U.S. Marshals: Cuyahoga County deprives inmates of food, water and Constitutional Rights amid string of seven deaths
https://www.cleveland.com/expo/news/erry-2018/11/9b3d3f3cc89150/us-marshals-cuyahoga-county-de.html
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Cuyahoga County fails to provide jail inmates with the basic necessities they to need live. It withholds food and water and doesn’t provide medical and mental health care for inmates, according to a blistering report released Wednesday by the U.S. Marshals.
The report says that the inmates’ constitutional rights are routinely violated.
The report offers a clear picture of a jail rife with deplorable conditions, described by marshals' investigators as inhumane.
The jail investigation comes after the deaths of seven inmates between June 10 and Oct. 2. Cleveland.com learned of the seventh death during some two months of investigating the jail. Three of those inmates committed suicide. Fifty-five other inmates tried to take their own lives within the past year, the marshals found.
The county doesn’t investigate what led to the deaths, the report says.
Among the findings in the 52-page report made public Wednesday:
· Warden Eric Ivey withholds food as punishment and inmates aren’t fed properly.
· Jail staff shut off water to toilets and sinks.
· Pregnant women are forced to sleep on mats on the floor.
· Vermin infest the kitchen.
· Inmates sometimes are denied toilet paper and toothbrushes.
· Officers decked out in paramilitary gear routinely threaten inmates until they fear for their lives, going so far as to call some prisoners snitches in front of other prisoners.
· Medical staff lack proper licenses to provide treatment.
· Inmates with mental illness are denied care, even while they’re in isolation.
· Children are housed with adults.
· Inmates spend long stretches of time locked in their cells, sometimes up to 27 hours at a time, once for 12 days in a row.
The problems are so egregious that the U.S. marshals say the county won’t be able to fix them in a timely manner.
The marshals’ team that performed the review consisted of U.S. marshals from Washington and Cleveland, and FBI agents who investigate civil rights violations and economic fraud.
“They need to have a strong leader to implement all of these changes,” U.S. Marshal Pete Elliott said of the jail. “They need a strong leader with corrections experience to make it up to standard with other jails. I have full confidence in the sheriff that he’s going to find someone who is able to do that.”
Cuyahoga County Executive Armond Budish asked for the marshals' review. His top jail official, Ken Mills, resigned last week ahead of the release of Wednesday’s report.
In an interview Wednesday, Budish said he based his previous conclusions about jail safety and conditions on state inspections that never raised the breadth of the issues raised after the marshals' investigation. Budish and Sheriff Clifford Pinkney said they were stunned by the marshals' findings.
The report was made public just days after the former jail director Ken Mills tendered his resignation shortly after the U.S. marshals’ presented its preliminary findings to county officials.
Budish said that fixing the problems in the jail is now his top priority, but both he and the sheriff acknowledged that significant changes in leadership at almost every level is needed.
“We need to make sure that our prisoners and our staff is safe in the jail. That is number one,” Budish said.
The list of findings by the marshals is long, and at times, overwhelming. Cleveland.com is providing the full list so that the public, which foots the bills for the jail, can understand the magnitude of the problems.
Former Jail Director Ken Mills, who resigned last week ahead of a scathing U.S. Marshal report about the conditions of the county jail, talks April 5 about the opening of the Bedford Heights Jail. (Cory Shaffer, cleveland.com)
County doesn’t investigate jail deaths
After seven county inmates died this year, Cuyahoga County spokeswoman Mary Louise Madigan said the Sheriff’s Department would investigate what led to the deaths. That never happened, the report says.
The county never performed post-mortem reviews and provided the marshals with insufficient and unclear answers about the recent deaths, including two that remain unexplained today. The county doesn’t review its own policies, procedures or any other possible contributing factors to the deaths.
There are no debriefing reports or mortality reviews, no required documentation, minutes of debriefing, medical summaries, timelines of incarceration, notifications, or autopsy reports in the county’s case files in the medical unit, all in violation of county policy.
The warden kept no files regarding the deaths.
The marshals also found that after every inmate death, someone took the housing unit’s logs, which document routine information, emergencies, and unusual incidents. Someone removed the logs and replaced them with a new one. Those new logs never mentioned why it was necessary to start new logs.
The marshals also had issues uncovering any information about inmates and said their records are stored in various locations throughout the jail, making them difficult to find. The jail has no central place for all inmate records.
Jail officials, along with Cuyahoga County Executive Armond Budish, far right, at an April 5 ribbon cutting ceremony at the Bedford Heights Jail.
Inmates with medical and mental illness don’t get treated
The jail’s most vulnerable inmates, those with chronic and mental illnesses, are denied consistent and proper treatment. Some nurses and medical staff don’t have the necessary qualifications to administer health care.
Medical files provided to the marshals were surprisingly deficient. Of 10 nurses hired in October, no records were available for review. Of the files provided, four medical staff members had expired professional licenses; one nurse had no license on file; one medical staff member was not certified to perform CPR and two had only partial CPR certifications; a medical technical assistant had no diploma, and a nurse and nurse practitioner had board actions against them with no documentation of their disposition.
Inmates with serious mental-health needs, developmental disabilities, physical impairments, or inmates who are frail or elderly don’t get specialized treatment that takes into account their conditions.
Some inmates with mental illnesses who are placed in isolation don’t receive the mental health care they need, and never receive mental-health treatment for the entire time they’re in isolation. They don’t have access to therapeutic activities either inside their cell or outside their cell.
There’s no documentation of mental-health providers making face-to-face contact with isolated inmates, which violates federal guidelines.
Cleanliness and sanitation in mental-health-care unit is “minimally acceptable.”
Medical staff doesn’t maintain lists of patients who need medical care for chronic health issues. Treatment schedules for those conditions aren’t tracked on a patient-by-patient basis.
There’s a quarterly meeting that identifies problems with health care in the jail, but when a recent meeting found that there were problems administering medicine to inmates, nothing was done about it.
Jail staff “pass” on training about administering medication. The method used to track missed medications involves a numerical code without a description of what that code means.
Medical and mental-health appraisals aren’t conducted within the required 14 days after an inmate’s arrival at the jail. The people that Cleveland police arrest and take to the jail never get an initial medical screening . Medical staff are only made aware of those inmates’ health concerns when they become urgent, such as a “diabetic inmate who has not had his/her insulin for four days, or others who become symptomatic due to not having hypertensive or psychotropic medications.”
Cuyahoga County Executive Armond Budish speaks before the swearing in of Carole Rendon as U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio. Joshua Gunter, Cleveland.com
‘Men in Black’ threaten inmates, use excessive force
The Special Response Team, a specialized unit in the jail decked out in riot gear, frequently threatened, harassed and intimidated inmates, sometimes withholding basic necessities as a way to control inmate behavior.
Marshals interviewed 100 inmates who described this team as the “Men in Black” because of their paramilitary uniforms. The marshals also viewed the response team's body cameras to reach their conclusions.
The marshals described a chilling scene where members of the specialized team escorted inmates to interviews with the U.S marshals’ investigators, and officers threatened and intimidated the prisoners and called them “snitches.”
The intimidation was so pervasive that guards bullied inmates in full view of the marshals' investigators. The behavior concerned investigators, prompting them to request that 10 inmates get released from the jail “for fear of SRT members retaliation, and the legitimate fear of detainee/inmate safety.”
The inmates interviewed described the Men in Black as routinely abusive. They placed inmates in isolation or segregation and refused to give them blankets when they were cold. They withheld hygiene products such as toothpaste and toilet paper, forcing inmates to use old towels, rags or clothing.
In one case, a response team officer told an inmate that toilet paper is only handed out on Wednesdays and handed him a paper towel.
The team used excessive force on inmates during cell extractions.
The officers verbally abused the inmates with explicit language and used “prejudice and unofficial authority to dictate and control” inmates.
Child inmates are held in the same areas as adult inmates while assigned to isolation or segregation. This is in violation of federal jail standards.
While child inmates charged as adults are held in the main county jail, they aren’t supposed to mix in with the general adult jail population for their safety.
Those children don’t receive the extra nutrition or exercise they need for development, and don’t receive programs that are educational or aimed at brain development.
They are subjected to the same extreme lockdowns as adults. That means they often don’t have access to hygiene, recreation and time outside of their cells.
A video that a judge ordered Cuyahoga County to release to cleveland.com shows a jail supervisor taking a naked and mentally ill female inmate to the ground and spraying her face with pepper foam.