New protocols put in place to slow the spread of COVID-19 inside Cook County Jail may be wearing on detainees, and may not be possible to maintain if the usual summertime rise in arrests leads to an influx of inmates, lawyers for Sheriff Tom Dart said in a court-ordered report.
The report details changes made at the jail where more than 500 detainees and 300-plus jail staff members have tested positive for COVID-19. Six detainees and one corrections officer have also died from complications related to coronavirus since late March.
The report given to U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly last week includes more than 200 pages of documentation showing the twice-weekly distribution of soap and cleansers to detainees, and nearly a dozen coronavirus-related disturbances inside the jail complex within the last month.
Inmate advocates in March filed a class-action lawsuit seeking the release or transfer of elderly and medically compromised detainees, prompting Kennelly to order heightened sanitation and single cells for detainees wherever possible.
Dart has angrily contested criticism of his handling of the outbreak, citing massive efforts including reopening long-closed sections of the jail and converting a former boot camp into a 500-bed quarantine hospital. Despite those efforts, the number of detainees who have COVID-19 peaked at 274 on April 12, according to data compiled from the sheriff’s public reports by Injustice Watch.
Changes to jail procedures have caused some to become restive over a lack of activities and anxious about catching coronavirus, Dart’s lawyers wrote in the report, citing coordinated protests and a destructive “uprising” involving more than a dozen inmates.
“There have recently been an increasing number of incidents involving multiple detainees acting in concert in response to measures implemented by the Sheriff in response to the COVID-19 outbreak,” the report states. The incidents include:
• Detainees who had been moved into a dormitory-style housing tier in the jail’s Residential Treatment Unit — which typically is home to low-risk inmates with medical problems — staged an “uprising,” tearing apart medical equipment to use as weapons and flooding the tier with soapy water.
• Female prisoners on a tier reserved for COVID-19 positive detainees pulled off their masks and coughed on the corrections officers who were separating them during a brawl.
• Inmates on a quarantine tier refused to wear surgical masks when ordered to do so by corrections officers.
• Detainees on two tiers refused dinner in their cells on separate days in April, though guards reported the detainees did eat the food they bought in the commissary.
Lawyers for the detainees declined to comment on the report, but said they would file a response in court soon.
Jail officials have been able to find space to practice social distancing by reopening portions of the jail, which once housed more than 11,000 detainees, and joint efforts by the public defender, state’s attorney and criminal court judges have reduced the number of detainees to a record low of just over 4,000 in recent weeks. But finding room to practice social distancing will be all but impossible if the jail population rises as it typically does in the summer months, the report states.
“The first warm Spring weekend may now be upon us, and the officers are bracing for a wave of new detainees. However, the resources at the Jail are reaching their limit already under the court’s order,” the report states.
“A sudden spike in the jail population in the near term would upend the delicately balanced housing arrangements currently in place, and there are few alternatives left that would allow the jail to operate effectively and still permit ‘full’ social distancing throughout the jail.”
