INSIDE OUR FAILING JAILS

As Too Many Inmates Are Crowded Into Too Little Space, The Problems At
201 Poplar Grow.

Overcrowding has plagued the Shelby County Jail for years. But few have
told stories about the results of overcrowding such as the jail's
unsanitary conditions and slow processing system. A federal court-ordered
evaluation of the jail was delivered last month, and the Shelby County
Commission has already budgeted almost $200 million for a new intake
facility. But those who work there doubt that it will help.

Inmates sometimes wait days to be processed. Many end up sleeping on the
intake area floor.

A PRESSURE COOKER

Jane could be anybody's daughter.

It was a humid Saturday night in the parking lot of Denim & Diamonds. An
expansive slab of deserted concrete seemed a fairly discreet place for the
20-year-old and her friend to snag a good buzz before a night of dancing.
Like many kids, they rationalized that they could avoid the expense of club
liquor by throwing back a drink before going out.

They sat in their car, a tray of vodka-spiked purple Jello on the arm rest
between them. Their banter about school, going out, their friends was cut
short by the sobering shine of a cop's flashlight.

"I couldn't see his face," Jane says. "Maybe he thought we had drugs or
something. He was like, 'What are you doing?' and the next thing I know
he's charged me with driving under the influence and we went to jail."

For more than 17 hours, the girls -- neither of whom had been arrested
before -- were held in a downtown jail cell at 201 Poplar with about 40
other inmates, some of them charged with prostitution, drug possession, and
attempted murder. The young women were given paperwork with a box checked
for them indicating they had refused their phone call -- standard operating
procedure for an overcrowded jail that doesn't have the time to let
everyone make a phone call. When Jane didn't come home that night, her
mother -- ironically, an inmate counselor -- figured her daughter spent the
night with a friend.

About a week later, another woman about Jane's age was arrested for driving
drunk. She too had never been arrested. For more than 20 hours, she
squatted on a concrete floor in the jail's basement while cockroaches
zig-zagged in between her shoes and underneath other inmates lying nearby.
She was menstruating at the time and begged a female guard for a sanitary
napkin. The guard refused, so the girl bled all over herself. If the
jailers had allowed her a phone call, she says she wouldn't have called her
parents. She was too scared and embarrassed. Her family still doesn't know
about her arrest. The Flyer agreed not to print her name.

"What you've got is a pressure cooker," says Douglas Morgan, retired
director of Tennessee Corrections Institute and a Shelby County jail
inspector. "There are people kept in there who've committed minor offenses
- -- traffic offenses some of them -- for days. Overcrowding causes
everything else -- the dirty conditions, the unhappy staff, the frustrated
and angry inmates. It could definitely be a volatile situation."

Outside Looking In

Three years ago, Darius Little did what few other inmates in the history of
the jail have done -- he sued the county and the sheriff's department for
not hiring enough guards to protect him from being gang raped. Ultimately,
Little's case prompted a federal court to order an expert evaluation of the
jail. Morgan, a nationally respected jail critic, was asked to scrutinize
the method and frequency of violent acts among inmates. Last month he
completed his inspection, which included interviews with inmates and
jailers. Morgan's report cited the jail for lack of adequate staff, a poor
classifying system, overcrowded cells, and an inefficient computer system
for tracking physical or sexual assaults. In a report related to Little's
case, three jail experts -- the current director of jail inspection at the
Tennessee Corrections Institute, a former Chief of Jails Division of the
National Institute of Corrections, and the vice president of a top jail
inspection consulting firm -- concluded that hundreds of rapes, stabbings,
and beatings among inmates go undocumented every year. Morgan says the
jail's problems are the worst he's seen in his 20 years of corrections
experience and the worst he's inspected across Tennessee.

"The more people you pack in there, the higher the tensions are going to be
and the potential for violence," he says. "You've got a facility built to
hold 1,200 people, but there's about three times as many in there. You add
to that the very real existence of gangs, and let's just say it's not a
place you want to be."

Recently the Shelby County Commission allocated $172.2 million for 256
additional inmate beds and for the construction of a new intake facility.
But many, including Morgan and several county commissioners, say that is
like putting a Band-Aid over a wound that needs stitches.

The jail's design is so cumbersome, Morgan says, that "adding on isn't
going to make a difference. You'd have to change the whole structure of the
place for it to be effective and that's impossible."

The Shelby County Jail has 29 cell blocks. Most of the blocks are not
supervised by a cell-block officer for three hours per day, either due to
overlapping breaks or lack of staffing. There are 23 cells to a cell block.
The cells -- each eight feet long and six-and-a-half feet wide -- were
originally built to house one inmate. It's typical to see two inmates to a
cell, sometimes three or more. On an average weekend the jail's processing
area, a hot windowless concrete hall, is often packed with as many as 150
inmates standing shoulder to shoulder. The hours of waiting eat away at
what little patience detainees may have had. The drunk ones are sobering up
and getting angry. The ones who holler with their chest puffed out,
demanding they be processed now, don't wake those who are passed out or
huddled up against the concrete walls to sleep. Rows of their legs and
shoes move like an centipede down the hallway.

Most of the time, jail workers do not fully classify inmates before
deciding where they will be housed within the jail. Because the jail has
only one computer capable of searching the National Crime Information
Center to check every inmate's criminal history, it sometimes happens that
a person arrested for making an illegal left turn is housed in a cell with
a person charged with murder.

The jail is not designed in a linear-style which would allow guards to view
inmates in their cells at all times. Rather, guards sit in plastic chairs
facing a long, curving corridor that on both sides has open recreation
space. Behind that space and farther away from the guards are the actual
cells. To get a clear view of what inmates are doing, guards must go down a
catwalk and get close to the cells. They are required to do this only once
an hour. The jail is noisy. If an inmate were screaming for help, it's
unlikely a guard would hear them.

"Most of the guards are simply afraid to go down there," Morgan says. "And
if one is going to do it, then he's going to want another guard standing
watch at his post to get his back just in case something happens. There
aren't enough guards for that. It's almost a hopeless event working there.
I feel bad for the staff."

Adrianne Hebron, an assistant to jail union president Byron T. Williams,
says the overcrowding problem has brought guards to their physical and
emotional breaking point. She laughs when asked if adding 256 beds and a
new intake facility will alleviate overcrowding.

"We are just saturated because we have to deal with offenders from the city
and the county. They bring them all to us," she says. "I just know that the
minute more space is added, it will be filled and we'll still have a
problem. They say the crime rate is down, but I don't see it. All these
people shoved in here, lying on the ground waiting for their trial that's
going to take forever because the courts are so backlogged. It's a real mess."

A Day At The Jail

(Picture)Inmates often defecate on the floor or throw feces at the guards.
It's routine for guards to have feces, urine, sharp objects, and old food
thrown at them while inspecting the cells, says a female lieutenant who has
worked at the jail for more than a decade. She asked the Flyer not to print
her name for fear that speaking out would prompt her superiors to harass or
fire her. "You can't understand how bad it is unless you see it," she says.
"The staff is so stressed by the filth. It's horrendous. It's a living hell."

The lieutenant, other jail officials, and inmates say the cells' dirt and
grime is so thick that it's difficult to see the floor. Each tells stories
about both inmates and guards spitting or grinding insects into inmates'
food and rats found in snack machines. The toilets often back up and
inmates defecate on the floor. Some smear feces on the walls or throw it at
guards. The walls reek of urine and inmates' beds are infested with brown
recluse spiders, fleas, cockroaches, and mice. The tension among inmates
fighting over a cup of clean water, plus gang beatings and killings, can
make the cell blocks feel like a shaken soda can ready to explode. Not
surprisingly, guard turnover is high and morale is extremely low.

Jail union president Byron T. Williams has worked in the downtown jail for
two years. He was elected head of the union in August. Yet he's never met
Sheriff A.C. Gilless. Many jailers, including Williams, say they feel that
the sheriff's department has ignored their need for better health care
insurance -- right now deputy jailers receive less medical coverage than
sheriff's deputies. Due to their unsanitary and stressful work environment,
jailers frequently develop high blood pressure and respiratory illness.

If the conditions of the downtown jail are so bad and employees are
ignored, what keeps people like Williams and the lieutenant from quitting?

"A lot of people have asked me why I stay with a job like that," says the
lieutenant. "I like working with the inmates who want someone to talk to
them. I like the idea of helping them rehabilitate themselves. It's always
fascinated me what makes someone commit a crime. In there I get closer to
figuring it out sometimes. But it didn't use to be like it is now."

For many jailers, continuing to work in the jail is a symbolic gesture that
they still believe in the criminal justice system. Quitting is an
admittance of defeat not for them individually, but a defeat of order and
peace. They still hold onto the notion that their jobs are nobler than what
people on the outside might consider.

"There are guards who are doing some of the horrible things to inmates.
But, I think they've just lost it. They are wanting to blame and punish
them for what's wrong in the jail," she says, noting that the jail is a
holding facility for people still considered innocent before they go to
trial. It is not a prison for already-convicted criminals.

"They are human beings. They should not have to live that way," she says.
"And inmates are aware of their rights. If you deny them, they will lash out."

"Who's Going To Listen To My Story?"

(Picture)An inmate with a festering brown recluse spider bite. Inmate
Martin Funkhauser is a tall man with straight blond hair and big droopy
eyes. When he's asked what landed him in jail again, Funkhauser first says
he's got a problem with success. Then he says he was arrested for a
probation violation related to a crack-cocaine charge. Classified as a
non-violent offender, Funkhauser was held in the basement of 201 Poplar for
more than a day without food or clean water while jail officials processed
the stream of more than 110 inmates flooding the jail at the time of his
arrest. He spent about a month there before he was sent to an adult
offenders' center in Shelby Farms -- considered a much cleaner and
efficiently run facility. During his stay at the downtown jail, he was
given stale bologna sandwiches for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. One day,
he was given a piece of liver about the size ofa computer mouse as his meal
for the day.

"You think, 'Who's going to care, who's going to listen to my story?"
Funkhauser says.

He's sitting in a windowless interview room at one of the boxy brick
buildings dotting the bucolic farmland surrounding the County Corrections
Center. He'll finish his sentence there. Funkhauser doesn't want to talk
about his wife and children who have already left him. His sister, Cynthia
Storck, and his mother are the only people who have given Funkhauser money
to buy better food and a few pair of socks and underwear from the jail
commissary. Without their help, he would look like most of the other
inmates housed at the downtown jail -- barely dressed and dirty.

"When my mother and I went to visit him," Storck says, "it was as if I
couldn't have imagined a worse nightmare. We tried to talk to him through a
filthy glass wall covered in mesh. I was afraid to put my mouth and ear up
to the phone. We were treated like we had done something wrong by the
guards. It really amazes me that the jail treats these men like dogs and
doesn't expect them to bite back."

Basic Training

A pool of urine left by an inmate. It's 8:30 a.m. at the Shelby County
Corrections Training Academy.

"Who does the Fourth Amendment apply to?" asks Neil Shea, Shelby County
Sheriff Department academy trainer.

Silence.

One hand in the back of the classroom goes up. He thinks he knows who is
guaranteed privacy and protection against illegal search and seizure.

"Every citizen of the United States of America," he says proudly.

"Are you sure?" Shea presses.

Silence.

For the next 15 minutes, Shea questions his class of rookie deputies on who
has the right to privacy. Do children? Do illegal immigrants? Do prisoners?

Another hand.

"I think prisoners do, sir," the student answers. "But in cells, they can
expect a limited amount of privacy and fewer freedoms."

Shea nods his head and explains that everyone, in jail or not, is entitled
to privacy rights, but inmates can expect fewer rights to privacy while
incarcerated.

"You make no exceptions otherwise for who has Fourth Amendment protection
or that will get you in trouble, that will get you a lawsuit," he tells his
class. "You will bring your prejudices and your misconceptions about
different races, types of people, nationalities, whatever, to this job. You
are the same person before you put on that uniform as you are after."

Shea moved to Memphis in 1990 -- the same year 22 inmates started a riot at
the downtown jail because they felt their complaints about unsanitary
conditions were ignored. He spent a year and a half working for the
county's internal affairs bureau and quickly became a favorite of Sheriff
Gilless. Not long after joining the sheriff's department, Gilless asked
Shea to revamp the rookie training program and four years ago he became the
academy's director. For part of Gilless' first term, rookies -- many of
whom either work full-time in the jail or at least deal with inmates while
making arrests -- were required to have only one week of academic training.
Physical tests were also part of the one-week preparation, but it was far
from challenging, says Shea. Now rookies must complete a 10-week course of
regimented academics and physical training.

Shea thinks conditions at the jail have improved since the riot.

"I remember driving up on that and it was quite a sight," he says. "I saw
mattresses on fire being thrown off the roof. When it was over, I went in
there to look at the damage. Man, it's amazing the kind of destruction
violent, angry people can do to steel and cement with just their hands."

Shea agrees with Morgan's report which stated that Gilless and the county
were making "good faith" efforts to curb jail overcrowding. The academy
trainer says the argument that there are people in the jail who should not
be there is ludicrous. And blaming the sheriff's department for
overcrowding due to unnecessary arrests ignores the fact that one in five
of every jail inmate is arrested for drugs or an offense committed to
acquire money for drugs. In other words, the drug problem in Memphis is
much worse than it was 15 years ago, hence more criminals to lock up.

"If there are more people in the jail than there should be, then we have to
start changing laws," Shea says. "What are we going to do? We can't just
let people out the back door. There is certainly a problem with processing
and space."

Shea hopes the academy's training program will help improve guard attitude
and aptitude. The curriculum is one of the few in the country that teaches
deputies how to deal with prison gangs and educates them on the
psychological profiles of various kinds of offenders. Deputies are shown
how to provide limited emotional counseling to inmates. "Verbal judo," or
talking down an inmate before applying force, is a popular course section.

"We know that things can escalate when you use force," Shea says. "And
that's a last resort. But there has to be a definite distinction of who has
the authority. A guard can't give too much. Training can only give a person
certain tools; it's the experience that they have which shapes how
effective they will be."

Improving the cadre of rookies filtering by the hundreds out of the academy
to become jailers and street officers is made "in inches," Shea says. He
would like more than 10 weeks to train rookies. On average, his classes
teeter on 50 people for each session.

"I can't possibly know whether each individual is ready emotionally for the
job," he says. "You just have to hope that they are helping and that the
conditions, as they are now, don't get to them."

Lost Without Space

For 10 months, Sonny Newton, inmate #153-122 didn't exist.

No stranger to the jail, Newton was arrested in 1998 for the third time
fora parole violation related to two previous aggravated burglary
convictions. Newton knew the drill downtown. It would take the usual 24
hours or more to be processed -- probably longer because he had a rather
lengthy rap sheet. But the inmate's days turned into weeks. Weeks turned
into months.

Once or twice every week, Newton called his family from jail and asked them
to contact the criminal court clerk's office to get copies of his paperwork
and information about when he would be sentenced. His family says they were
told that there was no record of Newton's latest arrest or paperwork
tracking him through the jail system. To the clerk's office, Newton was not
an inmate.

Public defender Allan Newport represented Newton in 1995 on one of the
burglary charges. Newport says "losing" or misplacing paperwork within the
overcrowded, chaotic jail system is not unusual.

"It's not as outrageous as you may think," he says. "I wouldn't say,
though, that it happens all the time. The situation in Shelby County is
that if you can't afford private counsel and the state represents you --
you're given a public defender -- between the time that you're indicted and
the time you go to trial you are technically not represented by anyone. You
are sort of in this never-never land. It's especially bad for people who
can't afford representation and are in jail."

Because he was arrested on a parole violation, Newton was not entitled to
public counsel. He didn't know that and spent months trying to contact a
public defender he never really had. Newton was finally able to reach his
parole officer Jennifer Poe, who is no longer working for the Shelby County
parole office but as a public school teacher. She was instrumental in
having Newton transported from the jail to the County Corrections Center to
serve the remainder of his sentence.

Another consequence of overcrowding is an immense amount of paperwork, says
Newport. The timeline between the arrest and a preliminary hearing can drag
on for weeks. And because the jail is a holding facility not meant for
long-term confinement, inmates end up occupying their time fighting and
growing more frustrated.

Nashville and Chattanooga's county jails are far more expeditious in
issuing indictments and pushing inmates through the system. Nashville
assistant district attorney general Michaela Mathews says that in almost
every case, inmates go to preliminary trial within 10 days of their arrest
and are indicted approximately 65 to 70 days later. The same applies to the
Hamilton County Jail in Chattanooga.

"We've never had problems docketing cases and we have a bit of an
overcrowding problem here," Mathews says. "Overcrowding, I suspect, is a
problem for a lot of jails across the country. But you have to find some
way to deal with it."

The Hamilton County Jail has a maximum capacity of 489 inmates and is
currently housing 572. Although its capacity is much smaller than the
Memphis jail, it is dealing with the same problems of overcrowding and
understaffing. Their guards work six days a week, usually more than eight
hours each day.

Wildes says that although the Chattanooga jail is overcrowded, it's the
most efficiently run facility he's worked at in more than 20 years as a
jailer. He credits that to the jail chief, a former Marine intent on
running a clean jail.

"I'd say it's the exception," he says. "We do laundry once a week for the
inmates. Tennessee law requires that they get two meals a day, but we give
them three -- cheeseburgers, fries, soups, sandwiches."

If morale is up at the Hamilton County Jail, it's probably not because the
guards are getting paid what they deserve. Jailers recently received a
raise. They used to make $16,000 a year and now make $21,000. Guards at the
Shelby County Jail make more -- about $27,000. But that salary is low
considering Tennessee jailers are supposed to be paid according to the
percentage of inmates for which they're responsible.

"I don't think people realize how hard it is to work in a jail," Wildes
says. "Everybody -- inmates and guards -- has to feel like they are being
protected."

Playing Catch-Up

"Nobody's going to be sleeping in those new beds tomorrow."

Simply put, county commissioner Cleo Kirk says the additional 256 beds and
intake facility is a project that could take two years to finish. By that
time, the jail's problems will likely worsen.

Kirk voted for the improvement plan, but has spent the past three years
trying to find an alternative solution. Because more than half of the
inmates in the jail are arrested for a drug-related offenses, Kirk
advocates investing county funds in a community drug treatment center, a
24-hour drug court, and, eventually, a new facility built to guard and
inmate safety specifications.

"This problem has been going on for years, but now we felt like we had to
do something quick because a federal court told us what our problems were,"
he says.

Kirk blames the jail's overcrowding problem on the city police and sheriff
department's zero-tolerance-for-crime mantra. Although that seems like a
good philosophy, says Kirk, it can also backfire.

"I agree that people who commit crimes should be punished, but putting some
of them in jail for days -- the ones in for minor violations -- contributes
to the overcrowding," he says. "Putting more officers on the street who
will make more arrests will later deter others from committing crimes, but
right now it just means more inmates."

Both Kirk and commissioner Tommy Hart concede that the severity of the
crime should determine whether someone goes to jail, not simply that
someone has broken the law.

"You've got a lot of youngsters in the jail who shouldn't be there, whether
they were arrested for drinking or petty theft," Kirk says. "There needs to
be more consideration and not an automatic reaction to people who get
themselves in trouble. We may have become a little zealous in arresting
everyone."