Hundreds of calls for help: What 911 logs reveal about the Cuyahoga County Jail

This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project – Cleveland, a nonprofit news team covering Ohio’s criminal justice systems. Sign up for their Cleveland newsletter and Facebook Group, and follow The Marshall Project on Instagram, Reddit and YouTube.

When local officials try to block the public from seeing what goes on in a jail, the calls they make to 911 can offer a view into how people there are being treated, and which problems jail employees struggle to address on their own. 

A surge in emergency responses to a jail can reveal patterns of medical neglect or widespread drug use, as well as other chronic issues, from detainees starting fires to fights or suicide attempts.

Corrections officers and medical personnel in jails are considered first responders, said Michele Deitch, a former Texas prison monitor and director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas-Austin. When a jail consistently makes emergency calls for outside help, she added, it suggests that larger, systemic problems are likely going unaddressed. 

“If there’s a crisis going on, whether it’s a fight or a medical situation, they’re supposed to have the people on-site to deal with that. It just seems odd to me that they need to reach outside the jail to have someone deal with an emergency,” Deitch noted. 

Local governments have a constitutional obligation to protect and care for anyone they hold in custody, Dietch said. Even if jail administrators outsource their responsibility to care for people to another agency, the cost still falls on the county. “Either they’re paying for better care in the jail,” Deitch said, “or they’re paying for emergency services that get sent to the jail.”  

When disability rights lawyers sued a South Carolina jail in 2024 alleging that it violated the constitutional rights of people with mental illness held there, they pointed to a 50% surge in 911 calls over the previous three years. Calls related to substance abuse had more than quadrupled in that time, and reported stabbings and puncture wounds also jumped.

To see how local jails are handling emergencies, The Marshall Project’s teams in Cleveland, St. Louis and Jackson, Mississippi, analyzed months of 911 records. Listening to calls and reviewing emergency medical logs revealed patterns of substance abuse and mental health crises in the jails, violent assaults and a staff culture that neglects detainees until tensions among people inside escalate into a crisis. 

Cleveland

Workers at the Cuyahoga County jail in Cleveland called 911 for emergency assistance 845 times last year, according to data provided by the city. Many of the calls were for overdoses, chest pains or other medical emergencies typical for a facility that houses about 1,500 people at a time. But there were also calls triggered by people detained at the jail ingesting batteries or bleach, and others were for “near hanging, strangulation or suffocation.” Other calls pertained to people dealing with psychosis, catatonia or altered mental status from alcohol or drug withdrawal. 

Cuyahoga County spokesperson Kelly Woodard declined to comment on 911 calls to the jail and operations, citing legal counsel from the county’s law department and the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office.

People are transported to the hospital for issues that were once handled internally, including psychiatric calls, said Adam Chaloupka, general counsel for the Ohio Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, which represents the jail’s corrections officers. The jail has shifted care away from in-house nurses and doctors to its county-owned medical provider, MetroHealth, Chaloupka said. And, while some medical workers remain at the jail during business hours, the facility no longer provides the same level of on-site care — such as having a doctor on duty overnight — on weekends or holidays. 

Chaloupka said that when someone held in the jail has to go to an outside hospital, a corrections officer must accompany them, and these frequent transports strain the already-limited staffing inside the facility. 

A county-commissioned staffing analysis of the jail, published in October 2025, found that emergency transports to the hospital resulted in the jail shutting down posts due to a lack of officers. When this happened, one officer had to oversee multiple housing units. As a result, men and women were locked in their cells for hours at a time, Chaloupka said.

When workers at the jail call 911, records suggest they do not always know how to respond to an emergency or even accurately identify their location to dispatchers. 

In one call to 911, following an apparent suicide attempt by a 42-year-old woman in December, the jail employee who called for help didn’t know the address of the facility or its phone number. In some cases, 911 wasn’t called until the person was already cold to the touch. Jennifer Wade, 41, entered the jail in September 2024 because a state psychiatric hospital refused to admit her due to her frail physical health. In February 2025, jail workers found her unconscious on the floor of her cell and called 911. By the time they discovered her, she was cold and was later pronounced dead from congestive heart failure. 

Chaloupka said that corrections officers are not permitted or trained to call 911. He recalled jail deaths where “the COs were accused of not providing medical care,” but he said they are trained to call for the facility’s medical workers and then wait for help. 

“It might sound inhumane, but the policies don’t require them to. The policies are like, they just hit the button…to alert the medical staff,” Chaloupka said.