When COVID Came to Cook County Jail
AS THE LAST DAYS OF JANUARY FLED, the skyline of the country’s largest single-site jail knuckled up against a cold, chalky sky, its slab walls and watchtowers thrusting upward like fists, making it look like a forbidding junior college campus. The man who runs Cook County Jail, Sheriff Tom Dart, likens it to a small town. There’s the population: some 5,000 inmates on any given day and 2,400 staff members. There’s the size: The collection of soot-smudged limestone and brown brick buildings stretches across 96 acres and eight city blocks on the southern edge of Little Village, looming grimly over the neighboring bodegas and bungalows. And then there are the services: The jail has a medical center, a privatized food provider, a commissary, multiple classrooms and chapels, and a transport system — the blocky white buses and the vans that roar in and out of the site daily.
But in every other important and defining way, it is not a town at all. The residents are captive, of course, and held in tight quarters. Some stay in the “dormitories,” large rooms filled with rows of bunk beds. Others are doubled up in 6-by-10-foot cells on two-floor tiers that can hold as many as 48 inmates each. Each tier has a single common space: a medium-size room with bolted-down tables and a wall-mounted TV.
Though built to conf ine, Cook County Jail remains, under normal circumstances, a hive of activity, fed by a steady influx and outflow of people. In 2019 alone, nearly 60,000 people awaiting trial or bond release passed through, charged with everything from trespassing to triple murder. The newly arrested are herded, shoulder to shoulder, into the basement, where they are clumped 20, 30, 40 at a time in various chain-link holding areas as they are processed. Add to that the hundreds of lawyers, contractors, and suppliers who come and go, plus the 500 to 1,500 people visiting inmates each day.
All of this — the captive population, the close quarters, the constant flow of people — makes the place a petri dish, as Cook County Board president Toni Preckwinkle called it, a place particularly susceptible to the rapid spread of a contagious disease. Indeed, from mid-March through April, COVID-19 “turned the jail upside down,” Dart says, leading to 1,000 cases among inmates and staff in that span alone. Ten people — seven inmates and three correctional officers — would eventually die from the disease. The jail would be declared the “top U.S. hot spot” by the New York Times. It would be hit by a federal class-action lawsuit on behalf of inmates that alleged Dart failed to stop a “rapidly escalating public health disaster” and demanded he do more. Protesters would line up outside calling for the jail to release all its inmates.
“We were bracing for impact,” says Dr. Connie Mennella, head of the jail’s medical services. “I don’t think we realized at the
