(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Section 1001 of the Patriot Act mandates the Justice Department’s Inspector General to review complaints of civil rights abuses from the public.
But while the DOJ Inspector General received 739 complaints during the last six months of 2023, none resulted in investigations being opened, according to an audit the DOJ-IG released earlier this month.
According to the audit, 717 of the complaints did not fall within the DOJ-IG’s jurisdiction or did not warrant further investigation. Those complaints involved allegations against agencies or entities outside the DOJ, “as well as allegations that were not suitable for investigation,” the audit said.
The remaining 22 complaints it received involved DOJ employees and included allegations that required further review. However, the DOJ-IG determined that 20 of the remaining complaints “generally raised management issues unrelated to the [DOJ-IG’s] Section 1001 duties.”
Examples of complaints in this category included allegations by federal prisoners about the general prison conditions, and by others that the FBI did not initiate an investigation into particular allegations, according to the report.
The remaining two complaints were from federal prisoners alleging civil rights abuses, but the DOJ-IG determined that these complaints “generally raised management issues.”
“During the period covered by this report, there were no investigations completed by the OIG or a DOJ component finding abuses of civil rights or civil liberties by a DOJ employee or official,” the report concluded.
The lack of DOJ-IG investigations comes despite the myriad of civil rights abuses that took place in the latter half of 2023—some of them documented by this publication.
In the Bureau of Prisons’ Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center, for instance, civil rights abuses are so widespread that at least one federal judge has stopped sending low-risk inmates there.
The judge said MDC is “egregiously slow in providing necessary medical and mental health treatment to inmates—especially where such care requires the attention of outside providers.”
“It has become common for defense counsel to require court intervention to ensure that inmates receive basic care—and, even more shocking, not uncommon for court orders to go unheeded,” he said.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
