Levine Cava vowed to fix county jails. Court monitor sees ‘failure to competently act’

Jail reform has been a top priority for Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava since taking office two years ago, but the county’s Corrections Department still suffers from poor management and a shoddy safety record after 11 inmate deaths this year, according to a federal monitor.

In an Aug. 12 report, the head of a monitoring group enforcing a 2013 federal improvement plan for the jail system said she was encouraged by the mayor’s statements but discouraged by continued management failures in the jails.

“The on-going harm to inmates is due to the County’s failure to competently act, after all these years. This is more than just a concern; it is alarming,” wrote Susan McCampbell, the monitor in the Department of Justice’s civil-rights case against Miami-Dade over its Corrections Department.

Levine Cava promised jail reform in Miami-Dade

Levine Cava is expected to defend her administration’s efforts to turn around Corrections at a morning hearing Wednesday in Miami in federal court, where the judge overseeing the case is demanding the county explain itself after McCampbell findings.

“This report follows a glaring lack of compliance by the Defendants, resulting in life-threatening consequences to inmates,” U.S. District Court Judge Beth Bloom wrote in an Aug. 30 order calling for the hearing.

UPDATE: Miami-Dade mayor counting on retired Idaho sheriff to turn around troubled jail system

At the heart of McCampbell’s critique is Miami-Dade’s alleged failure to manage more than 4,000 inmates in a way that keeps the population safe.

That includes mental-health services and monitoring to prevent suicides behind bars. Of the 11 deaths this year in county jails, four were self-inflicted, McCampbell said.

She also faulted Miami-Dade’s inability to sort new inmates by their potential for attacking others — a central element to any detention system’s safety plan. It took more than a year for Corrections to produce the investigation findings from two inmate homicides in 2021, and McCampbell called both reports “astoundingly inadequate.”

Federal lawyers sued Miami-Dade in 2011 over jail conditions

The 2013 order, known as a “consent decree,” imposed an improvement plan on Miami-Dade jails under the supervision of court monitors. Miami-Dade Corrections houses about 4,500 people on an average day and plans to spend roughly $430 million this year — about 68% of that from property taxes and other local funds.

In a statement Tuesday, Levine Cava noted the required improvement plan at Corrections started seven years before she took office in late 2020. “I put in place a new leadership team overseeing Corrections and have been working closely alongside our dedicated staff to move forward critical reforms,” she said.

In her report, McCampbell said she would leave her post at the end of 2022, questioning what good she and her team of jail monitors were doing after years of Miami-Dade failing to improve.

“We honestly don’t know what else we can do to propel the County to compliance,” she wrote. She faulted an “internal culture” at Corrections, an agency with “leadership ambivalence” and an “absence of sufficient subject matter expertise.”

McCampbell noted COVID was behind some of the jail deaths in the last two years. She tallied 11 inmate deaths in all at the time of her report and 14 in 2021. But she said both fatality totals leave Miami-Dade Corrections “substantially” above the average U.S. jail system for mortality rates.

On Wednesday, the Corrections Department released an updated summary of inmate deaths. Juan Diasgranados, a Corrections spokesperson, said the department recorded 13 inmate deaths so far this year. Of those, seven were ruled natural causes, four suicides, one a homicide and one remains unclassified, he said.

Federal civil-rights lawyers sued Miami-Dade in 2011, alleging the jail system provided shoddy mental-health care for inmates and wasn’t taking the right steps to prevent suicides behind bars.

A former sheriff now a top consultant at Miami-Dade jails

Earlier this year, Levine Cava rearranged top leadership at Corrections and hired a retired sheriff from Idaho, Gary Raney, as a turnaround consultant in the jail system.

Levine Cava’s management shakeup included the February removal of Daniel Junior, the Corrections director appointed by the prior mayor, Carlos Gimenez.

In August, Levine Cava named retired county police director J.D. Patterson the temporary Corrections director while she searches for a permanent replacement. Patterson was a top deputy to Levine Cava before his appointment, overseeing all public-safety agencies in the mayor’s office.

“I have a long track record of advocacy and service in the social justice arena, and I share a deep commitment to making local government more responsive, more accountable, and more transparent,” Levine Cava, a former social worker and nonprofit director, told Judge Bloom during an April 15 hearing, according to a transcript.

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“I have now taken a deep dive, and will continue to do so, to learn as much as I can to drive these reforms necessary to make our system more efficient, safe and humane for our inmates and our staff,” Levine Cava said.

Levine Cava used COVID relief dollars to slash the charges Miami-Dade inmates pay for telephone calls, and is in the process of ending the $2 daily room-and-board fees county jails bill inmates but rarely collect, leading to credit-history woes once detentions end.

But the COVID-era ban on in-person visitation remains, a morale crusher for inmates and their families, said Maya Ragsdale, director of the Beyond the Bars advocacy group pushing for better treatment of people in jails.

“All they have now are video calls,” she said. “It’s been really, really rough.”

Miami-Dade has satisfied most requirements of jail order

The case against Miami-Dade began under the administration of President Barack Obama, and in a Sept. 16 court filing federal lawyers noted the county has satisfied 154 of the 171 requirements in the original 2013 improvement plan.

Even so, the federal lawyers wrote that Justice “is deeply troubled about the multiple recent deaths, including four suicides and one homicide, in 2022.”

The Sept. 22 death of one inmate, Rodney Latzzis, came after the monitor’s report analyzing 11 deaths at Corrections. The death of Latzzis infuriated his defense attorneys who had repeatedly implored Corrections to keep him in “protective custody” because other inmates kept assaulting him.

Twice earlier this year, a Miami-Dade judge signed orders recommending Latzzis, who was in a wheelchair, be kept separated from other inmates. By law, judges can’t order jails to house inmates in certain facilities or wings.

Latzzis, 34, who was awaiting trial in a human-trafficking case, was in general population at the Pre-Trial Detention Center when he was discovered unconscious in his cell. The Medical Examiner’s Office has yet to determine a cause and manner of death.

One possibility is that Latzzis died of a drug overdose, something that has happened repeatedly in recent years. In one case, two Miami-Dade inmates were indicted for murder for supplying the fentanyl that killed an inmate.

“I think the cause of death is neglect, no matter what the autopsy shows,” said Latzzis’ attorney, Andrew Rier.

This story was originally published October 11, 2022 at 4:02 PM.