The Utah man who kidnapped teenager Elizabeth Smart in 2002 is being transferred from the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute after being attacked in custody.
David Mitchell, 72, joins a growing list of high-profile inmates attacked within the chronically understaffed and violence-plagued U.S. prison system.
Mitchell has survived at least two attacks this year, both of which occurred in areas designated as “protected,” meant to isolate individuals considered to be at higher risk, according to people familiar with both incidents.
“There's no excuse for serious assaults in prison,” said David Fathi, who directs the American Civil Liberties Union’s prison policy project.
“The whole point of prison is surveillance and control, and the No. 1 job of prison administrators is to keep people safe. So, any serious assault is, by definition, a failure of prison management."
That is particularly true for the penitentiary in Terre Haute, Fathi said, because it is set up to house people that the federal prison bureau has determined to need a high level of surveillance themselves or higher protection from others.
One assault on Mitchell took place in an outdoor recreation area that prisoners and corrections staff refer to as the “west yard,” according to Keith Gace, who is serving an 85-year sentence for manufacturing child pornography.
Gace said he saw a prisoner attacking Mitchell from across the yard and headed over to intervene: “I got up and walked over expecting the guards to come running but they never did,” Gace recounted in a hand-written letter to WFIU/WTIU News.
Gace wrote that he found Mitchell on the ground, bleeding from his head. He wasn’t sure whether or not he had been stabbed.
Guards took Mitchell to the Special Confinement Unit, or SHU, according to Gace and others who agreed to discuss the incident.
The SHU is the most closely monitored and secure area of the prison but soon after arriving there, Mitchell was attacked once again, according to two people who were being held there at the time.
“The individual that you asked about is actually not far from me,” James Danis, an ex-gang member who was being housed there after being attacked himself, wrote in a letter. “I was however too far to see — I could only hear.”
A second prisoner reported the same thing after returning from the SHU, telling inmates in the unit Mitchell once occupied that he was found “in a pool of blood.”
The prisoner declined to speak for attribution about what he witnessed but passed along messages explaining that he feared reprisals from staff.
In late September, WFIU/WTIU News sent a list of questions to representatives at the Terre Haute prison, including what — if anything — they were doing to protect Mitchell and find out how the previous incidents occurred.
A spokesperson responded with a link to a webpage about how to file open records requests but did not directly address any of the questions.
But, weeks later, prisoners said, officials took Mitchell from the SHU and placed him on a bus with other prisoners leaving the prison.
He next boarded a plane that landed outside the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma. From there, earlier this week, he was taken to the Federal Correctional Institution-Lewisburg in Pennsylvania, a medium-security prison.
“He is currently housed at our institution,” a prison official confirmed in an email.
