Miami-Dade County Jail is one of the largest jail systems in the United States, with an average of 4,000 inmates spread across its three main detention facilities. For many of the guards and inmates here, it’s hell on Earth.
But sometimes, the people inmates expect to protect them can become part of the danger. Between 2020 and 2023, there were a total of 1,185 use-of-force incidents, and that’s only the ones the guards themselves reported. None of them led to the officers losing their jobs.
The problem became especially visible at the Metro West Detention Center. Use-of-force incidents skyrocketed over a three-year period. In 2019, there were 198. In 2022, that number jumped to 380.
Officials explained that 60 percent of the incidents were due to officers trying to break up fights between inmates. But in some cases, the officers took things a little too far.
In August 2022, Luigi Cruz was hospitalized following an attack by corrections officer Delman Lumpkin. While handcuffed, Cruz claims he was hit 23 times in what he described as a brutal beating.
“The blows to the head and to the neck area continued. It continued, it did not stop.”
Cruz filed a complaint with the Miami-Dade Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation in 2023, and it turned out this officer had a history of abusing inmates.
In 2019, video footage showed Lumpkin throwing 15 punches in just 10 seconds against inmate Mike Neal, who was handcuffed and using a cane to walk. Before the video footage was released, Lumpkin claimed he was acting in self-defense after Neal attempted to hit him with his cane.
Initially, Neal was arrested for aggravated assault, even though he was the victim in this case. After video evidence revealed what really happened, the felony charge against Neal was dropped, and Lumpkin was suspended for 30 days.
Reports indicated that Neal had actually gone to Lumpkin’s supervisors, claiming the officer had threatened him prior to the assault. Sadly, he was ignored until it was too late.
The Forgotten Floor revealed another side of the problem. Until its closure in 2014, a dedicated area for inmates suffering from mental illnesses occupied the ninth floor of the Pre-Trial Detention Center. The psych ward was the furthest thing from a rehabilitation center, earning the nickname “the forgotten floor.”
In 2006, CBS News investigated its horrific living conditions and inmate abuse. Inmates wore robes without sleeves and no shoes, and there were no mattresses in any of the cells. In one instance, an inmate resorted to drinking toilet water to quench his thirst.
Over the course of just a few months in 2013, three inmates died while in custody on the ninth floor. One inmate, Juaquin Cairo, died from internal bleeding after another inmate assaulted him. His injuries weren’t taken seriously by guards until it was too late.
Then, in 2016, Mark Young, a former inmate on the ninth floor, filed a lawsuit against Miami-Dade County Jail and eight officers after he was severely assaulted. His crime? Trying to clean feces off the walls of his cell.
Young was beaten so badly by correction officers that he needed emergency surgery to remove his spleen and stop internal bleeding.
But inmates weren’t the only ones in danger.
Janel Navarro worked at Miami-Dade for almost 25 years, but on December 7, 2021, her job as a corrections officer nearly killed her. An inmate picked something up off the floor, ran towards her, stabbed her with whatever he had in his hand and punched her on the side of her head.
Navarro believed the inmate should never have been cleared for general population, given his history of violence.
“If it wasn’t for the unit and the rapport I had with my inmates, I firmly believe I would have died.”
These incidents highlight a system where violence could come from either side of the bars. As Bryce Peterson explained, prisons and jails are violent places, and it is usually a combination of the prison environment, the people inside and a lack of proper controls that allows these situations to happen.
