the growing use of private extradition companies to transport prisoners.

Officials say private firms save money for states and county governments. But critics of the growing privatization of law enforcement say inhumane treatment of prisoners often is the cost of the savings.

Not Convicted

“What’s amazing to me is that most of these people haven’t been convicted of any crime, and yet they put them into crowded vans, in chains, and they even have to sleep sitting up,” said a Los Angeles police detective familiar with extraditions. “With these companies obviously the name of the game is big volume. To me it’s making a profit off of people’s woes.”

Private extradition companies have been a topic at recent meetings of the National Assn. of Extradition Officials. “The attitude of many in the association is that the use of private extradition companies is something to be handled cautiously because of the potential liability,” said Earl Dorius, past president of the association and an assistant attorney general in Utah.

Nevertheless, the use of such companies has grown in recent years as the privatization of government functions has increased in popularity. Extradition Corporation of America, one of the largest extradition firms and the company that was hired by Camdenton, Mo., to extradite Cantrell from California in 1986, recently signed an exclusive three-year contract with the California Department of Corrections to transport prisoners to state institutions and to all 58 California counties.

Company officials did not respond to requests for interviews. But, in court papers, they have denied allegations made by Cantrell and others in a number of lawsuits pending in federal court.

Cantrell’s allegations were considered serious enough in Camdenton, Mo., though, that the county no longer employs the company. And rape allegations made by another woman last year who said she was assaulted by a guard while en route from West Virginia to Los Angeles prompted an investigation by the Los Angeles County district attorney of Extradition Corporation of America’s overall performance.

After interviewing female and male prisoners transported by the company, Barbara Moore, extradition chief for Los Angeles County, turned a host of allegations of inhumane treatment and unsafe conditions over to the state attorney general’s office in June. As a result, the state Department of Corrections now is conducting its own investigation of the company’s performance.

Concerned About Vans

Moore said she was concerned from the beginning about the use of vans to transport prisoners for long distances. “We don’t have a lot of say about the contract,” she said. “All we can do is make what we have learned available to the people who can do something about it.”

Other than the rape allegation--which Moore would not discuss--the complaints mostly stemmed from prisoners being transported long distances in shackles in often overcrowded, overheated vans. Prisoners--who often don’t get to change clothes or shower during the days-long trips--reach their destinations with leg and wrist injuries and complaining of lack of sleep, infrequent restroom stops and poor medical attention. Some prisoners have arrived in need of hospitalization, complaining that the guards did not heed their pleas for medical attention, Moore said.

After Marilyn Cantrell was arrested Aug. 5, 1986, at her home at Edwards Air Force Base on check fraud charges, she agreed to waive extradition proceedings. She says she thought she would be quickly flown cross country to stand trial in Missouri. She admits that she stopped payment on a $15,000 check to a Missouri resort in 1985 because she thought she was being double billed.

Instead of being flown back to stand trial, though, Cantrell says she was shocked two weeks after her arrest when two men wearing blue jeans and Extradition Corporation of America shirts came to the jail to pick her up. They told her they would be making the journey by van.

“I thought they were joking,” she said.

What she says happened next, though, was no joke. The now-36-year-old mother of two was locked in a caged compartment in the back of the van, she says. Over the next five days, while careening over mountain roads and across deserts and plains through five states, she says she was subjected to almost constant harassment and abuse.

Almost immediately, the guards began making sexual comments to her, asking if she were married and if she liked to fool around, she said.

‘Very Cruel’

“They were very cruel to us,” Cantrell said, alleging that sometimes the prisoners were only fed once a day. “It was always McDonald’s or something like that . . . We had nothing to drink except when we ate.” Because the guards would stop only infrequently to let the prisoners use the restroom, she said the men had to urinate in their soft drink cups.

Some of Cantrell’s fellow prisoners have corroborated parts of her story in letters written to her attorney, Carol Watson of Los Angeles.

“I wondered if dogs get treated as bad,” wrote David Long, one of the prisoners. “I started to get headaches because of the heat and if you drank liquids to help against the heat then the vibration and liquids would make you need to go to the restroom, which they wouldn’t allow.”

The prisoners were allowed to shower twice--once in Yuma, Ariz., and again in Delta, Colo., when the prisoners were put up for the night in local jails. In Delta, Cantrell said she was startled when she heard keys drop while she was taking a shower. “I turned around and saw them there looking at me,” she said of the guards.

One prisoner, Wayne Osborne, wrote that one guard later bragged to the male inmates about seeing Cantrell in the shower. “He then made the statement to the other driver that he was gonna have to get him some from Marilyn before the trip ended, the older driver just smiled and said that sure would be nice.”

Across Border

The day after the stopover in Yuma, Ariz., the guards drove across the border into Nogales, Mexico, Cantrell said. Cantrell alleges that one of the guards, a blond Tennessean in his early 20s, bribed the border guard and then drove to a tiny Mexican police station. Several police officers were brought out to the van.

“They got me out of the van and made me turn around in circles,” she said, “ . . . and they started bidding, joking around.”

The conversation was mostly in Spanish, but Cantrell said one of the prisoners later told her that the guards had tried to pimp her. “They tried to sell my body to pick up some extra cash,” she said.

The episode ended, Cantrell said, when an older policeman who she thought was the chief said in English: “No way. We’re not getting mixed up in this.”

For the last part of the trip, Cantrell was put in the cab with the drivers because the van was overcrowded. She sat on a hard plastic ice chest placed between the bucket seats.

Osborn wrote that one of the guards “would put his hands under Marilyn’s blouse and feel her out. I could hear Marilyn begging him to please stop what he was doing . . . Marilyn was helpless against him.”

After picking up the last prisoner in McPherson, Kan., the guards drove north to Salina. Sheriff Darrell Wilson said all of the male prisoners were dropped off there to spend the night.

Women’s Facilities

“We had facilities for women,” Wilson said, “but as best of my people can recall they never asked about putting a woman in our jail.”

Long wrote that when the male prisoners were dropped off the guards told them it was because they wanted to be alone with Cantrell.

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Missouri, Cantrell alleges that while one of the guards drove westward toward Camdenton, Mo., the younger man climbed into the back of the van with her and assaulted her.

“After he had raped me, he put a gun to my head, forced me to look in his eyes and told me that if I ever told anybody he would kill me,” she said.

The van reached Camdenton a little more than four hours later. There, the sheriff took her to a doctor because of back injuries she suffered from sitting for so long in an awkward position on the ice chest with no back support. She didn’t tell local authorities right away about the rape, however.

“After being in the van with the two guys that were supposed to be like representatives of law enforcement people . . . I was scared to talk to anybody,” she said.

After being given a court-appointed attorney, she pleaded guilty and was given five years probation on the check fraud charge. When she returned to California, she filed rape charges but action was held up for months because of confusion over jurisdiction.

Moving Vehicle

“We were never able to establish where and if that crime was committed,” said Wilson, the sheriff in Salina. Because the alleged rape occurred in a moving vehicle en route from Salina to Camdenton, “there was a real problem with jurisdiction.”

The case was eventually turned over to the FBI, but their investigation has been stymied, Wilson said, because they have not yet located the two guards.

“My understanding is that the employees left the agency and nobody knows how to locate them,” he said.

When private extradition companies such as Extradition Corporation of America first came into existence, law enforcement officials interviewed said, they operated far differently than they do now.

Sheriff Larry Whitten of Camden County, Mo., said his small county has used private firms for 11 years because it reduced the cost of extraditing prisoners by one-third. “When (the companies) first started they actually had planes and they flew people around the country,” he said. Now the reported half-dozen or so private extradition firms use specially modified vans into which sometimes as many as 11 prisoners are crowded.

“I’m not saying anything about the (rape) allegations,” said Whitten, “but when they brought her in a vehicle that was overcrowded and caused her to sit on an ice chest that did some at-least temporary damage to her lower back, we decided that if we were going to be paying medical bills for things like this maybe we should start using our own people . . . I just think it’s extending your liability. If you’re starting to get complaints like this, you better quit.”

Officials in Los Angeles, too, were concerned about the use of vans to transport prisoners.

“We were concerned from the beginning about ground transportation being used over long distances,” said Moore, the Los Angeles County extradition chief. “Maybe it would be fine to a bordering state, but to bring someone to Los Angeles you’re going to be crossing a lot of desert. We’re a long distance from almost anywhere they may be coming from.”

Escape Risks

Some law enforcement officials also complain that, since there is no regulatory agency to oversee the performance of private extradition companies and the training of employees, the chances are greater of prisoner escapes.

The California Department of Corrections first signed a short-term contract with Extradition Corporation of America in May, 1988, the same month the state canceled its contract with the previous extradition contractor because of three high-profile escapes, which occurred in rapid succession.

The last escape occurred April 10, 1988, slightly more than two weeks after the previous escape. Two guards employed by Interstate Extraditions, an Illinois-based firm, were transporting a man charged with rape, torture and murder from Iowa to Visalia in Tulare County in the central part of the state. The guards stopped at a convenience store in San Antonio to buy soft drinks, leaving the keys in the ignition.

While they were in the store the murder suspect kicked out a window in the back of the van and crawled out. He then got into the cab of the van and drove off. Two blocks away, he used the keys to unlock his restraints and, after the other prisoners refused his offer of freedom, abandoned the vehicle to flee on foot.

“There were three cases where there was a very definite breakdown,” said Michael Van Winkle, the California Department of Corrections spokesman. “Not paying attention to the company’s own policies and guidelines resulted in the inmates escaping.”

Share of Escapes

Extradition Corporation of America, the company hired to replace Interstate, also has had its share of high-profile escapes--including one in 1987 where a prisoner overpowered his guards, commandeered a pickup truck and then shot himself in the head during a high-speed chase through Oregon. Also, the company currently has from 15 to 20 lawsuits pending against it alleging civil rights violations, according to Watson, Cantrell’s Los Angeles attorney who has filed several of the lawsuits, including the two alleging rape.

Van Winkle said the corrections department, which has paid the company $1.9 million for services rendered since May of last year, recently signed a long-term contract that expires the last day of 1991.

By contracting with a private extradition company, he said the state is able to save half a million dollars per year.

“It’s more cost efficient,” he said. “And it provides real benefits for the smaller counties that do a lot fewer extraditions than some of the larger ones.”

The average cost of extraditing a prisoner is $900 if the state or a local law enforcement agency handles it, he said. If a private extradition company does it, it costs an average of $600.

Prior to contracting with a private company, the state reimbursed counties for the costs of extraditing prisoners. Now, except in special circumstances, the counties have to use the company chosen by the state. Seventy-five percent of all California extraditions are performed by the private firm. The special circumstances include prisoners with known medical problems and prisoners that for some reason must be extradited quickly.

Profit Margins

Because the companies are paid on a per-prisoner basis, critics say the companies increase their profit margins by loading in as many prisoners and making as many stops as possible. This sometimes means a prisoner spends days or weeks on the road in the crowded cages built into the vans.

In California, “the main benefit is that if (a small county) does one extradition a year, sending one deputy by plane to New York could cost a thousand dollars,” said Van Winkle of the corrections department. “Instead, if you put them on a bus with ECA that might be bringing back five or six or 11 prisoners it would cost a lot less than reimbursing the costs of the county making individual arrangements.”

The state’s contract with Extradition Corporation of America stipulates that the guards receive law enforcement training equivalent to that of a police officer and that each prisoner receive a “safe and secure” trip with three meals a day and restroom stops at least every three hours. The contract also stipulates that the prisoners must be kept in restraining devices at all times.

Critics of the use of private companies complain, though, that the companies’ compliance with such regulations are poorly monitored since no government agency has responsibility for regulating the firms.

A clause in the state’s contract allows the cancellation of the contract if it is determined that the company is doing a poor job, Van Winkle said.