Local Jails Go Full

Want to know how your local jail operates? Sorry, that may be a trade secret.

- Samantha Michaels

Four days before Christmas 2016, Heather Ashton Miller, an inmate in Davis County Jail outside Salt Lake City, slipped while climbing down from her bunk bed. The 28-year-old, who had been arrested a day earlier for alleged drug-related misdemeanors, fell five feet and landed with a thud. When she tried to stand, she couldn’t— the fall had ruptured her spleen. As her lips turned purple, jail staffers gave her ibuprofen. It took nearly three hours for emergency medics to arrive; she died shortly after reaching the hospital.

When lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah asked for the jail’s operational standards, hoping to find out what had happened to Miller and other inmates who had died, they were told they couldn’t see them: The guidelines had been written by a contractor named Gary DeLand, who insisted that sharing his copyrighted work would jeopardize his business of developing jail guidelines and would open sheriffs to lawsuits. In April 2018, the Utah State Records Committee agreed, ruling that Davis County Jail did not need to release its guidelines because the county did not own them.

Many jails have guidelines to ensure they comply with constitutional requirements to keep inmates safe and healthy. These standards can govern virtually all aspects of a jail’s operations, from its medical care and food safety to the dimensions of its cells and mailroom procedures. “If the jail wrote and kept these standards itself, they would be public,” says David Reymann, an attorney who is representing the ACLU of Utah and the Disability Law Center in a lawsuit seeking access to the Davis County Jail guidelines. The idea that “you can contract out to a third party and put your governmental records into a black box is very troubling,” says ACLU attorney Leah Farrell.