Bolts this week is covering the crisis in local jails, and the county boards that oversee them, with a three-part series. Read our reporting from Houston, from Los Angeles, and from Harrisburg.
In a stunning turn of events, Justin Douglas, a political newcomer, defied expectations to win a seat on the Dauphin County commission, ousting Republican Commissioner Chad Saylor by a mere 184 votes. This victory flipped Dauphin County’s three-person county commission to Democrats. This is the first time the party has won a majority here since at least the Civil War, and an exclamation point on a strong election night for Pennsylvania Democrats generally.
The upset has brought Douglas, who’ll be inaugurated on Jan. 2, a lot more attention. He says his calendar is suddenly jammed with people who’d never looked his way but now want to meet, and that he is invited into rooms he could not previously access.
Here's a look at the election results:
| Candidate | Party | Votes |
|---|---|---|
| George Hartwick (I) | (D) | 32,094 |
| Mike Pries (I) | (R) | 31,505 |
| Justin Douglas (D) | (D) | 26,821 |
| Chad Saylor (I) | (R) | 26,779 |
For a combined 16 years, Chad was the chief clerk and chief of staff at Dauphin County, home to Pennsylvania’s state capital of Harrisburg. Chad also has served at the state level, including a stint with the state Senate early in his career and later as Deputy Chief of Staff and Communications Director for former Lt. Gov. Jim Cawley from 2011 through 2014. Chad earned his bachelor’s degree from Lebanon Valley College.
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A video captures Douglas’ reaction when he learned his win: “Are you kidding me right now? Oh my gosh.
Douglas is a pastor who lives in Conewago Township with his wife and three children. Aiming his campaign at younger voters, his materials included a YouTube video styled after the celebrity interview web series “The Hot Ones,” in which stars eat increasingly fiery hot wings. His campaign also distributed door hangers with the message, “Did you know? The mayor from Jaws is still the mayor in Jaws 2.
We met in downtown Harrisburg, early on a frigid Wednesday just before the weekly commissioner’s meeting, which he chose to attend-as a spectator, for now. He’s instantly recognizable as almost anything but a successful politician: he’s got gauge earrings, 42 tattoos, and dresses in jeans, band tees, and Nike sneakers. When we arrive at the county building, a local NAACP chapter leader joins us in the elevator and gives Douglas a hey-aren’t-you-that-guy look, then asks to grab coffee some time. Later that morning, as he readies for an interview with Harrisburg’s CBS station, Douglas confesses that he’s got a lot to learn; that he’s not convinced the Democratic majority will work well together; that he feels icky about attending the inauguration on Jan.
The TV crew leaves and he asks me how he performed, then ponders how to best articulate his ideas going forward. “I’m figuring it out. I’m figuring out how I’m going to move differently now,” he says. “Not in morals or in authenticity, but if this is a simulation and we’re in a video game, I leveled up and skipped a few levels.
Douglas is not alone in navigating these questions. He is brainstorming next moves with Lamont Jones, a like-minded reformer and political newcomer who won a seat on the Harrisburg city council in November. Onah Ossai, an organizer with Pennsylvania Stands Up, is watching attentively.
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The county commission has vast power over that jail, a significant factor, Douglas says, in his decision to take Run for Something up on its proposal. A year ago, he says, he could not have named the three men who serve on the county commission of Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, his home since 2015. Still, he got a call in February from Run for Something, an organization that recruits progressive candidates for local elections, to see if he’d be interested in running for a seat on the county commission. The last time the office was on the ballot, in 2019, Douglas did not vote. He’d just been fired from his job as pastor at a local church for appearing in a promotional video welcoming LGBTQ+ people to join the congregation. He, his wife, and their three kids were forced out of the home, which was owned by the church. His stand at the church fit with what he describes as his longtime activist streak.
Dauphin County Commissioner Justin Douglas announces run in 10th Congressional District
A mainstay in various corners of Dauphin County where matters of social equity and justice are concerned, Douglas grew active in recent years in protest of conditions in the local jail, an aging and oppressive facility where people die at an alarming rate.
By any standard measure, his campaign seemed doomed from the start: He had no paid staff or office. His team of volunteers, a few friends of his with zero combined campaign experience, met in the corner of a Starbucks in Hershey. He spent roughly a fifth of the little campaign money he raised on a single, highway-side billboard highlighting the lethal lock-up, which sits between Harrisburg and the Douglas family home near the southeast edge of the county. “Eighteen prisoners dead since 2019,” Douglas’ billboard read. “Vote for change on Nov.
Douglas hammered that message relentlessly-on social media, at candidate forums his opponents didn’t bother to attend, and on the few occasions journalists reached out to interview him.
“There was activism that made a candidacy like this viable,” Ossai, who met Douglas at a Juneteenth rally this year outside the jail, told me. “No one else was running on the prison or talking about it before. Justin put up a billboard, he came to prison events, he came to prison board meetings.
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Despite its name, the Dauphin County Prison operates more like a common jail. Most of the roughly 1,000 people detained there on any given month have not been convicted and are held pretrial. Many are there because they can’t make bail, or due to violations of probation or parole.
Many Pennsylvania jails are deadly for the people who churn through, but Dauphin County’s jail death rate still exceeds statewide and national averages, PennLive determined in a recent investigation. “You don’t have to live in Dauphin County long to know this is a problem,” Douglas tells me.
In one such instance, Dauphin County reported the death of Herbert Tilghman as a “medical event,” which, PennLive found, obscured the fact that prison staff failed to take Tilghman’s stomach pains seriously, providing minimal treatment and even accusing him of faking illness shortly before he died.
“It’s disgusting,” Harrisburg’s Doniesha Bell told me this month, shortly after she was released. Though she hasn’t been convicted of any crime, she spent six months in jail because she could not make bail. “You have to sit in a cell and eat where you have to use the bathroom. You’re locked down 23 hours a day, and that’s if the guard feels like letting you out,” Bell said. “I was locked up with people who’d seen people die in there, and I get it: you’ve got to bang on the door because there’s no way to get ahold of the [correctional officers]. … The one day my blood pressure was up, they just told me to deal with it, to wait.
“The way they make more money is by providing lower-cost food and low-wage employees,” Hayden says. “They’ll go several weeks in a row with bologna sandwiches for lunch every day.
These stories have spurred deep local activism. Meetings of the jail board are well attended, and some advocates have successfully pushed their way into unofficial oversight roles; the nonprofit Pennsylvania Prison Society takes regular tours of the prison and reports back to the community on what it’s seeing. Destiny Brown, a member of that group, tells me she and others in her advocacy corner were pleasantly shocked that Douglas won, and that they “hope and pray this brings change.” Her Prison Society colleague, John Hargreaves, adds that Douglas winning is “injecting a note of optimism.
While I was in town to see him, Douglas toured the prison for the first time. He reports back to me following the visit: Certain cell blocks don’t ever go outside, he learned. Rather, he says, they have gym time, which the jail counts as “outdoor” time because air flows in through barred windows. Douglas says he observed in the gym that some of the basketball hoops have no rims, and learned that the jail’s juvenile unit has no working showers. He says he met another man on suicide watch, under supervision of an officer who told Douglas she is overworked and was filling in for a colleague on that day’s assignment. Douglas tells me, “That’s not a place I’d want to be in if I were in mental health crisis.
He was escorted during his tour by the county’s director of criminal justice, John Bey, a longtime Pennsylvania police chief who was hired by the county earlier this year to oversee its correctional system. And so, when we spoke by phone this week, I was curious to hear how Bey feels the county can better communicate what happens inside the jail. He immediately rejected my premise and suggested that the county has been forthcoming about jail deaths, despite thorough PennLive reporting to the contrary. He added, “They’re not housed in their cells locked down 23, 24 hours a day.” I mentioned Bell’s claim that she had been locked in for that long. “I’m not going to say that that lady is lying,” Bey replied. “We do feed inmates in their cells.
Douglas says he met more than 20 people detained at the jail during his tour, and some knew he’d been elected. Douglas will soon have some real power over the jail. When he is inaugurated, he will automatically join the county’s prison board, the facility’s governing body, on which all three commissioners have a seat alongside four other local officials. The three-member commission, as a separate, standalone body, has final say on budget questions and on contracts for health care, food, and other services.
He’s also aware that the best way to keep someone from dying at the jail is to make sure they never get there at all. He insists that focusing on improving economic conditions throughout Dauphin County would have that effect. But Douglas knows change will be difficult. Many of his ideas have gotten little visibility from the local political establishment until now.
Douglas is the first to concede that he isn’t anywhere close to functioning majorities in favor of bold jail reforms. “I don’t trust that everything’s better,” Ossai says. “We’ll see if they’re able to work together, and to what end, and we’ll see who holds the power.
He says he’ll frequently and loudly talk about what goes on in the jail. He wants public meetings on that and other topics to be understandable to the public-that is, no more sailing through agenda items without discussion. He wants meetings of the prison board to be events and hopes to invite more voices of activists, including currently and formerly incarcerated people, into those spaces. He tells me, “The prisoners whose hands I shook-I’m going to get to know their names.
Jones, too, overcame tremendously long odds to reach these heights. He’s formerly incarcerated, including two stints inside the Dauphin County jail. He’s Black, was raised in poverty in Harrisburg, and by 15 was selling cocaine. Now 48, he voted for the first time at age 39; like so many in the country, he says, he spent years wrongly assuming his felony record meant he could not vote. When Jones decided to run for Harrisburg’s council this year, local Democratic power players conspired to keep him off the ballot, arguing his criminal past should disqualify him.
“We’re in the era of criminal justice reform, right? Here, I’m someone who has exemplified that enough to be elected into a position to give hope to people who didn’t think they could do anything with a felony, who didn’t think they could get out of the situation. I listened as Jones and Douglas considered how they can work together to reduce poverty, criminality, and incarceration.
“We’re going to have to make some relationships with some people that we don’t even care for,” Jones tells Douglas. The two men feel politically lonely and they’re already bracing for blowback, but they’re also focused on building power on the outside. “It can’t stop with just him and I,” Jones tells me.
First, another man has died inside the prison. His name was Christopher K. Phy, he was 38 years old, and he hanged himself. Douglas is disgusted, furious. I ask him how it’ll feel after he’s inaugurated, if and when someone else dies in there, or the county is made to pay for its violence against a future detainee, and reporters or members of the activist base from which he’s risen call him demanding answers.
“I’m not going to cost the county anything,” Douglas tells me. He continues, “I’ll lose this job and they can sue the hell out of me, if that’s the consequence of being honest and transparent. Let’s be honest: the county just paid a family $4 million because they murdered somebody.
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