Jails are notorious for inhumane conditions. Detainees often complain of violence, inedible food, limited programming and subpar healthcare. Lack of sunlight may be an unexpected addition to the list. But sunlight deprivation causes a myriad of serious issues, including high blood pressure, osteoporosis, and an increased risk of diabetes, as well as a host of mental health problems such as depression and sleep disorders.
Jails built in the last century often have few windows and little room for recreation and natural light, making them “obsolete” by today’s design standards, according to Kenneth Ricci, prison and jail architect with Nelson Worldwide, a design firm.
Bringing sunlight and fresh air into jails often takes a back seat to other pressing issues. But a lawsuit in San Francisco suggests forcing detainees to live in the dark could violate their constitutional rights. In 2021, a group of men awaiting trial at two California jails sued the city and county of San Francisco for being confined without fresh air and sunlight.
The Cuyahoga County jail complex in downtown Cleveland, Ohio.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim ultimately agreed with the men. In 2023, she ruled that the jails had violated the Constitution’s due process clause. The officials “created the problem by building a jail without a secured outdoor exercise yard and then relies upon that problem to claim that it cannot provide a secure way for inmates to have access to direct sunlight,” she wrote.
These issues are top of mind for residents who have followed the opening and closure of jails in St. Louis, Cleveland, and Jackson, Mississippi, where detainees can go years without seeing the sun. The jails in all three cities have requirements to provide sunlight and fresh air, either mandated by jail policy, or by the state or federal governments. Yet all three have consistently fallen short, according to jail officials and state and federal inspection reports.
Jail administrators in Cleveland and Mississippi are banking on new facilities to improve conditions. City officials in St. Louis closed their crumbling older jail in 2021, but shuffling detainees into the remaining, newer jail hasn’t solved the problems. In each city, questions remain about whether new jails will address the web of challenges — building design, court backlogs and understaffing chief among them — that keep detainees from seeing the sun.
Reporters from The Marshall Project’s local news teams offer a closer look at the effects of limited sunlight access on people held in jails in Cleveland, St. Louis and Jackson.
The maximum-security St. Louis City Justice Center, where people inside have limited access to natural light.
St. Louis City, Missouri
When Darnell Rusan saw the sun for the first time in over a year, during a transfer from the city jail to the courthouse, he later recalled, he gazed up at it and took a deep breath.
“I hadn’t seen it in so long, breathed fresh air in so long,” said Rusan, who was released from jail in March. “I’m going to make sure I never go back in there.”
The St. Louis Division of Corrections stipulates in its official policies and procedures that every jail in the city “will have an outside exercise/recreation area for inmate use or an area that provides natural light.” In addition, all facilities must provide “a wide range of recreational program[s]” that includes indoor and outdoor exercise and leisure-time activities.
However, the city’s downtown jail – the maximum-security St. Louis City Justice Center – doesn’t meet these requirements, conceded Interim Jail Commissioner Doug Burris. There is no outdoor exercise area and no windows in the cells, just a pane of glass in the door that faces the dayroom.
Burris said in an April interview with The Marshall Project – St. Louis that, even on a bright summer’s day, “not much” sunlight makes it to people inside. Only a paltry amount of light filters through thick frosted windows at the top of a small rec area where, on a good day, detainees may spend a few hours. What’s more, he said, some people go years without access to the outdoors.
“We’ve got 50 to 75 people in here that have been here for at least two years, up to five years,” he said. “We’re taking an abundance off their life.”
Instead of lobbying to improve outdoor access at the jail, Burris said he is in the process of updating the jail’s guidelines to remove this requirement. The City Justice Center was designed without an outdoor recreation area. Fixing it would require finding the space in downtown St. Louis to construct a secure outdoor yard, or building one on the roof – both extremely costly, said Ricci, the architect at Nelson Worldwide.
Burris believes the lack of opportunities for recreation and exercise is harmful. “To house people at the facility in excess of a year likely exacerbates mental health issues for detained people already afflicted,” he wrote in a 2025 operational review of the jail. “It also could create mental health issues for those who previously had none.”
Rusan was detained awaiting trial for more than four years. Over the course of his stay, Rusan said he was often unable to tell the difference between day and night. As a result, he suffered disruptions in his sleep that continued well after he returned home.
“That place is like a basement,” said Rusan, who was ultimately found not guilty. “Now that I’m home, [my family has] been asking me why I keep waking up at night.”
There are no windows to the outside world in the cells of the St. Louis jail. Light filters only through thick frosted windows in a small recreation area.
Understaffing also means sections of the jail are on lockdown for 23 hours a day, meaning that many detainees are “not even going to the indoor rec area,” said Khanika Harper, a member of the city’s detention facilities oversight board. “As far as actual sunlight, they don’t have access to that at all.” (Burris confirmed in April that roughly half of the pods in the jail are on 23-hour lockdown.)
With the demolition in March of the Workhouse, St. Louis’s former medium security jail, Burris said the city’s focus is on improving conditions at the Justice Center. But improving access to natural light and fresh air were not on Burris’s list of immediate action items, which includes redesigning the jail intake area, getting a tablet for every detainee and creating a mentorship program and retention plan for jail staff. However, he said he hopes increased staffing and a “rocket docket” (that allows people who have been detained longest to get their case quickly before a judge) will ameliorate the worst effects.
“I would like to get to a place where we could even get some vans and go pick up trash, just so they could be out in the sun,” he said. “But I’ve got more immediate needs right now.”
The Cuyahoga County jail complex houses cells with small windows, as well as windowless “dead rooms”, which detainees said were used as punishment in the 1990s.
Cuyahoga County, Ohio
The Cuyahoga County jail is housed in a foreboding brutalist structure known as the Justice Center. Built in 1976, the complex is made of concrete and includes the Cleveland Police headquarters and the Cuyahoga County and Cleveland Municipal Courts tower.
When it first opened, the Justice Center was heralded as a new era for humane conditions for the incarcerated. It replaced the “leaky old jail” — compared in the press to a “crumbling coffin” — where, in the span of six months, 16 prisoners escaped through the windows. The Justice Center was expanded in 1995 and renovated four years later to add more beds.
Today, “Jail 1,” the original highrise built in 1976, doesn’t have a single window in the north section of the tower. The 1996 expansion does have windows—thin slits that don’t let in much light. As a result, the people incarcerated there — and the jail’s employees — do not have access to fresh air or sunlight for most of their stay.
Incarcerated people routinely complain that the disconnection from the outside is disorientating, said one jail staffer who worked in the building from 2017 until last year. She spoke to The Marshall Project on the condition she not be named for fear of being retaliated against by people who still work in the jail. She said the incarcerated people she interacted with told her they could only tell what time of day it was by the meals they were served.
State law mandates natural light in housing units in every jail in the state, and the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction has repeatedly cited the Cuyahoga County jail for falling short, state records show. Even though the jail was cited in 2019, 2021, 2022 2023 and 2024, county jail officials have never faced penalties for failing to meet the standard.
Little has changed in the 30 years since the second building was built.
Darrell Houston was booked into jail in 1991 after being charged for a murder. His conviction was later reversed, and he was exonerated after serving 18 years in state prison. But he still remembers the lack of air and sunlight in the county jail.
He said the windows on the main housing units are “a little slot. You have to peek out. You don’t get a full view. It’s about the width of your finger.” (The windows in one tower of the jail are roughly 1.5 inches by 5 inches with steel fixtures secured on the outside, County Executive Chris Ronayne confirmed. In the jail’s second tower, the windows are 2.3 inches by 2.3 inches.)
The windows one tower at the Cuyahoga County jail, left, are thin slits, roughly 1.5 inches by 5 inches with steel fixtures secured on the outside, the county executive confirmed. The windows of the jail’s second tower, right, are 2.3 inches by 2.3 inches.
Houston also remembered the windowless “dead rooms” in the jail, which were used as punishment.
The emphasis on security over sunlight affects employees, too. Adam Chaloupka, general counsel for the Ohio Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, which represents the county’s corrections officers, said union members call it “a sick building.” Over the years many officers said they have developed breathing problems from the lack of fresh air, he added.
“No real air circulates. All air is recycled,” Chaloupka said. “In the rec rooms, which are little gyms in a few parts of the jail, they can open up shutters. That’s about the only access to outside air.”
He said the county’s hopes of resolving the complaints seem to lie in the construction of a new jail.
County officials have budgeted nearly $1 billion for a replacement facility, which officials say will address the jail’s substandard conditions. However, Cuyahoga County Council members have expressed frustration and concern about the county executive’s lack of clear communication about the building plans.
In June, the county will present its design planning progress to the council’s Public Safety Committee. A jail steering committee was established in 2019, but hasn’t convened since 2022. Last year, four Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court judges wrote a letter pleading with the county executive to reinstate the committee to ensure accountability and oversight of the new project.
A spokesperson for the county executive told The Marshall Project – Cleveland that the new building will provide access to “fresh air and natural light” and that the administration takes “the health and safety of our staff and those in our custody at the Cuyahoga County Corrections Center seriously.”
The new facility is expected to be completed in late 2028 or early 2029.
The Raymond Detention Center, the Hinds County jail, in Raymond, Mississippi.
Hinds County, Mississippi
When Semiko Crump arrived at Raymond Detention Center in December 2023, she said officers threw her “in the hole.” Crump estimates she was in the dark, single-person cell for a few hours, writhing in pain from a broken foot. A small window allowed very little light in from the outside. “It was like a hole,” she said. “It’s no lights, absolutely no lights in this place.”
Crump’s nephew, Dexter Crump, was also arrested and taken to Raymond Detention Center on the same day. “I couldn’t tell what time of day it was,” he said. He remembers seeing a small window high up, but none that he could see out of.
Years of dangerous conditions at the detention center prompted a federal takeover in 2022. Lack of sunlight rarely makes the list of issues to resolve, but experts argue it exacerbates existing problems.
“It’s all of the stressors adding up, and then they tend to compound each other,” said forensic psychiatrist Dr. Terry Kupers, who has visited correctional facilities across the country and served as an expert witness on lawsuits about their conditions. He likened the conditions in many U.S. prisons and jails to torture.
“You’ve got someone who doesn’t get exercise, has no window to the outside world, whose lights don’t work. All of this adds up to despair,” he said.
Former jail administrator Kathryn Bryan oversaw the jail until January 2022. She said jail practitioners know “with a certainty that environment dictates behavior.” Hinds County had a number of compounding issues, she recalled: the majority of the jail’s windows were completely covered, allowing no sunlight, and there were broken light fixtures.
“Hinds County was experiencing the most deplorable conditions I have witnessed,” she said. “Cells were dark 24 hours a day.”
Over a span of three months, there were more than 70 assaults. Seven people died in the jail in 2021. “When there’s a lack of sunlight and fresh air and recreation, almost unilaterally you see more critical incidents occurring,” Bryan said. “Inmates who are idle or who are afraid take life-saving measures to protect themselves. So they create weapons… [and] you see sicker inmates because of the stress.”
A consent decree with the U.S. Justice Department, overseen by a federal judge, required five hours of outdoor recreation each week for people incarcerated in the jail. But those monitoring the jail consistently reported that it failed to meet this standard. There simply weren’t enough employees to regulate recreation time.
Hinds County Sheriff Tyree Jones denied the court monitor’s reports, and said incarcerated people on all pods of the jail get recreation time. “I think the monitors did not present a clear picture to the courts of how the jail operated at times,” Jones told The Marshall Project – Jackson.
Meanwhile, the county is building a new jail, set to be completed in 2028. In the new facility, each housing unit should have its own recreation area that is managed by detention staff in that unit, an architect working on the project testified in a 2022 court hearing.
Construction of the new Hinds County Jail in Jackson, Mississippi.
