House Republicans are suddenly concerned about how prisoners in jail are being treated. This is a serious issue across the country, with people who in many cases have not been convicted of any crime facing horrific, inhumane conditions. But Republicans are only worried one set of inmates in one jail: the Republican insurrectionists arrested for attacking the Capitol and imprisoned in a D.C. jail.
House Republicans are investigating whether Jan. 6 defendants have been mistreated in jail. The answer is assuredly yes—not because those defendants have been specifically mistreated because of who they are, but because the jail’s conditions are appalling and to be there is to have been mistreated. They’re going to try their hardest to show that conditions for their people are retribution, though, and that members of the Capitol mob are being mistreated specifically as political prisoners.
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Following Tucker Carlson’s whitewashing of the attack on the Capitol, Rep. Mike Collins tweeted, “I've seen enough. Release all J6 political prisoners now.”
“Eyewitness accounts of conditions at the D.C. jail facilities—particularly regarding the treatment of Jan. 6 detainees—paint a picture of despair, hopelessness, and a severe abuse of justice,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote in a letter to Mayor Muriel Bowser that was also signed by House Oversight Chair James Comer and Rep. Clay Higgins. “No prisoner in the United States should be treated in this fashion.” She is correct on the latter statement.
But it’s only the fact that some Jan. 6 defendants have been in the D.C. jail that has gotten widespread attention for the conditions other inmates have long faced. In late 2021, the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS), which oversees federal detainees in the D.C. jail, investigated conditions there. What the USMS found was horrifying. Water shutoffs were common and were carried out for punitive reasons. Toilets had standing sewage and “The smell of urine and feces was overpowering in many locations.” Some detainees had visible injuries but “no corresponding medical or incident reports.”
The Jan. 6 defendants, though, were being held in a part of the jail called the Correctional Treatment Facility, which had better conditions than the Central Detention Facility. The USMS report uncovered problems so severe that the Justice Department announced a plan to transfer inmates to a federal facility in Pennsylvania—but in some cases, lawyers for the people about to be transferred filed emergency motions asking instead to be transferred to the Correctional Treatment Facility.
The problems at the D.C. jail go back way before a bunch of white Republicans arrived there and got the attention of the USMS and Republican lawmakers. After the USMS inspection, the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia noted years of complaints by it and other organizations:
The inhumane conditions have included long-term solitary confinement for people with no disciplinary issues, lack of running water, full illumination of cells for 24-hours per day resulting in sleep deprivation, cells soiled with feces and blood, lack of air conditioning during the summer and heat during the winter, lack of proper medical care, failure to provide mental health treatment, and physical and mental abuse by correctional officers of people in their custody.
A 2015 report by the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs cited earlier inspections that found “an active infestation of vermin/pests throughout the facility,” leaking roofs, water penetration in the walls, mold growth on the walls, and “numerous sanitation issues in the kitchen, such as unsanitary equipment and improper temperature control for refrigerated foods.” There were serious problems with both the heat and air conditioning systems, and in 2016, nearly 200 inmates had to be moved because of excessive heat. The largest group of them was moved to the Correctional Treatment Facility, where the Jan. 6 defendants are now held. Because, again, they are being held in the nicest part of the jail.
That’s not to say that the conditions the Jan. 6 defendants face are acceptable. They probably aren’t. The USMS inspection was spurred by a judge’s decision to hold jail officials in contempt over their failure to provide medical records to the lawyers of one of the Jan. 6 defendants after he broke a finger while in custody, and the judge’s recommendation that the Justice Department investigate conditions more fully. That is an appropriate course of action—and one that has been denied other inmates. Micheal Cohen, a Black former inmate, told Time magazine that when he cursed at a corrections officer who was refusing to turn on the water so Cohen could flush the toilet (a type of complaint noted in the USMS report), the officer beat and pepper sprayed him. Cohen’s report of the incident did not get any action.
That 2015 Washington Lawyers’ Committee report noted, “Slightly less than half (49.5%) of the District’s total population, but 91% of the District’s prisoner population, is Black. By contrast, 43.4% of the District’s total population, but only a small fraction (3%) of the District’s prisoner population, is White.” A group of high-profile white people arrives there and go figure, suddenly the horrible conditions at the jail start getting attention all the way up to Congress after years of complaints.
Once again we’re seeing that there are two systems of justice in this country. And when white Republicans get a taste of the system they are usually fine with because it only comes down on other people—when after a violent attempt to prevent Congress from doing its part in the peaceful transition of power left 140 police officers injured, leading to some of the alleged perpetrators being jailed—they’re outraged. The outrage is that these abuses exist every day, not just for a few Jan. 6 defendants in D.C. and not just for the rest of the inmates in that jail, but in jails around the country.
Last year, images from New York City’s Rikers Island facility showed “both human squalor, like a photo of a man sleeping on the floor of an intake cell next to a pile of feces, and substandard necessities, like crumbling buildings and moldy food.” Jails around the country use restraint chairs, strapping prisoners into one seated position for hours or even days on end, which can cause death from blood clots. In some jails, food is served just twice a day and prisoners report losing significant amounts of weight. Pregnant prisoners are often forced to give birth in chains.
All of this is appalling. If there was reason to believe that high-level Republican attention to a few of their own was going to bring about serious change in jails more generally, it would probably be worth the trade-off of the nauseating attempt to martyr people who tried to carry out a coup. But that’s vanishingly unlikely. What Republicans like Greene want is to show that the Jan. 6 defendants were treated worse than most inmates because of who they are, that they truly are political prisoners being persecuted for their beliefs. The available evidence says that the reverse is true—they were in the most desirable area of a terrible jail, and when they were, like so many inmates, denied medical care, a judge took note and intervened, leading to the USMS investigating conditions.
But buckle up for more Republican howling about how they’re always the victims.
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