The news of a troubling jail death in Prince George’s County, in which a black man accused of killing a white officer was found strangled to death in his solitary cell, comes with another sad story of homicide behind behind bars. One morning this March, DC jail staff checked in on a 44-year-old inmate named Houston Quildon and “discovered that his blood pressure was low,” according to a release. Twenty-five minutes later, Quildon had lost consciousness. Emergency personnel took him to Greater Southeast Community Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.The Medical Examiner initially ruled Quildon’s death a result of natural causes. But yesterday, investigators said they now believe Quildon was killed. Back in September, he had been assaulted in his cell and suffered a fractured mandible. Despite surgery, his health continued to deteriorate. Police have a requested a warrant for the homicide, but have not released the name of their suspect.

This wasn’t the first episode in Quildon’s nightmarish experience with the D.C. jail. Back in 2006, in custody on drug charges, he had surgery for esophageal cancer and had to send his defense attorney to court to argue for the follow-up treatment he thought he deserved. Here’s part of the story, from the Washington Times.

Late last year, Jennifer Durham settled her lawsuit against the District regarding the death of her son, Thomas Jones, who suffered a heart attack while playing basketball inside the D.C. Jail. A video of the incident showed that corrections officers had failed to perform CPR or even the most basic life-saving measures on her son ( Cover Story, “Man Down,” 6/27/07). The settlement provided a six-figure sum to Jones’ young daughter. It wasn’t enough for Durham’s attorney Douglas Sparks. He wanted Department of Corrections officials to meet directly with Durham and prove to her that they’ve made changes.

On March 10, Durham and Sparks met with corrections officials at its headquarters on Vermont Avenue NW, where they were greeted with a surprise: DOC Director Devon Brown had decided to run the session himself. The meeting lasted nearly two hours. Sparks says Brown began the meeting by doing what few officials ever do—he apologized. Another official soon pulled out detailed spreadsheets showing that the entire corrections workforce had been certified in everything from basic first aid to the operation of portable defibrillators—a key issue in Durham’s lawsuit.

“It was the first time in my career—and I’ve been doing this almost 30 years—I’ve ever seen anyone in the DOC, especially in the high level, show such compassion,” Sparks says. “It’s the first time I’ve had them say they’re sorry.”

When it was Durham’s turn to speak, she told stories of her son and talked about what it was like to see the video of him dying on the gym floor. She cried. She came away from the meeting satisfied.

“It made me feel like what [my son] went through, what he went through, it mattered. It made a difference,” Durham said at the time. “You know, I feel pretty good behind it.”

From the legal blog In this Case, one man recounts his weekend stay at the D.C. Jail. He got tossed in there after getting picked up on a DWI charge (his second apparently). He recounts roaches, a lot of “motherfucker” this and that, and just general mass confusion. Here’s a taste of the jail’s intake process:

“They do a psychological test to check that you’re mentally stable. An AIDS test, a TB test. There’s a big desk, and there’s one CO waving guys in, and they’re constantly doing head counts to make sure they don’t lose anyone. The guards were pretty overwhelmed and confused. And understaffed. If something went down, someone could easily get hurt before anyone really responds. And then I could hear on all the radios, Code Blue, and about an hour or two later they were wheeling in this guy on a stretcher with blood all over him. He was strapped down, knocked out, blood all over him. I’m like, man, this is lawless. One CO got accidentally locked in the holding cell with us. There was dead silence in the room; he was pretty scared. I couldn’t believe something like that could happen. What if he was killed that night, right there? There were guys in that holding cell for attempted murder and this corrections officer was all alone. Complete lawlessness.”

The narrative boasts more gritty details. You can read it all here.

With so many millions of dollars walking out the door in Jimmy Choos, etc., courtesy of the tax scandal, you’d figure D.C. Gov would be totally into recovering millions of other dollars it’s rightfully owed by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).

You’d figure that. But you’d be wrong. In a classic case of buck-passing between the Office of Property Management (OPM) and the Department of Corrections (DOC), the utility bill for steam used to heat the Correctional Treatment Facility—located right next to the D.C. Jail and privately operated by the Nashville-based CCA—has gone unpaid for years. What’s owed is up for negotiation. Last March, former OPM director Lars Etzkorn (who has since lost his job over that unfortunate police department relocation fiasco) testified before the Council that OPM was “collecting monies owed.” To wit: “For example, last month OPM presented to the Department of Corrections the analysis for it to recover $5.7 million from the Corrections Corporation of America…”

OPM didn’t take over collecting the money, mind you, it presented an analysis of how to collect the money. And this was after At-Large Councilmember Phil Mendelson figured out in the 2006 budget process that DOC was actually being billed for the steam rather than being paid for it. A year after OPM was informed of that, a year after Etzkorn’s testimony throwing around “$5.7 million,” none of the money has been collected. And $5.7 million could be way underselling it.

To be fair to the CCA, the folks in Nashville didn’t know how much steam they were using in D.C. until OPM installed a meter last March; a bill didn’t even go out until a few months later, in June. According to the bill, the meter shows that in six months—from June to December of 2007—the Correctional Treatment Facility used more than $450,000 in steam. When you do the math, and take into account that the CCA, according to its lease, has been responsible for paying utilities on the facility since 1997…. well that’s somewhere around $10 million to $11 million in danger of—poof!—evaporating.

The DOC, by nature of its relationship with the the jail, the next-door Correctional Treatment Facility, and the CCA, has been the agency ostensibly in charge of the lease with the CCA. But—and you’ll have to try and follow this alphabet soup—the DOC thinks it’s the OPM’s job to get the CCA on board. Beverly Young, spokesperson for DOC, e-mailed that succinct response to me this week: “The Department of Corrections is not responsible for the collections. The matter is ultimately an issue between OPM and CCA.”

Mendelson agrees. The DOC, he says, never should have been in charge of the lease in the first place. “The only agency that should administer a lease is OPM,” he says, and further: “They (OPM) screwed around last year with invoicing and not getting payment….They’re very slow to act and wer’e talking about millions of public dollars.”

At a hearing last Friday, OPM’s interim director Robin-Eve Jasper (after being jousted by Vincent Gray) faced Mendelson on this front:

Mendo: “We should get answers without having to think of every angle to ask the question. So I get the bills, but it turns out we’re not getting the pyament…”

Jasper: “I’m going to have to get back to you. We are billing currently, but the first bill didn’t go out that long ago…and I don’t believe it was as high as $11 million….I will get back to you with a detailed response.”

Mendo: “What I was last told at our last hearing on this was that the Office of Property Management was talking to the Department of Corrections. I’m not sure why that makes sense. Why doesn’t the OPM talk to CCA or to the CFO’s office?”

Jasper: “I can’t answer that question…I can’t answer why we were in discussion with the DOC rather than sending out a demand note and just proceeding on that basis.”

Mendo: “When you get back to me, can you also go into what was going on prior to June 2007?”

Jasper: “Yes, I believe we’re trying to establish a baseline of a full year at this point and…establish prior payments.”

Mendo: “I’ve yet to receive any evidence that anyone has talked to CCA, so this would all be a surprise to them when we send them a bill. That would kind of help, I think, to talk to them.”

Hey, it’s a start.

OPM’s spokesman, Bill Rice, did not return three phone calls. Stay tuned!

This just in: D.C. Jail Warden William J. Smith quit his post on Friday. According to Department of Corrections spokesperson Beverly Young, Smith left the job citing “personal reasons.”

Smith had only held the job for a year. He was appointed warden on Oct. 1, 2006. Smith had little time to make much of an impact. According to one jail watcher, the troubled facility has been neither exceptionally bad nor exceptionally good under Smith’s tenure.

Maybe the personal reasons included the District government finally accepting a cap on the jail’s population.

Via today’s local papers, this one included, comes news that the Fenty people have finally agreed to a cap on the population of the D.C. Jail. That cap is 2,164 inmates, and it’s at the high end of the range that a city consultant recommended for the lockup. If given its druthers, the city would have put the ceiling at 3,198 inmates. Talk about barbaric. As this paper and others have pointed out over the years, the D.C. Jail is a hellhole of towering dimensions. Just a shortlist of the bullshit that’s gone on there: guards macing inmates in their private parts, guards not knowing how and when to administer CPR, culminating in an inmate’s death, shit flying around, and all manner of overcrowding and miscellaneous inhumanity. All this stuff is fully documented, not in dispute. Yet two successive mayoral administrations—AAW and AMF—respond by trying to cram more people in there, or at least maintaining the latitude to do so. The city’s greatest currently underutilized asset—former Ward 3 Councilmember Kathy Patterson—spent many hours sticking it to the establishment on this cause. Even so, she left office without attaining a clear-cut victory. It’s sick that further pressure—a lawsuit and a good judge—would be required to force the city to treat its own people according to the most basic standards of decency.

The city has agreed to cap the population of the D.C. Jail, finally complying with the terms of a 2003 law passed by the D.C. Council and settling a two-year old lawsuit.

Phil Fornaci, who chairs the D.C. Prisoners Project, which helped wage the lawsuit on behalf of a group of jail inmates, says the settlement agreement will be entered on Friday. The population will be capped at 2,164, which represents the high end of a permissible range determined by a consultant hired by the city in 2004.

Last week, the city had floated setting a cap of over 3,000, which was well above the consultant’s figures and drew a stiff rebuke from Superior Court Judge Melvin R. Wright last Friday.

In Saturday’s Washington Post, Peter Nickles, general counsel for Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, announced that the city was planning to appeal Wright’s decision to the D.C. Court of Appeals. The city had previously argued that the judge had no authority to order the executive branch to comply with the council’s legislation.

Nickles says the city decided an appeal was not worth the time or expense. “I believe the judge is always right,” he says. “It is not a good use of taxpayers’ money to litigate forever after the court has ruled.”

One part of the settlement that was important to the city, Nickles says, was that it include a “provision of exigent circumstances,” where the cap could be temporarily lifted in the case of a mass-arrest anomaly.

Without such a provision, he says, “you invite the possibility of violating a court order, which we don’t do.”

More on this issue in tomorrow’s Loose Lips column.

In a hearing this afternoon, Superior Court Judge Melvin R. Wright strongly criticized the District for failing to comply with a 2003 law requiring the city to cap the D.C. Jail population.

The agony over the D.C. Jail’s population dates back to at least 1975, but this particular conflict has its roots in a law passed by the D.C. Council in 2003 that required the mayor to “establish by rule the maximum number of inmates to be held at any one time” at the jail. A consultant hired by the city in spring 2004 to determine the number came back with a range between 1,958 and 2,164 inmates.

Still, the recommendations in hand, the city did nothing. Now, a suit filed in 2005 seeking to have the city comply with the 2003 law has finally come to a head; in August, Wright granted summary judgment and ordered the District to set a cap in writing by today’s hearing.

Well, set a cap the city did: In a filing earlier this week, the city announced its intention to set the cap at 3,198 inmates—more than 1,000 above what its own consultants recommended as an upper limit for the jail population.

Plaintiffs’ lawyer Theodore A. Howard called the figure “a number that has no relation to anything.”

Earlier the attorney general’s office had argued that separation-of-powers issues prohibited the Council from setting a cap—specifically that the cap inhibited the mayor’s power to “allocate resources” as he sees fit.

Wright showed little patience with the city’s arguments in today’s hearing. “I don’t understand at all the Distict’s position,” he said.

City attorney Andrew Sandon Saindon said, “It’s a political decision. It’s a dispute between the executive and legislative branch.” Wright took the opportunity to give the courtroom a civics lesson and ask Sandon why, if the executive branch had such a big problem with the bill, didn’t the mayor veto it.

Wright said the District’s argument have “no merit” and gave the city until next Friday to comply by submitting a number within the suggested range—”not an arbitrary number that you think you can justify”—lest it face contempt-of-court proceedings.

“The District of Columbia…has the same obligation to obey the law that any individual citizen does,” Wright told Sandon. “The fact that the mayor or the Department of Corrections doesn’t like the legislation is not a reason not to obey.”

Deborah Golden, a lawyer with the D.C. Prisoners’ Project, which is helping to litigate the case, expects the city to take their arguments to the D.C. Court of Appeals, further delaying the implementation of a meaningful cap. “We’re frustrated,” she says, “that this will take more time.”

CORRECTION, 10/8: Due to an error by reporter Mike DeBonis, city attorney Andrew Saindon’s name was misspelled.

In June 2006, two inmates escaped from the D.C. Jail by shimmying down a canopy. In the aftermath of the escape, officials pledged that the canopy, which protects waiting visitors from the elements, would be removed. But when At-Large Councilmember and Judiciary Committee Chairman Phil Mendelson toured the facility on Tuesday, he noted the canopy was still there. “I thought they removed it,” he says. “I was surprised. I was told a year ago that it jeopardized security.”

Corrections spokesperson Beverly Young blames former Mayor Anthony Williams. “Director Brown sought approval from the previous administration to have the canopy removed but did not receive response to his formal request,” Young writes in an e-mail. “Of concern was that the visitors would not have any shelter during inclement weather.” She adds that there are construction plans in the works that will address the visiting area.

While working on my cover story about inmate Thomas Jones‘ death and the jail guards’ bungled response, I must have watched the surveillance video more than a dozen times. I slowed down the speed. I counted up how many points Jones scored during his basketball games. I freeze-framed on key moments—particularly what the officers did and didn’t do after Jones collapsed on that gym floor. Not once did I see anything resembling basic lifesaving techniques or CPR.

The Jones family has sued the District over this issue. But it was still shocking when lawyers representing the District argued in a court filing that after they watched the video they concluded that “guards come in and CPR is performed.”

Yesterday, the government filed a correction [PDF] in Superior Court. A small army at the Office of the Attorney General wrote the court: “It has come to the attention of the District of Columbia (the “District”) that former counsel made an error…” They then retracted their testimony that “guards come in and CPR is performed.”

They now argue that “guards come in and provide medical assistance to [Jones].”

Of course, “medical assistance” has a lot of wiggle room. But I’m still unclear what was “medical” in any of their actions. Watch the video and decide for yourself.

Rule No. 1 for law enforcement when responding to an incident of lousy behavior is to trot out the need for more training. With an excessive-force case, officials suddenly get religion for verbal judo and sensitivity training. If only the officer had more training, he or she wouldn’t have thumped on that dude. As far as PR strategies go, it’s pretty terrific.

My cover story this week details the response and actions of D.C. Jail corrections officers after an inmate collapsed while playing basketball. The inmate was having a heart attack. The guards, well, don’t quite go by their own manual.

In this case, jail officials had long ago mandated that that officers go through basic life-saving and CPR training every year. They were being proactive! And yet, the officials would have flunked the CPR test that day and the next and the next.

But all the training in the world can’t fix an officer’s skeptical attitude toward inmates crying out for medical attention. “One of the biggest challenges for corrections and all the people involved in that, we have to guard against cynicism,” admits Cpl. John Rosser, chief shop steward for the officers’ union. “The inmates did not all come off the 19th Street Baptist Street choir. I’m going to say that 80 percent of the sick requests are simply a desire to get out of the unit and stretch their legs and get in a different environment….We must treat every incident or request as a medical emergency. But after 10 or 15 years of that you have to be a strong person.”

I asked Rosser if more training is necessary—if the guards knew more about signs and symptoms of seizures or cardiac arrest and other medical emergencies, they could better handle the lag time before an infirmary doctor arrived. His response: Hell no.

“That would pretty much set the correctional force up for lawsuits,” Rosser explains. “Inmates in general are litigious. They will sue. We are not going to stretch our duties beyond safety and accountability.”

What Rosser fails to realize is that all the “more training” I was asking about actually comes straight from their own requirements.

Legal Times has done some pretty damn great coverage of the recent inmate suicides at the D.C. Jail. But despite their strong stories, its reporter did not get any sense that the powers that be give a shit. Councilmember Phil Mendelson didn’t even return the man’s calls. And DOC poobah Devon Brown refused comment. So today, this came into our inboxes—a massive e-mail the Legal Times news editor sent to various government muckety-mucks wondering aloud: What the fuck are you gonna do about those suicides?

From: Brendan Smith
Sent: Tuesday, April 10, 2007 2:58 PM
Subject: Legal Times seeks responses on suicides of mentally ill inmates in the D.C. Jail

April 10, 2007

Dear Mayor Adrian Fenty and D.C. Councilmembers:

My name is Brendan Smith, and I am the news editor of Legal Times. I am writing to seek any responses or further investigation of the recent suicides of two mentally ill inmates in the D.C. Jail. There appears to be little oversight of the D.C. Department of Corrections in relation to these deaths, which also raise questions about the reliability and timeliness of psychological assessments of mentally ill inmates.

On March 31, Alicia Edwards, who suffered from bipolar disorder, hanged herself in the jail while awaiting trial on a couple shoplifting cases and some related charges. Jail officials claimed she was housed in the mental-health unit under increased observation by clinical staff. This false information was reported last week by The Washington Post and The Examiner. I published an article yesterday that revealed Edwards actually was being held in a single cell in the intake unit, where she was not under increased observation because a required mental-health assessment still hadn’t been completed by jail health-care contractor Unity Health Care. Here is a link to the story:

http://www.law.com/jsp/dc/PubArticleDC.jsp?id=1175622006604&hub=TopStories

On Dec. 23, Thomas Alemayehu also hanged himself in a single cell in the intake unit, and he also was not under suicide watch. Two days before his death, a psychologist from the D.C. Department of Mental Health found he showed no signs of suicidal tendencies or any mental illness in a court-ordered mental competency screening. One day after being found to be mentally competent, Alemayehu’s erratic behavior in court caused him to reject a plea deal that would have set him free for a couple traffic charges. Instead, he was sent back to the jail where he hanged himself less than 24 hours later. Both his friends and family said he suffered from serious mental problems that should have been obvious to a psychologist. Here is a link to an article on his case published last week in Legal Times:

http://www.law.com/jsp/dc/PubArticleDC.jsp?id=1174912588731

I am not aware of any external investigation of either suicide. The Corrections Department conducts its own investigations, even though its own employees, contractors or managers may be at fault. This presents an inherent conflict of interest.

I am still reporting on these suicides and their repercussions. Please call or email me with any comments or responses about further investigation of these deaths. Thank you for your time and attention to this matter.

Best, Brendan Smith
News Editor
Legal Times
1730 M Street NW, Suite 800
Washington, D.C. 20036
Office: (202) 828-0340
Fax: (202) 457-0718

CC: D.C. Office of the Inspector General U.S. Justice Department Civil Rights Division D.C. Department of Mental Health Office of Accountability D.C. Prisoners’ Project University Legal Services

Last week, I had the privilege of writing another story on the ongoing saga of overdetentions at the D.C. Jail. It was my third piece that touched on the issue in the last few years. And while it’s nice to be able to go back to the well so many times, my editors’ eyes tend to glaze over at the mention of the words “overdetention” and “D.C. Jail.”

But maybe there’s a solution to my editors’ fatigue, perhaps reader fatigue(!), and more importantly inmate fatigue. There seems to be growing agreement that maybe, just maybe, inmates should not be sent back to the D.C. Jail to be released; maybe inmates should be let free directly from the courthouse. At-Large Councilmember Phil Mendelson, who chairs the judiciary committee that oversees the jail, thinks this is decent solution.

“It’s easier on everybody,” he says. “It’s easier on the inmate, the marshals don’t have to re-transport. There’s less likelihood of a late release like at 10 o’clock at night.”

Apparently, Department of Corrections and Superior Court bigwigs are meeting on the issue.

The Department of Corrections has decided to once again allow Protestant religious groups to worship in the room historically set aside as the D.C. Jail’s chapel, reversing a policy set in place after an escape last summer.

Since Protestant groups draw by far the most worshippers, jail officials allowed only smaller groups, specifically, Muslims, Catholics, and Hispanics, to use the room. Members of the clergy complained loudly.

According to department spokesperson Beverly Young, the department has drawn up a schedule that will allow all groups to use the room on a rotating basis.

Potential D.C. Jail inmates may want to consider some scheduling pointers: First and foremost, don’t get cuffed on a weekend if you want to see your family before Monday at noon.

Saturday visiting hours have been canceled since August, and Department of Corrections Director Devon Brown confirmed to the D.C. Council last week that the policy is permanent. There’ve long been no Sunday visits—leaving friends and family to follow the alphabet rule: Inmates with last names starting with A through H on Tuesday and Thursday, J through P on Wednesday and Friday, Q through Z on Monday.

Plenty of folks are still complaining, though. Inmate advocate Pauline Sullivan, of Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants, brought her concerns about visitation rules to the oversight hearing for the Department of Corrections last Thursday. “I was very disappointed,” she told public-safety committee chair Phil Mendelson. “I really do not know the reason why it’s been discontinued.”

The cutback, Brown said, was necessary to maintain “safety, security, and order,” and he added that the jail was harder to staff on weekends.

Mendelson was not pleased. “Long-term, it does not sound agreeable,” he said.

Brown replied, “It’s gonna get worse.” An upcoming construction project at the jail, he said, will further curtail visitation rights.