JAIL
There isn’t much room in the Sullivan County jail for human dignity.
There is no room in the jail for anything resembling rehabilitation or anything resembling more than the confinement of livestock.
The jail is a health hazard to the inmates and represents a cruel punishment for those presumed innocent who are stil awaiting trial, in one instance waiting since April. ;
The cell blocks are unclean, bug infested and inmates show the evidence of bug bites on their bodies. The plumbing is bad, commodes overflow and the mess is not cleaned up. Showers don’t work right, and prisoners are allowed to go however long as they please without showers.
“We give them soap and brooms and mops twice a day to clean their cells,” said jailer Ron Morrison. “If they don’t do it, I’m not going to do it myself.”’
The Times-News recently received a letter from Sullivan County jail inmates complaining about their living conditions. Staff Writer Rick Patterson was assigned to investigate their claims. Whether living conditions are satisfactory or unsatisfactory is a subjective judgment of the viewer. In part this story reflects the reporter’s perspective and conclusions.
Capt. Clyde Baldwin, sheriff’s deputy who is in charge of the jail, said “I can put ten new mattresses in there, $15 vinyl mattresses, and by the next morning three of them will be torn up. If I could catch one of them at it, I could charge them with destroying public property.”
“A lot of these people are just groundhogs, wanted from all over the country. Look at this,” Baldwin. said, pointing to a roster showing hold for North Carolina, hold for Virginia hold for Washington.
“You should have been here this morning. They can go for weeks without taking showers. Two this morning were so ripe, I had to leave the room to breathe,” Morrison said.
The attitude is that some people just don’t want to be clean, don’t care if their environment is inhuman.
Dep. J. L. Sheperd offered perhaps the only solution when he said, ‘Really, we need a new jail.” This one just isn’t designed to be humane.
The lay-out is several cell blocks containing six individual cells. The block is designed to hold up to 12 men, and the average population of each block is nine or ten.
The individual cells are closed during the night and during feeding. They open out to a small room where the prisoners of each block can mingle during the day. On one side of the room is a long narrow bench which serves as a table and a smaller bench which serves as the seat for the inmates when they eat.
Each block contains a sink, a commode and a three-walled shower stall.
From one corridor between the two rows of cell blocks, guards can control the individual cell doors. That corridor is a solid steel wall with a door in it. Once the prisoners are locked in their cells, the main door is opened and the trusties carry the trays in, leaving them sit on the bench.
One pours coffee into plastic pitchers – really bleach bottles.
Once the trusties are back in the hall, the guard closes the door and opens the individual cell doors.
Through the small glass window in the steel door, you watch the inmates moving to their food.
It is a degrading ritual. At 7 a.m. and 4:30, it is the only ritual to break the monotony of each day. Each cell block is a self-contained unit. There is no organized activity, such as an exercise yard, a reading room, or a chapel .
The far side of the block is a row of steel bars and a corridor which allows guards to observe the prisoners. The only light is from the corridor. The light cannot reach the individual cells and the light in the block area is too dim to read by.
The Sullivan County jail could not do more to destroy the human spirit if it were calculated to do so. For some. reason, shower curtains are not provided for the Stalls. Inmates tear up the mattresses because “the vinyl is cold.” They hang the vinyl covering over the entrance to the shower.
The commodes are unclean. They apparently overflow when they are flushed, much less. It would be difficult to approach them, to use them. And cleanliness can hardly be enforced by any one individual living with eight or nine other men.
The county for its part, provides. inmates with soap and mops. No one as yet seen fit to provide has the discipline and the environment which would lift the inmates above their “groundhog” status .
The prisoners are well aware of their condition. For the second time in three months they have petitioned for improvements, this time not only sending their letter to the Times-News but to Sheriff Bishop and the state health department.
Their most recent letter, mailed Feb. 2, flashes the bravado of mandate and contains a reasoned yet nonetheless implied threat of violence.
Their jailers scoff at the petitions, “Oh those guys, give them everything and they’d still be complaining,” one says.
County officials tolerate the abyss. The jail conditions are not hidden from the Court’s Safety Committee nor the Grand Juries which make regular tours. “They seem to think we like living this way,” said one inmate.
One of the main complaints in the petition is the lack of a county health officer to visit the jail. The county simply hasn’t been able to replace Dr. J. W. Erwin. Prisoners have to be transported to Bristol Memorial Hospital for any kind of treatment. That’s tying up sheriff’s cruisers, and may not be happening as often as warranted.
The petition relates that one man fell from his top bunk twice during the night and waited five to six hours before getting medical help.
Another prisoner was brought to the jail with lice on his body and in his clothing. The prisoners complained and the man was moved from cell to cell, before authorities finally put him in a cell by himself.
“The prisoner was moved around for two weeks and he received clothes and from fellow prisoners, not medicine the authorities according to the petition.”
Prisoners on medication have prescriptions kept in the lock-up box which covers the levers to operate the cell doors in the blocks. It is also a locker for other personal effects, such as shaving cream and soap
At feeding times, the dosage is given to the prisoner without water and no one checks to make sure he actually swallows the medicine.
Many of the prisoners are on medication, and much of it is Valium and other pain killers.
Another complaint was that “winos and drunks handle our food,” and don’t have health check-ups and TB exams.
But the sanitation problems they present are pale in comparison with the sanitary conditions inside the cells where the food is eaten.
“The roaches are so bad that you can’t eat without them falling off the ceiling into your food,” the petition complains.
The bugs are a problem because the cells aren’t clean, breakfast trays are allowed to sit until a prisoner gets up to eat. Coffee served with meals is left in the cells. The jailers complain that prisoners are setting fires with tissue paper “trying to heat coffee. They melt the plastic bottles.”
The problems in the jail stem from two sources. The bad plumbing and the lack of motivation to do anything more than stay there. Discipline is a problem in that there is no regimen of personal cleanliness and policing the cell blocks.
Authorities said that out of meanness some prisoners will stuff books down the toilets to make them overflow. But it is one way of drawing attention to the sinks that don’t work and showers that don’t have hot water.
The prisoners have worked out a two-man system to “punch the shower button and flush the commode” to get the showers working.
Money has been appropriated to fix the plumbing in the jail but it hasn’t happened yet.
Fred Hayes, Hayes Plumbing and Heating, Bristol, surveyed the jail’s plumbing “sometime within the past year,” but it has been so long, he can’t remember the date.
“Most of it is antiquated, hasn’t been maintained. All of it needs a general overhaul and revamping,” Hayes said.
Hayes submitted an estimate for replacing all of the sewer pipes and certain water pipes, but the estimate is outdated and “isn’t worth a dime right now.”
County purchasing agent, Ray Winters, has asked a Kingsport firm to survey the jail. “I’m trying to find out the best way to fix it,” submitted in detail so he can write specs and put the job out for competitive bidding.
Hayes said there is no way to know what the job will involve until he gets into it. “I know it’s pretty bad. Some sewers are blocked and overflowing. Vent lines have to be changed to keep the fixtures from drawing sewer gas. Capt. Baldwin has had to shift and makeshift so they can keep the jail open, so they can use it.”
“What’s causing part of it, I don’t know.” Capt. Baldwin said of the discipline problem, “we can only ask them to do something. If they don’t do it, we can put them in solitary, which is a 12 by 12 hole, but in two weeks they seem to have forgotten about it.” Both he and Sheriff John Bishop laid some of the blame on overcrowding. “If we can hold it down to 60, we’re pretty good.” The jail has about 90 inmates right now,
One prisoner said, “What we’re really griping about is the health environment. Instead of wrecking the place, we filed the petitions. We don’t want to cause any trouble because the odds are against us We’re locked up.”
The petition reads “No one can say we haven’t gone about it in the right way, but if we can’t get any changes, we will make some changes ourselves even if it’s for the worse. The petition set a deadline of last Thursday.
It will take a little longer than that. County officials have known about conditions in the jail for some time. Attitudes will have to change before they’ll stop treating a man like livestock and wondering why he won’t use a mop.
