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?

• Author: Ciaramella, C.J.

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 cellmate 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.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

"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 rebelin 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, as6 "a filthy example of man's inhumanity to man."

When Goldfarb arrived at the jail, the inmates were holding Hardy up to a window with the gun against his head. They wanted an airplane. They wanted $1 million. But above all, they wanted someone to hear about the conditions they lived in. "We came to the conclusion we are going to die," one of the organizers of the uprising told him, according to The Washington Post. "When this is over, and the other brothers come along, make it better for them." Another inmate holding a knife shouted, "His head is coming off. You better believe it."

After nearly 24 hours of fraught negotiations, Goldfarb and the other observers convinced the rioters to release all the hostages except Hardy in exchange for an unprecedented late-night hearing before U.S. District Court Judge William Bryant, who allowed six inmates to present their grievances before the court. As compensation for a peaceful resolution, Bryant offered every inmate a lawyer. They agreed, and representatives from the nascent Public Defender Service of D.C., who had came to the late-night court hearing at the request of the judge, were sent to the jail to interview inmates. In the years that followed, Bryant ruled in two different lawsuits, including Gold-farb's, that the overcrowded, unsanitary conditions that prevailed inside the D.C. jail violated inmates' Eighth Amendment rights.

"For imprisonment under such conditions," Bryant wrote, "where a man may be stuffed into a tiny cell with another, surrounded by the nocturnal moans or screams of mentally disturbed but untreated fellow inmates, plagued by rats and roaches, sweltering by summer and shivering by winter, unable to maintain significant contact with his family in the outside world, sometimes going for long periods without real exercise or recreation, can only have one message for him: Society does not acknowledge your existence as a fellow human being. And when that message is delivered in the D.C. Jail, whatever small chance may have existed that a person might act as though he were a member of a civilized society is obliterated, along with his decency and humanity."

In 1976, a new D.C. jail opened its doors--the one still in use today. The old one was emptied and eventually torn down. Its stones were used to restore the venerable Smithsonian Castle; they had been mined from the same quarry a century before. But the new facility's troubles began before the ribbon cutting: The maximum capacity when it opened was 960 inmates. The average daily population of inmates that year was 1,218. In other words, D.C. built an institution that was overcrowded before the first resident bunked down for the night.

The story of the D.C. jail is a tale of the repeated triumph of hope over experience. District politicians have always wanted to lock up more people than they're willing to pay to incarcerate. Even in the capital city, with all the resources of the federal government to draw on and the best possible chance to influence national policy, the District of Columbia seems incapable of building and running its single jail effectively. Without a re-evaluation of who we're keeping in jail, why we're keeping them there, and what we expect them to do during and after their incarceration, history looks very likely to repeat itself.

"It came off...