A 2013 lawsuit alleging mistreatment of prisoners at the East Mississippi Correctional Facility in Lauderdale County is scheduled to go to a bench trial before a federal judge on Monday.

Eighteen plaintiffs are listed in the complaint, which includes dozens of testimonies from prisoners who allege bad conditions ranging from untreated testicular cancer to lack of treatment for mentally ill prisoners to abuse by the prison’s guards.  

Plaintiffs in the suit are Jermaine Dockery, David Thompson, Jeffery Covington, Joseph Osborne, Courtney Galloway, Phillip Fredenburg, John Barrett, Tafforest Chandler, Derrick Hayes, Eric Ward, Christopher Lindsey, Dexter Campbell, Alvin Luckett, James Vann, Benjamin McAbee and Anthony Evans.

The Americian Civil Liberties Union, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Law Offices of Elizabeth Alexander and the law firm of Covington & Burling LLP are representing the plaintiffs. 

The initial complaint was lodged against Christopher Epps, the former commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Corrections and other MDOC officials. In a separate case, Epps was arrested and pleaded guilty in February of 2016 to conspiring to accept kickbacks and bribes totaling more than $1.4 million.

The privately-run prison was formerly managed by The GEO Group, Inc. and is now managed by the Management and Training Corporation. 

“Today, EMCF is an extremely dangerous facility operating in a perpetual state of crisis, where prisoners live in barbaric and horrific conditions and their basic human rights are violated daily,” the complaint stated.

The class-action suit covers all prisoners housed at EMCF and three subclasses: those isolated, the mentally ill and those held in Units 5 and 6, according to court filings.

Jermaine Dockery, according to the complaint, said he sometimes “thinks about committing suicide just to see how long it would take for (staff) to come, to let people know that stuff isn’t right” – hung himself until he lost consciousness.

Staff reportedly didn’t take him to an emergency room but stripped him and locked him in an isolation cell.

The complaint includes a report of a man in his 20s, diagnosed with glaucoma at a young age, who lost his eyesight after the facility refused to treat his condition.

Others report capturing rats in their cells and finding mice in the broken, leaking toilets. 

In the death of an inmate, called “Richard Roe” (an alias) in the document, correctional officers allegedly used Mace in his cell excessively, shackled him and then took him to an emergency room, where he was pronounced dead. “For several days after Mr. Roe’s death, medical staff continued to “document” in the daily segregation log that Mr. Roe appeared to be “in good health and mood,” according to the complaint. 

The docket report for the cases stretches beyond 600 entries, one of which was 551 pages long. 

Defendants asked United States District Court Judge William H. Barbour Jr., for a summary judgment, which Barbour denied on Friday. The case will be heard by Barbour on Monday, March 5 in Jackson.