How Not To Build A Jail

The D.C. jail has been a disaster for more than 100 years. Can a new jail avoid the mistakes of the past? 

- C.J. Ciaramella

In the early hours of October 11, 1972, D.C. jail inmates Frank Gorham Jr. and Otis Wilkerson hatched a plan. Wilkerson pretended to be having a seizure, and when two correctional officers entered to check on him, his cell mate Gorham pulled out a loaded .38 revolver. Before long, 50 angry inmates were loose on the cell block, chanting “Attica!” They had 12 hostages, including the city’s corrections director, Kenneth Hardy.

“Here I go again,” Rep. Shirley Chisholm (D–N.Y.) said as she was rushed into the jail. Chisholm had been an observer at the Attica prison uprising a year earlier, where inmates at the upstate New York penitentiary had seized control and taken 42 hostages. The Attica rebellion ended after four days, when state troopers retook the prison by force, first dumping tear gas on the prison yard and then unleashing a 30-minute barrage of gunfire that left 43 people, including 10 of the hostages, dead. The D.C. inmates had requested that Chisholm and Marion Barry Jr., just then beginning his meteoric rise in local politics, hear their demands.

Attica’s bloody climax was on Ronald Goldfarb’s mind. Goldfarb, a local lawyer, was litigating an ongoing class action lawsuit on the inmates’ behalf; when he heard about the hostage situation, he drove to the facility to see what he could do. Goldfarb’s suit argued that the Eighth Amendment’s protections against cruel and unusual punishment covered not just direct abuse but the physical and psychological effects of overcrowding and poor conditions. In 1972, the D.C. Department of Corrections was operating at 56 percent over its rated capacity. A few years earlier, the American Civil Liberties Union had described the building, a structure built back in the 19th century, as “a filthy example of man’s inhumanity to man.”