Sheriff Richard Jones' cruel and unusual punishment
An immigration attorney lays bare the wanton cruelty, brazen criminality and mandatory injections at the heart of Butler County's ad-hoc mass deportation industrial complex.
Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones claims he began preparing to assist the Trump Administration with mass deportations a day after the 2024 General Election.
“I want to do what my constituents, the people that are my boss, want me to do. They want people that are here illegal not to be here,” Jones told Spectrum News on Dec. 2, 2024.
“They don’t want people in schools that don’t speak English, they don’t know even what their shot records are, you don’t know how old they are, they come here with none of those things.”
Jones, probably unbeknownst to him, was repeating bog-standard anti-immigrant boilerplate about disease-ridden hordes while also conflating non-English-speaking “people in schools” with the more apt descriptor of “children.”
Two weeks after his boisterous decree, The Rooster encountered Jones in the Statehouse Rotunda, while he was ambling toward the State Senate chamber to certify Ohio’s electoral votes for Donald Trump.
Jones is one of the few politicians who makes my 6’2” frame look small, even if he hadn’t been wearing that ridiculous cowboy hat to hide the baldness that he’s still insecure about at the ripe age of 72.
But boasting about mass deportations to brow-beaten reporters is a lot easier than explaining the logistics of deporting the roughly 14 million undocumented immigrants residing in America.
“What will [those mass deportations] look like?” I asked Jones.
“It looks like I’m going to have buses loaded up with people … that are being deported,” Jones said, before ambling into a restricted area where I couldn’t follow without being gleefully tased by numerous Sargeants-at-Arms.
A little over a year later, we have a much clearer understanding of the brutality required for a federal policy that, if enacted in totality, would likely collapse America’s economy almost overnight.
According to the Butler County Sheriff’s office, its three jails housed 9,962 inmates throughout 2025.
Even if all of them were undocumented immigrants, that would only reflect 9% of the estimated 110,000 estimated to live in Ohio.
The Rooster recently filed a public records request for key information about every inmate processed through Butler County’s jails in 2025.
Butler County Litigation Specialist Jonathan E. Davidson, Esq., responded that it would not be possible due to the depth and scope of the request.
The Rooster cited Butler County’s duty under Ohio law and will hire our own litigation specialist should that request not be processed by the fall.
At the moment, it’s impossible to say how many of those 9,962 inmates were incarcerated for being undocumented immigrants, or how many of those undocumented immigrants had been convicted of a violent crime, if any crime at all.
We do know that, in Dec. 2024, Hamilton County Sheriff Charmaine McGuffey told Spectrum News that her jails, which housed roughly 1,200 inmates per day, only processed 70 undocumented immigrants in what she described as a “solid year.”
While we await the official documentation about undocumented immigrants from Butler County, we can examine Sheriff Jones’ wanton cruelty, disregard for the law, and the festering humanitarian crisis that The Rooster has every reason to believe his department has worked hard to hide from the state’s shoestring investigators.
Jones started his career in law enforcement not as a Sheriff’s deputy, but with the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections. His 17 years within the state’s carceral system served as the backbone of his skillset when Butler County elected then-Deputy Jones as Sheriff in 2004.
That background bleeds into Jones’ unrepetent joy when discussing the incarceration and deportation of immigrants, many of whom were here legally.
The Rooster spoke with an Ohio-based immigration attorney, granted anonymity to avoid retribution from a vindictive reactionary force like Jones, who laid bare the deplorable inhumanity that serves as a bedrock of a social policy that millions of Americans were duped into believing would only target violent offenders and sadistic criminals—not children’s hospital chaplains or Venezuelan mayors.
The lawyer described one client’s journey through Butler County’s ad hoc immigration center, with Constitutional violations beginning at the time of arrest.
“My client appeared for a routine ICE check-in appointment at the Westerville, Ohio, office for case review,” the lawyer said.
“What he expected to be a standard appointment turned into an immediate detention without due process, legal representation, or meaningful explanation.”
The ICE agents, without an interpreter present, duped the client into signing paperwork disavowing his right to legal counsel.
The client was then whisked into a concrete room with other detainees and no furniture for approximately 11 to 12 hours.
“We were all sitting on the concrete floors,” the client said. “I was very tired, and I was trying to sleep but couldn’t.”
ICE agents refused to provide any basic necessities after four hours in the make-shift holding cell.
“ICE brought a bottle of water for each of us,” the client said. “There were three of us in a room. They also brought one package of tuna fish and toilet paper to use as a napkin.”
That was all they would receive over their 12-hour detention.
When night fell, the ICE agents loaded the detainees, who had committed no crime other than appearing at their scheduled immigration check-ins, into a van with the windows spray-painted white on the inside to prevent them from looking outside on their ride to Butler County Jail.
“The intake process sets the tone for the degrading treatment to follow.”
The lawyer, who represents multiple clients currently incarcerated or who were incarcerated in Butler County, believes that the systemic pattern of abuse violates the Eighth Amendment, which bars cruel and unusual punishment.
“Upon arrival, my clients describe being held in a concrete holding room measuring approximately 20 feet by 20 feet with 10 other men, forced to sit on steel benches in extreme cold for approximately four hours.”
Butler County Sheriff’s deputies only provided one packet of peanut butter, two pieces of bread, and one biscuit cookie—and no water.
Multiple clients described signing several documents on the jail’s digital signing pad, again with no interpreter present.
“The officer was behind thick glass, and it was very difficult to hear him,” the client said.
Butler County Jail’s newest inmates completed their processing at roughly 3 a.m, at which point they were allowed a single phone call.
“They provided a thin blanket and no pillow.”
Unsurprisingly, the conditions only deteriorated from there.
Inmates are supplied with a thin blanket and no pillow. They sleep on a mattress that one client described as “a three-inch terrible mattress that would deflate as soon as you lay down—so it was like sleeping on steel.”
Thin blankets did nothing to protect the inmates from brutal cold, compounded by their steel interior.
The situation became so desperate that the client “used a damp toilet paper to place over the vent holes to keep the cold air from blowing on us in our cell.”
The blistering cold was only half of the mental and physical torture endured by the inmates. Burning fluorescent lights lambasted them throughout the day. The only thing that turned off was when the inmates left the cell.
“It was so fucked up,” the client said. “It has messed up my vision. I’m still recuperating from having all the lights on all the time.”
Another client revealed that he went 30 days without seeing natural light. “My eyes still seem to be adjusting to normal natural daylight,” he said.
The lawyer noted that these practices appear deliberately designed to deprive detainees of sleep and cause “lasting psychological and physical harm.”
“The cereal was served on flat trays with powdered milk.”
Sheriff Jones is infamous for serving misbehaving inmates so-called “warden burgers” to extract better behavior.
"It’s made with soy crumbles, beans, potatoes, vegetables, tomato paste, some chili powder, oats, and then they bind it all together," an inmate advocate told WKRC on Jan. 16.
Warden burgers might be considered a Michelin-star meal compared to the regimen served to immigrant inmates.
Multiple clients have described “constant, gnawing hunger” and the feeling of their “bodies physically deteriorating,” the lawyer said.
Breakfast is cereal with powdered milk, served on a flat tray.
One client noted that inmates can purchase a bowl for $5.99. That might seem like a steal, until it’s realized that inmates don’t receive any water to mix the powder into liquid milk.
Another client described a type of stale, discolored “cake” that accompanied the meal, but “nobody ate that cake because it was so nasty.”
Lunch, served in minimal portions, doesn’t get better. It’s a half-cup each of “boiled vegetables and mushy rice,” according to the lawyer.
Dinner is little more than the staple first served to them in the ad-hoc holding cells after their arrests: “Two slices of white bread with single-serving packets of peanut butter and jelly.”
But one client revealed sometimes they get a bonus: One slice of yellow American shitty cheese in the sleeve and two shaved thin pieces of some type of deli meat.”
That regal meal was only “every other day,” however.
Sheriff’s deputies didn’t serve the inmates any beverages. “No salt or seasoning is available unless purchased from the commissary,” the lawyer said.
The constant hunger leads younger inmates to scavenge any scraps left on the plates at the end of meals, “so they could save it for later,” said a client.
Mandatory injections upon arrival without any meaningful explanation
Butler County Jail’s inhumane conditions also extend to violations of medical autonomy, religious freedom and basic sanitation standards, according to the lawyer.
“Multiple clients have described being administered mandatory injections upon arrival without any meaningful explanation of what was being injected into their bodies,” the lawyer said.
One client said he asked the nurse, “‘What is the shot you are giving me?’ I didn’t understand what she told me. But the officers said it was required for all people.”
Concerns for sanitary conditions are even worse.
“Clients receive a single small towel, one single-use packet of shampoo, and what my clients describe as a ‘finger sheath’ with minimal bristles rather than an actual toothbrush,” the lawyer said.
One client noted that “Many people were not given the finger toothbrush or other items that I was used to because the jail was becoming so full.”
Showers only run cold water.
“Exploitative pricing that takes advantage of desperate, hungry detainees and their families.”
Once incarcerated in Butler County, Sheriff Jones unleashes a predatory system aimed at separating as much money as possible from inmates and their families—most of whom are poor and undergoing a lifetime crisis.
Clients report that for $12.99, they can feast upon “one McDonald’s type of sandwich.”
For $1.28, they receive “a small package” of ramen noodles.
For $6.29, they can enjoy a cup of instant coffee.
Phone cards—their lifeline to the outside world—cost $8 for 40 minutes of talking time, forcing many clients into “impossible choices between communicating with family or legal counsel and purchasing basic food items,” according to the lawyer.
The marginal food, offered as an incentive for inmates to subsidize the disgusting lack of any nutritional foundation in the jail’s regimen, is also woefully inadequate.
For example, the lawyer noted that $1.28 for a small package of ramen noodles might seem like a good deal, but there is no hot water for inmates to properly cook their noodles.
There’s only “warm” water—and inmates can only “cook” their noodles if they purchase the aforementioned plastic bowl for $5.50.
One client estimated to the lawyer that only half of Butler County’s inmates had any commissary money.
“That means,” the lawyer said, “Half the population has no access whatsoever to supplemental food, phone calls to family, or basic necessities like bowls and salt.”
Where is all the money going?
The One Beautiful Bill—seemingly the only major legislative act that the Republican federal trifecta will pass between Trump’s election and November’s midterms—allotted a staggering $85 billion toward ICE’s budget.
It’s worth asking where all that money is going, given that we seem to be living in a golden age of corruption, led by a president who flaunts his historic graft in the faces of two branches of government, allegedly equal in power, designed to prevent that behavior.
Despite Sheriff Jones’ glee in participating in brutally exploiting human chattel, there doesn’t seem to be any influx of money to help alleviate the depraved conditions of his jails.
“The totality of these conditions paints a picture of a facility operating far beyond its intended capacity with deliberate indifference to the health, safety, and constitutional rights of those in its custody,” the lawyer said.
“These are reports of human beings subjected to conditions that no civilized society should tolerate.”
THOSE WMDs. Minnesota proved MAGA wrong… “The biggest act of union-busting in American history:” Trump’s war on federal workers… He had to get out alive after leaking details of a South Asian scam compound… From bus rides to playgrounds, we’re raising children in a culture of fear… Your friendly neighborhood resistance.
Temu Joe Arpaio
Good grief. The 1950's called and they want their bad sheriff villain manual back. My hope is these vile people are voted out by responsible law enforcement who do the right thing. Thanks Rooster 🐓 for investigating.