By C1 Staff
WASHINGTON — A former D.C. inmate is suing the city and the Department of Corrections for forcing him to clean up another inmate’s messy suicide.
According to NBC Washington, Keith Johnson claims he was “ordered” to clean up the bloody jail cell of a fellow inmate who’d killed himself just minutes earlier. Johnson’s suit alleges the experience was traumatic and should’ve instead been completed by trained staff or an expert crime scene cleanup contractor.
He claims he now suffers from a diagnosed mental health condition that was exacerbated by the work assignment.
He was serving a one-year jail term in 2013 at the Department of Corrections jail in southeast D.C. for making threats by phone.
During his sentence, former U.S. Labor Department attorney Paul Mannina killed himself in his cell with a razor blade.
Once his body was removed, jail staff assigned Johnson the task of cleaning up the rest of the human remains in the cell, according to the suit.
Johnson said he was not trained in proper cleanup of blood and was not given proper equipment to do so. He also claims jail staff looked on from a distance as he and a fellow inmate worked for three hours to complete the cleanup.
The DOC declined to comment on the lawsuit, but did say that inmates are free to refuse a work assignment.
NBC news did find that several regional jails and prisons do commonly assign inmates the task of cleaning bodily fluids.
“The cleanup job is a detail and official job within the department that inmates volunteer to do and they get extensive training,” said a spokesman for Maryland’s state prison agency.
“We have blood-borne pathogens training for offender medical workers, laundry workers and maintenance workers that assist staff in cleaning,” said another spokesperson for Virginia’s state prison agency.
However, the spokesperson did acknowledge that the inmates would never be asked to touch a human body or remains.