Report: Rash of suicides at D.C. jail points to deep problem with inmates" mental health care The assessment was conducted in late August by Lindsay M. Hayes, a national expert in the field, but the city's Department of Corrections did not release the report until Thursday, when D.C. Council member Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6), chairman of the judiciary committee, began a long-awaited hearing on the string of in-custody deaths. Wells blasted Corrections Director Thomas Faust for the delay, questioning whether he and the administration of Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) were trying to subvert the council's oversight responsibilities. Faust said he did not want to release the report until he had a plan to combat the problem, and he came to the hearing armed with a schedule to ramp up training next year and to spend $600,000 removing welded towel bars, clothing hooks and other items apparently used in suicide attempts at the nearly 40-year-old jail complex. In the report and in testimony offered Thursday, however, critics painted the city jail as a place lucky to have not recorded additional suicides in the past year. The jail has only nine "suicide resistant" cells, which as of late August housed 1,739 inmates. About 40 percent were believed to have mental-health issues and a higher risk of suicide. In a two-year period beginning in 2011, 165 attempted suicides were logged at the facility, jail officials acknowledged Thursday. One of those occurred in late August as Hayes was conducting his assessment. An inmate in isolation was found with "something tied around his neck and attached to the ceiling. His feet barely touch the floor, his eyes were bulging, saliva was coming from his mouth, and he urinated on himself," Hayes wrote, quoting an internal jail report on the incident. To Hayes's surprise, he wrote, "despite the seriousness of the incident," the inmate was later returned to an isolation area, where he might be checked only once every 60 minutes, rather than placed on constant suicide watch. It was at least the fourth time in two months, Hayes wrote, that internal documents showed the inmate had attempted to hang himself, and the situation did not appear uncommon: This writer observed that there were more than nine inmates on observation status each day during this on-site assessment that resulted in several inmates being housed in non-suicide resistant cells on the mental health unit. Several of these . . . contained several dangerous anchoring devices, including a towel rack on the desk, a towel rack on the sink, ventilation holes in bunks, large holes in ventilation grates, and clothing hooks.