They remember dust. Noise, too, but first dust—lodging in their hair, penetrating face oils in a mask. They wore dust, smelled it, tasted it.
“It was a dirty job,” says Tina Rosser. She’s referring to the computer recycling she did for Unicor while serving time for a drug crime at Marianna Federal Prison Camp for minimum-security female prisoners in Florida. She says the job was a coveted one at the federally owned company that runs the recycling operations. “Any Unicor job pays a little more than other jobs in the camp,” she says. “Then, too, they were hyping it up like it was something you could take home, work at a company, and get a job like that.”
Rosser explains that the workers would usually try to open the computer casing with screwdrivers first. But some screws were stripped. In such cases, “we used hammers” on the monitors “to break off pieces and get in,” she says. “Any way we could get it open, they wanted us to open it. We had to get it open to get the parts out.”
The cathode ray tubes inside computers can contain both lead and cadmium. The women were told to pile parts into boxes. But the tubes “still got broken,” says Rosser. “Sometimes, you’d hear the things explode” and they’d release what she calls “powdery stuff.” Other times, “if you opened up something and it was real dusty, it would like poof up in the air,” she says. Rosser remembers black layers accumulating on the floors, and her fellow inmates trying to find time to sweep.
“Our clothes would be black from all the dust in there,” she says. The inmates took their lunch breaks in the clothes they worked in, she says, and they wore those clothes back to their cells. Three or four times a week, Rosser says, she washed her dusty clothes in the prison laundry, which she shared with the other inmates.
The dust also stuck to her skin. “When you left you could see it in the hairs of your arm,” says Rosser. “I hated that—for that crap to get on my face.” Rosser says she and her fellow inmates had no respiratory protection. The only safety equipment the prison provided her, she says, included steel-toed boots and work gloves.
Today, out of prison, Rosser describes respiratory problems. “I always have something stuck in the back of my throat,” she says, and claims to have been “coughing up blood and mucus.” She says the prison did not test her blood for possible exposures. “They never gave us any idea that it wouldn’t be safe,” she says. Though the dust bothered them, though they blew their noses and found the cloth black, they lived with it in a kind of innocence at first.
Nita Molsbee also served time at Marianna—for making false statements on a Medicare cost report, and failing to report income. “You could walk through the door of the Unicor building and see the dust in the air,” she says.
Only a wall separated her job from the recycling operation, she says, and she saw the women working with the computers. “The women’s hands were always dirty,” she says. Molsbee reports having respiratory problems, gall bladder surgery, and sores that travel slowly along her body. “I get one on my foot, then it will go to my chest, and then it will go to my hand,” she says. “It takes about two to three weeks to heal, and then it will show up in another spot.”
They got used to dust. The fine, slow snow was just always there. But there’s a problem with dust in the air, coating skin and clothing and eyelashes. It can enter bodies.
Maxie Carroll also served time at Marianna, where she transported Unicor employees and worked in the prison laundry, washing the dusty uniforms. She describes “little sores that pop up in my hair.” She, too, says she’s had respiratory problems—along with a kidney attack, a hysterectomy, and breast cancer. “I just fell apart, I guess,” she says. “I had always been so healthy.”
Computers are, among other things, containers of heavy metals. They can hold five to seven pounds of lead, for instance. Exposure to this element “affects practically all systems within the body,” says the EPA. High levels of exposure “can cause convulsions, coma, and even death. Lower levels of lead can cause adverse health effects on the central nervous system, kidney, and blood cells.” Even very low levels “can impair mental and physical development,” and “the effects of lead exposure on fetuses and young children can be severe.”
Cadmium is also a problem. OSHA notes that chronic cadmium exposure can cause “cancer (lung and prostate) . . . kidney damage . . . pulmonary emphysema and bone disease.”
In addition to lead and cadmium, computers can also contain arsenic, barium, beryllium, chromium, mercury, phthalates, and selenium. Some of these metals can damage the skin and organs, such as the kidneys, liver, and lungs, as well as the central nervous system. And exposure to some of these metals can cause cancer. Unicor operates computer recycling facilities at six federal prisons.
Now, a group of former federal prison inmates and staff have filed a lawsuit against the government, alleging numerous health problems they believe to be caused by exposure to “hazardous metals” and “toxic substances” contained in the recycled computers.
An ongoing investigation by the Office of the Inspector General of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons is attempting to determine the extent of hazardous exposures to workers at recycling facilities in the federal prison system. And a recent examination by federal health inspectors at one prison recycling facility found lead dust at 50 times the permitted level and cadmium at 450 times.
“When they’re reconditioning those computers, sure, there are hazardous chemicals that have to be handled properly,” says Dr. Richard Lipsey. “There are going to be some heavy metals.”
Lipsey, a Jacksonville-based forensic toxicologist, has spent the past thirty-six years investigating working conditions and exposures at Navy and Army bases, federal office buildings, hospitals, numerous companies, and prisons. “The symptoms are going to be heavy metal poisoning, for the most part, which are mostly neurological,” says Lipsey, “but there are some other things to worry about.”
He says that one worrisome ingredient is organic mercury, which, among other things, “destroys brain cells.” But the symptoms of heavy metal poisoning can be many, he says. “You can name just about any symptom—neurological or respiratory or chronic fatigue. There is just a barrage of symptoms associated with heavy metal poisoning.”
Although Lipsey has examined working conditions at most Florida prisons, to his knowledge he has not visited the Marianna facility. “I would love to get in there and take the kind of samples” that a forensic toxicologist takes, he says.
The reason? Lipsey says situations where workers claim exposure to heavy metals require careful epidemiological study. “Heavy metals don’t go away. They’re called ‘permanent pollutants,’ ” he says. So whatever heavy metals a worker encountered, even decades earlier, will remain at the work location, he says. “And they can be permanent in the body, too,” in the brain, the liver, and the kidneys.
The process of determining workplace exposures includes a careful examination of the work site and what is called “chelation,” in which the exposed workers drink a substance that causes their bodies to excrete the heavy metals lodged there. A forensic toxicologist such as Lipsey would then correlate evidence of the workers’ exposures to those in the facility.
So far, the Marianna workers are stuck at step one. They don’t know what they were exposed to in the federal prison camp. Materials for recycling, they say, traveled to Marianna from numerous federal agencies and departments, including the Department of Defense and NASA.
In addition to computers, some of them say, they took apart devices marked with radiation symbols and skull and crossbones. They don’t know what those were. The alleged toxic exposures at Marianna affected not just the prisoners.
Freda Cobb worked there as a correctional officer and as a cook supervisor. “We were never informed that there were dangers,” she says. “We never knew that there were toxic chemicals.” Cobb describes a coating on the inside of her nose and a peculiar flavor. “You’d have that metallic taste in your mouth. Then you’d blow your nose and it would be all grey. That grey dust was computer dust,” she says. “We’d bust thousands of them a day.” Cobb thinks the food was contaminated.
“Whenever I worked food service, there was dust all the time,” she says. The women wore their work clothes in to lunch and had to go through what Cobb calls “shakedowns” when they entered. “ ’Course they’d shake their shirts, their hair. They proceeded to shake all this dust in our food, our utensils.” Cobb says her clothes turned “grayish, yellowish, silverish,” and that the dust traveled to the parking lot, where the powder coated the vehicles “just like pollen.” “It was like you’re going down a dirt road and hadn’t washed your car in two weeks. That’s how dusty it would be,” says Cobb, describing a game the guards played, racing their cars to the parking lot of a nearby restaurant to run the vehicles under a sprinkler. “It was funny, but we didn’t know that it was poison.”
For Cobb, the dust long ago lost its potential as an amusement. “Well, guess what, they’re dying,” she says of the inmates and guards who breathed the dust day in and day out. Cobb says she has had gall bladder surgery, diverticulitis, and irritable bowel syndrome, as well as short-term memory loss, hip deterioration, and sclerosis. “1996-97 is when my physical body started to change,” she says. “My body started retaining fluid. . . . They found my uterus had enlarged three sizes.”
She says her doctor commented, “You can’t tell me you haven’t been in a car crash when your bones are so cracked. Your bones are the skeleton of an eighty-seven-year-old woman.” Cobb was forty-two at the time. Cobb says she knows of six inmates exposed to the computer dust who have died.
As for herself, medical problems have “taken over my life,” she says. “I’m on sixteen pills a day now, just to keep my body functions going.” And the pills are costly—“$200 a month with insurance,” she says. “I wanted to work and retire and play ball with my grandchildren,” she says. “My life has been stolen from me.”
Tanya Smith worked as a security officer for Unicor at Marianna from 1999 until early 2006. She patted down inmates in the recycling operation and was exposed to the dust in the air. Like Cobb, she was forced to leave her job due to what the lawsuit, filed in March 2008, terms “severe health problems.”
According to the complaint, Smith’s health problems included “systemic lupus, frequent blood clots, protein deficiencies, kidney failure, internal bleeding, digestive problems, joint and muscle pain, heart and respiratory disease. Her conditions have required that she have two open heart surgeries within the last year.”
The disparate illnesses have one thing in common, according to the lawsuit. “Many of her symptoms are commonly associated with exposure to the toxic substances found in CRT [cathode ray tube] monitors and other equipment recycled by Unicor,” the suit says.
On August 1, Tanya Smith died. She was thirty-six. “With people dying now, of course you start to get nervous,” says Lisa Lamar, referring to Smith. “She was young. She was my age.” The lawsuit alleges that at least twelve persons who were “exposed to the dust or powder resulting from the Unicor recycling operation at Marianna” have died after suffering “from symptoms consistent with exposure to heavy metals and other toxic substances found in computer monitors.”
It adds: “Many others suffer from cancer and other illnesses,” even though they are not smokers and do not have family histories of the diseases.
While many of the plaintiffs in the Marianna case, including Molsbee, Carroll, and Cobb, are former prisoners or guards, Lamar occupies a different category. “I was clueless because I was not working for Unicor or having anything to do with the prison,” she says.
Yet Lamar, a former nurse, developed health problems she did not understand. “Respiratory infections,” she starts, counting off the troubles. “I spent the entire year throwing up and having diarrhea. Energy level went down to absolute zero. Fatigued all the time.” Eventually, the nagging health decline became dire. “I was in complete renal failure,” she says, adding that she contracted pneumonia twice. She spent four weeks in the hospital.
Six months later, Lamar noticed a rash on her lower legs, “about pinpoint” in size. One week later, the sores had expanded till they were a half inch in diameter, she says, “and they had completely ulcerated.” Lamar’s medical problems spiraled into financial ones. She was so often sick that she lost her job as executive director of a local nonprofit. “We lost our home, lost everything,” she says. “At times it feels like the bottom’s going to drop out.”
Lamar’s husband was acquainted with Freda Cobb. One day, Cobb noticed the sores on Lamar’s legs. “She showed me one of her scars, and our scars matched up,” says Lamar. “Which in a way was a complete relief.” Her husband had made a practice of visiting the computer recycling facility at Marianna. “My husband was going out there quite frequently to buy things,” says Lamar. “Computer parts, hard drives” for his business rebuilding computers. “We had a rebuilt computer in the house with parts” from Marianna.
Once Lamar began to think of her illnesses in terms of exposures to a dangerous dust, her many symptoms began to make sense, even the kidney failure. This is not uncommon with exposures to cadmium, which is a bio-accumulative, explains the former nurse. The kidneys can’t filter the substance. She says her diagnosis was “tubulointerstitial necrosis,” one often connected with cadmium exposure. Now she’s scared: “What’s going to happen?” Joe McNeal served as factory manager of the first Bureau of Prisons recycling program—the one at Marianna. Now he, too, is a plaintiff in the lawsuit.
McNeal’s affidavit says the Marianna recycling program developed in the mid-1990s “ ‘on the fly’ without any research into potential hazards, health or safety matters, training or discussions of hazardous waste handling. . . . Initially, no one associated with the program knew how to properly handle electronic wastes.” McNeal says in his affidavit that he “was unaware of any health or safety issues or hazards associated with the disassembly of any electronic components . . . and received no health or safety training.”
McNeal also “traveled to other Federal Prisons to assist and train staff on how to start and operate an electronics recycling program like the one in Marianna at their correctional facilities,” his affidavit says. He conducted no safety training “concerning handling of hazards materials or health safety.” The recycling program was a “cash cow,” says the McNeal affidavit, “generating millions of dollars per year in cash.”
In 2001, Leroy Smith was worried. As the safety manager at the federal penitentiary in Atwater, California, he began noticing health problems with some inmates and staff. “They were sneezing and coughing out black stuff,” says Smith. Next, “inmates and staff started having skin irritation and eye irritation. Our health services would tell them, ‘It’s dry skin, use lotion.’ In response to red eyes, health services advised, ‘Use Visine.’ ” Smith started to think a lot about the computers the inmates were recycling.
“My concern was with the hazardous metals that existed within the cathode ray tubes themselves,” he says. There was “no type of containment, no respirators, no glasses, no type of protection at all for staff or inmates.”
Nor did he like the work process. “The way they were doing it was barbaric,” says Smith. “They would take a piece of metal and hit” the back of the monitor. “They would just bash this” to split open the computer. “When you crack these things, they have a tendency of exploding. It sounds like a double-barrel shotgun.”
In 2002, Unicor responded to Smith’s concerns by installing glass-breaking booths to contain the dust. But, says Smith, “they didn’t have the proper filters. They should have been using a Hepa filter.” Smith says the food service area was located about 200-300 feet away from the glass-breaking booth. “It was wide open,” he says. Wipe samples of the area showed lead and cadmium on the “refrigerator, tables the inmates were eating on.”
He says that staff left the building wearing the dust. “They would take it into their vehicles, they would take it home, cross-contaminate at home, expose their wife, their husband, their children at home—for years.” Smith says air samplings were supposed to catch evidence of any high levels of metals or chemicals that could endanger workers. But he says the Atwater recycling facility changed its practices on test day.
“The way they would run normally wasn’t the way they would do it during air sampling,” he says. “We would do it slower,” taking apart “fewer computers, which doesn’t produce the same air sample as after they leave.” Smith doesn’t mince words. “This has been a cover-up.”
Finally, Smith used his own funds to pay for air sampling. It “confirmed my worst nightmare—that for at least three to four months, we were probably about 500 times above permissible exposure limits,” he says. “I said, ‘Enough’s enough. We have to stop this operation.’ ”
But stopping the recycling proved difficult, he said. “I would request that it be shut down. It would be shut down for a day or so, then, boom, it would be up and running” without safety processes being followed. Adequate safety processes “never happened in 2002, 2003, 2004,” he says.
So in the fall of 2004, Smith applied for federal whistleblower status and filed a lawsuit. “I’m afraid I waited too long,” he says.
In 2006, Smith’s suit led the U.S. Office of Special Counsel to chastise the Federal Bureau of Prisons for exposing Atwater inmates to “excessive levels of toxic metals.”
Unicor, founded by executive order in 1934 to train federal inmates, says it is “pledging to protect the environment with a TRUE Green Solution” through the recycling of computers and electronic equipment. “The environmentally sound processing of computer and electronics equipment, health and safety of our workers is paramount.”
The company says its “operational procedures comply with all laws and regulations, demonstrate commitment to pollution prevention, are environmentally sound and conserve resources.” It runs six certified factories at prisons. In addition to those at Atwater, California, and Marianna, Florida, it has facilities in Elkton, Ohio; Fort Dix, New Jersey; Lewisburg, Pennsylvania; and Tucson, Arizona. The company says it “has engaged professional, independent organizations to conduct third-party inspections and verify environmental compliance efforts.”
The company also says it monitors staff and inmates for elevated levels of toxins in their blood and urine and that its facilities undergo air and wipe tests. But the federal government was not impressed with Unicor’s facility in Elkton.
In 2007, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and the Federal Occupational Health Service visited Elkton and concluded in their report that the recycling plant contained fifty times the amount of lead dust federal workplace regulations permit.
When workers changed the air filters, the levels of cadmium dust in the air would reach 450 times federally acceptable levels, their report revealed. “It is likely that this contamination originally emanated from the cathode ray tube (CRT) glass breaking operations,” said the report. Lead and cadmium contamination was present on “various elevated building surfaces located throughout the factory floor, even at distances well away from the current and former glass breaking areas.”
Last summer, the recycling facility at Elkton was closed. But Elkton wasn’t the only facility that has concerned the government. Conditions at other recycling facilities were “similar in many respects to the conditions at Elkton,” wrote S. Randall Humm, investigative counsel at the Office of the Inspector General at the Justice Department, in a November 2007 letter to NIOSH.
“We really can’t comment” about the allegations concerning the computer recycling program at Marianna because they are “the subject of ongoing litigation,” says Traci Billingsley, a public information officer for the Bureau of Prisons. “However, we can tell you that the continued safety of inmates and staff is a top priority of the Bureau of Prisons,” as well as Unicor. She says Unicor “is committed to ensuring compliance with all applicable health, safety, and environmental requirements.”
Like Leroy Smith, former inmates at Marianna allege that Unicor tried to cover its tracks, and their attorneys are seeking discovery “regarding spoilation of evidence . . . or concealing evidence in the buildings” where Unicor operated.
Freda Cobb says preparation for program review led to “pressure-washing all the dust off the building” and “changing the soil.” She explains that odd phrase: “They’d have tractors out there picking up soil and putting down new soil.” In addition, the factory would “stop all glass-breaking” about a week before the reviewers came, says Cobb. “When they left, they’d start up the glass-breaking again.”
Nita Molsbee and Maxie Carroll say they were required to sign forms asserting that they attended monthly safety trainings that never took place at the Marianna prison. Molsbee says she once asked what would happen to her if she didn’t sign the form. The answer: solitary confinement. The memory angers the former felon. “It makes me feel that the government was dirtier than I ever thought about being,” says Molsbee. “They could have taught me all about fraud or theft or all I’d ever want to know.”
Anne-Marie Cusac is an assistant professor in the Communication Department at Roosevelt University, a contributing writer for The Progressive, and the author of “Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America.”