Filed
12:00 p.m. EST
12.14.2024
Some state and local lockups are facing federal intervention due to problems ranging from filthy cells to violent abuse.
A man talks to an attorney during a virtual visit at a detention center in June 2024.
This is The Marshall Project’s Closing Argument newsletter, a weekly deep dive into a key criminal justice issue. Want this delivered to your inbox? Subscribe to future newsletters.
On Thursday, President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of nearly 1,500 federal prisoners who were released and placed on house arrest during the COVID-19 pandemic. The president also pardoned 39 people with nonviolent drug convictions. While it was the largest single-day act of clemency in presidential history, the effort still left out many of the federal prisoners seeking Biden’s consideration in the waning days of his presidency.
Women formerly incarcerated at FCI Dublin have so far been excluded from clemency. The California prison was closed after an investigation found that staff had engaged in rampant rape and sexual abuse of people held there.
“We all just feel so passionately that if Biden can pardon his son, he can definitely grant clemency to survivors of this heinous abuse by federal government employees,” Kendra Drysdale told The Guardian last week. Drysdale was released from Dublin in April and is now an advocate with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, a prison abolition organization.
The Biden administration has indicated that it will announce more acts of clemency in its final weeks, but it’s unclear whether Dublin survivors are under consideration.
Most women who were at Dublin at the time of the investigation have been sent to more than a dozen other federal facilities. That process can carry its own trauma, according to Johanna Mills, who wrote for The Marshall Project last month about her experiences as a prison sexual assault survivor being transferred from facility to facility.
Last week, the Bureau of Prisons agreed to settle a class action lawsuit filed by Dublin survivors. The deal authorizes a court-appointed monitor to scrutinize the treatment of the roughly 500 ex-Dublin prisoners in their new facilities. People involved in the negotiations believe that thousands more incarcerated women will benefit from the oversight of a court-appointed monitor, The Associated Press reported. The agreement still needs to be approved by a judge.
Federal prisons aren’t the only place where judges are considering appointing an independent authority to oversee dangerous incarceration conditions. Late last month, U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain ruled that the city of New York was in contempt of court for failing to address ongoing violence and excessive force at Rikers Island, and said she was “inclined” to impose an outside authority, known as a receiver, to take control of the city’s jails. Rates of stabbings and slashings, fights and assaults on staff “remain extraordinarily high,” nine years after a federal monitor was appointed to provide oversight, Swain said.
As our colleague Beth Schwartzapfel noted in this newsletter last year, this kind of takeover has only happened a few times in U.S. history. Receivers are entrusted with huge amounts of power: They can hire and fire staff, write budgets and policies as they see fit, and sometimes even override union contracts or state rules with the judge’s permission.
Swain has ordered New York City and lawyers representing Rikers detainees to come up with a plan for a receivership by Jan. 14, 2025, and possible candidates for the role are already raising their hands.
In Hinds County, Mississippi, which includes Jackson, U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves ordered the appointment of a receiver to take over the jail more than two years ago, but the effort was stalled by legal challenges from the county. Those challenges weren’t resolved until last month.
Reeves had previously found the county in contempt of court twice over unconstitutional conditions at the jail, describing “a stunning array of assaults, as well as deaths,” staffing shortages, cells that don’t lock and other problems.
In Fulton County, Georgia, home to Atlanta, there’s no receivership on the horizon — despite a Department of Justice investigation that last month described “unconstitutional and illegal conditions” at the jail. The probe was launched shortly after the death of Lashawn Thompson in the jail’s psychiatric wing in 2022. The 35-year-old died due to extreme neglect, according to an independent autopsy, including dehydration, malnutrition and severe body insect infestation.
Investigators found housing units flooded with water from broken toilets and sinks, mold, human waste, cockroaches, rodents and exposed electrical wires. The jail has a stabbing rate that is 1 ½ times that of even Rikers Island, an extremely violent jail, according to the probe. You can see more in this video tour of the facility by CNN.
The Justice Department gave Fulton County officials until early January to resolve issues at the jail, with the possibility of legal action on the table — but it’s unclear whether the incoming Trump administration will follow through on the arrangement, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Bugs are commonplace in deteriorating jails across the country. In Oklahoma City, where advocates are seeking a federal takeover of the jail, one detainee told a city council member, “We don’t kill the cockroaches. They eat the bedbugs,” according to The Oklahoman.
As Shannon Heffernan and Keri Blakinger wrote this week for The Marshall Project and Los Angeles Times, even prison conditions that are less viscerally shocking can leave a dramatic impact on the bodies and minds of incarcerated people. Chronic noise, 24/7 lighting, frequent nighttime disruptions, inadequate bedding, extreme temperatures and overcrowding all play a role in creating dangerous and inhumane conditions.
“Decisions that are made about how the facilities are going to be run reflect an inability to recognize the humanity of the people inside,” Sharon Dolovich, a professor at the UCLA School of Law, told Heffernan and Blakinger.
