The 10-page hand printed lawsuit, filed in December, calls the conditions at the state’s Lieber Correctional Institution in Dorchester County “deplorable” and accuses its employees of committing “grossly negligent acts.” It targets the state Department of Corrections, the Department of Health and Environmental Control, and the Department of Agriculture. Report by The Augusta Chronicle.

“An awful, innumerable, and unbelievably overwhelmingly (sic) amount of flies were present in the dining room,” reads the inmates’ complaint, which includes a request for $30,000 in damages.

The inmates who are suing are Patrick L. Booker, 26, convicted of armed robbery, Bobby A. Gilbert, 34, convicted of murder, and Patrick Strozier, 46, who is serving a kidnapping sentence.

Their lawsuit also says that since 2009, the prison officials failed to ensure that inmate kitchen workers did their jobs. The result, they said, is a dining room floor that is “absolutely filthy with gross removable black soot, dirt and grime.”

When asked about the suit over the summer, a spokesman for the corrections department declined to comment, because the dispute was pending.

The inmates said the food they were served contributed to weight loss, headaches, listlessness, anxiety and depression.

Other allegations detailed in the suit include:

• Inmates were served “spoiled, greenish and undone meat; stale, molded bread; rotten boiled eggs; undercooked cold rice; flowered down and watery gravy; overcooked beans; soogie (sic) brownish lettuce; cold soup; spoiled and contaminated milk; cold, harden (sic) bread rolls and biscuits … long expired items such as ketchup, salad dressing, meats and discolored tomato paste.”

• Prison staff flouted state regulations that require them to post the food service grade and score and inspection records. The inmates also say they were served food labeled, “not for human consumption, animal feed.”

• Since May 2009, prison leadership engaged in “unfair trade practices” in order to cut costs and further their “kickback scheme.”

The American Correctional Association had no data on the number of grievances filed regarding food service in South Carolina prisons or across the nation. But a staff member said he could not recall receiving any reports about the conditions in prison kitchens or of the quality of food.

However, Harder says he doesn’t believe Broome needs to change its rules about saving video records of jail incidents. He said the cost of extra storage equipment could be prohibitive and still might not have helped resolve the incident that spurred former inmate Richard E. Sipe Jr., 28, to sue for $250,000. “We have machines set up to record the stuff that goes on in there,” Harder said. “But the lawsuit didn’t happen until several months later. The officers looked at the tape (soon after the incident), and said, ‘It’s only a bloody nose.’ How long are you going to have me save this stuff?” …

County officials said last week that a video of the incident was not retained. They later amended that to say a copy might have been made, but no one has been able to find it. State law does not require counties to retain jail videotapes, though it does require paper records to be kept for specified periods … Broome’s jail video system currently over-writes its recordings after about 30 days, unless a staffer elects to save a copy of an incident, officials have said …

Deputy County Attorney Aaron Marcus said Broome likely will release some or all of the records soon [in relation to media FOI requests]. He has said that jail employees should have retained a copy of the tape when they learned that Sipe claimed to have been assaulted, and asked for medical attention. Sipe says in court papers that he tried within three days of the incident to file charges against Mable.The county acknowledges that Sipe received attention from jail medical staff on multiple days after the incident. But it has not been able to say if he was seen because of the Mable incident.

Corrections officials now give themselves 60 working days – up from 15 – to deal with the most serious inmate grievances, complaints that sometimes lead to explosive uprisings, Howard Sapers said yesterday in his annual report to Parliament. Such grievances include harassment and discrimination along with claims of unfair segregation and various rights violations.  Mr. Sapers has a ready answer for those who roll their eyes at the dissatisfaction of sometimes brutal convicts.  “It would be easy to dismiss this,” he said in an interview. “But internal grievance resolution … is a core, central component of effective, safe correctional practice.”

Two inmates died and much of the fortress-like prison was trashed during a four-day riot that erupted at Ontario’s Kingston Pen on April 14, 1971.  A public inquiry found that the prison system’s failure to deal fairly with inmate grievances was a major factor, Mr. Sapers said …He chides the Correctional Service of Canada for repeatedly extending the timeline for meeting its legal duty to resolve inmate complaints – especially those that have been deemed serious enough to clear two of three assessment levels. “The explanation given by the service is that … they can only resolve 15 to 20 per cent of these very significant grievances within the previous [15 working days] time frame.  So instead of working to comply with their policy and legal requirement, they simply made the time frame elastic so that it fit their current level of effort.”

The full article at the Globe & Mail has more detail.