Custody and health issues are challenging enough, but the facility also has its own dysfunctional problems. They include an ongoing investigation into alleged sexual misconduct between male guards and female inmates and the continual turmoil at the top with revolving jail directors. Most recent was the forced resignation of corrections director Ken Ray in January, just four months after County Executive Ron Sims hired him as an "innovative leader" to replace a longtime interim corrections director. Sims has since appointed 29-year custody veteran Reed Holtgeerts to oversee the county's jail system, one of America's largest. The downtown jail that houses 1,700 costs about $36 million annually to operate, while the newer and more efficient 1,400-bed jail at the Regional Justice Center in Kent costs $23 million to run. Deputy Director Bolton notes the downtown facility was erected in 1986, and "they don't build them like this anymore." The main jail has an old-style layout and security systems. It nonetheless impressively passed an accreditation inspection by the National Commission on Correctional Health Care in February, and as Sims points out in a statement, "The bar that is set for accreditation is very high." Also a plus, Holtgeerts has the savvy of an insider to set things right, Bolton and others believe. Two jail officers, however, complain there was no heads-up notification to jail staff about the recent deaths, suggesting the jail tried to hush them up in the embarrassing wake of its sexual misconduct investigation. And a custody worker with inside knowledge of inmate health services says it's not as rosy as administrators might like to portray. "The situation at the jail has become so dangerous for anyone who is mentally ill, physically ill, or elderly," the worker says. "In fact, you stand a good chance of dying at the jail due to the new procedures they recently instituted because of remodeling and attempts to save money." Bolton maintains the remodeling and updating will, in fact, create safer and more efficient conditions.
Attorney Susan Wilk wants to know if there will be changes in policy, as well as physical ones. Wilk, who handled Ron Hicks' unsuccessful appeal of a three-strikes conviction for the gas-station robbery, says her client should have been on suicide watch, as he had been previously. A week before his death, Hicks received word from the state Court of Appeals that he'd spend the rest of his life in prison. He could have already begun stashing his prescribed medicine or obtained illegal drugs in jail to do the deed. Hicks, who had earlier convictions for assault and second-degree rape, was found guilty in 2003 of a spontaneous holdup of an Issaquah gas station. He was arrested 200 yards away after running out of gas. At his December 2003 sentencing— to life, automatically, as a three-time loser—Hicks asked the court to kill him instead: "I don't want to wait till I'm old and bent over to die. . . . I did ask my counsels that if this happened, and I get struck out . . . if you could possibly impose the death penalty instead of having me wait to get killed. . . . I don't understand why people want to spend all their life in a little room, you know, their entire life in a little room. That is far worse than death. . . . Hook me up to something and let me go. Don't make me wait to die."
According to court papers and police reports, Hicks tried to commit suicide at least twice previously in jail, including the night after he asked the court to kill him. An attorney who handled his trial says Hicks was able to down as many as 150 antidepressant pills, which he apparently had hoarded in jail. The death attempt left him in a coma for several days, but he survived. Wilk, the appeal attorney, describes Hicks in court papers as severely mentally ill. He was, she said, third-youngest of 13 children raised in an abusive home. An African American, Hicks had a blacker skin color than his siblings, and that caused him to be singled out for abuse, said Wilk. He also suffered a brain injury as a youth that changed his behavior, along with the alcohol that Hicks' parents allowed their children to drink, court documents state. (Of Hicks' 12 siblings, 10 had mental-health or substance-abuse problems.) In and outside jail, Hicks was prescribed a variety of drugs, including the antidepressants Prozac and Celexa. He had been drinking for at least 12 hours when he robbed an Issaquah 76 station on New Year's Eve 2001, said Wilk. He intimated he had a gun—he was unarmed—and told the clerk: "I'm not going to hurt you. Don't push any buttons, just empty the till." He departed with $200, telling the clerk, "I know you have to call this in." His gasless car sputtered to a stop within a quarter-mile, and police arrived just as a good Samaritan in an SUV was trying to give Hicks a push.
Attorney Wilk unsuccessfully argued in her appeal that Hicks, who signed all his court papers with an X, suffered diminished capacity, lacking the requisite mental state to be convicted of the robbery. In a phone chat and e-mail exchange, she recalls visiting Hicks in his cell before the appeal ruling. "I was surprised," she says, "that he had been moved from the seventh floor, where inmates with mental-health and medications issues are housed, to the ninth floor general population. I believe that because of this move, the jail failed to appropriately monitor Mr. Hicks' medication supply, with the result that he was able once again to hoard his medications." Deputy corrections director Bolton said toxicology tests, due in a few weeks, ought to settle that question. He also makes a point of noting, as does Dr. Fotinos, that jail custody and health workers take it personally when a Ron Hicks or Sabrina Owens dies in their care. "The thing is," Bolton says as our elevator lumbers down to the jail's entry floor, within reach of welcome daylight and fresh air, "the suicide rate is exceptionally low. That's something you have to work at, and we do."
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randerson@seattleweekly.com
