Mother seeks justice for son’s jailhouse suicide
6th February 2023 · 0 Comments
By C.C. Campbell-Rock
Contributing Writer
With voice cracking and tears flowing, Jovon Harris recounts the last time she spoke to her son Jamaal Harris. “He said, ‘Momma, I can’t take this anymore. I’m in here, and I can’t breathe.’
Harris had asthma, and he was on mental health medications. He told his mother that he was not given his medicine. He told his mother he had to set his mattress on fire to get out and get asthma medication.
That was on a Thursday. By Sunday, November 13, 2022, Jamaal Harris, 23, allegedly hung himself while in solitary confinement at the Elayn Hunt Correction Center ((EHCC) in St. Gabriel, Louisiana. Jovon Harris knew her son was sad, but she was not sure he had committed suicide.
Harris was arrested for three armed robberies with a firearm in 2014 when he was 16. No one was hurt in the incident. Harris’ public defender advised him to take a plea deal. The youth agreed to a 15-year sentence with a release date of 2027. However, his mother anticipated him being paroled in February 2023.
“Yes, he was a prisoner, but he was still human,” Jovon Harris says. “He was mine. He was loved,” says the mother of seven. Harris also reared her nephew. “When I last talked to him, he was preparing to come home and finish classes. “I had signed him up for college,” she adds. Jamaal earned a high school diploma and welding certification while incarcerated.
On Thursday, January 5, 2023, Ms. Harris, several family members, and civil rights activists Pastor Gregory Manning of Broadmoor Community Church, the Rev. Raymond Brown, founder and director of National Action Now, and Mandy Smith, co-founder of Afrikan Americans Freedom Union, held a press conference and prayed for justice for Jamaal in the prison’s parking lot.
According to news reports, the St. Gabriel Police arrived and asked them to leave. Ken Pastorick, a Department of Correction spokesperson, told the Advocate that demonstrations are not allowed on prison property.
Pastor Manning learned about Harris’s death while working with Decarcerate LA and prison reform activist Mandy Smith. Smith was in touch with another young man at Hunt who was serving a life sentence without parole.
“He told us about the inhumane treatment that occurs when an inmate is in solitary confinement and segregated from the rest of the population. ‘No medical needs are met, or mental health medication is given. There are no blankets when the weather is cold.”
Manning has doubts about Jamaal’s suicide. “I think if you went to ten Black men, ages 18-25, and ask them to tie a noose, they couldn’t do it.” Jamaal supposedly hung himself with a sheet while in segregation. “I believe harm was done to him for making it known he was a Muslim.”
Smith said there was another suicide in June 2022. In that case, a guard was convicted of obstruction for not providing evidence. Smith provided a declaration from an anonymous prisoner who spoke about being in a segregated cell 23 hours a day without heat, medications, food, or blankets. The inmate says guards routinely spray mace on them for complaining about inhumane conditions.
The Rev. Brown says there should be an independent autopsy and an investigation of the cell in which the suicide occurred. “This may well be a murder rather than a suicide,” Brown adds. “We don’t have any evidence he committed suicide.”
“This all boils down to a system of racism. Ninety percent of the corrections officers are Black, but 90 percent of those in administration are white. Black people get their orders from whites. The entire Department of Corrections needs to be investigated, and improvements must be made,” continued Brown.
Harris says her son complained of being put in “the hole,” a term used for solitary confinement. During a face time chat with her, Jamaal showed his mother the deplorable conditions of the cell. There were broken windows that let in hot air during summer and cold during winter. Jamaal was wearing boxers and a T-shirt.
Jamaal also told his mother he was being tortured because of his religion. He became a Muslim while incarcerated.
In retrospect, Harris wished she could have afforded a private attorney. A friend of Harris said he was in on the robberies. But his mother is not clear about her son’s participation in those crimes. “They never found a firearm,” Harris adds.
Recently, the Justice Department announced that there is reasonable cause to believe that the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections (LDOC) routinely confines people in its custody past the dates when they are legally entitled to be released from custody, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Louisiana’s Department of Corrections also made national headlines last fall when Loyola Law Professor Andrea Armstrong testified during a Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations about the death rate in Louisiana’s prisons.
Armstrong and law students run Incarceration Transparency, a project, and website that collects, publishes and analyzes deaths in custody in Louisiana prisons, jails, and detention centers. They studied the number and type of deaths in Louisiana prisons.
Armstrong’s study found that there were 786 known deaths at Louisiana prisons, jails, and detention centers between 2015 and 2019. While the study found that the majority, about 85 percent, of those deaths were of medical causes, suicide was the second leading cause of death in prison.
Armstrong said the program discovered that 43 percent of all suicides in Louisiana jails occurred in solitary confinement compared to only seven percent in Louisiana state prisons.
“Deaths in segregation may indicate challenges for custodial supervision and/or reflect the unique isolation of segregation cells. Segregation, more commonly known as solitary confinement, is usually employed for discipline for rule violations, protective custody, or for close observation/suicide watch. In segregation, a person is typically allowed out of their 6×8 foot cell for 1-2 hours each day, but is otherwise isolated from human interaction, denied visitation or participation in programming, as well as other privileges,” the study reports.
And on November 1, 2022, United States District Court Judge Elizabeth Foote ruled that hundreds of men housed in solitary confinement at David Wade Correctional Center (DWCC) were stripped of virtually all personal belongings and deprived of meaningful human contact and mental stimulation for lengthy periods through its policies and practices.
“These conditions at DWCC expose inmates to a substantial risk of severe psychological pain and suffering; that it deprives those inmates of their sanity in violation of the Eighth Amendment; that, regarding inmates who already have a mental illness, it violates their Eighth Amendment rights because the conditions of confinement on restricted housing expose inmates with mental illness to a substantial likelihood of even more psychological pain and suffering, including the exacerbation of their already diagnosed mental illness,” the judge wrote.
The Rev. Brown is calling for an independent investigation into Jamaal’s death. “They’re investigating themselves, and I believe the coroner has ties to the prison system,” Brown explains.
Jamaal’s mother never received a copy of the autopsy. She only got a few of his belongings the day they held the press conference. She adds that computer tablets, expensive clothing, and other items were not returned.
Mosangeli Elomba Ngabo and Mandy Smith founded the Afrikan American Freedom Union (AAFU) in 2022. AAFU is a human rights organization aimed at ending prison slavery, Jim Crow, and other abuses of power that causes human suffering and misery.
The AAFU wants Louisiana Department of Corrections Secretary James LeBlanc to partner with Justice and Beyond, Promise of Justice Initiative, Bar None, American Civil Liberties Union, Vera Institute of Justice, and the AAFU to secure monies and resources for rehabilitation programs at EHCC and other prisons.
“The AAFU is holding another rally at Elayn Hunt Correctional on Saturday, April 22, 2023, from 11:30 – 2 p.m.,” Smith confirms.
“Jamaal didn’t have a life sentence. I’m so angry. The state of Louisiana let my son down. Losing Jamaal is a big loss for my family and me. I must sleep in his graduation shirt,” Harris says, to cope with the loss.
“I just want justice for my baby,” Harris asserts.
This article originally published in the February 6, 2023 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
