Cheh, who was a Washington D.C. City Council member at the time, says a tour she took of the D.C. Jail that summer that led her to introduce the Inmate Segregation Reduction Act of 2015, which attempted to limit solitary confinement throughout the District’s correctional facilities. 

In December of that year, advocates with the National Religious Campaign Against Torture erected a full-size replica of a solitary confinement cell in the Foundry United Methodist Church in Northwest D.C. to raise awareness for Cheh’s bill ahead of a council vote. Cheh, who visited the church one Sunday that month to speak about the proposed reforms, says the image of the cell’s cramped confines has stuck with her ever since.

“It really took the activism of groups to point out to me the ills—the absolute horror, even—of solitary confinement,” she told Bolts. 

But Cheh’s bill never made it to a vote. In fact it never made it out of the judiciary committee where it was first referred. Cheh tried twice more to pass laws reducing solitary confinement before leaving the council in 2022, but those proposals died as well. 

Then in September 2023, D.C. Council member Brianne Nadeau took up the baton by introducing the ERASE (Eliminating Restrictive and Segregated Enclosure) Solitary Confinement Act. Nadeau’s office worked with the local chapter of Unlock the Box, a coalitional advocacy campaign seeking to end solitary confinement nationwide, in drafting the language of the bill. It aims to comprehensively ban solitary practices in the D.C. Department of Corrections’ facilities, but it remains to be seen whether Nadeau and her co-sponsors on the Council will be able to generate the political will to get it passed this time. 

Despite calls to end it over the intervening years, solitary confinement has remained a regular practice in the D.C. Jail, which holds between 900 and 1,300 residents at any given time. Most are pretrial defendants or people serving short sentences for misdemeanor convictions. 

In fact, D.C.’s Department of Corrections has been shown to use solitary confinement more than many other correctional systems around the country. An agency memo reported that eight percent of its population were held in solitary confinement in 2018, and nine percent in 2017—three times the national average, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report released in 2015. And at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, the agency reportedly held 1,500 people in prolonged isolation for nearly 400 days.

Solitary confinement—defined as prolonged isolation with little to no human contact—has been decried by governments and activists the world over for exacerbating the harmful behaviors that often land people in solitary in the first place. In 2015, the United Nations classified solitary confinement beyond 15 consecutive days as torture for the damage it does to inmates’ physical and mental health. Studies have shown that some residents held in solitary confinement become “actively psychotic and/or acutely suicidal.”

“It creates a situation where if somebody is already suffering from a mental illness, it exacerbates those conditions,” Jessica Sandoval, national director of the Unlock the Box, told Bolts. 

“All of the research out there and all of the personal experience we hear people share shows that putting someone in solitary is likely to make them more violent, not less,” said Emily Cassometus, former director of government and external affairs at DC Justice Lab, part of the Unlock the Box D.C. coalition. “Towards themselves, towards other people in the facility, staff and residents included, and more likely to be victims of violence, to be victims of self-harm, and to commit violence once they’re released.”

The D.C. Jail has leaned on isolation as a strategy to deal with inmates experiencing mental health crises in particular, yet publicly contends that it doesn’t put people in “solitary confinement.” In 2022, then-DOC spokesperson Keena Blackmon told a local outlet that the D.C. Jail “does not operate solitary confinement within its facilities,” and only uses “restrictive housing” for suicide prevention. 

These are known as “safe cells,” designed to keep suicidal inmates from environments that could endanger their safety. But advocates have argued that these restrictive housing units are just isolation by another name, and say these units more closely resemble punishment than medical care. 

“Jail authorities are very clever and they give different names to solitary confinement, but it’s still solitary confinement,” Cheh told Bolts. “They could call it whatever they want.”

A lawyer representing people formerly incarcerated in the D.C. Jail told Bolts of numerous complaints emanating from the restrictive housing cells over the past decade. People incarcerated in these units have complained of being held for 23 hours of each day isolated inside their cell; that they had no access to showers or running water; that they slept on plastic blocks due to a lack of mattresses; that bright fluorescent lighting blazing all day inside their cell made them lose track of time; that they were stripped of all their clothes and personal belongings, including religious material, and even thrown in cells with feces on the walls—likely from past residents who’d covered themselves in it trying to force officers to let them shower. 

Between November 2012 and August 2013, four residents of the facility committed suicide, which jail officials at the time said was three times the national average. So the department commissioned suicide prevention expert Lindsay Hayes to survey the area in order to prevent further self-inflicted harm.

In his report published September 2013, Hayes found the conditions “overly restrictive” and “seemingly punitive,” and suggested that the agency avoid isolating at-risk residents to prevent further self-harm.

“Confining a suicidal inmate to their cell for 24 hours a day only enhances isolation and is anti-therapeutic,” he wrote.

While the jail has updated their practices based on Hayes’ suggestions, residents are still reportedly held for up to 22 hours a day in severe conditions. And the suicides haven’t stopped.

Nadeau’s bill makes note of the “deplorable conditions at the District’s jails and restrictive housing units—including flooding, lack of grievance procedures, lack of mattresses, and more.”

The bill seeks to prohibit “segregated confinement” outright within the D.C. Jail. But it still makes an exception for safe cells; it would “strictly limit” their use for suicide prevention, allowing for people on suicide watch to be put in “safe cells” only if “immediately necessary”, and sets a 48-hour maximum limit for holding a person there continuously. It also puts in place other guardrails, such as frequent checks by a medical professional. 

This stripped back version, which didn’t include juvenile detention facilities the way Cheh’s bill did, was introduced in an attempt to ease its way to passage.

But even if the bill is passed, the reforms would need to be regularly enforced by an independent oversight body or risk becoming toothless. The D.C. Corrections Information Council was created for such oversight, but in recent years it has received sharp criticism for its inattention to conditions in the D.C. Jail.

“Sixteen years on the Council taught me a few things,” Cheh told Bolts, “and one of them is that you can pass all the laws you want, but if people aren’t enforcing them, then they’re not worth the paper they’re written on.”

The legislation hasn’t progressed much in the new year. In fact, the city council seems to have moved in the opposite direction on criminal justice, passing an omnibus anti-crime bill in early February that would among other things create harsher penalties for gun crimes and theft, with a focus on retail theft in particular. The ERASE Solitary Confinement Act was referred to the judiciary and public safety committee back in November, but there hasn’t been any movement on the legislation since.

Cassometus says she fears that to many D.C. leaders, the invisible nature of solitary confinement is a feature, not a bug. “It’s really hard to draw attention to an issue that no one can see, hear or smell,” she told Bolts. “Solitary confinement has been talked about as a solution to problems but it’s not. It’s locking our problems in a smaller box inside the jail and wishing that they would go away without actually proposing any solutions.”

The post “An Issue No One Can See”: Watchdogs Fault D.C. for Ongoing Solitary Confinement appeared first on Bolts.

Evan Lee had trouble getting the medication he needed for mental illness and other health issues after being booked into the Harris County jail, just three days from Christmas in 2021. As a result, Lee’s family says he deteriorated during his time inside the hulking lockup in downtown Houston, until March 9, 2022, when he was badly beaten and injured by another inmate.

According to a lawsuit Lee’s family filed against the county earlier this summer, it took two days for jail officials to give him any medical care despite visible injuries like facial bruising. Even then, according to the lawsuit, jail medical staff “simply looked at Mr. Lee and sent him back to his cell without any treatment, observation or further diagnostic testing.” On March 18, more than a week after the fight, jail staff finally sent Lee to a hospital because of how disoriented he was. Doctors found serious head injuries, including two areas of bleeding in his brain, and pronounced him brain-dead two days later. 

Lee, 31, was one of at least 28 people who died after being in Harris County jail custody in 2022, when Texas’ largest jail system saw a record wave of deaths. Alongside other mourning parents, his mother Jacilet Griffin-Lee now religiously attends meetings held by the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, a state regulatory agency. For more than a year at these hearings, Harris County has been called to the carpet for violating minimum safety standards, including for lapses in medical care and monitoring of people in custody. Griffin-Lee and other family members drove the 160-mile trip from Houston to Austin for the jail commission’s last hearing on Nov. 2 and stood at the back of the room, holding poster-sized photos of loved ones lost to the jail as an entourage of Harris County officials testified about efforts to improve conditions. 

After Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez left the hearing room, Griffin-Lee peppered him with questions in the basement level of the Texas capitol building. “It’s a horrible facility, it just hurts for people to get the death penalty while they’re waiting for their case,” she said as other grieving mothers circled the sheriff. “We should not be getting the kind of letters we’re getting from inmates that are there and what they’re witnessing.” 

Harris County officials have largely blamed the jail crisis on overcrowding and short staffing; as of the November hearing, more than 9,000 people were detained inside a Harris County jail system that had more than 200 vacant jailer positions. And yet they haven’t announced major new efforts to shrink the population they wish to jail. Instead, in response to the jail commission’s escalating pressure, they’ve started shipping even more people in their custody to for-profit lockups far from Harris County. 

Last month, after the state jail commission threatened to reduce Harris County’s jail capacity if it didn’t comply with minimum standards, the county’s governing body—its five-person commissioners court—unanimously approved a $11.3 million contract to send up to 360 people to a private prison in Mississippi. That’s on top of the roughly 1,300 people whose detention the sheriff’s office already outsources to other private lockups outside the county. 

Any pretrial detention, which accounts for more than 70 percent of the county’s jail population, separates families; it also makes mounting a defense more difficult, putting pressure on people to plead guilty. But those challenges multiply when people are sent hundreds of miles away. It may even compound the backlog in criminal cases that has contributed to the overcrowding crisis. According to county data, people now spend on average nearly 200 days in Harris County jail custody, most waiting for their case to be processed, which is far greater than the national average jail stay of 33 days. Defense attorneys say more outsourcing could add to delays in cases as more people must be transported back to the county for court hearings.

“It’s hugely expensive, it draws things out, and it destroys relationships between clients and lawyers and clients and their families,” Alex Bunin, Harris County’s chief public defender, told me. “It creates just all kinds of anxieties that can play out later and affect things like recidivism and getting a job and getting back into society.”

The outsourcing, ostensibly a response to dangerous jail conditions in Harris County, will put even more people in the hands of private prison companies with their own histories of abuse. 

CoreCivic, the private prison giant that inked the new contract with Harris County last month to detain people in one of its Mississippi lockups, has long been accused of short staffing, excessive force, and poor treatment at its facilities. Another company Harris County contracts with to house up to 500 people in one of its Louisiana prisons, LaSalle Corrections, has a similarly troubled track record; in 2020, the company lost its contract to run a bi-state jail on the Texas-Arkansas border following years of lawsuits over deaths on its watch. 

Harris County detainees shipped to the LaSalle Corrections Center in northwest Louisiana, nearly 300 miles from home, have already warned of dangerous conditions. Rahan Atia, a Houston defense attorney, told me that he started hearing complaints of extortion and threats of violence after he took over the cases of several defendants held there. 

In September, Atia asked a Harris County judge on one of his cases to prevent the sheriff’s office from sending a client back to LaSalle after he’d been brought to Harris County for a hearing. (Atia asked that his client not be named to protect his privacy.) The request prompted a hearing over whether to keep the defendant in Harris County. 

Lawyers for the county opposed the motion. “The same people that are out there are here,” said Graylon Wells, a lawyer with the Harris County Attorney’s Office, according to a transcript I obtained of the hearing. 

Wells said that the jails managed by the county also present dangers, questioning whether the defendant would be any safer staying in Harris County. “My confusion here is inmates rotate from LaSalle to here, so why is he safer here than he is in LaSalle?” Wells asked. Victoria Jimenez, a lawyer with the sheriff’s office, told the judge, “It is nearly impossible to prevent any type of extortion from happening … What if something happens to him here?” 

“Is something going to happen to him here?” the judge, Natalia Cornelio, asked. “God forbid, no. Hopefully not,” Jimenez replied, then added, “Things happen every day in that jail.” 

Atia told me the hearing felt like a troubling admission by the county that it couldn’t ensure safety for anyone in its custody, whether in the facilities they run directly or elsewhere. He credited Cornelio for taking the matter seriously and granting his request to keep the defendant in Harris County after the extortion attempts, but he added that other judges refused to even hear similar complaints. “Other judges went, ‘Well you know, it’s just the culture,’” he said. “No, it’s not just the culture. We need to stop this.” 

Neither the sheriff’s office or LaSalle representatives responded to my requests for comment or questions sent by email for this story. 

The outsourcing also decreases oversight of the conditions under which people are detained. Jails inside the state fall under the regulation of the Texas jail commission and are required to hold independent law enforcement investigations into each death in custody and report them to the state attorney general. (As I wrote earlier this year, some Texas sheriffs have tried to undermine these requirements.) 

But those requirements stop at the state line. 

Andrea Armstrong, a law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans who works with her students to compile information about deaths in custody across Louisiana, says that her state has comparably weak jail regulations and oversight. She pointed to the case of Billie Davis, a 35-year-old man who died after Harris County sent him to the LaSalle Correctional Center last year. Had he died in Texas, Davis’ death would have triggered a report to the Texas AG as well as an independent police investigation. After Davis died in Louisiana, Texas jail reform activists struggled for months to find out what happened to him. This year, activists finally tracked down a coroner’s report, which concluded that Davis died from the result of “multiple blunt force traumatic injuries during a fight in custody” and ruled his death a homicide. 

Armstrong said Louisiana law doesn’t require any particular investigation into deaths in custody other than by a coroner, so it’s unclear what, if any, other inquiry occurred into Davis’ death. (Sheriff’s officials in LaSalle Parish, where the facility is located, didn’t respond to my questions for this story.) “In our work documenting deaths in Louisiana prisons and jails, one of the most difficult facilities to obtain information from is privately operated facilities,” Armstrong told me. “My students often end up in extended conversations with legal counsel. It’s a difficult undertaking.” 

Brandon Wood, executive director of the Texas jail commission, acknowledged the outsourcing of detainees may decrease oversight of the conditions in which they’re detained. “I don’t know if I want to use the term, ‘black hole,’” he told me, “but it is one of those things where once they are no longer within the state of Texas, we lose a lot of our authority regarding those inmates.” 

Advocates for jail reform in Harris County have urged local officials to prioritize reducing the jail population over more outsourcing. Krishnaveni Gundu, executive director of the Texas Jail Project, which monitors jail conditions and advocates for incarcerated people and their families, says there have long been other options. 

For instance, she pointed to a 2020 consulting report commissioned by the county that recommended prosecutors dismiss all non-violent felony cases older than nine months in order to cut the county’s case backlog—especially since more than half of those cases eventually wound up dropped or deferred anyway.

Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg has balked at such recommendations, calling them unrealistic. Ogg, who faces a heated primary challenge to keep her seat next year, was also admonished by her own party earlier this month, with Harris County Democratic Party precinct chairs voting overwhelmingly to pass a resolution that condemns her for, among other things, “[standing] in the way of fixing the broken criminal justice system.” Ogg has also clashed with local judges who have supported bail reform and pursued efforts to relieve the local jail.

Gonzalez, the local sheriff, has said that outsourcing is “not a preferred solution” and has made halting efforts to release people—including flagging people in his jail system who present no public safety risk for consideration by the DA’s office and judges. “We incarcerate way too many people,” the sheriff told the grieving families who had gathered in November to confront him. “Right now, law enforcement is on the front lines of three things in this country: mental health, addiction and poverty,” he said. “We should not be on the front lines, we should find other alternatives to that, instead of people ending up incarcerated.”

Even with such rhetoric from officials, Harris County continues to double down on jail-based solutions to the crisis. In addition to the increased outsourcing, the county earlier this year approved an additional $645,000 to expand services for people in the jail who have been found incompetent to stand trial—a program that county administrators have proposed expanding even further. Gonzalez himself has suggested that the county should seriously consider new jail construction. 

All five members of Harris County’s governing body, even those who have clashed with the DA, approved the new outsourcing contract last month. County Judge Lina Hidalgo, who leads the county government and supported the contract, told Houston Landing that it “breaks my heart” and that she wants to be “figuring out a solution.” But, she added, “I don’t have it yet. It’s a little scary to say I’m working on one and I don’t know if we’re going to find one.” (Hidalgo’s office didn’t respond to my questions for this story.)

But Gundu insists there are many alternative policies for the county to pursue. “Instead of lining the pockets of private prison companies, we could be investing those taxpayer dollars in robust evidence-based solutions that actually promote public safety,” she told me. “Such as access to affordable and stable housing, crisis respite centers, psychiatric ERs, community based mental health care, guaranteed income programs, equitable access to healthcare—any of these solutions is guaranteed to keep our communities safer than a jail.” 

Meanwhile, families of people who died in Harris County jail custody say they will continue to pressure officials for accountability, including by attending the next state jail commission hearing. “I want to let the commissioners know that we’re watching and we care about our loved ones, even when they are in their worst state,” Lee-Griffin said after the last commission hearing. As it approaches two years since her son’s death, Lee-Griffin told me she tries to focus on good memories of him, like his love for sports and for his community. 

For others at last month’s jail commission hearing, the pain of losing a child to jail still felt fresh. Dianne Bailey Rijsenburg showed me photos of her 30-year-old son, Ramon Thomas, who died after being incarcerated at the jail this summer. Tears welled in her eyes as recalled praying to herself and pacing around her house after she got the call that he had died this summer, as if trying to stabilize herself with movement and faith.

“How can those people come and rip your children from you like that, like they’re nobody?” she asked, holding a photo of her son bordered by blue flowers. 

The post Out of Sight appeared first on Bolts.

There are many paths to elected office, Justin Douglas quips, “but fired pastor is not one.” 

A year ago, he says, he could not have named the three men who serve on the county commission of Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, his home since 2015. This powerful body, with control of a $222 million budget and a county government workforce of 1,700, meets Wednesdays in downtown Harrisburg, in a building that Douglas had never entered. 

Still, he got a call in February from Run for Something, an organization that recruits progressive candidates for local elections, to see if he’d be interested in running for a seat on the county commission. The last time the office was on the ballot, in 2019, Douglas did not vote. He’d just been fired from his job as pastor at a local church for appearing in a promotional video welcoming LGBTQ+ people to join the congregation. He, his wife, and their three kids were forced out of the home, which was owned by the church. All this time later, Douglas, 39, is still working three jobs to make up for what happened: he’s a pastor at a new church and a fitness instructor, and last year he drove more than 2,000 miles for Uber. 

His stand at the church fit with what he describes as his longtime activist streak. A mainstay in various corners of Dauphin County where matters of social equity and justice are concerned, Douglas grew active in recent years in protest of conditions in the local jail, an aging and oppressive facility where people die at an alarming rate. The county commission has vast power over that jail, a significant factor, Douglas says, in his decision to take Run for Something up on its proposal. He still felt like an imposter when he decided in March to enter the race.

By any standard measure, his campaign seemed doomed from the start: He had no paid staff or office. His team of volunteers, a few friends of his with zero combined campaign experience, met in the corner of a Starbucks in Hershey. He ran without institutional backing or money; while his opponents combined to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, Douglas reports spending only about $12,000.

And he centered his campaign around denouncing the fact that so many people have died in Dauphin County’s jail—an unusual focus, to say the least, for a political candidate. 

He spent roughly a fifth of the little campaign money he raised on a single, highway-side billboard highlighting the lethal lock-up, which sits between Harrisburg and the Douglas family home near the southeast edge of the county. Dauphin County has admitted at least two jail deaths in each of the last four years, a pace that stands out even by terrible national standards. 

“Eighteen prisoners dead since 2019,” Douglas’ billboard read. “Vote for change on Nov. 7.”

In most states, jails are run solely by sheriffs. In Dauphin County, as in most of Pennsylvania, jails are managed directly by local bodies that each feature all three county commissioners, plus some other officials. That gives Dauphin County’s commission a potent vantage point from which to force change, but local advocates have long been angry at what they see as commissioners’ indifference in the face of this death crisis. 

Douglas hammered that message relentlessly—on social media, at candidate forums his opponents didn’t bother to attend, and on the few occasions journalists reached out to interview him. The day before the election, Douglas posted on TikTok urging people to vote, a standard campaign move with an atypically specific appeal: “What got me into this race is prison reform,” he said. “Restorative justice is the solution, and we need that throughout Dauphin County.” 

The following day, on Nov. 7, Douglas defied all expectations to win a seat on the commission, ousting Republican Commissioner Chad Saylor by just 184 votes. A video captures Douglas’ reaction when he learned his win: “Are you kidding me right now? Oh my gosh. Is this for real?” he says, pacing the parking lot outside of the restaurant where he’d gathered with his team.

His victory flipped Dauphin County’s three-person county commission to Democrats. This is the first time the party has won a majority here since at least the Civil War, and an exclamation point on a strong election night for Pennsylvania Democrats generally. Dauphin County now leans blue in federal politics, with Joe Biden carrying it by 9 percentage points in 2020, but Democrats have struggled down-ballot.

The upset has brought Douglas, who’ll be inaugurated on Jan. 2, a lot more attention. He says his calendar is suddenly jammed with people who’d never looked his way but now want to meet, and that he is invited into rooms he could not previously access. He’s been plunged into a new role, one that he hadn’t imagined he’d actually win, and must now figure out how to shake up the local political establishment from the inside. 

When I first talked to Douglas last month, he was still processing his unlikely victory, and planning with his allies how he could turn their newfound clout into better conditions—and a greater voice—for the people detained in Dauphin County. 

We met in downtown Harrisburg, early on a frigid Wednesday just before the weekly commissioner’s meeting, which he chose to attend—as a spectator, for now. He’s instantly recognizable as almost anything but a successful politician: he’s got gauge earrings, 42 tattoos, and dresses in jeans, band tees, and Nike sneakers. The morning we met, he’d put on a collared shirt and a blazer because, he said, he’s trying to look the part these days. 

When we arrive at the county building, a local NAACP chapter leader joins us in the elevator and gives Douglas a hey–aren’t-you-that-guy look, then asks to grab coffee some time. Douglas takes a seat in the back row of the commissioners’ meeting room, and tells me he feels a bit out of place. 

Later that morning, as he readies for an interview with Harrisburg’s CBS station, Douglas confesses that he’s got a lot to learn; that he’s not convinced the Democratic majority will work well together; that he feels icky about attending the inauguration on Jan. 2 at a fancy hotel downtown; that he’s having trouble trusting all the folks who now want to be his friend; and that he isn’t sure how, exactly, he’ll navigate the political terrain to bring about change inside the county prison that was the focus of his campaign. 

The TV crew leaves and he asks me how he performed, then ponders how to best articulate his ideas going forward. “I’m figuring it out. I’m figuring out how I’m going to move differently now,” he says. “Not in morals or in authenticity, but if this is a simulation and we’re in a video game, I leveled up and skipped a few levels. I’m the dude off the street.” 

Douglas is not alone in navigating these questions. He is brainstorming next moves with Lamont Jones, a like-minded reformer and political newcomer who won a seat on the Harrisburg city council in November. And he is in conversation with other central Pennsylvania advocates who are eager to build on this moment. 

Onah Ossai, an organizer with Pennsylvania Stands Up, is watching attentively. She thinks Douglas’s ascent was catalyzed by the protests for social and racial justice in 2020 that, in her words, “primed people” in Dauphin County to view the jail as an everyday scandal. 

“There was activism that made a candidacy like this viable,” Ossai, who met Douglas at a Juneteenth rally this year outside the jail, told me. “No one else was running on the prison or talking about it before. Justin put up a billboard, he came to prison events, he came to prison board meetings. I think people really understood that he was someone who was at least paying attention, that he was a real outsider.”

Despite its name, the Dauphin County Prison operates more like a common jail. Most of the roughly 1,000 people detained there on any given month have not been convicted and are held pretrial. Many are there because they can’t make bail, or due to violations of probation or parole. The average length of stay at the jail is 120 days, the county reports. 

While the county hasn’t recently published demographic information about the people it incarcerates, many who’ve been inside of it told me the detained population skews disproportionately Black, which is in keeping with the county’s historical trends.

Many Pennsylvania jails are deadly for the people who churn through, but Dauphin County’s jail death rate still exceeds statewide and national averages, PennLive determined in a recent investigation. More broadly, the county’s own numbers show over 2,000 incidents since 2019 in which staff used physical force or deployed chemical agents on people held at the jail. 

“You don’t have to live in Dauphin County long to know this is a problem,” Douglas tells me. “It’s hard to miss.” 

In addition, local journalists have found that the county has often misreported its jail deaths—in some cases, covering up its own responsibility. 

In one such instance, Dauphin County reported the death of Herbert Tilghman as a “medical event,” which, PennLive found, obscured the fact that prison staff failed to take Tilghman’s stomach pains seriously, providing minimal treatment and even accusing him of faking illness shortly before he died. In a separate case, the county initially said Ishmail Thompson died in a “medical episode,” failing to note that officers had placed Thompson in a restraint chair, and a hood over his head, then pepper-sprayed him soon before he fell unconscious and, ultimately, comatose.

A dozen people I interviewed for this story with knowledge of conditions inside the jail spoke of nearly round-the-clock lockdowns, and neglect for people’s mental and physical health needs.

“It’s disgusting,” Harrisburg’s Doniesha Bell told me this month, shortly after she was released. Though she hasn’t been convicted of any crime, she spent six months in jail because she could not make bail. She said she was staying at a local shelter, having no stable place to live.

“You have to sit in a cell and eat where you have to use the bathroom. You’re locked down 23 hours a day, and that’s if the guard feels like letting you out,” Bell said. “I was locked up with people who’d seen people die in there, and I get it: you’ve got to bang on the door because there’s no way to get ahold of the [correctional officers]. … The one day my blood pressure was up, they just told me to deal with it, to wait. And they never called the nurse.”

John Hayden, a local watchdog with a Quaker-led citizen group called the Harrisburg Advocacy Team, said the prison’s running crisis is the result of policy choices—namely, contracts with profit-driven companies Aramark and Primecare Medical to provide food and healthcare.

“The way they make more money is by providing lower-cost food and low-wage employees,” Hayden says. “They’ll go several weeks in a row with bologna sandwiches for lunch every day. Sometimes they’ve had bologna sandwiches for all three meals.”

These stories have spurred deep local activism. Meetings of the jail board are well attended, and some advocates have successfully pushed their way into unofficial oversight roles; the nonprofit Pennsylvania Prison Society takes regular tours of the prison and reports back to the community on what it’s seeing. Destiny Brown, a member of that group, tells me she and others in her advocacy corner were pleasantly shocked that Douglas won, and that they “hope and pray this brings change.” Her Prison Society colleague, John Hargreaves, adds that Douglas winning is “injecting a note of optimism. People feel somewhat hopeful now, whereas they didn’t before.” 

Douglas told me, “I’ve moved in activist communities in this area pretty much since I got here, and there are a lot of people who’ve come before me, who are much louder than me, who have educated me on this issue.”

While I was in town to see him, Douglas toured the prison for the first time. He reports back to me following the visit: Certain cell blocks don’t ever go outside, he learned. Rather, he says, they have gym time, which the jail counts as “outdoor” time because air flows in through barred windows. Douglas says he observed in the gym that some of the basketball hoops have no rims, and learned that the jail’s juvenile unit has no working showers. He says he saw leaking water from corroded pipes throughout the kitchen, and a man naked in a cell, defecating on the floor. 

He says he met another man on suicide watch, under supervision of an officer who told Douglas she is overworked and was filling in for a colleague on that day’s assignment. Douglas tells me, “That’s not a place I’d want to be in if I were in mental health crisis. That would not aid in my betterment.” 

He was escorted during his tour by the county’s director of criminal justice, John Bey, a longtime Pennsylvania police chief who was hired by the county earlier this year to oversee its correctional system. Commissioners touted him as an agent of change, and Bey himself said at the time of his hiring, “My position embodies transparency.” 

And so, when we spoke by phone this week, I was curious to hear how Bey feels the county can better communicate what happens inside the jail. He immediately rejected my premise and suggested that the county has been forthcoming about jail deaths, despite thorough PennLive reporting to the contrary. He acknowledged the jail’s poor reputation, but insisted conditions are improving and that “at no time in the history of this place” has accountability been higher.

“I can assure you that as a facility, as an institution, we take the care of our inmates here very seriously and we work closely with PrimeCare to ensure that inmates and those under our care receive at the very least adequate medical care to ensure they’re thriving as much as they can be, given whatever maladies they enter the prison with,” he said.

He added, “They’re not housed in their cells locked down 23, 24 hours a day.” I mentioned Bell’s claim that she had been locked in for that long. “I’m not going to say that that lady is lying,” Bey replied. “We do feed inmates in their cells. They’re very small cells.”

Douglas says he met more than 20 people detained at the jail during his tour, and some knew he’d been elected. He recounts one prisoner saying, “You’re coming in here to fix this place.” He responded, “I’m going to do what I can.” 

Douglas will soon have some real power over the jail. When he is inaugurated, he will automatically join the county’s prison board, the facility’s governing body, on which all three commissioners have a seat alongside four other local officials. The board proposes contracts and settles policy questions in the jail, and it regularly holds meetings to take public input.

The three-member commission, as a separate, standalone body, has final say on budget questions and on contracts for health care, food, and other services. Douglas has been critical of the county’s relationship with those vendors, suggesting that local leaders are influenced by campaign donations from potential vendors. 

None of the current commissioners—Democrat George Hartwick and Republican Mike Pries, who will stay in office next year, plus Saylor—responded to my interview requests. 

Douglas vows that he’ll use his new standing to demand major improvements in detention conditions, from fixing the broken pipes to restricting solitary confinement. 

He’s also aware that the best way to keep someone from dying at the jail is to make sure they never get there at all. He insists that focusing on improving economic conditions throughout Dauphin County would have that effect. He thinks the county should detain fewer people pretrial, a reform that other parts of Pennsylvania have adopted, and hopes to partner with the Dauphin County Bail Fund, a local anti-carceral organization, to highlight punitive bail practices.

But Douglas knows change will be difficult. Many of his ideas have gotten little visibility from the local political establishment until now. On the prison board, he’d need to form a broad coalition to force changes; for decisions made by the commission, he’d have to win over at least one of his colleagues.

Douglas is the first to concede that he isn’t anywhere close to functioning majorities in favor of bold jail reforms. While Douglas and Hartwick will form the board’s new Democratic majority, and could shift policy on some issues, like access to voting, Douglas is skeptical this will easily extend into criminal justice policy; the two men have little relationship so far.

“I don’t trust that everything’s better,” Ossai says. “We’ll see if they’re able to work together, and to what end, and we’ll see who holds the power. Justin’s new, he’s outside.” 

But Douglas thinks his activist background is an asset and says that he is prepared to use his bully pulpit to disrupt normal proceedings in the county, forcing other officials to reckon with the deaths and the suffering happening under their watch.

He says he’ll frequently and loudly talk about what goes on in the jail. He wants public meetings on that and other topics to be understandable to the public—that is, no more sailing through agenda items without discussion. He wants meetings of the prison board to be events and hopes to invite more voices of activists, including currently and formerly incarcerated people, into those spaces. He says he’ll take journalists on jail tours and that he plans to pop in often for his own tours, sometimes without warning. 

He tells me, “The prisoners whose hands I shook—I’m going to get to know their names. They’re going to see me regularly.”

Inside a coworking space in Harrisburg, which serves as Douglas’s office for the time being, he ponders these power dynamics in a meeting with Jones, the incoming Harrisburg city councilor. 

Jones, too, overcame tremendously long odds to reach these heights. He’s formerly incarcerated, including two stints inside the Dauphin County jail. He’s Black, was raised in poverty in Harrisburg, and by 15 was selling cocaine. Now 48, he voted for the first time at age 39; like so many in the country, he says, he spent years wrongly assuming his felony record meant he could not vote. He’s got a close perspective on the dangers of the local jail: his cousin, Ty’Rique Riley, died after being detained there in 2019—one of 18 names behind the statistic on Douglas’s billboard.

When Jones decided to run for Harrisburg’s council this year, local Democratic power players  conspired to keep him off the ballot, arguing his criminal past should disqualify him. Jones prevailed in court and again on Election Day. 

In this heavily Democratic city within this light-blue county, Jones says, he has a hard time talking about his path to the ballot without crying.

“We’re in the era of criminal justice reform, right? Here, I’m someone who has exemplified that enough to be elected into a position to give hope to people who didn’t think they could do anything with a felony, who didn’t think they could get out of the situation. But none of those people who talk about criminal justice reform was willing to stand beside me,” he says.

I listened as Jones and Douglas considered how they can work together to reduce poverty, criminality, and incarceration. They know they’ll need to build consensus in circles that have upheld a status quo that is deeply punishing for communities like the one Jones was raised in.

“We’re going to have to make some relationships with some people that we don’t even care for,” Jones tells Douglas. “We may have to take some losses.”

The two men feel politically lonely and they’re already bracing for blowback, but they’re also focused on building power on the outside. “It can’t stop with just him and I,” Jones tells me. “We’re going to need more people.”

Upon my return from Harrisburg, Douglas contacts me with news of two local developments: 

First, another man has died inside the prison. His name was Christopher K. Phy, he was 38 years old, and he hanged himself. PennLive reports this is the county’s 19th jail death since 2019. 

Second, the county has agreed to a $4.25 million settlement with the family of Ishmail Thompson, the man who died after jail staff restrained and pepper-sprayed him. 

Douglas is disgusted, furious. I ask him how it’ll feel after he’s inaugurated, if and when someone else dies in there, or the county is made to pay for its violence against a future detainee, and reporters or members of the activist base from which he’s risen call him demanding answers. He tells me local officials are already advising him to not talk openly to the media, because too much sunlight could expose him or the county to liability.

“I’m not going to cost the county anything,” Douglas tells me. “What actually happened is what’s costing the county money.”

He continues, “I’ll lose this job and they can sue the hell out of me, if that’s the consequence of being honest and transparent. Let’s be honest: the county just paid a family $4 million because they murdered somebody. If that happens again on my watch, I’m going to want to say a lot.”

The post His Shock Win Flipped a Pennsylvania County. Now He Vows to Raise Hell over Its Lethal Jail. appeared first on Bolts.

When Los Angeles Sheriff Alex Villanueva lost his reelection bid in November 2022, it seemed to mark a default cessation of hostilities between him and the Board of Supervisors, the county’s five-member governing body. The conflict spanned his four-year tenure, from an early clash over Villanueva’s rehiring of a deputy fired for allegations of domestic abuse to his dispatching a team of deputies armed with battering rams to raid one of the supervisor’s homes just before the 2022 election. There was no shortage of choice words, either: At one point, the sheriff said the supervisors “need to be taken to the shed and they need to be beat down so they start doing their job.” 

Recently, though, Villanueva has reemerged from retirement with a novel provocation: He is seeking to join the ranks of the body he long antagonized. In September, he announced his bid for county supervisor, running against Janice Hahn, a centrist Democrat with deep roots in LA politics. Perhaps predictably, the other four sitting supervisors have endorsed Hahn, who promptly issued a statement calling Villanueva “a fraud and a failure.” In response, Villanueva told Bolts: “Janice Hahn is a fraud and a failure, hands down.” 

All this feuding can seem petty, but the stakes are quite literally life and death for some Angelenos. 

Jail deaths steadily increased each year Villanueva was in power. “Under Villanueva, the conditions in the jails deteriorated significantly,” said Claire Simonich, associate director at Vera Action, “[there were] people with serious mental illness being chained to chairs for days at a time, dozens of people being crammed together in overcrowded facilities.” 

In response to a request for comment on the jail deaths, Villanueva emailed Bolts: “Aw gee, did something called the pandemic happen during my tenure?” He also touted his efforts to reduce the jail population during the pandemic. However, a UCLA report found that despite an initial decline in the population, overall people were actually held in custody pretrial longer during the pandemic, in part due to the sheriff department’s practices. 

But the crisis has continued since Villanueva’s exit. At least 46 people have died inside LA County jails or elsewhere in the sheriff’s custody thus far in 2023. These numbers make the jails in Los Angeles deadlier than Rikers Island, the New York lockup that frequently makes national headlines for its intolerable conditions. An 18-year-old also died in one of the county’s juvenile detention facilities in May.

Part of the responsibility falls on Villanueva’s successor, Sheriff Robert Luna. But the county’s Board of Supervisors also possesses an extraordinary amount of power over this situation: it sets the county’s $46.7 billion budget, including how much money goes toward incarceration and how much goes to alternatives to incarceration like inpatient mental health treatment, and holds oversight power over county jails and the sheriff’s department.

“On the flip side,” Simonich said, “the board does have responsibility to build up the types of services that will prevent crime from happening in the first place and invest in housing, invest in mental health care, invest in substance use disorder treatment.” The supervisors have dragged their heels on funding for the mental health beds the county desperately needs, and continuously failed to close the dangerous and dilapidated Men’s Central Jail, a move they first committed to in 2019.

The showdown between Hahn and Villanueva, then, underscores just how drastically the sheriff’s department and the board alike have failed to protect the people in their care.

Their race may be resolved as early as the March 5 primary if a candidate receives more than 50 percent across District 4, an area in the county’s southern part. That’s a strong possibility, with only two lower-profile candidates in the race. Otherwise, Villanueva’s comeback bid may continue into a Top 2 runoff in November.

But local advocates are also eying the two other seats on the board that Angelenos will decide this election, hoping to put in place a stronger alliance next year willing to finally flex the board’s power to improve jail conditions. 

“The Board of Supervisors, apart from when they are forced to discuss in-custody deaths, have been entirely silent,” said Ambrose Brooks S., the campaign and advocacy manager for Dignity and Power Now, a member of the Justice LA Coalition. “This is urgent, this is an emergency, and their silence is not going to make us stop advocating for them to do something.” 

Thanks to a state transparency law that went into effect on New Year’s Day, 2023, the LASD now maintains an in-custody death tracker. As of December 18, the list includes 45 names: men between the ages of 20 and 91, most of them pretrial, who allegedly died by suicide, because of illness, or a drug overdose, or, in three instances, at the hands of another person. But the majority of deaths listed are attributed to “natural causes” or are pending a final autopsy report.

There is at least one person whose death is nowhere to be found on that list: Stanley Tobias Wilson, Jr. Wilson was a talented athlete who attended Stanford and went on to play football in the NFL. But unresolved trauma from childhood sexual abuse combined with CTE from years of football proved devastating to his mental health, his mom, Dr. D. Pulane Lucas, told Bolts. Last November, Wilson was deemed incompetent to stand trial for a recent break-in. Unbeknownst to Lucas, a judge ordered that her son be moved from where he was being held at Twin Towers, the county’s second largest jail, to Metropolitan State Hospital, which specializes in psychiatric care, by no later than Dec. 5. 

Nearly two months later, he was dead. A County Medical Examiner employee initially told Lucas he’d been found unconscious in his cell. “And then the story changed,” Lucas said. Now, they were telling her he’d fallen out of a chair and died of a pulmonary embolism while waiting to be admitted to Metropolitan. Lucas, who runs a policy nonprofit in Virginia, flew to Los Angeles to try to figure out what had happened, visiting the sheriff’s department to request records, then to Metropolitan, where her son had allegedly collapsed. “And that’s when they told me that they’ve never had anyone by the name of Stanley T. Wilson Jr. admitted,” she said. “I was blown away…now all of a sudden to get the message in person that Stanley did not die there and was never a patient there?”

Lucas sought another autopsy. “There’s blatant evidence of violence against him,” Jason Major, an autopsy technician who performed the independent death review, told Bolts. “He had a footprint on his face that’s clearly visible…he had abrasions on his knuckles, on his knees.” 

To Lucas, it is impossible to square the simple answer for her son’s death—a pulmonary embolism—with the errors, shifting narratives, and obfuscations surrounding Wilson’s death that she received from the County Medical Examiner’s office. (The office did not respond to a request for comment). Major and Lucas both believe that the truth is closer to the County Medical Examiner’s original version of the story; that Wilson collapsed and possibly even died at the jail, and that deputies transported him to the hospital after realizing that they were in flagrant violation of the judge’s order to transfer him months earlier. “They never even checked him in,” Major said. “He basically was dropped off, like Weekend at Bernie’s.” 

Nick Shapiro, the director of the Carceral Ecologies lab at UCLA, says that Wilson’s case is characteristic of jail deaths in LA County. Fatalities that get chalked up as natural often stem from a complicated interplay of factors such as poor mental health treatment, racialized violence, and negligence, he told Bolts. “The Black population has been subject to specific racial violence from deputy gangs [within the jails]… there’s been very long-term, documented gang related activity in the mental health ward.” 

In a 2022 analysis of 58 autopsies of people who died in LA county jails between 2009 and 2018 (just a small fraction of the total number owing to the county’s refusal to release most records), Shapiro and his co-author, Terence Keel, the founding director of the UCLA Lab for BioCritical Studies, found that more than half of the deaths classified as “natural” exhibited signs of violence on the body. They also found that Black people’s deaths were much more likely to be categorized as “natural” than those of other races. “There’s a problem in thinking about ‘natural death’ being the same for incarcerated populations that have no free will to choose what they eat, to choose what they drink, to bathe themselves on their own schedules, to wear appropriate clothing for the weather,” said Shapiro. In a recently published follow-up report, the researchers conclude that these classifications serve to downplay the responsibility of deputies and other jail staff for these deaths, whether through negligence and deprivation of care or outright violence—essentially blaming incarcerated people for their own demise. 

“What we’re looking at is really capital punishment through other means,” Keel told Bolts. 

To Lucas, one of the most suspicious aspects of her son’s death was how the official story changed and coalesced over time: “They’re telling their story after the fact and it appears that they’ve all gotten together because they’re all saying the exact same little story, you know, word for word.” (Lucas said that LASD has refused to release video footage she’s requested). 

Lucas told Bolts that Wilson’s omission from the official LASD tracker leads her to suspect that there are other deaths missing, too. (She recently wrote an editorial for The Appeal exploring this issue). “Within one month of when they started counting—here’s Stanley,” she said. “The beacon to say: look, some of us aren’t being counted. And here’s Stanley with a mama who’s not just going to accept the medical examiner’s statement of how he died.” 

In September, Lucas flew once more to Los Angeles to attend a vigil for those lost inside county jails. The following day, she gave public comment at the Board of Supervisors meeting. “While it’s too late for Stanley, I’m here to speak to the importance of providing needed services for inmates with mental health services, and also to support alternatives to incarceration,” she told the board. 

The board has a complex record on both of these issues. “Historically, the board has taken first steps to establish ‘care first’ practices in Los Angeles,” said Simonich of Vera Action. They’ve pledged to shut down Men’s Central Jail, established an “Alternatives to Incarceration” working group to explore implementing a variety of services that can preclude jail time, and created a Justice, Care, and Opportunities Department to one day move pretrial services out of the Probation department and instead develop community programs to support people awaiting trial. “Where the board continues to falter is on follow-through.” 

Simonich told Bolts she wanted to see the board immediately commit to a clear timeline to close Men’s Central Jail, which has been responsible for a disproportionate share of deaths this year. “It’s now been more than two years since the board commissioned the report on how to close Men’s Central Jail, and no actual plan has been adopted. No timeline has been put in place,” she said. 

For Brooks S. of Dignity and Power Now, the single most important intervention to alleviate the jail death crisis would be for the Board of Supervisors, in collaboration with the County CEO, to fast-track funding for more county mental health beds. Dignity and Power Now has been working with a woman whose son was jailed about a year ago while suffering from paranoid schizophrenia ; a judge ordered him released to inpatient mental health treatment this fall, but he’s still in jail, and won’t be released until sometime this month because there are so few spaces available. “If there was no waitlist, all of the people who were ordered by the court for mental health diversion could go the day that the order is made,” Brooks S. said. “That would drastically decrease the jail population.” 

The board could see a serious shakeup in several directions during the 2024 elections, from the arrival of Villanueva to the replacement of its most conservative member by a staunch progressive. Two supervisors besides Hahn are up for reelection: Holly Mitchell, whom Justice LA considers the foremost champion of the ’Care First, Jails Last’ agenda, and Kathryn Barger, the board’s lone Republican. 

Mitchell faces three challengers, at least one of whom is questioning her support for criminal justice reforms; the consensus among local observers is that she’ll be the clear favorite in a district that covers South Los Angeles and western portions of the county.

Barger, whose district encompasses LA County’s relatively conservative, exurban Northeast but also includes left-leaning cities like Pasadena and Burbank, faces a challenge from two progressive Democratic candidates, Assemblymember Chris Holden and Burbank Mayor Konstantine Anthony. Two other candidates, Perry Goldberg and Marlon Marroquin, are also in the race. (Here too, the top two candidates will face off in November if no one receives more than 50 percent on March 5.)

Though Hahn has dismissed Villanueva’s candidacy, her political choices in recent months appear directly influenced by his presence in the race. After the former sheriff blamed her for voting for a hiring freeze on deputies in 2022, Hahn spoke emphatically at a recent event against defunding the sheriff’s department, noting that the Board has increased LASD funding by over a billion dollars over the past decade, even boasting that her office had stepped in to pay for extra patrols in some unincorporated communities. Recently, she cast the lone vote against moving parking enforcement out of the sheriff’s department and into the department of public works, which would remove some funding from the sheriff. “To me, that suggests Hahn tacking to the right and specifically playing into law enforcement,” Brooks S. said. 

A spokesperson for Hahn emphasized to Bolts that the supervisor was concerned about rushing the measure without prior study. She added that fully funding LASD and investing in mental healthcare, job training, and youth programs was “not a contradictory effort.” 

One of Hahn’s other challengers, Rancho Palos Verdes City Councilor John Cruikshank, is also running to her right, calling for more detention and support for sheriff officers.

Meanwhile, Barger has recently demonstrated more serious interest in investing in mental health care in the county. But the supervisor has also long expressed support for building a locked mental health facility in place of Men’s Central Jail, which organizers have denounced as a jail by another name. When Supervisors Hilda Solis and Lindsay Horvath introduced a motion seeking to immediately reduce the jail population in April, both Barger and Hahn expressed their opposition, citing public safety concerns. (Solis ultimately withdrew the motion). “We are desperate for Supervisor Hahn and Supervisor Barger to take the situation in the jail seriously,” said Brooks S. 

In a statement to Bolts, Barger reemphasized her stance on closing the jail. “I believe Men’s Central Jail should be permanently closed and I stand by my belief that we need to replace it with a state-of-the-art facility that is secure, safe, and provides high quality care for those who pose a danger to themselves and the community,” she wrote.

Anthony, the Burbank mayor running against Barger, criticized her record in an interview with Bolts, including her support for a locked mental health facility to replace Men’s Central Jail. “On day one, if it hasn’t been agendized, I will agendize the closing of Men’s Central Jail,” he said. “I will absolutely vote for a speedy timeline. It’s well overdue.” Anthony also told Bolts he’d move to fast track mental health beds, as long as they weren’t supplied through Care Courts, a novel form of court-ordered mental health treatment championed by Governor Gavin Newsom that has drawn criticism from disability rights and civil liberties advocates. “We can build outreach centers…that the county simply funds, and [are] run by the local city or jurisdiction. We need to spread out the help,” he said. 

Holden, Barger’s other challenger, didn’t respond to multiple requests for an interview. He has supported police and prison reform at the state level, writing a bill known as the “George Floyd law” to establish greater consequences for police who fail to intervene when a colleague is using excessive force, and most recently sponsoring the Mandela Act, which would bring California in line with U.N. restrictions on the use of solitary confinement—including in the local Los Angeles jails. 

Anthony said he hoped to hasten the Board of Supervisors’ halting advancements towards a county system that prioritizes care over incarceration. “By running in this race and getting elected, I’ll be able to flip one of the seats that is preventing a lot of this progress, and hopefully that will get rid of many of the barricades that we’re seeing,” he told Bolts. 

Los Angeles faces the strange possibility of emerging from these elections with four supervisors who have expressed a commitment to advancing criminal legal reform at the county level—and Alex Villanueva. And while it may seem that just one supervisor couldn’t do much to throw a spanner in the works, Simonich of Vera Action cautioned that each member of the Board holds enormous power, from choosing what to place on the agenda for public hearings, which can have significant policy ramifications, to appointing commissioners, including to two separate boards with oversight power over LASD and the jails—and positions such as the Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner. 

Keel, the UCLA researcher, hopes that the March primaries spur a broader reconsideration of how the county responds to these deaths. He wants the Board of Supervisors to establish an independent medical board to provide a secondary autopsy for everyone who dies in state custody, “whether that’s in jail, or on the streets.” 

 “We are not helping to create a better county if we continue to just assume these people died as a result of their own will and their own poor biology, rather than saying, No, we’re culpable, we’re accountable,” he said. “We need to be thinking differently about inequality—and how the ultimate cost of inequality is death.” 

Correction (Jan. 2024): This article has been updated to reflect the final version of Terence Keel’s and Nicholas Shapiro’s report on LA County Jail autopsies.

The post As Los Angeles Politicians Trade Barbs, Jail Deaths Keep Mounting appeared first on Bolts.

Local DAs like Willis have become a key GOP target this year, as Republicans go after prosecutors who they think are standing in the way of their political or policy ambitions. New laws in Georgia and Texas give courts and state officials more authority to discipline DAs. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is challenging Trump for the GOP’s presidential nomination, has over the last 18 months removed two Democratic prosecutors from office, angry over their policies like not prosecuting abortion. 

The presidential election is also pulling sheriffs into its orbit. Far-right sheriffs have allied with election deniers, using local law enforcement to amplify Trump’s lies about 2020, ramp up investigations, and even threaten election officials. One such sheriff, Pinal County’s Mark Lamb, is now running for the U.S. Senate in Arizona, leaving his office open. Over in Texas, Tarrant County (Fort Worth) Sheriff Bill Waybourn inspired a new task force that will be policing how people vote while he runs for reelection next year.

With roughly 2,200 prosecutors and sheriffs on the 2024 ballot, voters will weigh in on county offices throughout the nation next year, settling confrontations over the shape of local criminal legal systems while also choosing the president and Congress.

Bolts today is launching its coverage with our annual overview of which counties will hold such races and when: Find our full list here.

Which Counties Elect Their Prosecutors and Sheriffs in 2024?

Learn whether your county is hosting a prosecutor or sheriff race next year.

These offices often get overshadowed since the criminal legal system is so decentralized, but that’s also what makes these offices so powerful: DAs exert a great deal of discretion within their jurisdiction, choosing what cases to prosecute and how harshly, as do the sheriffs who run their county jails like fiefdoms. 

Most of the counties choosing their prosecutors and sheriffs in 2024 last elected these officials in 2020, a tumultuous year defined by the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests and amplified attention to racial injustice.

Many candidates broke the traditional mold of law-and-order campaigning that year, making the case instead that punitive practices haven’t delivered on safety even as they’ve ballooned prisons. Reform-minded prosecutors were elected or reelected in the counties that contain Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin, Tucson, and Ann Arbor, among others; voters also elected some new sheriffs who interrupted immigration detention. But progressives fell short in high-profile races in the contain Houston, Detroit, Fort Worth, and Phoenix.

Those offices are all back on the ballot in 2024. Criminal justice reformers are defending more incumbents than ever but also hope to gain some new ground where they’ve faltered in the last cycle, with the future prospect of policies that would ramp incarceration up or down on the line.

To kick off our coverage of criminal justice in 2024’s local elections, here is an early guide to storylines to watch.

1. The reform-minded prosecutors seeking second terms

Los Angeles County’s size (ten million residents) and the tensions around George Gascón’s reelection bid are enough to make LA the marquee DA race of 2024. After Gascón ousted his tough-on-crime predecessor in 2020, he faced an internal revolt from staff prosecutors unwilling to implement his reforms and survived several efforts by his critics to force a recall. (One of the loudest champions for recalling Gascón, Sheriff Alex Villanueva, was ousted by voters in 2022.)

Gascón, who has dubbed himself the “godfather of progressive prosecutors,” now faces a very crowded field to secure a second term. While he’s also faced criticism from the left for not delivering on some of his promises, his opponents are largely running to his right, promising to roll back his sentencing reforms.

Other first-term progressive incumbents are also up for reelection. They include former labor organizer José Garza in Texas’ Travis County (Austin), Eli Savit in Michigan’s Washtenaw County (Ann Arbor), Deborah Gonzalez in Georgia’s Clarke County (Athens), and Laura Conover, who went from protesting the death penalty as a youth activist to promising to never seek it as the chief prosecutor of Pima County (Tucson).

Police groups have taken note and are already involved in these races. In Austin, police groups have tried to drum up complaints against Garza, who used his first term to prosecute police officers accused of violence, breaking with usual norms of impunity in a way that has made him a target for the national right. Last week, though, Garza dismissed the felony assault charges he had brought against 17 officers for their actions against protesters in 2020. 

Other new prosecutors who’ve clashed with police include Mike Schmidt in Oregon’s Multnomah County (Portland), whose challenger Nathan Vasquez has a closer relationship with the police, and Mimi Rocah in New York’s Westchester County. Rocah, who won her DA race in the wake of a major police scandal, vacated convictions that were tied to the testimony of a disgraced police officer. She won’t seek reelection next year, sparking an open race.

2. Clashing visions of public safety 

Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx is retiring in 2024, eight years after ousting Chicago’s chief prosecutor and starting to implement some reforms. So far, the Democrats running to replace her are walking a line between promising to keep Foxx’s changes and vowing to work more closely with law enforcement; a GOP candidate, meanwhile, has denounced Foxx for turning the office into a “social service agency instead of the prosecuting arm of the people.” 

However hyperbolic, that statement underscores the clashing visions of public safety in many of these prosecutorial races. Reform-minded candidates often make the case for strengthening a broader array of public services as an answer to crime, while their critics want to keep the focus on the more conventional tools of policing and incarceration. 

In Ohio’s Hamilton County (Cincinnati), for instance, Republican incumbent Melissa Powers hopes to prevail in a county that’s trending leftward by stroking fears about the effects of a Democratic takeover. She recently said her loss would turn Hamilton County into “a Baltimore, a Saint Louis,” naming two of the nation’s big cities with the highest share of Black residents. To prevail in November, Powers would need to perform strongly in the county’s populous suburban areas, which are far whiter than its urban core of Cincinnati.

But many of next year’s most intriguing elections will be decided within the Democratic Party. Incumbents with a record of fighting local criminal justice reforms, and who beat back progressive challengers in 2020 or 2022, may choose to seek new terms in 2024.

These incumbents include: San Francisco DA Brooke Jenkins, who has embraced harsher policies and dropped police prosecutions since replacing Chesa Boudin, a progressive who was recalled in 2022; Harris County (Houston) DA Kim Ogg, a fierce critic of local bail reforms whose clashes with reform-minded Democrats have escalated this year; Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) Prosecutor Michael O’Malley, known for the frequency with which he seeks death sentences; Wayne County (Detroit) Prosecutor Kym Worthy, who has defended punitive practices toward minors; and Albany County DA David Soares, who is a leading voice among New Yorkers demanding more rollbacks to the state’s recent bail reforms. 

Some of these races will be slow to take shape since the filing deadlines are still months away. But in Houston and Cleveland, the primaries are already around the corner. On March 5, Ogg faces Sean Teare, a former prosecutor in her office whose platform is more muted than some of Ogg’s prior opponents but who has support from some of her progressive critics. On March 19, O’Malley faces law professor and former public defender Matthew Ahn, who has pledged to never seek the death penalty and decrease pretrial detention. 

Bolts will keep an eye on these and many more races next year, with prosecutor elections still taking shape all around the nation, from Bernalillo County (Albuquerque) and Maricopa County (Phoenix) to Milwaukee and Honolulu.

3. Can criminal justice reformers even run for local prosecutor in certain red states?

When DeSantis suspended Tampa prosecutor Andrew Warren over policy disagreements in 2022, Bolts writer Piper French pondered how to take future Florida elections seriously in light of that abrupt move. “What does it even mean to run for office when the governor’s political whims could turn a win into a loss?” she asked. Since then, Warren’s DeSantis-appointed replacement has rolled back some of his reforms, and DeSantis has since fired a second prosecutor, Monique Worrell, in Orlando. (Worell is still contesting her ouster in state court.)

Nearly all Floridians will vote on their prosecutor in 2024. That means that in Hillsborough (Tampa) and Orange (Orlando) counties, residents will get to weigh in for the first time since DeSantis summarily dismissed the officials they’d elected in their last local elections. 

But the atmosphere created by DeSantis will make it tricky for there to be real policy choice in those elections. In Tampa, Orlando, and everywhere else in the state, candidates will know that their win may be overturned by the governor if they run on a vision that differs from his.

A similar dynamic exists, to a lesser extent, in Georgia, where the GOP adopted a new law that makes it a removable offense for local DAs to propose certain policies that progressives have prized, as well as in Texas, where some DAs are facing similar efforts to oust them. Conservative critics of Garza, Austin’s DA, filed a complaint seeking to remove him from office this month over his approach to prosecuting lower-level offenses.

4. Who will speak up against gruesome jail conditions?

Aggravated by routinely poor health care, jail deaths are a crisis all over the country—including in states such as Georgia, Michigan, Texas, and West Virginia that will be electing all of their sheriffs in 2024. 

Sheriff Bill Waybourn, for instance, has overseen a startling string of deaths in Tarrant County, Texas, though that didn’t stop the Republican incumbent from narrowly securing reelection in 2020. 

Patrick Moses, one of Waybourn’s two Democratic challengers next year, promised to step up investigations into jail deaths when he launched his bid last week. “I view the 60 in-custody deaths at the Tarrant County Jail since 2018 as 60 individual reasons to run for office,” he says on his new website. 

Other counties with sheriff races are under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice for conditions in their local jails, including Fulton County (Atlanta) and parts of South Carolina. 

Fulton County Sheriff Pat Labat, a Democrat, is facing heavy fire and calls for his resignation due the many people who’ve died under his custody in Atlanta and due to his flailing response. Asked by Atlanta News First last week if Labat should step down, the chair of the county board pointed to the upcoming elections: “In the final analysis, it’ll be up to the voters come 2024.”

5. The rise of the far-right sheriffs

After Kansas’ most populous county, Johnson County, voted for Joe Biden by eight percentage points in 2020, Republican Sheriff Calvin Hayden went on a crusade claiming that elections are marred by widespread fraud and ramping up investigations, echoing Trumpian conspiracies.

Hayden is just one of the many sheriffs who have linked up with election deniers and other far-right organizations, using the power of the badge to push their agenda. And now he’s already facing an opponent in what’s likely to be a tough reelection bid next year. 

Many sheriffs with similar politics represent far redder territory, though recent examples show they may still lose against fellow Republicans or independents. The GOP primary to replace Mark Lamb in conservative Pinal County will be especially noteworthy if it yields a new sheriff who won’t see his role as propping up so-called constitutional sheriffs all around the nation. 

6. Immigrants’ rights will define more sheriff elections

Several Southern counties in 2020 interrupted their history of anti-immigration policies. In Charleston County, South Carolina, and Cobb and Gwinnett counties, Georgia, voters elected Democratic sheriffs who terminated their counties’ so-called 287(g) contracts—agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that authorizes sheriff’s deputies to arrest and detain people they suspect to be undocumented immigrants.

These sheriffs are all up for reelection in 2024, all in counties that may be competitive in a general election.

It may be hard for immigrants’ rights activists to break up more of these contracts through the polling booth in 2024, though. Per Bolts’ analysis, there are almost 90 counties presently in the 287(g) program that hold sheriff’s races, but they’re mostly in staunchly conservative areas. The exceptions are largely in Florida, due to a recent law signed by DeSantis that mandates that sheriffs join 287(g) whatever their own preferences. Outside of Florida, only one Biden-carried county has a 287(g) contract and is voting for sheriff in 2024: Bill Waybourn’s Tarrant County. 

But collaboration with ICE extends far beyond 287(g). Many sheriffs rent out jail space to ICE, or seek out federal grants to police immigrants. And come 2024, sheriff races in Arizona—a border state with a long history of anti-immigrant practices—may be the central battleground for those debates, especially with yet another unpredictable election taking shape in Maricopa County. 

Home to Joe Arpaio, one of the nation’s most visible far-right politicians, Maricopa County in 2016 saw Democrat Paul Penzone oust Arpaio and end some of the county’s most aggressive practices against immigrants. But Penzone also severely disappointed immigrants’ rights activists by maintaining close ties with ICE and keeping federal agents in his local jails.

Penzone announced this fall that he’ll resign in January, making the race unpredictable at this stage. In early 2024, the county board will need to replace him with a new Democrat, who’d then decide whether to seek reelection; already in the running is Penzone’s 2020 Republican rival, Jerry Sheridan, a former Arpaio deputy. In this county of 4.4 million, the race may present an opportunity for local immigrants’ rights activists to gain a stronger ally, though it also opens the door for one of the nation’s largest law enforcement agencies to swing back to the far right. 

7. The many other elections that will matter greatly for criminal justice policy 

Sheriffs and prosecutors are just slices of the vast institutional edifice that runs the nation’s criminal legal systems. In 2024, big cities such as Baltimore and San Francisco will elect their mayor—an office that often, though not always, exerts direct control over the police department.

Ten states will elect their attorneys general, a role with broad authority over law enforcement. At least 33 will elect supreme court justices, who’ll shape local policy and individual criminal cases. 

And all of these races are bound to be overshadowed by a presidential campaign likely to pit President Biden against his predecessor. Trump is again playing up a strongman image, proposing the death penalty over drug sales and outlining a vast deportation infrastructure for which the collaboration of local sheriffs could prove critical. 

The post The Thousands of Local Elections That Will Shape Criminal Justice Policy in 2024 appeared first on Bolts.

Jenny had been locked up for several years by the time Ujevich arrived at West Virginia’s all-women Lakin Correctional Center and Jail. There, Ujevich says, Jenny had complained of a persistent pain in one of her breasts, but struggled to get staff to take that problem seriously. In fact, Ujevich says, the staff hardly paid her any mind until Jenny’s condition sharply and visibly worsened. Only after that point did Jenny learn she had breast cancer. 

Ujevich still fumes over how long it took Jenny to obtain that diagnosis, and over what came next: “She couldn’t get her chemo on time,” Ujevich told Bolts.

Jenny was released in late 2016. She spent Christmas with her family, then died in January.

Ujevich is now free and heading a nonprofit project called West Virginia Family of Convicted People, where she advocates for changes to the state’s prison system, including improvements in health care. She’s nervous that a new state law, passed during a special session last month by West Virginia’s GOP-run legislature and signed by its Republican governor, could lead to more cases like Jenny’s.

Senate Bill 1009 bans the use of state funds for any health care for incarcerated people that isn’t deemed “medically necessary.” The policy leaves it to state Corrections and Rehabilitation Commissioner Billy Marshall—a career law enforcement agent who has said incarcerated people are lying when they allege inhumane treatment by the state—to define “medically necessary” and makes clear that this definition can supersede guidance from health professionals. “A provider of health care prescribing, ordering, recommending, or approving a health care service or product does not, by itself, make that health care service or product medically necessary,” the law reads.

West Virginia already routinely fails to provide basic, essential care in its jails and prisons, several formerly incarcerated people told Bolts. Kenneth Matthews, who was locked up for more than eight years and has been free since 2020, says he lived this firsthand, as a diabetic person with high blood pressure. 

In prison, he said “I didn’t get insulin, and they didn’t give me medication for my high blood pressure either. They said maybe if I lost some weight and worked out more, my blood pressure and diabetes would correct itself.”

And Zoey Hott, a trans woman who was incarcerated for about 18 months and released August 1, said people needing gender-affirming care feel this struggle acutely. She told Bolts she was promptly taken off hormone therapy when she arrived at jail and then denied this treatment as she was transferred to several different jails. The interruption, she said, caused physical discomfort and profound mental health issues. 

“It took me five months to even be evaluated,” Hott added. “They don’t really look at it as something of significant importance for anybody. I feel like they view it as an elective procedure.”

Stories like these abound, JoAnna Vance, an organizer with the West Virginia Economic Justice Project, told Bolts. “Health care in jails and prisons is not good. ‘Mental health services’ is just throwing people in solitary. We just had another death in one of our jails this morning. I know people who’ve been having seizures in jail and the correctional officers ignore them or tell the other inmates to deal with it. Lord, there’s so much.” 

West Virginia contracts with a private company, Wexford Health, for medical care in its jails, prisons, and juvenile detention centers. All over the country, from Arizona to Illinois to West Virginia, incarcerated people and their advocates have complained for years of medical dangers resulting from government partnerships with Wexford. Most recently, a lawsuit filed in July accused the company of denying thousands of incarcerated West Virginans medication for opioid use disorder. 

In the treatment of addiction and so much else, health care in U.S. carceral facilities is typically abysmal—even as the people locked in those facilities are, on average, much more medically vulnerable than the population at large. The situation grows even more dangerous where care is outsourced to private companies, like Wexford, a broad Reuters analysis found.

But even against this national backdrop, West Virginia stands out: it led the nation in prison deaths per capita in 2020, and, that same year, the Reuters analysis found that its jails had the highest death rate between 2009 and 2019, among dozens of regions around the country that the news agency surveyed.

And so it is alarming to those critical of this deadly system that the state has passed a new law that could soon curtail what little public funding the state currently allocates for health care in jails and prisons. Advocates worry now about what SB 1009 will mean for incarcerated people seeking gender-affirming care, contraception, disability accommodations, or anything else the state might try to argue is not “necessary.”

“I think this has the potential to be extremely abused. I really do,” Ujevich said. In West Virginia jails and prisons, she added, “They just do not give a shit about your medical care. Not one shit.”

It’s hard to know how, exactly, SB 1009 will change the status quo. The enrolled bill is less than 500 words long and leaves many blanks to be filled. Notably, it does not specify any forms of health care that are being provided today that might be eliminated under this policy and leaves broad authority to the state Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation to set new rules moving forward. 

And while the law does require the division head to consult with a “medical professional” before deciding whether a given instance of medical care is indeed “necessary,” it neither defines “medical professional” nor compels the division to accept professionals’ advice.

Delegate David Kelly, the Republican chair of West Virginia’s House Jails and Prisons Committee, told Bolts the point of the bill is to make carceral health care rules uniform across the state system—that is, he said, whether or not someone receives a certain type of medical care while locked up should not depend on their facility. But he was unable to say whether there is a lack of uniformity in the system today, and could not identify any particular procedures or benefits the state funds today that he believes should not be covered in the future.

With few specifics written into the law and such broad powers granted to prison officials, a dozen different lawyers, lawmakers, advocates, and formerly incarcerated people interviewed for this story told Bolts the best they can hope for is that the policy change won’t much affect West Virginia’s standard of care in jails and prisons. But, “worst-case scenario, it will prevent even more medical care for incarcerated people,” said state Delegate Mike Pushkin, a Democrat who voted against SB 1009.

Pushkin and several others said they believe this law could open West Virginia to lawsuits. Recent successful litigation accused Corrections officials of inadequate medical and mental health care, and a new suit filed this month in federal court alleges 10,000 people in the state’s custody live in inhumane conditions.

“The United States constitution sets the minimum floor as to what the state has to provide to people who are incarcerated, and there’s no statute that the West Virginia legislature could pass that would somehow remove that obligation,” said Lydia Milnes, deputy director at Mountain State Justice, which has sued the state over health care for incarcerated people. If SB 1009 leads West Virginia officials to deny even more basic health care in jails and prisons, Milnes said, “There can and will be more litigation.”

SB 1009 could also be a cost-saving measure for a state jail and prison system dealing with critical staffing issues—Commissioner Marshall said over 1,000 positions are vacant in West Virginia jails and prisons, twice as many as before the COVID-19 pandemic—that advocates say contribute to the state’s deadly carceral conditions. But the special legislative session last month resulted in much more discussion of pay raises for jail and prison staff than of ways to ensure safety and wellbeing for incarcerated people.

“I think they’ve barely chiseled away at the edges,” said Pushkin, one of just 11 Democrats in the 100-member state House. “You need safe places for people who are incarcerated. And we don’t have that here in West Virginia.”

Republican Governor Jim Justice called the special session, which began on the same afternoon he announced it. SB 1009 was one of the 44 bills that Justice included on his call, directing the legislature to take it up.

He requested for the session to begin at 4 p.m. on a Sunday, and some state lawmakers told Bolts they didn’t get a peek at the legislation being proposed until about 3:30 p.m. The process left many people directly concerned with or affected by the slew of legislation no time to assess it, much less to testify on it. 

“The lack of transparency during the special session was completely appalling, and it’s not the way democracy is supposed to work,” Pushkin said.

Kelly, the Republican delegate, pushed back, telling Bolts that SB 1009 had been brainstormed for “several months.” If so, that’s news to many people who work closely on and are directly affected by the issue of health care in jails and prisons in West Virginia.

This policy change concerning “medically necessary” care received only one public hearing before it became law, in a 35-minute discussion of the House Judiciary Committee. The Republicans backing the bill made little effort to identify the need for this change, and Brad Douglas, the executive officer of the Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation, offered little information when he testified under oath. 

In a private meeting the day the special session began, the Republican legislative leadership said this reform was needed “because of nose jobs and knee replacements” for incarcerated people, Democratic state Delegate Evan Hansen told Bolts. “They did not present any backup data or evidence.”

Among the few substantive public remarks any elected West Virginia Republican has made on this policy, state Delegate Brandon Steele voiced support during the committee hearing for state funds being used on voluntary sterilization of incarcerated people.

“If one of these individuals wanted to get a vasectomy or hysterectomy or something like that, I think that it’s good public policy to allow them to do that,” Steele said, in a remark that went unchallenged at the hearing. (Steele isn’t the first to advocate along these lines: GOP state Senator Randy Smith recently suggested West Virginia should shorten jail and prison sentences for anyone who agrees to be sterilized, so that those people “don’t bring any more drug babies into the system.”)

At one point in the hearing, Democratic Delegate Joey Garcia, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, pressed Douglas to identify any procedure or medical benefit that the state is funding today, but may not fund under SB 1009.

“So, you don’t have any examples?” Garcia asked.

“I do not,” responded Douglas.

Only when asked directly about West Virginia’s extreme rate of jail and prison deaths did Douglas even acknowledge them. “It would be accurate to say we’ve had inmates die in jails, yes,” he said. When asked if that is a “problem,” Douglas said only, “It’s never good if any inmate passes away.” 

SB 1009 passed the legislature the following day. It passed the Senate unanimously, including with support from Democratic members. The House passed it on a margin of 86 to 9, with eight Democrats and one Republican opposing. 

“The guy was playing dumb,” Hansen said of Douglas. “But that happens with a lot of bills in the legislature in West Virginia, now that the Republicans have a supermajority. They work things out in their caucus ahead of time, and it’s very rare for someone from the majority party to slow things down by asking questions.”

For the previously incarcerated people who spoke to Bolts, SB 1009 has reaffirmed their feeling of abandonment by the state and renewed their outrage with what they perceive to be indifference by state officials to the lives and livelihoods of those locked up in West Virginia. 

“It’s horrible, to say the least,” Matthews said. “I think they’re putting a lot of men and women’s lives at risk over the sake of potentially saving some money. Somebody’s life shouldn’t have a dollar amount attached to it.”

Soon after he was released, Matthews was hospitalized with diabetic ketoacidosis, a life-threatening condition. “My endocrinologist told me I should have been on medication for a long time,” he said. “I asked, ‘What’s a long time?’ and he said at least the last five or 10 years. I said, ‘That’s interesting, because I was incarcerated for most of that time.’”

Matthews said that his own experience underscored for him that whether a particular procedure or treatment is considered elective or necessary can depend on the whims of whomever gets to make the call.

“It would have been very easy for them to get me on medication to control this early, but I guess they didn’t feel that it was ‘medically necessary,’” he said. “A lot of guys’ life expectancy is shortened because of this. I could’ve died in my sleep because they didn’t take my issues seriously.”

The post New Law Could Make It Even Harder to Get Health Care in Deadly West Virginia Lockups appeared first on Bolts.

Kaddarrius Marquise Cage was experiencing a severe mental health crisis when he entered the East Baton Rouge jail in late May. The 28 year old had stabbed his stepfather in the midst of an acute psychotic episode, but his mother, Kim, says that neither she nor her husband, who was badly wounded in the attack, thought that jail was the right place for Kaddarrius, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. They were told there was simply no other option. 

The deputy who arrested Kaddarrius “assured me that he was being put on suicide watch,” Kim told Bolts. “It was all a lie.” 

Kaddarrius’s stay at the jail, formally known as the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison (EBRPP), disrupted his normal medication schedule, which Kim suspects destabilized him even further. On the morning of May 31, guards found him hanging in his cell. “I called the jailhouse every day for 12 days begging and pleading with them saying please let me—can you have my son call me, can I speak to my son, my son’s not in his right mind,” Kim said. “If I was able to get his medicine to him, my son would be alive today.”

Between 2012 and 2016, the EBRPP had a death rate more than twice the national average, according to a Reuters analysis. Since 2012, there have been 59 fatalities in custody. Jail staff have long faced allegations of neglect and deadly lapses in medical treatment, and in 2016, the brutal treatment of people arrested and jailed for protesting the Baton Rouge police killing of Alton Sterling sparked a movement for jail reform.

The man who has overseen the jail for 15-plus years, East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff Sid Gautreaux, has often blamed the deaths on the building, which activists, politicians, and sheriff’s department officials alike agree is antiquated and dangerous. Gautreaux, a Republican, has for years sought to replace the current jail with a new, even larger facility, but voters have shot down requests for funding to build a new one. The sheriff, who is also the parish’s chief tax collector, has faced allegations of profiting off his office, raking in significant campaign contributions from contractors during elections where he has run unopposed or lacked a significant challenger. This includes thousands of dollars in donations from a law firm that has represented Gautreaux and his co-defendants against plaintiffs whose loved ones have died in his jail. 

Despite his track record, Gautreaux seems likely to secure reelection once again this year. East Baton Rouge has reliably voted for Democratic governors and presidents over the last decade, and Mark Milligan, a Democrat who challenged the sheriff in 2019, is running again, as well as two other candidates. But none of the three challengers appear to be actively campaigning less than two months out from the October 14 election. Four years ago, Milligan received only 17 percent to Gautreaux’s 70 percent.

“Unfortunately, again, because the majority of our residents are not in tune to what’s going on at Parish Prison until it hits them personally…he continues to fly under the radar,” said Baton Rouge Metro Council member Chauna Banks, a Democrat who has previously called the jail a “money grab.” 

Gautreaux didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment for this story. 

Family members of people who died at the jail, advocates for reform, and academics who have studied deaths behind bars there blame the sheriff as well as the warden, Dennis Grimes, and negligence on the part of guards and medical staff for these deaths. But they also blame larger systemic failures that have turned jails into a backstop for people experiencing addiction, instability and mental health crises. 

A paucity of mental health services across Louisiana, as well as the jail’s use of solitary confinement and other practices that can exacerbate mental health crises, only intensify the problems at the lockup, says Reverend Alexis Anderson, the co-founder of the EBRPP Reform Coalition, which has both established a support network for people who have lost loved ones inside the jail and fought to transmit their message to a broader community that remains largely unaware of its issues. 

Anderson said a new jail, which the sheriff continues to advocate for, won’t fix the problems illustrated by a steady stream of tragedies there. In her view, rampant criminalization, from schools to traffic stops to unhoused people, has contributed to a ballooning jail population. She also pointed to the defunding and privatization of state services that ramped up under Louisiana’s former Republican Governor Bobby Jindal, which led to the closure of the charity hospital where incarcerated people in mental health crisis were once sent and paved the way for a private, for-profit company with a long history of scandals to take control of healthcare in the jail. Meanwhile, high bonds and a lack of pretrial reform have also left people who are legally innocent to languish in jail with little treatment for years on end. 

“Mass incarceration is our number one industry,” Anderson told Bolts. “Conversations about the building take away from the real work that we as a community need to do…so we aren’t continuing to use a jail as a de facto mental health facility, as a de facto addiction detox center, as a de facto cooling center for people who are struggling with domestic violence.” 

Rather than building a new jail, the EBRPP Reform Coalition seeks to install an independent monitor to oversee healthcare and conduct investigations of deaths and abuses in custody, so that people aren’t effectively forced to file a lawsuit to try to figure out what happened in their relative’s last moments. Advocates also wish to put an end to the use of solitary confinement inside the jail, and they want fundamental changes in how the country treats residents struggling with addiction, homelessness, and mental illness, with the ultimate goal of incarcerating fewer people.  

In addition to these changes, the coalition is demanding accountability for the suffering the jail has already caused—something a new building alone can never address. “A facility didn’t kill my uncle,” said Sherilyn Sabo, the niece of Paul Cleveland, who died in the jail in 2014. “Three deputies tased him while he was having a heart attack.” 

Not long after Baton Rouge police killed Alton Sterling in 2016, one of Linda Franks’ clients called her to make a salon appointment. Over the phone, she told Franks that she had been arrested during the demonstrations roiling the state capital. “She was very, very, very upset,” Franks recalled. The client told Franks that she and other protestors booked into the jail were pepper sprayed, denied access to basic hygiene products, and left in a freezing cold cell without blankets. It seemed like the guards were retaliating against them for going out to protest Sterling’s death. 

The year before the protests, Franks’ son Lamar Alexander Johnson had disappeared inside that same jail after an officer pulled him over for having tinted windows and discovered that he had an old warrant for a bad check in another parish. “Lamar was like, ‘Mom, you know, everything’s fine. I know I had a traffic ticket,’” she told Bolts. “And four days later my son was hanging in a cell.”

Franks says that Johnson had never before experienced any issues with his mental health in his 27 years. “He was always the peacekeeper,” she said. “He was just an amazing loving father and very attentive to his children.” He lingered on life support for a week, enough time for Franks and her husband to make sure his vital organs went to save a 9-year-old boy who needed them.

Johnson’s passing, in early June 2015, marked the beginning of a furious quest for Franks to understand what happened to her son and prevent others from suffering similar tragedies. She founded an organization called the Fair Fight Initiative. Along with Reverend Anderson, Franks also established the EBRPP Reform Coalition, and started talking to her friends and customers about her work — including the client who called the salon to relay her detention horror story after the Alton Sterling protests. 

Around the same time, Andrea Armstrong, a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans, began receiving a flurry of calls from students who were serving as legal observers during the protests. Their stories led to a 2017 report titled “Punished Protestors: Conditions in East Baton Rouge Parish Prison,” that detailed the abuses visited upon demonstrators during their stays in EBRPP. 

“I’ve been writing about jail and prison conditions for my entire career, but I had never necessarily focussed on a particular facility,” Armstrong told Bolts. She decided to dig deeper, especially after talking to Franks. Armstrong recalled her questions: “Was her son the only one to die this way? You know, ‘Are they telling me the truth about what happened to my son?’” 

Gautreaux, has downplayed deaths in his custody by citing the prevalence of addiction and comorbidities amongst people in his care. More than any other part of the criminal legal system, jails tend to admit people in a state of crisis—which is precisely why speedy medical and psychiatric care, addiction treatment, and regular observation are so important in that setting. But Armstrong also seeks to trouble the assumption that death is simply an inevitability, pointing to nationwide statistics that suggest that the vast majority of jails lack a fatality in any given calendar year. “Death is and should be a rare occurrence behind bars,” she told Bolts.

Diving into EBRPP’s statistics was no easy feat: there was next to no information publicly available. “When we started looking at it, nobody had a list. Nobody was tracking—not even the jail, in a publicly accessible way, at least—who was dying, and why and how,” Armgstrong told Bolts. When Armstrong got records for EBRPP from between 2012 and 2016, she found that 22 of the 25 men who had passed away during that time were legally innocent: They had died awaiting trial. “Their deaths were preventable,” she wrote in a follow-up report. Inspired by her work in EBRPP, Armgstrong would eventually go on to map deaths behind bars throughout the state. 

Despite its name, the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison is a jail, not a prison. The vast majority of its residents are pre-trial, and there’s very little in the way of programming for people incarcerated there, said Amelia Herrera, an organizer with the Baton Rouge chapter of the group Voice of the Experienced who was incarcerated there for a number of months in 2015. But at the same time, people often live there for months or years on end. “Entering jail now is like throwing the dice—you don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said. “Every call is like a 911 call.”

Anderson has been court watching at the local district courthouse for nearly five years. Almost everyone she sees is eligible for bond, suggesting they’re not considered a threat to public safety, but the amounts are set so high that very few people have a hope of posting. Sabo’s uncle’s bail, for instance, was set at $300,000. “How many of the people that you’re holding, you’re only holding there because of poverty?” Anderson asked. “I watch one on one who’s coming in that jail, and I can tell you disproportionately that so many of those people are not medically stable when they get there…We have lots and lots of people [who] go in there because we’ve criminalized mental health.” 

Until 2013, when Republican Governor Bobby Jindal began decimating the state’s charity hospital system (he ultimately shuttered or privatized 9 of 10 facilities), people incarcerated at EBRPP who needed medical care—about 35-40 patients a month—would be taken to the Earl K. Long Medical Center. When the city took over the provision of healthcare services, moving all medical care inside jail walls, things quickly went downhill. A 2016 evaluation by an outside consultant group would deem healthcare at EBRPP “episodic and inconsistent.” ​​At the time, nurses who worked there told the Baton Rouge Metro Council that they frequently lacked basic supplies such as neosporin, and that the jail’s EKG machines could not effectively determine whether someone was in the midst of a heart attack or not. “I can personally attest to them not coming out to give insulin, not checking blood pressures,” said Herrera. The year after she was there, eight people died. 

However, a for-profit carceral healthcare company called CorrectHealth was already in touch with city officials before the 2015 evaluation was even completed. Problems with medical care persisted even after 2017, when the city passed responsibility for healthcare provision off to the company, which has been dogged by lawsuits and is run by a doctor who oversees prison executions in his spare time. 

EBRPP Reform Coalition has been active in the fight to send the company packing. They won a partial victory when the metro council underwent a more transparent contract bidding process and ended up choosing a different company, Turn Key Health Clinics, to take over healthcare provision. But Anderson stressed that without an independent healthcare monitor, any progress that might have been achieved by CorrectHealth’s ouster is incomplete. “We are getting the same bad results because we are doing the exact same things,” she said. Meanwhile, Anderson has counted at least nine fatalities since the new company took over in early 2022—a bleak form of déjà vu. “The deaths keep coming,” said Herrera.

A mental health facility called the Bridge Center for Hope opened in early 2021, an event city officials heralded as transformative for the provision of mental health care in the parish. The 24/7 taxpayer-funded crisis center––the only one in the state—includes a crisis observation unit, a short-term psychiatric unit, and a detox unit, according to their website. But Anderson stressed that most people with mental health issues who cross paths with the sheriff’s department may require longer-term care. In court, she told Bolts, “many of the people who come through with behavioral health issues are not short-term care people. They’re already in our existing mental health system. And so what they need to be connected to is their existing system.”

Jail staff also continue to put people with mental health issues in solitary confinement. Johnson, Franks’ son, was in solitary for a time before his death, and Herrera spent nearly a month there when she was in jail in 2015 after struggling with her mental health in the wake of her mother and husbands’ deaths. “The jail isn’t equipped to handle anyone with a mental illness,” she said. “Instead of receiving help that I really needed, being incarcerated and thrown into a cell….” Ultimately, Herrera said she wasn’t permitted to see a psychiatrist until four months had passed.

During the pandemic, in an effort to keep the isolation that incarceration engenders at bay, the EBRPP Reform Coalition staged a monthly “caravan of justice” outside the jail. “We wanted a way for people being detained as well as people that worked there, to let them know that someone is watching,” Franks said. “I just felt like someone needed to hear a horn blow. I just, I thought, you know, if Lamar heard a horn blow that morning….I don’t know what that would have accomplished, but god put that on my heart to do.”

Despite the body count and rotating cast of healthcare providers at his jail, Gautreaux has largely stayed out of the limelight, all while raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign funds, serving a term as president of the Louisiana Sheriff’s Association He has easily won every election he’s faced, even receiving endorsements from prominent local Democrats despite running as a Republican. 

Gautreaux has a powerful fundraiser and ally in Alton Ashy, a prominent lobbyist for Louisiana’s booming gambling industry who has also served as his campaign chairman and treasurer. Ahead of a December 2022 parish vote on a millage tax to fund the sheriff’s department, Ashy set up a PAC to advocate for the measure, raking in donations from casinos, bingo distributors, and a for-profit correctional services company. 

In a 2021 report, the government accountability group Common Cause singled out Gautreaux for the breadth and depth of donations he has received over his career that represented potential or outright conflicts of interest, including money from CorrectHealth. The report also pointed to a law firm, Erlingson Banks PLLC, that donated to the sheriff and handles the sheriff’s office’s public records requests. Court records show that the firm has also represented the sheriff and other jail officials in multiple lawsuits over jail conditions and in-custody deaths. Mary Erlingson, a partner at the firm who has served as Gautreaux’s general counsel, is also listed as treasurer on the millage tax PAC, which was created to advocate for funding for the sheriff’s office. 

Meanwhile, according to the Common Cause report, Gautreaux has accepted over $150,000 in contributions from construction companies since his initial campaign in 2008. One construction company owner donated $50,000 in one fell swoop to the millage tax PAC in 2022. 

Given all this, advocates are suspicious that the sheriff’s desire for a new jail is less about seeking to improve conditions than the potential for other collateral benefits. Gautreaux initially argued for a 3,500-bed facility, twice what the jail currently possesses, leading some to suspect that he intends to take advantage of a common practice in Louisiana where the state pays sheriffs a per diem to house people in the state prison system. (Under Louisiana’s only 287(g) agreement, the sheriff’s department also collaborates closely with ICE, including holding people in custody for 48 hours after a judge has said they’re free to go so that the agency has time to come pick them up).

“All the research indicated we needed a smaller jail, and we needed to operate in a more therapeutic way,” said Banks, referring to a report commissioned by the MacArthur Foundation, which recommends reducing the jail population. “I know for a fact that would not be a model that the current warden who is running the jail or Sheriff Gautreaux can actually execute.”

The gulf between the power Gautreaux has over parish residents’ lives and the amount of power that they in turn believe they have over his continued employment there frustrates Anderson enormously. “One of the things that I’m constantly in the business of doing is reminding people that you have to have skin in the game.” It’s difficult to convince people, though, when Gautreaux so resoundingly trounced his two opponents in 2019, and no one is yet running a robust campaign to defeat him with the primary just two months away. “If we don’t see a change, these may be some of the most historically low turnouts we’ve ever seen,” Anderson said. Still, “groups like ours will keep reminding people: there is a cost to not paying attention,” she said. 

For Linda Franks, a big part of the fight has been striving to make sure that the broader community understands the horrors of the jail as viscerally she and others who have lost loved ones inside do. She talks to her coworkers and clients at her salon about her work; the EBRPP Reform Coalition tries to do a press conference every time there’s a fresh death. But she recognizes that it’s an uphill battle.

Just last week, on August 10, a local news site reported that a 25-year-old man named Kiyle Maxwell killed himself in police custody while waiting to be transferred to EBR Parish Prison. 

“He didn’t even make it to the jail,” Anderson said.

Correction: A previous article misstated the city affiliation of organizers with the group Voice of the Experienced

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Guards put Bland in a jail cell alone with little supervision despite her telling them that she was depressed and had attempted suicide the previous year. The Rangers investigation would later show evidence that jailers lied about how often they checked on Bland, leaving her unmonitored for nearly two hours before they found her hanging in her cell three days after her arrest.

Bland’s treatment by Texas law enforcement in July 2015 quickly blew up into a national scandal. In the following years, her family channeled that public pressure over her death into a $1.9 million settlement agreement with Waller County that also mandated changes at the local jail, as well as into a statewide reform bill the Texas legislature passed in 2017 bearing Bland’s name. The Sandra Bland Act required Texas police to collect more data on traffic stops and make a “good faith effort” to divert people with mental illness away from jail. 

The new law also required Texas sheriffs to commission an independent investigation whenever people die in their jails. That job has mostly fallen to the Rangers, and state police investigations into jail deaths have spiked since 2018, when the requirement went into effect, helping spotlight the dehumanizing and dangerous conditions that can lead to preventable deaths. 

But those investigations could soon dry up because of a bill, filed in the Texas legislature this month by a Republican lawmaker, that would allow sheriffs to investigate themselves for deaths in their jails. Under the bill, the current mandate for an independent investigation would no longer apply if a death is due to “natural causes or occurring in a manner that does not indicate an offense has been committed,” even though such conclusions are what an investigation is supposed to determine in the first place. 

Cannon Lambert, the attorney who represented Bland’s family and helped them negotiate the 2017 reforms, says the proposal, Senate Bill 1896, would undermine a key plank of the reforms that bear her name. “It’s antithetical to the purpose of the act,” Lambert told me, saying Bland’s family had wanted systemic changes that would lead to greater oversight of jail conditions and accountability for deaths in custody. 

“Having a situation where law enforcement is investigating itself, it causes concern for what the result of that investigation will be,” Lambert said. “It shouldn’t be someone trying to cover something up or trying to massage facts, it shouldn’t be any of that, it should be what are the facts, what do they bear out, and how should they be dealt with.” 

The broadly-written exception in SB 1986 could be stretched to cover the vast majority of state police investigations into Texas jail deaths in recent years. In 2021, a former colleague and I obtained and reviewed more than 400 Rangers investigations into Texas jail deaths. Most had not immediately raised suspicion and almost all were initally ruled by medical examiners to be either suicides, accidental (largely drug overdose) or due to “natural causes,” a blanket term including anything from heart attacks to COVID-19 to complications from withdrawal. But the investigations later conducted by the Rangers often revealed troubling new facts in those cases. Reports I have reviewed detail jail staff across the state ignoring people with deteriorating health, taking hours to respond to emergencies, denying treatment for chronic conditions like diabetes or heart disease, and even mocking dying people while they moan in pain.  

Dean Malone, a civil rights attorney who represents families of people who have died in jails across Texas, told me the Rangers investigations sometimes help uncover initial facts that make it possible to bring a case because their reports often point to lapses and systemic problems that likely contributed to someone’s death—even when ruled to be from “natural causes.” 

Malone pointed me to a lawsuit he filed earlier this month on behalf of the family of Lonnetta Johnson, a 41-year old woman who died last January after a heart attack in the Harrison County jail in rural East Texas. Like many people who die in Texas jails, Johnson struggled with serious mental illness that resulted in her arrest and incarceration at the county jail more than a dozen times over the previous decade. The Harrison County sheriff’s office shared a boilerplate press release after her death that said Johnson experienced “labored breathing” at the jail and was sent to a hospital, where she was later pronounced dead. 

But the Rangers investigation that the sheriff was then required to commission later painted a different picture. Their investigation report, which I reviewed, showed that jailers had put Johnson on suicide watch inside a solitary cell without a mattress for more than two weeks, with nothing more than a smock and a blanket to cover herself. While jailers were told to check on Johnson every 15 minutes, that usually just meant peering through her cell window. Guards interviewed by the Rangers said Johnson’s health seemed to be deteriorating before her death. The investigation showed that Johnson had been sitting on the floor of her cell, hunched over what looked like a puddle of urine, for several hours before jailers finally entered, discovered she was “cold to the touch” and called an ambulance. One guard said it felt like 60 degrees inside the cell. (The Harrison sheriff’s office did not reply to my request for comment.) 

Malone says that he worries the language in SB 1896 could preclude independent police investigations into the vast majority of jail deaths, including many from “natural causes,” like Johnson’s, that deserve a closer look. Like most investigations into law enforcement, Rangers reports rarely result in consequences or charges for jail staff, let alone convictions, and sometimes they reflect the kind of pro-police bias that independent investigations are supposed to prevent. These lawsuit settlements offer the only semblance of justice most grieving families can ever hope to see. 

Michele Deitch, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin and an expert on prison and jail oversight, told me that the Sandra Bland Act gave Texas “one of the best statutes in the country when it comes to allowing for independent investigations of deaths in custody.” She said that this part of the 2017 law provided “a vehicle for identifying measures that can prevent deaths in the future.” SB 1896, she says, would create “an enormous loophole” that could reduce overall reporting of jail deaths, which sheriffs already undercount. A 2019 report by state jail regulators highlighted how sheriffs across the state already skirt the requirement to report and commission outside investigations into deaths by abruptly releasing people in medical crisis from custody right before they die. 

“This reduces transparency at a time when we need increased transparency about these deaths,” Deitch said. 

The author of SB 1896, Republican state Senator Brian Birdwell, didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment or any of my written questions about his bill. The topic surfaced during a Senate committee hearing Birdwell hosted last November, when the senator invited sheriffs to testify about the crushing deployment of state police and national guard troops to the border in recent years. Tarrant County Sheriff Bill Waybourn, whose jail has seen a spike in deaths and numerous allegations of brutality and medical neglect in recent years, suggested during the hearing that state police were wasting precious time and resources investigating him. 

“For instance, last week I had a death in custody, he was in my jail for 20 days, he was in stage-four cancer, died in the hospital, had been up there for 12 days, and now I’ve gotta take up the Rangers’ time looking at that,” Waybourn told senators. “I just think that maybe we can look at a better way of doing that. We want accountability, but sometimes it’s like, golly, well couldn’t he be doing a murder case or something else than reviewing this?” 

Waybourn’s office initially sent me a written statement claiming the exception in the bill would only apply to “the death of inmates who are in custody, but are in the hospital under the medical supervision of a physician and pass away.” The actual language in the bill, however, is much more broad and, as currently phrased, it expands the exceptions for sheriffs to even report any jail deaths. In fact, the state’s criminal code at present already specifies that the reporting mandate does not apply to deaths that occurred “while attended by a physician or registered nurse”; the new bill would strike out that clause, replacing it with broader language. In answer to follow-up questions, Waybourn’s office said he’s “happy with the current language of the bill.”

The Rangers investigations into jail deaths are currently part of a larger patchwork of jail oversight in Texas that might look solid on paper but in practice still repeatedly fails to keep people safe. Law enforcement are required to report all deaths in custody to the state attorney general’s office, which also compiles reports on jail deaths that typically just restate whatever the sheriff’s office said.

Then there’s the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, a governor-appointed commission with minimal staff and a shoestring budget, which is tasked with inspecting more than 240 jails across the state and also looks into deaths to determine whether facilities complied with minimum state jail standards. However, those jail commission investigations have limitations; commission inspectors are not police, are not looking for potential criminal violations, and the commission itself has said that it often encounters “opposition when requesting inmate medical records,” which can cloud their inquiry. Civil rights activists and even another state auditing agency have criticized the jail commission for failing to hold sheriffs accountable; jails across the state, from rural counties to the largest, regularly fail inspections and sometimes cycle out of compliance for years. The commission’s executive director has defended its work, saying regulators have tried to “remain respectful of local government.” 

Even with the increased investigations required by the Sandra Bland Act, circumstances surrounding jail deaths remain opaque. It often takes a lot of persistence and money to get records from the Rangers, and sometimes sheriffs will kick jail death investigations to a much smaller local police department, which usually refuses to release any documents at all. Malone says people mourning loved ones usually struggle to get even basic information about what happened to them. “Even if there’s an investigation, the family has to fight to get the records,” Malone told me. “But if there’s no investigation, then nobody knows what’s going on in these jails, and I’ve seen some pretty horrific situations described in these records.” 

Deaths and overcrowding behind bars are on the rise in Texas, while Republican and law enforcement officials push to restrict pretrial releases. Civil rights activists as well as some sheriffs have warned that more people experiencing homelessness and mental health problems are now getting stuck in county jails on low-level charges like criminal trespass. Most people who die in Texas jails are pretrial detainees, like Bland and Johnson, who weren’t convicted of the charges that put them in jail.
 

“When you lose a loved one in jail, it’s like an unspoken death sentence,” says Krishnaveni Gundu, co-founder and executive director of the Texas Jail Project, which monitors conditions in local jails and advocates for better conditions. “Answers are nearly impossible to come by without a thorough and impartial investigation. All families want and hope for is to know what happened to their loved one so they can find some sense of closure. And this bill will take away what little those families are currently able to get.”

Gundu helped organize a group of people who lost loved ones to Texas jails to attend the state jail commission’s most recent meeting in February, begging for help. Among them was Deborah Smith, who held up two poster-sized images of her daughter, Kristan, 38, as she testified before commissioners. One of the photos showed her daughter with a beaming smile; in the other, Kristan is hooked up to a ventilator. While an autopsy into Kristan’s death at the Harris County jail last May is still pending, Deborah says her daughter was diabetic and struggled to get proper medical treatment in jail. 

“This is what I gave to Harris County,” Deborah said, showing the photo of a smiling Kristan around the room before grabbing and holding up the image of her daughter lying in a hospital bed. “This is what I got back.”

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Thomas Hodgson, the Republican sheriff in Bristol County, conceded defeat late on election night, ending a 25-year reign marked by extreme medical neglect, mounting jail suicides, and staunchly anti-immigrant policies.

“Today is a great day!” Kellie Pearson, the former partner of Michael Ray, who committed suicide in jail in Bristol County, texted Bolts on Wednesday. Bolts reported last week on Pearson’s allegations that Ray experienced extreme medical neglect. “People are becoming more educated about the state of our jails and they are ready for a change.”

Hodgson’s successor will be Democrat Paul Heroux, a former state representative and the mayor of Attleboro, Bristol County’s fourth-largest city. Heroux declared victory just after 1 a.m. local time Wednesday, after several hours of back-and-forth returns had produced no clear winner. 

“Whatever the voters decide in the end is ultimately what they want and we’ll obviously recognize that, understand it,” Hodgson told local reporters, prior to conceding the race. “There’s no other way to look at it. … This is a democracy and ultimately, in the end, the last thing we want to do—we’ve seen enough people questioning our democracy in this country.” (Hodgson has been an avid Donald Trump ally and, like Trump, has echoed baseless claims about widespread voter fraud.)

Heroux beat Hodgson in the cities of Dartmouth and New Bedford, where the county lockups are located. He performed particularly well in New Bedford, home of one of the oldest and most notorious jails in the nation. It has been the subject of lawsuits, protests and calls for a permanent shutdown by advocates. One formerly incarcerated man, Richard Saunders, told Bolts of pipes exploding with sewage in that jail, of rats and opossums that ran through it and of food so revolting that he and everyone he knew there became malnourished.

Hodgson routinely boasted about his deliberate efforts to make jail so unwelcoming that no one would want to come back. At various points over his 25 years in office, he reinstituted chain gangs and deprived people in his custody of any fresh fruits or vegetables. He also offered to send Bristol County incarcerees to help build Trump’s wall at the U.S.-Mexico border.

His jails were host to a disproportionate share of the state’s suicides in the decade between 2006 and 2016, according to a report by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting. Hodgson has often described these suicides as unavoidable tragedies that caught his staff off-guard—but lawsuits and Bolts interviews with people who knew the deceased in those cases suggest the sheriff’s office tends to ignore major warning signs, with fatal consequences.

The Heroux campaign was bolstered by a team of local activists that has spent years laying groundwork for this victory. One member of that team, writer David Ehrens, told Bolts Wednesday morning, “Hodgson’s defeat represents the tireless efforts of regular citizens, church groups, and community organizations across Bristol County who had simply had enough of Hodgson’s intentional and egregious cruelty.”

Perhaps no population felt Hodgson’s brutality more acutely than immigrants detained in his custody. The sheriff for years had contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deputize local officials to enforce federal immigration law and to house immigrants from the region and beyond in Bristol County. The federal government ended both of those contracts after Massachusetts Attorney General—and, as of Tuesday, Governor-Elect—Maura Healey found severe civil rights violations by the sheriff’s office, including overwhelming use of chemical agents and trained dogs on detainees.

Heroux describes a fundamentally different vision from Hodgson’s: “His attitude is to make life miserable for you,” he previously told Bolts. “My attitude is that we’re going to address your needs, your drug addiction, mental illness.” 

But Heroux took no conclusive stances on key policy areas that local activists have focused demands on. He’s said he’s open to cooperating with ICE in the future and that he isn’t sure whether he believes the jail in New Bedford should be shut down. 

He is not the only Democrat to win a critical Massachusetts sheriff election. In neighboring Barnstable County (Cape Cod), Democrat Donna Buckley won on Tuesday, replacing a Republican who held office for two decades. Barnstable County is home to the last remaining county-level ICE partnership in New England, and Buckley told Bolts she would end that arrangement on her first day in office. 

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The official line was that Mark Trafton’s suicide came out of nowhere.

A guard found Trafton hanging in his cell just before 5 a.m. on May 3, 2019, inside the Ash Street Jail in New Bedford, a city by the bayline in Bristol County, southeast Massachusetts. He was 59, pronounced dead the same day he was set to appear before a judge in a rape case.

This wasn’t an unusual scene in Bristol County, where at least 22 people have taken their own lives while in jail since 2006. Lawsuits against the sheriff’s office, which runs the local lockups, have for years alleged the kind of degrading conditions and neglect that can increase the risk of suicide behind bars. 

The local news made Trafton’s death sound unavoidable, writing that he’d indicated no suicidal ideation when meeting earlier that week with a mental health profressional and his attorney, and that he did not “exhibit any suicidal behaviors or statements since he arrived in custody” in September of 2018. The New Bedford Guide quoted Tom Hodgson, the Republican sheriff in charge of the jail since 1997, who offered condolences to Trafton’s family and said, “we’re keeping not only them but everyone involved in this incident in our prayers.” 

But Richard Saunders, who was incarcerated with Trafton at the Ash Street Jail, told Bolts that Trafton was obviously suicidal and spoke often of killing himself. Through tears, Saunders recalled how others incarcerated with Trafton worried he would act on the threats—and said at least three people warned guards about it—when he scribbled suicidal thoughts on the wall in his cell, and started calling a drawstring from his laundry bag his “hanging rope.” 

Saunders said he was horrified, but not surprised, when he heard guards rush into Trafton’s cell before dawn, then the beeping and static crash of a defibrillator before he saw his friend whisked out under white cloth. 

Hardly two months passed before another person died by suicide in another Bristol County jail—again portrayed as an unavoidable tragedy, with Hodgson telling the local news, “There was absolutely no indication to anyone. This was a shock.” 

Jail suicides under Hodgson have long been shown to surpass those in other counties. According to a statewide review of jail suicides in Massachusetts by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, Bristol County, home to about 8 percent of the state’s population, accounted for nearly a quarter of its jail suicides between 2006 and 2016.

Lawsuits and protests over dangerous jail conditions, malnutrition and medical neglect have made Hodgson infamous among many jail watchdogs.

“He’s earned the nickname ‘The Arpaio of the East’,” said Elizabeth Matos, executive director of Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts, referencing Joe Arpaio, the rightwing strongman and former sheriff of Maricopa County (Phoenix), Arizona, whose brutal jails and discriminatory policing practices were so egregious as to earn him unusual national scrutiny and a criminal conviction.

“I don’t know why he’s not as famous as Arpaio,” Matos said of Hodgson in Bristol County. “But he should be.”

There are plenty of similarities: Both are staunchly anti-immigrant strongmen deeply embedded in far-right networks. Both support the movement of “constitutional sheriffs,” which preaches that sheriffs have ultimate authority within their counties. Both tied themselves closely with Donald Trump once he came to power in 2016. And both are also known for scandals and inhumane treatment inside their jails, and have faced heaps of lawsuits over dangerous conditions.

“Jail shouldn’t be a country club,” Hodgson has said, a longtime mantra that nearly mirrors an infamous Arpaio catchphrase. 

Hodgson, Massachusetts’ longest-serving sheriff, is again seeking re-election on Nov. 8. He has defended his oversight of the jail, including releasing his own internal report on jail suicides that absolves his department of responsibility while ignoring key details. He has pushed back against a state probe into his jail practices, calling it a “political witch hunt.” After the most recent suicide on his watch, earlier this month, Hodgson said his staff had gone “above and beyond” to help the man, and should be applauded.

There are no consistently Republican counties in Massachusetts, but Bristol County, where Trump claimed 43 percent of the vote in 2020, is widely considered to be the state’s most conservative. Hodgson’s Democratic opponent Paul Heroux, the mayor of Attleboro, a small and largely working-class city near the state’s Rhode Island border, is running with support from the state’s Democratic establishment. His campaign recently released an internal poll showing him within two percentage points of Hodgson. 

Heroux, who is Hodgson’s first election opponent in twelve years, criticized the sheriff’s treatment of incarcerated people. “How can anybody say that’s a good idea, to have this type of person, with his mindset, being our chief jailer?” he said. 

But Heroux added he has struggled to rally interest since entering the race in January. “A lot of people told me this race would get national attention,” Heroux told Bolts in mid-September. “I was told I was going to get a million dollars in my campaign account from donations all over the country. … Right now, I’m struggling to raise money. People don’t really care about a sheriff.”

Hodgson was appointed sheriff in 1997 by Governor William Weld, a Republican who compared himself to Attila the Hun on crime issues, and said prisoners should be made to break rocks. Since then, he has won re-election four times, most recently in 2016 in an uncontested race. 

In his more than two decades in power, Hodgson has worked to build a brand as a tough-on-crime community protector. The responsibilities of sheriffs in Massachusetts, unlike in many states, are largely limited to overseeing jails; they do not have regular patrol or arrest duties. But Hodgson has repeatedly sought to have his office patrol the county, drawing pushback from local officials. In 2003, for instance, he declared New Bedford a “killing field” and sent his deputies to “the troubled areas” of town. The mayor asked a judge to block Hodgson’s patrols in the city while the district attorney at the time publicly criticized the sheriff’s plan, telling the Boston Globe, “You can’t have the guy who was serving mashed potatoes to inmates last week calling himself a drug detective this week.”  

Matos, who grew up in Bristol County as Hodgson rose to power, says the sheriff has a charming public persona that belies the callous indifference to human suffering that occurs inside his jails. Dangerous conditions and far-right politics are common in American sheriff’s offices, but Matos, who has helped sue jails and prisons across Massachusetts, said conditions inside the Bristol County jails stand out. “Folks who are incarcerated who we’ve interviewed consistently say that (Bristol’s) is by far the worst they’ve ever been in,” she said. “It’s intentionally dehumanizing.”

Matos’s organization is currently suing Hodgson in a state court on behalf of three people with mental illness who allege they were placed in solitary confinement inside Bristol County jails with little treatment for their conditions. The suit accuses the sheriff of tolerating an “alarmingly high” suicide rate—twice that of other Massachusetts county correctional facilities and three times the suicide rate for jails nationally, according to the lawsuit—and argues that “harsh and humiliating” jail policies “discourage prisoners from reporting thoughts of self-harm or suicide.”

The lawsuit also alleges squalid conditions in solitary confinement. “Prisoners describe a pervasive stench when disturbed prisoners flood their cells and their floods with human waste,” it states. “All too often, correctional staff respond to such events with verbal or even physical abuse.” The suit says people confined to solitary are allowed outside their cells for only about five hours per week, for recreation “alone in small pens resembling dog cages.”

Hodgson declined through spokespeople to be interviewed for this story and didn’t respond to written questions from Bolts. The sheriff, who on his podcast once said, “I never, have ever, denied any outlet an interview, … because I felt like I’m in a public position, I have an obligation to answer,” has suggested that people who complain about treatment in his jails are liars. He told The Boston Globe in response to the solitary confinement lawsuit, “Surprise, surprise, we might have people in our facilities who are not telling the truth.”

Hodgson has also pushed back against critics by citing his department’s stellar ratings from accreditation inspectors at the American Correctional Association. But Matos said that people incarcerated in the Bristol County jails tell Prisoners’ Legal Services the inspections are easy to pass. “We have heard consistently that there is plenty of notice when inspections happen, and incarcerated people almost always know because things are suddenly getting painted and patched,” she told Bolts. “Then things go back to normal after the dog-and-pony show.”

Saunders said he was scared to speak up when inspectors came by. “You want to talk to them, but they’re walking with lieutenants and you know that if you say anything, you’re going to the hole,” he told Bolts. “And they (the inspectors) don’t even look in the cells. My ceiling was falling down. The mice had eaten into my ceiling, and there was mold. There’s toilets coming off the wall. There was an opossum that came through. They didn’t look in.” 

Saunders, who was released from the jail earlier this month, said that he experienced extreme temperatures during his four years at the Ash Street Jail; he said his cell, which was near an open door to the building, once started to fill with snow. He said the food was barely edible and often comprised mostly carbohydrates like unseasoned, nearly raw potatoes, meant to meet minimum calorie standards without providing much nutrition. “Everyone gets a belly in there,” Saunders said. “Even the guys who work out seven hours a day.” 

Saunders said the plumbing at Ash Street often fails, with pipes bursting regularly. He recalled one time feces exploded from a pipe into a living area. He remembered the solitary confinement cells being even worse. “There’s feces rubbed on the walls,” he said. “Nobody cleans it. They throw you in there and they disrespect you. They don’t give you your property.”

Kellie Pearson said she recalls her former partner, Michael Ray, describing extreme medical neglect at the Bristol County jail campus in Dartmouth. He once suspected he had a staph infection, she said, and called her inconsolably upset: “He said, ‘Kellie, I’m worried I’m going to die and they won’t listen to me. They gave me a cream, they told me it was like a bug bite.’” 

Pearson said she tried every phone number she could locate for the jail, and finally, after threatening to sue and to whistle-blow in the press, she convinced a nurse to call him down for treatment. “When they checked him he needed to be rushed to hospital,” Pearson said. “The doctor told him that he might have died if he hadn’t come in.”

Ray’s incarceration ran almost two years, before he hanged himself in his cell in 2017. Pearson unsuccessfully sued Hodgson in 2018 over the high cost of phone calls from jail, explaining that the financial stress inhibited Ray’s ability to communicate with her.

Stories like these abound in Bristol County. The Standard-Times of New Bedford reported in 2018 that people incarcerated in Bristol were receiving no fresh fruits or vegetables—until the newspaper began investigating, at which point the sheriff’s office “changed its policy to allow each person two apples a week.”

People detained there have mounted hunger strikes to protest lack of medical care, overpriced commissary items and unsanitary facilities. And lawsuits against Hodgson piled up to the point that Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey called for a state investigation into his office in 2018.

“Recent lawsuits have raised serious allegations about the conditions of confinement at Bristol County jails,” Healey wrote in a letter to state law enforcement officials. “ Among other things, these lawsuits allege that inmates with mental illness are routinely segregated for unreasonably long periods of time, exposed to unnecessarily harsh conditions, and denied access to basic programs and services.” She said the lawsuits were consistent with complaints her office had received about “inadequate mental health screening and treatment, denials of medical care, overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, poor nutritional services.” 

In December 2020, Healey’s office released a long report detailing civil rights violations committed under Hodgson against immigrants detained at his department’s Dartmouth campus. It investigated a clash early in the COVID-19 pandemic between staff and detainees who were scared of how they would be treated in quarantine and refused to be removed from their units. 

According to the report, one detainee said that Hodgson personally shoved him while he was phoning his attorney, an allegation Hodgson has denied. The report says that the scene dramatically escalated as Hodgson’s staff overwhelmed detainees with dogs and so much pepper spray that two men were hospitalized and another needed an emergency procedure, performed in the jail, to be revived. After he was revived, Healey’s office wrote, the man “was not taken to the hospital for a medical evaluation or assessment, but was instead placed in solitary confinement.”

Prior to the incident, Hodgson had multiple partnerships with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. One was a contract to detain immigrants in ICE’s custody; the other was membership in the 287(g) program, which deputizes local law enforcement to act on ICE’s behalf within jails. A staunch defender of ICE detentions, Hodgson has repeatedly traveled to Washington, D.C., to champion stricter immigration enforcement, and he once offered to send Bristol County detainees to the U.S.-Mexico border to help build Trump’s wall.

But the attorney general’s investigation in 2020 found that Hodgson’s staff had shown “deliberate indifference” to the safety of detained immigrants, and recommended that the federal government break off its partnerships with him. The Biden administration agreed, terminating the 287(g) and detention contracts last year. (Neighboring Barnstable County, home to Cape Cod and immediately to Bristol’s east, is now the only county in all of New England involved in 287(g).)

Albert Orlowski, a retired longtime deportation officer with ICE and a Dartmouth resident who says he advised Hodgson’s staff on immigration enforcement, described Hodgson as unprofessional and unreliable in an interview with Bolts. Orlowski aired some of his criticism in the local press in 2017, and Hodgson replied by accusing Orlowski of lying about their prior relationship.

“You do not use tear gas on detainees. You do not use canines,” Orlowski told Bolts about the 2020 events. “If you go into a facility, which is a closed environment, and you throw tear gas and send in barking, vicious dogs who are trained to react, how do you think people are going to behave in that situation?”

The man running to unseat Hodgson calls his jails revolting and inhumane, arguing that people under the sheriff’s custody deserve better medical care and services. 

“His attitude is to make life miserable for you,” Heroux said. “My attitude is that we’re going to address your needs, your drug addiction, mental illness.” He also vows to increase the transparency of the office. 

A report released this year by a special commission on correctional funding convened by the Massachusetts legislature found that Bristol County spends far less on programming for detainees than the other eleven counties studied, and roughly a third as much as the next highest county. In 2017, the New England Center for Investigative Reporting found that Bristol had just three mental health clinicians for a jail population averaging about 1,350 people; by comparison, Hampden County (Springfield) had ten for roughly the same average jail population. 

Saunders told Bolts that few efforts are made to help the people detained in Bristol County—almost all of whom are there pretrial, and will eventually reintegrate in the community—prepare for release. “There is absolutely zero success stories, and everything Hodgson says is a lie,” Saunders said. The sheriff’s office lists dozens of programs, ranging from religious meetings to vocational classes. “There is no such training. There are no programs available,” said Saunders, who added that most people locked up in Bristol County spend at least about 21 hours a day in their cells.

Pearson similarly told Bolts that she never heard her former partner mention being involved in a single program while he was locked up.

Hodgson has blamed his office’s lack of investment in jail services on state funding, while also bragging that he’s simply good at cutting costs and saving taxpayer money. Court documents show his office has collected millions in kickbacks from Securus Technologies, the private company that charges incarcerated people to make phone calls. He also spent at least about $2 million early in his tenure on a “homeland security force,” even though he has little authority beyond his jails—the money reportedly covered a $500,000 “mobile command center,” and a set of miniature fire trucks and police cars meant for simulations of terrorist events.

In conversation with Bolts, Heroux did not detail many policy changes he would make to improve conditions at the jail. Asked about local advocates’ longtime push to close the jail on Ash Street, Heroux did not stake a position, other than to say he’d be wary of shutting it down without first freeing up new bed space somewhere else. He also did not name any offense for which people are presently jailed that he believes should not carry jail time; more reform-minded figures in the state have tried to move Massachusetts away from arresting and incarcerating people for drug offenses and other actions typically deemed “low-level.”

Heroux also said that he is “indifferent” toward the 287(g) program, though he added that he feels local law enforcement should not do the federal government’s job. He said he “would entertain it” if ICE made any request of him, including if it asked him to share information on detainees or to keep people detained past their release dates. 

Asked about the push to make phone calls from jail free, Heroux initially was under the false impression that the legislature already eliminated those costs. But a legislative proposal died earlier this year, after heavy pushback from the state’s sheriffs. Once corrected, Heroux added that the issue called for legislative action so that the costs are incorporated into the state budget. “We shouldn’t obstruct an inmate’s ability to call home to stay in contact with friends and family,” he said. Massachusetts sheriffs in 2021 jointly announced they would cap the cost of phone calls but opposed making them free; Hodgson himself has fought a lawsuit to eliminate fees in Bristol.

Heroux is backed by local activists who have organized against Hodgson for years, penning endless guest columns in local media, publishing deep opposition research and staging protests. Several activists told Bolts that it’s been hard to get voters to care about abuses at Hodgson’s jails. 

“The average person doesn’t want to know what brought somebody to jail. Their attitude is, you made your bed, it’s not my concern, you did this to yourself,” said David Ehrens, a member of the citizen group Bristol County for Correctional Justice and a prolific anti-Hodgson writer. 

Everytown for Gun Safety, an organization founded by Michael Bloomberg, began digital advertising against Hodgson earlier this month, NBC News reported.

Pearson, the former partner of Michael Ray, is among those Bristol County residents who cannot afford to ignore the topic of jail conditions. As a mental health clinician, Pearson told Bolts that she is well positioned to understand that Ray should have received special care when in jail. She spoke of his lengthy history of mental illness history and of another suicide attempt years before he was locked up in Bristol County.

Never far from her mind is something Ray wrote to her in a letter before he took his own life in Hodgson’s custody: “If something happens to me, I want people to know I’ve been getting no help.”

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