Jails are notorious for inhumane conditions.
Detainees often complain of violence, inedible food, limited programming and subpar healthcare. Lack of sunlight may be an unexpected addition to the list. But sunlight deprivation causes a myriad of serious issues, including high blood pressure, osteoporosis, and an increased risk of diabetes, as well as a host of mental health problems such as depression and sleep disorders.
Jails built in the last century often have few windows and little room for recreation and natural light, making them “obsolete” by today’s design standards, according to Kenneth Ricci, prison and jail architect with Nelson Worldwide, a design firm.
Bringing sunlight and fresh air into jails often takes a back seat to other pressing issues. But a lawsuit in San Francisco suggests forcing detainees to live in the dark could violate their constitutional rights. In 2021, a group of men awaiting trial at two California jails sued the city and county of San Francisco for being confined without fresh air and sunlight.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim ultimately agreed with the men. In 2023, she ruled that the jails had violated the Constitution’s due process clause. The officials “created the problem by building a jail without a secured outdoor exercise yard and then relies upon that problem to claim that it cannot provide a secure way for inmates to have access to direct sunlight,” she wrote.
These issues are top of mind for residents who have followed the opening and closure of jails in St. Louis, Cleveland and Jackson, Mississippi, where detainees can go years without seeing the sun. The jails in all three cities have requirements to provide sunlight and fresh air, either mandated by jail policy, or by the state or federal governments. Yet all three have consistently fallen short, according to jail officials and state and federal inspection reports.
Jail administrators in Cleveland and Mississippi are banking on new facilities to improve conditions. City officials in St. Louis closed their crumbling older jail in 2021, but shuffling detainees into the remaining, newer jail hasn’t solved the problems. In each city, questions remain about whether new jails will address the web of challenges — building design, court backlogs and understaffing chief among them — that keep detainees from seeing the sun.
St. Louis City Justice Center
When Darnell Rusan saw the sun for the first time in over a year, during a transfer from the city jail to the courthouse, he later recalled, he gazed up at it and took a deep breath.
“I hadn’t seen it in so long, breathed fresh air in so long,” said Rusan, who was released from jail in March. “I’m going to make sure I never go back in there.”
The St. Louis Division of Corrections stipulates in its official policies and procedures that every jail in the city “will have an outside exercise/recreation area for inmate use or an area that provides natural light.” In addition, all facilities must provide “a wide range of recreational program[s]” that includes indoor and outdoor exercise and leisure-time activities.
However, the city’s downtown jail — the maximum-security St. Louis City Justice Center — doesn’t meet these requirements, conceded interim Jail Commissioner Doug Burris. There is no outdoor exercise area and no windows in the cells, just a pane of glass in the door that faces the dayroom.
Burris said in an April interview with The Marshall Project – St. Louis that, even on a bright summer’s day, “not much” sunlight makes it to people inside. Only a paltry amount of light filters through thick frosted windows at the top of a small rec area where, on a good day, detainees may spend a few hours. What’s more, he said, some people go years without access to the outdoors.
“We’ve got 50 to 75 people in here that have been here for at least two years, up to five years,” he said. “We’re taking an abundance off their life.”
Instead of lobbying to improve outdoor access at the jail, Burris said he is in the process of updating the jail’s guidelines to remove this requirement. The City Justice Center was designed without an outdoor recreation area. Fixing it would require finding the space in downtown St. Louis to construct a secure outdoor yard, or building one on the roof — both extremely costly, said Ricci, the architect at Nelson Worldwide.
Burris believes the lack of opportunities for recreation and exercise is harmful. “To house people at the facility in excess of a year likely exacerbates mental health issues for detained people already afflicted,” he wrote in a 2025 operational review of the jail. “It also could create mental health issues for those who previously had none.”
Rusan was detained awaiting trial for more than four years. Over the course of his stay, Rusan said he was often unable to tell the difference between day and night. As a result, he suffered disruptions in his sleep that continued well after he returned home.
“That place is like a basement,” said Rusan, who was ultimately found not guilty. “Now that I’m home, [my family has] been asking me why I keep waking up at night.”
Understaffing also means sections of the jail are on lockdown for 23 hours a day, meaning that many detainees are “not even going to the indoor rec area,” said Khanika Harper, a member of the city’s detention facilities oversight board. “As far as actual sunlight, they don’t have access to that at all.” (Burris confirmed in April that roughly half of the pods in the jail are on 23-hour lockdown.)
With the demolition in March of the Workhouse, St. Louis’s former medium security jail, Burris said the city’s focus is on improving conditions at the Justice Center. But improving access to natural light and fresh air were not on Burris’s list of immediate action items, which includes redesigning the jail intake area, getting a tablet for every detainee and creating a mentorship program and retention plan for jail staff.
However, he said he hopes increased staffing and a “rocket docket” (that allows people who have been detained longest to get their case quickly before a judge) will ameliorate the worst effects.
“I would like to get to a place where we could even get some vans and go pick up trash, just so they could be out in the sun,” he said. “But I’ve got more immediate needs right now.”
This story from The Marshall Project was shared by The Missouri Independent.
