Cuyahoga County has reached a settlement with plaintiffs in a 2018 class action lawsuit over conditions in the county jail.
The settlement does not include a monetary award for plaintiffs, but instead focuses on conditions in the jail.
“I didn't want money. I just want changes to be made,” said Tonya Clay, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit. “And I don't think they're being made. They just tell you something, they're going to do this, but it gets worse and worse.”
Clay joined her attorneys, Sarah Gelsomino and Terry Gilbert, for a press conference Wednesday, a day after Cuyahoga County Council approved the terms of the settlement.
Clay was arrested in September 2018 and initially held on a $30,000 bond that was later increased to $100,000. She and a co-defendant were charged in a shooting and Clay spent eight months in county jail before posting bail.
Her time in the jail was a nightmare, said Clay, who added she suffers from bipolar disorder and struggled to receive medical care while held there.
“It’s sad. There’s people dying in there. Nobody should lose their family member because they’re not getting their medication or anything,” Clay said, holding back tears. “That could have been me that died in there.”
After pleading guilty to one of the charges she faced, Clay received two years of probation, which she successfully completed in 2020.
During Clay's time in the county jail 11 other detainees died in less than a year and a report by the U.S. Marshals Service, released in November 2018, described inhumane, overcrowded conditions in the jail.
The settlement is one step in the county’s ongoing work to improve conditions at the jail, said county spokesperson Jennifer Ciaccia in a statement following council’s approval of the settlement.
“The parties chose to work cooperatively to address conditions and practices in the jail with the goal of improving those conditions,” Ciaccia said.
Part of the process was hiring an outside expert to inspect and report on conditions in the jail. The report, completed in July 2022, was based on site visits in 2021 and written by Martin Horn, a professor emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
The 252-page report covers a wide range of policies, including on use of force policies, medical care and food services. The version the county provided to Ideastream includes fully redacted sections on uses of force by corrections officers.
It’s unclear how many of the report’s recommendations have been met already, two years after the report was issued. One issue — medical screenings of every prisoner upon arrival at the prison — appears to have been addressed since the report was completed, according to the report and county council meetings on the topic.
Plaintiffs’ attorney Terry Gilbert was involved in a lawsuit against the county in the 1980s that focused on conditions in Jail I, one of the two buildings at the Downtown Cleveland Justice Center. That lawsuit led to the building of Jail II next door, and according to Gilbert, issues at the jail still need to be addressed decades later.
“You’ve got to remember these are people who are presumed to be innocent, who haven’t been convicted of crimes, who can’t make bond and who had to suffer through these difficult conditions in the jail,” Gilbert said. “Hopefully this is a start that we can actually have some control over how the jail will be reformed.”
In addition to the recommendations from Horn’s report, the county will pay for a jail monitor, Utah-based corrections consultant Donald Leach, to conduct twice-yearly inspections of the jail and report on the county’s progress.
The county will also hire two monitors to oversee the county’s medical services contract with MetroHealth and food services contract with Trinity Services Group.
The inspections will start in 180 days, said Gelsomino, and their reports will be public.
“We’re trying to open up the realities of what’s happening in the jail, and hopefully with that, with some public scrutiny, we will have a better chance of holding the county accountable to what’s been agreed to here,” Gelsomino said.
