City Room™ - Metro - Cook County Jail Copes with OverCrowding

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Cook County Jail Copes with OverCrowding
Produced by Tony Arnold on Friday, February 29, 2008

The Maximum Security Dormitory at the Cook County Department of Corrections in Chicago. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

Attorneys were back in federal court today to present more concerns about overcrowding at Cook County Jail.

The hearing was part of a long-standing effort to find solutions to problems at the jail; including too few beds for the nearly 10,000 inmates. Attorneys criticized a two-month old strategy called "hot bunking." That's where an inmate is assigned to a bed for an eight hour shift, then spends the rest of the day in a break room while another inmate takes the bed.

Locke Bowman is an attorney representing inmates. He says there are rules against hot bunking.

BOWMAN: There is to be a permanently assigned bed, a permanent bed for each individual in the county jail.

Bowman says the jail's so crowded, some inmates are sleeping on the floors.

Meantime an attorney for the sheriff's department says most inmates like hot bunking because it gets them out in the open more.