Henry "Enrique" Tarrio said he's been taunted by correctional officers and exposed to horrifying jail conditions, including dirty toilet water flooding in from a neighboring cell, brutal guards, and smoke-filled hallways. According to the Associated Press, he asked for his sentence to be either reduced or finished under house arrest to get out of these conditions.
"I've been to jail before, and what I've seen here, I've never seen anywhere else," Tarrio told the judge by video in jail. "This place needs to be shut down immediately."
The Proud Boys member said he witnessed a prisoner who had a seizure lay on the floor for a half-hour before any help arrived. The conditions he lives in and the harassment he suffers from correctional officers have left him "deathly afraid that something is going to happen to" him, he said.
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Tarrio pleaded guilty to destruction of property and attempted possession of a large-capacity ammunition feeding device, according to the outlet.
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The report added that Washington's Superior Court Judge Jonathan Pittman will decide by the end of the week whether Tarrio's punishment would be reduced to 90 days.
The conditions of prisons have been called into question following the capture of hundreds of people believed to be connected to the Jan. 6 riot. Many of the people captured have been held in solitary detention, an arrangement that has drawn bipartisan criticism from political figures such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Lindsey Graham.
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Attorneys for the government acknowledged some problems with the jail conditions, saying they were being handled. The flooding, they said, came from a prisoner in a neighboring cell who regularly flooded his own toilet in protest, and said Tarrio had since been transferred to another cell. They denied Tarrio had been mistreated, singled out or denied his rights in any way.
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Tarrio's complaints about jail conditions in Washington mirror those of several prisoners charged in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Conditions at the D.C. central jail have long been a subject of criticism for local activists. The issue has taken on a national political dimension in recent months because of the Jan. 6 defendants.
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In October, a federal judge held the District of Columbia's corrections director and jail guard in contempt of court and asked the Justice Department to examine whether inmates' civil rights were being mistreated. The District and the U.S. Marshals Service struck a deal last week to fix conditions at the jail.
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