Dominic Coschino, a recent U-M undergraduate, has published We Live 24/7 in Hell: Detroit’s Wayne County Jail, 1968-76, a a multimedia report that chronicles the inhumane conditions and racist oppression in Detroit’s Wayne County Jail from 1968-1976. Then as now, a large majority of those incarcerated were poor African Americans in pretrial detention and convicted of no crime. The report reproduces dozens of documents about the experiences of incarcerated people, including affidavits and testimony from the lawsuit filed by a radical coalition.
In the overcrowded jail–declared “unfit for human habitation” by a watchdog group in 1968–people arrested for minor offenses or for no crime at all slept on the floor amid raw sewage, faced beatings from the “goon squad,” were thrown into “the hole” for complaints, and on multiple occasions committed suicide. By 1971, 85% of those held in the jail were African American, and 90% were poor. Their testimonies describe guilty pleas just to escape the jail (by going to prison), miscarriages, attempted suicides, brutality and racist abuse, and deprivation of medical care.
View the full report here. View supporting infographics here.
Researched and created by Dominic Coschino for the DCC-Mellon partnership and its Detroit as a Carceral Space research initiative.
