Cassandra Greer-Lee lost her husband, Nickolas Lee, to COVID-19 in April 2020 while incarcerated in the Cook County Jail in Chicago, the largest single-site criminal in the United States. Lee was only the third user to die from the virus. in the pre-trial detention centre, whose general population is around 6,000 inmates, a time when there was not much data on the spread and containment of the virus.
Since then, at least a dozen more deaths of incarcerated people and criminals have followed, according to criminal records, prompting human rights activists to take a closer look. Over time, frustration with criminal control regarding the overall maintenance of the facility. and care for inmates has only intensified as new inmates have died. Some of the deaths are COVID-related and others are not, leaving critics wondering the criminal’s commitment to keeping inmates safe.
“My husband died out of sheer negligence,” Greer-Lee told Yahoo News, noting that she called the sheriff’s workplace and criminal hospital at least 132 times when her husband fell and said nearly every call went unanswered. “He entered Cook County. Jail, a healthy 42-year-old man, and left him in a bag of pictures. “
Cook County officials, however, reject the idea that they are not doing everything they can to protect other people in their facilities and that this criminal is more harmful than any other in the United States. They claim Lee was taken to the hospital as soon as medical staff said he became ill.
The sheriff’s office said in a statement that it had no record of Greer-Lee’s court cases or appeals.
“The Cook County Sheriff’s Office is working very hard to maintain the health and safety of those in its custody,” Matthew Walberg, press secretary for the sheriff’s office, told Yahoo News in an email. “We function as one of the largest prisons in the country. “The United States, and while each and every death is tragic, we have recorded fewer deaths in custody for years than in comparable prisons. “
Greer-Lee says that, in her experience, this couldn’t be further from the truth. She says her husband told her and the criminal staff about the symptoms on March 29, 2020. It was more than a week before anything was done, she said. Nevertheless, he was admitted to hospital on April 6. Six days later, he was dead.
According to criminal data, which was shared with Yahoo News, from 2017 to 2021, there were a total of 57 deaths of other people incarcerated in Cook County custody, a sum that falls just below the national rate of criminal death. This year, according to the criminal, there have been 3 deaths so far. While resources for determining the information are readily available, advocates believe the numbers may be even higher.
For Cook County officials, those numbers illustrate a criminal under control. For critics, the numbers are evidence of a criminal in distress.
Greer-Lee has participated in a one-woman crusade for the past 18 months, seeking to hold the Cook County Jail accountable for what she calls forgetting and, in the end, eliminating existing criminal leaders. Her actions, she says, have resulted in the preventable deaths of her husband and a large number of others incarcerated, as well as subhuman conditions, adding a plague of cockroaches and rodents and mold that causes the disease.
“There are other people there who have been there for nine or 10 years,” he said. essential elements. I’m not saying it has to be like a Holiday Inn or a suite, but soap, disinfectants and tissues : I shouldn’t have to beg for those things.
Every day, Greer-Lee highlights the criminal outdoors at 1 p. m. in protest, seeking responsibility for lives lost and expecting long-term deaths.
Cook County disagrees.
“Everything has been done to our staff, who have worked tirelessly, and to the others in criminal custody since the beginning of the pandemic,” Walberg said. “These claims about the lack of PPE, cleaning products and soap are tired and false reiterations. of claims made two years ago, and they are also patently false now as they were then. “
Much of the blame for the jail’s delinquency, according to Greer-Lee, falls squarely on the shoulders of Tom Dart, the county’s sheriff. Dart, who has held the position since 2006, has brought an “aggressive yet innovative approach to law enforcement,” according to his personal website, and in 2009 he was recognized by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, praised for reducing the large number of evictions across the county during the previous year.
But according to Dart’s biggest critics, that only tells a portion of who he is.
Nicholas Zaeyda, a lieutenant at the jail, told Yahoo News that at least eight officers he knows of have died of COVID since the start of the pandemic. Zaeyda, who’s currently running to replace Dart, has spent the last 23 years working at the jail and prior to that spent a decade as an interrogation specialist with the U.S. Army.
“We are doing our job with handcuffs on” due to severely limited resources available to officers to combat a COVID surge, he said, adding that favoritism within the ranks has ballooned the number of directors well into the hundreds and no one knows who is in charge.
Cook County officials shared data of the office structure, which includes eight officer roles ranging from executive director to correctional officer. According to their numbers, no role above the rank of lieutenant exceeds 12 officers. There are 100 lieutenants, 163 sergeants and more than 2,000 correctional officers.
Walberg rejected accusations that they didn’t care about the deadly virus.
“Any accusation of ‘lack of general interest in COVID all the time’ and negligence” of guards “with fear of inmates due to lack of leadership from the most sensible to the lowest, starting with Dart” is ignorant and offensive,” he said. “Those who would say this are completely unaware of the sacrifices the sheriff and our staff have made. “
The sheriff’s office also noted that Zaeyda was suspended for 60 days expired last year for insubordination.
However, the deaths continued.
Under Dart’s leadership, last month, Raheem Hatter, 24, found subconscious on the floor of his mobile with head injuries, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. A post-mortem report from the medical examiner concluded that the death was homicide.
Hatter’s circle of relatives reportedly never reported his death, but learned about it through an Instagram post.
Just over a year ago, another inmate, Nickolas Lockett, was found dead on his mobile less than a week after pleading guilty to the annoying attack on a police officer. The initial investigation uncovered no symptoms of a criminal act or signs of suicide, and an inconclusive autopsy. But critics believe there’s more to the story.
“He, through it all, sought to recover,” Lockett’s mother, Mary Lopez, told the Chicago Tribune. “And why when they need to change, do they come up with something?”
An organization of educators and researchers motivated by the inequalities observed in Illinois offenders have amassed their own knowledge about inmate deaths in the state. Using public records received under the Freedom of Information Act, they found that between 2010 and 2021, between 80 and 100 people died in custody in Illinois criminals, according to the Illinois Custodial Deaths Project. But their criminal knowledge is incomplete, one of the report’s authors told Yahoo News, because the formula does not impose any legal liability for percentage of this information.
“We have the cause of death provided by the state, but having to make sure the data is a challenge,” said Erica Meiners, a professor of education and studies on women, gender and sexuality at Northeastern Illinois University. formula data, and there is no legal responsibility on the formula for percentage of data. . . . There are no teeth.
The purpose of the task was to increase the transparency of criminal deaths, but Meiners notes that genuine outrage deserves to be directed at the greatest number of Americans in criminals and the penal system, especially since confinement replaces the control of serious intellectual disorders. With more than 2 million people in prison at any given time, the United States far exceeds the incarceration rate of any other country in the world.
“The explanation for why we have other people dying in criminals and criminals is that we use criminals and criminals as a way to fight poverty and all sorts of disorders that they shouldn’t solve,” Meiners said. “We want to lessen our dependence on our criminal formula and our criminal formula . . . The only way to prevent other people from dying in criminals and criminals is to make sure they don’t get there in the first place. “
The most recent comprehensive report on death rates for Cook County Jail inmates, published in 2007 in the Journal of Urban Health, found that between 1995 and 2004, 178 inmates died in prison, an average of nearly 20 deaths per year. The vast majority of those deaths were black men who died of illness or homicide. These events occurred before Dart assumed his current position.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s office did not respond to Yahoo News’ request for comment, but advocates say she is a staunch supporter of Dart for the sake of increasing the prison’s population.
Dart recently manages a $600 million budget as the prison’s chief executive director. He was sued by civil rights attorneys at 3 Chicago Community Bond Fund law firms in April 2020 for not taking sufficient PRECAUTIONS against COVID.
“People were complaining and nobody listened,” former inmate Anthony Johnson, who contracted COVID-19 at a prison in April, told Southside Weekly, a local Chicago-based nonprofit newspaper. strategy] just trial and error. . . . The thing is, they didn’t know what to do.
The court issued an initial court order requiring private protective equipment, soap, disinfectant and social distancing, but Dart tried to rescind the orders. He got the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit to try to get the U. S. Court of Appeals. The U. S. Department of Homeland Security will lift the social distancing requirement even in prisons. in other states it began releasing thousands of low-level nonviolent inmates.
In addition to Cook County, jails across the country have noticed COVID-19 wreaking havoc, as millions of inmates have been infected with the virus amid a host of conditions. distancing, as well as lack of medical equipment and patients with problems of uncontrolled intellectual fitness.
“This rotation produces well epidemic machines that cause epidemics in and beyond, compromising public protection across the country,” Dr. Eric Reinhart of Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine told NPR last year.
Efforts to curb deaths in Cook County, advocates say, have not been enough.
As early as March 2020, more than a hundred organizations coordinated through the Chicago Community Bond Fund, a nonprofit that advocates for an end to pretrial detention, signed an open letter to the Cook County Jail about what was needed to slow the spread of COVID-19. Fraudsters say their considerations were largely ignored when detainees began to die. The bond fund called for the mass release of nonviolent, low-level detainees, but to no avail. it was not proven during the initial remedy in prison, that there was not enough PPE for inmates and staff, and that those who had symptoms were denied the spark remedy, if necessary.
After all, the criminal scaled back in the spring of 2020 and transferred inmates to individual cells, saving dozens of lives and avoiding many hospitalizations, researchers from Stanford and Yale universities found in a study published early last year.
“Taken together, those measures not only have an effect on the correctional facility, but also on the network fitness systems surrounding the prison,” the study authors wrote. “Our findings suggest that depopulation efforts deserve to be a number one strategy for COVID-19. “19 mitigation in prisons. “
Dart called the study a justification for effective criminal precautions, while human rights advocates saw it as proof that controlling the virus saves lives and that more deaths may have been prevented.
Inmates reportedly called the prison’s efforts to curb covid “smoke and mirrors,” and said they had to fend for themselves. Many refused to meet in groups and had to disobey officers’ orders to do so. Others slept in the open-air hallways,cells to keep their distance, shared cleaning products or T-shirts used to make homemade masks.
Earlier this year, an inmate named Tommie Davis told Injustice Watch, a nonprofit journalism organization, that on the New Year, at least six men who had COVID symptoms were isolated for six days and then sent back to the general population without undergoing a COVID test. Davis described this party in crude terms.
“It’s terrible,” he said. It’s like being in hell. No – hell.
Cook County Jail officials told Injustice Watch they may simply not verify or deny this account, but said the prison follows recommendations from local and federal fitness branches for testing and quarantine.
Lately there are more than 5,000 inmates incarcerated in the prison every day, and more than 74% of the population is black.
Mark Clements was detained in early March 2020. He spent two days in prison for posting on Facebook that the governor of Illinois “needed to have his ass kicked” to keep families in the criminal. Clements told Yahoo News that, in his experience, “there is no guarantee” for inmates at the Cook County Jail and said the guards “didn’t give a damn if everyone they provided had died. “
Clements recalls that the guards did wear masks and cared about the well-being of the inmates in the institution.
“What I personally saw in the prison was the negligence of many sheriffs,” he said.
Regarding existing COVID precautions for the prison, Walberg said a COVID test is being administered to all incoming inmates, that vaccinations must be obtained for staff members and inmates, and that PPE is still available.
“We continue to work heavily with Cermak Health Services, the Chicago Department of Public Health, as well as the state and federal public health government to have our COVID-19 protocols describe or adhere to the most productive practices,” Walberg said. testimony to our initial efforts that many of the protocols that were developed at the beginning of the pandemic are still effective and are used today. “
Greer-Lee says she doesn’t accept Cook County’s leadership as true. Instead, he says he has pledged to share his frustrations regarding crimes in hopes of preventing more preventable deaths.
“Inmate lives don’t matter here in Chicago,” he said.
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Cover thumbnail illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Cassandra Greer-Lee, Scott Olson/Getty Images
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