The Paterson jail has a scandalous past: Citing "shameful" conditions, a federal judge began reducing inmates' sentences there last year. Abuse allegations had prompted federal immigration officials to yank detainees from the jail in 2005, and U.S. marshals quit placing inmates there last year.
The jail also grapples with the same crowding problems that plague Philadelphia prisons. Built for about 900 inmates, the jail's inmate count this week was nearly 1,400, according to the Herald-News of Passaic County.
Bill Maer, a spokesman for the Passaic County Sheriff's Department, which runs the jail, didn't return phone calls yesterday from the Daily News. But he told the Herald-News that jail officials are working to improve conditions in the 50-year-old building.
In Philadelphia, jails are so crowded that up to 3,000 inmates live three-to-a-cell in two-bunk cells. In such cells, the third inmate's sleeping quarters are a plastic shell on the floor next to the commode.
Such crowding prompted civil-rights attorneys David Rudovsky and Jonathan Feinberg to sue last month over "unconstitutional" prison conditions that, they charged, jeopardize medical care and other basic needs.
Moving inmates to Passaic County would essentially be trading one "dungeon" for another, Rudovsky said yesterday.
"It is extremely disturbing that the city of Philadelphia would even consider moving inmates to a prison that has been condemned by federal authorities in New Jersey as so deficient in protecting basic human rights that the federal government has pulled all their inmates out of there," Rudovsky said.
Rudovsky and other prisoners' advocates say shipping inmates out of Philadelphia is the wrong way to alleviate overcrowding.
