In California, lawyers accused staff at the Los Angeles County jail of chaining mentally ill detainees to chairs for days at a time. In West Virginia, people held in the Southern Regional Jail sued the state, saying they found urine and semen in their food. In Missouri, detainees in the St. Louis jail staged multiple uprisings last year, while in Texas, a guard at Houston’s overcrowded Harris County Jail said she and her coworkers started carrying knives to work for fear that they wouldn’t have backup.
And while the infamous Rikers Island jail complex in New York City has been the focus of media coverage for its surging deaths, rural and urban lockups from Tennessee to Washington to Georgia are not faring much better.
“It seems jails are even more wretched than usual these last few months,” said David Fathi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project. “Having worked in this field for 30 years, I don’t remember any other time when there seem to be so many large jails in a state of complete meltdown.”
Several lockups denied claims about deteriorating conditions or did not respond to requests for comment. A few, including Rikers, acknowledged problems such as infrastructure issues, detainee deaths and high staff attrition.
“We are working hard to stem the rippling effect of years of mismanagement and neglect within our city’s jails,” a spokesperson for the New York City Department of Correction said in a statement. “Turning our jails around requires a collaborative effort, transparency and time.”
Unlike prisons, most jails are funded and managed locally, so the problems they face can vary. While there’s crumbling infrastructure in Atlanta’s Fulton County Jail, there’s been murky brown drinking water in Seattle’s King County Jail and overcrowding in Houston because of a backlog in the court system.
More than a dozen employees and detainees told The Associated Press of the two problems they’ve seen at all jails: too many people incarcerated, and not enough guards.