From hired to fired: Richland County needs to lose its new jail director to start fixes

What seemed impossible has been accomplished by Richland County. The county has made its jail worse.

In light of the latest gaffe, the county’s new jail director should resign, and if he doesn’t take that high road, the county needs to fire him immediately. Anything less will make Richland County a laughing stock of administration and could deepen the problems plaguing the jail, a prospect that seemed fantastical given the depth of the issues.

In early July, the county hired a new jail director, Tyrell Cato, without, apparently, checking in with his last employer, the Kershaw County Detention Center, where he was the director for the last three years.

Come to find out, records show that Cato was fired from Kershaw County in May for sexual misconduct after a woman who worked at the jail accused him of asking for sex, making other advances and sniffing her hair.

Cato denied the accusations in letters submitted to the county during an internal investigation. Of course, he denied them. That’s what men accused of sexually harassing women have done in case after case.

The Kershaw County committee tasked with reviewing the investigation upheld Cato’s firing in late June.

Did Richland County’s administration call Cato’s last job like any other employer would do when looking into a potential hire? We reached out to the county but had not received an answer by late Tuesday. County Administrator Leonardo Brown told the Post and Courier that during the hiring process in April he was not aware that Cato was fired.

Richland County officially hired Cato in July.

Richland County’s ineptitude in running the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center would be comical if lives hadn’t been lost and others endangered.

For years, Richland’s jail suffered under an inadequate directorship that allowed problems to build up. When COVID hit, those problems worsened and new ones arose, which the jail had zero leadership abilities to fix.

The number of jailers dropped to dangerously low levels, violence escalated, including an attack on two jailers, and lawyers were denied in-person access to their clients, which led to a court challenge. On top of that, two directors resigned, an inmate died from dehydration (which was ruled a homicide) and a disabilities rights group sued the county, claiming the detention center uses barbaric practices in jailing people with mental illness. All in the last year.

Hiring a new director was the most important step to cleaning up the mess. Richland County botched it.

Anyone fired from a job for sexual misconduct would have been the wrong person to lead Richland County’s jail because of who works there. The majority of the Richland County jail’s staff are women, according to a September 2021 inspection report. In fact, the jail at that time had more than double the number of women on staff than men.

Hiring someone previously fired for sexual misconduct will worsen one of the key problems plaguing the jail — the significant shortage of staff.

As if the low pay and looming violence were not enough, Richland County has just given all the women jailers working at the detention center one more reason to look for new jobs.

The state Department of Corrections and Lexington County Detention Center are always looking for people willing to do the rugged work of a jailer. Any women who were thinking of applying to the Richland County detention center now have all the reason to put that application in somewhere else.

The Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center is Richland County’s leading moral issue. Inside those walls, human rights, the justice process and basic decency are at stake. Conditions in Richland County’s jail not only measure the commitment county administration and council members have for those tenets, but the commitment of the county’s citizens as well.

If the county cares about those tenets as well as not getting its pants sued off, it’ll do what might seem impossible. Fix the jail. That starts by firing the director it just hired.