Pubdate: 28 Oct, 1999
Source: The Memphis Flyer
Contact:  http://www.memphisflyer.com
Author: Ashley Fantz

INSIDE OUR FAILING JAILS

As Too Many Inmates Are Crowded Into Too Little Space, The Problems At
201 Poplar Grow.

Overcrowding has plagued the Shelby County Jail for years. But few have 
told stories about the results of overcrowding such as the jail's 
unsanitary conditions and slow processing system. A federal court-ordered 
evaluation of the jail was delivered last month, and the Shelby County 
Commission has already budgeted almost $200 million for a new intake 
facility. But those who work there doubt that it will help.

Inmates sometimes wait days to be processed. Many end up sleeping on the 
intake area floor.

  A PRESSURE COOKER

Jane could be anybody's daughter.

It was a humid Saturday night in the parking lot of Denim & Diamonds. An 
expansive slab of deserted concrete seemed a fairly discreet place for the 
20-year-old and her friend to snag a good buzz before a night of dancing. 
Like many kids, they rationalized that they could avoid the expense of club 
liquor by throwing back a drink before going out.

They sat in their car, a tray of vodka-spiked purple Jello on the arm rest 
between them. Their banter about school, going out, their friends was cut 
short by the sobering shine of a cop's flashlight.

"I couldn't see his face," Jane says. "Maybe he thought we had drugs or 
something. He was like, 'What are you doing?' and the next thing I know 
he's charged me with driving under the influence and we went to jail."

For more than 17 hours, the girls -- neither of whom had been arrested 
before -- were held in a downtown jail cell at 201 Poplar with about 40 
other inmates, some of them charged with prostitution, drug possession, and 
attempted murder. The young women were given paperwork with a box checked 
for them indicating they had refused their phone call -- standard operating 
procedure for an overcrowded jail that doesn't have the time to let 
everyone make a phone call. When Jane didn't come home that night, her 
mother -- ironically, an inmate counselor -- figured her daughter spent the 
night with a friend.

About a week later, another woman about Jane's age was arrested for driving 
drunk. She too had never been arrested. For more than 20 hours, she 
squatted on a concrete floor in the jail's basement while cockroaches 
zig-zagged in between her shoes and underneath other inmates lying nearby. 
She was menstruating at the time and begged a female guard for a sanitary 
napkin. The guard refused, so the girl bled all over herself. If the 
jailers had allowed her a phone call, she says she wouldn't have called her 
parents. She was too scared and embarrassed. Her family still doesn't know 
about her arrest. The Flyer agreed not to print her name.

"What you've got is a pressure cooker," says Douglas Morgan, retired 
director of Tennessee Corrections Institute and a Shelby County jail 
inspector. "There are people kept in there who've committed minor offenses 
- -- traffic offenses some of them -- for days. Overcrowding causes 
everything else -- the dirty conditions, the unhappy staff, the frustrated 
and angry inmates. It could definitely be a volatile situation."

Outside Looking In

Three years ago, Darius Little did what few other inmates in the history of 
the jail have done -- he sued the county and the sheriff's department for 
not hiring enough guards to protect him from being gang raped. Ultimately, 
Little's case prompted a federal court to order an expert evaluation of the 
jail. Morgan, a nationally respected jail critic, was asked to scrutinize 
the method and frequency of violent acts among inmates. Last month he 
completed his inspection, which included interviews with inmates and 
jailers. Morgan's report cited the jail for lack of adequate staff, a poor 
classifying system, overcrowded cells, and an inefficient computer system 
for tracking physical or sexual assaults. In a report related to Little's 
case, three jail experts -- the current director of jail inspection at the 
Tennessee Corrections Institute, a former Chief of Jails Division of the 
National Institute of Corrections, and the vice president of a top jail 
inspection consulting firm -- concluded that hundreds of rapes, stabbings, 
and beatings among inmates go undocumented every year. Morgan says the 
jail's problems are the worst he's seen in his 20 years of corrections 
experience and the worst he's inspected across Tennessee.

"The more people you pack in there, the higher the tensions are going to be 
and the potential for violence," he says. "You've got a facility built to 
hold 1,200 people, but there's about three times as many in there. You add 
to that the very real existence of gangs, and let's just say it's not a 
place you want to be."

Recently the Shelby County Commission allocated $172.2 million for 256 
additional inmate beds and for the construction of a new intake facility. 
But many, including Morgan and several county commissioners, say that is 
like putting a Band-Aid over a wound that needs stitches.

The jail's design is so cumbersome, Morgan says, that "adding on isn't 
going to make a difference. You'd have to change the whole structure of the 
place for it to be effective and that's impossible."

The Shelby County Jail has 29 cell blocks. Most of the blocks are not 
supervised by a cell-block officer for three hours per day, either due to 
overlapping breaks or lack of staffing. There are 23 cells to a cell block. 
The cells -- each eight feet long and six-and-a-half feet wide -- were 
originally built to house one inmate. It's typical to see two inmates to a 
cell, sometimes three or more. On an average weekend the jail's processing 
area, a hot windowless concrete hall, is often packed with as many as 150 
inmates standing shoulder to shoulder. The hours of waiting eat away at 
what little patience detainees may have had. The drunk ones are sobering up 
and getting angry. The ones who holler with their chest puffed out, 
demanding they be processed now, don't wake those who are passed out or 
huddled up against the concrete walls to sleep. Rows of their legs and 
shoes move like an centipede down the hallway.

Most of the time, jail workers do not fully classify inmates before 
deciding where they will be housed within the jail. Because the jail has 
only one computer capable of searching the National Crime Information 
Center to check every inmate's criminal history, it sometimes happens that 
a person arrested for making an illegal left turn is housed in a cell with 
a person charged with murder.

The jail is not designed in a linear-style which would allow guards to view 
inmates in their cells at all times. Rather, guards sit in plastic chairs 
facing a long, curving corridor that on both sides has open recreation 
space. Behind that space and farther away from the guards are the actual 
cells. To get a clear view of what inmates are doing, guards must go down a 
catwalk and get close to the cells. They are required to do this only once 
an hour. The jail is noisy. If an inmate were screaming for help, it's 
unlikely a guard would hear them.

"Most of the guards are simply afraid to go down there," Morgan says. "And 
if one is going to do it, then he's going to want another guard standing 
watch at his post to get his back just in case something happens. There 
aren't enough guards for that. It's almost a hopeless event working there. 
I feel bad for the staff."

Adrianne Hebron, an assistant to jail union president Byron T. Williams, 
says the overcrowding problem has brought guards to their physical and 
emotional breaking point. She laughs when asked if adding 256 beds and a 
new intake facility will alleviate overcrowding.

"We are just saturated because we have to deal with offenders from the city 
and the county. They bring them all to us," she says. "I just know that the 
minute more space is added, it will be filled and we'll still have a 
problem. They say the crime rate is down, but I don't see it. All these 
people shoved in here, lying on the ground waiting for their trial that's 
going to take forever because the courts are so backlogged. It's a real mess."

A Day At The Jail

(Picture)Inmates often defecate on the floor or throw feces at the guards. 
It's routine for guards to have feces, urine, sharp objects, and old food 
thrown at them while inspecting the cells, says a female lieutenant who has 
worked at the jail for more than a decade. She asked the Flyer not to print 
her name for fear that speaking out would prompt her superiors to harass or 
fire her. "You can't understand how bad it is unless you see it," she says. 
"The staff is so stressed by the filth. It's horrendous. It's a living hell."

The lieutenant, other jail officials, and inmates say the cells' dirt and 
grime is so thick that it's difficult to see the floor. Each tells stories 
about both inmates and guards spitting or grinding insects into inmates' 
food and rats found in snack machines. The toilets often back up and 
inmates defecate on the floor. Some smear feces on the walls or throw it at 
guards. The walls reek of urine and inmates' beds are infested with brown 
recluse spiders, fleas, cockroaches, and mice. The tension among inmates 
fighting over a cup of clean water, plus gang beatings and killings, can 
make the cell blocks feel like a shaken soda can ready to explode. Not 
surprisingly, guard turnover is high and morale is extremely low.

Jail union president Byron T. Williams has worked in the downtown jail for 
two years. He was elected head of the union in August. Yet he's never met 
Sheriff A.C. Gilless. Many jailers, including Williams, say they feel that 
the sheriff's department has ignored their need for better health care 
insurance -- right now deputy jailers receive less medical coverage than 
sheriff's deputies. Due to their unsanitary and stressful work environment, 
jailers frequently develop high blood pressure and respiratory illness.

If the conditions of the downtown jail are so bad and employees are 
ignored, what keeps people like Williams and the lieutenant from quitting?

"A lot of people have asked me why I stay with a job like that," says the 
lieutenant. "I like working with the inmates who want someone to talk to 
them. I like the idea of helping them rehabilitate themselves. It's always 
fascinated me what makes someone commit a crime. In there I get closer to 
figuring it out sometimes. But it didn't use to be like it is now."

For many jailers, continuing to work in the jail is a symbolic gesture that 
they still believe in the criminal justice system. Quitting is an 
admittance of defeat not for them individually, but a defeat of order and 
peace. They still hold onto the notion that their jobs are nobler than what 
people on the outside might consider.

"There are guards who are doing some of the horrible things to inmates. 
But, I think they've just lost it. They are wanting to blame and punish 
them for what's wrong in the jail," she says, noting that the jail is a 
holding facility for people still considered innocent before they go to 
trial. It is not a prison for already-convicted criminals.

"They are human beings. They should not have to live that way," she says. 
"And inmates are aware of their rights. If you deny them, they will lash out."

"Who's Going To Listen To My Story?"

(Picture)An inmate with a festering brown recluse spider bite. Inmate 
Martin Funkhauser is a tall man with straight blond hair and big droopy 
eyes. When he's asked what landed him in jail again, Funkhauser first says 
he's got a problem with success. Then he says he was arrested for a 
probation violation related to a crack-cocaine charge. Classified as a 
non-violent offender, Funkhauser was held in the basement of 201 Poplar for 
more than a day without food or clean water while jail officials processed 
the stream of more than 110 inmates flooding the jail at the time of his 
arrest. He spent about a month there before he was sent to an adult 
offenders' center in Shelby Farms -- considered a much cleaner and 
efficiently run facility. During his stay at the downtown jail, he was 
given stale bologna sandwiches for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. One day, 
he was given a piece of liver about the size ofa computer mouse as his meal 
for the day.

"You think, 'Who's going to care, who's going to listen to my story?" 
Funkhauser says.

He's sitting in a windowless interview room at one of the boxy brick 
buildings dotting the bucolic farmland surrounding the County Corrections 
Center. He'll finish his sentence there. Funkhauser doesn't want to talk 
about his wife and children who have already left him. His sister, Cynthia 
Storck, and his mother are the only people who have given Funkhauser money 
to buy better food and a few pair of socks and underwear from the jail 
commissary. Without their help, he would look like most of the other 
inmates housed at the downtown jail -- barely dressed and dirty.

"When my mother and I went to visit him," Storck says, "it was as if I 
couldn't have imagined a worse nightmare. We tried to talk to him through a 
filthy glass wall covered in mesh. I was afraid to put my mouth and ear up 
to the phone. We were treated like we had done something wrong by the 
guards. It really amazes me that the jail treats these men like dogs and 
doesn't expect them to bite back."

Basic Training

A pool of urine left by an inmate. It's 8:30 a.m. at the Shelby County 
Corrections Training Academy.

"Who does the Fourth Amendment apply to?" asks Neil Shea, Shelby County 
Sheriff Department academy trainer.

Silence.

One hand in the back of the classroom goes up. He thinks he knows who is 
guaranteed privacy and protection against illegal search and seizure.

"Every citizen of the United States of America," he says proudly.

"Are you sure?" Shea presses.

Silence.

For the next 15 minutes, Shea questions his class of rookie deputies on who 
has the right to privacy. Do children? Do illegal immigrants? Do prisoners?

Another hand.

"I think prisoners do, sir," the student answers. "But in cells, they can 
expect a limited amount of privacy and fewer freedoms."

Shea nods his head and explains that everyone, in jail or not, is entitled 
to privacy rights, but inmates can expect fewer rights to privacy while 
incarcerated.

"You make no exceptions otherwise for who has Fourth Amendment protection 
or that will get you in trouble, that will get you a lawsuit," he tells his 
class. "You will bring your prejudices and your misconceptions about 
different races, types of people, nationalities, whatever, to this job. You 
are the same person before you put on that uniform as you are after."

Shea moved to Memphis in 1990 -- the same year 22 inmates started a riot at 
the downtown jail because they felt their complaints about unsanitary 
conditions were ignored. He spent a year and a half working for the 
county's internal affairs bureau and quickly became a favorite of Sheriff 
Gilless. Not long after joining the sheriff's department, Gilless asked 
Shea to revamp the rookie training program and four years ago he became the 
academy's director. For part of Gilless' first term, rookies -- many of 
whom either work full-time in the jail or at least deal with inmates while 
making arrests -- were required to have only one week of academic training. 
Physical tests were also part of the one-week preparation, but it was far 
from challenging, says Shea. Now rookies must complete a 10-week course of 
regimented academics and physical training.

Shea thinks conditions at the jail have improved since the riot.

"I remember driving up on that and it was quite a sight," he says. "I saw 
mattresses on fire being thrown off the roof. When it was over, I went in 
there to look at the damage. Man, it's amazing the kind of destruction 
violent, angry people can do to steel and cement with just their hands."

Shea agrees with Morgan's report which stated that Gilless and the county 
were making "good faith" efforts to curb jail overcrowding. The academy 
trainer says the argument that there are people in the jail who should not 
be there is ludicrous. And blaming the sheriff's department for 
overcrowding due to unnecessary arrests ignores the fact that one in five 
of every jail inmate is arrested for drugs or an offense committed to 
acquire money for drugs. In other words, the drug problem in Memphis is 
much worse than it was 15 years ago, hence more criminals to lock up.

"If there are more people in the jail than there should be, then we have to 
start changing laws," Shea says. "What are we going to do? We can't just 
let people out the back door. There is certainly a problem with processing 
and space."

Shea hopes the academy's training program will help improve guard attitude 
and aptitude. The curriculum is one of the few in the country that teaches 
deputies how to deal with prison gangs and educates them on the 
psychological profiles of various kinds of offenders. Deputies are shown 
how to provide limited emotional counseling to inmates. "Verbal judo," or 
talking down an inmate before applying force, is a popular course section.

"We know that things can escalate when you use force," Shea says. "And 
that's a last resort. But there has to be a definite distinction of who has 
the authority. A guard can't give too much. Training can only give a person 
certain tools; it's the experience that they have which shapes how 
effective they will be."

Improving the cadre of rookies filtering by the hundreds out of the academy 
to become jailers and street officers is made "in inches," Shea says. He 
would like more than 10 weeks to train rookies. On average, his classes 
teeter on 50 people for each session.

"I can't possibly know whether each individual is ready emotionally for the 
job," he says. "You just have to hope that they are helping and that the 
conditions, as they are now, don't get to them."

Lost Without Space

For 10 months, Sonny Newton, inmate #153-122 didn't exist.

No stranger to the jail, Newton was arrested in 1998 for the third time 
fora parole violation related to two previous aggravated burglary 
convictions. Newton knew the drill downtown. It would take the usual 24 
hours or more to be processed -- probably longer because he had a rather 
lengthy rap sheet. But the inmate's days turned into weeks. Weeks turned 
into months.

Once or twice every week, Newton called his family from jail and asked them 
to contact the criminal court clerk's office to get copies of his paperwork 
and information about when he would be sentenced. His family says they were 
told that there was no record of Newton's latest arrest or paperwork 
tracking him through the jail system. To the clerk's office, Newton was not 
an inmate.

Public defender Allan Newport represented Newton in 1995 on one of the 
burglary charges. Newport says "losing" or misplacing paperwork within the 
overcrowded, chaotic jail system is not unusual.

"It's not as outrageous as you may think," he says. "I wouldn't say, 
though, that it happens all the time. The situation in Shelby County is 
that if you can't afford private counsel and the state represents you -- 
you're given a public defender -- between the time that you're indicted and 
the time you go to trial you are technically not represented by anyone. You 
are sort of in this never-never land. It's especially bad for people who 
can't afford representation and are in jail."

Because he was arrested on a parole violation, Newton was not entitled to 
public counsel. He didn't know that and spent months trying to contact a 
public defender he never really had. Newton was finally able to reach his 
parole officer Jennifer Poe, who is no longer working for the Shelby County 
parole office but as a public school teacher. She was instrumental in 
having Newton transported from the jail to the County Corrections Center to 
serve the remainder of his sentence.

Another consequence of overcrowding is an immense amount of paperwork, says 
Newport. The timeline between the arrest and a preliminary hearing can drag 
on for weeks. And because the jail is a holding facility not meant for 
long-term confinement, inmates end up occupying their time fighting and 
growing more frustrated.

Nashville and Chattanooga's county jails are far more expeditious in 
issuing indictments and pushing inmates through the system. Nashville 
assistant district attorney general Michaela Mathews says that in almost 
every case, inmates go to preliminary trial within 10 days of their arrest 
and are indicted approximately 65 to 70 days later. The same applies to the 
Hamilton County Jail in Chattanooga.

"We've never had problems docketing cases and we have a bit of an 
overcrowding problem here," Mathews says. "Overcrowding, I suspect, is a 
problem for a lot of jails across the country. But you have to find some 
way to deal with it."

The Hamilton County Jail has a maximum capacity of 489 inmates and is 
currently housing 572. Although its capacity is much smaller than the 
Memphis jail, it is dealing with the same problems of overcrowding and 
understaffing. Their guards work six days a week, usually more than eight 
hours each day.

Wildes says that although the Chattanooga jail is overcrowded, it's the 
most efficiently run facility he's worked at in more than 20 years as a 
jailer. He credits that to the jail chief, a former Marine intent on 
running a clean jail.

"I'd say it's the exception," he says. "We do laundry once a week for the 
inmates. Tennessee law requires that they get two meals a day, but we give 
them three -- cheeseburgers, fries, soups, sandwiches."

If morale is up at the Hamilton County Jail, it's probably not because the 
guards are getting paid what they deserve. Jailers recently received a 
raise. They used to make $16,000 a year and now make $21,000. Guards at the 
Shelby County Jail make more -- about $27,000. But that salary is low 
considering Tennessee jailers are supposed to be paid according to the 
percentage of inmates for which they're responsible.

"I don't think people realize how hard it is to work in a jail," Wildes 
says. "Everybody -- inmates and guards -- has to feel like they are being 
protected."

Playing Catch-Up

"Nobody's going to be sleeping in those new beds tomorrow."

Simply put, county commissioner Cleo Kirk says the additional 256 beds and 
intake facility is a project that could take two years to finish. By that 
time, the jail's problems will likely worsen.

Kirk voted for the improvement plan, but has spent the past three years 
trying to find an alternative solution. Because more than half of the 
inmates in the jail are arrested for a drug-related offenses, Kirk 
advocates investing county funds in a community drug treatment center, a 
24-hour drug court, and, eventually, a new facility built to guard and 
inmate safety specifications.

"This problem has been going on for years, but now we felt like we had to 
do something quick because a federal court told us what our problems were," 
he says.

Kirk blames the jail's overcrowding problem on the city police and sheriff 
department's zero-tolerance-for-crime mantra. Although that seems like a 
good philosophy, says Kirk, it can also backfire.

"I agree that people who commit crimes should be punished, but putting some 
of them in jail for days -- the ones in for minor violations -- contributes 
to the overcrowding," he says. "Putting more officers on the street who 
will make more arrests will later deter others from committing crimes, but 
right now it just means more inmates."

Both Kirk and commissioner Tommy Hart concede that the severity of the 
crime should determine whether someone goes to jail, not simply that 
someone has broken the law.

"You've got a lot of youngsters in the jail who shouldn't be there, whether 
they were arrested for drinking or petty theft," Kirk says. "There needs to 
be more consideration and not an automatic reaction to people who get 
themselves in trouble. We may have become a little zealous in arresting 
everyone."

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