Richland County was right to fire its jail director. Here’s what should happen next
After allegations of sexual harassment and creating a toxic work environment at his previous job, Richland County made the right call and fired its jail director.
The county’s administration deserves praise for making what was surely a tough choice, seeing that the director was only hired in June. But it was a needed choice. The county fired director Tyrell Cato Sept. 9, as The State’s Morgan Hughes and Ted Clifford reported Wednesday.
Cato was not the man to solve problems at the beleaguered Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center. How he came to lead Richland’s jail for about three months is a winding tale.
Kershaw County fired him as its jail director after an employee claimed he sexually harassed her. But Richland County didn’t know about that firing because it didn’t ask the next county over. Richland County also never pulled Cato’s law enforcement record before it hired him — although even if it had, the record was incorrectly labeled, saying that Cato had resigned from Kershaw County rather than being fired.
One of Alvin S. Glenn’s main problems has been years of understaffing, which got worse during the pandemic. The majority of employees are women, and it’s well known among jail administrators that women are regularly applying for detention officer jobs. Cato’s firing from Kershaw County for sexual harassment was only going to push away women working at the Richland County jail as well as those who might apply.
Inside Richland County’s jail, legal issues that get at the heart of some of the highest American values, such as the right to a fair and speedy trial and the right to be protected from cruel and unusual punishment, play out every day. That’s why Richland County’s administration must not botch the new search for a jail director.
Hiring Cato, a jail director in the neighboring county, always reeked of a lazy — or irresponsible — search.
Richland County’s administration needs to do a nationwide search and vet a series of candidates. Those candidates should be presented to the council, the public defender’s office, the solicitor’s office and the public. The opinions of those groups should be taken into consideration.
It’s not a good sign that the county administration wouldn’t tell The State’s reporters if Cato had been fired or not, and that the reporters had to find out from an outside source. The search for the next candidate has to have more transparency than that.
Staffing a jail is difficult, and that’s been shown not just in Richland County, but across the country. But that must not be an excuse for another irresponsible search.
If Richland County truly wants to improve its jail, the administration will hire someone that all the jail’s stakeholders support.
This time, at very least, Richland County needs to pull any candidate’s law enforcement record.
This story was originally published September 14, 2022 at 4:12 PM.