For two days, Morgan Neilio, incarcerated at the Camden County Correctional Facility, did not have toilet paper. Neilio scrounged other items to use as replacements, like pads or ripped-up shirts. Jail policy says officials should have responded to her official complaint about the lack of toilet paper within 10 days — by Feb. 28, 2022. Instead, it took them five months. “It was extremely upsetting and degrading,” she said, the New Jersey Monitor reports. Neilio, who has been held at Camden County for four years while awaiting trial, was part of a group of incarcerated women who filed a lawsuit in federal court last year alleging that the jail, its warden, law librarian, and others have committed a “failed duty of care” that violates their constitutional rights.
As recently as January 2024, White House officials praised the jail and its then-warden, Karen Taylor, for the facility’s medication-assisted treatment program to help incarcerated people conquer opioid addiction. That praise does not hold true for to people imprisoned in Camden’s county lockup say conditions there are inhumane, complaining of a lack of recreational opportunities, limited access to social workers, inadequate and unhealthy meals, and no access to alcohol and drug addiction recovery services — even as the majority of those incarcerated at Camden struggle with addiction. “We all know that jails and prisons are not intended to be a trip to Disneyland,” said Racquel Romans-Henry, policy director for the racial justice group Salvation and Social Justice New Jersey. “But what we’re seeing at these facilities are a real dereliction of duty around the agencies who have been charged with custody, security, and wellness of the human beings.”