People stayed home and committed fewer crimes. Yet in the months after COVID-19 hit, the number of people in local lockups plummeted. The twin issues of overcrowding and understaffing have plagued jails across the country for years, and even before the pandemic many facilities were in disarray. “Our jail facilities are at capacity,” said David Cuevas, president of the Harris County Sheriff’s Office deputies’ union. 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.īut more than a dozen employees, detainees and experts who spoke with The Marshall Project and The Associated Press highlighted two problems they’ve seen at jails across the country: too many people incarcerated, and not enough guards. Unlike prisons, most jails are funded and managed locally, so the problems they face can vary widely from one county to the next. “Turning our jails around requires a collaborative effort, transparency and time.” “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, which runs Rikers, said in a statement. A few, including Rikers, acknowledged problems such as infrastructure issues, detainee deaths and high staff attrition. Several lockups denied claims about deteriorating conditions or did not respond to requests for comment. “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.” “It’s hard to believe, but 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. In other words, America’s jails are a mess. Louis jail staged multiple uprisings last year, while in Texas, a guard at Houston’s overcrowded Harris County Jail said she and her coworkers had started carrying knives to work for fear that they wouldn’t have backup if violence broke out.Īnd while the infamous Rikers Island jail complex in New York City has been the focus of media coverage for its surging number of deaths, rural and urban lockups from Tennessee to Washington to Georgia are not faring much better. In West Virginia, people held in the Southern Regional Jail sued the state, saying they found urine and semen in their food. In California, lawyers accused staff at the Los Angeles County jail of chaining mentally ill detainees to chairs for days at a time.
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