Chicago, IL — “I didn’t write this to become a hero. I wrote it because I got tired of watching officers break down and disappear.” Those are the words of Jabril Gushiniere, a sworn Cook County Sheriff Deputy working as a correctional officer at Chicago’s sprawling Cook County Jail, one of the largest jails in the United States.
Gushiniere sent a 46-page exposé to Unicorn Riot titled “Beneath the Badge: Corruption and Administrative Abuse Within Cook County Jail” which we are publishing in full (pdf), along with 84 documents provided by Mr. Gushiniere, including an affidavit of facts (pdf) and a grievance statement (pdf). View all of the documents in our vault server; they’re summarized below.
The collection of documents sheds light from an unusual angle on a county jail system that was under federal oversight for more than 40 years due to repeated and systemic abuses.
Gushiniere wrote their viewpoint was “as a whistleblower, a survivor of administrative abuse, and a voice for those who’ve been silenced behind one of America’s largest and most secretive correctional systems.” In Illinois, the “State Officials and Employees Ethics Act” (5 ILCS 430/15 & 740 ILCS 174/20.2) “provides ‘whistle blower’ protections to State employees who report, or threaten to report wrongdoing” or similar, according to the Office of the Executive Inspector General.
He said his report “exposes systemic corruption, retaliation, contract violations, and union collusion” within the Cook County Department of Corrections. It presents not only a personal account but a “documented pattern of institutional abuse that impacts both officers and detainees.” (Unicorn Riot did not independently confirm Gushiniere’s work experiences within the jail.)
Gushiniere said he’s seen officers “suffer in silence, break down, burn out, or walk away from this job in disgust. So I made a different choice. I decided to write. I decided to tell the story. I decided to expose the machine.”
Beneath the Badge Corruption and Administrative Abuse Within Cook County Jail – Download
“This exposé is not simply a retelling of misconduct — it is a full-body autopsy of a broken institution,” said Gushiniere, whose story of being the target of retaliation, defamation and systemic abuse started with him “refusing to cross-watch in violation of security protocol.”
Cross-watching, he explained, is when a single officer is tasked with monitoring “two, sometimes even three, separate housing units at once.”
The practice of cross-watching has led to many serious issues including fights and even deaths in the jail. The Department of Justice Civil Rights Division ordered the jail to stop cross-watching in 2008 (pdf). Seventeen years later, the practice continues unabated in Cook County Jail which holds around 5,700 inmates on a daily average. The Cook County Sheriff’s Office employs over 6,700 staff, with 3,500 employees in working in the jail (pdf) and adjacent Cook County Department of Corrections buildings which sit on 96 acres of land off California Avenue and the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.
Gushiniere was hired as a correctional officer to work in the Cook County Jail in February 2017. He left the position in November 2019 to pursue other professional opportunities, he said, and returned in May 2021.
Gushiniere has suffered several major injuries while on the job: he’s broken his ankle, tore his meniscus and needed surgery and most recently tore his labrum while working, he said. After the labrum injury, he “was forced back to work” when Cook County’s independent medical examiner said he’s fit, despite not being “fully healed.”
They “ignore our treating physicians, cut off our pay, and tell us to go on disability like that’s the solution. It’s a scheme, plain and simple,” Gushiniere told Unicorn Riot, “and it’s happening to more of us than people realize.”
In all of the communications and his exposé, Gushiniere never once made disparaging remarks about the people incarcerated at Cook County. He said that his injuries are from stopping fights “because I never want a family to say no one helped their loved one when they were in danger.” He said the fights “aren’t clean or fair. It’s rarely a one-on-one situation. It’s usually 3-on-1, 4-on-1, and sometimes they’re using jail-made weapons. It gets brutal fast.”
“I didn’t write this to become a hero … I wrote it because I got tired of fighting alone. Because I’ve bled for this job. Because I’ve shattered bones for this department. Because I gave everything, and when I came back—when I needed dignity, protection, and Respect I was handed threats, lies, and a forced assignment. I wrote this because the pain is real, and the paper trail is long. And I know I’m not the only one.” – Jabril Gushiniere
Gushiniere presented an affidavit of facts dated March 23, 2025 (pdf) where he notes the impetus that drove him to blow the whistle on the institution that employs him — he was given a forced bid assignment as he came back from injury that he said went against his contract.
He said he received phone calls two days earlier from an executive assistant and a director of the Cook County Sheriff’s Office that were filled with “coercive language, procedural misconduct, and retaliatory tone” used against him.
Both calls lasted around 15 minutes and Gushiniere says his requests for a list of available vacancies to bid for his next job posting were repeatedly declined. Before telling him that he was going to list him as a “non-bid” and send him “where there’s a vacancy and a need,” Director Matthew Wilensky reportedly told Gushiniere that “everyone similarly situated” has faced the same process of a phone call and preferences, rather than an open board to bid from, a process specified in the officers’ union contract. That call was preceded by a call with assistant Janice Yost, who abruptly hung up the phone when Gushiniere alerted her the call was being recorded.
He said he believes their actions “constitute retaliation, bad faith negotiation, and abuse of power in violation of the CBA, Illinois labor statutes, and whistleblower protections.”
According to the documents provided by Gushiniere, he was given 7-day suspension (pdf) and a 10-day suspension (pdf) for two incidents occurring the same day on Feb. 3, 2022, one for refusing to cross-watch and the longer suspension for “unsatisfactory work performance.”
“Over the course of my tenure as a Correctional Officer at the Cook County Jail, I have witnessed — and became the target of — a coordinated campaign of retaliation, defamation, and systemic abuse. My crime? Refusing to cross-watch in violation of security protocol.” – Jabril Gushiniere
Gushiniere’s experience features elements that could be heard from any correctional officer at any carceral institution in the United States, which has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Each state in the country incarcerates more people per capita than most of the rest of the world.
It’s well documented that corrections officers suffer from on-the-job trauma. Gushiniere’s story and exposé is a glaring example of some of the administrative issues and staffing shortages at these institutions that are a continual theme. These all lead correctional officers to having higher rates of depression, PTSD, and suicidal ideations than other professions. Four deputies that work at Houston’s Harris County recently committed suicide over just six weeks. [For more on the emotional and physical health of correctional officers, read the 64-page report I Am Not Okay – Wellness White Paper by the correctional officers organization One Voice United.]
“We don’t talk about the officers who took their own lives. We don’t talk about the ones who snapped on shift and never recovered. We don’t talk about the ones who were once kind and composed but are now angry, bitter, and broken. We don’t talk about the mental health crisis happening behind the badge. But we should.” – Jabril Gushiniere
Cook County Jail was under federal oversight from 1974 to 2010; Gushiniere is calling for another federal investigation. The Department of Justice should investigate Cook County Jail for labor violations, safety hazards, civil rights violations, abuse of authority, and union and management collusion, said Gushiniere.
Gushiniere listed practices and patterns of misconduct falling on corrections officers:
- CBA violations that are ignored and repeated
- Retaliation against officers who invoke their rights
- Cross-watching that endangers lives in violation of federal safety standards
- Bid rigging that undermines seniority and labor law
- HR negligence that protects administrators instead of staff
- Mental health neglect that leads to emotional collapse
- Union silence that borders on abandonment
- Leadership intimidation that kills protected speech
- Document suppression, stonewalling, and strategic obstruction
This is all in relation to its employees, not the thousands of inmates shuffled in and out the jail, or the 18 inmates who died inside the Cook County Jail in 2023, which the sheriff blamed “detainees overdosing on drug-laced paper” for causing the jail’s deadliest year in decades. Another deputy was charged last August for allegedly bringing papers that “contained synthetic cannabinoids” into the jail. The deputy had been on “injured on duty” status since July 15, 2024, after they tried to intervene in an inmate fight, according to press reports; a similar case was reported in 2023.
Gushiniere’s grievance statement (pdf) said the administration breached Article 14 of his collective bargaining agreement regarding reentry and bid placement, retaliated against him in violation of Illinois Whistleblower Act and that he was not given due process. He called for an “immediate reversal of the forced bid assignment,” a “formal acknowledgment and correction of the CBA violation,” an “assurance of protection from further retaliation,” and “a formal investigation into the conduct of Janice Yost and Director Wilensky.”
Corrections officers work between the confined inmate population and upper management; reports like Gushiniere’s raise questions about how management decisions systematically make violence more likely to occur.
Last April, two Cook County corrections officers were charged for separate incidents of beating inmates and more recently a lone guard was beaten by an inmate and saved by another inmate as the guard’s supervisor reportedly violated jail policies ordering him to do a safety check alone.
Gushiniere currently remains employed at Cook County Jail where he’s calling on officers to build a better future, to document everything, file grievances, connect with each other, pressure the union, call in oversight, and support independent journalists. Read his expose here (pdf) and his related documents below.
At the state level, Illinois has failed to hold its Department of Corrections staff accountable. A 2022 ProPublica/WBEZ investigation found at least 18 employees “abused or used excessive force” on inmates; “all remained on the job.”
A 2016 report from the Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (pdf) covered how prison corruption often reaches high levels of prison administrations across the USA, including alleged “pay-to-play” with private prisons. In Michigan, guards are alleged to be smuggling drugs into prisons while state authorities turn a blind eye.
Another major scandal has been brewing after several New York prison guards were indicted for second-degree murder in February, after Robert Brooks was killed at the Marcy Correction Facility in December. Governor Kathy Hochul has initiated proceedings to fire “more than a dozen employees implicated in the attack.” The Marshall Project analyzed 12 years of records from a formerly secret database and found that due to correctional officers’ union contract, outside arbitrators got 75% of corrections officers their jobs back after accusations of abuse or coverups. One former inmate turned reform organizer told CNYCentral these problems span the entire New York state prison network.
Dan Feidt contributed to this report. Cover image by Niko Georgiades for Unicorn Riot.
Resources: Cook County Jail & Related Documents
View all of the documents Gushiniere provided in our vault server.
- Collective Bargaining Agreement with International Brotherhood of Teamsters No. 700 (Dec. 1, 2020 to Nov. 30, 2024 – 124 pages (pdf)
- Beneath the Badge: Corruption and Administrative Abuse Within Cook County Jail by Jabril Gushiniere – 45 pages (pdf)
- CCDOC Electronic Mail policy #138 – 3 pages (pdf). The policy is marked with a copyright by Lexipol dated 03/15/2024. A 2022 Indiana Law Journal report covered “Lexipol’s Fight Against Police Reform” (pdf): “[An] often-overlooked private company, Lexipol LLC, has become one of the most powerful voices pushing against reform of use-of-force standard… Lexipol now writes police policies and trainings for over one-fifth of American law enforcement agencies.”
- Gushiniere’s work calendar, Jan. 2024 (1 – 2)
- Compliant incident against Gushiniere, 2/3/2022 (1 – 1a – 1b – 1c – 2 – 3 – 3a)
- CCDOC Memo, Officers Department-Wide Bidding Process, 1/9/2024 (1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5)
- CCDOC Memo, Officers Department-Wide Bidding Process, 1/22/2025 (1 – 2 – 3 – 4). Photographed on brick wall.
- CCDOC Disciplinary Action Forms with suspensions, 2/3/2022 (1 – 2)
- CCDOC Sworn Member Grievance Status Form, re 2/3/2022 incident. (1)
- Discipline excerpts for December 2023 and January 2024 (1 – 2)
- Email to Colleagues (1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8) and Responses (1 – 2 – 3 – 3a – 4)
- FOIA to Cook County: Email receipts (1 – 2 – 3) and In Progress (1 – 2). Request Denied (1). Responses (1 – 2 – 3). Additional receipts in 2025 (1 – 2). Replies by Gushiniere (1 – 2). Screenshot of a list (1). More responses in 2025 (1 – 2).
- Kendall County, Illinois wage chart (1)
- Cook County Sheriff’s Office, Office of Professional Review, Jan. 27, 2025 notice of being accused re sending emails. (1)
- Office of Public Safety Administration, HR Division, Dec. 4, 2023, notice re violating rules of Chicago Police Department (1)
- Social media post re working conditions (1)
- FOIA email to Cook County response (1)
- Release for Duty Authorization, 2/28/2025 (1)
- Rejected email screenshot, 3/22/2025 (1)
- Sheriff’s Office Managed Phone Enforcement, 2/26/2024 (1)
- Teamster-related social media posts (1 – 2)
- Teamster Local No. 700 Grievance Form, filed 3/2/2022 (1)
- Teamster working condition excerpts (sections 13 – 13b – 14 – 14b – 14c – 14d – 18 – 19) and wages (1 – 2)
- FOIA messages, Spring 2025 – 45 pages (1)
- Forced bid assignment, 3/23/2025 (1).
- FOIA response correspondence, Jan. 21, 2025 (1)
- Email statements from Gushiniere – 10 pages (1)
- Gushiniere Affidavit of Facts, (1) Cover letter (1), Grievance Statement (1), Packet summary and certification (1)
- Transcript with Director Matthew Wilensky, Call 3/21/2025, 4 pages (1)
Originally published with Unicorn Riot on April 17, 2025.
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