Jul 17, 2008 6:41 pm US/Central
Probe Finds Serious Problems At Cook County Jail
Investigation Shows Prisoners Not Protected From Harm By Other Inmates, Staff
CHICAGO (CBS) ―
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart is angry about a federal report blasting the way he's running the Cook County Jail.
A 17-month federal investigation has found numerous abuses at the nation's largest single-site county jail, including a failure to protect prisoners from being harmed by other inmates and staff, officials said Thursday.
The 96-acre jail is even more foreboding than it looks. It is, federal investigators say, a place where inmates can be beaten by guards for a verbal insult.
"No one wants to ensure that corrections officers are insulted by inmates, but the response is not to engage in the beating of the inmates, certainly not organized beatings and not beatings that end up with inmates being hospitalized," said U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.
Cook County Jail inmates were not only unprotected from excessive force by staff and violence from fellow prisoners but the jail failed to provide adequate medical and mental health care, fire prevention and sanitation, the investigation found.
"The Cook County Jail has an obligation to provide conditions of confinement that do not offend the Constitution and take reasonable measures to protect inmates from harm," Fitzgerald said. "The investigation clearly found that the jail failed that test."
A 98-page Justice Department letter detailing the alleged abuses was given to Cook County Board President Todd Stroger and Sheriff Tom Dart a week ago, federal officials said.
Telephone messages seeking comment were left Thursday for Stroger and Dart.
It is a place, the U.S. Attorney alleges that is dangerous to everyone there, inmates and guards alike.
"A person died, was found unconscious in his cell and 10 were brought to the hospital and then they died. No investigation was done because the person hadn't died in the jail facility," Fitzgerald said.
Dart, who runs the jail, says the investigative report is not accurate.
"They are absolutely aware that over the course of the last 18 months, we have dramatically changed all sorts of procedures and processes here and yet virtually none of them made it into the report," Dart said.
He also complains about understaffing and crumbling conditions at the jail.
"Like a lot of areas of government, could you use more money, more staff? Yeah," Dart said.
"We pay more taxes here than anywhere else in the country," Fitzgerald said. "We can't be the only county that can't afford a jail that meets constitutional standards."
Fitzgerald says if things don't improve in the next month and a half, the government will file a civil rights lawsuit. If there's a conviction that could lead to a federal judge overseeing how Cook County Jail is run.
While it found many faults with the jail, the letter commended jail staff for cooperating during the civil investigation.
The Cook County Jail sits on 96 acres on Chicago's West Side and has a daily population of about 9,800 male and female inmates, most awaiting trial in the state's criminal court system, making it the nation's largest single-site county jail, federal officials said.
Federal officials said inmate violence in 2006 resulted in the death of two prisoners. They said that in one week in March 2007, the jail documented 35 inmate fights and the use of force to stop them was required in 27 instances. Guards confiscated 46 weapons from inmates.
The report said inmates are regularly subjected to inappropriate and excessive use of physical force. The investigation found such force has sometimes been used after the inmates already were restrained.
CBS 2's Mike Parker and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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