Whether the Harris County, Texas, jail is a particularly bad one in the scheme of jails is a question better left to locals.  Having never been there, I know nothing about it. But there’s nothing unusual in jails being thought of as unpleasant places, making the commentary on the website of  Stradley Chernoff & Alford uncontroversial:

The jail personnel, especially in Harris County, seem to take a perverse pleasure in making the jail visit as unpleasant as possible. Their actions sometimes border on the sadistic, and the client who is finally released on bail, fatigued, dehydrated and humiliated, vows never to go back.

This isn’t exactly a rare complaint, particularly as regards the treatment of visitors to jail elsewhere, who regularly complain about inappropriate touching, outrageous disrespect as if they’re some lesser species, and a laundry list of abusive, often arbitrary, demands and requirements.  After all, they’re there to visit “criminals,” presumptions and fact notwithstanding, and therefore unworthy of human treatment.

So, Harris County jail, and its Jefe, Sheriff Adrian Garcia, gets poked.  Hardly unexpected.

But then somebody started to cry because of the hurtful comments.  As  Mark Bennett explains, that’s a surprise.  You would think the guy in charge of a jail was a Big Boy, able to take a poke in stride.  Not so.

But Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia’s in-house flack, Alan Bernstein, got a burr under his saddle and rattled off an indignant  letter to “Legal Assistant” at the firm:

So I hope you will live up to your principles by deleting from said web site this inflammatory and highly dubious statement: “The jail personnel, especially in Harris County, seem to take a perverse pleasure in making the jail visit as unpleasant as possible. Their actions sometimes border on the sadistic, and the client who is finally released on bail, fatigued, dehydrated and humiliated, vows never to go back.”

I’ve got to admit, there are some crafty “weasel words” in there. It says that jail personnel in Harris County “seem to” take a perverse pleasure in making the jail visit as unpleasant as possible. But the damage of an unproven allegation has been done regardless.

It’s unclear what “damage” Bernstein, a former newspaper reporter who now serves to make sure that only nice things are written about the jail, is talking about.  Winning “Jail of the Year?”  Getting a centerfold in “Jail Digest?”  If a jail has a flack, there must be a reason, because it’s not like bad press is going to ruin its business and leave it without customers.

Like Bernstein, I’m particularly sensitive to “crafty ‘weasel words’.”  As “weasel words” go, however, these are neither particularly crafty nor, in fact, weasel words.  Often, the inclusion of such language, particularly when used in multiples, tells me that somebody wants to say something mean about someone or has no guts to stand up to the challenge, allowing them an out on the back end.  Here, as Bennett correctly notes, it’s a matter of imputing motive to some other person, which can only be based on the manifestations of conduct.  We can’t say for sure what someone else is thinking, and thus words that would be weaselly in one context are necessary for accuracy in another. 

But I suspect Bernstein knows that, being a newspaper guy and all, and just sought the opportunity to toss in “crafty ‘weasel words'” as a means of denigrating the commentary.  Talk about crafty!  When Sheriff Garcia picked his flack, he chose wisely.  Alan Bernstein knows how to turn a phrase.

This isn’t a criticism of Bernstein, who is just doing his job.  The public relations guy is charged with making the place look good in the public eye.  And when some “Legal Assistant” writes something that makes the place look bad, or makes his boss feel sad, it’s his role to do what he can to deal with it.  Indeed, as Robb Flickman notes in a comment to Bennett’s post, he’s long found Bernstein to be an honest and helpful fellow.  But even honest and helpful fellows have a job to do.

The underlying problem isn’t that Bernstein is trying to strong arm the firm into removing its comment.  That Sheriff Adrian Garcia is a sensitive soul doesn’t make him a bad person, though guys who run jails aren’t usually delicate teacups.  The problem is that they’re treating this as a public relations problem rather than a reflection of a deeper problem, that the actions of jail personnel “border on the sadistic.”

In his letter to the firm Bernstein offers, “If you have [specific evidence], please provide it to me and I will relay it to jail commanders for corrective action.”

What planet does Bernstein live on? The offer to relay evidence to supervisors is like an offer to whitewash abuse. The chain of command in a police department does not root out misconduct. That’s why internal-affairs divisions exist.

Allegations of abusive conduct at jails are particularly problematic, as it’s invariably a matter of a pissing contest between inmate or visitor and guard, the battle being a foregone conclusion, and given the control a jail has over the well-being of the inmate, there is enormous concern about the price to be paid for complaining.  It’s one of those instances where, right or wrong, you lose.

Whether the fault for this is Bernstein’s or Garcia’s can’t be said, as whatever was discussed about the handling of this criticism isn’t available for outside view.  This is probably for the best, given that the sight of Sheriff Garcia weeping at the hurtful words written about his jail are likely too much to bear.  But it raises an important question:

Steph Stradley asks, “doesn’t the Sheriff’s Department have better things to spend their money on than scouring the web to find unhappy words about them and send long, whiney letters?” I know it’s a rhetorical question, but I’ll answer it anyway. Sure it does: it could spend its P.R. money investigating conditions in its jails.

Which lead ineluctably to one conclusion:

That Sheriff Garcia is more interested in trying to stifle criticism than in investigating abuse helps explain why abuse persists.

And that strikes me as much better reason to cry. It hurts when someone suggests your people are sadists.  It hurts more if they’re right. If you don’t want to be hurt, then fix the problem.