
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, October 5, 1993                   TAG: 9403170018
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

VIRGINIA JUSTICE

PICTURE THIS. An 18-year-old Virginian gets in trouble with the law. He's not convicted of anything, mind you; he still is innocent in the eyes of the law. But he is arraigned, for charges described as "theft-related," and he is taken to jail.

Whereupon the following happens, according to a lawsuit he has filed:

He is forced to run naked through a crowd of other inmates who beat him with shoes. He is made to perform oral sex on more than 10 prisoners. He is repeatedly raped - anally, violently.

All the while he screams for help, but no sheriff's deputies come to investigate. His ordeal goes on for three and a half hours.

This "orgy of violence" is alleged to have occurred in our state, in Chesapeake's city jail. Another inmate, beaten during the episode, also has sued the city, its sheriff, and jail employees.

We won't comment on the suit itself, or predict its outcome. But a few obvious observations are in order.

If these events did occur, more than a token response at the Chesapeake jail is required. The sheriff and a good part of his staff should go away and never come back.

Most people would judge (certainly let us hope most people would judge) such punishment cruel and unusual, certainly grotesquely out of proportion with the inmate's circumstances: just arrested, held for trial, on merely "theft-related" charges.

Even if he were a killer serving 20 life sentences in a maxium-security prison, or on death row, an inmate still should be protected from the kind of abuse the 18-year-old says he received.

Jails nowadays are more than holding cells. Because state prisons are so overcrowded, many violent, convicted offenders who should be in maximum security remain instead in jail. Local jails are overcrowded, as well, making conditions there all the more dangerous.

This incident may be only a worst-case replay of similar incidents in jails and prisons across the state. Virginians should't tolerate such treatment of wards of their state, albeit unpopular offenders. We shouldn't be sentencing people, in effect, not just to incarceration but to rape and beatings because of inadequate security. (And remember, in this case, no sentence was involved.)

The jailhouse described in the lawsuit isn't the sort of "corrections" environment that, when it ejects offenders back onto our streets, should make law-abiding Virginians feel any safer.

Suspects and convicts deserve a minimum level of protection while they are incarcerated; law-abiding residents of this state also should demand, in their own interest, that prisoners be spared orgies of violence. In Virginia justice, there should be no room for torture.

by CNB