CLEVELAND — Ronda Gibson has accepted the job of Administrator of Corrections for Cuyahoga County Jail, confirmed county spokeswoman Mary Louise Madigan.
Gibson was offered the position this week. She currently works for Lorain County, and previously ran Seneca County Jail, according to her biography on Lorain County's website. In 2007, she was hired as Jail Administrator for Wood County Sheriff’s Office. The capacity for that facility is 220 inmates, according to the state.
Gibson began work as Lorain County’s Captain/Jail Administrator on July 30, 2018. The capacity of that facility is 422 inmates, according to the state. In April of this year, a Lorain County inmate, Michael Kilgore, died in the jail. As of Friday, the coroner did not have a cause of death for the inmate.
Gibson will now take over operations of a jail with a capacity of 1,765 inmates but has been frequently overcrowded. Cuyahoga County Jail housed 2,420 inmate at the time that the U.S. Marshal's Service review team inspected the jail late last year.
Earlier this month, interim jail director George Taylor retired.
Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department Captain Don Gerome assumed Taylor’s duties April 7, a county representative said.
The jail and its administrators have been under constant scrutiny since the U.S. Marshals report came out in late November 2018.
The report described a horrid picture of what inmates inside the jail are forced to live in. According to the report, incarcerated individuals live day-to-day in an inhumane environment and have their very basic civil liberties withheld — sometimes as a form of punishment by staff.
In the wake of the report, the U.S. Marshals, who hold their federal inmates at the facility, pulled them out of the downtown jail.
U.S. Marshal Pete Elliott said the jail review team found the Cuyahoga County Jail to be "one of the worst in the country."
