What The Hell Is Going On In Flint’s Jail?

Feb. 18, 2016 (Mimesis Law) — While some Flint residents had the option to drink bottled water, the prisoners in the Genesee County Jail had no choice but to drink lead contaminated water, even after Mayor Karen Weaver announced a state of emergency.

“We’re just in a heck of a bind,” Robert J. Pickell, the Genesee County sheriff said last October, after he was notified that the Genesee County Health Department had declared a public health emergency due to dangerously high levels of lead in the tap water. Sheriff Pickell arranged for bottled water.

It’s expensive, but my concern is if one of the inmates got sick on the lead, we’d have a lawsuit which would be a lot more expensive than the water.

But only five days later, priorities “shifted,” and the jail abruptly switched back to the city supply after the sheriff said a water quality test showed the water was safe.

The prisoner situation was brought to light when Jody Cramer, a former inmate and Flint resident, went to the press after he was released after serving a two-month sentence in early February. Cramer worked in the kitchen and helped distribute bottles of water to other inmates. He said he cooked and cleaned with the lead-laced water, the same used in showers by other inmates. When Cramer called home to speak to his family, his mother told him the water was not okay. She called the jail repeatedly and was told the facility was using a filtration system.

This was a bad situation. Pregnant women were drinking that water for months, and ingesting lead while pregnant leads to miscarriages, brain damage and other permanent bad shit. But then, the deputies didn’t drink the water.

Many inmates made complaints due to the fact that the deputies did not drink from the faucets. We were consistently told the water was good. In jail, we were drinking from the taps. Our food was being made from the taps.

Sheriff Pickell denied that jail staff received better treatment than inmates. He told ABC7:

Unless [staff] brought the bottled water from home, I mean I would have no way of knowing that, but I wasn’t providing them with anything. I think when we started providing the inmates that’s when we started providing staff.

But then again, if everyone else in Flint had to guzzle this dreck, who cares about a bunch of inmates? After all, if the screws can bring bottled water from home, why can’t the inmates?

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