What'S The Worst Prison In America

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In December 2013, 53-year-old Emmett Stanley Martin bled to death while imprisoned at the Oklahoma County Jailafter a dispute with 54-year-old jail supervisor Andres Sanchez.

Over the past 15 years, the 13-story jail, in Oklahoma City has had many alleged problems, fromunsanitary conditions to negligent care of inmates, poor medical care, and outright abuse of inmates.

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A clerical worker at the jail posted a YouTube video claiming inmates had been beaten right in front of her. The majority of those held at the jail have yet to be convicted of a crime, according to the Department of Justice.

Martin, a native of nearby Midwest City, was arrested in late November 2013 over a small-claims case involving an unpaid legal bill of $1, 250 dating to 2006.Martin was cited for contempt of court in 2011 and a judge issued a warrant for his arrest.

On December 2, 2013, jail supervisors tried to give Martin an orange jumpsuit to change into before they moved him to a new cell, according to an affidavit filed in the criminal case against Sanchez. Martin refused to hand over the clothes he had been wearing, and stuck his hand out of his cell to prevent officers from locking him in.

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From there things got violent. Sanchezsubdued Martin with the help of other officers, pushing his face onto the jail floor outside the cell and jerking his arms up over his head, according to the affidavit. In the process, Sanchez and other officers allegedly delivered numerous blows to Martin and dislocated his right shoulder, causing massive internal bleeding and hemorrhaging. Martin had a punctured lung and broke several ribs. He bled to death early the next day.

Martin's death doesn't appear to be an isolated incident. The Oklahoma County Jail has long been plagued by violence between fellow inmates and abuse byofficers on inmates.

The Department of Justice started investigating the jail in 2003. In 2009, the DOJreleased a report detailing the awful conditions at the jail, including unsanitary facilities, fire hazards, lack of clothing or showers, excessive inmate-on-inmate violence, and use of excessive force by jail officers.

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The report found the jail was wildly overcrowded (with twice its rated capacity) and understaffed, which put undue stress on both inmates and officers. The report cited “an inordinately high number of use of force incidents” for the jail and noted that, often, by the time officers began using force, detainees were no longer resisting.

Sanchez's attorney, Michael Johnson, told The Oklahoman that Martin died of injuries from a second, later struggle with other officers. Johnson declined to comment to Business Insider for this story.

In January, a judge ruled that prosecutors had enough evidence to go to trial. A key thing in the case is a video of the incident showing Sanchez subduing Martin with the help of other officers. The video has not been made public.

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Jason Ruegge, an instructor with the Oklahoma County Sheriff’s Office, testified that Sanchez’s actions were far more extreme than what officers are trained to do.

“In my opinion, it’s punitive and it’s excessive. It was outside the scope of training and unreasonable, given the totality of the circumstances, Ruegge said during testimony, according to the Oklahoman.

Oklahoma County Sheriff John Whetsel, right, walks with Maj. Jack Herron, left, jail administrator, in the common area of a pod at the Oklahoma County Jail in Oklahoma City on Friday, Feb. 13, 2015. AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki

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Similarly, Oklahoma County Sheriff John Whetsel, who is in charge of the jail, told The Oklahoman that the incident was “a disappointment.”

In December 2012, one-time inmate Dionne McKinney won a$39, 000 jury award after alleging jail detention officers beat her without provocation during a DUI arrest in 2003.

By Timmons' estimation, there have been close to 75 lawsuits against the jail by inmates who have been abused by officers. According to her, most of the lawsuits never make it to trial. Timmons explained why the cases are so hard to prosecute.

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The officers either beat up people that were drunk or accused of some sort of drinking issue, Timmons said. Then you can cover up the beatdown by saying they fell or were belligerent and had to be subdued. There was a pattern to the beat-downs I saw there.

“[The officers] take some abuse over there, she said, but I see no excuse for some of the brutality that happens over relatively minor infractions.”

Martin was not the first inmate to die at the jail. In 2007 Christopher Beckman died of injuries sustained during a struggle with jail officersafter his arrest for a DUI. His family got $1 million in damages over the death.

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The criminal trial against Andres Sanchez will take place over the next year, followed by an expected civil case that could run into damages that could near a million dollars.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department is keeping an eye on the jail.After the release of the report, the DOJ gave the jail five years to make appropriate changes to the jail (detailedin this memorandum of understanding) while it remained under an open investigation. That deadline passed in November. The DOJhas said it will continue to monitor the jail.

Watch: Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller explains how compelling stories are what really shape our economy — from bitcoin to Trump's presidency“If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.” So goes the old saying. Yet conditions in some American facilities are so obscene that they amount to a form of extrajudicial punishment.

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Doing time is not supposed to include being raped by fellow prisoners or staff, beaten by guards for the slightest provocation, driven mad by long-term solitary confinement, or killed off by medical neglect. These, however, are the fates of thousands of prisoners every year—men, women, and children housed in lockups that give Gitmo and Abu Ghraib a run for their money.

The United States boasts the world’s highest incarceration rate, with close to 2.3 million people locked away in some 1, 800 prisons and 3, 000 jails. Most are nasty places by design, aimed at punishment and exclusion rather than rehabilitation; while reliable numbers are hard to come by, at last count 81, 622 prisoners were being held in some form of isolation in state and federal prisons.

Thousands more are being held in solitary at jails, deportation facilities, and juvenile-detention centers. Nearly 1 in 10 prisoners is sexually victimized, by prison employees about half of the time—more than 200, 000 such assaults take place in American penal facilities every year (PDF), according to estimates compiled under the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act. Suicides, meanwhile, account for almost a third of prisoner deaths, per the Bureau of Justice Statistics, while an unknown number of fatalities result from substandard nutrition and medical care.

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While there’s plenty of blame to go around, and while not all of the facilities described in this series have all of these problems, some stand out as particularly bad actors. We’ve compiled this subjective list of America’s 10 worst lockups (plus a handful of dishonorable mentions) based on three years of research, correspondence with prisoners, and interviews with reform advocates concerning the penal facilities with the grimmest claims to infamy. We will be rolling out profiles of the contenders over the next 10 days, complete with photos and video. To start off, let’s travel to Florence, Colorado, to visit the “Alcatraz of the Rockies.”

The basics: Known as ADX, and nicknamed the “Alcatraz of the Rockies, ” this is among the most secure prisons in the world—and one of the most isolating: Many of its cells, fashioned out of poured concrete with solid steel doors, are equipped with built-in showers and automated chutes that open onto private concrete “exercise yards, ” such that occupants need never see a guard or fellow prisoner—much less a visitor. One former warden interviewed by

Some ADX prisoners have killed guards or prisoners at other facilities. But many others land here by virtue of their notoriety or politics. Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, shoe bomber Richard Reid, and Oklahoma City conspirator Terry Nichols are all notable personages, to be sure, but none of them has been shown to present any special security risks in an ordinary prison environment. Many of those housed at ADX are Muslims serving time for low-level terrorism offenses—such as Syed Fahad Hashmi, convicted of helping to supply Al Qaeda with socks and rain ponchos.

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The backlash: ADX residents have been the plaintiffs in a number of lawsuits claiming cruel and unusual punishment. Consider the following quote from a class-action filed on the prisoners’ behalf last June, keeping in mind that the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has a policy against housing the mentally ill at ADX:

Many prisoners at ADX interminably wail, scream, and bang on the walls of their cells. Some mutilate their bodies with razors, shards of glass, sharpened chicken

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