"This is very hurtful," he says. "But I'm not alone; I'm not the only one this has happened to. And if I talk about it, maybe someone else won't go through it."

Liberto is doing more than talking about it. He is planning to file a lawsuit (the amount has not been disclosed) against Shelby County and the Shelby County Sheriff's Department, which operates the facility. The brass is investigating Liberto's charges, says sex crimes investigator Sgt. Gloria White, who confirmed that officers have witnesses they plan to interview. Liberto's attorney Kathleen Caldwell will not file suit until the investigation is complete.

What Liberto didn't know, when he was admitted to Shelby County Jail, was that he was entering a hellhole -- a penal facility so plagued by severe gang violence, unsanitary conditions, lax medical service, overcrowding and inadequate supervision that two federal judges have declared it unconstitutional. The jail, the largest in Tennessee, is the focus of more than a dozen ongoing local lawsuits and an active U.S. Department of Justice investigation. Four men have died while being held in the Shelby County Jail; the families of three of those men have filed a $15 million wrongful death suit against the man who runs the jail, Sheriff A.C. Gilless, and other authorities. Just last week, on Jan. 17, Gilless and other penal authorities were also slapped with a $22 million lawsuit by 16 Shelby County Jail guards, who claim they were severely traumatized after Gilless and others authorized a phony takeover of the jail's control room last June.

Liberto is just one of hundreds of inmates who have been assaulted at the Shelby County Jail. Former inmate Darius Little was 19 years old when he was gang-raped; he sued and won a civil rights suit against the sheriff's department in 1996. His case led to a federal court order to improve the facility's conditions and reduce inmate violence. But three months of federal court testimony late last year revealed that far from improving, the jail is more violent and out of control than ever. On Dec. 22, U.S. District Judge Jon McCalla found the county in contempt of the 1996 order, threatening to jail Gilless if he didn't improve the facility.

"I can't fix the jail," McCalla warned the sheriff. "But I can make you want to fix it."

As with Liberto, the nightmare for many of those who are admitted to Shelby County Jail begins as soon as they walk in the door. A jail is supposed to be a temporary holding place for people when they are arrested. Unlike prison inmates, people in jail have not only not yet been found guilty, they haven't been charged. Some of them could quite possibly later be found innocent. Once inmates are processed and taken to court to be officially charged, the justice system allows them to either post bail and be released, or stay at the jail until their trial date. New prisoners are supposed to be classified as soon as possible and allowed to make a phone call within a reasonable period of time; violent and nonviolent inmates should be segregated.

At Shelby, most of the prisoners are impoverished, many with drug problems; only a few of those admitted make bail. The rest are forced into a broken system that is supposed to hold only 1,200 inmates, but actually holds 3,800. Shelby has only one computer equipped with classifying software, so many suspects have to wait more than a day to make a phone call. Some, like Liberto, spend hours without a clue as to what's going to happen to them. Violent and nonviolent inmates are not segregated, so fights often break out in intake. Liberto's solo cell assignment was unusual. Most inmates are housed two, sometimes three to a cell the size of a walk-in closet, despite a court order requiring that the jail place inmates in individual cells to keep predatory inmates away from weaker ones.

And far from protecting inmates from jailhouse violence, the poorly trained, badly paid and demoralized guards -- who are themselves at great risk of physical harm -- practice it themselves, according to lawsuits. Last month, two inmates arrested for DUI filed separate suits. One alleges guards broke his jaw for not answering a question correctly. The other accuses the guards of providing poor medical care after other inmates, wanting his diamond ring, broke his ankle and his fingers. (After being caught stealing from inmates, guards are now no longer allowed to confiscate their charges' valuables.)

Perhaps most frightening of all, Shelby County Jail is so plagued by violent, out-of-control gangs that it has been likened by corrections experts to New York's infamous Riker's Island, a prison that in the mid-1990s reported 1,100 gang-related stabbings and assaults in one month. According to Judge McCalla's recent ruling finding the county in contempt, the jail holds more than 250 members of Memphis' most lethal gangs, the Gangster Disciples and the Vice Lords, who outnumber the guards and run the jail with more authority than they do.

The gangs maintain systematic control over non-affiliated inmates through what's become known as "Thunderdoming." The style of combat is modeled after the pro-wrestling shows the inmates watch on television: Typically, a non-affiliated inmate is jumped from behind by a group of other inmates, hog-tied with a bed sheet and beaten with heavy rubber shower shoes and filled water bottles.

Larry Graham paid a price for refusing to Thunderdome. In November, the 5-foot-11, 220-pound inmate told Judge McCalla that he was savagely beaten, hog-tied and strangled with a rope. Showing the court a thick white scar encircling his neck, Graham said that while he floated in and out of consciousness, his attackers stripped him and took him to the showers. He woke up naked hours later, hog-tied on his cell bunk. He was transported to Memphis' Regional Medical Center where doctors fixed his broken bones as he struggled to open his swollen, bruised eyes.

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