New Jersey's County jails are Rife with human rights abuses and mistreatment according to an investigative report by New Jersey monitor in which inmates say the conditions inside the correctional facilities are so poor they'd be hazardous even to a dog critics have long pointed out that County jails lack the same oversight and transparency as state prisons despite the fact that they routinely pass regulatory inspections or that more people cycle in and out of County jails than State Prison some 10,000 inmates are behind bars in 16 County jails on any given day in New Jersey Dana DiFilippo looked into the complaints and joins me with her reporting Dana it's so good to have you on the show and thank you for sharing this reporting with us just walk me through first of all some of the complaints that you found and these details of the conditions inside the jails sure so we first started looking at this because of Mercer County Jail um specifically we had seen on social media and we had a couple people reach out to us directly about uh the physical conditions there there's mold on the walls the well they often turn off the water because there's leaks and I'm not sure why else they might turn it off but that restricts then people's access to toilets to showers um to drinking water even um and so uh so so that was a large issue um just utility outages um they don't have they don't seem to have anyway uh working laundry and so uh you know if you go there you're wearing a jumpsuit and you either have to keep wearing the same jumpsuit without laundering it or you have to wash it yourself and so uh folks told us that they were doing that in mop buckets and mop sinks um and hanging them up to dry um they had you know problems beyond the physical um they have they were there were complaints that uh they are denied medications that they can't see a doctor when they want to that the phones are down frequently so that they can't communicate with their loved ones um there were all sorts of kind of quality of life uh problems that were reported to us but also um just treatment so there was there were complaints about how uh they were treated by uh prison staff um there are a lot of assaults at that prison um in general we found that there was a lot of assaults reported uh in most of the county jails um and uh Mercers was one of the higher ones uh so it sounds like there's kind of the whole the whole gamut there of problems and yet this facility along with the other County jails routinely and annually pass inspections that are mandated how are they able to do that so the inspections are done by the State Department of Corrections they do them every year um and uh it's not clear how they're able to pass them like that the um department does check for Regulatory Compliance so the uh reports that they do or the the things that they fill fill out it's a largely a checklist um they're fill in the blank forms so they're um checking for things like uh are they doing this training are they is there this much space in the day rooms um you know are they offering educational classes that kind of stuff um and so you literally check on on the Forum compliant or non-compliant um and so they're not there's there's lot lots of things they don't um measure sounds very black and white with those inspections no gray area for these like you said physical or um humanitarian type conditions exactly they're checking for Regulatory Compliance not necessarily for human rights uh problems or abuses so okay I know you reached out to a number of people through your reporting what is it that Watchdogs want to happen and why has it been allowed to continue to this point because years ago there was talks of shutting down the Mercer County Jail in particular so the um main problem here is that there's not really any um oversight and so uh for state prisons in New Jersey there's an non buds person who uh does these kinds of Human Rights checks he issues uh his name's Terry Schuster and he issues uh you know regular reports not just annual reports but he tackles all kinds of of topics but he is statutory statutorily um tasked with only looking at state prisons and so there is no real kind of independent strong oversight of the county jails and the Watchdogs that I talked to said they should be um it should be outside of the county it should be outside of Corrections um it should be civilian lead and they should uh talk to folks who are incarcerated in these facilities um visit them and and uh you know do these kinds of Human Rights checks quality of life checks uh that are missing right now Dana DiFilippo is a senior reporter with New Jersey monitor thank you so much for your reporting sure thank you for having me [Music]