Locking It Down

In connection with one of my law school classes, I toured the Middlesex County Jail in East Cambridge yesterday. Situated on the top four floors of the 21-story Edward Sullivan Courthouse, the jail houses approximately 350 pre-trial detainees, despite the fact that it was originally constructed to house half as many.

As a result, the jail is horribly overcrowded. The cells are all full, so inmates sleep on bunk beds laid side to side, barely a foot apart, in the hallways of the cellblocks. Other rooms, which are barely bigger than my living room, house over a dozen inmates. Inmates without their own cells have tiny storage lockers for their possessions. The jail also includes an administrative segregation wing with six individual cells, as well as a protective custody area.

For recreation, the inmates have a small gym with several cardio machines, half a dozen weight machines, and a ping pong table, along with two rooftop yards, each containing half a basketball court. While outdoors, the yards are fenced in by concrete walls with only small slits giving a view of the outside world. The jail cafeteria serves three meals a day. The jail also has a chapel with weekly services conducted by clergy of various faiths, along with a small library and a full-service medical clinic.

One thing the correctional officers will tell you as soon as you enter the jail is that it's a pre-trial facility, meaning that the inmates must be consider innocent, since they have not yet been proven guilty. As a result, the officers remain very cognizant of the inmates' constitutional rights and treat the inmates with the utmost respect. In many respects, the inmates and the officers are equals, working side-by-side to prepare meals in the kitchen or sitting together . By treating the inmates like fellow human beings, it reduces (though it doesn't eliminate) the animosity that leads to prisoner-officer conflagrations.

While it may be a pre-trial detention facility, it is still a detention facility for which time spent before conviction is applied toward your ultimate sentence. Therefore, it's not supposed to be particularly comfortable. Certain security procedures must be followed as well. What seemed most awful about the jail is the complete lack of personal space and the boredom that predominates during the day. When you go to sleep at night, there very well may be other inmates lying down within a foot or two on either side of you. During the day, there isn't much of anywhere you can go outside of meal and recreation periods. As a result, most inmates spend their days just sitting or lying down on their beds or perhaps wandering around the cell blocks. It just seems downright miserable. But it could be much, much worse.