When U.S. District Judge Milton Shadur declared recently that he had had enough of trying to force better conditions at Cook County Jail, he was as prophetic as he was candid. The jail, he warned, had become ”a ticking time bomb.”
There was frightening testimony to this Tuesday when several melees broke out among inmates and between inmates and guards, leaving 67 people injured. It is, as observed by experts who monitor inmate treatment at the jail, a matter of luck that this hasn`t occurred before. And to be fair, that it has not also is a credit to the majority of personnel assigned the daunting task of riding herd at the jail.
Ten years after the Shadur-directed consent decree that was to end overcrowding at the jail, the facility is stressed worse than ever. Some 9,000 inmates are housed there daily, without beds for about 1,700.
These conditions invite mayhem of the kind that erupted Tuesday, a situation apparently inflamed by a security lockdown in force since last Thursday after accused drug kingpin Erdogan Kurap escaped. In the wake of that incident, jail officials must review two critical questions: whether Kurap, considered one of the most important drug dealers in the country, should not have been kept in the jail`s highest security section; and whether the lockdown was kept on too long after an escape suspected of being an inside job.
The greater urgency is a reminder again that conditions at the jail cannot continue to be tolerated. It is a challenge that falls primarily to the people who inherited this mess: Cook County Board President Richard Phelan and the board, and Sheriff Michael Sheahan.
Their first priority must be to ensure that two more planned additions to the jail are completed promptly. But as Phelan has pointed out, there is no hope of building a way out of the overcrowding.
There must be continued emphasis on creative alternatives to simply locking people up, the most recent among them Sheahan`s proposals-endorsed by Phelan-to establish a boot camp and day reporting center for non-violent felons, with an emphasis on education, drug treatment and job training.
The incident Tuesday could have been a lot worse; it is a warning that the bomb is still ticking.
