FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

June 11, 2018

Contact: Kristen Powers, kristen@scsj.org, 781.635.8226

Statement from Ian Mance Offered at the Public Hearing Durham County’s Fiscal Year
2018-19 Budget

DURHAM, N.C. - Ian Mance is a staff attorney for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice
and counsel for the family of Unience Fennell, a child who was found deceased, hanging in
the Durham County Detention Facility in March 2017.

Mr. Mance made the statement at tonight’s public hearing regarding Durham County’s
Fiscal Year 2018-19 Budget:

My name is Ian Mance. I’m an attorney at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, and we
along with Hank Ehlies of South Carolina, represent Ms. Julia Graves, who is here with me
tonight. Ms. Graves is the mother of Uniece Fennell, a child, who was found deceased,
hanging in the Durham County Detention Facility in March of last year.

We are here tonight because the proposed budget fails to address long-standing safety
issues at the facility that Niecey’s death, and other recent deaths, have brought to light. We
respectfully urge you to reconsider.

For fifteen years prior to Niecey’s death, the county was aware of a hanging risk that existed
in the facility. In 2002, Sheriff Worth Hill circulated a memorandum warning of hanging
hazards that existed in the window bars, citing four deaths that had occurred over the prior
6 years. Following those warnings, this commission took no action and chose not to spend
the modest sum of money, less than $100,000, that it would have taken to address the
issue.

The next year, in 2003, Sheriff Hill wrote to the County Manager, and again urged that
“every possible attempt be made to correct these structural facility problems as soon as
possible.” Again, this Commission took no action to fund such corrections.

Over the following years, the county was repeatedly warned by state inspectors with the
Department of Health and Human Services that it needed to address the hanging hazards in
the Durham County Detention Facility. This commission did not fund the needed
modifications, and people continued to die. We have had far too many hanging deaths in
the facility since it opened in 1996 and countless attempts. Recently, the Sheriff finally
made some changes designed to mitigate the hanging risk, but the fact remains it took
more than 20 years for action to be taken.

There are other outstanding safety issues at the facility that this budget fails to account for,
and we cannot wait another 20 years—we can’t afford to wait even one more year—for this
to become a priority.

My client’s daughter, Uniece Fennell, was 16 years old when she was placed in DCDF with
adult detainees. In almost any other state, and in many counties here in North Carolina, this
would have never happened.

In 2003, the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act set a national standard of total sight and
sound separation between detained children and adults. Under federal law, children under
18 are not to be housed or to come in contact with adults in detention facilities. A decade
and a half later, Durham County has still failed to meet that standard. Children as young as
16 years old are still placed in dangerous housing situations that they are not in any way
prepared to handle. This practice actively endangers the life of every child in custody. And
this is no small number of people we’re talking about—we average about a dozen and a
half children in detention at any given time.

This budget does not reflect that those children are a priority to this Commission. We are
engaging in a practice that almost every county in America has long abandoned, and our
budget gives no indication that we are attempting to do anything to change that.

Children who are charged as adults in Durham County need to have their own physical
space where their safety can be assured. The Broad Street facility will not take them, and
the detention center, where they’re currently housed, does not have a space set aside for
them. These children either need to have their own standalone facility in Durham County or
the current one needs to be modified to comply with the federal PREA safety standards.

North Carolina began the process last year of raising the age of juvenile jurisdiction. That
alone will not solve this problem for you. By 2020, we will end the practice of intermingling
children and adults, but it’s not going to build or modify any facilities. If this Commission
fails to make this issue a priority, the result will be that children like Niecey will be shipped
out of Durham County to state facilities, where it will be difficult if not impossible for their
parents and loved ones to visit them and provide them with the support they need during
the most difficult time in their lives.

Separately, this Commission needs to take a hard look at the state of medical and
psychiatric care in DCDF, which is inadequate, certainly with respect to child
detainees. There have been far too many deaths in this facility, and a common thread
seems to be inadequate risk assessment at intake and inadequate monitoring of people in
order to identify and intervene with respect to serious medical and psychiatric
conditions. My client did not learn until after her child had passed away in March that she
had been placed on suicide watch the previous November. No one from the jail notified her
or involved her in devising an appropriate response. This sort of thing does not happen in a
facility that is properly attuned and sensitive to the complex mental and medical needs with
which many people in the facility are struggling.

If this Commission is serious about getting a handle on the problems at the jail, it should
revisit this proposed budget and commit to allocating the resources necessary to
addressing these problems. Thank you.

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