Expert: Michael Troy - 12/12/2006

Question
My brother is currently in prison and is being harassed by his counselor. His counselor is a former inmate at his prison and said to him, "If you were locked up when I was here we would have run up inside of you already." My brother has numerous witnesses and went to his counselor's superior and he said that he backed whatever his counselor said and walked away. When I went to visit my brother one of the guards came up to my brother and told him to hook him up with me and my brother told him to go away and the guard then pushed my brother and told him not to disrespect him like that. There are too many complaints to mention but I wanted to know if there is anything we can do about this.

Answer
Legally, a prisoner can file a complaint with prison authorities.  But in reality, filing such a complaint can end up leading to even worse treatment.  Prison administrators have a lot of latitude to make life miserable for a prisoner while remaining within the technical limits of the rules.

Prison rights are not really my best area of expertise, however.  If you want to pursue this further, I would advise taking a look at the ACLU Prisoner's Rights Project:

http://www.aclu.org/prison/index.html

You may even want to contact them to see if they can provide some free legal advise on your brother's situation.

Good Luck!