Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 27, 1990 TAG: 9005270156
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium
"We have had a terrific amount of assaults on whites by blacks," Winston said. The assaults, the most recent occurring Thursday morning, led Winston to move the white inmates later that day.
While Winston insists that the move does not constitute inmate segregation, it will leave Cell Block G-1 with all black inmates. G-1 is where most people awaiting trial are held. There are no whites-only areas in the jail.
The arrangement may fly in the face of a 1978 federal court order ordering Winston to end segregation at the jail. When U.S. District Judge Robert Merhige Jr. issued the order, the jail then had blacks-only sections which Winston said then were needed for security reasons.
The 1978 court order came after a former inmate sued, contending that he had been the subject of racial discrimination because he was housed in a blacks-only section of the jail. The former inmate was awarded $250 by Merhige.
The City Jail was built in 1964 and designed to hold 624 people. It regularly houses more than 1,000. The jail population on Thursday included 957 black inmates and 154 white inmates.
Winston said the whites are now being held in a section of the jail previously reserved for inmates who are sent on work details throughout the city. Many of those inmates are black.
"We put them in with a group where we felt like we knew the people we were putting them in with," Winston said. That dormitory now has a more equitable mix of blacks and whites, he said.
Winston argued then that racial balancing was necessary because "serious security difficulties might arise and in the past have arisen where a small white inmate population is evenly distributed among the total inmate population."
"We've never segregated and we're not segregating it now," Winston said Friday. "I just tried to alleviate the problem on G-1."
Winston filed suit in December 1988 in an effort to force the state to remove 289 felons from the jail. That suit was settled in February 1989 when the city agreed to build a 100-bed addition to the jail and the Department of Corrections agreed to remove felons from the jail within 90 days of their sentencing.
The jail is supposed to house only people who are awaiting trial, who have been convicted of a misdemeanor or who have been convicted of a felony and are awaiting assignment to prison. However, because of crowded prisons, the jail had been used in recent years to house felons with sentences up to five years. Such inmates usually are paroled within a year.
Winston said racial attacks are nothing new at the jail. In fact, Winston himself last month was sued by a former jail inmate - a white man - who alleges that he was beaten in a "racially motivated" attack there in November 1988.
The sheriff said his decision was "related to the lawsuit" but was not made because of it.
by CNB