At least eight people have died at Hampton Roads Regional Jail in the past 17 months.
WASHINGTON ― Mark Goodrum
died last year after spending a month in Hampton Roads Regional Jail in
Virginia. He had been charged with misdemeanor marijuana possession and
was unable to come up with the approximately $100 he needed for a bail
bond.
Getting locked up in connection with a simple marijuana possession charge isn’t particularly rare at Hampton Roads, according to Norfolk Sheriff Robert McCabe, who took over management of the jail facility on an interim basis two weeks ago.
“We had 86 inmates that were in there for simple possession of marijuana,” McCabe said in a interview with The Huffington Post this month. McCabe says he looked up those numbers in early September.
If that rate held steady throughout the year, it would translate to a cost of roughly $1.84 million per year to lock people up for possession of marijuana (at a rate of $58.69 a day per inmate), according to McCabe. Another 300 or so inmates, out of a population of around 1,100, are charged with marijuana possession plus at least one other offense, McCabe said.
(At the national level, FBI statistics released this week indicate that marijuana arrests are at a 20-year low of 643,000 per year, or about once every 49 seconds. The vast majority of marijuana arrests are for possession.)
Getting locked up in connection with a simple marijuana possession charge isn’t particularly rare at Hampton Roads, according to Norfolk Sheriff Robert McCabe, who took over management of the jail facility on an interim basis two weeks ago.
“We had 86 inmates that were in there for simple possession of marijuana,” McCabe said in a interview with The Huffington Post this month. McCabe says he looked up those numbers in early September.
If that rate held steady throughout the year, it would translate to a cost of roughly $1.84 million per year to lock people up for possession of marijuana (at a rate of $58.69 a day per inmate), according to McCabe. Another 300 or so inmates, out of a population of around 1,100, are charged with marijuana possession plus at least one other offense, McCabe said.
(At the national level, FBI statistics released this week indicate that marijuana arrests are at a 20-year low of 643,000 per year, or about once every 49 seconds. The vast majority of marijuana arrests are for possession.)
Hampton Roads Regional Jail
holds inmates on behalf of five different cities in the region: Newport
News, Hampton, Norfolk, Portsmouth and Chesapeake. Eighteen people have
died at the jail since 2012, including at least eight in the past 17 months.
Goodrum’s death was first reported as part of The Huffington Post’s jail deaths project, which seeks to chronicle every jail death that happened in the U.S. in the year following the death of Sandra Bland on July 13, 2015.
Our analysis indicates that Hampton Roads Regional Jail is one of the deadliest jails in the country, and it has been named the most dangerous jail in Virginia by the Richmond Times-Dispatch. The Justice Department is currently mulling whether to launch a civil rights investigation into conditions at the facility following a request from Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring.
The Virginian-Pilot reported this month that federal authorities pulled immigration detainees out of the jail in 2014 because the facility had failed to meet detention standards. That was a $10 million hit to the jail authority, and it happened the year before the deaths of Jamycheal Mitchell, 24, and Henry Clay Stewart, 60, which have received significant media attention.
(Mitchell’s case was particularly disturbing, as starvation ― or “wasting syndrome” ― was a major contributor to his death. Some inmates have alleged they were threatened for speaking up about Mitchell’s death.)
McCabe, who said he expects to be on the job at Hampton Roads Regional Jail for a few months until a permanent replacement is found, is familiar with the DOJ civil rights investigative process, as he was in charge of the Norfolk City Jail during a federal probe in the 1990s.
“When I took over the Norfolk City Jail, it had some issues,” McCabe said. “I think that they thought maybe some of that experience would be helpful to take over here in the interim.”
McCabe has been on the board of the Hampton Roads Regional Jail for 17 years, and says the previous head of the jail hadn’t been keeping the board informed about important matters. Internal and external communication has been a major issue at Hampton Roads, McCabe added. He held his first press conference at the facility last week ― pledging firings, promotions and restructuring ― and said he’ll hold a press conference each Friday for the foreseeable future.
“The challenge here is to restore confidence that if there are any problem areas here at the regional jail, that we’re going to make sure that they’re addressed and that the public feels confident that this jail is being well-managed and that the inmate health care is what it should be by all standards,” McCabe told HuffPost.
Goodrum’s death was first reported as part of The Huffington Post’s jail deaths project, which seeks to chronicle every jail death that happened in the U.S. in the year following the death of Sandra Bland on July 13, 2015.
Our analysis indicates that Hampton Roads Regional Jail is one of the deadliest jails in the country, and it has been named the most dangerous jail in Virginia by the Richmond Times-Dispatch. The Justice Department is currently mulling whether to launch a civil rights investigation into conditions at the facility following a request from Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring.
The Virginian-Pilot reported this month that federal authorities pulled immigration detainees out of the jail in 2014 because the facility had failed to meet detention standards. That was a $10 million hit to the jail authority, and it happened the year before the deaths of Jamycheal Mitchell, 24, and Henry Clay Stewart, 60, which have received significant media attention.
(Mitchell’s case was particularly disturbing, as starvation ― or “wasting syndrome” ― was a major contributor to his death. Some inmates have alleged they were threatened for speaking up about Mitchell’s death.)
McCabe, who said he expects to be on the job at Hampton Roads Regional Jail for a few months until a permanent replacement is found, is familiar with the DOJ civil rights investigative process, as he was in charge of the Norfolk City Jail during a federal probe in the 1990s.
“When I took over the Norfolk City Jail, it had some issues,” McCabe said. “I think that they thought maybe some of that experience would be helpful to take over here in the interim.”
McCabe has been on the board of the Hampton Roads Regional Jail for 17 years, and says the previous head of the jail hadn’t been keeping the board informed about important matters. Internal and external communication has been a major issue at Hampton Roads, McCabe added. He held his first press conference at the facility last week ― pledging firings, promotions and restructuring ― and said he’ll hold a press conference each Friday for the foreseeable future.
“The challenge here is to restore confidence that if there are any problem areas here at the regional jail, that we’re going to make sure that they’re addressed and that the public feels confident that this jail is being well-managed and that the inmate health care is what it should be by all standards,” McCabe told HuffPost.
“At the very least, we can
probably agree that the transparency and communication was not what it
should have been,” McCabe said, noting that there were limits on what
officials could tell the press due to litigation and health care privacy
laws.
The facility was “not the easiest jail to work in,” McCabe said, “because out of the five jurisdictions, most of them send over their most chronically ill.” He estimated that 80 percent of the inmates have some sort of medical problem.
As part of his transparency push, McCabe has released video from the hours leading up to Mitchell’s death, as well as a list of all the inmates who have died at the facility in recent years. This has sent media outlets digging into additional deaths, like that of 69-year-old William Thrower.
“Please help me,” Thrower wrote on a medical grievance form in February, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Thrower said he was having sharp pains and could not sleep. On March 19, he once again asked for help, saying he hadn’t been able to sleep for four days and had been unable to use the bathroom. Someone made a note on his form indicating that it wasn’t an emergency medical grievance, according to the Times-Dispatch. Thrower was dead the next day.
As first reported in HuffPost’s jail death database, Thrower died from acute gallstone pancreatitis. Dr. David Buxton, a Richmond-area palliative care physician, told the Times-Dispatch that Thrower’s condition would have been very painful, and that it would likely have been obvious to a medical provider that he was seriously ill.
Gallstone pancreatitis is not typically deadly and can be fixed with surgery, Buxton told the Times-Dispatch. Such a surgery, of course, would have been costly for the medical provider, and could potentially have eaten into the private medical provider’s profit margin. The Times-Dispatch said it wasn’t even clear who was serving as medical director when Thrower died.
The facility was “not the easiest jail to work in,” McCabe said, “because out of the five jurisdictions, most of them send over their most chronically ill.” He estimated that 80 percent of the inmates have some sort of medical problem.
As part of his transparency push, McCabe has released video from the hours leading up to Mitchell’s death, as well as a list of all the inmates who have died at the facility in recent years. This has sent media outlets digging into additional deaths, like that of 69-year-old William Thrower.
“Please help me,” Thrower wrote on a medical grievance form in February, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Thrower said he was having sharp pains and could not sleep. On March 19, he once again asked for help, saying he hadn’t been able to sleep for four days and had been unable to use the bathroom. Someone made a note on his form indicating that it wasn’t an emergency medical grievance, according to the Times-Dispatch. Thrower was dead the next day.
As first reported in HuffPost’s jail death database, Thrower died from acute gallstone pancreatitis. Dr. David Buxton, a Richmond-area palliative care physician, told the Times-Dispatch that Thrower’s condition would have been very painful, and that it would likely have been obvious to a medical provider that he was seriously ill.
Gallstone pancreatitis is not typically deadly and can be fixed with surgery, Buxton told the Times-Dispatch. Such a surgery, of course, would have been costly for the medical provider, and could potentially have eaten into the private medical provider’s profit margin. The Times-Dispatch said it wasn’t even clear who was serving as medical director when Thrower died.
Thrower was not a pretrial
detainee, but many of the individuals incarcerated at the facility have
not yet gone to trial or been convicted. McCabe says the jail has little
control over which inmates it receives, and that only the cities that
send people there have the power to change policies to help people
facing low-level charges to avoid incarceration.
“Each individual locality, the magistrates in those localities determine whether someone is going to get a high bond, a low bond or no bond,” McCabe said. “Some localities have pre-trial services where they don’t have to put up a bond, but they’ll let them out because of the nature of the offense.”
Unlike some jurisdictions that determine whether someone can be arrested based on their threat to public safety, many jurisdictions that feed inmates to Hampton Roads Regional Jail are tied to a bail bond system that leaves indigent people locked up even though they are legally presumed innocent.
“Each individual locality, the magistrates in those localities determine whether someone is going to get a high bond, a low bond or no bond,” McCabe said. “Some localities have pre-trial services where they don’t have to put up a bond, but they’ll let them out because of the nature of the offense.”
Unlike some jurisdictions that determine whether someone can be arrested based on their threat to public safety, many jurisdictions that feed inmates to Hampton Roads Regional Jail are tied to a bail bond system that leaves indigent people locked up even though they are legally presumed innocent.
But Michael Crichlow, a
35-year-old black man who runs Michael’s Bail Bonds in Newport News,
Virginia, and works with people incarcerated at Hampton Roads Regional
Jail, is not swayed by arguments that the money bail system is unfair to
the poor.
“They can afford to get drunk at the bar, but you mean to
tell me that you can’t spend $100 to pay bail? It’s absurd to me,”
Crichlow said. “Whatever these liberal social justice warriors want,
it’s ridiculous. I don’t run across people who can’t afford $50, $100.
In 2016, it’s absurd to think that somebody cannot afford $100 to get
out on bail.”
Crichlow, a self-identified member of the Libertarian
Party, says he’s been arrested three or four times, so he’s been on both
sides of the bail system. About a year before the Newport News police
knocked on Mark Goodrum’s door, they’d shown up to a party Crichlow was
throwing.
In addition to possession of marijuana, Crichlow was
charged for loud music and resisting arrest. He says his bond was
$1,000, and he was able to get out of jail pretty quickly.
“I had to pay $100 to a bondsman that I know,” Crichlow
said. He said he has little sympathy for someone like Goodrum, a
bedridden 60-year-old who was arrested on an outstanding warrant in
connection with his marijuana possession charge as he was being evicted
from his apartment.
“They’ve got money to buy a half ounce of weed for $150,”
Crichlow said. “You mean to tell me you can’t spend $150 to get out of
jail?”
Goodrum’s friend T.J. Thompson, a disabled Navy veteran and medical marijuana advocate, said Goodrum really didn’t have any money.
“I knew he had absolutely zero dollars to his name,” Thompson said. “He couldn’t afford anything.”
Thompson, who said he bonded with Goodrum over music, told
HuffPost that Goodrum typically received marijuana as a gift and would
use it for pain relief in lieu of painkillers. Goodrum would give
Thompson “that extra push” to do the type of medical marijuana advocacy
that Goodrum couldn’t do on his own.
Goodrum was arrested on the warrant and arrived at Hampton
Roads Regional Jail on Oct. 14, 2015. Although he went in with
significant medical problems, there are major questions about the
quality of the care he and other inmates received at the facility.
Reviews of records held by the jail’s former medical provider have
“raised significant concerns regarding the quality of assessment, care,
follow-up, and documentation,” according to a report from the Virginia Office of the State Inspector General.
Goodrum died on Nov. 13, 2015, of
“end stage renal disease” with history of “hemodialysis, hypertension,
anemia of chronic disease, peripheral vascular disease, tobacco use,
diabetes mellitus, and history of stroke contributing,” according to the
Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Virginia.
Like many people who knew Goodrum, Thompson found out he
had died before he knew he’d been in jail. Thompson said Goodrum could
be “somewhat difficult to deal with at times,” and that he’d lost touch
with Goodrum in the last few months of his life. “If you’re in that much
pain and suffering, you’re going to be mad at the world,” Thompson
said. “It’s understandable.”
Life had “just been tough on [Goodrum], it seemed,”
Thompson said. “We would just talk about music, and he’d forget about
all the crap of the world.”
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