A JAIL’S DEADLY LEGACY
Since 2015, 22 inmates have died in custody
The Hampton Roads Regional Jail’s deadly history is repeating itself.
Since the deaths of Jamycheal Mitchell in 2015 and Henry Stewart in 2016 sparked intense scrutiny on the jail, the leadership has changed again and again. State and local leaders have investigated the facility’s practices. The Justice Department issued a rare report into its treatment of inmates. Changes have been made inside the facility.
But nothing prevented two men from dying in the jail’s custody in ways that mirror the tragic incidents of Mitchell and Stewart.
And the message from the sheriffs and city leaders who sit on the regional jail’s board?
It takes time to make the kind of changes needed at the jail.
But time ran out for 18-year-old Davageah K. Jones, an inmate with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder who died alone in a regional jail cell last year after
being arrested for misdemeanors, much like Mitchell in 2015.
Time also ran out for 51-yearold Tyrone Lee Bailey, who begged for medical treatment in the days before his death on jail grievance forms, as Stewart did in 2016.
Jones, Mitchell, Bailey and Stewart are four of at least 22 people to die while in the jail’s custody since 2015.
"It’s the exact same thing,” James Boyd, president of the Portsmouth NAACP, said of Jones and Bailey’s deaths. “Now it’s a pattern. … There’s no accountability there whatsoever. The board that oversees that jail — the city managers and the sheriffs that send people over there — they’re not going to make a fuss because it’s not in their interest.”
Bob Geis, deputy city manager of Chesapeake and the jail’s board chairman, said the facility is making changes.
“I’m not prepared to say that history is repeating itself,” he said.
Each death needs to be investigated and everyone involved must make sure they are doing everything they can to prevent such deaths, Geis said.
“We should be following our procedures properly, we should be making sure we’re taking care of the inmates to the best of our ability,” he said. “We should be making sure that they’re getting the health care that’s mandated and that they need.”
In a board meeting May 16, Superintendent David Hackworth told jail officials that the facility needs 113 additional officers and an additional psychiatrist at a cost of $7 million, according to the Portsmouth Sheriff ’s Office.
But it will likely be another year before any of those officers could be hired, even if the cities agreed to the increased cost. That’s because the meeting in which Hackworth proposed adding officers came shortly after Norfolk, Portsmouth, Chesapeake, Hampton and Newport News — the cities that partially fund the jail and house their sickest and highest-need inmates there — set their budgets through June 2020. And the State Legislature, which provides most of the rest of the jail’s money, isn’t in session again until January.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department is moving at a glacial pace — even for them. The report, released in December 2018, was completed nearly a year earlier. It was not made public until Jeff Sessions, long an opponent of federal oversight of local law enforcement, resigned as attorney general.
Hackworth says the government shutdown earlier this year has further slowed the process. A source with knowledge of the investigation says the two sides remain at odds on a number of issues.
Often, Justice Department pattern-or-practice investigations, like the one conducted on HRRJ, lead to consent decrees — negotiated reforms overseen by a federal judge and independent monitor. But Session’s last act in office was to restrict the department’s ability to effectively use them. Whether such an agreement is put in place at HRRJ remains to be seen.
Bill Farrar, strategic communications director for the ACLU of Virginia, said he isn’t sure whether adding 113 officers is the right thing to do, but the lack of transparency around the proposal and its timing — right after the cities passed their budgets — is concerning. “From the jail administration to the jail board, to the DOJ to the state actors … there just doesn’t seem to be any sense of urgency around this,” he said.
Norfolk Sheriff Joe Baron said that, while there have been significant changes in recent years and the amount of money each city is contributing to the jail is increasing again this year, he would like to see things move faster.
“But I know that just like my office, things can only move as fast as there is money to deal with the issue,” he said. “The board is of the mind that something has to be done, that it’s going to require money. And we’re all on board — let’s do what we have to do to fix it.”
Hackworth points to a plan to increase security staff to 309 people, the use of video conferencing and increases to medical staff as some of the jail’s recent changes.
“I think we are speeding up now,” he said. “I don’t know what the time frame is, but I definitely think there is a need to change and move into the future. To say we are not doing that isn’t a fair assessment.”
Newport News Sheriff Gabe Morgan said the jail’s problems weren’t created overnight, and they can’t be fixed overnight.
“That’s going to be a process,” he said. “Everybody in the region, I don’t care what law enforcement agency you’re in, everyone has critical shortages right now.”
If the jail does end up adding an additional 113 security personnel, it will bring the facility up to 422 non-medical staff, the exact number called for in the jail’s most recent staffing study.
That study and the need for a drastic increase in staff was the basis of a $5 million request for money from the legislature by then-Superintendent Ronaldo Myers in 2018. The bill died in a legislative subcommittee.
Baron, Geis and other board members criticized Myers’ request because there were dozens of open positions in the jail at that time. Morgan opposed it.
But by January of this year, the jail was fully staffed with about 299 people. Still, officials did not ask the legislature for additional money for positions during the 2019 legislative session.
Institutional reform doesn’t come easily, said Michele Deitch, a jail oversight expert and senior lecturer at the LBJ School and the School of Law at The University of Texas at Austin.
“One would hope that it will not take litigation to turn this around,” she said. “And the conditions are clearly problematic. You’ve had terrible, terrible harm caused to people because of the conditions, you have the Justice Department investigating. You don’t need litigation here. This is a matter of will to fix the problem combined with addressing the lack of resources and structural issues.”
Rhonda Thissen, executive director of NAMI Virginia, said that during a recent meeting between jail officials, NAMI, ACLU and other local groups concerned with the jail’s practices, she came away feeling as though jail officials didn’t have a good grasp on what it would take to fix its problems.
At one point, Thissen and Farrar say, the group asked Hackworth and the assistant superintendent what the jail was doing to improve conditions.
The answer: some inmates were now being given crayons.
While it’s true crayons can have therapeutic uses, Thissen and Farrar didn’t consider that a full answer to the question.
“My concern was that we had come to the jail, to hear from them what changes they were making to address the DOJ’s concerns about deficiencies,” Thissen said. After hearing about the crayons, “we actually asked that they bring in someone else to answer our questions.”