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Posted: 6:25 AM- WASHINGTON - Utah Corrections officials are disputing a report by a human rights group that listed the Beehive State as one of five prison systems in America that allow the use of dogs to force inmates out of their cells.
Utah Corrections spokesman Jack Ford said the report is erroneous since the department has a policy, instituted in 2001, that forbids the use of dogs to extricate inmates from cells.
Before that policy, dogs were used in two instances in the last 15 years, including the last time in February 2001 when officers deployed a dog because the inmate had a weapon, Ford said.
"This was a practice used rarely, but since 2001 we do not use animals, dogs in forced cell extraction," he said.
New York-based Human Rights Watch, a research and advocate organization, issued the report this week saying that five states "permit the use of aggressive, unmuzzled dogs to terrify and even attack prisoners in efforts to remove them from their cells."
"The entire world has seen the photo of an Abu Ghraib detainee crouched in terror before a snarling dog, but the use of attack dogs against prisoners here in the U.S. has been a well-kept secret," Jamie Fellner, author of the report and director of the U.S. Program of Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. Fellner said in an interview that a Utah Corrections official told her about the two uses in the last 15 years, but the department did not say it had instituted a policy prohibiting the practice.
If the department sends a copy of its policy to the group, Fellner says, Human Rights Watch will gladly put a notice on its Web site noting the change.
"I'm delighted if it has ended," Fellner said.
Other states Human Rights Watch listed are Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa and South Dakota. Fellner says Delaware also has complained that it's against policy to use dogs to extricate prisoners but the state has not provided a copy of that mandate.
Ford says the Utah policy was changed in 2001 because the department decided it was better for officers in body armor to enter the cell of a prisoner who will not listen to commands. Dogs are still used, Ford says, in some cases when prisoners are rioting or there's a large scuffle, but the dogs are never let off their leashes.
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