Cell doors at the D.C. Jail failed to unlock nearly 700 times over an 18 month period, placing corrections officers and inmates in danger in the event of an emergency.
In a single day this spring, cell doors at the main facility failed to lock or unlock 39 times, documents show.
A corrections officer who works at the 32-year-old jail said the problem of doors not locking was much worse than doors that get stuck because locked ones often can be manually released.
“The real danger is, ‘Can you secure it, can you lock it and be sure that it cannot pop open?'” said the officer who asked that his identity not be revealed for fear of retaliation. “That’s a danger that corrections officers that walk the tier deal with on a daily basis.”
The inmates know that in addition to giving them the freedom to move around the unlocked doors also expose them to attacks too, the officer said.
D.C. Jail spokeswoman Sylvia Lane said the inmates and guards were safe despite the lock failures. She said the jail has an interim plan to fix 332 of the 1,434, locks at the main central detention facility at a cost of $325,000.
“I don’t think the industry has produced the inmate-proof door yet,” said John Rosser, vice president of the corrections officers union. “The inmates have plenty of time on their hands. After a while, they can figure out how to defeat the locking mechanisms.”
Members of the University of District of Columbia legal clinic asked for the number of times cell doors could not be unlocked earlier this year after a client became stuck in his cell for two hours, said professor William McLain. This arose as the professors also sought the D.C. jail’s emergency evacuation plan to prevent a repeat of the fiasco in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in which the sheriff’s department abandoned hundreds of inmates imprisoned in the city’s jail.
“If (our client) had been critically ill, unconscious or attacked by another prisoner, he would have died,” McLain said.
From January 2008 to June 2009, inmates became “stuck” in the cells, according to jail officials. The length of time the inmates were stuck was not provided.
The jail provided one days worth of incidents in which the doors could neither lock or unlock, the date that McLain’s client got stuck.
On that day, March 20, 2009, there were six instances where cell doors couldn’t be unlocked and 31 instances in which doors to the cells, cellblocks, the TV room and other places could not lock or needed repair.
