The stabbing of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd in 2020, at a special unit inside a Tucson, Ariz., prison is the latest in a series of attacks against high-profile inmates in the short-staffed federal Bureau of Prisons. The assault came less than five months after Larry Nassar, the doctor convicted of sexually abusing young female gymnasts, was stabbed at a federal prison in Florida. It follows Justice Department reports detailing incompetence and mismanagement at federal detention centers that led to the deaths of James Bulger, the Boston gangster known as Whitey, and Jeffrey Epstein, who had been charged with sex trafficking. Chauvin, 47, was stabbed around 12:30 p.m. on Friday, requiring life-saving measures” before being rushed to a hospital emergency room, says the New York Times.
The facility where Chauvin was stabbed is referred to as a “dropout yard,” one of several protective units in the federal prison system housing informants, people convicted of sex crimes, former gang members and former law enforcement personnel, said Joe Rojas ,retired president of the union local representing workers at the Federal Correctional Complex near Coleman, Fla. These facilities — including units in Tucson, Coleman (where Nassar was stabbed), and Terre Haute, Ind. — are supposed to provide more safety for high-profile inmates. Such inmates tend to avoid conflicts and disciplinary infractions prevalent in the wider prison population for fear of losing their protected status. “There is a different inmate code at these places,” Rojas said. It was not clear how Chauvin, serving a sentence of over two decades in federal prison on state murder charges and a federal charge of violating Floyd's constitutional rights, was assaulted. Nor was it clear why prison officials failed to protect one of the most hated, vulnerable inmates in the 160,000-person federal prison system.
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