State should shutter regional jail
Years have passed without the changes needed at correctional facility
Closing the Hampton Roads Regional Jail — as the state Jail Review Commission recently recommended this week in a scathing assessment of the facility — would remove a blight on our region. The blight is not the hundreds of people who live in its cells, but rather the callous lack of humanity shown to them. It’s the staggering number of deaths, the inability to ensure the safety of inmates and guards, the repeated constitutional violations that required state and federal intervention — all of it.
The regional jail is a failed experiment that, absent sweeping and swift correction, should end.
By now, residents throughout Hampton Roads — indeed, throughout the commonwealth and across the country — know about the horrors experienced by inmates at the regional jail.
The 2015 death of Jamycheal Mitchell, a 24-year-old from Portsmouth who succumbed to what the medical examiner termed “wasting disease” after losing 46 pounds during the 100 days he spent there, illuminated the deep problems at the facility.
Mitchell had a history of serious mental illness and was ordered by a judge to undergo a psychological evaluation — had a clerk not mishandled his paperwork, leaving him to languish in jail. The medical and mental health care he received can charitably be described as inattentive and wholly inadequate.
Officials were removed or resigned, investigations begun, promises made and, ultimately, millions paid to Mitchell’s family.
But that didn’t stem the tide of deaths.
Public records and exceptional investigative reporting found 49 deaths at the facility between 2008 and 2020; the next highest total for a facility in Virginia in that span was 34.
To some extent, a higher number of deaths was expected. It was by design. The five cities which populate the HRRJ send their sickest inmates — those with chronic illness, serious mental illness and other ailments — there. Medicine, even exceptional care, cannot save every life.
But the HRRJ isn’t the only facility to care for sick prisoners and its per capita
death rate far exceeds its peer institutions. It earned the ignoble distinction of being the deadliest jail in Virginia and one of the deadliest in the nation, labels the data supports.
The Mitchell case should have been a wake-up call for the cities responsible — Chesapeake, Norfolk, Newport News, Portsmouth and Hampton — for the HRRJ and local officials who serve on the HRRJ Authority, the facility’s governing board. They could have increased their per-prisoner payments or set aside additional funds for better health care.
But good luck convincing a politician he or she should advocate spending more tax dollars on medical care for inmates. Instead, cosmetic changes were mulled, solemn promises were uttered and precious little improved.
The jail entered into a consent agreement last year with the U.S. Department of Justice, a result of the federal investigation that followed Mitchell’s death, and HRRJ officials insist they are working to meet the mandate it sets forth about health care and safety.
But the jail is woefully understaffed — there are 100 vacancies within its officer ranks — and that shortage prompted Norfolk Sheriff Joe Baron and Chesapeake Sheriff Jim O’Sullivan this year to relocate their inmates from the HRRJ. Portsmouth hasn’t sent anyone there since 2019.
The Jail Review Commission’s recommendation isn’t the final word and there will be hearings about how to proceed, allowing HRRJ officials to make their case for keeping the facility open. Jail officials argue that the commission’s report is based on cases at least two years ago and didn’t account for changes made since.
Perhaps those officials and the five constituent cities can offer a compelling, workable strategy for reforming the HRRJ and ensuring the safety of inmates housed there and the guards who work there. Perhaps they can explain what’s taken so long and reassure the public that things are improving quickly.
Without that, however, the regional jail appears destined to face closure. Despite the complications that may create for our communities, Hampton Roads will be better for it.