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

Lawsuits over Cook County Jail Division 5 fell into two main tracks: a class action challenging group strip searches of male detainees, and individual conditions-of-confinement suits over mold, asbestos, pests, polluted water, and inadequate food and heating. Those cases ran alongside a U.S. Department of Justice investigation that produced a 2010 consent decree, and Division 5 itself was shut down around 2013 or 2014.¹

What Detainees Were Suing Over

Division 5 was part of an aging jail campus with chronic disrepair. Detainees housed there specifically complained of mold in bathrooms and shower rooms, asbestos in the air, polluted water, pest infestations, and inadequate food and heating.²³ Division 5, along with Divisions 1, 2, and 4, was eventually condemned for what detainees and advocates described as inhumane and unsanitary living conditions.⁴

Streeter v. Sheriff of Cook County

Streeter v. Sheriff of Cook County was filed in 2008 as a class action in the Northern District of Illinois. It challenged the jail’s practice of conducting group strip searches of male detainees in Division 5, where groups of up to 100 people were searched simultaneously, standing shoulder to shoulder. Female inmates, by contrast, received individualized searches behind privacy screens.⁵

The plaintiffs sued under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, arguing the searches violated the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process and equal protection guarantees. The court denied the defendants’ motion to dismiss, found the allegations stated viable constitutional claims, and directed the parties toward settlement.⁶

Young v. County of Cook: The $55 Million Settlement

A related strip-search 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 Tom Dart liable for allowing the practice to continue after he took office.⁷

Smith v. Dart

In July 2013, pretrial detainee Donald A. Smith sued Sheriff Dart and other jail officials over conditions in Division 5. Smith alleged he was paid just $3.00 per day for laundry work and that the division suffered from pest infestations, polluted water, and inadequate food and heating. The district court initially found his conditions-of-confinement claims colorable but later dismissed them, and the case was terminated in January 2014. On appeal, the Seventh Circuit appointed counsel and considered whether the lower court had failed to liberally interpret Smith’s filings, as required for people representing themselves.³

Cox v. Dart

Harold Donald Cox v. Thomas J. Dart raised health-related claims about Division 5, including exposure to mold and asbestos. An amicus brief in the case argued that under Supreme Court precedent, detainees did not need to prove a current diagnosable injury to challenge conditions posing an unreasonable risk of serious future harm. The brief also noted that federal courts had previously found asbestos exposure sufficient to meet the physical-injury threshold required by the Prison Litigation Reform Act, even without a current diagnosis.²

The DOJ Investigation and 2010 Consent Decree

The individual suits played out against a federal civil rights investigation. After on-site inspections in 2007, the DOJ issued a 98-page letter in July 2008 documenting systemic failures across Cook County Jail: “serious ventilation issues,” electrical hazards, plumbing deficiencies, and infestations of mice, cockroaches, and drain flies. Investigators described a “culture of abusing inmates,” with verbal disputes between guards and detainees frequently escalating into physical beatings. The intake area was “chronically overcrowded, cramped, chaotic, and insufficiently staffed,” and during one week in March 2007, 591 detainees were sleeping on the floor. The DOJ called the jail’s medical care a “broken and dysfunctional” system and its fire safety “poor.” U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said, “you can’t have conditions where people are dying and being amputated.”⁸

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

Hundreds of Small-Dollar Settlements

Beyond the high-profile 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 by detainees. The county admitted no wrongdoing in any of these deals. The sheriff’s office publicly dismissed many of the underlying lawsuits as the work of inmates with “too much time on their hands,” while some county commissioners viewed the settlements as a cheaper alternative to full litigation, calling the accumulation of claims a “festering sore.”¹⁰

Closure and What Followed

According to a January 2016 announcement by Sheriff Dart, Division 5 had been shut down approximately two years earlier, placing its closure around 2013 or 2014.¹ In November 2016, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and Sheriff Dart announced plans to demolish Divisions 1, 3, and 17, buildings dating to the 1920s that required constant repairs. The demolitions were projected to save more than $3 million annually in operating costs and avoid $188 million in capital expenditures over the following decade.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. That claim fed Mays v. Dart, a class action that forced the jail to implement testing, social distancing, and sanitation measures.⁴¹²

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
Chicago Community Bond Fund. Testimony From Inside Cook County Jail About the Conditions and Needs of Incarcerated People
5
Prison Legal News. Illinois Federal Court Refuses to Dismiss Chicago Jail Strip Search Suit
6
FindLaw. Streeter v. Sheriff of Cook County
7
NBC Chicago. Cook County Jail Settlement Strip Searches
8
Prison Legal News. Cook County Jail Conditions Unconstitutional, Charges Department of Justice
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
12
Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts. Dart COVID Protections Federal Order