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Archive: August, 2012
Philly's jails are crowded beyond capacity, and they're filling up more month by month, despite the fact that all inmates serving two years or more are now being moved to state facilities. We wrote a few weeks ago about what's driving some of this crowding — now, a jury has been asked to decide if the conditions at Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility (CFCF) are unconstitutional.
The case was Marcellous Minnick v. the City of Philadelphia, the first of a whopping 500something civil actions brought by inmates who say the overcrowding and understaffing at CFCF, where some inmates sleep three to a cell, negatively impacted their health or violated their civil rights. The city has faced similar litigation before, but court-appointed lawyer Gerald Williams of the firm Williams Cuker Berezofsky says it’s probably the largest number of such lawsuits to be consolidated for trial in succession.
Minnick spent almost a year as a pretrial detainee starting in September 2009; he was convicted on sex charges in August of 2010, but he’s still in jail awaiting sentencing. Before his arrest, he had been scheduled for a hip replacement due to a degenerative joint disorder. He wasn’t able to get the surgery, and developed a hernia and “severe dermatitis” (i.e. a rash) all while awaiting trial and sleeping in over-capacity cells.
In his complaint, he says he was often confined to a “blue boat” — a plastic cot on the floor — 16 hours a day, since there was nowhere else to go during frequent lockdowns.
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