Violence looms, lawyers kept from clients: Insiders describe ‘crisis’ at Richland jail
A man’s eye was “hanging” out of his head, Eric Junious said. The man had been jumped by two other detainees in Richland County’s jail. He was beaten so severely that his orbital bone could no longer keep his eye in place.
That was just one of the violent beatings Junious said he witnessed in the three months he was detained at Richland County’s Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center.
A severe shortage of jail officers has lingered since at least last year, if not longer, and shines a hotter spotlight on the jail after an attack on two detention officers in September and the death of a detainee in February.
Junious and others — including lawyers and former jail guards — describe a violent environment that’s made worse by the lack of guards at the jail. The staff shortage is also hindering detainees’ right to meet with their lawyers, attorneys have said.
The full picture at Alvin S. Glenn is one of deteriorating control of and care for detainees. Three detainees have died in the jail since the beginning of this year. The jail’s issues are so bad that the region’s chief public defender, Fielding Pringle, said last month that “the community is facing a dire situation.”
The State reached out to the Richland County Coroner’s Office about how those three detainees died but had not received an answer by Tuesday afternoon.
Richland County administrators did not respond to inquiries from The State about the jail. Richland County Council Chairman Overture Walker said, “the County remains committed to taking actions that promote and/or enhance the health and safety of every individual” at the jail.
Junious spoke with The State after being released in March from a three-month stint in Alvin S. Glenn. He was arrested and jailed on a contempt of family court charge, he said.
As of November, about 700 people were jailed in Alvin S. Glenn, according to Richland County, which runs the jail. Most are awaiting court proceedings and are legally innocent of any crime until a jury or judge determines otherwise.
The State has asked Richland County multiple times over the last six months about the number of jail officers working at the detention center. The county has never answered.
A former guard told The State in December that about 150 guards work at the jail. In 2017, Shane Kitchen, then assistant director of the jail, told Richland County Council that fully staffed the jail would have 266 employees. At the time, 106 positions were vacant. A lawyer who frequents the jail said that it has about half the staff it needs.
Sources who spoke with The State described the jail as a place where the innocent-until-proven-guilty detainees are nonetheless punished by looming violence and nearly day-long lockdowns and where detainees are sometimes not even able to access their lawyers.
“To say it’s understaffed diminishes the true severity of the situation out there,” said Bakari Sellers, a former state lawmaker and a civil rights and defense attorney for the Strom Law Firm.
Junious witnessed the severity of the guard shortage.
The man having his eye beaten from its socket wasn’t the worst he saw in Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center, Junious said.
‘A lifetime’
At 6 feet tall and about 250 pounds, Junious’ physical stature offered him some protection from the violence. But his size didn’t make him immune.
About a month and a half before his March 13 release, Junious had “an interaction” with another detainee, he said.
“But I made quick work of him,” Junious said. “Then he took his anger out on someone else.”
In the Foxtrot cell block where Junious stayed, everyone called one of the detainees “Rock and Roll.” That’s just what everyone knew him as, Junious said. Four days after Junious’ fight, the same detainee attacked Rock and Roll.
The attack was “vicious,” Junious said — the most brutal that he witnessed. The detainee beat Rock and Roll for 30 or more minutes.
With no guards in sight, the detainee “had time to work him over,” Junious said. “He had 30 minutes to impose his will.”
Rock and Roll’s eyes were blackened and his nose swelled, appearing broken, Junious said. His body was covered in deep bruises.
No guard was in the cell block to stop the attack when it started, and no guard came around on patrol, Junious said. Eventually, a nurse showed up to help Rock and Roll, but only after the attack had ended.
That was the worse of two fights in two days, according to Junious. The day before, another fight broke out as a nurse distributed medicine.
Junious’ description of unmitigated violent moments stemming from a guard shortage echoes the experience described by a former guard. In October, The State reported that on a day last fall when two guards were attacked by detainees, with one of the guards being severely beaten, the jail was under-staffed.
Frequently, one jail officer would be watching over three cell blocks, which can hold a dozen to nearly 60 detainees apiece, a former guard and lawyers told The State.
That description matches with what defense attorney Brian Shealey said he sees today at the jail. But he remembers a time between five and 10 years ago when each cell block had two officers.
“It is ridiculous,” Shealey said.
The shortage of detention officers means detainees in certain cell blocks often are locked in their cells for nearly a whole day, according to multiple sources, a practice which Shealey and others have said only makes the detainees more combustible.
In September, after a dozen inmates attacked two guards, Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said the detainees were upset about not having enough recreation time.
In the jail’s orientation packet, on page three, it says, “Offenders must be under constant supervision. ... If they did not need to be under supervision, they would not be in jail.”
The understaffing is dangerous because not enough officers are available to respond to emergencies, multiple sources have said.
With the guard shortage, the jail has to round up every guard on duty to respond to emergencies instead of having an emergency team at the ready, Junious said.
That assertion is backed up in a report on the September attack by one of the jail’s ranking guards. “We did not have enough staff to deal with the issue” of unruly detainees, a captain wrote about the moments leading up to the assault on two guards.
When an emergency hits or a detainee finds fists flying into his face and his body being stomped on, the response “will take 10 or 15 minutes,” Junious said.
“In those circumstances, that’s a lifetime,” he said.
‘Crisis’
“Crisis” is the word three lawyers used to describe the Richland County jail where they try, and sometimes are refused, to see their clients.
“There is a crisis that’s emerging” at Alvin S. Glenn, Stuart Andrews, an attorney with Burnette Shutt McDaniel law firm, said in February when talking about the jail conditions and the death of 27-year-old Lason Butler.
“People need to know there’s a staff crisis,” said defense attorney Justin Kata of Columbia’s Giese Law Firm. “It’s at a crisis level.”
Lawyers who spoke to The State pointed to the start of the pandemic in 2020 as the moment when staff levels started to drop to a point that lawyers were denied seeing their clients in the jail.
For defense attorneys like Kata, the shortage of guards has caused a dramatic reduction if not an outright halt in their ability to see and effectively represent their clients.
Legal representation is woven into the the “fabric of America,” and the staffing shortage is tearing that up, Kata said.
“There’s just no one back there to assist with whatever needs to be done,” Kata said. “You can’t effectively represent them if you aren’t communicating.”
Kata credited the people who are working at the jail with trying their best. But simply, he said, not enough people are staffing the jail to allow it to be effective.
Kata, who has been a lawyer for 12 years, remembered about a decade ago when he could visit five clients in a day at Alvin S. Glenn. He said what he used to be able to accomplish with clients in an hour now takes a whole day. That’s “if you don’t just give up” and leave.
Shealey, who with his twin brother, Luke, are the namesake of the Shealey Law Firm in Columbia, said he hasn’t seen one particular client face-to-face in 18 months because of the lack of staffing at the jail. The only communication they’ve had is through low-quality video calls.
Video calls are a laughable form of meeting with clients, especially while trying to prepare for a murder trial that’s coming up in a couple months, Shealey said.
“I’ve been turned away from the front door of the jail,” Shealey said. “They said ‘Sorry. Can’t let you in. We’ve got no staff.’ ... That’s happened to me before as a lawyer. I can’t even get into the front door.”
Like Kata, Shealey could remember a little less than a decade ago when he could “quickly, readily” see clients in the jail. Now, he’s at the point of having to rely on the state, which is prosecuting his clients, to be able to see those clients in person. More and more, lawyers are asking judges and prosecutors to allow their clients to be transported to the Richland County courthouse, which Shealey had to do recently.
“It’s just bad,” Shealey said of the staff shortage at the jail. But even worse, “It’s negligence. It’s terrible, terrible negligence.”
The day before Lason Butler’s death in February, Sellers came to the jail to see a client but was denied because of the staffing shortage, he said.
“I’m of the belief that Richland County simply doesn’t care and has failed,” said Sellers, who is now representing Butler’s family.
While the county jail is typically thought of as a place to separate people charged with crimes from society, Junious said the jail, at its core, is a “vehicle” to get people through the court system.
By being an obstacle to legal representation, the jail is cutting off the right to due process and a quick and speedy trial, he said.
“You are the barrier,” Junious said of the jail.
What Richland County has said
Richland County, like a handful of other counties in South Carolina, runs Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center.
Some county jails are operated by the county’s sheriff’s department. Richland County’s jail is headed by a jail director who answers to county administrator Leonardo Brown. Brown makes most of the county’s decisions but ultimately answers to the Richland County Council.
The county hasn’t responded to the accusations that staff shortages have increased violence and hindered access to lawyers. The State has requested records of any investigations into the incidents described by Junious.
Council Chair Walker said he can’t discuss the jail because of pending litigation.
“But it’s imperative for the public to know that the health and safety of all individuals at the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center are paramount to Richland County,” Walker said. “Moreover, the County remains committed to taking actions that promote and/or enhance the health and safety of every individual at the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center.”
Brown told The State in December that the county has taken steps to improve conditions as well as retain and attract detention officers. Those changes included increasing salaries, giving bonuses and using federal coronavirus relief money for safety upgrades at the jail.
“We’ve done those things, but we won’t stop there,” Councilman Paul Livingston said in December when he was the council chairman. He said the county was considering how to provide better training to officers.
But what Junious witnessed wasn’t improvements, he said; it was “malice.”
This story was originally published March 29, 2022 at 1:17 PM.