Cook County Jail Division 5: Lawsuits, Consent Decree, and Closure

Lawsuits over Cook County Jail’s Division 5 centered on three problems: degrading group strip searches of male detainees, health risks from mold and asbestos, and squalid living conditions including pest infestations, polluted water, and inadequate food and heating. The cases were filed in federal court in Chicago between 2008 and 2013 under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, and they ran alongside a Department of Justice civil rights investigation that produced a 2010 consent decree covering the entire jail. Sheriff Tom Dart shut Division 5 down around 2013 or 2014.¹

What Detainees Were Suing About

Division 5 housed men in a building that had fallen into chronic disrepair. Detainees described mold in bathrooms and shower rooms, asbestos in the air, polluted water, pests, and inadequate food and heating.²³ A 2008 investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division confirmed jail-wide problems including ventilation issues, electrical hazards, plumbing deficiencies, and pest infestations involving mice, cockroaches, and drain flies. The DOJ called the medical care “broken and dysfunctional” and fire safety “poor.”⁴ Division 5, along with Divisions 1, 2, and 4, was eventually condemned as inhumane and unsanitary.⁵

Streeter v. Sheriff of Cook County: Group Strip Searches

The most prominent lawsuit tied directly to Division 5 was Streeter v. Sheriff of Cook County, filed as a class action in the Northern District of Illinois in 2008. The plaintiffs challenged a policy of strip-searching groups of male detainees in Division 5, up to 100 at a time, standing shoulder to shoulder. Female inmates received individualized searches behind privacy screens.⁶

The complaint invoked the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process and equal protection clauses. The court denied the defendants’ motion to dismiss, found the allegations stated viable constitutional claims, and pushed the parties toward settlement.⁷

A related case, Young v. County of Cook, produced a $55 million settlement fund covering up to 250,000 people jailed between January 2004 and March 2009. U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly faulted the jail for the group searches, and a jury found Sheriff Dart liable for letting the practice continue after he took office.⁸

Smith v. Dart: A Pro Se Conditions Case

In July 2013, pretrial detainee Donald A. Smith sued Sheriff Dart and other jail officials over Division 5 conditions. Smith alleged he earned only $3.00 a day for laundry work and that his division had pest infestations, polluted water, and inadequate food and heating. The district court first found his conditions-of-confinement claims colorable, then dismissed them, and terminated the case in January 2014. On appeal, the Seventh Circuit appointed counsel and examined whether the lower court had failed to construe Smith’s filings liberally, as courts must for people representing themselves.³

Cox v. Dart: Mold and Asbestos Exposure

Harold Donald Cox v. Thomas J. Dart raised health claims about Division 5, including exposure to mold and asbestos. An amicus brief argued that Supreme Court precedent lets detainees challenge conditions posing an unreasonable risk of serious future harm without proving a current diagnosis. The brief also noted that federal courts had treated asbestos exposure as sufficient to satisfy the Prison Litigation Reform Act’s physical-injury threshold even absent a present illness.²

The DOJ Investigation and 2010 Consent Decree

The individual Division 5 suits ran alongside a federal civil rights case that swept the whole jail. After on-site inspections in 2007, the DOJ issued a 98-page findings letter in July 2008 documenting a “culture of abusing inmates,” where verbal disputes between guards and detainees regularly turned into beatings. The intake area was “chronically overcrowded, cramped, chaotic, and insufficiently staffed”; during one week in March 2007, 591 detainees slept on the floor. U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said “you can’t have conditions where people are dying and being amputated.”⁴

Those findings produced a 2010 consent decree requiring the jail to improve detainee safety, medical care, and cleanliness. The jail had been under some form of federal monitoring since the 1970s. The sheriff’s office added surveillance cameras, hired more correctional officers, and upgraded medical services. A federal judge lifted the consent decree in June 2017, ruling the jail met all standards for inmate safety.⁹

Hundreds of Small-Dollar Settlements

Beyond the class actions, Cook County approved roughly 230 individual settlements of $1,000 or less between 2015 and 2017, totaling about $101,890, to resolve civil rights claims from detainees. The county admitted no wrongdoing in any of them. The sheriff’s office publicly dismissed many of the suits as the work of inmates with “too much time on their hands,” while some county commissioners treated the payments as cheaper than full litigation and called the pile of claims a “festering sore.”¹⁰

When Division 5 Closed

Sheriff Dart announced in January 2016 that Division 5 had been shut down roughly two years earlier, placing its closure around 2013 or 2014.¹ The closure fit a broader consolidation driven by a shrinking jail population, which Dart credited to expanded electronic monitoring and diversion programs and which he said had dropped more than 20 percent since 2013.¹¹

During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, detainee testimony alleged that some previously condemned divisions were being reopened to house new arrivals, a claim that fed into the Mays v. Dart class action forcing the jail to implement testing, social distancing, and sanitation measures.⁵

1
Cook County Sheriff’s Office. Sheriff Dart Announces Cook County Jail Building Closures
2
U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. Prison Conditions Amicus Brief, Cox v. Dart
3
University of Virginia School of Law. Smith v. Dart, Opening Brief
4
Prison Legal News. Cook County Jail Conditions Unconstitutional, Charges Department of Justice
5
Chicago Community Bond Fund. Testimony From Inside Cook County Jail About the Conditions and Needs of Incarcerated People
6
Prison Legal News. Illinois Federal Court Refuses to Dismiss Chicago Jail Strip Search Suit
7
FindLaw. Streeter v. Sheriff of Cook County
8
NBC Chicago. Cook County Jail Settlement Strip Searches
9
WCBU. Federal Oversight of Cook County Jail Ends After Decades
10
Northern Public Radio. Cook County Settles Hundreds of Lawsuits Over Jail Conditions
11
Cook County Government. President Preckwinkle, Sheriff Dart Announce Demolition of Underutilized Jail Buildings