America's Jails

The Search for Human Dignity in an Age of Mass Incarceration

Derek Jeffreys

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781479820856
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Criminología

A look at the contemporary crisis in U.S. jails with recommendations for improving and protecting the dignity of inmates Twelve million Americans go through the U.S. jail system on an annual basis. Jails, which differ significantly from prisons, are designed to house inmates for short amounts of time, and are often occupied by large populations of legally innocent people waiting for a trial. Jails often have deplorable sanitary conditions, and there are countless records of inmates being brutalized by staff and other inmates while in custody. Local municipalities use jails to institutionalize those whom they perceive to be a threat, so hundreds of thousands of inmates suffer from mental illness. People abandoned by families or lacking health insurance, or those who cannot afford bail, often cycle in and out of jails. In America’s Jails, Derek Jeffreys draws on sociology, philosophy, history, and his personal experience volunteering in jails and prisons to provide an understanding of the jail experience from the inmates’ perspective, focusing on the stigma that surrounds incarceration. Using his research at Cook County Jail, the nation’s largest single-site jail, Jeffreys attests that jail inmates possess an inherent dignity that should govern how we treat them. Ultimately, fundamental changes in the U.S. jail system are necessary and America’s Jails provides specific policy recommendations for changing its poor conditions. Highlighting the experiences of inmates themselves, America’s Jails aims to shift public perception and understanding of jail inmates to center their inherent dignity and help eliminate the stigma attached to their incarceration.

1

Degradation and Disorientation

A Glimpse into the Cook County Jail

In the jail in Chicago, Illinois, the cells were dark, without ventilation and swarming with vermin. Some were so foul that, after a few minutes’ stay in them, we felt a sickening sensation. Yet, in these close and filthy abodes human beings, crowded together, are confined for days, weeks, months even, many of whom are adjudged to be innocent. It is a crime against humanity to deprive anyone, however depraved, of the light and air of heaven, since, apart from the its essential injustice, such physical punishment invariably induces moral disorientation, and the individual subjected to it re-enters society a worse man than he left it. How great, then, must be the crime of such deprivation, when inflicted on the innocent.

—Report on the Prisons and Reformatories of the United States1

My first encounter with Chicago’s Cook County Jail left me disoriented and confused. Located on the city’s West Side, the jail encompasses more than ninety-six acres, and is one of the largest single-site jails in the United States. It holds anywhere from eight to ten thousand inmates, depending on the day and season. The jail has eleven divisions, most of which are surrounded by an old wall. On my first visit, I walked into one of the gates, and was immediately accosted by a corrections officer who barked, “Who are you? What are you doing here?” I explained that I was there to see the Sheriff’s director of communications, who was going to show me around the jail. She called him, and he quickly arrived. He assured the officer that I was an authorized visitor, and soon ushered me into the jail.

We entered a maze of tunnels, and I immediately experienced sensory assault. I saw dozens of inmates in various parts of the jail. Some were in orange suits, and were being transported through the tunnels. Others were sitting on benches handcuffed and chained. As I walked, I was overwhelmed by unpleasant odors that I couldn’t identify. I heard constant noise, produced primarily by corrections officers shouting at inmates. Occasionally, an officer would rudely inquire where I was going, and ask if I were a lawyer. I felt lost in a labyrinth, and was grateful that my host knew his way around the buildings. After spending the day in the jail, I was appalled at what I saw, and went away from the experience emotionally exhausted. In my subsequent visits to the jail, I never lost this sense of disorientation and confusion.

Because of its history and the work of its current sheriff, Thomas J. Dart, the Cook County Jail provides an opportunity to explore the limits and possibilities of change in our nation’s jails. In this chapter, I describe some of the conditions that inmates experience in the Cook County Jail. First, I discuss the jail’s recent history. Long a horrific place, it grew enormously in the 1980s and 1990s, and became the site of staff abuse, health hazards, and gang violence. Second, I describe some of the police encounters and crimes that land people in the Cook County Jail. Third, I discuss the journey of a person through the Cook County Jail. Hundreds of inmates pass through the jail daily in a degrading and frightening process, and those who cannot afford bail remain incarcerated. Fourth, I describe the terrible problem of mental illness at Cook County. Thousands of inmates suffer from mental illness, and confront a nightmarish existence. Finally, I describe how officials in the jail struggle to deal with these inmates, but lack adequate resources to address their needs. A large jail is no place for someone with mental illness, yet thousands of such people cycle in and out of the Cook County Jail annually.

A Brutal History

The history of the Cook County Jail is a brutal one. As I will note several times in this book, most people in jails are legally innocent. Although they are entitled to the presumption of innocence, for decades Cook County officials have assumed that inmates are criminals who deserve to be punished. Chicago had a jail for most of the nineteenth century, but built its House of Corrections in 1871. Because of significant overcrowding, Cook County opened the Cook County Jail in 1928. For several decades, the jail contained a death chamber where inmates were executed. Inmates were housed in horrible conditions, and routinely beaten by staff. The jail was poorly administered, and prominent criminals often operated as they pleased. The House of Corrections and the Cook County Jail were merged in 1969 (Olson 2012). In the 1960s and early 1970s, Cook County operated with the notorious “barn-boss system.” Officials took a hands-off approach to managing the facility, allowing inmate gangs to control large sections of it. Because officials endorsed this system, inmates who were sexually assaulted or otherwise harmed had little recourse but to submit to the most powerful inmates in the jail. A series of lawsuits, arrests of corrupt officials, and tough administrators put an end to the barn-boss system.2

Because of the war on drugs and other policies, in the 1980s and 1990s the jail’s population skyrocketed. Officials struggled to accommodate thousands of inmates, with many forced to sleep on the floor. Inmates brought lawsuits protesting these conditions, and Cook County entered a Consent Decree (a legal agreement between parties similar to a contract) with the U.S. Department of Justice. The agreement became official in 1980. It pledged to reduce overcrowding, and was named after one of the inmates who brought the suit (Dan Duran). The Duran Consent Decree, monitored by the John Howard Society, a prison reform organization, required every inmate to have access to a bed. It quickly became the subject of repeated court cases and lawsuits. Monitors reported that the jail often failed to meet the Consent Decree’s requirements. County officials either denied these charges or proposed new ways to reduce jail overcrowding.3 The Duran Consent Decree produced legal battles about conditions at the Cook County Jail that lasted for years.

As the jail population swelled in the 1980s and 1990s, officials experimented with different ways to alleviate overcrowding. These included releasing large numbers of inmates with bonds that required only their agreement to return to court, and a Day Reporting Center that offered services to those with addictions and other problems. For the most part, these measures served as Band-Aids that only temporarily addressed overcrowding crises. Moreover, they produced a massive growth in the physical facilities, as new units were added on to the original 1928 building. Gradually, the Cook County Jail became one of the largest single-site jails in the United States. Often operating at close to 100 percent capacity, it sometimes housed over ten thousand inmates.4 It became a violent, frightening place with considerable inmate-on-inmate violence. Sophisticated gangs operated within the facility, and corrections officers faced dangerous and violent situations.5

The Strip-Search Cases

In these years (the 1980s and 1990s), inmates were routinely beaten by staff and lived in appalling conditions. To paint a picture of this hell, let me briefly focus on two cases involving the strip-searching of inmates. Jails have a legal right and obligation to search inmates upon their arrival in a facility. However, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the Cook County Jail conducted these searches in a deeply degrading manner. The details of the practice emerged in a class-action lawsuit in the 1990s. Courts found that upon entry to the jail, women would be ordered to remove their clothes. They would then be told to stand naked in large groups, so tightly packed that people touched each other. They would be forced to bend over, and be subjected to rectal searches. Corrections officers would shower abuse and ridicule on the inmates, and yell orders at them. Menstruating women would bleed on the floor, overweight women would be derided by officers, some inmates would smell of excrement, and unmuzzled dogs would occasionally enter the search area. Women were often strip-searched twice, once while entering the jail and another time while exiting. In a key court ruling, judicial officials demanded that the jail cease these abusive group searches. It also awarded monetary damages to tens of thousands of women who had been subjected to them.6

The Cook County Jail contested this court ruling, and dragged its feet in implementing change. Amazingly, it also continued to strip-search males in groups. Male inmates also brought a lawsuit, which revealed more terrible details. Males would be put in groups of fifty to seventy-five people. Naked and often forced up against each other, they would also be insulted with homophobic slurs and nasty comments about the size of their genitals. Dogs would also be employed, barking at them aggressively. In 2009, over a decade after the case related to women came to light, federal courts found that the Cook County Jail had violated the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. They awarded monetary damages to thousands of people.7

Before detailing additional history of the Cook County Jail, I want to pause a moment to consider the scale of the abuses I just described. Cook County processes anywhere from seventy-five to one hundred thousand inmates annually (Olson 2012, 2). This means that for the time covered by the strip-search cases, hundreds of thousands of people were forced to endure humiliating group body cavity searches. Many were guilty of only misdemeanor offenses and couldn’t afford to pay the money for bail. Others were innocent of the crimes for which they were charged. Moreover, in this same period other big jails in the United States found technological ways of searching inmates that eliminated the need for group searches. Yet, for years the Cook County Jail stubbornly persisted with its brutal and unconstitutional policy. It’s hard to fathom the kind of psychological damage this policy caused to many human beings.

The 2008 U.S. Department of Justice Intervention

The disputes over the Duran Consent Decree and other matters became very intense in 2008, when the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) released a scathing findings letter about conditions in Cook County Jail. Covering a host of areas including sanitation, staff behavior, and medical care, the letter stated,

We find that CCJ [Cook County Jail] fails to adequately protect inmates from harm and serious risk of harm from staff and other inmates; fails to provide inmates with adequate medical and mental health care; fails to provide adequate suicide prevention; fails to provide adequate fire safety precautions; and fails to provide safe and sanitary environmental conditions. (U.S. DOJ, Civil Rights Division 2008a, sec. III)

In grim detail, the letter described extraordinary cruelty in the jail. Any sign of disagreement or questioning on the part of inmates was met with savage beatings. Groups of corrections officers would kick, stomp, and punch inmates, many of whom were handcuffed and helpless. Anyone who complained about such treatment could endure additional brutality.

Because of this treatment, inmates suffered serious injuries like concussions and broken limbs. Yet they had little recourse for responding to staff abuse. The DOJ found that the jail had a completely inadequate system for reporting use-of-force incidents. Corrections officers filled out forms in a vague manner, supervisors rarely read them, and a thick bureaucracy delayed their processing for months. The DOJ letter confirmed in detail what inmates and activists had known about the jail for decades: corrections officers used terrible violence with little or no accountability. Occasionally, they would be disciplined for excessive force and some were even fired for their behavior. Overall, however, officers knew that they could get away with violence with impunity. Cook County responded to lawsuits and outside monitoring with delaying tactics that enabled the officers to continue their cruelty. According to the DOJ, they managed a large and violent population with lawless violence (U.S. DOJ, Civil Rights Division 2008a, sec. IV, A).

In addition to staff abuse, the DOJ found a host of other horrors in the jail. It noted a major dysfunction related to health care, with two different chains of command unresponsive to each other. As

a result of the administrative division between corrections and health care at CCJ communication between mental health staff and correctional staff is informal and often strained. Significant communication problems between custody and mental health staff result in a fragmented, uncoordinated system. (U.S. DOJ, Civil Rights Division 2008a, sec. III, C, 4)

Cermak, a private health care company with little accountability to the Cook County Sheriff’s Department, provided health care to inmates. The DOJ letter found that because of this broken system, inmates received inadequate medical screening upon arrival at the jail. Many were on medications, but didn’t receive them for weeks. In a particularly egregious case, an inmate told officials he was on the blood thinner, Coumadin, but received it only after waiting for three weeks. Others suffered from health problems that were never treated. In one case, an inmate had a limb amputated in what the letter called an unnecessary operation. The DOJ concluded that some inmates likely died after receiving inadequate health care (U.S. DOJ, Civil Rights Division 2008a, sec. III, B).

In a disturbing part of the DOJ letter, officials described how the jail was unprepared to control infectious diseases. Inmates with obvious skin rashes went untreated, raising the prospect of a tuberculosis outbreak. People handling food didn’t wash their hands, and prepared it in ways that invited a disease outbreak. Cells and recreation areas were filthy, crawling with mice, flies, and cockroaches. Finally, inmates received washed clothes only once a week, and the laundry service failed to clean uniforms in a sanitary fashion (U.S. DOJ, Civil Rights Division 2008a, sec. II, B, 8).

The mental health care negligence at the Cook County Jail was appalling. According to the DOJ letter, incoming inmates were given a form to fill out regarding mental health needs and medications. They received inadequate mental health screening, often because of a shortage of qualified mental health care workers. Those treating inmates were often overwhelmed by the challenges they faced. Inmates often went weeks without psychotropic and other medications. Officials failed to monitor inmates who were suicidal. Finally, inmates with mental illness were often targeted for violence by staff and other inmates. Because they didn’t understand or respond to orders quickly, officers would beat them until they complied (U.S. DOJ, Civil Rights Division 2008a, sec. II, C).

The 2008 DOJ letter described other problems at the Cook County Jail that I will not discuss (inadequate fire safety and decaying infrastructure). It offered a detailed look inside a large U.S. jail, and the picture wasn’t a pretty one.

The 2010 Consent Decree

When the DOJ issues such a letter about a penal institution, it can result in a lawsuit against a county or municipality. Usually, however, authorities agree to make changes ordered by the DOJ. Sheriff Thomas J. Dart, a relative newcomer (and not sheriff for most of the period under investigation), entered negotiations with the DOJ. In a Consent Decree, the jail agreed to address all the concerns in the 2008 letter by making important changes.8 These included better cooperation between Cermak and the jail, the hiring of additional correctional and medical staff, better use-of-force procedures, improved sanitation and fire safety, and better medical and mental health care. The parties to the Consent Decree also agreed on a monitoring system to ensure that these changes occurred. Monitors chosen by both parties would inspect the jail to ascertain if it complied with the Consent Decree. They would issue reports describing the jail’s progress on key areas of concern. Sheriff Dart also initiated new policies to help those with mental illness. He appeared often on media programs like CBS 60 Minutes to sound the alarm about the crisis of mental illness in U.S. jails.

The MacArthur Center Lawsuit

Later in this book, I will discuss important and positive ways in which the Cook County Jail worked to remain in compliance with the 2010 Consent Decree. However, in 2014 the jail confronted a major lawsuit charging that it failed to correct the staff abuse charged in the 2008 DOJ investigation. The MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University’s School of Law brought the lawsuit. This center does a range of legal advocacy work, including initiating lawsuits on behalf of inmates and those abused by the police. In dramatic fashion, its lawsuit maintained that “a culture of brutality and lawlessness infects the jail and forces these men [in the class], all of whom are awaiting trial, to live under a constant risk of life threatening violence.”9 It alleged that “the most recent monitor’s report, filed in December 2013 (Doc. No. 211 in United States v. Cook County) and available to each of the Defendants, finds that the County is not in compliance with critical Consent Decree provisions related to protection from harm and excessive use of force.”10 According to the lawsuit, use-of-force reporting and prosecution of abusive officers improved only marginally.

The lawsuit alleged that corrections officers savagely beat inmates. Dozens of inmates reported to MacArthur Center investigators that they were harmed by staff. Officers would

slam people to the floor, stomp, kick and punch them—often while the individuals are handcuffed and shackled. After beating shackled men until they lose consciousness, officers will drag them by their chains, banging their heads on steel doors or allowing their heads to slam into the concrete floor. Officers often violently attack people living with mental illness—generally for behaviors that are manifestations of mental illness or in response to an individual’s request for a mental health evaluation. People who appear to be in active psychosis are frequently brutalized by mobs of officers for alleged “non-compliance.” Officers also order the men to attack, beat and stomp each other—instigating violence between the very individuals that they are supposed to protect.11

According to the lawsuit, staff members acte...