A recent article detailing conditions in Deklab County jail by unicorn riot is “[…] a chronicle of inhumane, and often grotesque, conditions of confinement caused by a culture of neglect and apathy on the part of guards, contractors, and jail staff, often exacerbated by crumbling jail infrastructure.
In 2022, those conditions led to the deaths of nine people in the jail, a number that far exceeds the national average. Two of those deaths appear to be attributable to hypothermia after detainees were left in unheated cells in the winter. Others died by suicide or heart conditions after not receiving proper medical attention. Several of those who died in the jail had a history of struggles with mental illness.
“Nothing’s ever anybody’s job and it’s never nobody’s fault,” said Dulce, a woman who spent more than a year in the DeKalb County Jail who asked to be identified only by her nickname. “So it’s hard to get things done like they’re supposed to. Even with our food, they’d give it to us when they felt like it. We sat and watched our trays sitting in the hallway for hours. But because it wasn’t anybody’s job to do it, it wouldn’t get done. So we’re hungry just sitting there waiting for our food.”
Many of those we spoke with said they spent their time in the jail waking up at 3 or 4 a.m. to eat breakfast and then often going without food for 12 hours or longer. They talked about surviving on very few nutrients because they were often served undercooked or moldy food, much of it inedible. Some said they mopped their floors several times a day because the toilets or sewage pipes continuously seeped water and were never repaired, causing large puddles to form in their cells and pods.
“The area that I lived in, 24 gallons of water was leaking out of the toilet area per day: 24 gallons,” said one former detainee who was held in the jail for more than four months. “I know for a fact it was 24 gallons because I, and another inmate, we mopped up three buckets a day. Eight gallon buckets…24 gallons of water leaks out daily.”
Many lived in pods with few functioning toilets and lived with the smell of bodily waste they couldn’t flush. Others said they flushed their toilets and they’d keep flushing for six hours or more, sometimes flushing all night. “And jail toilets are very loud, in case you didn’t know.”
Some said they slept with the lights on in their cells because the guards simply refused to turn them off. They all said they rarely, if ever, got recreation time.
One person, who spent over two weeks in the jail, said the recreation area was available for about 5 or 6 hours during his entire stay. Still, he chose to stay inside because the recreation area was so “depressing.”
“It smelled like stale piss,” he said. “And you can see outside but…it’s just a bare room. People are just running back and forth or something. I’d rather just stay inside than get teased with outside but not even getting the fresh air because there’s a backed up toilet.”
“Most of those interviewed about jail conditions said detainees were consistently denied much-needed medications, such as insulin, blood pressure medication, antidepressants and antipsychotics. One said a woman who had been denied blood pressure medication passed out in her arms as the guards looked on, unconcerned.
Many said they witnessed severely mentally ill patients locked in their cells 24 hours a day without access to psychiatric treatment or mental health medications—and at times without access to food and water. Many said they lived with the screams of mentally ill detainees ringing in their ears.”
“Another forest defender described a mentally ill person who was locked in his cell 24 hours a day, frequently sitting in his own feces. He smeared feces on the walls of his cell and on his body. Guards, the forest defender said, would often forget to open the man’s cell door to give him food. Other detainees on the pod would keep an eye out to make sure he got fed or pass food under his cell door if he was hungry. “The whole pod looked out for him.””
“Over the course of that year, Dulce said she saw three women try to hang themselves with bedsheets. One narrowly survived the attempt when Dulce and another woman pulled her limp body back over the railing on the upper tier of the pod. When they loosened the sheets around the woman’s neck, she started breathing again.”
“The most recent of those attempts occurred in March 2023, when Stop Cop City activists were held in the same pod as Dulce. They described pressing the call button to get the guards to open the woman’s cell so they could untie her from the top bunk where she was hanging. When guards refused to respond, the women in the pod began banging on the glass together and screaming. Eventually guards opened her cell door and detainees rushed in and untied her. She survived, and the women in the pod stood against the wall and watched as guards led her away.
Three of the nine people who died in the DeKalb County Jail in 2022 died by suicide. All three hanged themselves.”
“What gets lost in this attention economy is the quotidian suffering of the millions of people in this country living behind bars: the weeks spent without access to recreation time, sunlight, or fresh air, the guards who, as one DeKalb County Jail detainee put it, seem to think being cruel to detainees is “the best part of the job.” The leaking sewage, the black mold, the hunger.”
Read the entirety of this article on Unicorn Riot