A Florida corrections officer is under arrest after his own jail released surveillance video showing him throw a handcuffed inmate headfirst to the floor — and the private prison company that runs the facility has said absolutely nothing about it.
CITRUS COUNTY, Fla. — The Citrus County Sheriff’s Office released the footage themselves: 22 seconds of surveillance from inside the Citrus County Detention Center, a jail run by CoreCivic, one of the largest private prison companies in the country. The officer in the video is Joshua Swanson. The inmate on the floor never fought back.
It’s just after 10 PM on October 6. A two-person cell, lights off. Investigators say Swanson claimed the inmate had contraband and ordered him out of the cell to be searched. The inmate put his hands behind his back and started walking toward the cuffs. He never made it.
The video shows Swanson grab him and take him down — a hip toss that puts the man headfirst onto the walkway floor, Swanson’s forearm ending up on his head. The sheriff’s office says the inmate was briefly unresponsive afterward. From the cell door to handcuffs: fifteen seconds. At no point, officials say, did the inmate take any defensive action.
Swanson was arrested Tuesday, October 13 — one day after CoreCivic’s internal review deemed the incident credible and referred it to the sheriff’s office — and charged with battery. He was booked into the very same jail where he worked.
Here’s the part nobody’s answering for. Reporters contacted CoreCivic: no response. The county commissioners who approved the contract that keeps CoreCivic in Citrus County: also no response. And earlier this year, that same Board of County Commissioners rejected a proposal to even begin terminating the county’s CoreCivic contract entirely.
The video is public. The company is silent. The county already voted, once, to keep the contract it now has to explain.
Swanson is presumed innocent until a court says otherwise. The charge is battery — but fifteen seconds of released surveillance footage tends to make these cases about what the video shows, not what the defense says.
