Authorities at the D.C. jail ordered members of the U.S. Marshals Service to leave the facility after a team of deputy marshals spent several days last month conducting a surprise inspection of the jail and cataloguing “egregious” conditions, including the mistreatment of prisoners, a federal judge said Wednesday.
Speaking from the bench in U.S. District Court in Washington, Judge Royce C. Lamberth said he and other judges were briefed about the jail this week by the court’s acting U.S. marshal, Lamont J. Ruffin, who ordered the inspection. Ruffin’s findings led the Justice Department to announce that about
400 inmates, being held at the jail in federal criminal cases, will be
transferred to a penitentiary in Pennsylvania.
After the surprise inspection, from Oct. 18 to Oct. 23, uncovered what Ruffin termed “systemic failures,” such as grotesquely poor sanitation and the punitive withholding of food and water from detainees, deputy marshals showed up at the jail on Sunday, Oct. 24, but were ordered to leave, Lamberth said.
He said Ruffin, in a meeting with federal judges this Tuesday, told them about the deputies being directed to exit the facility, which Ruffin described as unprecedented in his long experience with the Marshals Service.
“For the first time in history, they were ordered to leave the jail,” Lamberth said, quoting Ruffin. “He has never seen a jail bar marshals from entering. . . . It is beyond belief, some of the reports of the marshal here to the court.”
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