COMMENTARY
Donn Esmonde: Giambra sees the absurdity of mess at jail
It was not the best of times. But at least the jail doors were not barred to justice.
Most of us do not have fond memories of Joel Giambra. The ex-county executive rose to the heights of popularity on a leaner-government vision, then plummeted to earth after the county’s finances imploded. But Giambra, for all of his faults, had a more enlightened attitude about the mess at the Erie County Holding Center than successor Chris Collins and his cohorts.
“We had issues going back-and-forth, absolutely,” Giambra told me. “But there was never this kind of confrontation.”
The hits keep coming. Buffalo News reporter Matt Spina chronicled Wednesday the 2005 story of Bonita Bolden, who ended up at Millard Fillmore Hospital with broken ribs and bruises after a fight with her husband and an alleged beating by guards. Add her name to a long list.
The county’s Holding Center, a way station for the recently arrested, has for years been Buffalo’s slice of Calcutta. I toured the place in 1996, when John Dray ran the overstuffed prison.
Dray was furious about prison overcrowding. To amplify his cries for help, the superintendent routinely let reporters into the jail. I saw prisoners clustered like cattle in the notorious “hold area.” I sat in a gymlike room lined with cots, set up to handle inmate over-spill.
I did not see any mouthy prisoner get “tuned up” by overstressed guards. I did not witness any medication-needy inmate being told to suck it up. Maybe that stuff was reserved for the VIP tour. But I got a sense of the controlled chaos that apparently has not changed much.
What has changed, however, is the attitude of the powers that be. There has been a mountain of credible complaints in recent years, ranging from beatings to the casual cruelty of prisoners denied food and water. The county has spent millions to settle lawsuits from abused prisoners. Investigators from the Department of Justice and the state’s Commission of Correction want to talk—unchaperoned by county officials, for obvious reasons—to guards and inmates. It sounds reasonable to me. Yet County Attorney Cheryl Green, with the blessing of Collins and Sheriff Tim Howard, continually says no.
“I don’t think that fighting with the state and feds is an appropriate response, as opposed to sitting down and working stuff out,” Giambra said. “There is a level of absurdity here that was never reached before.”
Giambra hardly batted a thousand at the Holding Center. His takeover of the city’s cellblock hurt more than it helped. Ripples from the budget fiasco extended to the downtown jail.
Giambra was gone by the time the DOJ asked the county for the keys in January 2008. But he cooperated with DOJ investigators during his last year in office and said he would have let them check out allegations of abuse.
“It would never have escalated to this,” said Giambra, who now works for a lobbying firm. “The way it is being handled is embarrassing.”
But, hey, why worry about a communal black eye over some broken ribs and bruised bodies?
The level of public outrage over alleged— and confirmed—abuse of prisoners, some of whom were not convicted of anything, barely moves the needle. Many folks figure that they will never get there, and do not care about those who do. Howard, in a campaign ad that must have ACLU members reaching for the Maalox, touts the lousy conditions as a tough-on-criminals point of pride.
But you can measure a society on how it treats its prisoners. And the only thing between any of us and a Holding Center stay is a traffic stop and a cop having a bad day.
Most folks are not pining for Giambra’s return. But when it comes to common sense at the jail, I miss the guy.
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