Georgia inmates plead to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene: help us with our horrible jail conditions, too
The Whitfield County Jail, in Dalton, Georgia — in the heart of Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s congressional district — offers the “Turtle Suite.”
It’s a small, padded cell that guards put inmates in after stripping off their clothes. It’s designed to prevent suicides, but inmates there tell Raw Story that guards use it for punishment.
Guards also administer lockdowns for no good reason — just another indignity among a slew of problems that plague the facility, inmates say.
“If they don’t feel like doing their job, they find the littlest thing to lock us down in our rooms all day and night,” Amy Seay, an inmate at the jail, told Raw Story via JailATM, a private communication service that lets detainees communicate with their families. One woman, Seay says, begged for migraine medication during a lockdown. The guards ignored her, and “when she woke up on the floor in her own vomit they still didn’t help her.”
Another woman has been bleeding for a month, Seay says, adding that “they haven’t let her see a doctor."
Matthew Bronson, 36, has been detained in the Whitfield County Jail for five months, accused of false imprisonment and battery. He’s pre-trial. Bronson, a former Marine, is a big fan of Greene, the far-right firebrand who, in her second term, has become one of the most nationally loved — and loathed — members of Congress.
But Bronson also says conditions at the jail are rotten. He said he believes that if Greene knew how badly inmates in her district are being treated, she would do something about it.
“Do you work for her?” he asked Raw Story hopefully before being disappointed to learn via the JailATM messaging service that he was communicating with a news reporter, not a Greene staffer.
Still, Bronson expressed optimism that Greene will come to see conditions in the jail herself and do something to improve them.
Greene, after all, has championed the causes of certain Americans she considers unjustly arraigned or unfairly incarcerated.
They just haven’t been Americans who live in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, which Greene represents.
Greene, for example, traveled to Manhattan earlier this month to protest what she views as the unfair treatment of former Donald Trump on the day a judge arraigned him on 34 felony counts stemming from a hush money payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels.
Greene also led several members of Congress on a tour of the District of Columbia Jail where some January 6 riot suspects are detained while awaiting trial.
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These J6ers, as they’re colloquially known, have complained of numerous problems they’ve endured while behind bars: black mold, abuse by guards, malnourishment, inadequate medical care.
"Their due process rights are being violated,” Greene concluded. “And they have been mistreated and treated as political prisoners," Greene told reporters after the D.C. tour.
Seay, Bronson and several other inmates from the Whitfield County Jail told Raw Story that they had never seen Greene during their periods of incarceration.
In response to questions from Raw Story, Greene said in an email that she recently met with elected and appointed officials in Whitfield County and will endeavor to visit the Whitfield County Jail “in the future”.
“We actually discussed the management of jails and the issues they are facing due to drugs flooding across the border under Joe Biden and past closing of mental hospitals during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama eras,” Greene wrote. “Jails are not meant to hold mental health patients and these Sheriffs are doing their best with a bad situation.”
Greene added that she is “concerned about any allegations [of] mistreatment of pre-trial detainees but they must be proven, at this time I’ve seen no formal reports. I’ve toured jails in my district and will continue to do more tours to ensure the civil rights of every constituent are being protected.
“I’m confident the sheriff’s office is doing their absolute best to protect the rights of pre-trial detainees and look forward to visiting the facility in the future to see for myself,” Greene concluded without specifying when she planned to tour the Whitfield jail.
Jail officials and the Whitfield County Sheriff Department did not return several messages left by Raw Story.
Seay says she has no big problem with Greene, even though she disagrees with some of the provocative things her congresswoman says.
But as for the hope that Greene will visit Whitfield and lobby for her and other people behind bars in the district, Seay is skeptical of Greene’s commitment.
“We both know they sweep dirt under the rug,” Seay says. “She is not concerned with inmate rights at all, only what makes her look good.”
‘Georgia is horrible’
Bronson tells Raw Story he served in the U.S. Marine Corps, working primarily on the V-22 Osprey as an avionics technician. He held that job between 2009 and 2014, when he was honorably discharged, he says. He suffers from stress injuries in his neck, back, and shoulder as well as hearing loss, he tells Raw Story. His injuries and time in the Marine Corps make him eligible for VA benefits.
But he says he can’t access them in the jail, and he’s missed multiple routine tests for his conditions. The guards also don’t give him his prescribed mental health medication, he says. He adds that inmates need to pay a fee just to get ibuprofen. Inmates also have to pay for basic hygiene products such as nail clippers, he said.
Bronson describes the facility as “very gross and negligent in nature,” “corrupt” and “very unjust.” He wanted to write a letter to Greene, but he says the guards wouldn’t give him contact information for her office.
Many infractions that land people in the Whitfield jail are probation violations and possession of meth.
Greene has publicly spoken out about meth, albeit to score a political point off liberals: In February 2021, she said that Democrats’ impeachment of Donald Trump was “more addictive than meth.”
Bronson, for his part, is being held without bond.
“Somehow the jail is able to hold [us] for months and months,” he says. “They are only worried with money and not about civil rights and the law at all. There is bullying, unlawful ‘lockdowns,’ no yard time, contaminated food, mold in the showers…”
Other inmates corroborate Bronson’s accounts. His cellmate, Tony Weaver, tells Raw Story that he’s witnessed the former Marine being deprived of medical care.
“It’s bad,” another inmate, Mandy Calhoun, 43, told Raw Story from the Whitfield jail. “We don’t get enough toilet paper. There’s mold here. There’s mold coming out of the vents.”
She says the facility, which houses both women and men, is overcrowded, with up to five people in a room.
As for food, Calhoun says she can barely choke it down.
“It’s very gross. It’s like … leftover sop.”
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Bronson says he’s stopped eating the meat they serve because, as he describes it, it’s an unpalatable mystery substance. He worries he doesn’t get a healthy amount of calories from cornbread, noodles and rice.
“No source of protein at all,” he tells Raw Story.
Like Bronson, Calhoun says that it’s next to impossible to get medical help. Her legal situation, too, is confusing. She didn’t get bond for her crime and says doesn’t know why. According to the Sheriff’s Department, her release date is 2027, four years after her arrest this March.
Seay, who’s behind bars for a probation violation stemming from an expired warrant, says there’s also mold everywhere in the women’s wing and that the food there, too, is barely edible. Hygiene is also a problem, she says.
“The females have a hard time getting pads and toilet paper. It takes medical forever to come back if someone is hurt.”
Like Calhoun, she says that there are five people per cell, which means most of them sleep on the floor, while the bedding that is available is mattresses without stuffing.
“Some people are in fact criminals and belong in jail,” Bronson says. “But Whitfield County believes everyone is. In this jail we are all guilty until proven innocent. This system couldn’t be more screwed up.”
Jail and prison reform advocates say that Greene’s home state is among the nation’s worst when it comes to the treatment of inmates.
“Georgia is horrible,” Whitney Knox Lee, a lawyer with the Southern Center for Human Rights, told Raw Story.
She says that solitary confinement — which is defined as torture after 15 days by the United Nations — is basically the go-to solution for people experiencing a mental health crises behind bars.
“Sometimes clients send us roaches in bags, so we can see what they’re dealing with.”
