Ex-director to serve time in own jail

CLEVELAND — The former director of a county jail in Cleveland where federal authorities described conditions as “inhumane” was sentenced Friday to serve nine months in that same jail.

A Cuyahoga County sheriff’s deputy handcuffed Kenneth Mills in a Cleveland courtroom, as Visiting Judge Patricia Cosgrove chastized him while delivering the sentence.

“What you’ve done is unthinkable and callous,” Cosgrove told Mills. “I don’t know how you can look at yourself in a mirror.”

Conditions worsened during Mills’ four-year tenure, prosecutors said, with inmates living in unsanitary conditions with little or no medical care and inedible food while locked in their cells for periods for 24 hours or more.

Prosecutors said Mills fronted a money-making plan to have the jail in downtown Cleveland serve as a regional corrections facility that would charge suburbs and Cleveland to house their prisoners. The regionalization plan led to severe overcrowding and forced corrections officers to work in intolerable conditions, prosecutors said.

Mills, 56, was convicted in September on misdemeanor counts of dereliction of duty for having caused unsafe conditions in the jail and falsification for having lied to Cuyahoga County Council when he said he had not blocked the hiring of badly needed jail nurses despite evidence to the contrary.

Mills resigned in late 2018 shortly before a U.S. Marshals Service report was released calling jail conditions inhumane and after six inmates died within in less than a fivemonth period.

Cosgrove, the judge, denied a motion by Kevin Spellacy, one of Mills’ attorneys, to delay the sentence pending an appeal.

Spellacy cited letters written on Mills’ behalf before sentencing, and said the charges and conviction were “riddled with hypocrisy.”

Mills did not speak during the hearing.

Assistant Ohio Attorney General Matthew Meyer in a presentence report wrote that Mills’ tenure as jail director harmed prisoners and corrections officers.