Washington’s jails have long been a source of local shame and outrage. The U.S. Marshals Service recently reported finding sewage and water leaks at the jail, as well as instances of corrections officers withholding food and water as punishment. But the more extreme conditions were not in the section of the jail where the Jan. 6 defendants are held.
Karl A. Racine, Washington’s attorney general, said last month that the squalid conditions in the jail — where most inmates are Black — had “received little attention until they were raised by mostly white defendants accused of perpetrating the Jan. 6 insurrection.”
In court filings and accounts shared by supporters, though, the incarcerated Jan. 6 defendants have used these conditions to augment their portrayal of themselves as oppressed but resolute prisoners of war. Every night at 9 p.m., they stand to salute an American flag…
