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Rape, Crime Rampant Within South Carolina Jail, DOJ Investigators Say

Crime and Justice News

Federal investigators delineated this week, in a scathing e 36-page report, how the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center, a large jail in South Carolina, vastly underreports the violence occurring behind its walls and lets dozens of inmates go unsupervised for so long that at least two killings of prisoners were reported to jail staff from outside callers, the Associated Press reports. The U.S. Department of Justice told the jail in Richland County, which includes South Carolina’s capital of Columbia, that it must improve conditions as soon as possible — repairing holes in walls, fixing locks that don’t lock at all and fixing broken light fixtures that otherwise might be turned into weapons. The DOJ also ordered the jail to stop the flow of contraband such as cell phones and drugs. Currently, cellphones are used to orchestrate gang beatings even as inmates are moved from one wing to another for safety. And drugs brought into the facility caused eight prisoners to overdose in two months last year.


One inmate who has been held at the jail for three years pre-trial was beaten and stabbed and the jail took no action until his mother called them two days later, the report said. Then he was beaten again and a guard only responded when other prisoners reported he was bleeding. He was attacked a third time by four inmates and then a fourth time by seven prisoners, only receiving help when an inmate called the central command center and reported him bleeding and crying, the report indicated. Also, on two separate occasions, jail officials only learned of inmate killings from outsider callers. Criminal conduct in the jail often goes unpunished, DOJ investigators concluded. “We found multiple, multiple incidents where crime scenes were cleaned up by inmates before the sheriff’s office was ever notified — or perhaps they were never notified,” a DOJ official said at a press conference.

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