How understaffing, mental health failures led to ‘mounting crisis’ in Richland County jail

The breaking point for the Richland County jail was years in the making.

As early as 2008, studies commissioned by the county warned that the jail was dangerously understaffed. When the COVID pandemic hit, that breaking point arrived.

Staff levels plummeted as inmate populations rose. From 2020 to 2023, experts found that about half the time entire housing units, which regularly exceeded their 56 inmate capacity, had just one officer on duty. In January, staff of one dorm reportedly performed just 28 of a required 1,176 patrols.

Since 2020, reports of stabbings, weapons and contraband skyrocketed. The smell of tobacco and marijuana smoke came to pervade the facility, according to some accounts. Inmates complained of being left without working toilets or drinking water. Holes in the ceiling and faulty cell doors allowed prisoners to escape their housing areas and commit robberies and assaults.

Safety concerns were so serious that in 2022, the jail’s health provider declined to renew its contract.

The result, some have warned, is a crisis for inmates diagnosed with a mental illness, which make up two thirds of the jail’s population.

This in-depth look inside of the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center was revealed in court documents filed last week in the U.S. District Court for South Carolina as part of an ongoing lawsuit against Richland County. That lawsuit argues that the jail’s conditions violate the constitutional rights of inmates with mental illnesses.

The filing, a 917-page motion for an injunction made by lawyers for Disability Rights South Carolina, included detailed reports from three experts who investigated the jail, along with internal emails, depositions of staff and sworn statements of inmates.

One expert, Dr. Kenneth Ray, wrote that of the more than 50 inspections he had performed nationwide while employed at the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Institute of Corrections, the Richland County jail “stands out as particularly hazardous and inappropriate for the management and protection of inmates with Serious Mental Illness.”

This July, four inmates died in the jail, at least three from confirmed drug overdoses.

But county administrators have defended their treatment of inmates with mental illnesses.

The detention center is not a mental health hospital, the county said in a statement. “While we provide necessary mental health care, a jail is not a therapeutic setting designed to offer the comprehensive psychotherapy and programming found in mental health hospitals,” the statement said. “This distinction is in line with standards for jails nationwide.”

The jail contracts with Freedom Behavioral Health to provide a team of 10 “qualified mental health professionals, two psychiatry providers, and a discharge planner providing 24/7 services to detainees,” according to the statement.

No inmates were being housed in cells without a working toilet and progress has also been made in renovating the jail’s facilities, the county says. Along with the kitchen, three dorms have been renovated and reopened, while ongoing repairs are being made to lighting fixtures.

“Claims about poor living conditions at the facility are based on outdated information,” the county wrote.

Warning Signs

By the middle of 2022, safety concerns at the jail were so serious that the private health care companies contracted by the county were sounding the alarm.

A flurry of emails sent in April that year from health care provider Wellpath laid out the situation in stark terms. Staff had been assaulted and threatened by inmates. They were groped, and “unknown liquids” were thrown on them. One provider had “multiple asthma attacks” caused by smoke in the facility.

The staffing shortage meant that there was no way to get in touch with individual officers who were watching multiple dorms. “This poses a safety risk as this leaves no way to call for help in the event of an emergency,” wrote Cindy Watson, Wellpath’s CEO, in an email to members of county and jail leadership.

That same month, Wellpath, which services over 140 detention facilities around the country, decided not to renew its contract with Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center.

There does not appear to be one specific cause for the deteriorating conditions at Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center. High staff vacancy rates and poor resources for an inmate population with high rates of mental illness have been persistent problems at the jail.

A 2014 study conducted by consultants Pulizer/Bogard & Associates cautioned that that the jail had a “very high” staff vacancy rate of 13%. Additionally, the study warned of “inherent problems with the organizational structure,” notably the lack of on the ground oversight from jail leadership, which limited “effective supervision of inmates and management of the facility”

“Large numbers of inmates with mental illness are straining ASGDC resources, compounding overall inmate supervision challenges.” This “will only become more challenging in the coming years,” the report said.

After 2020, these problems appeared to grow more severe.

In September 2021, a riot led to the resignation of the longtime director, who was out of town when inmates took over the jail. The jail would be without a permanent director for the next two years.

The jail’s population was growing while staff numbers stagnated. From 2022 to 2024, the inmate population ballooned from an average of 703 inmates to 999. In the same period, staff numbers only grew from 90 to 101, falling far short of the 294 staff members called for by a 2023 Staffing Needs Assessment performed by Richland County.

The result appears to have been disorder. The total number of serious incidents, including the discovery of drugs and weapons as well as assaults on inmates and staff, grew from 210 in 2021 to 321 in 2023.

During the same time period, the number of 911 calls to the jail surged from 493 in 2020 to 750 in 2023. Emergency calls for alcohol impairment, altered mental states and overdoses inside of the jail rose from 11 in 2020 to 59 in 2023.

Reported stabbings and puncture wounds exploded from 2 to 38 incidents while reported inmate on inmate assaults with weapons went from none reported in 2020 to 16 in 2023. The number of weapons found in the jail increased by a factor of 6.

“These statistics, however, only begin to scratch the surface of the mounting crisis within the facility,” Ray wrote in his report. “These figures are not mere numbers; they represent a clear and present escalation in violence and health-related emergencies.”

In February, 2022, Lason Butler, a 27-year-old from Orangeburg, was found covered in rat bites, dead of dehydration after suffering an episode of psychosis. His death was ruled a homicide.

That June, a representative of Advanced Correctional Healthcare Inc., which currently provides health care for the jail, wrote to county and jail leadership that they were pulling their nurses out of the facility for the evening when it was discovered that there would only be one officer on duty.

“There is a serious safety risk in the facility that has risen to a dangerous situation there. The shortage of correctional staff is dangerous not only to the jail staff and inmates but also to the nurses,” the representative wrote.

But in 2023, the decision was made to freeze hiring for 65 security and custody staff in order to increase officer salaries and hire additional management staff. This was “an extraordinarily dangerous decision,” Ray wrote in his report, later adding, “The psychological stress on inmates due to insufficient oversight can also lead to increased incidents of self-harm and suicide.”

A mental health crisis

LaRoyal Harley spent three stints inside the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center. Her third ended in tragedy.

Although Harley was not identified in last week’s filing, The State matched key details with public reporting about her. Harley’s was just one instance where multiple failures contributed to the death of an inmate.

After Harley was jailed in Alvin S. Glenn in August 2022 for aggravated assault, mental health providers noted that she struggled with impulse control, anger issues, insomnia, racing thoughts and reliving her crime. While she was not on medication, she requested psychiatric services.

In a report from October 2022, Harley was classified as MH-1, “mental health need, not serious.” Records submitted to the court do not indicate what treatment Harley received, if any.

There is “minimal to no behavioral health treatment” at the jail, wrote Nichole Johnson, a forensic psychiatrist who inspected Alvin S. Glenn.

Inmates with mental health needs are typically only seen by a provider once every 30 days, according to court filings. Given the rotating patient population, providers are assigned to dorms, not to specific inmates, meaning there is no set caseload for providers.

In a deposition included in the court filings, the jail’s mental health director stated “clinicians do not engage in therapy as there is not sufficient time to address issues which may arise,” according to filings.

Other than medication, treatment consisted largely of being given handouts on “coping skills” and “coloring pages,” Johnson wrote.

In June 2023, Harley was placed on suicide watch after staff overheard her on the phone telling her mom that she wanted to die, according to records filed with the court. A box for “mentally ill and dangerous to herself” was checked on one form dated June 28, 2023.

But after she was placed on suicide watch, mental health staff noted that Harley said she had no thoughts of self harm. Instead, she told staff she wanted to die because no one would pay her bond, according to records.

Suicide watch and assessment at Alvin S. Glenn are “inadequate,” Johnson wrote in her report. Assessments for suicide risk were conducted with no privacy, in front of other inmates. Guards also failed to check on inmates who were on suicide watch.

While checks on inmates on suicide watch are meant to be performed at irregular five minute intervals, per jail policy, Johnson wrote that she “reviewed numerous suicide logs and there were hours unaccounted for, watches done on exact intervals, or done in longer intervals than required, i.e. a watch completed 30 minutes apart.”

Harley was released from the jail later in 2023. She was arrested again later that year in connection to a shooting at a club and released on bond, in early January 2024.

In February, Harley was arrested and charged with possession of a weapon during a violent crime.

When she returned to the jail, Harley was placed on a 10-hour observation at intake, “a status normally assigned to individuals at suicide risk,” according to lawyers for Disability Rights South Carolina, a group that advocates for the rights of South Carolinians with disabilities.

Experts hired by Disability Rights’ lawyers were critical of the jail’s intake process. One report in the court filing found that in January 2024, 47 inmates were crammed into just 12 intake cells, with no differentiation for mental health classification.

This “falls short of industry standards,” wrote Emmitt Sparkman, former deputy commissioner of institutions for the Mississippi Department of Corrections.

On March 2, three days after she arrived, other inmates reported that Harley was distraught after a judge denied her bond.

“She cried, screamed... you could tell she needed some type of mental evaluation,” according to a sworn statement from an inmate who knew Harley from a previous stay in jail. The two women prayed together, the inmate wrote, but their moment of peace was disrupted when Harley got in a fight with another inmate who spit on her.

There were no officers on the unit to break up the fight so the two women were eventually separated by other inmates, according to the statement. A guard later moved Harley to a lockdown unit, Juliet, without consulting mental health professionals.

When Harley was brought to Juliet, the inmate could hear her speaking to someone on one of the tablets issued to inmates, according to a sworn statement from that inmate.

Around 4:30 p.m., guards let the inmates out for recreation. They were returned to their cells for dinner, but no guards came to the cell block until almost 11 p.m., the inmate wrote. It was silent on the cell block, until she heard the sound of the light fixture falling.

At 10:34 p.m., a nurse delivering medication discovered Harley. She had hung herself with sheets tied to an exposed light fixture.

“She was overwhelmed,” Richland County Coroner Naida Rutherford told TV station WLTX shortly after Harley’s death. “And this was at her own hand. This was not something that the jail did that put her in danger.”

In their statement, the county wrote, “we want to emphasize that this individual had specifically denied any suicidal thoughts or tendencies and had no history of mental health issues or treatment.”

Those in the jail don’t agree with Rutherford’s assessment.

“Nobody checked on us,” the inmate in the cell next to Harley wrote in her statement. “Light fixtures are exposed with wire hanging [and this] has resulted in the death of a 22 year old girl.”

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