Justice Department gives Richland County 49 days to start protecting jail inmates
The U.S. Justice Department has found conditions at the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center, the Richland County jail, in violation of the Eighth and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, it was announced today. The department’s report details the findings of a comprehensive investigation of the jail, which is funded and operated by Richland County.
The Justice Department has given Richland County 49 days to address remedial measures outlined in the DOJ’s findings. If the county does not, DOJ is authorized to sue.
“This is a great day for the men and women confined at Alvin S. Glenn. They have been vindicated,” said attorney Stuart Andrews of Burnette Shutt & McDaniel, who for almost three years has been representing Disability Rights South Carolina and a proposed class of detainees with serious mental illnesses in a federal class-action lawsuit on behalf of South Carolinians with physical disabilities and mental illnesses.
“When the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department speaks, state and local officials tend to listen,” he added. “I hope that will be the case with members of the Richland County Council. The strategies they’ve been using aren’t working. It’s time for a change.”
From its own separate investigation, the federal government has now concluded that the county has violated the rights of inmates by failing “to provide reasonable safety and to protect incarcerated people from serious harm and death by physical violence from other incarcerated people, including assaults with weapons, assaults by multiple people on single victims and sexual assaults.”
In the lawsuit, initially filed in 2022, Disability Rights states that at the detention center many detainees with disabilities, who have not been convicted of any crime, are among other things:
- Locked into small, cold, moldy, filthy, infested, unsafe, and unsanitary cells for up to 24 hours a day.
- Denied adequate mental health care and support.
- Placed in solitary confinement for extended periods of time.
- Locked into showers too small to allow them to sit down for up to 48 hours at a time.
- Shackled to a “restraint chair” for days at a time with handcuffs and zip-ties, without adequate monitoring or any breaks, even to go to the bathroom.
- Left naked in cells without monitoring when they are supposedly on suicide watch.
Forcing anyone, especially people with mental or physical disabilities, to live in these medieval conditions is unconscionable, inexcusable, and clearly unconstitutional, says Disability Rights. Currently, the jail houses about 965 inmates.
“Alvin Glenn has consistently failed, for years on end, not only to provide humane living conditions for those accused of crimes,” said attorney Ashley Pennington of Burnette Shutt & McDaniel, “But it has forced these men and women into situations in which their very lives are in danger.”
Since that lawsuit was filed, conditions have grown worse. In July 2024, Burnette Shutt & McDaniel attorneys asked the U.S. District Court for South Carolina to issue a preliminary injunction ordering Richland County to take immediate action to end these inhumane conditions.
And now the Department of Justice has agreed with the thrust of the lawsuit’s argument, and stressed the urgency.
“The conditions inside the Richland County jail are a matter of life and death. Individuals accused of crimes in Richland County should not face a death sentence before they ever see a court room,” said U.S. Attorney Adair F. Boroughs for the District of South Carolina today. “By addressing the remedial measures outlined in our findings, we believe this can change. We hope to work with Richland County and the detention center to make it a safer place for both detainees and staff.”
“Incarceration in our nation’s jails should not expose a person to severe and pervasive violence like that in the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center,” added Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
More information will be forthcoming from Burnette Shutt & McDaniel. In the meantime, here are some news accounts of this development:
The State: https://www.thestate.com/news/local/crime/article298573833.html
The Post and Courier: https://www.postandcourier.com/columbia/news/alvin-s-glenn-jail-richland-county-federal-investigation-civil-rights/article_04c12a9e-d348-11ef-9770-5799d94c69dc.html
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