Cook County Jail

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The Cook County Jail, located on 96 acres (390,000 m2) in Cook County, Illinois, is the largest single site county jail in the United States of America housing approximately 9,800 men and women. It employs 3,800 law enforcement officials and 7,000 civilian employees.

The Jail has held several infamous criminals including: Al Capone, Tony Accardo, Frank Nitti, Larry Hoover, Jeff Fort, Richard Speck and John Wayne Gacy.

U.S. Department of Justice report

In July 2008, the civil rights division of the United States Department of Justice released a report finding that the Eighth Amendment civil rights of the inmates has been systematically violated.[1] [2] The report found that the CCJ failed to adequately protect inmates from harm or risk of harm from other inmates or staff; failed to provide adequate suicide prevention; failed to provide adequate sanitary environmental conditions; failed to provide adequate fire safety precautions; and failed to provide adequate medical and mental health care.

Specific violations that have resulted in Federal sanctions and/or class action lawsuits include:

1. Systematic beatings by jail guards.
2. Poor food quality.
3. Inmates forced to sleep on cell floors due to overcrowding and mismanagement (resulting in a $1,000 per inmate class action settlement).
4. Rodent infestation and injury caused to sleeping inmates by rat and mouse bites.
5. Violations of privacy during multiple invasive strip searches.
6. Failure to provide adequate medical care, including failure to dispense medications.
7. Invasive and painful mandatory tests for male STD's (resulting in a $200 per inmate class action settlement).
8. Unnecessarily long waiting time for discharge upon payment of bond, completion of sentence, or charges being dropped. Wait times are currently routinely in excess of 8 hours, nearly all of which is spent with many inmates packed into tiny cells.

The Cook County jail was the setting used for the musical Chicago.


References

  1. ^ Federal Report Finds Poor Conditions at Cook County Jail (New York Times)
  2. ^ U.S. blasts jail conditions (Chicago Tribune)

External links

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