Suit by Mentally Disabled Detainees at South Carolina Jail Secures Class Certification; No Action on Damning DOJ Report
by Chuck Sharman
In January 2025, at the conclusion of a year-long investigation into the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center (ASGDC) in South Carolina’s Richland County, the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) reported that it found “reasonable cause to believe that ASGDC violates the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution by failing to protect incarcerated people from an unreasonable risk of violence and harm from other incarcerated people.”
The DOJ threatened to follow up with a lawsuit if conditions failed to improve. But 10 months later, there has been no follow-up investigation by the DOJ, much less any lawsuit filed to remediate what it called “systemic problems that have enabled severe violence and avoidable harm to persist.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina advanced a suit seeking to protect the jail’s mentally disabled detainees with a ruling on September 23, 2025, granting class certification. Brought by the nonprofit Disability Rights South Carolina (DRSC), the complaint claimed that the jail routinely keeps mentally disabled detainees “locked in cold, moldy, filthy, infested, unsafe, and unsanitary cells for up to 24 hours a day largely as a result of their symptomatology.” The suit further accused ASGDC of denying the detainees adequate mental health care and “le[aving] them in solitary confinement or restrictive housing for extended periods of time.”
DRSC filed the suit in 2022, noting that conditions are also unsafe for mentally disabled detainees outside of isolation, where they are at risk of violence from other general population detainees because of guard understaffing. The complaint accused ASGDC of a “pattern and practice” of confining the detainees “up to 48 hours at a time in shower stalls so small they cannot sit down” or leaving them shackled to a restraint chair “for prolonged periods without regard to their ongoing behavior and often with little or no monitoring or breaks”; some “are left in the restraint chairs for so long without a break they are forced to urinate on themselves.”
The district court granted Defendants’ motion to dismiss Plaintiffs’ claims under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), 42 U.S.C. § 12101 et seq., but it refused to dismiss their Fourteenth Amendment Due Process claims. It also granted certification on their conditions-of-confinement and failure-to-protect claims to a class consisting of (a) all those detained at the jail on or after April 28, 2022, and (b) who were or are assigned to an ASGDC mental health housing unit or diagnosed with a mental disorder by a psychiatrist or “other licensed clinical mental health professional.”
Eleven plaintiffs identified by their initials were appointed Class representatives. Attorneys with Burnette Shutt and McDaniel PA in Columbia were appointed Class counsel. PLN will continue to monitor the case and report further developments. See: Disability Rts. S.C. v. Richland Cty., 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 186774 (D.S.C.).
No Follow-Up on DOJ
Threat to Sue
Conducted under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act, the DOJ investigation examined “thousands of documents” from the jail, plus more from the county, state and “third parties such as hospitals and public sources.” DOJ investigators toured the lockup and interviewed detainees and staff, also holding public meetings with members of the community.
Among the problems they found was a spate of 60 stabbings in 2023; with an average daily population of 701 that year at the jail, that represented a rate nearly equal to the rate in the New York City jail system—which has since been placed under a form of federal receivership, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Aug. 2025, p.1.]
ASGDC recorded at least eight drug overdoses in August 2024 alone, three of them fatal. But “[w]eapons, drugs, and contraband cell phones are commonplace,” the DOJ report declared, “facilitate[ing] gang control and violence in the Jail.” Jail administration “fails to respond with proper investigations and appropriate discipline.”
The DOJ also reported that the jail suffered from a “lack of sufficient staff, a deteriorating facility, and systemic lapses in security operations, such as deficient prisoner supervision, inadequate internal investigations, and lax contraband prevention.” In just a month in early 2024, nine staffers were arrested, including eight on contraband charges, as PLN also reported. [See: PLN, Apr. 2024, p.34.]
The DOJ report threatened that a lawsuit could follow within 49 days. But no suit has been filed. The most likely reason is not that Sheriff Leon Lott and staff have addressed the failings identified in the report; more likely, it simply reflects a shift in DOJ priorities—away from investigating civil rights violations in prisons and jails—since Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) took office, just days after the report was released. See: Investigation of the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center (Columbia, S.C.), DOJ Civil Rights Division (Jan. 2025).
With a nearly 10% chance of getting stabbed, detainees continue to face an excessive risk of being subjected to unconstitutional conditions at the jail, whose population has climbed near 1,000, according to an October 2025 report by the Charleston Post & Courier. The news outlet also asked the DOJ about its failure to follow-up on its earlier report. The agency didn’t respond.
Additional source: Charleston Post & Courier
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Related legal case
Disability Rts. S.C. v. Richland Cty.
| Year | 2025 |
|---|---|
| Cite | 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 186774 (D.S.C.) |
| Level | District Court |