By Michael O. Allen, Record Staff Writer | Thursday, July 25, 1991
The Record (New Jersey) | Four Star B | NEWS | Page B01
A 1988 federal lawsuit seeking to reduce overcrowding and improve conditions at the Bergen County Jail is nearing a settlement, the state Public Advocate Department says.
“We still have to fine-tune it,” said Audrey Bomse, an attorney for the agency, which represents the inmates. “I would say it’s a matter of months.”
Murshell Johnson, assistant Bergen County counsel, declined to discuss the case.
Patricia Leuzzi, special assistant to Attorney General Robert J. Del Tufo and the lawyer representing the state in the lawsuit, acknowledged that the inmate population and jail conditions were two major topics in the ongoing talks.
The October 1988 lawsuit, filed by the Office of Inmate Advocacy and nine inmates, charged that overcrowding at the jail creates conditions that make it unfit for human habitation and violates inmates constitutional rights.
Bergen County contended during hearings in 1990 that the conditions were not inhuman and that the New Jersey Corrections Department was responsible for the overcrowding. More than 300 of the jail’s roughly 1,000 inmates should be housed in a state prison, Bergen County lawyers charged.
In two recent letters to the state Corrections Department, Bergen County Sheriff Jack Terhune warned that an overload of state inmates was making the county jail unmanageable. Under a state executive order signed in 1981 and renewed every six months since, Bergen County must take 72 state inmates. About 425 inmates now in the jail are state prisoners.
Recently, inmates were put in disciplinary “lockdowns” following a food fight and a separate gang attack.
Keywords: BERGEN COUNTY; PRISON; LAWSUIT; NEW JERSEY; GOVERNMENT
ID: 17350593 | Copyright © 1991, The Record (New Jersey)
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