By Cory Shaffer
Advance Ohio Media
CLEVELAND — Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine on Wednesday discussed several measures the state enacted this week to help the Cuyahoga County Jail address its worst outbreak of coronavirus to date, including deploying the Ohio National Guard soldiers to help staff the facility.
“It doesn’t solve the problem forever,” DeWine said during a virtual meeting with the cleveland.com editorial board. “But it buys some breathing room for the jail.”
DeWine’s comments come one day after Cuyahoga County Sheriff David Schilling and Prosecutor Michael O’Malley moved to dismiss a lawsuit they filed earlier this month against the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction over policies that they said hampered their ability to send jail inmates who received prison sentences to a state facility.
After more than 100 inmates in the county jail contracted the virus during an April outbreak, the state only considered accepting prisoners from the county jail on a “case-by-case basis” and required the county jail to quarantine every inmate for 14 days before the prison would accept them, despite the prison also placing all new inmates in a 14-day quarantine.
O’Malley said more than 120 inmates in the jail as of last week were sentenced to prison and are awaiting transfer. Some have waited for months.
The jail is in the midst of an explosion of COVID-19 cases among inmates and staff. There were 298 inmates currently positive with the virus on Tuesday, and dozens of corrections officers and medical staff could not work because they either contracted the virus or were exposed to someone who had.
On Wednesday, DeWine said that O’Malley reached out to him several days ago to inform him of the dire situation in the jail. The two worked together previously when DeWine was the Attorney General on issues including the prosecution of previously untested rape kits and using familial DNA to catch an Elyria man who kidnapped a Cleveland girl out of her home in 2017.
“I said, ‘Look, we’re concerned about what is happening with you. I’m concerned with any problem in the state. I’m the governor of the whole state, not just the governor of DRC,’” DeWine recalled.
O’Malley told cleveland.com that the two spoke Dec. 9, and by that evening, DeWine had assembled a team to come up with potential solutions to address the jail.
On Monday, ODRC Director Annette Chambers-Smith said in a letter to O’Malley and Schilling that the prisons would shorten the quarantine length from 14 to 10 days and no longer require inmates who recovered from the virus to quarantine before being shipped to prison. The state would also hold off on a scheduled jail inspection until the outbreak is contained, deploy National Guard soldiers to the jail to fill-in for dozens of corrections officers out, and remove all inmates currently held on parole violations.
O’Malley’s office filed a notice with the Supreme Court the next day saying that they intended to dismiss the lawsuit.
O’Malley credited DeWine, whose administration he said was “instrumental in bringing assistance to us in Cuyahoga County and to help with our issues in the jail.”
Cuyahoga County is not the only lock-up to experience an outbreak.
Marion Correctional Institution, where more than 75 percent of prisoners had tested positive at one point, became the nation’s worst hot spot in the early weeks of the virus. In an email last week, ODRC spokeswoman JoEllen Smith said that the Cuyahoga County Jail is among more than 20 county jails barred from transferring inmates to state prisons at some point during the pandemic. Four jails — in Butler, Montgomery, Clermont and Ross counties — were under suspension from sending inmates to state prisons as of last week, Smith said.
DeWine said Wednesday that addressing the outbreak of the virus behind bars is a collaborative effort.
“Jails have problems just like DRC has problems,” DeWine said. “No one wants COVID in either one of them.”
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