Sullivan County Ordered to Take Actions at Its Jail
Sullivan County officials must cut the population of the county’s main jail to 70 inmates within 180 days and must make other changes to rectify jail conditions so poor they constitute cruel and unusual punishment, according to a federal court order issued here Wednesday.
The jail’s population must be trimmed to 100 within 90 days, and after the number is cut to 70 within 90 additional days, the jail population cannot exceed 75, according to the order by U.S. District Judge Thomas G. Hull.
Other changes ordered within 90 days include:
- Doubling total visiting hours for inmates from four to eight hours per week.
- Providing one hour of out-of-cell exercise/recreation for all inmates five times weekly.
- Placing enlarged fire escape plans for prisoners under plexiglass in prominent areas in the jail.
- Closing the ‘‘workhouse” for misdemeanor and work-release inmates and building a 3,500-square-foot metal building to replace it.
Hull’s order follows a class-action lawsuit here June 25 in which jail inmates, who claimed jail conditions are inhumane and inflict needless punishment, successfully challenged the constitutionality of confinement conditions in the jail.
The main jail houses 122 inmates and the “workhouse” adj cent to it handles another 30 minimum security prisoners, but the jail population the day of the hearing was 167.
Former inmates testified at the hearing that prisoners often had to sleep on the floors, were never allowed outside and had no privacy. Plumbing and heating seldom worked, ventilation and lighting were inadequate, and sanitation was almost non-existent, they said.
Although county officials said they had made many improvements at the jail in recent months, corrections experts testified that sanitation, recreation, and living conditions at the jail were still deplorable, especially with the overcrowding. And the lack of adequate fire safety plans makes the jail a potential disaster, they said.
By the time of the hearing, lawyers for the county and the inmates had resolved all of the problems except fire safety and the main issue of overcrowding.
At the hearing they almost reached agreement on resolving these issues, too, but the county’s lawyers finally refused and asked Hull to issue an injunction mandating the changes he wanted.
They did so because county officials protested Hull’s ruling that jail conditions were unconstitutional, because the county wanted to reserve the right to appeal the order, and because they claimed demands to trim the jail population to 70 were unrealistic.
Officials had hoped construction of the county’s new 212-bed jail, scheduled to be completed within 15 months, as well as new alternative-sentencing programs aimed at reducing jail overcrowding, might temper Hull’s judgment. On April 1, Hull had threatened to cut the jail’s population by roughly half.
Although fire safety and overcrowding were the only issues tried by Hull, his order addresses at length overall conditions in the Sullivan County Jail based on testimony and exhibits at the hearing.
In summarizing the “squalid” conditions at the Sullivan County Jail, which Hull said are only made harsher by overcrowding and are also psychologically damaging for many long-term inmates, Hull wrote:
“The … average inmate is confined 24 hours a day in a physically dilapidated, insect infested, dimly lit; poorly ventilated area averaging under 20 square feet per inmate, without any available recreation or diversion other than some reading or letter writing, sharing a shower, which may or may not be operable, with three or four others, possibly sleeping on the unsanitary floor, or within inches of the toilet, in clothing that may not have been recently washed. The totality of these conditions offend notions of decency and are offensive to the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.”
Living areas in the jail are “so decrepit that it would be nothing short of a major project to make the jail palatable from a sanitary and cleanliness standpoint,” Hull found.
“We are dealing here with the bottom-line conditions of human existence. Nothing less than the dignity of man has been implicated by the offensive conditions of the Sullivan County Jail.”
