Swain County jail’s inspection failures highlight statewide issues
This story was updated Dec. 24 to include a quote from NC DHHS.
Between 2017 and 2025, Swain County Law Enforcement Center failed 13 of 16 biannual inspections, according to Disability Rights North Carolina.
The existence of one or more documented violations requires the sheriff to submit a plan of correction to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services detailing the steps that will be or already have been taken to remediate each issue.
But according to documents provided to DRNC, plans of correction haven’t mitigated chronic noncompliance.
DRNC defines “failed” as when the Division of Health Service Regulation, housed under DHHS, “cites a facility for non-compliance with the Jail Rules, meaning that the inspection found the facility was not following one or more of the Jail Rules.”
The failures actually put the jail on the same level as many other county jails in North Carolina. Among those in The Smoky Mountain News’ four-county coverage area, the jail in Macon failed 100% of 16 inspections conducted from 2017 to 2025. Jackson, having failed 11 of 15, had a marginally better eight-year track record. Finally, Haywood’s jail, without available 2017-2019 data, passed half — six out of 12 — inspections from 2020 to 2025.
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Importance of supervision
All North Carolina jail officials must make safety rounds twice per 60 minutes, with no more than 40 minutes between each round — and more often if there are health issues, behavioral factors or suicide watch.
Effective supervision — which includes both rounds and video observation, alongside two-way intercom communication — is routinely cited as one of the most important factors in mitigating suicide risk and better ensuring the safety of incarcerated people.
Jackson County’s 2017-2019 jail violations were to the tune of “two citations in 2017 for multiple missed rounds, [and] failure to enter cell blocks to directly observe people in custody,” DRNC noted. What’s more, Melissa Middleton Rice’s 2019 death by suicide “ following a traumatic domestic dispute” occurred in the Jackson jail’s booking area, said the nonprofit — “after being left alone without observation.” More recently, the county has incurred on-and-off citations for supervision inadequacies, with one 74-minute gap between rounds in early 2025.
In both inspections the year prior, “the video surveillance system and the two-way communication system located in the Master Control room were discovered to be locked and non-functional,” observed the DHSR officer. According to a May 2025 article in The Sylva Herald, since 2019, Jackson County Detention Center has recorded “at least six” fatalities.
The Macon and Haywood jails each held a better supervision record than Jackson’s, though in early 2024, the former was cited for a faulty dorm two-way communication system, and the latter for round breaks of up to 65 minutes.
Still, DRNC highlighted the Swain County Law Enforcement Center in particular for its routine failure to adequately perform safety checks — despite multiple corrective plans that promised to re-educate detention officers.
October 2025 marked the most recent jail death in SMN’s coverage area, which took place at the Haywood County detention center. There have been two deaths at SCLEC since 2018, a relatively low figure among the state’s counties.
When 25-year-old Joseph Lomas died in SCLEC in 2020, the Smoky Mountain News reported that he’d previously been placed in a holding cell “so he could be treated by a nurse for what appeared to be alcohol withdrawal.” Such symptoms observed in an inmate would require staff to conduct four or more safety checks each hour, no more than 20 minutes apart. Former sheriff Curtis Cochran told the Smoky Mountain Times that during a round 24 minutes before Lomas was found unconscious, he was sitting on a bench in the holding cell.
Swain inspection history
The Swain facility’s 2019 POC noted officers had been “reprimanded” for missing rounds. That seemed to do the trick; it had no issues with supervision in 2020, only failing due to inadequate sanitation. The jail received a passing mark the next year, but any success was short-lived: SCLEC failed both of its 2022 inspections, once on account of supervision.
In early 2023, Swain’s detention center passed; DHSR inspector Roger McCoy found “no deficiencies.” At the time, the county was being paid to house 27 people with federal convictions through a contract with the United States Marshal Service.
A few months later, however, McCoy documented significant violations.
Upon his visit, the inspector wrote that USMS was funding the jail for 23 of its beds, though he only observed a “total of three staff working the jail, all female officers, no male officers working the jail this shift.”
Additionally, he wrote, “1. There were no rounds conducted for a duration of 3 hours and 45 minutes, specifically from 2:15 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. 2. Only one supervision round was documented/conducted for the entire facility during the hours of: 1 a.m., 2 a.m., 6 a.m., 7 a.m., 12 p.m., and 5 p.m. … 3. Pods B and D lacked any documented rounds for the entire 24-hour period under review.”
Swain County then failed its first report of 2024 — while housing 40 people with federal convictions. Inspector Charles Brown noted that “the documented supervision rounds were not provided at the time of inspection.”
McCoy, responsible for the latter 2024 inspection, found “no deficiencies,” giving the jail a second passing mark. At that time, the contract with the USMS had the jail renting 41 beds.
It was not McCoy, but North Carolina Chief Jail Inspector Chris Wood, who conducted SCLEC’s first 2025 inspection. Then still operated by Cochran, who has since retired amid serious sexual assault charges in both Swain County and on the Qualla Boundary, it was flagged for a number of immediate issues. As for supervision, the March 26 report ran into the same obstacle: no records were readily available.
“The administrator of the facility stated that she would email supervision rounds to the inspector. Inspector has not received supervision rounds as requested,” the document read.
The jail’s litany of other violations — including failure to check fire extinguishers, a damaged intercom, moldy ceilings and unusable entry locks — were not fully addressed until days after its second 2025 inspection, signed in September. This timing was ostensibly permitted by DHSR, given the state’s eventual acceptance of the POC submitted by Swain County Sheriff Brian Kirkland and approved by jail administrator Christopher Grant.
Amid Cochran’s scandal, Swain County law enforcement has been navigating unprecedented territory these past few months, which Kirkland told SMN delayed POC process. Kirkland, then Cochran’s second in command, assumed the responsibilities of the highest law enforcement officer in the county.
Meanwhile, the jail, formerly under the responsibility of Leanna Arch, endured its own administrative turnover.
“Chris [Grant] came in, and that stuff hadn’t been completed yet by the previous administrator, and he had to go back and put that together to get it cemented,” Kirkland said of officers documenting their regular rounds in the jail.
The first 2025 POC addressed many of the issues but noted the department’s inability to find supervision logs.
“At this time I do not have the ability to pull rounds. County IT is working with Guard one to get the correct software for my computer and get it set up so I have access. I should have access in the next two weeks from my understanding,” Kirkland wrote, dating the item’s completion to Oct. 1.
DHSR officer Telia White finally had eyes on documentation during the second biannual inspection, discovering five supervision violations in multiple building wings throughout a 24-hour window beginning Sept. 17. The most significant instance of noncompliance was D-pod’s 101-minute gap between what are supposed to be semi-hourly rounds. White advised that this issue “be addressed with staff immediately.”
“I have spoke to the Detention Officers and trying to make sure things are done as they are supposed to be done. I will be watching and following for the future to ensure everything is being done as it is supposed to be done,” Kirkland wrote in a second plan of correction, signed Dec. 5 and currently awaiting DHHS acceptance.
Kirkland alleged the inadequate supervision was a result of SCLEC having been “extremely understaffed.”
“I know at one point in time we had six or seven openings,” he told SMN.
According to the sheriff, now “at least seven or eight people has been hired in the detention center since I took over, and it might even be a few more than that.”
Kirkland said his second POC supervision comment was not in reference to disciplining wrongdoers, but rather to training green detention officers.
Understaffing is a rampant statewide problem in both jails and prisons. Vance County’s detention center was mandated to depopulate in April due to violations that included only nine jail staff supervising 140 incarcerated people.
Overcrowding is also a common issue; in 2023, more than a quarter of the state’s jails exceeded maximum capacity for at least a month. And although the Swain jail typically is filled to 80% of its upper limit, a law passed by the General Assembly in late September could certainly create additional strain.
“Iryna’s law,” penned by state legislators in the wake of the stabbing death of young Ukrainian immigrant Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte, eliminates certain bail options and strengthens death penalty enforcement while narrowing pretrial release options and ordering mental health evaluations in the case of a violent offense. Mecklenburg County Sheriff Gary McFadden has warned that the law will overcrowd Charlotte jails, and a state DHHS official told The News & Observer that it’ll increase inpatient treatment demand.
Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson has already canceled a $1.9 million annual agreement with ICE, active since 2019 to house detained individuals, in anticipatio n of a surge in his jail’s local population.
The solutions
To further bolster SCLEC staffing rates, Kirkland has focused on both hiring people — and keeping them.
“Our retention rates seem to be getting better,” he said.
The new sheriff said he’s also been making improvements in other categories where the jail was not in compliance.
“We have purchased the whole brand-new control board for the detention center, which comes with new intercoms and new locking mechanisms,” he said, noting that the department had worked with county commissioners to approve a budget capable of funding it.
County law enforcement has also been “fixing some cameras, blind spots and stuff like that, as we’re moving forward. So that that should be getting installed here real soon,” he explained. Still, Kirkland said, “everything [in the jail] is outdated,” and it’ll take some time to see tangible progress on all standards SCLEC had violated upon inspection.
According to DRNC, why SCLEC — and so many jails across North Carolina — should hold a long-term record of non-compliance boils down to inadequate DHSR tools to enforce its own regulation.
“Jail closures are the Secretary’s only tool to force compliance with the Jail Rules, and it is an impractical, extreme measure that is difficult to impose,” the organization stated.
In an email to SMN, an NC DHHS spokesperson wrote that the agency's "Division of Health Service Regulation’s Jails and Detention Unit continues to work with the Swain County Jail Administrator on compliance with the requirements of 10A NCAC 14J .0601 Supervision Rounds."
