Former Warden at Troubled Illinois Lockup Promoted to Run BOP Training Academy
Overlooking a troubling record of overseeing abusive conditions, the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) promoted Andrew Ciolli in July 2024 to serve as director of the agency’s Management and Specialty Training Center (MSTC) in Aurora, Colorado. Ciolli is the former head of the U.S. Penitentiary (USP) in Thomson, Illinois, and the Federal Correctional Complex (FCC) in Florence, Colorado.
BOP shuttered the Special Management Unit at USP-Thomson after numerous uses of excessive restraint on prisoners, seven of whom died in less than four years after its 2019 opening—the highest of any BOP prison, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Aug. 2023, p.16.] At FCC-Florence, , a BOP staffer reported in an April 2024 whistleblower letter that restraints were also used on FCC-Florence prisoners even when they “were behind a secure door” and “no immediate threat to staff existed,” beyond which “no actual disruptive behavior was observed from any inmate that would have placed a staff member in danger.”
Ciolli started as a BOP Recreational Specialist in 2003, rising eventually to warden at USP-Atwater in California in 2019. He then moved in February 2021 to USP-Thomson, helming the prison when three of those seven SMU deaths were recorded in the solitary confinement unit before it was shuttered in 2023. His tenure was also marked by allegations of excessively tight restraints that scarred prisoners with what some called the “Thomson tattoo” in interviews published by the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs (WLCCR&UA). Some prisoners reported being shackled for hours or days at a time without access to food or a bathroom. See: Cruel and Usual: An Investigation into Prison Abuse at USP Thomson, WLCCR&UA (July 2023).
Thomas Bergami, who succeeded Ciolli as warden at USP-Thomson, said his predecessor left behind an “enormous problem with inmate abuse.” Meanwhile Ciolli was off to Colorado with a $20,000 raise, though allegations of abuse soon followed. The whistleblower complaint revealed that Ciolli and other prison officials targeted prisoners for masturbating, subjecting them to excessive force, solitary confinement and humiliation. An internal investigation earlier in 2024 substantiated some of the abuse and criticized Ciolli for failing to interrupt it. He was referred for disciplinary action, but then he landed in the top job at MSTC.
“Historically, when a warden is disciplined for misconduct, they aren’t reassigned as a director of anything, let alone a training center,” said Bergami, who has since retired.
Sources: The Marshall Project, NPR