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I've not been in a jail or prison? Can our law enforcement professionals/lawyers comment? Is it fairly common for people to be beating on the walls/shouting? I could see how that would be dismissed if it was commonplace, but Im with you guys. This is an insane lapse.
It's fairly common in prison for people to be banging on the windows or doors and generally carrying on, but in
prison it's all people who are convicted and serving their sentence. In a county jail you have a mix of people who are there awaiting trial and there serving sentences and things get crazy too, but
This was a DEA facility. The DEA is a highly specialized law enforcement agency; they deal only with narcotics. They do not hold people either awaiting trial or who have been convicted; those things are the responsibility of the Marshals and Bureau of Prisons.
The article specifically says a "holding cell"; holding cell generally means a
highly temporary cell for holding someone while the administrative matters that are conducted immediately after an arrest are concluded. If this individual was to be charged and held for trial, he should have been moved in fairly short order (I don't know their exact guidelines, but I cannot imagine the cell is certified for anything more than 72 hour holding and even that seems long; 24 hours is probably more likely) to a full-service facility; i.e. a jail where he'd have an actual bunk/cell, which has a kitchen and so on and so forth.
At the place I work we have holding cells for aliens; these are exceedingly spartan, but they are also exceedingly short-term. When a group of aliens is brought in (and a group can be just one alien) they are
immediately identified by name, inputed into the system we use for alien processing, and if old enough, fingerprinted and have records checks submitted. A file is created and a supervisor then reviews the initial file to see what method of processing that alien is amenable to. An adult, even when we are exceedingly busy (by which I mean in excess of 100 apprehensions in a day and sometimes hundreds of aliens at our station and more farmed out to less-active nearby stations) will be out the door in 72 hours. Period. A juvenile has a much shorter time frame. We may have as many as 18 agents processing on a given shift, with 3 shifts a day and completing close to 200 files in any 24 hour period.
That said, an alien
never, and I mean
never, gets "forgotten". They are all in the computer (and that computer specifies exactly what cell they are in) and when the shift changes (3 times a day) the outgoing staff duty agents
do not go home until
each and every alien and their property is accounted for. Period. If that means they are there 6 hours late, they are there 6 hours late. (so if you're smart, you keep on top of your paperwork during the shift.) Before an alien leaves the station, 2 supervisors must sign the manifest sending them out, the staff duty must sign, and the agency transporting them must sign. Every single one of them is fed every single shift (it's a hell of a lot of bologna sandwiches), juveniles more often. These procedures are exceedingly strict; like I said you do not go home until every alien is accounted for (not just in the station, but in the correct cell, or if not in the station, it is documented where he or she went.)
In the prison in Ohio it was exactly the same thing. Every inmate was counted 7 times daily IIRC (might have been 8 or 9) and the counts from every prison in the state had to be sent to the Highway Patrol, each time. During that time there was
absolutely no movement of inmates. They stayed in their bunks, no talking, or at their work location, no talking, until count was cleared, and count was only cleared when the Highway Patrol had cleared every prison in the state for that count. You had exactly half an hour to get a correct count to the highway patrol; if you went one minute over the warden got a phone call.
Basically, this DEA facility either A) had no, or very lax, accountability procedures or B) they weren't following them. It is absolutely inexcusable, in any correctional setting to lose accountability of an arrestee, detainee, or prisoner. That is the absolute first priority to know who you have, and what their status is in your facility. This incident speaks to
rank incompetence on someone's part, a total lack of proper accountability or feeding procedures.
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