While incarcerated at Georgia’s Clayton County Jail in Dec. 2019, Tiana Hill says she gave birth in her underwear while medical staff stood by and did nothing as she screamed. On Wednesday, she told U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff that up until the moment she gave birth, jail staff had insisted she wasn’t pregnant. She delivered her baby on a metal bed in the infirmary while male detainees walked by.
“The lead jail infirmary staff looked in my panties and started to panic,” she testified. “The jail staff told me nothing, wrapped my baby in my dirty sheets, and left.”
Her baby died five days later. She says she was never told how or why her son died and doesn’t know where his remains are.
“This shouldn’t happen to any mothers,” she testified. “Ever since I arrived at the jail, no one listened to me,” she testified. “They didn’t care, and they did not care about my baby.”
Hill spoke before the U.S. Senate Human Rights Subcommittee, which Ossoff chairs. The Georgia lawmaker has held several hearings on the conditions in his state’s lock-ups. Last year, Ossoff and Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock demanded the U.S. Department of Justice investigate the Clayton County Jail, but the agency has not yet taken public action.
“We’re talking about pregnant women and their newborn infants,” Ossoff said at the hearing. “I don’t know what can be a more relevant measure of a society’s humanity than how we treat pregnant women and newborn babies.”
In response to a request for comment, Levon Allen, Clayton County’s current sheriff, told The Appeal to contact ex-sheriff Victor Hill, who led the office from 2005 to 2022 before he was sent to federal prison for violating the constitutional rights of detainees inside the jail.
“I was not the sheriff in 2019 and that would be better for the 2019 Sheriff to comment on,” Allen said via email.
There’s been no shortage of atrocities at the Clayton County Jail. According to The Appeal’s analysis of news reports and documents provided by county agencies, at least six detainees have died this year, more than all of 2023. Detainees have reported that the overcrowded jail is violent and filthy. Dozens of men are forced to share a few working toilets.
The Sheriff’s Office pays the private contractor CorrectHealth more than $1.2 million monthly to give the jail’s detainees health care. The company has repeatedly been accused of providing dangerous and inadequate services. The Appeal reported last year that one man held on a forgery charge begged for medical help for almost two months before he died of testicular cancer. The Clayton County Medical Examiner’s Office later determined that medical neglect worsened his disease.
In April, Cordero Riley sued CorrectHealth for allegedly providing insufficient care after several detainees attacked him while he was imprisoned for a probation violation in 2022. Riley’s suit says he repeatedly asked to be taken to the hospital and told the medical staff he was having trouble breathing. But they allegedly only gave him ice and Ibuprofen. When he was released, he went to the hospital and was diagnosed with a collapsed lung.
“If I had to stay in that jail 48 more hours, I probably wouldn’t even be here,” Riley told The Appeal earlier this year.
CorrectHealth did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.
When Hill entered the jail in 2019, she told the intake staff that she was pregnant. She testified that they gave her a pregnancy test and congratulated her—on not being pregnant. After she missed her period, she was given another pregnancy test, but the staff refused to tell her the results.
“About fifty times, I told the jail staff I was pregnant,” she said.
Hill said she repeatedly asked jail staff for another pregnancy test and medical care, but they ignored her from October to November. Then, a staff member asked if she was pregnant. She said she believed she was.
“No jail staff ever addressed my concern,” she said.
In December, she went into early labor and began urinating blood. She told an officer she needed medical care, but instead, he called for more staff. They told her she wasn’t pregnant.
“I started crying,” she said. “I knew I wasn’t crazy and that I was pregnant. I could feel my baby moving.”
They left her in her cell.
“The pain was unbearable,” she testified through tears. “I knew I was in labor.”
Her panicked, weeping cellmate banged on the door.
“I was screaming in pain, trying to keep my baby in,” Hill said.
An officer finally came to her cell and took her to the infirmary, where staff gave her two pregnancy tests. Both were positive. When she urinated in the cup, it filled with blood. She begged to be taken to the hospital.
“The jail staff started making jokes about my size, my weight, saying, ‘How could anyone think I’m pregnant,’” she testified. “It was humiliating.”
She then gave birth on a metal bed.
Staff transported Hill and her baby to the hospital separately. Her son, born premature, was placed in the neonatal intensive care unit. She saw him just once while handcuffed to a wheelchair.
“That was all the time I had with my son,” Hill said.
Two days later, she was brought back to the jail, put in the general population, and then placed in solitary confinement. Jail staff fed her cold food and would not let her use the commissary. She wasn’t provided pain medication or pads and had to use tissue. (A person will typically bleed for several weeks after a vaginal birth.)
“They basically put me on lockdown for having a baby in their jail,” she said. “That’s how I looked at it. Like I was being punished.”
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