Every night, for the past 30 nights, Sherwood has laid his head down on that pillow and listened to the wet gurgle of the leaking commode. He has 120 more nights to go.
"It leaks bad," he said, "and when you flush, you get a real bad smell up out of the sink."
In fact, of the six sinks in the cellblock, only one is working, and it's not Sherwood's.
"The showers are all plugged up," he said, "and we ain't had no hot water for three weeks."
As he talks, Sherwood, a thin and smooth-skinned young man who grew up here on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, leans casually on a metal conduit pipe that emerges from the wall of his cell. When he shifts his weight, the pipe gives way with a lurch, pulling several inches out of the concrete.
"Man, it's all coming apart," he said, the capped outlet dangling in his hand. "There's spiders coming out of the cracks in the wall."
"But you should've seen it before," another inmate is quick to add. "It was really run down. It's a lot better than it was."
Better indeed. These days, Sherwood's toilet actually flushes.
The toilet flushes in no small part because Ed Naranjo made sure some improvements happened at the Browning jail last summer.
There were new locks, Naranjo said, new paint, new bunks and new security cameras. Crews patched the plumbing, and poured acid on the concrete floors to eat away the choking stench of urine and feces.
"Mostly though, it was just cosmetic," Naranjo said. "We didn't really make much of a dent in the infrastructure needs."
Naranjo heads regional law enforcement for the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, a beat that includes Indian jails spread across six states. In early March, he visited Browning's jail, which, like other reservation jails, houses people arrested on misdemeanors, with no sentence longer than one year. These are, for the most part, petty criminals, jailed for drunkenness or creating a public disturbance or, in the worst cases, minor assault.
Over the past three decades, Naranjo said, he's watched as jails all across Indian Country have slowly crumbled down around these inmates.
"I've seen a lot of reservation jails," Naranjo said. "The conditions are just appalling. I mean, Jesus, these facilities are pathetic. If they were anywhere else but on a reservation, they'd have been shut down a long time ago."
As if to prove Naranjo's point, David Spotted Eagle walks to the back door of the Browning jail and leans against the jamb. The entire door - frame and all - slides a good 4 inches out into the cold March morning.
Spotted Eagle, who runs the jail and is Browning's chief of police, has an idea for how to fix up the facility.
"It was built in 1968," he said. "I'd tear it down and build a new one."
It's an idea echoed by jailers throughout Indian Country.
"These jails are so old and broken down," Naranjo said, "it should be criminal to house people in these conditions."
Not to mention to ask people to work in these conditions.
Last summer, Spotted Eagle said, the front office temperature hit 118 degrees.
"There are absolutely safety issues related to facility conditions," said Darren Cruzan, chief of police on the Crow Indian Reservation near Billings. "We put our people at risk every day when we send them to work in these jails."
That Indian jails are substandard by any measure is not news.
"We have been underfunded and not treated equally with off-reservation jails," said Bill McClure, acting deputy director for the BIA. "We are generally, across the board, lacking resources."
McClure, who until recently was BIA's program manager for detention, said reviews of Indian jails show 50 percent are in "poor" condition, 25 percent in "fair" condition, and 25 percent in "good" condition.
Back in 1998, Attorney General Janet Reno told the Senate Indian Affairs Committee that "tribal law enforcement agencies are generally understaffed and underfunded, lacking uniformed police, criminal investigators, and detention staff and facilities, as well as basic communications and intelligence gathering technology."
Indian jails, Reno said, "are severely inadequate and antiquated. Most Indian Country jails are in such poor condition that they are out of compliance with contemporary building codes and professional jail standards."
It was the job of Congress, she said, to meet its obligations to Indian Country.
But three years later, in 2001, not much had changed.
A Department of Justice report from August of that year showed that more than half of the nation's 69 reservation jails were operating at more than 100 percent above capacity. One in six were holding more than twice their capacity.
All but two were determined to be in need of more training for jailers, and all but three needed more staff.
(Keeping qualified staff is tough. Spotted Eagle said Browning had eight chiefs of police between 1993 and 1999. The reason, he said - low pay and bad working conditions.)
Those who thought the Justice Department report might force change were disappointed. The jails, which serve 55 tribes in 19 states, were, again, not much better a year after that report.
A 2002 follow-up by the Department of Justice showed the Crow jail - built to hold 14 prisoners - held 60 on the day officials checked, or 429 percent of capacity. The Northern Cheyenne jail, also near Billings, was at 232 percent of capacity. The Browning jail was at 160 percent, Montana's Fort Peck jail at 146 percent, and the Fort Belknap jail at 148 percent. (According to Naranjo the jail on the Flathead Indian Reservation is not under regional BIA control and the last time he visited, it was in pretty good condition.)
Nationwide, Indian jails were at an average 126 percent of capacity.
The only real difference, Naranjo said, was that the jails were now a year older.
The following year, in 2003, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights produced a report titled "A Quiet Crisis: Federal Funding and Unmet Needs in Indian Country."
The report concluded "correctional facilities in Indian Country are also more overcrowded than even the most crowded state and federal prisons Native American law enforcement funding increased almost 85 percent between 1998 and 2003, but the amount allocated was so small to begin with that its proportion to the department's total budget hardly changed."
Naranjo can relate.
"We've known about this for years," he said. "Every one knows we need more money for Indian jails. But at some point, the needs get to be so great that they just become overwhelming. The people in Washington, D.C., don't want to hear about it."
The Blackfeet Tribal Council actually has a tape recording of a BIA official promising money for a new jail, but according to Naranjo, "there is no money. There's not going to be any money. The reality is, we need to accept that - but it's not acceptable. The funding level is a joke."
What's not a joke is Cruzan's story about the broken boiler at the Crow jail.
For years, he said, the 30-year-old boiler sputtered along, sometimes making hot water, sometimes not.
When he finally nailed down the cash to replace it, there wasn't enough money to also replace the 30-year-old pipes.
The new boiler, he said, simply blew holes in the old pipes.
Then, when he fixed the pipes, the pressure blew out the cooling system.
"The days of being able to repair the problems are gone," Cruzan said. "There's just so many Band-Aids you can put on."
Which is why he, for one, finally said enough is enough.
There was no ventilation at the Crow jail, he said, no bunks to sleep in. "It stank to high heck," and inmates vied for kitchen duty so they could huddle around the gas range to get a bit of warmth in the winter.
Finally, the day he watched inmates "showering" by sitting on a concrete floor and pouring pitchers of water over their heads, with a bank of 220-volt outlets right at hand, Cruzan shut it down.
"I looked at it and thought, 'I wouldn't put my family members in here, and I'm not putting my neighbors in here anymore, either.' "
Last July, Cruzan closed the doors at the Crow jail and began shipping inmates to Bighorn County Jail and the Northern Cheyenne reservation jail. Farming out inmates cost $40 a day per bed, or about $70,000 for the three months the Crow jail remained shuttered.
"It's good enough that we can use it," he said of the emergency fix, "but it's still unacceptable by any reasonable standard."
Of course, the standards in Indian Country are not the standards of mainstream America. The level of poverty and joblessness and abuse and violence that are the norm on reservations would not be accepted in mainstream America, Cruzan said.
"You can't compare the Browning jail to jails off the reservation," Spotted Eagle said. "This place is like the 19th century."
But Indian inmates, he said, don't have a very powerful lobby.
Enter Naranjo, who hopes to fix up more than just the Browning jail, and hopes those fixes will be more than cosmetic.
With a plan to retire tucked safely under his belt, Ed Naranjo has started making waves at the BIA.
"I would come back from seeing these jails and say, 'How can we put our people in these conditions?' " he said. "Finally, we did the video."
"The video," as it is known from Browning to Washington, D.C., is a 15-minute production orchestrated by Naranjo detailing conditions at Montana's Indian jails. It is brutally visual, not shrinking from adverse conditions faced by inmates and jailers alike, and it has stirred a hornet's nest of activity at the highest levels of government.
But the most controversial part of the video might prove to be its audience.
Naranjo, "sick of no action on these things," sent the video straight over the heads of his bosses, straight to the BIA chiefs in Washington, D.C.
"Oh yeah," he said. "A lot of people are pretty mad at me right now."
Others, however, are quietly cheering him on.
The Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, for one, has taken up Naranjo's cause.
The group - which represents more than 20,000 federal law enforcement officers - watched the video and then fired letters to Montana's congressmen last September, raising concerns about "the poor condition of jails on our Indian reservations."
The letter calls conditions "disturbing," and notes that "modern safety and security measures found in other jails are simply not present in Indian country."
The result, they told Montana's federal lawmakers, was that "the situation has deteriorated to the point where it is unsafe for the officers in these jails."
The BIA's acting deputy director doesn't argue.
"If you don't have appropriate staffing and adequate facilities, then there are safety concerns," McClure said.
The Montana chapter of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association has placed reservation jail conditions at the top of its priority list, which is exactly the kind of pressure Naranjo hoped for when he produced the video.
And the pressure seems to be working. Five months after the officers association launched its letter to Congress, a Department of Interior memo announced that "Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs David Anderson expressed his displeasure with the current reported conditions" in Indian jails.
Anderson's response was to create a new task force to identify problems and propose solutions. In addition, a BIA detention office will be formed, taking the jailers' task out of the hands of local chiefs of police and putting it on the desk of detention specialists.
"It's a chance to make some headway," McClure said. The plan, he said, is to tackle problems at the 50 percent of reservation jails categorized as "poor."
Naranjo, however, will believe it when he sees it.
"I've been in BIA law enforcement for 30 years," he said, "and I've seen task forces come and go over and over."
This latest, Naranjo predicts, "is another knee-jerk reaction that will have no real impact. The real question is, what can the task force do? I'm afraid it's just a stopgap to please the higher-ups, make it look like we're doing something."
He hopes he's wrong, he said, but after decades of failed promises, he feels his pessimism is justified.
The first step toward real change, Naranjo said, will come when the money comes, and only the political will of Congress can swing that trick.
"Is there the money to fix these jails?" McClure asked. "That's what we're still looking for. A lot of these buildings are in need of replacement," and right now, he admits, "there's no construction money on the table."
But that's not what Fred Guardipee heard a handful of years back when the BIA was promising Browning a new jail. Back then, he said, the check was in the mail.
Guardipee is a member of the Blackfeet Tribal Council and a representative of the local Law and Order Committee.
He also has worked in the jail, and remembers well the broken plumbing, poor ventilation, cramped quarters and "the smells that stay with you."
He also remembers when Indian Health Services condemned the building. And when the state of Montana condemned it. And when the BIA condemned it.
"But what could you do?" he asks. "That's the only facility we have."
Guardipee also remembers the BIA promising a new jail. But that was back when the agency kept a priority list for fixing Indian jails.
Called the "PONI" list, the BIA's Planning of New Institutions program put Browning in the No. 2 slot for a new jail. But the year before it was to be built, the BIA handed over jail construction to the Department of Justice, and the PONI list disappeared.
The Justice Department made its own list, Naranjo said, and for whatever reason, Browning was not on it.
Which has left Guardipee looking for other answers. Poverty is so grinding on his reservation that there is no hope of funding a jail through a local tax levy. And the tribe does not have the spare cash on hand to build its own facility, he said.
And so he's thinking they might add a "misdemeanor wing" onto the private prison in Shelby, where felons are housed for a profit. Or perhaps the tribe could get into the private prison business itself. Or perhaps it could pay rent to house inmates in nearby off-reservation jails. Or perhaps a bunch of tribes could pool their money and build a shared jail, located at a site roughly equidistant from each reservation.
"We've been meeting with financial institutions," he said, but they're still banking on the federal government to come through, because the feds have "a historic trust obligation to take care of these things."
"We need to lobby Congress," Guardipee concludes.
Congress, however, has not proved quick to act when it comes to Indian issues, especially Indian jails, Naranjo said.
"I don't know what it's going to take to get their attention," he said of federal lawmakers. "They should be ashamed and embarrassed to have people housed like this right here in their state."
Sure enough, in recent months, with "the video" fueling the fire, things have been heating up at the Capitol.
In September, Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., wrote to the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, asking for more information about conditions at Indian jails and directing the group to a staffer who would head any inquiry.
And Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., has been talking with federal law enforcement agencies about what's broken and how best to fix it.
"He's currently researching ways we can best serve the communities and the tribes," said Burns' spokesman J.P. Donovan.
Serving the tribes means involving the tribes, something Jim Foley says is critical to resolving the Indian jail problems. Foley is Montana chief of staff for Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., and says the past few months have ushered in an unprecedented effort to bring all the parties to the table.
Meetings have convened, bringing together prison wardens, federal agencies, congressional members, state lawmakers and, most importantly, the tribes.
"We intend to continue the discussions with each of the reservations and the elected tribal councils," Foley said, until a solution is found.
The process has begun, he said, and is gaining momentum, as the issue floats to the surface and the government begins to work with the tribes to prioritize projects and find funding.
"I think that there's positive progress being made because everybody's working together," he said.
But again, Naranjo - whose moviemaking sparked the frenzy of interest - will believe it when he sees it.
"The proof of their interest will be measured by their actions," he said. "It's that simple. These jails are appalling. We shouldn't have to lobby to get action on something so obvious."
The only lobby Sam Eeroche is worried about is the small front lobby of the Browning jail.
For five years, Eeroche has been the maintenance man at the jail, and if it were up to him he'd worry less about money for a jail and more about money for his people.
"The problem isn't the jail," he said. "The problem is jobs. Without jobs, you get poverty, desperation. That leads to more crime, and the jail gets overcrowded and it starts to wear out faster."
From his post near the top of the BIA, Bill McClure tends to agree with the maintenance man. A reservation town with a good alcohol and drug rehabilitation center, he said, is a town with less pressure on its jail. A town with jobs is a town with a whole lot fewer social problems.
"What you really need is to not have the jail be the primary stopping place for everyone who has a social issue," he said. "What you need to do is address the overall lack of community resources."
Again, the maintenance man and the BIA boss agree.
"This jail is falling apart," Eeroche said as he worked to hang a new security door, "but so is the whole town. We need a way to make a living, not just a new jail."
But dealing with systemic reservation poverty, obviously, is a much bigger bite for the feds to chew. Certainly, the unmet needs in Indian Country's jails and schools and hospitals and housing departments all can be traced back to joblessness and poverty, but "we don't always know how to deal with the whole poverty issue," Naranjo said.
"We do know how to build a jail."
But he still doesn't know how to get Congress to fund building new jails. The flagship jail in Indian County is on Colorado's Ute Mountain Reservation, with brand-new beds for 80 adults and 40 juveniles.
It was built, Naranjo said, only after the old jail became the center of a lawsuit charging inhumane treatment of inmates.
"Inhumane" is a powerful word, he admits, but if the cell fits, wear it. Ask jailers in Indian Country to pick some words to describe reservation jails and they come up with "in desperate need," "disgraceful," "sad." But before long, it always comes back to that word that caught the Colorado court's attention.
"It's inhumane," said Browning's Spotted Bear. "They're worse than dog kennels."
At least dog kennels have running water.
But at these facilities, jailers tell tales of roofs falling in, of broken security cameras, of cells with no fresh air ventilation and no fire sprinklers. They tell about the reservation jail where dust blows in through the cell walls every time a truck passes by, about the jail where the solution to toxic Freon leaking into a cell was to simply get a bigger bucket.
The jails are time bombs, Naranjo said, and it's only a matter of time before crumbling facilities lead to a jailer being badly hurt. Already, McClure said, there have been assaults against jailers that were complicated by poor jail design and dilapidated conditions.
"Detention facilities in Indian County are back two centuries," Browning's Spotted Eagle said. "Personally, I don't see it changing any time soon. Until we get some folks out here from D.C., maybe put them in the jail for a while to see how it is, then I think it's going to continue on like this."
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@missoulian.com
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