14 officers, including top official, indicted over violent attack, coverup at Edna Mahan, N.J. women

Source: NJ Advance Media

14 officers, including top official, indicted over violent attack, coverup at Edna Mahan, N.J. women’s prison

Updated: Sep. 28, 2022, 6:36 a.m.|Published: Sep. 27, 2022, 8:08 p.m.

By S.P. Sullivan | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

Fourteen former officers, including the acting administrator, at New Jersey’s lone women’s prison were indicted Tuesday on charges they assaulted inmates during a “forced extraction” in a high-security wing of the prison last year.

Grand jurors handed up indictments against all of the accused officers involved in the scandal at the troubled Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women in Clinton, which is now slated for closure.

It was the latest development in a widening scandal at Edna Mahan, which was singled out for violence, sexual abuse and exploitation of inmates by staff in a scathing report from the U.S. Justice Department in 2020.

The charges stem from a Jan. 12, 2021, incident in which teams donning riot gear marched into the prison’s “restorative housing unit” and began forcibly removing prisoners. Multiple inmates involved in the forced extraction told NJ Advance Media that prison administrators and medical staff were also present during the violent encounter.

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Read more: https://www.nj.com/news/2022/09/14-officers-including-top-official-indicted-over-violent-attack-coverup-at-edna-mahan-nj-womens-prison.html