Court Finds Milwaukee County Violated Agreement and Court Order to Run Jail Safely and Humanely

November 17, 2004

The Milwaukee County Circuit Court yesterday found that Milwaukee County and the Sheriff’s Department violated a court-ordered settlement agreement by holding as many as 13,000 people for days at a time in crowded, degrading and dangerous conditions in the county jail’s booking room. The violations took place from the fall of 2002 through April of 2004. The booking room is a temporary holding area where police first bring people who have been arrested and charged with both major and minor crimes. It has no beds, no blankets, no showers and no privacy.

The ruling comes in a class action lawsuit filed in 1996 and settled with a consent decree – a court ordered settlement agreement – in 2001. In the decree, the County agreed that no one arrested and brought to the jail would be kept in the booking room or without a bed for more than 30 hours. After learning of wholesale violations of the 30-hour limit, the Legal Aid Society of Milwaukee and the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin Foundation, along with local civil rights lawyer Curry First, filed a motion seeking a court declaration that the decree had been violated. Judge Jeffrey Kremers found yesterday that the County had indeed violated the decree. The next step is to determine the remedy for the violations and a mechanism for the more than 13,000 people who were held in violation of the agreement to obtain compensation for the harms they suffered.

Peter Koneazny, the Legal Aid Society’s litigation director, spoke with some of the 13,000 detainees about the conditions in which they were held: “They describe lying on the concrete floor next to the toilet trying to get some sleep and being packed into small holding cells with up to 15 other prisoners.” The problem of long stays in the booking room had become so common that jail staff had created a “shower list” for people who had been in booking for three days without being able to bathe.

“Among the other degradations these people had to suffer was the lack of hygiene and the overpowering body-odor of the other prisoners who had been unable to shower,” said Larry Dupuis, the ACLU’s state legal director. “The vast majority of the people in the booking room had not been convicted of a crime. They had not even seen a judge yet. They are supposed to be presumed innocent, but they were subjected to conditions that we wouldn’t allow to be inflicted on people convicted of violent crimes.”

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