WASHINGTON – Rep. Jasmine Crockett has a message for hard-right Republican House members complaining about the conditions facing those detained in the D.C. jail on charges related to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol: Come see what prisoners in Texas endure.
“If we want to go and talk about people that are suffering, we can go visit some jails in Texas, and I can show you what that looks like,” Crockett said.
The Dallas Democrat spoke to reporters outside the D.C. jail Friday afternoon after joining Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and some of the other most diehard Trump-aligned House GOP members on a tour of the facility.
“The DC Jail is mismanaged and violates human rights,” Greene said Friday as she described conditions she saw at the facility on a previous visit as “disgusting.”
Friday’s tour was part of an inquiry Greene and other Republican members of the House Oversight Committee have started into the treatment of Jan. 6 defendants at the jail. They wrote to D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser earlier this month requesting a slew of documents about the jail and those specific prisoners.
“Eyewitness accounts of conditions at the DC Jail Facilities — particularly regarding the treatment of January 6 detainees — paint a picture of despair, hopelessness, and a severe abuse of justice,” they wrote. “No prisoner in the United States should be treated in this fashion.”
Crockett said she and Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., tagged along Friday to fact check any claims that the Jan. 6 defendants are being treated inhumanely. She knows something about jail conditions, based on her years as a public defender and private criminal defense attorney.
She said she’s represented clients who died behind bars. She described sweltering Texas facilities with no air conditioning, where the inmates have limited access to on-site medical care and are expected to perform intense manual labor.
“We literally have people on farms and all kinds of stuff in Texas. I mean, it is bad,” Crockett said, before referencing the inmates in the jail behind her. “These guys are not working… they’re not lifting a finger.”
Jails are inherently dirty, germy places, she said, but they are intended to be deterrents.
“It’s not supposed to be the Ritz Carlton,” she said.
A 2021 surprise inspection by the U.S. Marshals Service did find substandard conditions at the D.C. jail at that time.
Greene took a tour of the facility in November 2021 with then-Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Tyler, and they complained the Jan. 6 defendants were being treated harshly, not being allowed outside enough and facing other deprivations.
On Friday, Greene said the defendants told them they had been made to scrub and paint their part of the jail ahead of the congressional visit. Greene said they are being treated differently than other prisoners in the jail as they are isolated in a separate wing and don’t have access to the same education programs.
“It’s a two-tier justice system, evidently,” Greene told reporters following Friday’s tour. “What we’ve seen all along is the pretrial January 6 defendants are treated like political prisoners.”
But Crockett said based on what she saw Friday, the facility easily passes the basic threshold of humane conditions.
“They’ve got yoga classes. They talked about getting acupuncture,” Crockett said. “They’ve got more than a lot of people in my district have access to.”
And the Jan. 6 defendants appeared to have it better than those in the general population at the jail, Crockett said, describing their accommodations as “suites” while other prisoners are packed into regular rooms.
She said the Jan. 6 defendants have access to tablets with which they can talk to family members. She also noted they have been able to record a song that turned out to be a hit on iTunes.
It’s “nonsense” to describe the Jan. 6 defendants as political prisoners, she said, citing the case of NBA star Brittney Griner, who was held for months in a Russian jail for having two vape cartridges with cannabis oil.
“Brittney Griner was a real political prisoner,” Crockett said.
