As the D.C. Council inches closer to fully approving legislation that makes the expansion of pretrial detention permanent, a District grandmother continues to worry about her grandson, one of the D.C. Department of Corrections (DOC)’s youngest residents.
This grandmother, who requested anonymity, told The Informer that, nearly three years after his arrest, her grandson still awaits his day in court while under the constant threat of physical harm inflicted by other D.C. jail residents.
These incidents of violence, the grandmother said, often happen within sight, and with the assistance of correctional officers.
“The officers do the picking and if they don’t like you, they [let them] hem you up and walk away,” the District grandmother said.
She spoke about a recent assault that landed her grandson in Howard University Hospital and, later, the jail infirmary.
“When [he got jumped], the guards came running, handcuffed him and slammed him. They…pulled him by his hair off the unit,” the grandmother continued. “He knew he had to fight and he did…he had stitches over his eye, a concussion, fractured rib and throwing up blood.”
According to the grandmother, this has been par for the course since her grandson entered DOC’s Central Detention Facility (CDF).
As she recounted, each visit often included a story from her grandson about an incident of physical or emotional violence experienced at the hands of other residents and jail personnel.
Such conditions, the grandmother said, began to weigh on him.
“I noticed a change within three months, maybe sooner,” she said. “He was telling me he had to watch his back, even [while] taking a shower. It was so bad, they put him on lockdown for five or six months, on and off.”
After what she described as several inquiries to jail officials, this D.C. grandmother said the search for accountability seems futile, and even deadly for her and her family.
“These guys know what they’ve done,” the grandmother said. “They did this to him and they say you can’t do no snitching. They will kill you for that.”
DOC didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
The Perils of Pretrial Detention: A Deeper Dive
Under what’s called a rebuttable presumption, a judge is authorized to hold a defendant in jail out of the belief that the defendant poses a danger to the community or is a flight risk. They often do so at the request of a prosecutor, and with the evidence before them.
This process happens as part of an arraignment, during which the attorney representing the defendant can challenge the presumption that the streets will be safer with their client behind bars.
In 2023, the D.C. Council approved emergency legislation that, among other things, temporarily expanded the use of a rebuttable presumption for defendants charged with armed and unarmed violent crimes. The legislative body later followed up with the Secure DC Omnibus Amendment Act, which included an amendment sanctioning a study about pretrial detention.
Last year, amid a string of in-custody deaths that the Corrections Information Council reported, advocates organized around demands for accountability and improved conditions at D.C. Jail.
A May report released by the Office of the D.C. Auditor, in partnership with the Council for Court Excellence, would later find that the rate of in-custody deaths at DOC’s CDF and Central Treatment Facility during the one-year audit period stood at more than 3.5 times the national average.
The report also said that overdose-related deaths happened 10 times more than that reported in U.S. jails overall.
As it relates to officer-resident relations, “multiple sources” cited in ODCA’s report mentioned instances when African-born correctional officers physically abused African-American residents, and verbally abused their families and their attorneys. The report said that harassment, misconduct and disrespect are lowering jail staff and resident morale, while infractions by DOC staff run the gamut, from failure to turn on body-worn cameras to smuggling contraband into the correctional facility.
Other findings included: 400 documented incidents of correctional staff use of force; one out of four instances when officials responded to reports of intra-resident use of force; lack of access to medical care and tablets for communication with family; reductions to DOC’s staff training budget; and $30 million in overtime expenditures to combat staff vacancies.
Recommendations by ODCA include: the development of a plan to fill frontfacing staff vacancies and decrease overreliance on overtime; the council’s expansion of access to DOC body-worn camera footage; more sophisticated tracking of mandatory training attendance and deeper emphasis on contraband prevention, body-worn camera requirements; and discussions about discrimination, harassment, and cultural competency in staff trainings.
“Overall, the recommendations go to the issue of adequate staffing, adequate training, adequate supervision,” D.C. Auditor Kathleen Patterson told The Informer. “Any issues with any of those can contribute to any staff people acting inappropriately, including inappropriate use of force.”
In recent months, Chantal Fuller has established bonds with other women who are visiting family members under DOC custody. She said those trips to D.C. Jail revealed what she described as an adversarial relationship between jail personnel and visitors.
The tension, Fuller told The Informer, often stems from how the former engages the latter.
“There are a few who still attempt to treat you with some dignity, but they just feel [that] you don’t deserve to be treated with respect, even though you’re not an inmate yourself,” Fuller said. “But because you are part of this carceral system right now, you’re going to be treated just like everybody else.”
Fuller, a former D.C. Council staffer, recounted instances when she and other visitors, despite registering and arriving early for scheduled hour-long visits, often had waited longer than anticipated to see their friends and relatives.
When it came to officer engagement, Fuller also expressed qualms about what she called inconsistent rules about visitor attire, and restrictions on visitor activity — including bathroom visits and use of the vending machine. Family members who are refused time with their loved ones suffer embarrassment at the hands of correctional officers, Fuller told The Informer.
“There have been situations that I’ve personally witnessed where they’ve accused people of smelling like weed and turning them down for a visit when they did not smell like weed at all,” she said. “They said children smelled like weed and gave parents a hard time about that. And it just very much comes across as a power struggle than it does as [a] District government employee delivering a service to residents.”
For Fuller, the buck stops with the D.C. Council, a legislative body that she deemed ill-prepared to advance policy of benefit to the District’s most marginalized residents, especially in the years after lawyers representing Jan. 6 insurrectionists and the U.S. Department of Justice brought local jail conditions to national prominence.
“It’s a reminder that these council members need to be hiring people from these communities,” Fuller said. “There shouldn’t be a reason why there’s not east of the river representation in every single council office, both ward [level] and at large.”
Looking Back: The Council Discusses Pretrial Detention
Weeks after the release of ODCA’s report, the D.C. Council engaged in discussion, not about D.C. Jail conditions, but the effects of pretrial detention.
That robust discussion on the dais resulted in the council’s first-reading approval of the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) Training Academy College Credit Opportunity Amendment Act of 2025, otherwise known as the Peace DC Omnibus Amendment Act.
If fully approved in its current form, this bill will make permanent the council’s expansion of pretrial detention for most violent crimes — except second-degree burglary and robbery where there’s no significant harm to human life. Other provisions focus on: D.C. Access to Justice; violence interruption and safe passage programming; survivors benefits for first responders.
D.C. Councilmembers Robert White (D-At large) and Brianne Nadeau (D-Ward 1) voted in opposition while D.C. Councilmembers Kenyan McDuffie (I-At large) and Janeese Lewis George (D-Ward 4) voted “present.”
Before his “no” vote, White warned against solidifying pretrial detention without the support of data directly tying it to a reduction in violent crime.
“About four months before we passed Secure DC, crime in the District started to decrease, and we have no data to show us that the expansion of pretrial detention has, in fact, made us safer,” White said during the council’s June 17 legislative meeting. “We do know that it has impacted justice when people are incarcerated. As they await trial, innocent until proven guilty, they lose their job, they lose their housing.”
Later in his remarks, White, speaking on the disproportionate number of Black people currently in custody, touted the need for exploring the factors that compel crime, rather than relying on pretrial detention as a solution.
“We keep adding on to this very broken system that is increasingly pushing people of color into incarceration… often not with data, but with these notions of what is going to help, even when there’s no data to support it,” White said. “So I want to make sure that I don’t give the [sense that] we abdicate our responsibility to safety, but I do want to make sure we appropriately balance safety with justice, and we make sure at least we have data to back up the things we’ve tried today.”
The theme of data-informed decision making remained prominent in Peace DC discussions, particularly when the council, in an 8-4 vote, later approved an amendment by Lewis George and D.C. Councilmember Charles Allen (D-Ward 6) striking out of provision of the legislation that expands the powers of special police officers on WMATA transit.
Before that, the council approved an amendment that D.C. Councilmember Brooke Pinto (D-Ward 2) introduced to allow MPD, in partnership with a local university, to award one-third of the college credit hours needed to become a sworn officer. In his remarks, McDuffie expanded the discussion about police officer staffing by highlighting what he called the struggle to make that career field more attractive to young Black D.C. residents from marginalized communities.
“I think it has something to do with the way that policing has impacted communities of color over the last several years,” McDuffie said. “I think we have turned, or we are on the verge of turning the page on some of the horrible things that happened five years ago but we have some ways to go.”
Minutes later, while weighing in on the issue of pretrial detention, McDuffie asked Pinto to cite “specific hard evidence” that the practice is making the city safer.
Pinto, in response, said pretrial detention wasn’t the only piece of the puzzle in quelling violent crime.
“The council made these changes in July of 2023, after which time we saw a precipitous drop-off of violent crime, the biggest delta that we’ve seen in years,” Pinto said on June 17. “Now, could you argue there are other interventions going on in the city at the time? Absolutely. I’m the first to say this is an ecosystem. We all need to work towards safety. I don’t think there’s ever one legal change that we make that fixes all of our challenges, but that is one piece of data.”
Along the Path to a Second Reading
The second reading of the Peace DC Omnibus Amendment Act is scheduled for July 1. Pinto recently told The Informer that she has no intention of removing the pretrial detention provision, especially with the expansion scheduled to expire on July 15.
“I studied this issue for months before I proposed it in [the] Prioritizing Public Safety emergency [legislation] in July of 2023,” Pinto said. “I do think it is one of many factors that has helped drive down crime …and I do not think it is a tool that we should take away from our criminal justice system in this moment.”
By the afternoon of June 24, neither White nor Nadeau, both in the throes of committee-level budget markups, had spoken with Pinto about the legislation. They however said that they would like to see the removal of the pretrial detention provision.
“My concern remains that the expansions to pretrial detention are not rooted in data that demonstrates the benefit to the community,” Nadeau said, “and rather could cause harm to the community because of what we know about the way that pretrial detention can actually create more harm.”
White spoke similarly about pretrial detention.
“We can’t do things to pacify people, that don’t make us safer, particularly those things [that] have a real consequence on people’s lives,” White told The Informer. “And for too long with public safety, legislators shoot from the hip and people suffer. And we’ve got to do better than that.”
During the latter part of May, the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, as mandated in emergency public safety legislation approved in 2023, released its analysis of pretrial detention, before and after the passage of the Secure DC omnibus bill.
The report confirmed a 14 percentage point increase in adults detained for violent offenses since the passage of Secure DC. However, CJCC couldn’t detect “meaningful patterns” that assert that a change in the frequency of “papered rearrests” — when alleged offenders reoffend while awaiting trial — between 2023 with the first expansion of pretrial detention and Secure DC.
On the morning of June 17, Frankie Seabron criticized Pinto’s inclusion of the pretrial provision, especially in light of CJCC’s findings. She revealed her intent to press the council member, between first and second reading, for changes to that portion of the Peace DC Omnibus Amendment Act.
The finalized bill, Seabron said, must show a reverence for the truth.
“What we’re asking for is time and breath to really see what the impact is,” said Seabron, Harriet’s Wildest Dreams’ project manager. “The CJCC report did not show that impact. [Councilmember Pinto] said it herself. So you are taking blanket swaths of legislation and applying it when people are harmed.”
Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, in existence since 2021, conducts a D.C. and Prince George’s County-based court watch program, where members assist Black mothers who are in custody while facing criminal charges. Earlier this month, Seabron and other Harriet’s Wildest Dreams members celebrated the exoneration of Taya Johnson, a D.C. mother who caught an armed carjacking charge carrying the possibility of a 15-year sentence.
“It was the middle of winter [and] she was with her two kids,” Seabron said. “She called an Empower (ride share) [which is] not even supposed to be operating. The driver assaulted her, picked up his camera, and then filmed her.”
For Seabron, Johnson shouldn’t have been forced to prove her innocence from within the confines of D.C. Jail.
“When we read these headlines, when we read these charges, you automatically assume that that person is guilty,” Seabron said. “We live in an America where the Constitution says that we are presumed innocent, and what pretrial expansion does is the opposite.”
Though Johnson, now free and cleared of all charges, gets to return to her family, Seabron said she faces the uphill battle of rebuilding a life lost while in the system.
“We supported her family and her two children,” Seabron said. “Her mother even lost her housing. She now has to go and reapply for all services that she can possibly get. She doesn’t have a job anymore. So now we carry that community weight on top of the fact of hiring a private lawyer.”
Mayor Bowser Weighs In
Shortly before the council’s first reading of Peace DC, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser sent a letter in support of the legislation, challenging the notion that judges abuse their discretion in whether to detain an alleged violent offender.
Bowser’s letter also cited year-to-date reduction in crime as further indication of pretrial detention’s effectiveness.
Earlier this week, the mayor, responding to questions about lack of data exclusively supporting pretrial detention as an effective crime reduction tool, echoed Pinto’s sentiments.
“No one thing is responsible for crime reduction,” Bowser told The Informer as she reflected on the events of the last two years. “I think that the fact that we would move much needed legislation that focused on violent offenders, that focused on shooters, and in the year since we have seen shooting[s] go down…that is part of the package that we moved and we’re gonna keep our foot on the gas.”
As it relates to the conditions at D.C. Jail, Bowser said the District can best address concerns about contraband and the quality of staffing with a new jail facility.
In speaking about a more immediate solution to DOC’s staffing conundrum, Bowser pointed to the Fiscal Year 2026 Budget Support Act, which, to the chagrin of workers’ rights and paid family leave advocates, includes a provision reducing flexibility in D.C. government paid leave.
“That will make more of our employees available,” Bowser said. “We will have less overtime, and we believe we would have safer conditions.”
