by Chuck Sharman

Three guards at the Cook County Jail in Chicago were arrested in separate violent incidents during one week in April 2023. The jail recorded its seventh detainee death of the year the month before, one from a fatal beating, the other a fatal overdose. A jail nurse was arrested less than two months before that, for attempting to smuggle drug to a detainee.

Running through all these incidents wove two common threads: Violence and drug abuse. Yet Sheriff Tom Dart reacted only to the second, and not by focusing on his problem staffers. Instead, he has banned jail visitors from bringing papers into the lockup – making no exception for attorneys and their legal documents. To justify this apparent incursion on detainees’ Sixth Amendment right to counsel, the Sheriff pointed vaguely to a rise in drug overdoses at the jail, which he blamed on drug-soaked paper smuggled inside by visitors.

In reality, there have been eight fatal drug overdoses among the jail’s average daily population of 6,000 detainees in the past four years. No cause of death has been determined for the last to die this year, Melvin Turner, but the 35-year-old was held in the jail’s Residential Treatment Unit when he was found unresponsive on March 3, 2023.

That was less than 60 days after jail nurse Joanna McCree was arrested on January 10, 2023, on charges she smuggled drugs to a detainee. The 34-year-old reportedly admitted becoming romantically involved with the unnamed detainee. She was booked into the jail where she worked, her bond set at $74,000.

The jail is not the first carceral facility to aim at the wrong target while fighting contraband drugs. Missouri prison officials switched to digitized delivery of prisoner mail for the same reason, yet overdose deaths rose anyway. [See: PLN, Apr. 2023, p.60.]

Meanwhile the first of the three guards was arrested on April 18, 2023. Richard Smith, 44, was captured on surveillance video in September 2022 striking a detainee 30 times, while the unnamed man was handcuffed to a wall. Smith was immediately “de-deputized,” Dart’s office said, and an investigation then led to charges of aggravated battery and official misconduct. Smith, a veteran guard at the jail since 2010, has now been recommended for firing to the Sheriff’s Office Merit Board. His bond was set at $50,000.

The day after his arrest, on April 19, 2023, guard Reginald Roberson, 52, was handed the same aggravated battery and official misconduct charges for a December 2021 beat-down of a detainee. The victim’s arms were raised in surrender when surveillance video captured Roberson wrap a pair of handcuffs around his fist like brass knuckles and beat the detainee in the head. The unnamed victim was left with cuts to his face and ear that required stitches. Roberson was also de-deputized. After his arrest, his bond was set at $20,000.

Before the week was out, a third guard was arrested on April 25, 2023. However, Alan Kettina, 25, was not accused of misconduct at the jail. Rather, he was picked up after an early-morning shooting outside a Niles nightclub that killed Mark Asber, 22. Kettina shot him in the back after arguing over Asber’s demand that the guard smuggle contraband into the jail, according to Kettina’s attorney. He was also de-deputized, and his bond was set at $40,000.

Sources: CBS News, WBEZ, WFLD, WGN

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