Update
Dear Prison Society Supporters:
Our latest walkthrough of the Philadelphia jails found a lack of staff supervision on housing units, lengthy delays in medical care, severely limited out-of-cell time, and more ongoing threats to incarcerated people’s health and safety. If that sounds familiar, it’s because these conditions remain nearly identical to what we observed in the jails almost two years ago.
Like Bill Murray’s character in the movie “Groundhog Day,” incarcerated people are caught in what seems to be an endless cycle: they report problems to the Prison Society, we send a memo carefully detailing the dire conditions to the Philadelphia Department of Prisons (PDP), and the PDP goes on as if nothing is wrong. All the while, incarcerated people and staff endure the same hellish reality over and over again.
Our latest memo adds to a mountain of new evidence of dangerous and degrading conditions, from a former corrections officer pleading guilty to charges relating to the brutal assault of an incarcerated person to a court-appointed monitor finding “significant safety risks for [incarcerated people] and staff.”
Extended confinement, poor hygiene, and rampant rodents
During our October 28 walkthrough of the Philadelphia Industrial Correctional Center, Prison Society staff, volunteers, and representatives from Councilmember Isaiah Thomas’ office interviewed 64 incarcerated men and women in general population and restricted housing units. They once again reported a dangerous absence of security staff on a regular basis, especially on weekends, holidays, and during Philadelphia Eagles games. One woman reported a single officer was assigned to cover three housing units.
This is just one outcome of the continuing staff shortage in the jail. The court-appointed monitor reported that the staff vacancy rate in the jails is now approaching 40 percent. The shortage has far-reaching consequences, including depriving incarcerated people of the minimum amount of time out of their cells required under the class-action settlement agreement that led to the monitor’s appointment. In its first report, the monitor found that the city is not fully complying with any of the major provisions of the settlement agreement.
“Every few days they have to shut down the jail and not let us out for [recreation],” one woman reported to the Prison Society. The extended periods of confinement, incarcerated people said, are continuing to create tension that can lead to violent incidents.
Many of the people we interviewed also reported an inability to maintain personal hygiene. The majority said they get fewer than three showers per week, and one man said he had gone 11 days without a chance to bathe. They again reported insufficient supplies of toilet paper and menstrual pads. Regarding the pads, one incarcerated woman said, “We’ve got to beg them for it. Then they give us attitude.”
They also continued to report serious problems with the physical facilities, from broken phones to cockroaches and mice running rampant. Nearly everyone we interviewed reported seeing rodents in their housing unit every day.
The PDP runs from its shadow
In response to our memo, the PDP only directly addressed a few of the issues we detailed. Commissioner Blanche Carney denied having “extended periods without staff supervision.” At the same time, she said the department was “exploring incentives that can be used to motivate staff to report during sporting events”—suggesting that a football game can determine whether enough staff show up to keep the jails safe. Carney also said new procedures were in place to increase access to the law library and make feminine hygiene products available on demand. The remainder of her response speaks in bureaucratic generalities about jail policies meant to prevent the conditions we heard about, asserting an idealized vision of how the jails are supposed to operate.
Seeing its own dark shadow in the disturbing details of our memo, the PDP, like the groundhog the world is watching today, is retreating into the protective den of institutional denials to wait for the problems to pass. But stalling and inaction, in this case, will only make the harsh climate in the city jails worse.
Only the PDP and city government can stop the nightmare in the Philadelphia jails from repeating over and over again.
