Monday, January 21, 2019

 

***FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE***

Cuyahoga County Jail Officials Fail To Respond to Community Demands

 

The Coalition to Stop the Inhumanity at the Cuyahoga County Jail will host another rally and press conference outside the upcoming Cuyahoga Council meeting on the corner of E 9th and Prospect on Tuesday, January 22nd at 4:30PM to update the community on our work and continue to demand accountability from our elected officials and those responsible for the horrors inside the Jail. After the press conference and rally, Coalition members will go into the County Council meeting and uplift our demands to the Council.

 

On January 8th the Coalition to Stop the Inhumanity at the Cuyahoga County Jail hand delivered letters to all who have jurisdiction over the Cuyahoga County Jail: Armond Budish, 11 members of Cuyahoga County Council, Judge John Russo, Judge Michelle Earley, and Sheriff Clifford Pinkney, with the request of a report of improvements that they have made or will make to alleviate the inhumane conditions at all the jail facilities, and a timeline for which improvements will be made next, with a deadline of response by January 21st. The lack of urgency around such inhumanity is truly egregious and unacceptable, with County Executive, Armond Budish, and County Council failing to meet the deadline.

 

“It seems like every day, something new and horrible is released about the inhumane operations of the Cuyahoga County Jail,” said LaTonya Goldsby, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Cleveland and member of the Coalition. “Just this weekend we heard that Cuyahoga County’s former jail director helped block the hiring of “necessary nursing staff” at the jail just a few days before the first of eight inmates died, three Cuyahoga County administrators have been indicted in a corruption probe, and we saw Armond Budish spend $5,000 to buy his own humanitarian award. If we don’t keep building power as a community and keep putting the pressure on our local government, more people will die, simply because they’re victim to an unjust system.”

 

The Coalition will continue to keep the pressure on and is letting those with the responsibility for these atrocities know that we won’t be going away. It can be incredibly disempowering for individual members of the community to stand up to those in power, but we know the magnitude of our own power when we stand together. “This is how we get justice,” urged Jackie Kovach, a member of the Coalition, “If we want change, we need to stay engaged with the Council, we need to speak our truth, and they need to hear us.”

 

The Coalition includes: Black Lives Matter Cleveland, Black on Black Crime, Inc., Carl Stokes Brigade, Cleveland Lead Safe Network, Cuyahoga Progressive Caucus (CCPC), Imperial Women Coalition, Northeast Ohio Black Health Coalition, Ohio Organizing Collaborative, Ohio Student Association, Puncture the Silence-Stop Mass Incarceration, Refuse Fascism Cleveland, Showing Up for Racial Justice Northeast Ohio (SURJ NEO), Survivors/Victims of Tragedy, Inc., and the Tamir E. Rice Foundation.