“Like I was less than human”: Inmates describe cruel treatment in Trumbull County jail

For as long as anybody can remember, there have been stories about people being mistreated in the Trumbull County jail. More recently, there have been news stories and even videos of what goes on inside the jail.

A Warren resident collected the following accounts of official cruelty in the Trumbull County jail. The names of people and the dates of their detention have been redacted to protect their identity.

It wasn’t just people detained in the jail who were willing to blow the whistle on the abuse happening inside. It was also nurses and correctional officers.

Previously, this kind of whistle-blowing only happened once a decade. Now, it’s happening pretty much whenever anybody seems willing to listen.

The letter below was written by someone who worked there for more than a decade.

In the past, this might have been enough to cause an oversight agency to investigate. It’s worth asking why that hasn’t happened, even at the state level with BCI.

These days, it takes not only whistle-blowers but also victim statements. Well, let’s see what we’ve got.

It seems as if many of these complaints were settled out of court or not settled at all because the victims didn’t know how to seek recourse or because there is a dearth of private lawyers ready to ruffle of the feathers of the powerful at the state and local level.

Dr. Malvasi is an important personage. Since 2000, he has been the sole provider of medical services to the Trumbull County jail, and theoretically, is the person who should be calling the shots when it comes to inmates in need of medical care and hospitalization. However, it’s obvious from their stories that he is missing in action, over and over.

It’s not surprising that inmates might complain about how they are treated, but it is surprising to read that the medical assistants also realized something was amiss.

That person was not the only one willing to talk about what they had seen, working at the jail.

Think about that: rinsing the milk out of your cartoon with toilet water. The amount of actionable claims in these complaints is astounding. The jail had an unofficial policy of violating HIPAA, which may or may not be ongoing, but it was explicitly communicated to the staff.

This former employee paints an even darker portrait.

In the letter above, Malvasi tells a staff member to tell a pregnant inmate that she is having a miscarriage and the staff was not going to do anything for her. The staff member, who is also pregnant, refuses to deliver the message.

The letter below was written by a woman who miscarried in Trumbull County jail. We can’t be sure they’re the same as the one above, but the story is similar.

If the remains were buried, they would have told her that, so I think we can be pretty sure that the remains of the fetus were thrown into the garbage. Why else would they refuse to tell her?

Since the staff have little medical training and little supervision, people who need medications or who might normally receive emergency treatment find themselves no recourse.

Predictably, anybody with diabetes will fare especially badly at the Trumbull County jail, if they survive.

Others have had relatives come out with permanent ailments due to their exposure to the conditions in the jail.

There’s also the insidious, official cruelty that takes away the humanity of those unfortunate enough to be indicted, even falsely.

In the Trumbull County jail, they flat-out refuse to provide medical services, on top of bed sheets, clothing, or water to drink or wash.

And they will let people wither away and die, without lifting a finger, as the next letter shows…

So far, we see a very serious pattern of misconduct, but it gets worse. Many people seem to have died due to medical emergencies that all the staff were well aware of but they refused to respond because they think everybody is “faking it.”

The inmate above was not experiencing mental health issues or withdrawal symptoms, but for those struggling with mental health or addiction, Trumbull County jail is far more dangerous.

The fact that Trumbull County inmates experiencing mental health crises and withdrawal symptoms are being repeatedly gaslit and ignored by staff all but guarantees that those who entered the prison with these issues will only experience further harm.

None of the staff or inmates mention any efforts to initiate inmates on medication-assisted treatments like naltrexone, buprenorphine and methadone, which cuts the death rate of addiction significantly. Also given the increased risk of overdose for individuals after a period of incarceration, connecting individuals with maintenance treatment during incarceration is crucial.

Sheriff Paul Monroe has been aware of the problem for years, but it seems like he still hasn’t found a way to provide medical care in a “cost-effective” way, so everyone just goes without.

As if all of the above weren’t bad enough, there’s still more. Much more.

In Trumbull County, it’s not always the in-your-face violence that is the most shocking, although there’s plenty of that at every level of the criminal justice system. What is more disturbing is the casual cruelty of refusing to give insulin to a person with diabetes.

The next letter really illustrates the biggest issue at Trumbull County jail.

According to the good Dr. Malvasi, it’s not his job to provide medical care. Dr. Malvasi thinks of his job more like the doctor hired by a drug cartel to keep their captives alive so they can be tortured.

So, the employees of the Trumbull County jail refuse inmates sanitary napkins. They refuse to let people wear glasses. They refuse diabetics insulin. They won’t provide water. They forced a woman to miscarry a fetus right onto cold concrete.

The cruelty is like something from the darkest pages of American history, and nothing is done about it. These people operate the jail without any concern for consequences, legal or otherwise.

These narratives agree that no matter what ailment an inmate presents, Dr. Malvasi gives them aspirin… if they’re lucky.

And the guards retaliate against anyone who complains.

With these testimonies in mind, it should come as no surprise that Dr. Malvasi’s misconduct in Trumbull County has resulted in numerous federal lawsuits and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal settlements.

Mahoning Matters reported that between 2005 and 2022, Trumbull County’s liability insurer, CORSA, paid over $700,000 to settle 11 claims against Malvasi’s medical practice.

Besides these payouts, why has nothing changed?

In Ohio, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has really lost the thread. Ohio is the first and only state to sell a prison to a private company. In Ohio, the Justice Department has been busy, lured by the violations of federal civil rights laws. In a way, the feds only intervene when a local official essentially forces their hand, doing something so terrible that it shocks the conscience of officials in Washington.

In the past, the DOJ came after prisons where inmates were dying. By pistol-whipping residents, Cleveland cops attracted federal attention.

The Warren Police Department (WPD) attracted the feds’ attention multiple times from 2002 to 2012. An investigation that began when a white cop’s billy club put a gash on a black man’s head in 2002, finally got into gear when the same cops attracted media attention for strip-searching black motorists during routine traffic stops.

From 2012 to 2017, the Justice Department audited the WPD. An outside police chief mentored the new local chief, Eric Merkel, and evaluated the department’s reforms in quarterly reports.

I chronicled around 40 years of Ohio police reform in Blue Mafia: Police Brutality and Consent Decrees in Ohio.

In theory, federal reform efforts will influence other departments in the area because they hear the experiences of their counterparts who were tasked with doing more paperwork and holding back on the brutality.

It’s also possible that a lot of unsavory events happen without attracting federal attention. It’s well known in the police community that when the White House is controlled by Republicans, there won’t likely be any hard-charging federal civil rights investigations.

With the political winds, federal oversight of Warren’s police rushed forward or ground to a halt. If it weren’t for Jeff Sessions lifting the decree, the feds may have taken up residence in Warren.

All that is to say that none of the federal civil rights reform litigation has seemed to have much effect on the way the prisons and jails in Trumbull County operate. They may be among the worst in the country.

What inmates had suffered and what the staff had witnessed was so horrific, they were anxious to tell their stories. That’s not common, especially in Trumbull County — where most people who have had a run-in with the law are scared to death to talk about it.

These letters may not be a fair representation of what Trumbull County jail is like for most inmates. But I’d wager that these sorts of tragic, shocking cases are rare for most jails, yet in the case of Trumbull County, these letters were relatively easy to gather.

We won’t even delve into the cases of “improper contact” between inmates and guards, which has been the cause of various terminations and resignations going back many years, especially at Trumbull County Correctional Institute.

Jail is not supposed to be on the terms of the jailed, but it shouldn’t also be chock full of anguish, debasement, and depersonalization. In these letters, there were almost half a dozen deaths that could have been prevented. Imagine how many died without someone on the outside to write about it. And remember, we’re talking about many people in pre-trial detention — they have merely been accused of a crime.

Those wretches rotting away without medical attention in Trumbull County jail are nominally presumed innocent by the justice system. Nevertheless, they are given the message that they are guilty often from the start of the law enforcement funnel into the bowels of the county jail, not only guilty but undeserving of life, liberty, and happiness.

And few people involved in criminal justice express their hatred and bias of the accused more vehemently than Assistant Prosecutor Chris Becker, now running for judge.

Becker tweeted, “Jails and prisons are run according to state and federal laws. 99% of the problems in them are the inmates in them… They act like animals on the outside and when their (sic) caged and treated like the animals they are they ‘protest.’”

Regarding the cost and cruelty of imposing the death penalty, Becker also stated, “It’s not ‘cruel’ it’s justice. It’s only expensive because liberal judges and whacko defense lawyers file absurd and ridiculous motions to delay and stall.”

This attitude is the cause of suffering and death in the Trumbull County jail.