Philadelphia Measure Would Bolster Oversight for the City’s Deadly Jails
May 13, 2025
Bolts Magazine: “In September 2024, activists burst into an auditorium in a Philadelphia library, interrupting a panel discussion on mass incarceration featuring Philadelphia jails commissioner, Michael Resnick. “One, two, three, four, open up the prison doors!” they shouted in unison.
One woman held up a cutout of a black tombstone. “You took my cousin’s life!” another person shouted, as Resnick watched from his seat on stage. “They all called for help. Nobody came…PDP killed her!”
Earlier that month, Amanda Cahill, 31, died in her cell at the Philadelphia Industrial Correctional Center, a city jail. Women who were jailed near her told reporters that Cahill was screaming for help for over an hour. The women say they banged on their cell doors for hours pleading for medical attention, but nobody responded. The medical examiner determined that she died of drug intoxication.
A week after Cahill’s death, a guard at the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility, a jail in northeast Philadelphia, found 61-year-old Michael McKinnis dead when he arrived at his cell to serve him breakfast. McKinnis, who was on medications for liver disease, was left alone for eight hours overnight, a symptom of chronic staffing shortages at the facility.
This past March, another man, Andrew Drury, 42, died at the same jail from a heart attack due to drug withdrawal. An intake worker at the jail flagged Drury as an “emergency” case but he never received a full health evaluation despite having been hospitalized multiple times for withdrawal-related complications when he was incarcerated at the same jail the previous fall.
Cahill, McKinnis, and Drury’s deaths point to problems with staffing, medical care, and dangerous conditions that have plagued Philadelphia’s troubled jails for decades. These problems have persisted despite decades of attempts at oversight, from federal court monitoring over the jail for 32 out of the past 43 years to a Prison Advisory Board that the city created in 2014 to monitor conditions and offer guidance.”