Virginia is moving to shut down Hampton Roads Regional Jail

Portsmouth Sheriff Michael Moore does not agree with the statement released by DeProfio, said Jon Babineau, a lawyer for Moore.

“That statement is full of significant inaccuracies and misrepresentations,” Babineau said. “There are ongoing investigations from the Department of Justice and the Department of Corrections on medical mistreatment and drug overdose deaths within the jail.”

The regional jail, by far the deadliest in the state and one of the deadliest in the nation, has had a severe staffing shortage and a recent homicide. All of this while the jail has been under federal oversight from the Department of Justice following a 2018 report that found conditions there violated inmates’ constitutional rights.

The jail remains under a federal consent decree — the only one issued to a jail under the Trump administration — and is required to make improvements, including hiring more medical, mental health care and security staff and reducing its use of solitary confinement for inmates with serious mental illnesses.

As of last month, however, the jail had more than 100 open positions, or more than a third of its total officers. The jail’s board voted in November to move 255 inmates — about 30% of the population — back to the city jails to alleviate the shortage. The extraordinary move was meant to be temporary.

Citing staffing levels that hadn’t improved, Norfolk Sheriff Joe Baron and Chesapeake Sheriff Jim O’Sullivan decided last month to pull all their inmates out of the regional jail.

That will leave the jail with only inmates from Hampton and Newport News, two of the five cities that pay to house incarcerated men and women there. Citing the DOJ report, Portsmouth hasn’t sent inmates to the regional jail since early 2019.

In his email, DeProfio said the reduced inmate population has improved jail operations and the ratio of inmates to officers. A new medical contract that was recently negotiated increases medical services to meet the DOJ consent decree, wrote DeProfio, assistant city manager in Hampton.

He said the jail is working to increase staffing so the cities can resume sending their inmates there.

Under the decree, the jail’s board and staff are working to revise procedures, reduce the use of solitary confinement, increase staffing levels, better provide mental health services and create a secure mental health unit, he said. Employees are being trained on suicide prevention and de-escalation, DeProfio wrote.

The three deaths examined in the jail review committee’s report highlight longstanding problems at the jail, including chronic staffing shortages and the inability to properly care for people with physical and mental illnesses.

Jakub Michael Plucinski died by suicide inside the jail on Dec. 31, 2018. He had previously been placed on suicide watch and had a history of seizures, depression, PTSD and psychiatric hospitalizations.

In the hours leading up to Plucinski’s death, an officer completed only nine of 13 required physical well-being checks on him, an internal affairs investigation found, according to a summary of the Jail Review Committee’s preliminary findings. The officer had just graduated from the Hampton Roads Criminal Justice Training Academy earlier that month.

An internal investigation found security checks also were not done properly the day before and the day of Victor Rhea Fountain’s death on Feb. 23, 2019. A day-shift officer failed to do 36 of the required 48 security inspections. And a night-shift officer didn’t do 17 of his 27 required checks, according to the Jail Review Committee’s letter.

Inmates said Fountain hadn’t eaten for days and was in medical distress. They said they told security and medical staff but that no action was taken, according to the internal affairs investigation.

About six hours before Fountain’s death, a sergeant saw Fountain lying on the bottom bunk in his cell, in the fetal position clutching his abdomen. Fountain said doctors had diagnosed him with stage-4 cancer and that he had abdominal pain and couldn’t keep food down.

The medical examiner ruled that Fountain died of a bowel obstruction related to scars from an operation, according to the committee’s preliminary findings.

The jail’s internal affairs investigation found the sergeant failed to have Fountain assessed by medical staff “when he was in obvious distress” and that a nurse failed to give medical treatment when told he needed it.

Tyrone Lee Bailey, who had been incarcerated at the regional jail for about a year, died April 19, 2019. He had lung cancer.

Weeks before his death, on March 29, 2019, a jail officer took Bailey to an appointment at Virginia Oncology Associates. The doctor told the officer that Bailey had missed at least 12 appointments in the last year while he was in the custody of the Hampton Roads Regional Jail, which was “slowing down his treatment.” The officer reported it to a supervisor, who contacted a scheduler for Wellpath, the jail’s medical provider. The scheduler said appointments hadn’t been canceled but some had been rescheduled “due to the heavy medical load on transportation at times,” according to the Jail Review Committee’s summary.

Several of Bailey’s chemotherapy treatments were delayed — in one case by 77 days. One of the reasons for the delays: The medical scheduler limited the number of outside appointments to five per day “due to workload of the transportation officers,” according to the summary.

Then-Superintendent David Hackworth told the Jail Review Committee investigator that he didn’t know the scheduler had imposed a limit, and he said he “immediately” told the medical provider not to place limits on off-site visits, the summary says.

The Jail Review Committee said it found the regional jail had “shown a wanton disregard for the Board’s minimum standards” in the three deaths, according to the letter.

The Board of Corrections in early 2020 threatened to decertify the regional jail if it didn’t turn over records related to the death of Davageah K. Kones, who died alone in a regional jail cell on May 15, 2018.

“Please know that neither the Board nor this Committee will tolerate attempts to evade the Board’s authority or frustrate its investigations,” wrote William T. Dean, then-chairman of the state Board of Corrections’ Jail Review Committee in a letter to the regional jail at the time.

A hearing on that case will also be heard May 19.

Last month, Portsmouth police charged an inmate with first-degree murder in the death of his cellmate at the regional jail. Thomas Fludd, 55, was found unresponsive about 1 p.m. Feb. 19, according to the jail.

Two sources with knowledge of the jail’s inner-workings told The Pilot that one of the four recent deaths inside the jail was being investigated as a homicide, but Portsmouth police and the jail wouldn’t confirm that for weeks. Police charged Shamsiddin Muhammad Abdullah about a month after Fludd’s death.

Also in March, the American Correctional Association revoked its accreditation of the regional jail, citing “continuous deaths” and the federal consent decree among its reasons.

Gary Harki, 757-446-2370, gary.harki@pilotonline.com

Margaret Matray, 757-222-5216, margaret.matray@pilotonline.com