By Ted Clifford
The State
RICHLAND COUNTY, S.C. — Entering the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center, a visitor shows an ID and turns over car keys. Phones and other electronics stay behind in the car outside a fence lined with bales of razor wire. Bags are run through an X-ray machine, and the visitor’s photo is taken before they step into a body scanner that whirs and clicks.
The visitor passes through a set of heavy doors to a large entry hall, off of which branch doors to bond court, the jail administration and the units of cells and open dormitories that make up the jail. It is a confusing warren of identical corridors with white walls and gray trim, thick doors and asymmetric housing blocks.
The confusion is part of the design, intended to keep the detainees from learning the ins and outs of the jail.
Over the past several years the Richland County jail has acquired an unusually grim reputation. Nine people have died in the jail since January 2023, four of them by overdose in the span of just nineteen days during the summer of 2024.
The facility is designed to house people who have been charged and arrested but whose cases have not yet been resolved, resulting either in their acquittal and release or a conviction and transfer to a prison run by the state Department of Corrections or a Department of Mental Health facility.
High profile incidents including a riot in 2021 and the death of detainee Lason Butler, who died of dehydration during a mental health episode (his death was ruled a homicide by the Richland County coroner), have cemented the jail’s reputation in the minds of many.
The county also faces a battery of lawsuits, including multiple claims of negligence following attacks and poor medical care as well as a class action lawsuit over the treatment of disabled and mentally ill inmates.
The jail is currently facing an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for South Carolina. The investigation, whose report is expected this week, was begun to examine whether Richland County violated federal law by failing to protect incarcerated people from violence and subjecting them to dangerous living conditions.
In an effort to improve conditions and combat the jail’s negative reputation, the Richland County Administration and the county council have undertaken a monumental overhaul of the facility.
Ten separate projects have been completed at an estimated cost of $33 million. These include the renovation of six dormitories, the jail’s kitchen, roof and HVAC system.
“We’re doing those things because they need to be done. We’re not doing them per se because we’re trying to build trust. We’re doing them because we care, and this is how we demonstrate our care,” said Richland County Administrator Leonardo Brown in an interview with The State.
Repairs have been made to ceilings and light fixtures. Old porcelain toilets and sinks have been replaced with stainless steel fixtures, and the county has employed consultants to help revamp policies. The county has installed a body scanner, a magnetometer and a mail scanner that can even detect drugs mixed into the ink.
As part of an effort to demonstrate these improvement, The State newspaper toured the jail this month to see the results of some of those improvements. Accompanied by four lawyers hired by the county, several detention center officers, a major and the jail’s assistant director, a reporter and photographer were given access to the facility. They were not allowed to conduct interviews with, photograph or video record any detainees.
The two-hour tour included both renovated and unrenovated housing units.
Old, unrenovated units reveal the depth of the problems. The old locks appeared no more complicated than one might find in a school. Open dormitories were streaked with rust, dirt and mold. There were broken tiles and light fixtures. Graffiti murals with swear words, devils, yellow smiley faces, flashing gold teeth and nearly nude women decorated cell walls.
It was easy to see how the facility became a breeding ground of violence. Crumbling infrastructure allowed detainees to turn their jail into a weapon, fashioning shanks from debris and escaping confinement through broken locks and unsecured drop ceilings.
The county said they are already seeing success. Between July and December 2023 there were 17 detainee on detainee assaults with a weapon. During the same period in 2024 there were three assaults.
“Whenever people are making progress, you have to applaud that,” said Bakari Sellers, a Columbia attorney who is representing Butler’s family. “But many of the issues they’ve had have been systemic for a very long time. It’s a tragedy that it took the death of Lason Butler and others for them to do something.”
Brown declined to discuss how the jail had gotten into such a dire state but said that he wants the public to know that both the county council and the administration are taking the jail seriously and making much needed investments that had been long ignored.
“We know that (the jail) is on top of people’s minds now, can we keep it there?” Brown asked. “So that there’s a constant focus on the detention center, just like all other forms of county government.”
Phase 1: Low-level security unit
The tour began with housing in Phase 1, which contains the lowest level of security. The jail is divided into five buildings, called “phases.” Higher phase numbers do not correspond with the levels of security. Phase 2 units are the most secure, while Phase 5 is in the middle.
Phase 1 includes the dorms Foxtrot and Alpha (all of the dorms are named following the NATO phonetic alphabet) are open dorms, meaning there are no cells. Beds line the walls of the ground floor and the second floor is accessed by a stairway that leads to an open gallery that runs around three sides of the room.
Detainees who are either denied bond or can’t afford it are classified into a housing unit based on a range of factors, including age, criminal history and behavior at this or other jails.
One of the crucial questions, jail staff say, is the detainee’s likelihood to be harmed or to harm others. It’s an essential question in a jail that has been plagued with violence — when Alex Murdaugh was awaiting trial for the murder of his wife and son, he stayed in a high security cell in Alvin S. Glenn, in part out of concern that other detainees would target him.
During The State’s tour, both of Phase 1’s dorms appeared clean, calm and relatively quiet. Detainees wandered freely around the space, lay in their beds, and sat at tables with chess and backgammon boards printed into the surface. They read, chatted and watched television. Cold weather deterred them from the enclosed basketball courts, which detainees at this level have free access to.
Jail staff said that they had begun chess tournaments for the detainees, with the best players in each of the units competing against each other in a jail-wide tournament where the winner can receive a prize, often food from the outside. The goal is to boost the camaraderie in the jail and give detainees an outlet.
Both of Phase 1’s dorms were supervised by a single detention officer seated behind a desk at the unit’s entrance. A red line ran around the desk that inmates were not allowed to pass without permission of the officer on duty.
A vending machine sat in the corner, where inmates can buy food with money from their electronic “canteen” funds. It’s stocked with ramen, chips and the surprisingly popular packets of smoked oysters.
Foxtrot is home to some of the jail’s older detainees and those with medical conditions. Several used wheelchairs or walkers.
Detainees were wary but respectful of the journalists. Despite the sense of quiet and order, both of the lower security dorms showed some evidence of the conditions that have been linked to disorder at the jail.
In both Alpha and Foxtrot, hard plastic cots were placed on the floor in the middle of the dorms. Jail officials have said that this was a temporary measure as court closures over the holidays meant that some detainees had not been able to go before a judge for a potential bond.
Alvin S. Glenn is one of the largest county jails in the state. On the morning of Jan. 7, 903 detainees were in the jail. The vast majority of them had not been convicted of a crime — they are being held on bond or awaiting trial or some other resolution of their case.
The jail has struggled with overcrowding for several years. From 2022 to 2024, the inmate population ballooned from an average of 703 detainees to 999 detainees, according to a lawsuit from Disability Rights South Carolina, a nonprofit that represents South Carolinians with disabilities and diagnosed mental illnesses.
Backlogs in the courts that continue to linger since the COVID shutdowns as well as statewide bond reform mean some detainees are being held in Alvin S. Glenn longer than before. The detainees who have been there the longest are nine detainees who have been at the jail since 2020.
Detainees whose cases are stalled in the court system are central to the jail’s problems, Brown said. In an attempt to address this, the county has provided a list of some of the problematic detainees to the Fifth Circuit Solicitor’s Office to expedite their cases.
“The detention center is a short term facility... When now you’ve been in the jail two, three, four or five years, and now you have time, and, if you have the energy, to try to figure out, ‘how do I create disruptions in the system? How do I create these challenges for others that are around me?’”
Phase 2: Maximum security
Inside of the jail’s most secure housing units, the conditions are very different. There is no freedom of movement. Inmates are confined to their cells for a minimum of 23 hours a day.
The jail’s most secure unit is the Behavioral Management Unit, or BMU. Formerly known as the Secure Housing Unit, the unit was reconstituted after being closed following the death from dehydration of Lason Butler. Reopened in December 2023, it was one of the first units to be fully renovated.
Detainees are sent to the BMU after committing violations of the administration’s policy. Confined to their cells, the detainees also lose access to electronic tablets that contain reading material.
Only slightly lower in security are Yankee and X-Ray, sometimes referred to as “stepdown units” from the BMU. Every Thursday, the jail’s administration decides whether inmates can be transferred from the BMU to either of these newly renovated units. Some detainees who jail staff consider a threat or who need a higher level of security might spend their entire stay in either Yankee or X-Ray, largely confined to their cells.
Inside of BMU and X-Ray, noise picks up the moment that detainees, peering from their cells, realize that there are new and unusual visitors on the unit. Soon shouting spreads around the entire unit in a cacophony, echoing from ground floor cells and cells in the upper galleries that are fenced with new metal wiring.
Amidst the storm of noise in X-Ray, one inmate greets one of the county’s lawyers by name. There are cries of “hey thug!” and one detainee simply yells over and over: “I’m stuck in a room! I’m stuck in a room.”
But it is in these units that the result of renovations can be seen most clearly.
On average, each unit in the jail has taken four months to renovate at a cost of a little more than $1 million per unit. The work has been constant but deliberate. Individual units have been shut for renovations with detainees moved elsewhere in the jail for the duration of the repairs.
Some of the cells’ access slots, which guards can open to pass trays of food or medication, feature an additional level of security with a “Millennium flap,” a metal box that attaches to the outside of the door preventing detainees from reaching out or throwing anything through an open slot.
Utility cabinets placed between cells will give staff direct access to pipes, which were previously buried under concrete, making them extremely difficult to repair. As a result, inmates regularly complained about flooding toilets and sinks that delivered foul smelling, brown water or no water at all. Inspection reports from the jail and experts hired by Disability Rights found that in January 2024 , 26 of the 56 sinks in X-Ray (at the time serving as the women’s dorm) were broken, and in the men’s open units just four of 18 urinals were functioning.
“It’s hard to exaggerate the effect of those plumbing problems,” said Stuart Andrews , an attorney representing Disability Rights.
Today, the common areas of X-Ray and BMU appear clean and largely empty. Gone are the guard booths, replaced by newly built segregated guard posts. They are imposing two story structures of black, one-way glass protected by green metal bars.
When fully staffed, each of these units will have one employee inside of the guard post and two detention center officers outside on the unit floor.
Doors with fresh coats of green paint boast heavy duty “Wedge Locks.” Green lights indicate the doors are locked, while an unlocked door displays a red warning light.
Running at roughly $5,500 each, these locks were touted by the county council as a cutting edge solution to past problems with inmates breaking locks open. With an estimated 448 locks in the jail, the county expected to spend $2.5 million on locks alone.
Brown and lawyers for the county say that safety has improved. In previous public statements, Brown laid much of the responsibility for the violence on the detainees. He repeated that argument during his interview last week with The State. Accountability for the jail’s condition and violence cuts both ways, Brown emphasized repeatedly during the three-hour interview.
The county’s promise, Brown said, is to provide an environment with resources and safe housing so that if a detainee follows the rules, they should be safe in jail.
“We’re providing that environment,” Brown said, “but if you (detainees) can’t commit to nothing bad happening regardless of the environment that we provide, then I think that becomes another question as to who then is responsible for the behaviors of individuals when they misbehave.”
Looking forwards
Brown contends many of the jail’s problems have been blown out of proportion.
“There may have been opportunities for the county to do some things differently,” Brown said, but it’s not helpful to describe the county’s initiatives as responding to “crisis-level events,” Brown told The State.
In previous statements, Brown has blamed lawyers suing the jail and the media for creating the impression that the jail is dangerous.
That impression has had a knock on effect, Brown said, of making it harder to hire guards and other jail employees.
“We’re really trying to communicate to the public that Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center is a workplace environment that you can effectively come into at the beginning of the day and go home at the end of the day,” Brown said.
While the inmate population grew nearly 30% between 2022 and 2024, the number of staff only grew from 90 to 101, according to Disability Rights’ lawsuit. This fell far short of the 294 staff members called for by a 2023 Staffing Needs Assessment performed by Richland County.
Data revealed in a lawsuit against the jail found that the total number of serious incidents, including the discovery of drugs and weapons as well as assaults on inmates and staff, grew from 210 in 2021 to 321 in 2023. Reported stabbings and puncture wounds exploded from 2 to 38 incidents while reported inmate-on-inmate assaults with weapons went from none reported in 2020 to 16 in 2023.
“No question exists that the jail is experiencing and has experienced for over a decade a security staffing crisis,” said Andrews. With so many vacancies, “There is an opportunity for some detainees to prey on others and take advantage of detainees with serious mental illness or disabilities.”
In an attempt to hire more staff, the county administration has raised the starting salary for officers to $44,424 and offered sign-on bonuses of $5,000 paid out over the first year. Administrators have promoted the effort at career fairs and splashed ads on social media and even at shopping malls around Richland County.
Brown argued that the short staffing was not the either the cause of or the solution to violence in the jail.
“If I’m going to harm someone, I’m going to harm them. And I think that there is an important distinction between having staff and then that leads to everything automatically being better. There’s a combination of mitigation tools that you want to have,” Brown said.
And the needs of detainees go beyond just staffing. A report obtained by The State from Disability Rights estimates that two-thirds of the detainees are diagnosed with a mental illness. But inside the jail, it is only the most seriously mentally ill detainees who are confined to the Mike unit, which remains to be renovated.
The problem, Brown acknowledged, is that because detainees with mental health conditions had not yet been through the judicial process and moved into a mental health facility, they were being held in an environment that was “not conducive for them.”
County lawyers have argued in court that the jail is meeting the standards of mental health care that jail administrators are obligated to provide. The jail has contracted with private health care provider Freedom Behavioral Health to provide mental health services to detainees. The more appropriate entity to provide mental health care, either in the jail or at one of their facilities would be the Department of Mental Health, Brown said. He reiterated that because detainees have not been convicted they cannot force anyone to accept treatments.
“We can make an assessment that medical care is needed. Well, what happens if a detainee refuses medical care?” Brown said. “Do you believe as a citizen that we can put that person in shackles and make them get treatment?”
Andrews said that he agreed with Brown’s contention that the state Department of Mental Health “should provide a much greater and deeper range of services” to detainees with mental illnesses.
As the county awaits rulings in major lawsuits against the jail and the justice department’s report, many questions about the future of the facility remain unresolved. There is currently no discussion currently to either build a new facility or have Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott take over the jail, Brown said.
“I’m going to challenge anyone that is interested in seeing things be better in the detention center environment, because there’s a lot work that they can do, I’m willing to work with them,” Brown said. “But it’s enough about talking about it, let’s do it.”
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