By Kathy Wray Coleman, editor
CLEVELANDURBANNEWS.COM-CLEVELAND, Ohio-The Cleveland Chapter NAACP, in cooperation with area community activist groups, will host a community hearing on the Cuyahoga County Jail on Thursday Dec. 6 from 6 pm-8pm at Mount Sinai Baptist Church on Cleveland's largely Black east side.
The overcrowded county jail last year merged with the Cleveland jail, which paid the county $5.6 million during the transition and merger period and is now paying the per diem rate.
Cleveland Municipal Court Judge Michael Nelson Sr., the former Cleveland NAACP president and criminal defense attorney who is refusing to send low level offenders to the jail until things are straightened out, will be in attendance, his personal bailiff told Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com.
"I do not know that he will speak but Judge Nelson will be there," said David Fann, Nelson's bailiff.
Last week Chief Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas Judge John Russo, via a letter to his judicial colleges, urged the other 33 judges on the general division bench to clear their dockets of people they have illegally jailed, a demand or gesture in response to an ongoing FBI investigation over seven county jail deaths in the last six months, inhumane and unconstitutional jail conditions, and an impending lawsuit seeking a federal takeover of the jail.
The city of Cleveland is currently under a court monitored consent decree for police reforms with the U.S. Department of Justice over its police department and questionable killings by police of Black people, including 12-year-old Tamir Rice, Malissa Williams and Timothy Russell, who were gunned down by police shooting 137 bullets in 2012, Tanisha Anderson, rapper Kenneth Smith, and Brandon Jones, whose family reached a million dollar settlement with the city last week.
What role the federal government will play, other than the federal court itself, in any oversight of the jail, is not clear.
Community activists have been picketing the county jail over its conditions.
They want both jail and court reforms via consent decrees with the federal government that are monitored by a federal judge.
A damning report released last month by U.S. Marshals on county jail conditions generated local and national news, a dreadful look at how inmates are mistreated such as withholding food for punishment, jailing juveniles with adults, rat and roach infested jail facilities, and a paramilitary jail corrections officers unit dubbed "The Men in Black" that intimidates and harasses inmates.
Pregnant women are jailed on the floor, heath care is inadequate, and the jail is one of the worst nationwide, data show. This is coupled with malicious prosecutions, excessive bonds and heightened criminal sentences that disproportionately target the Black community.
Indictment fixing by prosecutors, judges and the office of the county clerk of courts is routine, public records reveal.
Data show that Blacks in particular, and others, are often jailed illegally, sometimes to appease the prosecution, other times for political favors, and generally to perpetrate a money enterprise that centers around resources the county gets for jailing people.
Those fiscal jail resources, which further greed and public corruption, investigators have said, include a per diem rate to the county for each inmate, a jail shopping store that delivers food and other goods weekly to inmates, and expensive phone calls simply for inmates to talk locally to family members, and sometimes even to their lawyers.
According to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, Ohio incarcerates roughly 50,440 people at an average cost of $67.84 per inmate per day.
Clevelandurbannews.com and Kathywraycolemanonlinenewsblog.com, Ohio's most read Black digital newspaper and Black blog with some 5 million views on Google Plus alone.Tel: (216) 659-0473 and Email: editor@clevelandurbannews.com. Kathy Wray Coleman, editor-in-chief, and who trained for 17 years at the Call and Post Newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio. We interviewed former president Barack Obama one-on-one when he was campaigning for president. As to the Obama interview, CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE AT CLEVELAND URBAN NEWS.COM, OHIO'S LEADER IN BLACK DIGITAL NEWS.
