Pennsylvania’s county jails, it turns out, are no escape from big-prison problems, jail inspection reports and incidents over the past two years show. Even short time can mean hard time for county jail inmates, most serving sentences of under two years or awaiting trial. By their nature, the county prisons and jails are magnets for trouble, and much of it is never publicized. The state requires counties to report within 48 hours all ‘‘extraordinary occurrences’’ such as murders, suicides, escapes and outbreaks of infectious disease, but the contents of the reports are not released, only the numerical totals.

Across the state each year, about 1,500 extraordinary occurrences are reported — about two per month for the average jail. Most common are assaults by inmates on each other or prison staff — more than 2,500 have occurred since January 2001. Wardens have a self-interest in not reporting the true extent of the problems they encounter, said William M. DiMascio, executive director of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, an advocacy group for prisoners. ‘‘It’s their careers on the line, basically,’’ he said. ‘‘So it’s in their best interests to make sure that the operation looks as good as it possibly can. And often times it’s, ‘(Let’s) not let out what’s bad, let’s not make an issue of things, let’s keep them under cover

‘‘It’s easy to dismiss the significance and the importance of the assaults that took place inside the jail by saying, ’Well, they were all criminals anyway.’ But when you stop to think, it could be someone who, through a series of mix-ups or bad decisions, would get arrested,’’ he said. ‘‘It could be anyone’s son or daughter.’’

source: A/P

The abuse in county correctional facilities are worse than I had ever thought, I always felt sure that my loved one being housed in our local correctional facility would be treated humanely, mainly because the corrections officers that work there live in the same community with these inmates and their families. I had previously thought that because they lived here among us that they could never be so dim-witted as to mistreat the inmates that they are hired to watch over, obviously I was gravely wrong.