CHICAGO — Former “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett was sentenced to 150 days in the Cook County Jail on Thursday, three months after he was found guilty of lying about a racist and homophobic hate crime attack on Streeterville in early 2019.
In delivering his verdict Thursday night after an hour of argument, Cook County Judge James Linn told Smollett, “You really craved attention. They wanted to be more famous, and for a while it worked.”
Introduction
The Cook County Jail in Chicago has been overcrowded, inhumane, since its inception and excruciating. There is no excuse for their continued existence. In the last year, prison has become a petri dish for contagion of Covid-19. The prison’s notoriously brutal security forces, along with toxic sewage, carcinogens and some of the country’s worst air pollutants, conspire to ruin the lives of those held there. And while the city’s mental health services are ruthlessly neglected, the Cook County Jail has become the nation’s largest place for incarcerating people with mental illnesses.
This is no coincidence. In fact, the obscene conditions at the Cook County jail underscore the fundamentally racist attitude city officials, police officers, and bosses have always had toward people they viewed as criminals and undesirables. Segregation, imprisonment, abuse, torture, and murder have long been their tools to maintain a social order that serves the city’s predominantly white and affluent powerful.
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Karl Battiste
Inmate 64 Apr 19 Battiste was charged with killing a man outside his South Chicago home.
Battiste has been held without bail since January 2019. He named his daughter Karla on Easter Sunday to say he had a headache. He died at Stroger Hospital just a week later. Karla says her father noticed the symptoms spreading down her hallway and that her bed was under a hood. She was never officially notified of her father’s death, but received the news weeks later from a family member. “He was the smartest guy I’ve ever met. I could call him and ask him a question about anything and he would know the answer,” she says. “I wasn’t ready for him to go through with it.”
Detainee 42 Apr 19 Sangabriel has been held without bail since October on serious drunk driving charges. In early March, his attorney opted to keep him in the Cook County jail rather than plead guilty so the Little Village resident could finish his addiction treatment program. Undocumented, Sangabriel apparently feared that getting out of the Cook County jail would land him in the “arms of immigration,” a niece told the Tribune. “I wanted to wait there.”