Nation's Jails Understaffed, Underfunded, Experts Say

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By Associated Press

Published: 04/24/2003

Lee Wood was locked up in the Cherokee County (N.C.) Jail last summer on charges of possessing marijuana and stolen goods. He ended up dead on the jailhouse floor in less than a week.
Prosecutors say a criminally negligent jailer denied the 26-year-old diabetic the insulin he needed to live. After five days, relatives say, Wood's tongue was swollen out of his mouth and he begged a fellow inmate for a can of soda, desperate for sugar. When he collapsed, he weighed just 100 pounds.
Experts say the inattention that led to Wood's death is all too common in jails across the nation.
Stephen Ingley, head of the American Jail Association, said the majority of jails are understaffed and underfunded, from rural facilities like the one in Cherokee County to the biggest urban jails.
While billions have been spent building prisons, the local lockup often gets ignored, Ingley said.
'If the county needs a new school and needs a new jail, and they go out on a bond issue, who's going to win?' Ingley asked.
Jails are on the front lines of the criminal justice system, coping with inmates straight off the streets, often with serious mental or physical problems. A typical 1,000-bed prison has 500 annual admissions, Ingley said, while a jail of the same size will admit 22,500.
The problem hit home last year in western North Carolina. Four months before Wood's death on Sept. 5, eight inmates were killed when fire swept through the Mitchell County jail. Seven of the inmates were trapped in a second-floor holding cell.
The county has agreed to pay $2 million to families of the victims and the state still faces lawsuits. State labor officials concluded that inspectors for the county and state repeatedly failed to detect safety violations at the jail.
'In part, it's a financial problem,' said David Whelan, a criminal justice professor at Western Carolina University, which hosted a regional jail safety summit last week.
'But it's also it's a problem of having proper understanding of liability and proper understanding of management and planning,' he said. 'I think that there have to be guidelines that are followed for all these emergencies that have happened.'
Jimmy Wood and his wife, Marylin, said they called the jail daily from their home outside Andrews to make sure their son was getting his insulin shots. Each day, jailer Judy Mason told them he was.
On Sept. 4, another inmate called the family to say Wood was sick and needed help. The Woods said they spent much of the next day trying to get medical attention for their son.
The head of the county emergency medical service asked Mason to transport Lee Wood to a hospital. On Sept. 5, a district judge issued an order that Wood be transferred to the state corrections department for safekeeping.
Wood died before that order was carried out.
'I can't picture how they didn't give my son his medicine and let him lay there on the floor and die,' Jimmy Wood said. 'If he'd just gone there and they shot him, I could live with it better than that they let him go like that.'
Sheriff Alan Kilpatrick pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of waiting 17 days to report Wood's death to the state. A judge sentenced Kilpatrick to 24 hours of community service and $500 in fines.
Mason, meanwhile, was charged with involuntary manslaughter and failing to provide medical care in Wood's death. Her lawyer, Jerry Townsend, declined to comment.
Charles Hipps, district attorney for Cherokee and six other western North Carolina counties, said conservative attitudes toward government spending have kept jails operating on slim budgets.
'The cultural attitude is going to have to change,' said Hipps, who died of a heart attack Feb. 28. 'There's going to have to be some dollars spent.'

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