County Jail taking civil rights violations one step at a time

Train us not to abuse, guards say.

By CYDNEY GILLIS, Staff Reporter

Doug Justus is president of the King County Corrections Guild. He says a pattern of abuse and neglect highlighted in a Justice Department report on the 1,700 bed county jail are the fault of the Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention. “If there’s better training and equipment, then shame on [the DAJD] for not giving us those tools.” Photo by Luke McGuff

Back in September of 2006, according to a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) report issued in November, jail officers saw a developmentally disabled man having a seizure and moved him to a cell, where his “agitation” led guards to pepper foam his face.

A few days later, guards put a distressed woman in a wheelchair to take her to the jail’s mental unit. Her arms and legs were in restraints, but, as she screamed and tried to stand up from the wheelchair, an officer locked her head in a hair-hold.

On a tour of the jail — which the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division investigated last year in the wake of four guards being charged with sexual misconduct — inspectors themselves found a mentally ill woman who’d been deemed to have “no medical problems” vomiting and shaking in a cell.

Another inmate died of a perforated gastric ulcer after waiting seven hours to see a doctor — an incident widely reported after the report’s Nov. 13 release.

The hair-hold, pepper foam, and lack of medical care, the report says, were inexplicable — but far from isolated. In a frightening 27-page report, the DOJ cites incident after incident that it says show a pattern of violating inmates’ constitutional rights, including serious misuse of force, letting inmates go without medical attention or medication, and failing to have adequate training or basic procedures in place that could not only prevent the injuries, deaths and suicides that have occurred at the jail, but the spread of the superbug MRSA.

The Justice Department is currently preparing a settlement proposal, or agreement of rules to follow, for the county to sign — or face the possibility of a DOJ lawsuit over the county’s 1,700-bed jail. While the county waits for the document, which could take months to finalize in back-and-forth negotiations, administrators of the jail and its medical services, which are run by the county’s Public Health department, say they’ve already made a number of changes.

But they also dispute much of the DOJ findings, leading civil rights advocates to question the jail’s progress at and commitment to treating inmates humanely.

“We don’t agree with their interpretation of the events,” says Maj. William Hayes, a spokesman for the county’s Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention, which runs the jail. “We think it’s possible to step up our documentation to show that the actions that we took were within our policies.”

In its report, however, the Justice Department blasts the jail’s policies as outdated, unlawful, or in many cases simply non-existent, particularly in regard to the use of force and how such incidents are investigated internally, if at all. The DOJ says the jail’s Use of Force Continuum, for example, calls for techniques “that are either no longer authorized or may be unlawful” — up to and including the use of lethal force for “aggravated aggression” that jail policies don’t even define.

For the incidents that are reviewed, the report cites a lack of training and expertise that led the jail’s internal investigators to disregard a nurse’s report of a beating she saw and to deem it acceptable that guards twice pepper sprayed an inmate who was handcuffed and on the floor.

The Justice Department also notes many incidents aren’t investigated at all. In 2005, it says, the Internal Investigation Unit lost a report on a sexual assault and never even interviewed the woman who filed it. Incidents in which one inmate’s eye was lacerated and another received multiple head contusions were also not looked into.

Hayes doesn’t agree, however, with the DOJ about the jail’s excessive use of force. “I don’t believe it’s something that occurs in our facility on a grandiose basis,” he said.

Doug Justus, president of jail officers’ union, the King County Corrections Guild, agrees with Hayes, but says that many of the DOJ’s issues come down to training, which he says getcut year after year in the budget.

The training that many of the jail officers received years ago, Justus says, involved hair-holds and pepper-spraying. If those techniques are a problem, “then train us in other uses of force so we don’t use that anymore,” he says. “If there’s better training and equipment, then shame on [the DAJD] for not giving us those tools.”

Justus says guards now take training to prevent the type of sexual abuse cited by the Justice Department. In a letter sent to the department’s Civil Rights Division on Dec. 31, King County Executive Ron Sims also cited a number of other fixes made by the jail and its health services.

Among them, a new use of force policy was adopted last July, after the DOJ’s first jail visit in March, with a new internal review board put in place to examine all jail incidents that result in serious injury. First-ever policies and a training manual for internal investigators are also being drafted, with Hayes noting that the department may lengthen the time investigators spend in the unit “so they become proficient,” he says.

Television and phone cords have also been removed or shortened to prevent suicides and a shift change consultation instituted so that staff exchange information about inmates.

The jail has also replaced two-thirds of its mattresses with new ones to prevent the spread of disease, taught staff how to properly sanitize them (something the DOJ says wasn’t being done) and adopted polices to culture and monitor all open or draining skin infections or wounds, including creating a Wound Care Clinic.

Also new is a Jail Health Services medical screening that each inmate gets coming into the jail and a new electronic records system that helps medical staff track inmate medical issues and follow-up care.

But Doug Honig of Washington’s American Civil Liberties Union says the jail isn’t moving very fast on major issues such as suicide prevention, medical care, and training.

While the mattresses have been changed, inmates still wear the same uniform for a week and there’s no way to launder or get clean underwear — two problems pointed out in the DOJ report.

“Most of the items on the list of problems remain unresolved,” he says. “Regarding the medical issues,” he adds, “there are still significant problems, particularly with medications for chronic conditions” — with the DOJ citing cases where inmates didn’t get their prescriptions in a timely fashion. One HIV-positive inmate, for example, had to wait 26 days to start prescribed drugs.

While in the jail, inspectors also observed a female inmate swallow a handful of pills, with guards waiting a full eight minutes to summon medical help.

“We’re working with the DOJ to understand their description of the situation,” James Apa, spokesperson for Public Health, says of the drug overdose incident. But, “In any medical system,” he says, “you’re never going to be error free.”