In a D.C. jail, Jan. 6 defendants awaiting trial are forming bitter factions
Inside the Washington, D.C., jail, where a group of defendants charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol have been held for as long as a year or more, a bitter divide is growing, current and former inmates say.
A combination of that intense proximity, the stress of criminal cases and a fight over more than a million dollars donated to support the defendants has contributed to the rift.
One inmate described the situation to NPR as "too many rats together in a small cage for too long."
"Tempers naturally get short," he said, with "cliques solidifying further into independent 'camps' as time progresses."
That inmate, like several others, told his story to NPR on the condition of anonymity to describe the pressure-cooker environment inside the jail. A dozen current or former inmates of the D.C. jail ultimately spoke to NPR and said that the divisions among some of the highest-profile defendants in the country are now boiling over.
It all started in the weeks immediately after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. FBI agents conducted a campaign of "shock and awe," in the words of a
top prosecutor, making arrests as the Department of Justice rushed to bring charges. Most of the people arrested were allowed to go free while their cases worked their way through court. Judges decided a smaller group — often those facing the most serious charges or those who prosecutors worried might flee the country — should be locked up while they awaited trial. That decision presented authorities with a challenge: Where exactly should the government hold them?
Some ended up scattered in jails close to their homes. But a few dozen (the precise number has fluctuated) were incarcerated in the city where the Jan. 6 attack took place, in Washington, D.C.'s Correctional Treatment Facility. The District's Department of Corrections decided for the inmates' "
own safety and security" to detain all of the Jan. 6 defendants in just one part of the facility, a section known as C2B.
The combination of a court backlogged with COVID-19-related delays, plus the lumbering nature of a massive federal criminal investigation, has stretched the "pretrial" period to as long as a year or more for some detainees. And so the decision to hold a disparate group of alleged Capitol rioters from all over the country — including people linked by prosecutors to the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and QAnon — in one section of the jail for a protracted period has had unintended consequences.
Initially, the inmates seemed so unified and bonded that a defense attorney
told a judge the jail had developed a "cult-like" atmosphere. Experts on extremism
worried that the jail was radicalizing the inmates. But recently, conflicts have blown up between the inmates and grown into what another attorney referred to as a "schism" and what an inmate compared to a "middle school lunchroom."
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