When the U.S. Justice Department revealed beatings and brutality against the inmates in Erie County's two jails, an insider offered an explanation:

Overtime.

Not just overtime, but mandatory overtime burning out the staff.

"The effects of mandatory overtime need to be looked at with regard to how inmates are treated," said a veteran Holding Center deputy who asked to remain unidentified because he was speaking publicly without permission.

Deputies exhausted by double shifts are locked inside New York's second-largest pretrial detention facility for up to 16 hours a day with the dangerous, the deranged and the innocent desperate to be free.

Like many problems with Erie County's jails, mandatory overtime and its financial and psychological spin-offs seem to never go away.

The Justice Department, in a blistering 50-page report, recites serious examples of physical punishment against inmates by deputies in the Correctional Facility in Alden and especially the busy Holding Center in downtown Buffalo.

The Justice Department said Holding Center inmates have been beaten inside an elevator chosen because it has no working security camera. A pregnant inmate was thrown to the floor and kicked. A boisterous inmate had a sheet tied around his neck with the threat of a hanging.

Are such incidents common?

"They occur," the deputy said. "I am not saying they occur very often. You can blame the deputies all you want. But I would blame supervisors, the administration, the county.

"Fatigue will affect judgment. The general attitude is a negative one. You are there to get through your shift. If you were going in for just eight hours, your attitude would be different.

"Everybody's tired," he said. "Everybody's working a second shift. It definitely has an effect. The professionalism is less. That's human nature."

Mandatory overtime or not, Mary Jo Alessio says it's no excuse for the treatment given her son two weeks ago.

The 24-year-old … not being identified because his case is still under way … was jailed after a crystal methamphetamine rage, his mother said. He then fought with deputies during a court appearance upon learning the judge wanted to hold him another week, she said.

She said she later learned of the details of his beating for acting up in the courtroom. Alessio said her son told her that he was brought inside a shower room, stripped and beaten by deputies who addressed him with him gay slurs.

"If this was an isolated incident, I might be treating this a little differently. But it is not an isolated incident," Alessio recently told The Buffalo News after reading about the Justice Department report.

She said that once her son's case closes, she will file complaints with the sheriff's Professional Standards Unit and the state Commission of Correction.

Alessio, a registered nurse who says she has worked in institutions, does not want to file a lawsuit.

"This is not about vengeance," she said. "It is about doing the right thing for the people of Erie County. Period. This has to do with educating people about the signs and symptoms of mental illness and drug withdrawal. I am not sure a civil lawsuit could really effect that type of change."

Sheriff Timothy B. Howard over the past two years was given about 55 new full-time posts to fill in his Jail Management Division, swelling its full-time force to about 730 across both the Holding Center and the Correctional Facility, which have a combined daily inmate population of about 1,600.

Early this year, Howard won a huge ruling when the state's highest court agreed he could move inmates between the Holding Center and Correctional Facility without regard to the labor jurisdictions of the unions involved. The Teamsters guard pretrial inmates, and members of the CSEA guard sentenced inmates at the Correctional Facility.

Still, with continuous turnover in the staff, vacancies are common. Overtime spending is on pace to again bust this year's budgeted amount, just like it does almost every year, according to figures from the Erie County comptroller, whose auditors issued a report on jail overtime in 2007.

The Holding Center combines an aging, inefficient 1930s jailhouse with a more efficient 1980s expansion. On the newer floors, one deputy can watch several inmates. On the older floors, the layout is fractured. Sight lines are shorter.

The Holding Center administrators, responding to state Commission of Correction concerns about suicides, staff nearly 20 constant-observation posts. While there's a debate as to whether all are necessary, they eat up a lot of overtime.

Suicides still happen. One occurred in the Holding Center on March 31, 2008, and another a month later … as the Justice Department was delaying its visits to the Holding Center and Correctional Facility at the request of the new Collins administration.

The federal investigators wanted to examine the county's suicide-prevention efforts, among other things. But Howard and County Executive Chris Collins later barred the Justice Department from the jails and stopped cooperating with its probe … on the advice of County Attorney Cheryl A. Green.

The Justice Department report says deputies have been pitted against one another; jail deputies witnessing inmate-on-inmate violence have either looked the other way or refused to intervene; deputies have recruited inmates to mete out discipline on others in exchange for favors.

A Holding Center inmate in April 2006 was beaten unconscious and suffered a collapsed lung and broken ribs when beaten by deputies, the Justice Department said. The inmate said the incident began when he tried to air out his cell from the odor of other inmates' defecation and vomit.

Comptroller Mark C. Poloncarz predicts the county's lockout and the federal report will bolster inmate lawsuits against the county. The Holding Center has already generated a number of costly lawsuits, some of which highlighted the mandatory overtime.

In the death of Holding Center inmate Michael Bennett in 2002, caused by traumatic asphyxia when he was being subdued by deputies, the Commission of Correction's Medical Review Board faulted the Holding Center's medical response and found the medical staff work too many hours … as many as 30 overtime hours a week.

"Such an excessive overtime burden may be expected to impair the performance of health care professionals," the Medical Review Board said. Erie County paid $1 million to settle the wrongful death lawsuit filed in the Bennett case.

© 2009 The Buffalo News