An inmate who escaped from the D.C. Jail was given a work pass on the orders of a senior jail official, a District official said Monday.
District Council Member Phil Mendelson, D-at large, said he had been told that lower-level officials had properly banned Joseph Leaks from a painting detail, but an administrator in the jail overrode the decision.
Using that work pass, Leaks met up with fellow inmate Ricardo Jones on the administrative side of the jail. They broke through a window in the warden’s office with a floor buffer, scaled down a canopy and walked away from the jail.
Mendelson’s Judiciary Committee took testimony on the jail break Monday. Afterwards, Mendelson said he was satisfied that he’d been given a better answer into what went wrong on June 3, but he “was really waiting” for the results of the jail’s internal investigation, expected in two weeks.
Sources say that at least one guard helped Leaks and Jones by hiding guards’ uniforms for them in a garbage can in the women guards’ locker room.
Six guards, two jail staffers and a high-level administrator have all been placed on administrative leave as authorities try to figure out how much help Jones and Leaks actually had.
The escape has put new D.C. jail director Devon Brown on the defensive. Brought in because he had a reputation for fixing broken systems, Brown has already lost the confidence of Judiciary Committee member Sharon Ambrose, D-Ward 6, who last week called for his firing.
Ambrose was not at Monday’s hearing. But Brown lashed back at his critics during the hearing, saying that many of the problems of the jail predate his tenure and that he is working hard to turn the jail around.
Asked to address concerns about his plans to overhaul the Department of Corrections in the wake of the June 3 jail break, Brown said of his critics: “Their expertise lies somewhere else. Mine is in corrections.”
