The debate over defunding police has become part of a broad ideological battle over how and when law enforcement should face public accountability. Police Accountability Report hosts Taya Graham and Stephen Janis examine this debate in the context of their own reporting on police overreach and abuse. The pair breaks down the flaws in the anti-defund argument by revealing how law enforcement partisans have successfully avoided substantive oversight and public accountability.
Pre-Production/Studio/Post-Production: Stephen Janis
Transcript
The transcript of this podcast will be made available as soon as possible.
A study of budgets in over 400 American cities over the last 5 years shows that, despite persistent claims by politicians, pundits, and police unions, there was no mass defunding of police. Police departments got the same average cut of the city budget in 2021 as they did in previous years.
Defunding the police became a mainstream political topic in June of 2020, when nine members of the Minneapolis City Council announced their intentions to dismantle the city’s police department with cardboard signs saying “Defund Police.” George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis Police officers had set off a nationwide wave of protests which often called for cuts to law enforcement budgets as a way to curb police violence—and, briefly, it was floated as policy.
The call to “defund” was less of a unified call for abolition, and more of a general sentiment that directing nearly a third of taxpayer money to the police seemed inconsistent with the regular high-profile incidents of police violence. Opponents worried that fewer police would lead to more crime, and these ideas could have been the start of a long-overdue conversation about policing in America.
Our analysis of over 400 American municipal budgets found that police departments in America got more or less the same amount of money in 2021 than they did in the previous three years. The budget cuts that did pass in a handful of cities were modest compared to the size of the total budget.
But far away from the reasonable policy debate, defunding the police quickly became a right-wing bogeyman. As cities across the country reconsidered their police budgets, any insufficiently pro-police politician could be accused of wanting to defund. Black Lives Matter, Antifa, the burning precincts and looted Targets would naturally follow. Right–wingpublications, politicians, and otheroutlets accused the “defund” movement of spurring a national crime wave, both directly and by decimating police morale so much that it was affecting hiring.
“They defunded the police. What do they get?” said former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton in May of 2021. “Rising crime, cops leaving in droves, difficulty recruiting. Now, they’re waking up to the fact that our cities are unsafe.”
49% of participants in a Politico/Morning Consult poll from February 2022 blamed defunding police for rising violent crime rates in America. 69% believed increasing police budgets would decrease crime “a lot” or “some.”
The problem is there was little if any “defunding” of the police. Our analysis of over 400 American municipal budgets found that police departments in America got more or less the same amount of money in 2021 than they did in the previous three years. The budget cuts that did pass in a handful of cities were modest compared to the size of the total budget.
We acquired budgets from 2018 to 2022 from 419 American municipalities, selected for prominence, size, location and diversity. We then extracted the amount of the city’s general fund—the bulk of city funding—which was directed to the police department, and compared those amounts across locations and years. A more thorough statistical analysis of our data is available here.
Our model found that the percentage of the general fund dedicated to law enforcement stayed consistent from 2018 to 2021—around 29%—after accounting for city- and state-level trends. If police budgets shrank (or grew), they did in proportion to the overall budget. In 2022, cities allocated about 3% less for police, but did so after the “defund” backlash was in full swing.
Police budgets grew or shrank in proportion to overall city budgets, but the percentage of the general fund dedicated to law enforcement stayed consistent from 2018 to 2021—around 29%.
Police budgets did increase less in 2021 than in previous years. From 2020 to 2021, budgets grew an average of 1.8%, compared to 3.8% between 2018 and 2019, and 4.5% between 2019 and 2020. From 2021 to 2022, average growth was 5.0%.
However, city general funds (the entire budget, more or less) followed the same pattern. While general funding grew by an average of 3.7% from 2018 to 2019, and by 5.6% from 2019 to 2020, it only increased by 1.5% from 2020 to 2021. Growth returned to 7.4% from 2021 to 2022. The similar patterns indicate changes in police funding have as much to do with overall changes in budget size as anything else.
While general funding grew by an average of 3.7% from 2018 to 2019, and by 5.6% from 2019 to 2020, it only increased by 1.5% from 2020 to 2021. Growth returned to 7.4% from 2021 to 2022.
So what about the fights over police funding in cities like Minneapolis and Seattle? While Seattle City Council members initially aimed to halve the Seattle PD budget, the actual decrease was around 11%, from $406 million in 2020 to $360 million in 2021. SPD still gets $363 million for the 2022 fiscal year. The Minneapolis City Council initially backed a plan to replace its city police department with a redesigned “Department of Public Safety.” (This new department’s intended budget was unclear, but its critics still considered the move a form of defunding.) That support faded, and eventually voters rejected the redesign by a 56% to 44% margin in a citywide election. Meanwhile, Minneapolis PD did take a 14.7% cut in 2021 (from $188 million to $160 million), but recovered almost all of it in 2022.
Austin reduced its police department’s budget by 32.5% in 2021; then, like Minneapolis, gave it all back in 2022.
Comparison between the proportion of city budget spent on police departments in Austin, Minneapolis, and Seattle in years 2018-2022. Minneapolis PD did take a 14.7% cut in 2021 (from $188 million to $160 million), but recovered almost all of it in 2022.
Most controversies about attempts to “defund” in 2021 involved fights over a small fraction of a department’s budget. A push to redirect $865k of the $23 million Norman, Oklahoma, allocated for law enforcement erupted into citywide outrage. Asheville, North Carolina, shaved $770k from the $30 million originally earmarked for police. Despite its anti-cop reputation, Portland, Oregon, reduced its $229 million police budget by only $8 million.
Albuquerque, New Mexico, successfully launched a community safety department as an alternative to policing, but only reduced police funding by 12%, from $205 million to $180 million. It jumped back up to $222 million in 2022.
Even with their budgets “cut,” Seattle, Minneapolis, and Austin police were still getting 22.4%, 33.1%, and 31.1% of their city’s budget, respectively. None could be realistically considered “defunded.”
This raises a question as to what actually counts as “defunding.” None of the adjustments made in response to the demands of protesters are unprecedented, either in size or proportion. In 2020, Tulsa, Oklahoma, reduced its police budget by $12 million (11%). Honolulu, Hawaii, PD took a $15 million cut (6%) in 2019. Corpus Christi, Texas, Naperville, Illinois, and Grand Junction, Colorado, all reduced their police funding by over 12% in 2021, with no reason to believe they were motivated by protests. Budgets are complicated, carefully negotiated documents that adjust to new circumstances every year. Sometimes the numbers go down, and as previously stated, there is no indication the numbers went down any more than usual in 2021.
In light of this data, Joe Biden’s plea to give the police more resources (“Fund them. Fund them. Fund them with more resources and training”) in his 2022 State of the Union is just a request to throw more money at a government program with a questionable track record. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan’s “Re-fund the Police” initiative funnels $150 million of state money correcting a mistake nobody actually made.
Still, any public conversation about municipal police funding is progress. After all, while a more recent poll put support for “defunding the police” at a scant 28%, 43% of participants did support “redirect[ing] local police funding to community development programs.”
Baltimore resident Yolanda (whose name has been changed to protect anonymity) was charged with attempted murder in November 2020 and was denied bail. That means she spent months in pretrial detention at the notoriously corrupt and dangerous Baltimore City Detention Center (BCDC) for a crime she had not yet gone to trial over or been found guilty of—and that she says she did not commit.
Yolanda complained of deplorable medical care behind bars and borrowed money from family members to hire a lawyer to help secure her release, which for her could have meant the difference between life and death. Just months before her arrest, doctors told her she was suffering from heart failure and required a second open heart surgery. Her preexisting conditions put her at high risk of severe illness from COVID-19—and jails are an inevitable superspreader of the coronavirus.
An analysis by the legal advocacy group Baltimore Action Legal Team (BALT) found that in 2019, 75% of defendants who were not granted bail had the charges against them dropped, or they were acquitted at trial.
“I not only suffered from heart failure, I had other medical issues like asthma attacks, but nurses refused to treat me,” Yolanda told Battleground Baltimore. “I was really afraid I would die in there.”
With court cases delayed by months in Baltimore City, Yolanda was among hundreds of people held behind bars during the pandemic for increasing lengths of time before they faced trial. The vast majority of those charged with crimes in Baltimore and held in pretrial detention are not convicted. An analysis by the legal advocacy group Baltimore Action Legal Team (BALT) found that in 2019, 75% of defendants who were not granted bail had the charges against them dropped, or they were acquitted at trial.
“People want to get their day in court, they want to be able to prove they’re not guilty,” Samantha Blau, BALT’s policy and engagement director told Battleground Baltimore. “And a lot of times people end up not being found guilty in Baltimore City.”
As courts faced backlogs of cases and COVID-19 spread rapidly behind bars, calls to decrease the prison population moved Maryland courts to take action: Judges began releasing select clients to home detention with private electronic monitoring, a technology that, until that point, had primarily been used for post-conviction release.
Unlike bail, home detention fees are not returned to the client after their trial. A scathing 2021 study by the George Washington University Law School details the proliferation of such monitoring devices, which confine people to their homes, intrude on their privacy, undermine personal and family dignity, extract wealth from those who can least afford it, and set up people to fail and face reincarceration.
In his new book, Understanding E-Carceration, author and “survivor of prison and e-carceration” James Kilgore asks, “Why are [electronic monitoring devices] tools of incarceration and punishment instead of vehicles for change?”
Unlike most other Maryland jurisdictions, in Baltimore, where Yolanda lives, pretrial home detention fees are not paid for by the city. This means that, while her trial was delayed and she was allowed to be released, the cost of her electronic monitoring quickly reached thousands of dollars—and even though the state determined she qualified for a public defender, she had to personally cover those expenses.
“I can’t afford home monitoring. My law bills? I can’t pay. It’s really a hardship trying to pay the home monitoring fee,” Yolanda said. “What am I going to do when nobody is there to help me? My dad’s on oxygen. His funds are exhausted.”
In 2021, criminal justice reform advocates in Maryland helped pass a state law that covered these fees for poor people in localities that did not pay for them, such as Baltimore City. Hundreds of people have successfully utilized the program since it went into effect in October 2021. That measure is set to expire in June of this year. During the legislative session which just ended, the legislature passed Senate Bill 0704, extending the program for 18 months. But the fate of this legislation remains uncertain, Senior Policy Advocate Christopher Dews of the Job Opportunities Task Force (JOTF), a leading advocacy group working to reform pretrial detention, explained.
“Privatized electronic monitoring agencies have siphoned millions of dollars, specifically out of lower income pockets. It’s our job to eliminate barriers to employment, and it’s our job to decriminalize poverty. We don’t want to see people incarcerated because they can’t afford a fee.”
“If [the bill fails to become law] you’re going to have 400 Baltimoreans per month using this program that are just going to be left in the wind. They’re all gonna have to go back to just paying $500 a month that most of them cannot afford,” Dews told Battleground Baltimore. “All of this can be alleviated if we just extend the program.”
Maryland’s expansion of electronic pretrial monitoring is a temporary fix for crowded jails and a clogged criminal legal system, and it is a boon for private companies seeking to profit off the low-income communities of color who are disproportionately targeted by the criminal legal system.
“Privatized electronic monitoring agencies have siphoned millions of dollars, specifically out of lower income pockets,” Dews said. “It’s our job to eliminate barriers to employment, and it’s our job to decriminalize poverty. We don’t want to see people incarcerated because they can’t afford a fee.”
After languishing in prison for seven months and facing deteriorating health conditions, Yolanda was released into home detention with electronic monitoring in June of 2021—almost eight months after her arrest. That relative degree of freedom came with a price tag and created new ways to possibly incarcerate her. If she could not pay the $490 a month charged by the private, Baltimore County-based company Advantage Sentencing Alternative Programs (ASAP) to monitor her ankle bracelet, she would return to jail.
As Yolanda awaits her day in court, she is on the hook for thousands of dollars in fees and unable to earn a living to pay them. As a condition of her release she is only allowed to leave her home to receive medical care or legal advice—not to work.
“I had to lean on family members to help me,” Yolanda said. “If they stopped paying this bill, I’m truly doomed.”
Advocates say charging exorbitant fees for those unable to work can trap people in poverty and push them into debt: “Anecdotally, what we’re seeing is a lot of people are not being given the leeway to look for jobs or go to work,” BALT’s Blau said. “If you’re at home most hours of the day and not earning a wage, then you’re paying for your food, you’re paying your rent or mortgage on your house, and you have no income.”
As Yolanda awaits her day in court, she is on the hook for thousands of dollars in fees and unable to earn a living to pay them. As a condition of her release she is only allowed to leave her home to receive medical care or legal advice—not to work.
Yolanda was forced to sell her personal belongings and continued to borrow money from family members to pay for the home monitoring, rent, food, and legal fees.
“Trying to pay home monitoring has put stress on me. My health has declined. I don’t want to go back,” Yolanda said. “It’s a hardship to absolutely go anywhere. You can’t work under any circumstances”
In October 2021, Yolanda’s lawyer connected her with Dews at JOTF, who helped her access financial relief under the 2021 Maryland law that paid home monitoring fees for those with low income. HB316 allocated $5 million from the American Rescue Plan to cover such fees for low income residents. The measure was the result of lobbying by a coalition of groups including JOTF, BALT, Out for Justice, and the Maryland Office of the Public Defender.
“400 Baltimoreans per month since the program started have been using the program, so it’s a massive success,” Dews said. “Again, these persons have not been found guilty, they are awaiting their trial.”
A second primary provision of HB316 required Gov. Larry Hogan to appoint a working group to study the issue of pretrial detention in Maryland to come up with a long term solution. Hogan never did that, so advocates went back to Annapolis this 2022 legislative session to seek continued relief for the hundreds of residents like Yolanda who utilize the program.
Delegate Stephanie Smith and Senator Shelly Hettleman sponsored legislation to extend the program by 18 months and to again call on the governor to appoint a working group to study the issue. SB0704, Hettleman’s version of the bill was passed by both chambers of Maryland’s legislature in the final days of the 2022 General Assembly Session and now sits on the desk of Gov. Hogan.
Ending the program prematurely would be a “terrible shame,” Hettleman told Battleground Baltimore. “Number one, there’s still funding available to be able to continue the program,” Hettleman said. “I fundamentally believe people who are deemed to be safe in the community should be allowed to be released in the community pretrial and not be criminalized because they’re poor.”
Advocates became concerned when John P. Morrissey, chief judge of the District Court of Maryland, objected to language in the bill that requires “Maryland’s Judiciary” to administer the program. Hettleman said while a longer term fix to the issue would need to involve other state agencies, she believes the judiciary will continue this function on a temporary basis.
“I would be surprised, shocked, disappointed if the judiciary would all of a sudden say now that they have the infrastructure in place… ‘Sorry, we can’t do this,’” Hettleman said. Hogan has until May 30 to sign the bill into law, veto it, or take no action, which would allow the bill to become law without his signature.
There is also the issue of those whose income is too high for them to qualify for the state’s program but still can’t afford home detention fees. BALT has been covering home monitoring fees for 30 low-income clients that weren’t eligible for the state program. Since March 2020, BALT Legal has covered electronic monitoring fees for 234 clients. But later this month, on April 30, BALT Legal must end that program.
“We’re out of funds,” Blau said. “We can’t continue to pay.”
Todd Oppenheim, felony trial supervisor at the Maryland Office of the Public Defender, told Battleground Baltimore that while the public defender’s office supports expanding pretrial release options, which include home detention, its privatization should be reconsidered.
“We’re not married to the idea of having these private monitoring agencies have people under their control, but it’s definitely better than being in a jail or prison,” Oppenheim said.
Dews stressed that with bail the majority of the money is returned to the accused after their case, while privatized pretrial home detention fees are lost forever:
“Unlike bail where you get that money back, you don’t get that money back [from privatized home detention],” Dews said.
Yolanda’s trial is currently scheduled for September 2022—nearly two years after she was arrested and nearly a year and a half since she was able to return home on electronic monitoring. As she waits to schedule her heart surgery in the upcoming days, she says she remains hopeful the program will be extended.
“I got to eat. What am I going to compromise? Do I buy two rolls of toilet paper or do I buy one? I try to stretch,” she said. “If they stopped the program, I can’t afford this home monitoring and trying to pay my rent and my bills. This is a real hardship.”
The indiscriminate use of arrest powers is one of the most destructive forms of overpolicing in a country accustomed to aggressive law enforcement. In this episode of the Police Accountability Report, we examine the questionable arrest of a Mississippi woman who was detained by an officer and later charged for reasons that appear to contradict what was caught on body camera—an analysis which reveals just how potent police powers are, and why the ability to arrest requires more scrutiny.
Pre-Production: Stephen Janis Studio/Post-Production: Stephen Janis, Adam Coley
Transcript
Taya Graham: Hello. My name is Taya Graham, and welcome to the Police Accountability Report. As I always make clear, this show has a single purpose: holding the politically powerful institution of policing accountable. And to do so, we don’t just focus on the bad behavior of individual cops. Instead, we examine the system that makes bad policing possible. And today we will do so by showing this video of the arrest of a Mississippi woman for talking back to a cop. But it’s not just a story about a single arrest, but also about how another small town in rural America is using policing in ways that are punishing the poor and exploiting the power of the law.
But before we get started, I want you watching to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct, please email it to us privately at par@therealnews.com. And please like, share, and comment on our videos. You know I read your comments and appreciate them. And of course you can always reach out to me directly @tayasbaltimore on Facebook or Twitter. And of course, if you can, please hit the Patreon link pinned in the comments below, because we do have some extras there for our PAR family. All right, we’ve gotten that out of the way.
Now, as we’ve talked about on this show before, the license to arrest is one of the most unassailable but nebulous powers in the American legal system. Meaning it is an act sanctioned by the government whose devastating consequences are not fully grasped. That’s because the ability to arrest has, in a sense, broadened over time. Let’s remember American police arrest roughly 10 million people per year. And as this study by the Vera Institute found, roughly 80% of those arrests are for low-level offenses such as disorderly conduct or substance possession.
The reason I cite these statistics is because while the numbers are stunning, it’s only through the individual stories that we can understand their implications. And no story could be a better example of how the vast power of arrest has become problematic than the tale of Columbus, Mississippi, resident Rebecca Hall. As you can see in this video here, Rebecca had actually called the police to the home of a friend in September of 2020 after getting into a dispute with the daughters of that same friend during a visit. Let’s watch.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Police Officer 1: Except for, because Rebecca, [crosstalk] we just asked you a simple question and you’re still talking.
Rebecca Hall: What is disorderly?
Police Officer 1: You are still talking.
Rebecca Hall: Because I’m talking, it’s disorderly? I’m not raising my voice. I’m not, [crosstalk].
Police Officer 1: Rebecca, you are still talking. We’re not going to –
Rebecca Hall: I would like to leave.
Police Officer 1: Listen to me.
Rebecca Hall: Can I leave?
Police Officer 1: Rebecca. We’re not going to go back through this again. You understand me?
Rebecca Hall: Can I leave? Can I leave?
Police Officer 1: You understand me?
Rebecca Hall: You understand me? I want to leave.
Police Officer 1: Can you understand me?
Rebecca Hall: I’m ready to leave.
Police Officer 1: Do you understand me?
Rebecca Hall: I’m ready to leave, sir.
Police Officer 1: If you say one more word you’re going with me.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: But it’s actually, after police showed up that things get dicey. Especially when police ask for ID. Let’s listen.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Police Officer 2: …Over here to help me.
Police Officer 1: No, I don’t want to hear it no more. No, I don’t want to hear anything else. You ain’t got to tell the police. I don’t want to hear anything else. I had enough.
Rebecca Hall: Daddy, back up away from everything.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: Now there are several facts we need to unpack here before we show the events leading up to the actual arrest, because, technically speaking, Rebecca called the police. And for that reason we should acknowledge that if you do call the police, it’s not unreasonable for the police to expect you to identify yourself when they arrive. Simply as a practical matter, it makes sense for police to speak to the person who asked police for help, and to ensure that people who make false charges are held accountable as well. However, it’s how the police handled the situation when it was clear that she didn’t want to give her ID that is the focus of our show today.
As we see, as the video continues, she was standing next to the police car as the police talked to several family members who she’d accused of assaulting her prior to the officer’s arrival. But even though she was not herself accused of a crime, this is what happened next.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Police Officer 1: I’ve had enough.
Rebecca Hall: Wait A minute. Look, look.
Police Officer 1: We had [crosstalk] turn around. Turn around.
Rebecca Hall: I was going back there to get pictures of the marijuana plants. Why are you acting like this?
Police Officer 2: Failure to obey a police officer.
Rebecca Hall: You didn’t, you didn’t tell me to do anything.
Police Officer 2: I didn’t have, I didn’t have to. I got all this on. This is enough to tell you, I’m in jeopardy. You’ve been told – [crosstalk]
Police Officer 1: – To central. Come on over here. We had enough
Rebecca Hall: Sir.
Police Officer 1: Come on.
Rebecca Hall: For what? What am I being arrested for?
Police Officer 1: Failure to obey.
Rebecca Hall: What did you tell me to do?
Police Officer 1: We’re not going to listen to all this ma’am. [crosstalk]
Police Officer 2: Hold still. Stand still.
Rebecca Hall: But that’s what you were saying, is failure to obey. But what command did you give me?
Police Officer 1: We told you to be quiet and you still interfering when we trying to talk to everybody else [crosstalk].
Rebecca Hall: So that’s a crime, you told me to be quiet?
Police Officer 1: Yeah. You interfering when we trying to do our duty.
Police Officer 2: [crosstalk] Right there, you failure to obey.
Rebecca Hall: I was walking around there to get pictures of the marijuana.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: Now I know it’s easy to just write this off as police just dealing with a dicey situation with the best tool at their disposal: an arrest. I mean, even though Rebecca has not committed a crime or was even accused of one, she was being a bit defiant, as we can see in this video prior to police putting her in handcuffs. Let’s listen.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Rebecca Hall: I’m free. I don’t want to go anywhere.
Police Officer 1: No, no, go ahead. We’re not going to listen to all this.
Rebecca Hall: Well – [crosstalk] if you don’t want to listen.
Police Officer 1: This is your friend right? You don’t tell me [crosstalk].
Police Officer 2: Rebecca please.
Rebecca Hall: I can ask for a supervisor for me. That’s not right. Why are you walking up on me like you’re trying to –
Police Officer 1: You’re going to end up warming up. Do me a favor –
Rebecca Hall: No I’m not. For what?
Police Officer 1: Sir.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: But the reason we’re talking about this case at all is how it directly points to a problem with American law enforcement that needs to be called to account: Just how readily, and falsely, police turn to arrest as a tool against dissent. Let’s watch again, and this time, let’s pay really close attention to what finally prompts an officer to take out the cuffs.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Rebecca Hall: But wait, what command did you give me?
Police Officer 1: We told you to be quiet and you still interfering when we trying to talk to everybody else.
Rebecca Hall: So that’s a crime, you tell me to be quiet?
Police Officer 1: Yeah. You interfering when we trying to do our duty.
Police Officer 2: Right there you failure to obey.
Rebecca Hall: I was walking around there to get pictures of the marijuana.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: So it’s clear. The reason she was arrested was not because she posed a threat, or had committed a crime, or was otherwise imminent harm to the officer or bystander. She wasn’t put into handcuffs because the officer witnessed her break the law. It seems that the cop that took her into custody was simply annoyed. Meaning he found her behavior bothersome and decided to use the power of the law to abate it. And that is why the story is important, because it points to a deeper problem with law enforcement. And for more on this arrest and what it says about policing and, in particular, in rural America, I’m joined by my reporting partner Stephen Janis. Stephen, thank you so much for joining me.
Stephen Janis: Taya, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Taya Graham: So first, you’ve reached out to the Columbus, Mississippi, Police Department for comment. What have you learned?
Stephen Janis: Well, firstly, this arrest was executed by Lowndes County Sheriff’s Department, who are the people that actually made the arrest, although that includes Columbus, but not actually the Columbus Police Department. But what’s really interesting is we had some breaking news here. There was an FTA issued for Rebecca’s arrest because she hadn’t paid a fine related to this actual arrest of $278. And because of that she had to spend three to four days in jail, she’s told us. So, really, we reached out to them and asked them why and why are they doing this? They haven’t gotten back to us yet. But obviously it’s astounding that there was a very high fine related to this, which seems to be not only a questionable arrest, but a questionable fine.
Taya Graham: But like other cities, you did some digging on the finances and the political economy of the town with regards to policing. What have you uncovered?
Stephen Janis: Well, this is astonishing. The town of Columbus, Mississippi, as far as I can tell, does not share their financial information with the public. I searched the website over and over again. Couldn’t find the budget. So I emailed every single council person on the council, saying, could you please release the budget? Where are the budget figures? Now, they may be somewhere else, but they’re not easy to find, so obviously they don’t like to be too transparent about their finances. And I’m assuming there’s a reason why.
Taya Graham: And finally, we’re talking about the overuse of arrests by American law enforcement. You’ve been looking into the data. What is it telling you?
Stephen Janis:Well, if you look at the Vera Institute, they say that there are 10 million arrests a year, which is an astonishing number. But I think the best way to look at it is to see how much more efficient our criminal justice system is than other social processes which might benefit us. Like for example, is healthcare as effective as being able to process 10 million people a year? 10 million people a year through local jails, prisons, federal facilities. It’s an amazing amount of people, it’s extraordinary. And yet we have nothing similar, I think, in our social services, in the things that would actually help us, make us healthier, make us more productive, provide us jobs. So I think it’s an astounding fact that so many people are arrested and the cops are able to arrest so many people without more pushback from the public.
Taya Graham: And now we’re joined by the woman who was subject to this questionable arrest. Rebecca, thank you so much for joining us.
Rebecca Hall: I appreciate your time.
Taya Graham: So it seems on the video that the police officer put you in the handcuffs just for talking back. Is that correct?
Rebecca Hall: In the video that they gave me, in the body cam footage, he said, she’s trying to get smart and we ain’t going to have that. That’s what he said. And when he put me in the back of the car, I said, you’re telling me you are arresting me for not being quiet? He said, yep. Yes ma’am. I called them for help.
Taya Graham: After you were arrested, what were the exact charges you were facing?
Rebecca Hall: That time it was failure to obey a police officer, which is actually a secondary charge. You have to be detained before you have to obey a police officer.
Taya Graham: Have you heard of other people having issues with this police department?
Rebecca Hall: Yes ma’am. ‘Cause see, nobody has the balls to record them like I do. I’m just telling you the truth, because I know who I am. You have to realize, realization versus knowledge. You know what I’m saying? You can know it, but you got to realize who you are, man. And once you realize I ain’t taking no shit, I’m sorry. I’m not. No, I’m not sorry. Like I said in the video. But I want to educate the people in my town. Because I love y’all, man. And these police have been doing that to y’all too long. They kill the Black people. They shoot them in the back here. I’m telling you, Taya, it’s out of control. They be murdering people.
Taya Graham: How do you think officers should have handled the situation?
Rebecca Hall: Man, they should have been concerned about, did I get hurt? Was I okay? They never even mentioned it was a stop call, they called it a disturbance. They called it a disturbance on the fake ass report they made, the investigative report. They lied. They sounded like robots in court. But let me tell you, I know it was all staged. It’s so stupid, because they think I’m stupid.
Taya Graham: So how has this affected you and impacted your life?
Rebecca Hall: Taya, I preach to strangers. I look crazy as hell around here. Y’all know me. If you live in Columbus, y’all have seen me. And I tell you, under any circumstances, record the police, record them no matter what. When they tell you to put that phone down, don’t do it, make them throw you down. Cause baby, that’s your right.
Taya Graham: Now I’m sure anyone who watched my interview with Rebecca and the video of her arrest would ask a simple but reasonable question: Why should we care about the fairly uneventful arrestable woman who wouldn’t identify herself? And why, given that there are many more extreme examples of police overreach, should we take the time to unpack an incident that simply resulted in a short stay in jail and some unpleasant court time? Fair question. Let me try to answer.
Now as I’ve mentioned on this show before, I live in Baltimore City, Maryland. It’s a town that’s known for crab cakes, the Ravens, and, unfortunately, the popular copaganda-esque show called The Wire. But we also invented another less heralded concept that became a law enforcement tool for mayhem and communal destruction that continues to have consequences for residents today. The concept emerged during Baltimore’s massive experiment with a strategy called zero tolerance, which we’ve referenced on the show before.
During a period from roughly 2000 to 2007, police arrested 100,000 people a year in a city with a population of 600,000. And these arrests weren’t targeted at hardened criminals. Instead, police scooped up anybody sitting on stoops, drinking a beer, spitting on the sidewalk, or simply walking in a neighborhood where they didn’t live. It was a policy the Department of Justice eventually concluded was unconstitutional after a lengthy investigation, but it also created a problem for Baltimore Police. Zero tolerance led to so many people facing charges, the court system could not process the number of cases it generated. So in order to alleviate the burden, prosecutors would drop hundreds of cases almost daily with a notation that they had been, and I’m quoting, “abated by arrest.” Now this is a legal concept that didn’t really exist before people started arresting everyone. It’s sort of an odd legal limbo between adjudicating a case and dropping it.
And while this might sound innocuous, I want you to think about how this idea plays out for a second. First, the Baltimore City Police make so many arrests that the system becomes overloaded with cases. People’s right to move about freely is restricted to the point where courts simply cannot adjudicate. Then, instead of simply dropping the cases, prosecutors invent a new legal concept to deal with the overload that allows them to skip the process of deciding whether the charges are justified or if the officer violated the law. Mind you, the basic underlying idea of the Constitution is that everyone has the right to defend themselves in court. In fact, it is a right so inviolable it is consecrated in a series of key amendments that outline a variety of legal stipulations that in part bolster a key idea behind all of our legal jurisprudence: the presumption of innocence.
But here in Baltimore, thanks to police overreach, that right was simply buried by a system addicted to policing space with the stroke of the pen and the acquiescence of politicians and prosecutors alike. The imperative of policing was able to overwhelm and bury the basic Constitutional rights of the people. And the concept of abated by arrest ended up denying people the right to defend themselves in court, and perhaps cut off a vital venue where government sponsored violence of bad policing could have been exposed for what it truly was. But that didn’t happen, because, truthfully, as this example and as Rebecca’s arrest makes clear, we think very little about the consequences of using arrests indiscriminately and how that overuse can evolve into a dangerous political tool that can literally wipe out our rights if it’s allowed to expand – No pun intended – Unabated.
But again, you could ask the question, why does it matter? Why should I care?
Well, as I’ve mentioned before on this show, you can literally see the consequences here in our city. Vacant houses standing in disrepair, one of the highest murder rates in the country, rampant poverty. And, of course, all of it fodder for Hollywood elites like David Simon, who can turn our misery into million dollar programming for entertainment titans like HBO. But if you’re still not convinced, then consider an entirely different source. It’s a book by a Russian novelist, no less: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn is perhaps best known for his book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a dark and foreboding realistic portrayal of life inside Russian forced labor camps. But, I’m going to use another of his works that best applies to this discussion called the Gulag Archipelago.
It was a novel that delved into further detail about the forced imprisonment and death of millions of Russians under Joseph Stalin. And what is most notable about this book and my topic today is simply the title of the first chapter, “Arrest.” In a short 16 pages, Solzhenitsyn describes the terror and trauma and the violence and vileness of the use of arrest as a tool of oppression. He recounts how the Soviets of Stalin’s era would arrest people in their homes at all hours of the night for crimes unknown and for violating laws that didn’t exist. It was the precursor to all the suffering that followed. A way to subsume the people into a system of exploitation that caused untold suffering and still reverberates today. Now, I am not suggesting that we face anything similar in the present here, but what I do want to point out is how powerful the ability to arrest actually is. How a license to put someone in a cage is a profound capability that cannot be underestimated.
And that when it is abused, it is literally a vehicle for anti-democratic impulses that are always evolving and always seeking a path of less resistance to create more power for the elites and less for the people who deserve better. Which is why even in a case like Rebecca’s, we must be vigilant. It’s why we do need to continue to watch the police and expose their abusive powers that are anything but innocuous. It’s why it’s important to examine any use of arrest that does not take into account the consequences of misusing it. And that is why any example of police overreach is critical to parse, regardless of circumstance. And that is why we will continue to report on cases like Rebecca and others, because we will not let police abate our rights.
I want to thank Rebecca for sharing her experience with us, and I also want to wish her the best on becoming a cop watcher. Thank you, Rebecca. And of course, I want to thank intrepid reporter Stephen Janis for his writing, research, and editing on this piece. Thank you, Stephen.
Stephen Janis: Taya, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
Taya Graham: And of course, I want to thank friend of the show Noli Dee for her support. Thanks, Noli Dee. And of course, a very special thanks to our Patreons, we really do appreciate you. And I want you watching to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct or brutality, please share it with us and we might be able to investigate for you. Please reach out to us. You can email us tips privately at par@therealnews.com and share your evidence of police misconduct. You can also message us at Police Accountability Report on Facebook or Instagram or @eyesonpolice on Twitter.
And of course you can always message me directly @tayasbaltimore on Twitter or Facebook. And please like and comment. You know I read your comments and appreciate them, and I try to answer your questions whenever I can. And we do have a Patreon link pinned in the comments below. So if you do feel inspired to donate, please do because we don’t run ads or take corporate dollars. So anything you can spare is always greatly appreciated. My name is Taya Graham, and I’m your host of the Police Accountability Report. Please be safe out there.
On March 10, the Moriah Shock Incarceration Correctional Facility in upstate New York closed its doors. Opponents to the closure said that the Moriah Shock facility provided essential jobs for the community and that the military bootcamp style of the program at so-called “shock” camps helps inmates recover from issues with alcohol and drug abuse. But is this true? What are “shock” camps? What goes on there? And do they actually help incarcerated people? In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Mansa Musa speaks with Keri Blakinger about the closure of the Moriah facility and about her recent article on “shock” camps, ‘‘A Humiliating Experience’: Prisoners Allege Abuse at Discipline-focused ‘Shock’ Camps.”
Keri Blakinger is a staff writer for The Marshall Project whose work focuses on prisons and jails. She writes “Inside Out,” a regular column published in collaboration with NBC News. She previously covered criminal justice for the Houston Chronicle, and her work has appeared in the Washington Post Magazine, VICE, the New York Daily News, and The New York Times. She is the The Marshall Project’s first formerly incarcerated reporter. Her memoir, Corrections in Ink, comes out in June 2022.
Charles Hopkins: Welcome to this edition of Rattling the Bars. I’m Mansa Musa, co-hosting for Eddie Conway. Moriah correctional prison, shock camp, is one of six prisons that’s closing upstate New York. According to the State of New York, $1.7 million will be saved from this prison and others closing. Opposition is saying that closing this prison would decimate or devastate the economy in upstate New York. Here to talk about this and other things is Keri Blankinger. Keri Blakinger wrote the article with the Marshall Project outlining what shock camps are, how they function, and what they’re doing to the people that are incarcerated there. Thank you. Welcome, Keri, to this edition of Rattling the Bars.
Keri Blakinger: Hey, thanks for having me.
Charles Hopkins: Shock camps. A lot of people might not know what they are. Can you explain what they are, how they are operated, and how they came into existence?
Keri Blakinger: Yeah, sure. So, the shock camps in New York are some of the last in the country, but not the very last. But shock camps came about as a way to theoretically reduce prison populations after several states… Well, after lots of states built up prisons and didn’t have room for all the prisoners. The idea with shock camp has generally been that people who are in prison for addiction-related crimes or certain other subsets of crimes can complete some program that’s sort of a military bootcamp style program. Something like a 90-day or a six-month program, where you’re doing a lot of running and maybe cleaning toilets with toothbrushes and dealing with some very confrontational therapy. In the best case scenario, that’s how these programs would work. You would endure that for a set period of time, finish, and when you finish the program, you usually get some amount of time shaved off your sentence.
In New York, the way it works is you do this six-month program, you can go home up to two and a half years early. The problem is that these programs have really lent themselves to abuse over the years. And we see that especially in New York, where time and again prisoners have reported beatings and abuse, and there’s been some amount of sexual abuse, and on a somewhat daily basis people say that they’re being called crack heads and junkies, being made to shovel snow with spoons, having shoes thrown at them as a punishment. There’s a lot of degrading treatment, being made to eat off the floor like a dog. And these are not one offs.
I’ve been reporting on these sorts of programs in New York for a few years, and these are things that we routinely hear out of several of the facilities that have had these kinds of programs. But over the years, many states have closed their shock camps. In some cases because they’re not effective, they’re prone to lawsuits, and I think there’s a growing understanding that traumatizing people is not therapeutic. New York has some of the last few programs left. And one of them, Moriah, the one that I was writing about here, has been earmarked for closure and has recently closed, actually, in upstate New York. And now there’s only one of these programs remaining in upstate New York, and that is Lakeview Shock Facility.
Charles Hopkins: And let’s flesh this out. We’re talking about mental health issues in terms of people that’s suffering from substance abuse, and it’s known throughout the world now that substance abuse is a disease. The disease model is prevalent in terms of evaluation. Where is the connection between the mental health and the torture that these people are receiving? Or is it purely torture, and to try to torture a person out of wanting to use drugs? What’s your read on that? And why?
Keri Blakinger: Well, I think there’s a few things going on. I think that first of all, a lot of these started during the war on drugs. And I think that the whole idea of a military inspired program really played into the visuals of a war on drugs. If we’re having a war, it makes sense that you’re wanting to engage in military style programs as a way of combating it. So, I think part of it was that it really appealed to the ethos of the era in which it was created. But I also think that there’s a lot of people, and I think some of these people have a significant overlap with the population of people who are running and working in prisons, but I think there’s a lot of people that think the military teaches discipline. And they think that, oh, the military cleans up people’s lives, troubled teens get old enough and they go into the military and they turn out all right.
And I think that there’s some belief that transferring that treatment to an addiction, to dealing with an addiction would be an effective way of dealing with addiction. And you can understand the thought process behind that. Like, oh, the military straightened out my troubled cousin, maybe it’ll straighten out these troubled prisoners. But the problem is that prison is not the military. Prison doesn’t have any vested interest in your health or wellbeing or success. Whereas the military does need you to be healthy to do your job. And the military, also, this treatment you know is a means to an end and you end up with some skills and a respected career coming out of it.
None of that is true in prison. You are not getting some job skills or some resume credentials from surviving this shock incarceration. And I think fundamentally, beyond all that, you really can’t traumatize someone into wanting to be sober. And a lot of the people that are coming into these programs are dealing with a lot of existing trauma. And especially when you’re talking about women in the women’s facilities, a lot of them are coming in with trauma at the hands of men. So in those scenarios, you can imagine that having drill instructor type male screaming at you may actually undermine what you might need to have a sober and more stable life.
Charles Hopkins: And in your article, you spoke on how it’s an incentive-based program and that you have to have a substance abuse problem. Talk about the attitude of the people in these facilities that choose to go in these areas and some of the stories they told you about, the ones maybe that didn’t complete the program. And if you got any insight on the ones who completed then recidivate, if you could talk about these things.
Keri Blakinger: Yeah, sure. So, I actually did time in New York prisons before I became a reporter. So this was actually a choice that I was faced with in that, when you go through reception, which is what they call it when you get to prison and they do tests and they figure out what prison they’re going to send you to and what programs you’re going to be required to do. When you go through reception, you know that one of the possibilities is shock, if you qualify. Typically, that means that you have to meet some sort of age requirement. You usually have to be at least 18 at the time of your crime, and you usually have to be under a certain age, although the exact age that you have to be under has changed over the years. And at the time that I was going through, you also couldn’t be on any mental health medication.
So you couldn’t be on Prozac. You couldn’t be on anything for, I don’t know, bipolar. There’s all sorts of pretty necessary psychiatric medications that would be in and of themselves disqualifying. Not because the program was so rigorous that they were worried you couldn’t make it through if you needed mental health care, but more because the facilities were all considered low security facilities. And if you were on any psychiatric medications, they simply didn’t have the mental health staff at those facilities who would be able to give you those medications. Recently, like in the past two years, this has theoretically changed, and the Department of Correction says that now people who are on mental health meds can qualify. I don’t actually have any evidence as to whether that is happening or not, because just because they say a thing is permitted by policy doesn’t mean it’s something they’re doing on a widespread basis.
So, the verdict’s kind of out on that one. But for years, one of the decisions when you came into prison was if you knew that you otherwise qualified for shock, you had to think about, did you want to go off your mental health medications in order to qualify for this program that would allow you to get home earlier? You can imagine that’s a very powerful incentive. If you’re talking about like, geez, I struggle with depression, I’m on Prozac. But if I go off it for six months, I can get home to my kids two and a half years early. That’s a pretty coercive situation. So, I think that this is one of the things that people think about a lot when they’re coming into prison and trying to figure out if they are going to go to shock or not.
And then of course when they get out they’re now off mental health medications that were helpful to them. Now, the exact impact of that and how that influences recidivism numbers is really difficult to understand because there isn’t data on this specific population that has been released in terms of recidivism and the degree to which changes in mental health medication did or didn’t play a role in that. But it’s also difficult to look at the success of these programs, because frequently the Department of Correction says these programs have lower recidivism than the rest of prison. And that is true by the numbers, but it is also misleading in a few ways. First of all, you’re only having a narrow segment of the population that qualifies. For years, people with mental health medications didn’t qualify. That’s a demographic that’s at high risk of recidivism.
So there’s that, but also a large percentage of the people who go to shock fail out and don’t complete. And those people are not included in the recidivism numbers. So what you end up with is only the most determined, most motivated prisoners are the only ones who are graduating from shock to even be considered in these recidivism numbers. So, it’s really hard to measure the success of these programs, and it’s really hard to measure the impact of these programs on people’s lives. Also, of course, as is often the case with prison, we’re just not getting good data, reliable data, or trustworthy data. So a lot of what we find ends up being anecdotal and hearing about what people tell us. And as you can see from the story, what people say has often been pretty shocking.
Charles Hopkins: Talk about the… Because I’m looking at the mental health of substance abuse, and I’m also looking at relapse. And I’m a recovering addict, and I’ve been through the NA, and I understand the NA philosophy. Talk about this aspect of it from, okay, we are acknowledging that you cannot quantify the numbers in terms of the success of the program. But in terms of relapse, to your knowledge, has this program been successful in creating a mindset where a person would not be inclined to go back and use drugs? Because in essence, the program is supposed to be designed to, wherever their methodology is, to stop a person from wanting to use drugs. That’s how they got where they were.
Keri Blakinger: Right. I think, again, that’s a pretty complicated question. I think we do know, for instance, that there’s been some studies around the fact that confrontational therapy is not the best option. It simply… There’s a lot of studies around this, because this idea of the confrontational therapy where they yell at you and call it treatment, this is something that’s been tried before, especially when there were those troubled teen boot camps where they’d send troubled kids out into the wilderness that were real big in the ’90s and then people started dying. Those also were based on the tough love, confrontational therapy idea. And that generated some research around the success of that as a method. And it’s not, it’s not successful. It’s not the best way to treat people.
Of course, actual relapse data would be even harder to come by than just recidivism data. Because recidivism data, at least you can know whether someone is in or out of prison. But when you’re talking about relapse, somebody may, if they’re not on parole, you have really no way of knowing what they’re doing. And even if they are, it’s pretty spotty because it’s dependent on whether the parole officer is testing or not. But we can look at these methods and say that it is using a method that is not considered the gold standard, for sure.
And it is not using what is considered the most recommended practice at this point in addiction treatment, which has been medication-assisted treatment. Clearly, it’s not for everyone. I didn’t use medication-assisted treatment in getting off drugs, and a lot of people don’t. But it is considered the standard evidence-based approach at this point, and it is not allowed in shock incarceration facilities. If nothing else, there’s solid data that medication-assisted treatment using things like Methadone, Suboxone, Vivitrol, significantly reduces the risk of death by relapse. And again, this is something that these shock camp programs do not use.
Charles Hopkins:Right. And that’s really why I asked that question, because when you look at substance abuse and you look at a program that in fact uses torture to round to try to stop a person from having the desire to use drugs. And that’s what got me where I’m at, the desire to use drugs, and your program has nothing in there to try to get me to understand that part of my disease. Then I’m asking the question. Because I’m asking, well, if you are not having a mechanism to do that, and then you’re not utilizing the prohibitors to help with that, then really you’re just saying that I’m going to shock you out of wanting to use drugs. Which leads me to my next question.
In your article, you say that saving the state, the state alleges that these programs, which have been in existence for over 35 years according to your article, have saved over $147 million. Have you found any truth to that? And what percentage of this, when you say $147 million and you’re talking about upstate New York, and basically you talking about the camp system versus the other systems, you’re saying $147 million in lieu of…?
Keri Blakinger: Yeah. I think that it stands to reason that there’s probably some money saved on these programs in New York in the way that they run. And I say that because I think part of what they’re counting, and they haven’t given us a solid accounting as to how exactly they’re arriving at that number, but I can imagine that they’re probably including fewer days spent in prison as part of that metric. For instance, if you did shock camp and you got out two and a half years early, I imagine they’re counting that as two and a half years of incarceration money saved. And those are significant saving., But of course this is not the only way to arrive at them. If you think that someone can safely be released after six months of being yelled at and made to shovel snow with a spoon, then presumably they could also be safely released after six months even if you didn’t traumatize them. And then you would also save the state that same amount of money.
I would imagine – And again, they haven’t given us a detailed breakdown of this – I would imagine that part of the savings could also be in the cost of running a facility like this, because typically low security facilities cost less to run than higher security facilities. If that’s something they’re counting, I’m not sure that would necessarily be a fair metric. Because if someone can qualify for a low security shock camp, they could also qualify for another kind of low security prison, which would also be cheaper than a higher security facility. So I’m not sure if that’s something they’re counting or not. But the point, the overriding point regardless, is whatever cost savings are coming from this program could also be realized in more productive ways.
Charles Hopkins:And I’m going to be inclined to question the cost saving because unless everybody is released unconditionally, you’re not on parole or probation and you’re not in the collateral aspect of the system, then the money is just being deferred there. Can you address the opposition’s views on why the prison should not be closed? And we did a thing on small town America, rural America, where the major industry is prison. Can you talk about that? And what type of information did you get from your research and your interviews [crosstalk] to that?
Keri Blakinger: Yeah, sure. So, I’ve actually done a lot of reporting on prison towns in general. And I do think that, obviously, as you’ve alluded to, we hear a lot about prison towns who would oppose the closure of prisons because it will decimate the local economy. And that is real. Yes, there are people, even people that don’t work in prison and never plan to, who will be harmed by this closure. I’m not saying that means you should keep prisons open for that purpose, but it is a reality that we need to grapple with as prisons are closing. A lot of these towns were promised this economic boom decades ago when mills closed down, when factories closed down. When other means of stimulating small local economies began closing and prisons came in, they were heralded as something that would save these towns. And how much they delivered on that promise is subject to debate.
But in many cases, it did at least sort of keep these towns bumping along. And now when they close, even the people who’ve never worked in the prisons are going to be harmed. Because in some cases this means that utilities won’t be able to be provided. There are some towns that end up losing their sewage and water systems because of prison closures. In some cases, it harms local hospitals who are now not getting supported by the prison and the prisoners being sent there. I actually just talked to a community college president in California who is not opposing prison closures, but simply pointed out that the closure of a prison near his community college will mean that they lose about 200 students who were at that prison and were completing coursework behind bars.
So, I think there’s a lot of ripple effects out into the community. And again, that should not be a reason to not close prisons, but I do think it’s something that we’d need to seriously consider, that we don’t leave behind these rural towns. And what else can replace a prison. Because that is one thing that I don’t think I’ve seen many satisfactory answers to. What do you do to salvage a local economy in the absence of a prison?
Charles Hopkins: And in that regard, that’s really why I asked that question because I was wondering if the town was looking at some innovation outside of relying on torture and relying on all this misery to be the source of their livelihood. I was thinking that maybe they would try to attract a business or different things, and whether or not this was something in your research or in your article, that you had actually somebody saying that they like, we’re trying to attract business from international community, we’re trying to develop some type of manufacturing model, or we’re trying to track tax credits. I was wondering if you, have you seen that coming out in your article, in your interviews?
Keri Blakinger: Yeah. So, I actually, until yesterday, heard no real viable or good-seeming ideas as to what you do in the absence of a prison. Because first of all, most of these places that we’re talking about, the places that are going to be decimated by the closures, are in such rural remote areas that don’t have big workforces. It’s not a great incentive to be attracting new industries or businesses. But this community college president that I was talking to pointed out that he thought a national cemetery would actually be exactly a perfect fit for that area. Because again, it’s rural, there’s…
And this is, to be clear, in California, although I think many of the same things would apply to this area in upstate New York. But it’s rural, there’s a lot of space, you’d have the ability to have the space for a cemetery. And also if it’s a national cemetery, then you’d have people coming in and making use of the businesses, staying at hotels, you’d have funerals occurring there, you’d have apparently more jobs than I would’ve thought. It didn’t really occur to me that a cemetery would generate quite so many jobs. But a lot of these prisons are also the ones where a single remote prison in a small town are typically not huge prisons with thousands of employees. These are typically small and midsize prisons. So, these are things that the jobs could be replaced by something like a national cemetery. And I haven’t seen that done anywhere. I think it’d be interesting to see what happens if it is. But honestly, that is the only real viable alternative that I’ve heard floated in the time that I’ve been reporting on this.
Charles Hopkins: And before we close, you were very candid in the article, talking about your own substance abuse problems though. Talk a little bit about that and where you are at now in terms of your views on substance abuse and drug addiction.
Keri Blakinger: Yeah. So as I mentioned in the story, I did heroin off and on for about nine years. I also did pretty much any drug you would put in front of me. And then I got arrested and did about two years in prison. And I cover prisons a lot, I’m sober now. And I write a lot about addiction issues and mental health issues. And I also have a book coming out in June, which is a lot about addiction. It’s my memoir, and it’s about how I got into drugs and how I got off of them in prison, because I think that one of the things that a lot of people not familiar with this may not understand is that there are drugs everywhere in prison. And you can get high in prison. I could get heroin delivered to my bedside along with a needle while I was in prison. So getting sober in prison is not necessarily the easy task that people assume it is. And this is one of the things that I grapple with in that book. And yeah, I think it deals a lot with addiction and life after addiction.
Charles Hopkins: All right. Thank you, Keri. And thank you for this enlightening and engaging conversation about shock camps. We recognize now that it is a continuation of the prison-industrial complex and mass incarceration, we recognize that rural America is benefiting from mass incarceration. We are not insensitive to people working, but we definitely don’t have no sympathy towards nobody working and benefiting from slavery and the labor that’s coming out of that. But at the end of the day, we’re thankful for you and what you’re doing in terms of educating us about these torturous activity that’s going on in prison. We’re thankful that you were able to give us some insight into this disease model that’s taking place in New York, upstate New York prison. And do you have any last words?
Keri Blakinger: No. Just thank you for having me.
Charles Hopkins: Okay. And there you have it. This is another edition of Rattling the Bars. We want to encourage everyone that views, that listens to Rattling the Bars to support The Real News, because it’s not an alternative news, it is actually the real news, as you just saw Keri as the example of real news.
The billboard atop a vacant building loomed over Baltimore’s Station North arts district, announcing “DEFUND BPD”—broadcasting, in tall white letters, activists’ demands that the Baltimore Police Department’s annual $500 million+ budget be reduced.
Activist artists have used the billboard a number of times over the years, calling attention to the police who killed Freddie Gray, mocking elected officials and developers, and at the start of the pandemic, declaring “Cancel Rent and Fuck The Police.”
After George Floyd’s murder, as activists painted “DEFUND BPD” in the street in front of City Hall, and Baltimore residents began more loudly questioning police spending, the billboard was changed to “DEFUND BPD” (an accompanying “Free Palestine” was added last year).
After George Floyd’s murder, as activists painted “DEFUND BPD” in the street in front of City Hall, and Baltimore residents began more loudly questioning police spending, the billboard was changed to “DEFUND BPD” (an accompanying “Free Palestine” was added last year).
That’s how the billboard has remained over the past two years—at least until the end of March, when over a few days “DEFUND BPD” was painted over and replaced by an advertisement for the upcoming Charm City Smoke Fest, a 420-friendly hip-hop festival featuring a number of local rappers.
“CHARM CITY SMOKE FEST” was there instead of “DEFUND BPD,” and the cat from Alice in Wonderland with a weed leaf in its mouth covered up the words “Free Palestine.”
Baltimoreans were angry at or amused by (and maybe a little of both) a call for changes to policing painted over to promote a festival for cannabis. It is a drug that, while decriminalized in Maryland, continues to disproportionately incarcerate Black Baltimoreans and is commonly used by cops to justify searching someone’s car, place, or person.
Battleground Baltimore reached out to the artist who created the commissioned “CHARM CITY SMOKE FEST” mural, who declined to comment. They instructed Battleground Baltimore to speak to Andrew Ensor, who runs Charm City Smoke Fest. Ensor also declined to comment.
Battleground Baltimore also reached out to the activist artists behind the “DEFUND BPD” billboard, who explained their frustration.
“As the city budget comes around and we consider the impact of the police on our communities, and the toll of the drug war, we are disappointed that the weed industry decided to erase an important message for an advertisement,” they told Battleground Baltimore.
The artists behind “DEFUND BPD” have been persistent, always reclaiming little space on top of an abandoned building they’ve expropriated for radical sloganeering.
As of Friday, Apr. 8, the billboard had been repainted and again says “DEFUND BPD.”
“Defund2Refund”
Covering up the billboard’s “DEFUND BPD” message right now was especially poorly timed. While April may be the month of 4/20, it is also the month where Baltimore City’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year is released, and over the next couple months, the city council, community organizers, activists, and any Baltimorean who care, will try and weigh in and make the budget just a little bit more equitable.
Top of mind for many is the Baltimore Police Department’s allotment of that budget, which adds up to more than 25% of the total city budget. According to the group Organizing Black, one of the key organizers in the local push to defund BPD, “the city spends more than $900 per person on policing,” and “for every dollar spent on policing, 50 cents is spent on public schools, 20 cents on public housing, 12 cents on homeless services, 11 cents on recreation and parks, and 1 cent on mental health services.”
Currently, BPD receives $555 million a year. These budget increases, activists stress, are approved despite an ongoing failure to reduce crime and a never-ending stream of corruption scandals.
Already, groups such as Communities United and Organizing Black are pushing back against an imminent police budget increase for this year. For Communities United, the message has become “Defund2Refund,” both questioning spending on police and reminding people that money going to the cops is money not going to the city’s severely underfunded schools, for example.
“The city’s spending should reflect the values and needs of its communities, yet Baltimore’s Black community lacks stronger schools, better city services, and other basic resources,” a press statement from Communities United explained. “Instead, Baltimore spends more per capita on policing than 72 of the biggest U.S. cities and the Mayor’s budget is expected to continue this pattern of violence and abandonment.”
Organizing Black is once again engaging residents to show up for the city’s two Taxpayers Nights, where residents can show up and comment on the budget to the Board of Estimates and then, the City Council. In 2021, more than a hundred people showed up from all across the city calling for defunding but those wishes were ignored and the police got another $28 million.
Currently, BPD receives $555 million a year. These budget increases, activists stress, are approved despite an ongoing failure to reduce crime and a never-ending stream of corruption scandals. Just this week, former Baltimore Police Sgt. Keith Gladstone testified in federal court about stealing drugs and guns. Another cop under oath said he frequently falsified police reports.
In more encouraging cannabis news, thanks to two measures that passed in the Maryland House last week, legal, adult-use cannabis will finally be on the ballot in November.
Consistently derailed by hedging during legislative sessions (from many of the same Democrats who said they supported legalization), cannabis legalization has also been dogged by legislators’ inability to come up with an approach that accounts for the thousands of mostly Black lives harmed by pot prohibition.
House Bill 1, which puts legalization on the ballot, does not need Gov. Larry Hogan’s approval. If Maryland voters approve, those 21 and older would be allowed to legally possess 1.5 ounces or less of cannabis as of July 2023.
House Bill 837, which does go to Hogan, establishes some of the basics of a legalized cannabis for adults in Maryland: That bill would legalize possession of up to 1.5 ounces, reduce criminal penalties for low-level possession to a fine, and allow for the growing of as many as two plants per household. It would also automatically expunge past offenses for cannabis and create a Community Repair Fund, moving tax revenue generated by cannabis to those most affected by the racist war on drugs.
The bill also retains quite a bit of the power the police—and, after arrest, the entire criminal legal system—has over citizens due to cannabis.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland (ACLU MD) and Leaders Of a Beautiful Struggle (LBS) have noted some of the limits of HB 837. Namely, possession over 1.5 ounces remains a criminal offense (and could become a possession with intent to distribute charge), “which given Maryland’s history will be enforced in a racially biased way,” ACLU MD and LBS wrote.
A 2018 Baltimore Fishbowl study showed that between 2015-2017 (the first three full years of cannabis decriminalization), 96% of those arrested for cannabis possession of 10 grams or more (over the decriminalized amount) were Black.
ACLU MD and LBS also noted that the bill headed for Hogan’s desk does not curb the ability for police to use claims of cannabis odor to make traffic stops—a frequent police justification for searches and tool for racial profiling. Additionally, HB 837 adds cannabis to the open container law, which means no one in a car can be smoking cannabis. This, ACLU MD and LBS argue, “could ultimately contribute to more race-based traffic stops and searches.”
According to a 2020 ACLU report, a Black person in Maryland is 2.1 times more likely to be arrested for cannabis possession than a white person, and despite 2014’s decriminalization, 50% of the drug arrests in Maryland each year are still for cannabis.
Even such half-step legalization measures are historic for Maryland, and it has been a long time coming. Consistently derailed by hedging during legislative sessions (from many of the same Democrats who said they supported legalization), cannabis legalization has also been dogged by legislators’ inability to come up with an approach that accounts for the thousands of mostly Black lives harmed by pot prohibition.
“This is really, really complicated,” State Senator Bill Ferguson, who was on the Marijuana Legalization Workgroup, said back in 2019.
The bill going to Hogan’s desk does begin to address “complicated” things, though it is important to stress that this bill does not establish a regulated cannabis program. It simply legalizes cannabis. State Delegate Luke Clippinger and others have promised that next session in 2023, they’ll figure out the regulation and tax elements of legalization. “The legislature is focused to get this right and we have more work to do—but this is a huge step forward on our journey to legalize cannabis,” Clippinger said.
Video of the police killing of 18-year-old Donnell Rochester is harrowing.
Baltimore Police officers chase Rochester, who runs and then retreats back to his car, a white Honda Accord, and drives off.
“Get out the car, get out the car now,” cops yell at Rochester, who drives forward. Officer Connor Murray shoots at Rochester, whose car bumps Murray. Soon after, Officer Robert Mauri shoots at Rochester through the windshield and the Honda Accord stops, the car door opens, and Rochester, with his hands up, says, “I can’t breathe.”
He collapses into the street and repeats, “I can’t breathe.” Cops pull Rochester to the ground and try to handcuff him.
“Put your fucking hand behind your back,” Mauri, who shot Rochester moments before, yells.
“Start a medic,” Murray, who also shot Rochester, says over the radio. “Suspect in custody.”
Rochester, handcuffed, gasping for air, blood leaking out of him and onto the pavement of Chilton Street in Northeast Baltimore around 3PM on Feb. 19, is now surrounded by cops.
“What’s your name?” a cop asks.
Rochester can’t get it out: “My name is…”
“Where you hit at?” one cop asks Rochester. “Huh?”
Rochester struggles to answer. He has been shot in the chest.
“Where you hit at?” the cop asks again, impatient.
“He’s hit up top,” Murray says. “Upper chest.”
10 seconds later, another cop walks up to Rochester.
“Are you ok?” that cop asks Rochester.
“No,” Rochester responds.
Officers kneel over Rochester, trying to tend to the gunshot wound—or a “GSW,” as Mauri calls it over the radio at one point.
“Bro, where you shot at?” a cop asks.
Rochester struggles to answer.
“Where you shot at, bro?” the cop asks again.
“My stomach,” Rochester says, hard to hear.
“Turn him over, turn him over,” another cop advises.
The cops turn Rochester’s body around, still looking for the wound or wounds.
“I can’t breathe,” Rochester tells the cops.
Approximately 15 minutes after he was shot, Rochester was dead.
The killing of Donnell Rochester by Baltimore Police officers Mauri and Murray has been handled the way most police shootings have been handled under Commissioner Michael Harrison: The body-worn camera footage was released days after the shooting at one of those press conferences where the footage is prefaced by a few minutes of police explaining what you’re going to see and selecting certain portions to be slowed-down to really drive their point home.
Back in February, a few days after cops shot and killed Rochester, Scott said the police in Baltimore were doing a “fabulous job.”
Harrison began the press conference by calling Rochester’s killing a “police officer-involved shooting” and acknowledged “the high level of public scrutiny” that comes with a police shooting.
From there, Deputy Police Commissioner Brian Nadeau took over, he said, to “put some context to what you’re about to see” in the body camera footage. Here is what happened, according to Nadeau: Police noticed Rochester’s car and ran the license plate, and it came back with an outstanding warrant for a failure to appear in court. The charge for that court date he didn’t show up to was carjacking, the police said. So, the cops followed Rochester and, at some point, turned their lights and siren on. Rochester sped off and got away. Police then went looking for Rochester and found his car parked on Chilton Street. Rochester saw the cops, ran, and then turned around and jumped in his car to drive off, by which time cops were yelling at him to stop his car, weapons raised.
Rochester accelerated and Murray shot into the car. As the body-worn camera footage shows, Rochester was not going particularly fast, but fast enough to seemingly knock Murray to the ground: “Donnell then starts to drive towards officer Murray, who discharges his weapon, and officer Murray falls to the ground,” Deputy Police Commissioner Brian Nadeau told reporters at the press conference.
Mayor Brandon Scott, who has disappointed many activists by adopting many of the tough-on-crime policies and rhetoric of past administrations (while occasionally tempering it with references to root-cause solutions and “trauma-informed” care), explicitly praised warrant apprehension when he spoke to local television news outlet Fox45 last week. He discussed additional funding provided by Maryland governor Larry Hogan, which included $6.5 million for a Warrant Apprehension Task Force, and said, “We know that our Warrant Apprehension Task Force is going out doing great work and now having the state be a deeper partner in that is going to benefit… the City.”
Back in February, a few days after cops shot and killed Rochester, Scott said the police in Baltimore were doing a “fabulous job.”
Rochester’s family has been demanding officers Mauri and Murray be charged for killing Rochester, questioning the cops’ hard-charging tactics. On Mar. 25—the same day Scott was praising warrant apprehension—students marched from Morgan State University to Baltimore’s City Hall, calling for accountability.
“Back in 2014, that was the first time we heard the words ‘I can’t breathe’ when our brother Eric Garner said those words in New York City as he was being strangled by a police officer. Then again in 2020, we heard those same exact words, and now standing here in 2022, we hear those same exact words echoed by our brother, Donnell Rochester,” Joshua Turner of the organization B.R.E.A.T.H.E told the crowd of 50 or so, the MSU Spokesmanreported.
“My son didn’t deserve it,” Rochester’s mother Danielle Brown said in front of City Hall. “They killed him for nothing.”
There is another protest scheduled for Saturday, Apr. 2, at 3PM at the Northwood Appold United Methodist Church.
Reckoning with the legacy of Baltimore’s ‘zero tolerance’ crime policy this election year
To make this strange political moment even stranger, Katie Curran O’Malley, former prosecutor, career judge, and wife of Martin O’Malley, is running for Maryland Attorney General. The platform, as described on her campaign website, is a combination of reform-heavy, Biden administration-style gestures to more training (which also means more spending on police) and tweaks to the criminal legal system.
Like many Democrats two years out from the nationwide George Floyd uprisings, Curran O’Malley intends to split the difference between police reform and public safety: “We don’t need to choose between public safety and accountability in policing. We can and must do both,” Curran O’Malley tweeted earlier this week.
Marilyn Mosby, the trials of Keith Davis, and the death of Tyrone West
Family members of victims of police violence, along with activists who have been advocating on behalf of those victims, are challenging federally-indicted Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s progressive bonafides this week on social media, in court, and in front of City Hall.
Mosby has made claims that her indictment—related to a number of tax and mortgage issues and interconnected perjury charges—is a political attack on her and her “progressive prosecutor” policies. To hear the State’s Attorney tell it, as she did on MSNBC last month, she is “fighting for racial justice in the criminal justice system, fighting to end mass incarceration in a state where we have the largest incarceration of Black people in the entire nation,” and the feds are coming after her for it.
Two high-profile cases in particular complicate Mosby’s claim that her focus on police corruption and getting people out of prison is why she was indicted.
Baltimore City’s $1 Homes proposal rejected by City Council
Baltimore City Council President Nick Mosby’s $1 Homes program was voted down by council members last night, Thursday, Mar. 3.
The program would make vacants owned by the city available to longtime residents for just one dollar if they are able to repair and then live in the property themselves. Primary concerns about the bill were communicated to Battleground Baltimore back in November by City Hall sources; namely, that most Baltimoreans who could benefit from the program lack the funds to fully renovate homes and could end up owing money on a home they could not rehabilitate.
During last night’s hearing, Councilperson Odette Ramos stressed the need to ensure that “everyone who participates in this program isn’t going to be underwater.”
Maryland’s huge surplus two years into the pandemic is bad, actually
Immediate relief to Maryland families—and all Marylanders—would, of course, be actual immediate relief, such as putting the surplus money directly into their hands. It would require being far more inclusive than Franchot’s $2,000 to low-wage earners idea. Immediate relief is not people paying a little less at the pump for one month or maybe three months.
Indeed, the desire to project “fiscal responsibility” is so strong among state officials that it normalizes propositions such as using part of the surplus towards the state’s “rainy day fund,” where additional funds are held for economic instability and other crises.
Two years into the pandemic, many Marylanders might think back on how much more the state and federal government could have done for them, and ask what a “rainy day” looks like compared to all the days they’ve endured since March 2020.
Workers demand Baltimore Museum of Art live up to ‘progressive’ bonafides and let them unionize
While Baltimore artists, influencers, and reporters shuffled into the Baltimore Museum of Art for a preview of Guarding The Art, an upcoming exhibition that the BMA’s very own security guards curated in collaboration with curatorial staff, workers stood on the steps of the museum demanding their union be recognized by management.
On Tuesday, March 22, a group of seven workers who are part of the ongoing effort to unionize the Baltimore Museum of Art held signs with slogans such as “1 Voice, 1 Union” and “No More Delays”; one sign had “Guarding the Art” changed to “Guarding the Guards.” They were demanding that the BMA’s director, Christopher Bedford, sign the union’s election agreement. Bedford, the union stressed, has had two months to sign the agreement, which is needed in order to allow a union election organized by the city to proceed.
According to The Sentencing Project, “Private prisons in the United States incarcerated 115,428 people in 2019, representing 8% of the total state and federal prison population.” However, while private prisons still make up a minority of carceral institutions in the US, the infiltration of privatization has spread throughout the prison-industrial complex. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Mansa Musa speaks with Paul Wright about the dehumanizing practice of prisons digitizing mail, which allows for increased surveillance, and for profit-seeking companies to charge inmates and their families exorbitant fees to read mail on electric portals.
Charles Hopkins:Welcome to this edition of Rattling The Bars. My name is Mansa Musa, co-host with Eddie Conway. The Nation magazine published an article entitled “Why Prisons are Banning Letters” which outlines a current censorship trend that the prison-industrial complex is adopting. Here to talk about it is Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News. Welcome Paul.
Paul Wright:All right. Thanks for having me on the show.
Charles Hopkins:Okay. Why is mail guard a danger to prison’s ability to communicate with their families and society?
Paul Wright:Well, basically what we’ve seen in the last 30 years is a massive increase in both censorship and surveillance of mail by prisoners. But the bigger thing has been the trend starting in the early ’90s about monetizing prisoners and their families. You have companies, specifically Securus, Global Tel Link and now another company is focusing on mail called Smart Communications or Smart Com, who, basically what they want to do is they want to monetize and make money off of every form of contact prisoners have with the outside world. And for decades, prisoners and their families have been paying outrageous rates for phone calls to stay in touch with their families. It hadn’t been uncommon for prisoners and their families to be paying up to $25 for a 20 minute phone call with loved ones. We’ve seen, we’ve had some success regulating that at the federal communications level.
One thing that’s happened is as we reign them in a little bit on the telephones, the companies look to diversify their revenues. And their business model is that every communication that a prisoner has with a loved one or a family member outside of prison, they want to be able to make money off of it. So they start offering video calling, and one way for video calls to work is by cutting off, restricting, or eliminating in-person visitation. Then they started moving into text messaging and emails where they charge outrageous rates for that. Most people accept free email as a part of life. Not in prison. These companies charge anywhere from $0.50 to $1 or more just to send a single email. But they’ve realized that for this to work, they need to cut off the free alternative, which is the government mail service.
What they’ve been doing with that is in the past couple of years now they’ve been starting this trend of basically banning letter mail from prisoners, to and from prisoners, and forcing people to send their mail to these processing centers where the letters are scanned in, digitized, and then either they’re sent to the prison and they’re printed out and delivered to the prisoner. Or the bigger trend is the prisoner gets it in an electronic form on a kiosk, and then the prisoner is charged to access the kiosk or the tablet to view their mail on or their letter on.
Same thing. When prisoners go to send mail out of the prison, their mail is then digitized as well. These are all things that these companies are doing to basically exploit and monetize prisoners and their families. The other thing that they’re really selling to the government is they’re creating vast surveillance databases. Smart Com boasts the fact that they claim they’re only going to keep the letters for seven years, but then in an interview their president or one of their managers said, we’ve actually never deleted a single letter. Once we have it in our database, we just hold onto it. Then they make these letters available to other law enforcement agencies without warrants, without any type of controls or anything like that.
I think these are all issues that… They’re happening. There’s no legislation about it. It’s just happening in back rooms. This is just another trend on the monetization of prisoners and their families where prisoners and their loved ones are basically seen as money making profit centers by these for-profit companies and their government collaborators
Charles Hopkins:Let me ask you this here. That’s a good point, let’s flesh that out. Who’s financing, other than the corporations, who else is financially benefiting from this? Who’s regulating them? Because as you just noted that they are monetizing the prison-industrial complex, they are monetizing that.
Paul Wright:Well, there’s no regulation. As far as who’s benefiting, I mean, the American police state, basically it’s widening its web of surveillance. As a society here in America, I mean, every email message we send is collected by the government through its Carnivore program, which is run by the FBI. All of our phone calls are recorded and monitored by the NSA. The post office records the outsides of all letters that transit through the mail system. Now this is just one step further of opening up the contents of the letter, digitizing them, storing them, and making them available for government surveillance and intelligence gathering throughout the mail system.
Eventually the goal of this is to, I think, eventually have all prisoner mail being scanned and digitized and making it digitally searchable. I think that’s what these companies are touting and that seems to be the trend that the government is moving forward and towards.
Charles Hopkins:Okay. In terms of what we are seeing, do you think that we are moving into a quasi-privatization of prisons, and that all the infrastructures of the prison services are being privatized? We know medical, visits and all those things that you have outlined?
Paul Wright:The overall trend. I mean, as far as the private prison companies, which at this point are mostly CoreCivic and Geo Corporation, they’re only controlling around 7% of the American prison population, but a lot of the sources around prisons have been privatized and outsourced. This includes the medical services, as you noted, money transfers. I think that one of the things that’s really critical about a lot of this stuff is that these are services that were previously performed by the government. Now they’re being performed by private for-profit corporations. At the end of the day, one of the promises of privatization, which has turned out to be a big lie, is that somehow taxpayers are going to benefit. And it may well be true that these companies can provide the same crappy, murderous services that the government does, but the taxpayers don’t see any type of relief or savings from it. They’re providing it cheaper. The only people that are benefiting are their shareholders and the owners of these companies.
But I think it’s important to distinguish there’s two types of prison privatization model, or how they make their money. One, is the government procurement or contracting model. That’s what companies like Geo and CoreCivic do. In other words, they sign contracts with the government for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, where they come in and say, we’ll run your prisons, we’ll cage your people, and we’ll take care of everything. But the government’s their customer. The legislators, the governor’s office, the president of the United States, Congress, these are the people that approve these contracts. These are the people that appropriate that money. I look at it that, if legislators or the public or Congress has a problem with it, they won’t sign the contracts.
At this point it is well established that these companies engage in a lot of fraud. They overcharge, they don’t provide the services they’re contracted to. But that said, the reason they keep these contracts going is they provide a lot of campaign contributions. They give money to politicians. We also know they engage in criminal bribery. They personally give money to the politicians that just pocket the money as criminal bribes. And they also do this to prison officials, both as criminal bribes. There’s also the cronyism factor where they hire a lot of these government prison officials, they all retire and a lot of them go to work for these same private prison companies. That’s one model of prison privatization.
The other one is where basically they’re not looking to make their money in profit off of the government, but rather they’re looking to monetize and profit off of prisoners and their families. These are the phone companies like Securus, Global Tel Link, some of the mail companies, the mail companies like Smart Com. They seem to be going back and forth between two models. On the one hand, they contract with the government where the government’s giving them millions of dollars. On the other hand, they’re also looking to monetize their services by charging prisoners and their family members. I think the one that monetizes prisoners and their family members is, in my view, in a lot of ways it’s far worse because the public, the prisoners, the families, they have no choice in this. Basically it’s some government bureaucrat who’s making the decision to give this monopoly contract to one of these companies. Again, we know the telephone companies and these other companies, we know they engage in criminal bribery.
They give criminal bribes to people. They also have a kickback model where they give money back to the government in exchange for these monopoly contracts. The people actually paying the bills have no choice in who chooses, who’s providing the service. They have no choice about the quality of the services being provided. They’re just stuck with it. And the government and these for-profit companies, nearly all of which are owned by hedge funds, just use prisoners and their families as a commodity to be monetized, profited off of, and exploited. That’s their goal, is to squeeze every last penny out of prisoners and their families as they can. Unfortunately, they’re pretty good at it.
Charles Hopkins:In that regard, what do we do? What do the prisoner population do in terms of finding redress? Because as you said, and as was noted in this article, the services are crappy. They digitize your mail, some of your mail comes in, [inaudible] the head of the photos is all, a lot of the things that you could have done such as the children, giving, sending drawings to their parents, they can’t get that. What do we have as prisoners? Do prisoners have any redress, a constitutional redress in this regard?
Paul Wright: So far they don’t. But one of the things to keep in mind is that the Constitution guarantees a right to free speech, and that also includes mail. And not just the prisoners, but also the senders of the mail have a right to send their mail, to send their mail and have it read and received. They also have a right to receive mail from prisoners. I think there are other issues too, is that there’s also a privacy right protected under the Fourth Amendment that says that the government’s not supposed to conduct unreasonable searches and seizures. And the wholesale mass digitization and data basing of people’s mail, we’re talking millions of letters every year for prisoners and their families around the country, that’s not contemplated by the constitution. I think that one of the things that we’re seeing is because this is still a relatively new area of law, we’re still seeing just a new area here in terms of how this is manifesting itself or what’s going to happen.
I think the legal challenges are still new. I think that one of the things that’s critical to note is that a lot of these prison privatization schemes are basically taking what used to be free government services and they’re slapping a price tag on it. A really good example is prison money services. 20 years ago, if you wanted to send money to someone in prison, you got a money order at the post office or a cashier’s check and you sent it, you mailed it to them in the prison or the jail they are being held at. It was added to their prison trust account so they could buy commissary or whatever. Starting around 17 or 18 years ago, a guy named Ryan Shapiro starts a company called Jpay and his thing is, hey, we’ll, we’ll do it electronically, but we’re going to charge 15 or 20% or more to do it. But then he also realizes that if people still have the option of sending money for free, they’re probably not going to use his service. So like everything else, these crappy services that exploit people and charge a lot of money for, they’ve realized that their business model can only succeed if they cut off the free government alternative.
In other words, if people can still send the mail, they’re probably not going to use the email or the messaging service. Some people will, but you know what? For 500 years you can buy a stamp at the post office, put it on an envelope, and pop it in the mail and it gets delivered. That’s about as American as you can get is using the postal service. These companies realize that to succeed and monetize their services and make a lot of money, they need to cut out that government provided alternative of the post office. Just like they’ve done with making sure prisoners can’t do video calls. Prisoners around the world can use video calling services like WhatsApp or Skype to communicate with their loved ones. In this country you’ve got to pay Securus or GTL a dollar a minute or more to use the same services with lower quality that just aren’t as good as prisoners and other countries are using for free. Again, like I say, this is the business model that these companies have come up with to exploit prisoners and their families.
Charles Hopkins: Like you said, they’re taking these free services and putting a monetary value on them—is there something that they can be doing to try and mobilize their families to get the legislators to get involved and enact laws or policies that could directly impact these bloodsuckers?
Paul Wright:We’re starting to see a little bit of progress. We’re starting to see a couple of cities like Rikers Island, the jail in San Francisco, and a couple others where they’re now providing prisoners with free phone calls. This is a new thing. I think, and there’s no reason these services shouldn’t be free, or at least not charged for, or at least prisoners and their family should not be the ones paying for them. That’s one trend and that’s actually happening. We have not yet seen it at the DOC level. Connecticut seems to be poised to become the first state in the country to provide free telephone services for prisoners. That hasn’t quite happened yet. But I think that one of the things is by pushing back and why are these services being… Why are prisoners being charged for these services, and their families?
I think one of the things to keep in mind, if you look at things in terms of a big picture, so many of these prison agencies have literally billion dollar budgets. Then you look at the amounts of money that they’re charging prisoners and their families, or they’re getting millions of dollars in kickbacks, which millions of dollars is a lot of money when it’s coming out of the pockets of the poorest people in America.
On the other hand, a couple million here and there for an agency that already has a multi-billion dollar budget, it’s beyond chump change. I mean, they spend more money than that on paper clips and Post-it Notes. But again, it seems almost like it’s an ideological fixation for a lot of legislators and the people who run prisons and jails to literally pillage every last penny they can out of prisoners and their families. Rather than looking at this as these are, or should be, government services that we provide to members of the public or that we provide to prisoners and their families as tools to reduce recidivism, to strengthen community ties, to make our society and our country safer and a better place. Instead, they look at how many pennies or how many dollars can we take out of the pocketbooks of our poorest citizens.
Charles Hopkins:To your knowledge, is any of the money that’s being taken out of prisons any with these disservices or so-called services, is any of the money being put back into the institution to help advance some of the things that you spoke about? Building community relationships or providing prisoners with opportunities to advance themselves prior to getting out?
Paul Wright:Yes. It varies from state to state, and a lot of states claim the kickbacks are going into so-called inmate betterment funds, offender welfare funds, or whatever they call it in that state. Some states the money just goes into the state’s general revenue account. In other words, the government is like, hey, it goes into our budget. Whether it’s paying for roads or cops or school lunches, that’s where it’s going. Then to the extent that a lot of these prisons and jails claim the money’s going to some offender betterment fund, that’s a big old lie, because the reality is when you start looking at what they use this money to pay for in places like Los Angeles.
Los Angeles Jail gets around $40 million a year in kickbacks from their phone revenues, and they’re using this money to do everything from pay for food – I mean, they have a legal obligation to feed the prisoners. They’re using $7 million of that money to pay for food. And you know the corruption’s there as soon as you see hundreds of thousands of dollars going to unspecified consultants. But then they use the money to pay for guard salaries, they use it to pay for tanks, for shotguns, squad cars, everything else. The claim is that they… And I think anyone that’s done time or knows anyone who’s done time in America, you know that prisoners are not really being given even a fraction of the services for the millions of dollars that are being peeled off the backs of prisoners and their families. You go to jails, they’re lucky if they got a basketball or two and a couple of sets of dominoes in the day room, and the jail’s getting millions of dollars in kickbacks. And part of the problem is that most of this money, it’s not regulated.
There are no controls on it. If the sheriff says, hey, I’m going to take my girlfriend and my cronies and we’re going to go on a ski trip to Aspen with the prisoners’ money. This is documented. They do this, and there’s nothing illegal about it. This is also one of the things that I think that people have to think about too, is the very anti-democratic nature of this type of slush fund money. I’m not aware of any other agency in government where private corporations are giving government officials millions of dollars with no accountability. Every other branch of government, if you need or want money to spend, you got to go to the legislature, the county commission, the treasurer, you got to go ask someone for that money and there are strings attached to it.
You don’t get to… The school superintendent can go ask for money from the county and then get the money and decide hey, I’m going to go buy a Rolls Royce and tool around town in it. Yet that’s exactly what happens with the so-called prisoner trust fund money or offender betterment funds, or again, whatever they call it. There’s no accountability, there’s no control over it.
Charles Hopkins:In terms of the prisoners that can’t afford to interact with mail gram, as we know that they got tabs that you have to pay for to get to read your mail. To your knowledge are they providing indigent prisoners with opportunities to interact or engage in this mail system? The visit system?
Paul Wright:I don’t know if that’s happening or not. I haven’t seen any reports on it one way or the other. I would like to think they would, but if the purpose is to make money, maybe not. I don’t know the answer to that question
Charles Hopkins:Okay. And closing out, Paul, what do you think we should be doing outside in terms of one, educating the public, and creating some type of direct action to get this regulated? Because it needs to be regulated. Like you said, it’s the only slush fund where millions of dollars can be handed out to people with no recourse or no kickback. What can we in society and the public be doing to try to get some kind of control over this?
Paul Wright:Well, part of the problem is I think that a lot of people that think that prison reform and jail reform are A, they also think the word reform is good or positive and that’s not true. I mean, most of what’s happened in this country regarding prisons and jails in the last 40 years is all bad or negative, at least as far as the prisoners are concerned and their families are concerned. The bigger thing is they also think that reform happens in legislatures, in Congress and places like that. But we’re seeing, with regards to telephone contracts, these mail policies, and stuff like that, this stuff is happening behind closed doors, contract by contract, county by county, prison system by prison system. And there’s no public input on this. It’s just the prisons and the jails are just rolling it out as, hey, we’re digitizing our mail. Take it or leave it. If you don’t like it, it’s tough to be you.
I think that this also goes to the bigger picture, I think, of a lack of any type of accountability or oversight of prisons and jails. If you start asking legislators hey, what type of oversight are you guys having over it? There really isn’t any. These are all kind of like major problems. I think just having some type of accountability, some type of oversight. But you know what? These institutions have been really good for decades at not having any of that and I just don’t see that changing anytime soon.
Charles Hopkins:Okay. Thank you, Paul, for joining me on this edition of Rattling the Bars. On behalf of Eddie Conway and myself, we thank everyone for listening and viewing this. We appreciate all the work that you are doing, Paul, it’s a great service that you’re providing to those of us inside. I definitely benefited from it when I was incarcerated. I read the Prison Law News and utilized a lot of the cases that came out of it to get redress. I think that’s the message that we want to leave for the prisoners that’s there and their family members is to take and seek redress by taking direct action. On behalf of Eddie Conway, myself, and The Real News, continue to support The Real News and continue to support Rattling The Bars. Thank you, Paul.
Paul Wright:Thank you. And I’d just like to add, if anyone who wants more information, go to our website, www.prisonlegalnews.org. That covers detention facility news and information. Our other magazine at www.criminallegalnews.org covers criminal law and procedure and what’s happening with the police and prosecutors as well. Thanks for having me on the show.
When a Terre Haute, Indiana, man was arrested for not walking on a sidewalk on a street that doesn’t have one, the Police Accountability Report investigated. We obtained body camera and dashcam video evidence that offers a rare glimpse into the indifference of American law enforcement—evidence that not only contradicts the allegations made by the arresting officer, but that also reveals how difficult it is to escape the tendrils of this country’s law enforcement-industrial complex.
Pre-Production/Studio: Stephen Janis Post-Production: Stephen Janis, Adam Coley
Transcript
The transcript of this video will be made available as soon as possible.
From her world-famous book Dead Man Walking to a life spent educating the public about the inhumanity of the death penalty, the work of activist nun Sister Helen Prejean is known around the globe. What is less widely known is the story of how Sister Helen came to do this work and, as the description for her latest memoir River of Fire notes, how she evolved in her “spiritual journey from praying for God to solve the world’s problems to engaging full-tilt in working to transform societal injustices.” In this special conversation for Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway speaks with Sister Helen about River of Fire and about the deep historical roots of the racist, colonialist violence that is embodied today in America’s prison-industrial complex.
Eddie Conway: Welcome to this episode of Rattling The Bars. We are fortunate today to be joined by the foremost expert on abolishing the death penalty, the author of Dead Man Walking, which was turned into a movie, and now she has produced the latest book about her ride toward consciousness. So joining me today is Sister Helen Prejean. Sister Helen, thanks for joining me.
Sister Helen Prejean: Glad to be here.
Eddie Conway: Okay. So we want to start off by just finding out how your life was before you moved into the Black community. Give us a brief overview if you will.
Sister Helen Prejean: Yeah. Eddie, it was a perfect picture of white privilege. Grew up white Catholic family, French descent in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, ’40s, ’50s. Jim Crow in full swing. Had a couple, my daddy, a successful lawyer in Baton Rouge. A couple, Ellen and Jesse, never knew their last names, worked in the house, lived back in the servant’s quarters. A kind mother and father who actually helped Ellen and Jesse buy a house. Daddy helped Jesse get a job, but that was charity and that was kindness, but not working to change systemic injustice. Not awake about Jim Crow. And to me, looking at that, it was a perfect example of what culture does. Culture gives us eyes, gives us ears. Honey, it’s better for the races to be separate, never questioned it. And my whole book River Of Fire is about awakening to justice and getting out of my little white bubble in the suburbs and moving into the St. Thomas housing projects.
And that awakening had to do with a deep spiritual awakening that the gospel of Jesus was not just about being charitable to people who happened to be around us, but getting involved with the struggling and [marginalized] and suffering people of our day. So when I moved into the St. Thomas housing project, it was like I had moved to another country. I mean, I had everything to learn. I had an open heart, but I had everything to learn, and wonderful African American people who became my teachers, teaching me about racism and linguistic racism. For example, looking in the dictionary, white’s always pure, always good. Black, black ball, blacklist. Teaching me. And I saw the suffering just a 16th of a mile from where I lived it was like another… People didn’t have healthcare. People are dying. One man had a heart attack because he didn’t have health insurance, an ambulance wouldn’t come pick him up.
The kids are graduating out of high school, public high school and they can’t read a third grade reader. Violence everywhere, drugs everywhere. Police grabbing people, witnessed this with my own eyes, throwing them in the back of a police car. And they’re yelling to the nuns on a porch, sister, y’all are my witnesses. I got no drugs on me. And seeing everything from another point of view, and my heart catching fire for justice. And then one day coming out of that adult learning center that we had. And it was the one thing I could do. Black people had been my servants all my life. It’s a chance for me to serve so I could be a teacher and I could help people get their GED.
And coming out of that adult learning center, it was a simple invitation. Hey Sister Helen, you want to be a penpal to somebody on death row? All I was learning about it, all the injustices. I said, sure, I could write some letters. I thought I was only going to be writing letters. And it ended up I witnessed the electrocution of a man in Louisiana’s killing chamber, and came out of that experience and been on fire ever since. I noticed that it was almost a secret ritual, people thought it was fine. And so my mission was born. I had to get out, had to tell the story to wake people up, and that’s what led me to write Dead Man Walking.
Eddie Conway: Okay. You mentioned culture being responsible for this. Do you mean when you say culture the same thing as socialization?
Sister Helen Prejean: Yeah.
Eddie Conway: Is there a difference?
Sister Helen Prejean: Yeah. Socialization, of course they might be synonymous. Socialization is what makes us see, well here’s what it means to be a nice, good human being. With everything around us, people’s attitudes, the way people act, what people accept as white people. Well, it’s okay if Black people sit in the back of the bus. It’s okay if they don’t have their rights, it doesn’t affect us. We’re kind to the Black individuals we know. Socialization maybe is a good word for it, Eddie, because it’s what you see all around you, and it leads you not to question things, see. It’s the minute when you begin to question, which is what I loved about the ’60s in the United States. We really began to question things. And what’s happening now with George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, Confederate statues coming down. We can see there’s a shift of consciousness going on. Once you start asking questions, hey, wait a minute. Why is this? Then things can begin to change. So socialization would do it, I think.
Eddie Conway: Okay. I want to step back in history when you talk about culture, and maybe you can comment on this. When you go back to the first European invaders to the North American continents, the first thing you see is violence, warfare, and enslavement of the Indigenous population.
Sister Helen Prejean: Right.
Eddie Conway: So that culture goes back, and I want to go back even farther than that to the – And you are an exception in my mind – To the holy Roman Catholic Church and the vision of the world of people of color among the European powers. It seems to me that this culture goes back to, and I don’t want to be crude and say it goes back to the caveman, but I don’t know where. I guess I’m having problems understanding what… You are college educated, maybe university educated. How could you not see the history of this culture and realize that it was divisive and destructive for anybody that wasn’t white?
Sister Helen Prejean: About Indigenous people, look at that, the decimation, killing of Indigenous people. And missionaries came with the conquistadors, you always had the missionaries with. I have been blessed enough to be adopted in a family in a Northern Cheyenne tribe in Montana where I got to experience sweat lodge, Sundance, got really steeped to come to understand how Native American people pray and how they experience the world. And the thing, when you were saying to me, you were college educated. How come you didn’t learn this? Really interesting question, because it’s a thing Brian Stevenson says all the time: proximity. Who do you have proximity to? Not what are you studying in the books in academia, but whose lives do you have contact with? What people do you know where they can share their experiences? And that’s what happened when I got to know the Northern Cheyenne people in Montana. They began to tell, I mean, I learned more from one conversation with them and being in that sweat lodge with them, than all the courses I took in college. And learned how this oppression – And here’s the thing.
The Native American people thought it was a joke that these Europeans came over and they planted a little flag with their country on it and said, now this is ours. They knew the earth, mother earth did not belong to anybody. They thought it was really stupid that they were doing this, that whole mindset. We come and conquer you. We take your land and now it’s ours. So that violence has been built in from the beginning. I mean, there was a T-shirt that we all used to love to wear and it showed Native people there fighting terrorism since 1492, because it was terrorism, pure and simple [inaudible]. And it’s a mindset that’s still very present in the US. And the death penalty is an example of the way you solve social problems or get control is you use violence to get what you want. And so it’s been extended. And religion right in there. So religious institutions have a really bad history going back to the crusades, Muslim people, the Moors conquering the holy land. It’s just such a long, long history of religion being tied to violence.
Eddie Conway: Because you are a nun, you took a vow of poverty and you probably don’t own anything. I mean, you live somewhere and you eat.
Sister Helen Prejean: Right.
Eddie Conway: But it’s not like people in poverty in the projects. Most people in the projects want to get out. They don’t want to be in poverty.
Sister Helen Prejean: That’s real hard.
Eddie Conway: What’s the difference? You went into that environment to learn to help people who are trying to come out of that environment. So you talk in your book, River Of Fire, you talk about the nuns that went in 10 years before you, that kind of cleared the pathway and made you accepted by people in the community because of their work. I guess my gut feeling is, the reform work that had to be done only made the conditions more tolerable. Well, I mean, what could be done to really change the conditions of people that’s forced to live in projects?
Sister Helen Prejean: Right. One of the main things, first of all, it is very clear that, as nuns, we were not really poor. It’s the opposite. We came to redefine that. That we’re not poor people at all, but it was the spirit of the first Christian communities that you share all your goods in common with each other and you don’t own anything personally. Okay. And we have done that. But what I was learning about poverty, when I moved into St. Thomas, the big thing poverty does is reduce your choices. And talking to Geraldine Johnson, she could see her boys were changing once they moved in the projects. Experiences they were having with the police being taken under the New Orleans Bridge, threatened with being thrown in the river.
And she said, we can’t move. We can’t move. We don’t have the money. And they’re gentrifying the city. We can’t move. We got to be in here. It’s like we’re on a reservation. So what do you do? What do you do as a middle-class white woman coming into this? You know you want to be of service. And one of the first things I learned was through this great lawyer who represented poor people, Bill Quigley, is you got to learn the law and you got to learn your rights, and then you work for those rights. One of the first public demonstrations I was ever part of where I marched down on the street with the people in St. Thomas of the tenant association was because there were rats in the building, you couldn’t ever get maintenance to fix anything, and they needed lights.
So Bill Quigley is in there with the tenant association. Here’s the law, here are the rights. Now we’re going to march down the street to public housing and demand our rights. I was part of the support for the people. I joined my voices to theirs and I began to learn that Sister Lillian Flavin worked with her. She said, sometimes you have to pray with your body, with your legs. Put your body there. And so it was in solidarity with the people. And you got to raise your voice. You got to say, we’re not taking it anymore in order to get change.
Eddie Conway: Okay, so this whole process led you to oppose the death penalty. And you explained earlier that somebody asked you to write a letter. You wrote that letter. What followed that? How did you end up in the killing chamber?
Sister Helen Prejean: Right. Well, my image of it is almost like tumbling down a laundry chute. I knew nothing about the criminal justice system. Nothing about the courts. I hadn’t even noticed that the Supreme Court had put the death penalty back in 1976. What do I know about the death penalty? You got to know this, Eddie, that when Tim Robbins was working on the film, writing the screenplay of the film of Dead Man Walking of my book, he kept saying with his little laugh, the nun is in over her head. And indeed I was. I knew nothing. I didn’t know the importance of having a lawyer by your side when you went to trial. I didn’t know how race played in the death penalty overwhelmingly when white people are killed. How poverty, when it’s poor people who end up on death row. Knew nothing, but I wrote a letter and I met a human being on death row.
And of course, one of the ways that the death penalty had been sold to people is that these people who are on death row are not just murderers. These are the worst of the worst. Either by the nature of the action they have done or by the nature of their character. They are evil. They are unredeemable. Of course, that whole thing is done to people politically, too. Like our friend Samsa, politically of Black Panthers. These are evil, violent people. They want to destroy democracy and the whole thing. So you make citizens afraid. You demonize people. And so the very first time I went to death row and visited this man, I expected him to be Black. He was white. Of course, what the big crime was, of course, that he had killed white people, but they brought me in a room. They locked me in a room.
They had him in handcuffs, locked him in this little cubicle, had a heavy mesh screen between us. I’ll look through that little mess screen. And I went, my God, he’s a human being. And I mean, I just saw it. I could see it right away, whatever he had done. And I was going to come to grips with that. He is more than the worst thing he’s ever done in his life. No human being can ever be defined as an essence of an action, ever. And I began from that day forward to learn about him and to learn about human rights. And when I went to write Dead Man Walking, Eddie, you never would’ve heard of Dead Man Walking. That never would’ve been a film if I hadn’t had a great editor. I’d never written a book before. I had this great editor at Random House, Jason Epstein. He just died a month ago.
And the way I structured the story of Dead Man Walking, I was so into the human rights of this person who should be executed. And when Jason read the first draft, he said to me, nobody’s going to read your book. And the reason they ain’t going to read it is you wait far too long before you really face the crime this guy did. So all of the people are going to be reading, they’re going to be suspicious of you. She’s a nun, she believes in Jesus, forgive the poor murder and all that. And if within the first 10 pages, if they don’t see the crime that this man, Patrick Sonye, and his brother, Eddie Sonye, in cold blood shot and killed a teenage couple and left their bodies to rot in a sugar cane field, nobody’s going to read your book.
Because the challenge that you have on your hands is you have to take people into the moral outrage people feel when innocent people are killed and feel that moral outrage with them. And then step by step you got to take them into the situation of that killing chamber, where they get as close as possible to witness a human being being taken from a holding cell and strapped down and having 1,900 volts of electricity pumped through his body. Reading, I found out, can be a powerful thing because people are quiet. They’re not debating, they’re using their imaginations and you can come very close to bringing them into where they will never actually get to be a witness.
Eddie Conway: Okay. You look at institutional racism, you look at poverty, you look at the prison-industrial complex, you look at the lack of choices. And just until recently, healthcare and housing conditions and so on, education. You pointed out all those things. What’s your position on reparations for Black people?
Sister Helen Prejean: Absolutely. Reparation. I’ll give you one little example. A woman in our parish at St. Gabe’s, it’s an African American… Well, it’s a Roman Catholic parish, but it’s mostly composed of African Americans, who until the 1970s in New Orleans could not buy property and have a house. So the parishioners that are in St. Gabriel’s parish are mostly made up of those people. And one of the women in it, Sheraline Branch, good friend. She is one of the descendants of the slaves from Georgetown University, the Jesuit university that made this discovery that they had been slave owners. The Jesuits had been slave owners and helped build the university and all that. Well, they are serious about making reparations. The way they’re doing it is they have begun to meet with the families who are the descendants of those slaves and are offering scholarships and education to their children and great, great grandchildren to get an education.
That’s reparations. That’s not just an apology or we’re so sorry we had slaves, but that’s taking concrete steps to make up. And we have a long way to go in this country to acknowledge it. For a long time in the books here that kids were learning at school, they didn’t acknowledge slavery. And I know for a fact that the Texas textbooks didn’t even say that it was slaves they had. They were free workers who came. So we are doing a huge reckoning in this country right now with all the backlash that’s going with the 1619 Project going on and learning about slavery and our role in it. And its repercussions in the penal system.
I mean, and the more you learn, Eddie, even to get property, to buy a property, to get a house, the law of the land was written in there that Black people couldn’t. The law of the land was in there when Black GIs came home after World War II. They couldn’t get the loans to get a mortgage on a house. They couldn’t get the loan to get the GI bill to go to school. All that is built in and inherited generation after generation. Reparations are the only way to go. And so we got to wake up to that fact and we got to start taking concrete steps for that to happen.
Eddie Conway: Okay, great answer.
Sister Helen Prejean: Great question.
Eddie Conway: Yeah. I’m wondering, you talk about Georgetown. You could talk about Brown University, you could talk about any major corporation pretty much because the wealth was accumulated off of the backs of enslaved people. And even though it’s not the same thing, I would include indentured servitude of people also that wanted a new life and sold seven years of their life to get over here. The wealth was accumulated off of those backs. Is there ever going to be any way of education, beyond education, that we can ever catch up? I mean, the house always wins and we are playing by the house rules, and the house is so far ahead.
I just want to back up a minute and just add this one fact. During the Obama years when the economy around 2008, when the economy was in serious crisis, Black people lost 50% of their wealth that had been accumulated from the end of the civil war up until Obama. 50% of the collective wealth of the Black community disappeared because of Wall Street and the stock market and being forced to, well not being forced to, but thinking that you create a retirement fund, and you put your money in stocks and when you get old you’ll have it. Well, it disappeared. Grandma’s house disappeared. So how can we catch up? I mean, education is not going to get it. We need some kind of help. You got any comment on that?
Sister Helen Prejean: Yeah. When you look at the Bible and you see people up against great odds, the house always wins. There’s this prophetic dimension that causes social change, the prophetic dimension. And I turned to one, one of our best known was Martin Luther King. Who thought when they did that boycott of the Montgomery buses that anything could change? They didn’t know if they could carry off that bus boycott for a weekend. Word spread in the community, people walked to work, carpooled, and it lasted for a year. It was an economic boycott, and it was a step. And it has in it, the same dynamics that need to be present today for social change. And you pointed to something that’s been so disastrous, it’s that how do Black families inherit wealth? Everything’s been stacked for the white community and the estate tax and all of that, of inheriting wealth.
Instead, it’s generation after generation knowing nothing but poverty and the welfare system. And so you start now, I mean, David and Goliath is an understatement next to the Black community, but we do have now social media and wherever you have a committed group of people that are going to work for change and begin to raise their voices, we are seeing change. Look at Black Lives Matter. Now nothing’s perfect. And you’re going to have the squabbles among the leadership and all the human things going to come into it. But once you have consciousness in a group of people and they start raising their voices, and then you start putting pressure on political people to make the changes, change happens. And we are in the midst of that now. In a way we’re going to look at it and be, it’s always going to be their struggle, especially in a capitalist society like ours where even prisons are private. Privatized prisons where people are making money off of people suffering and incarcerating other people.
And you mentioned indentured servants. 13th Amendment when slavery was abolished had two exceptions: slaves, except for [the incarcerated] and except for indentured servants. Slavery is abolished, no, except for incarcerated people and indentured servants. So it’s built into the constitution. So we have such a long history, but all we got to do is when we meet people, I learned this at St. Thomas. Here was that Black tenant association standing up, marched down the street and made the public officials pay attention to their needs, and they got change. And that change happens, as you know, incrementally, and every now and then there was a big thing that happened. Obamacare was a big thing. And it’s going to be the thing, I think, that’s going to keep creating waves of change, because people with preexisting conditions realize we are going to lose that without Obamacare, but look at the struggle to get that.
But we got some hopeful signs going on in the Congress, because we got rid of Trump and we got a decent president. It’s not perfect, but at least we got people standing up now and white people beginning to realize. My main job has been to educate the white people of this country about the death penalty. Most of my audiences, I go to universities, talk to civil groups, it’s to educate the white people. It’s white people that got to understand just how endemic it is in the systems. People have good hearts and I’ve found they’re not entrenched. They just need to wake up.
Eddie Conway: Okay. River Of Fire details your ride into consciousness as I pointed out.
Sister Helen Prejean: And I love it. I should have put that as the subtitle of my book.
Eddie Conway: This is the final question, too. What do you think people can get from your book if they get it and read it?
Sister Helen Prejean: Yeah. It’s just one person coming to consciousness and then making a decision and making a change out of it. See, hope Eddie, hope is an active verb. If you’re not participating in some way in change and you’re standing on the banks of the river and just watching everything happen, especially now through the internet, you get all this news pouring over us and all the bad news in the world. If you’re not active, if you are not pulling on that rope with a group of people to work for change, you feel despair.
And maybe my story can just show people, look what happened when one person woke up. And a key factor of my waking up is I moved into another neighborhood where I could be with people who were different from me and who were suffering. It’s hard to manage all that change from your little bubble where you just read books or look at videos, have a little study group, but you’re always with other white people, none of whom are struggling. You got to be in the struggle some kind of way, which means you got to move. You got to make a move. And that’s what I did and maybe people could learn from that.
Eddie Conway: Okay. All right. Good answer. So Sister Helen, thanks for joining me.
Sister Helen Prejean: Eddie, I love being with you. I wish I had you before I put that subtitle of my book and I’d have riding into consciousness. Man, I like that.
Eddie Conway: Yes.
Sister Helen Prejean: Thank you. My visit with you is quite a ride today. Thank you for doing this interview with me.
Eddie Conway: Okay. And thank you for joining us.
Sister Helen Prejean: All right.
Eddie Conway: All right. And thank you for joining this episode of Rattling The Bars.
Another questionable arrest in a small town is raising more concerns about the state of policing in rural America. A man was repeatedly struck by police in Paducah, Texas, during an encounter that was caught on video and shared with PAR. We examine the arrest and discuss how it demonstrates the unchecked power of law enforcement in rural communities to inflict suffering on the people they’re ostensibly serving and to extract a disproportionate share of public resources.
Pre-Production: Stephen Janis Studio/Post-Production: Stephen Janis, Dwayne Gladden
TRANSCRIPT
Taya Graham: Hello. My name is Taya Graham, and welcome to the Police Accountability Report. As I always make clear, this show has a single purpose: holding the politically powerful institution of policing accountable. And to do so, we don’t just focus on the bad behavior of individual cops. Instead, we examine the system that makes bad policing possible. And today we will achieve that goal by reporting on a questionable arrest in rural America that you are seeing now in this video. It is yet another example of police violence in small communities that continues to surface as we broaden our investigation into over policing in small towns across the country.
But before we get started, I want you to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct, please email it to us privately at par@therealnews.com, and please like, share, and comment on our videos. You know I read your comments and that I appreciate them. And of course you can always reach out to me directly at @tayasbaltimore on Facebook or Twitter. And if you can, please hit the Patreon donate link pin in the comments below, because we do have some extras there for our PAR family. All right. We’ve gotten all that out of the way.
Now, as with any topic we report on, individual stories can sometimes be merely anecdotal, not necessarily an exemplar of a trend. But occasionally when we see similar stories surface over and over again, it behooves us to examine if they are representative of broader systemic problems, and I think the video you’re watching now is an example of the latter. The video you’re seeing right now shows the arrest of Travis Bateman by the Paducah, Texas, sheriff’s department six months ago. Deputies had stopped Travis and his fiance after his ex-wife called 911 when the couple walked past her house with their dog. The officers accused Travis of entering the property of his ex-wife. The pair denied the accusation, and the sheriff promised to return after reviewing video from the home in question. But as one of the deputies was driving away, Travis called out to his dog, prompting the sheriff to stop his car and jump out, and then this ensued. Let’s watch.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Travis Bateman: Mark, hear me.
Mark Box: Hands.
Travis Bateman: My hand is right here. I’m not fucking resisting you.
Mark Box: Hands behind the back.
Travis Bateman: Dude, I’m not –
Dorian Turner: Mark, he wasn’t doing anything wrong.
Mark Box: Hands behind your –
Dorian Turner: God damn. This is fucking ridiculous.
Travis Bateman: We’re recording him.
Mark Box: Hands. Last order.
Travis Bateman: My hands are right here. You can handcuff me in the front.
Dorian Turner: Mark, stop. Leave him alone.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: We spoke to Travis’s fiance Dorian Turner, who described to us what happened when Travis was taken to the ground by the deputies. Let’s watch. And as we do, let’s listen to her explain.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Dorian Turner: Well, we were walking, and his ex-wife called and said that we were in her house. And so they didn’t even go and ask her any questions. They came straight to us and started asking us questions. We just walked by her house, and she called and said that we were in her house.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: And finally, with Travis protesting his arrest and police refusing to relent, this happens. A physical assault. Let’s watch. And before we do, I want to warn viewers that this video is disturbing.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Travis Bateman: …Me in the front.
Dorian Turner: Mark, stop. Leave him alone. Leave him alone. God damn it. Mark, you’re a pussy. Baby, baby, here. Y’all are fucking mean. Y’all are wrong for what you’re doing. He wasn’t doing anything. [Duchess] get over here.
Travis Bateman: Record him [inaudible] going down.
Dorian Turner: God damn. You’re fucking mean, Mark.
Mark Box: One more and I’m going to fuck you up.
Dorian Turner: Baby, stop. Just don’t move.
Mark Box: [inaudible].
Travis Bateman: For what?
Mark Box: Give me your arm.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: And unfortunately, Travis’s ordeal is only just beginning. That is because the Cottle County court ordered him held without bail. Separately, the sheriff’s department has also convinced a judge to declare him incompetent, meaning he has been in jail for six months with no prospects for release. Let’s remember, up until this encounter with the deputies, he had not been formally accused of committing a crime. The only charges that have arisen are specific to the arrest itself, namely resisting arrest and obstruction. So, how does a man who has not been convicted of a crime end up in jail for six months, bloodied and bruised by police, while authorities stonewall? Well, that’s just the question we will try to answer today. And for more on that, I’m joined by my reporting partner Stephen Janis, who has been investigating the case. Steven, thank you for joining me
Stephen Janis: Taya, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Taya Graham: So, first, you reached out to the sheriff’s office. What did they tell you?
Stephen Janis: Well, this is what’s really interesting. I called the sheriff’s office like two or three times. No one answers the phone. I mean, I don’t really know what to say. There was no one answering the phone there, no one answering the phone at the prosecutor’s office. They didn’t even have an answering machine. So, it’s been a very weird thing. I would encourage anybody to call them. If they can get in touch, let me know.
Taya Graham: We know from our investigation so far, no paperwork has been given to his family regarding his arrest. What have you learned about that lack of transparency?
Stephen Janis: Well, what the problem is is that I think looking at some of the budget and the way this particular town operates, is that everything’s kind of part-time. So, what’s really scary about that is someone can just be put in the system, and it’s very hard to figure out where they are and why they’re there and how long they’re going to be there, because nobody is actually manning the phone. So, it’s a very scary system that I think you can almost disappear a person into.
Taya Graham: And finally, what can you tell us about this rural community and the sheriff’s department? What have you discovered about the political economy of policing there?
Stephen Janis: Taya, you have a $1.1 million budget, but a lot of those revenues go to law enforcement and it’s not really clear why. but as you can see, that law enforcement has a tremendous amount of power. I think what’s scary about this is because you don’t have sort of the other institutions that are as well funded, there’s so much power concentrating in the sheriff that I think the sheriff feels like he can make arrests like this and doesn’t really have anyone to be held accountable to. I think it shows the great risks of powerful law enforcement in rural communities that are poor, because law enforcement sucks up a lot of the money, and therefore there are no institutions to hold them accountable like media. And it’s really ultimately very scary.
Taya Graham: And now we’re joined by Travis’s fiance, Dorian Turner, to give us an update on the case and how this arrest has affected both her and Travis. Dorian, thank you for joining us.
Dorian Turner: Thank you.
Taya Graham: So, can you tell me why the officer approached you and your fiance?
Dorian Turner: Well, we were walking, and his ex-wife called and said that we were in her house. And so they didn’t even go and ask her any questions, they came straight to us and started asking us questions. We just walked by her house and she called and said that we were in her house.
Taya Graham: But wasn’t there evidence that you did not go into the house?
Dorian Turner: Yeah, she has cameras on the outside of her house. So, they could have gone over there and investigated it before they came and talked to us.
Taya Graham: Why did you walk by the house?
Dorian Turner: Well, we were just taking the dog for a walk and we went a block up, and then just all the way down the street, and then back around to our house. And her house is on the next block over.
Taya Graham: What did the officer first say when he encountered you?
Dorian Turner: Well, he’s like, Dorian, can I talk to you? And I was like, for what? Did I do something wrong? And he was like, well, did you? And I was like, walking the dog. Is there something with walking the dog? And he’s like, no, did you go into somebody’s house? I was like, no? And then here comes the sheriff and he pulls up and he’s like, you know people have video cameras on outside of their house? And I’m like, yeah, and they’re allowed to. I said, can you go check and see? Because we didn’t go in her house. We walked right by her house.
Taya Graham: How did the officer respond to your request to review the homeowner’s footage?
Dorian Turner: He’s like, well, if I go over there and find out differently, I will come back for an arrest warrant for you, Travis.
Taya Graham: How did things turn so badly? How did things escalate so suddenly?
Dorian Turner: Well, I was like, are we free to go? Can we go now? And he’s like, yeah, you’re free to go. So, they both get in their vehicles and start driving off. And we have our dog with us, and it’s a big old lab. We don’t have her on a leash, she just walks right next to us most of the time. And we started walking off and T started yelling at the dog, and I guess Mark Box thought he was talking to him. And he slams his vehicle and parks and jumps out, was asking T for his driver’s license, knowing that we don’t have it on us because we’ve been walking.
Taya Graham: Why was your fiance in cuffs? Did the officer ever say what the probable cause was or why he was being arrested? Did the officer ever explain why he was arresting him?
Dorian Turner: No. He just kept on asking him for his driver’s license, and I’m like, Mark Box, you know we don’t have our stuff on us. We’ve been walking. We can go down to the house and get it if you need it. And he tried to grab T, and T just went like this, and he missed him. And that’s when Mark Box jumps on him and I wasn’t even thinking. T’s like, get your phone out and record this, Dorian. And I’m like, okay. So, I get it out. And by that time I’m yelling at the officer, and he’s already done elbowed him in the head. He’s got a big old gash on top of his head. I got the pictures of him when he was in jail with that on his head. He’s got scrapes on his arms and stuff like that. Knowing that T’s wrists are messed up, he could’ve arrested him and put his handcuffs in the front, but he won’t. So, that’s why T was like, put them on in the front and I’ll let you do it. And he wouldn’t do it.
Taya Graham: I noticed the familiarity with the officer didn’t seem to help. He said that he knew that Travis had mental health issues and that he had a medical issue with his wrist. Why didn’t this familiarity help you? I mean, this is a small town, so why did it make things worse?
Dorian Turner: We live in a little small town and everybody knows everybody. He knows T has not had his medicine and stuff, because we haven’t been able to get the [inaudible] to go get his medicine. And he knows how T is because he’s the one that arrests him. He’s been arrested nine times before that.
Taya Graham: Why did the officers start hitting your fiance? At a certain point you can see the blood pouring out of the back of his head. He didn’t appear to be fighting or attempting to run away. So, why did the officer strike him so many times?
Dorian Turner: He came and served T with some papers one time and he took his belt off, his gun off, his badge off and pulled T to come out to the street and we could fight out there a couple months before this happened.
Taya Graham: So, tell me about the sheriff’s department. Have there been other complaints about them? What is their reputation in the community?
Dorian Turner: Well, my mom’s friend, Carolyn, she has a daughter that’s mentally ill too. And he’s done almost the same thing with her. I asked her to send me pictures yesterday of the incident, and she has had cancer and she has a port right here in her chest area. And he already had her in handcuffs, and he put his knee in her shoulder right here right on top of the port on concrete. She’s got scrapes on her arm right here. Yes. He’s done it to several people here in town. Well, one guy, he can’t talk about it. I don’t know if he got compensated with anything or had to sign a paper or something. But yeah, he’s done it to several people.
Taya Graham: Has the media done any reporting on this police department?
Dorian Turner: He wanted me to send it to the news and I was kind of scared to, because I don’t know if they’ll come and, you know what I mean, try to say something to me about it or anything like that. I don’t know. But I was like, I got to do something because we haven’t heard anything. Nothing. His lawyer doesn’t want to help us. His lawyer hasn’t even called him since he’s been in there and it’s been six months. I had to call his lawyer the other day to see what was going on with this case. Because I mean, there’s no bond set. He’s sitting there just wondering, and nothing’s happening.
Taya Graham: I know you told me he had nine arrests before this, but what is his life like now?
Dorian Turner: ‘Till I either go talk to the judge and he’ll finally go and set a bond for him or something, but I’ve been having to work to go and try to get something done about it. We’ve been together a year and a half, and in the last six months of it he’s been in jail. And before that it was the nine arrests, and it’s been going on for the last year. So, ever since he got divorced from his ex-wife. See, I’ve never been in a relationship like this, and this is something out of this world. This is insane. Insane.
Taya Graham: What was your fiance actually charged with?
Dorian Turner: It was resisting arrest, terroristic threat, and assault on a police officer.
Taya Graham: You mentioned something here I almost didn’t see, which was that the officer took photographs of your fiance’s blood on his clothes and photos of his injuries. Do you know why he did that?
Dorian Turner: In the video you can see where Mark Box has blood on his pants from T, and he kind of did it on purpose. If you really pay attention, you can see where Mark Box kind of rubs his head to get it on his pants. And the officer walks over to his vehicle in the background and you can see him taking a picture and smiling where he has T’s blood on him. And in the emergency room he does the same thing. He takes the phone and holds it up like this, where he’s right here and T’s in the background, and taking a picture with T in handcuffs. Because he calls me as soon as he gets into the jailhouse, because you get that one phone call and that’s the first thing he tells me.
He’s like Dorian, he was taking another picture. This is the second time he’s done that. He came in and arrested him out here one time and there was no reason for him to take him to jail. And he had one handcuff on one wrist, and he was taking his arm and putting it all the way behind his back, pulling it up to his head and kicking his feet out from under him. Hey, three or four times he did that. He didn’t have his body cam on either. And I was like, why are you doing that? There’s no need for that. T’s wrists were so swollen when he got to the emergency. They had to take him to the emergency room that day, and that’s when he was taking that picture like that. Yeah.
Taya Graham: So, you said your fiance has been in jail for six months now without bail. Do you know why he is being held without possibility of bail? And do you know how much longer he may be locked up?
Dorian Turner: Well, all the lawyer tells me is because he’s incompetent. He’s not incompetent. He’s not at all. He’s taking his medicine. He can tell you everything. He just doesn’t understand why he is there.
Taya Graham: Now, as I said at the top of the show, there’s a difference between a few anecdotal stories,and an actual trend that points to a broader, more troubling reality. And that’s the question we of course have to answer as journalists. Is there more to these stories of bad arrests than meets the eye? Well, according to a presentation we just attended, absolutely yes. So, what do I mean? Well, the talk we attended was on a topic we have referenced many times on this show. It dealt with a surprising statistical analysis that controverts the current notion of mass incarceration in America. What we learned is that when it comes to larger state prisons, the trend is decidedly downward, meaning states and big cities are not building prisons and are decreasing inmate populations as a whole. But that doesn’t mean America’s addiction to mass incarceration is taking a breather, not even close. That’s because the construction of local jails is exploding.
If you look at this chart, local facilities are being constructed and expanded in rural communities around the country. And as the statistics show, when they build it, police fill it, often with nonviolent offenders and people addicted to drugs, the favorite fodder of our well-oiled drug war machine. And what’s really disturbing about this emphasis on local jails is how the data shows the primary goal is cash. That’s because jails often house people at the behest of the state. Inmates who have broken state laws and less need to be housed in a way that makes it look like mass incarceration is decreasing. And when local jails take on excess prisoners the cash rolls in, the inmates disappear from the state populations, and the local jails keep expanding. What’s really distressing about this trend is that much of the construction takes place in communities where other industries and drivers of economic growth have disappeared.
Take for example Eastern Kentucky, where the coal business has stalled, but jail building has boomed. I think the point here is that when we see an inexplicable arrest like Travis’s, we have to probe deeper to understand the imperative that is driving these arrests. When cops literally fabricate crimes to put people in handcuffs, we need to look at the systematic trends that incentivize the behaviors that would otherwise seem impossible to explain. What I mean is that we can’t just show a shocking arrest without talking about the broader and less visible power that rewards bad policing and punishes the people subject to its extremes. That’s why we will continue our investigation of rural and small town policing. And that’s why we’ll also hold the departments accountable who deserve the system instead of serving the people who deserve better. I want to thank Travis’s fiance, Dorian, for speaking out on his behalf. Thank you, Dorian. And of course I have to thank Intrepid reporter Stephen Janis for his writing, research, and editing on this piece. Thank you, Stephen.
Stephen Janis: Taya, thanks from me. I appreciate it.
Taya Graham: And I want to thank friend of the show Noli Dee for her support. Thanks, Nole Dee. And a shout out to our awesome mod Lacy R. Thanks, Lacy. And a very special thank you to our Patreons. We really do appreciate you. And I want you watching to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct or brutality, please share it with us and we might be able to investigate for you. Please reach out to us. You can email us tips privately at par@therealnews.com and share your evidence of police misconduct. You can also message us at Police Accountability Report on Facebook or Instagram, or @eyesonpolice on Twitter. And of course you can always message me directly @tayasbaltimore on Twitter or Facebook. And please like and comment. I do read your comments and appreciate them. And we do have a Patreon link pinned in the comments below. So, if you do feel inspired to donate, please do. We don’t run ads or take corporate dollars, so anything you can spare is greatly appreciated. My name is Taya Graham and I am your host of the Police Accountability Report. Please be safe out there.
In January of this year, on the 20th anniversary of the opening of the notorious military prison at Guantánamo Bay on the eastern tip of Cuba, the United Nations’ top human rights office issued an excoriating report on “Gitmo” and its continued operations. “Guantánamo Bay is a site of unparalleled notoriety, defined by the systematic use of torture, and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment against hundreds of men brought to the site and deprived of their most fundamental rights,” the report stated. However, “Despite forceful, repeated and unequivocal condemnation of the operation of this horrific detention and prison complex with its associated trial processes, the United States continues to detain persons many of whom have never been charged with any crime.” TRNN correspondent David Kattenburg speaks about the continued horrors of Guantánamo Bay and the international fight to shut it down with Fionnuala Ni Aolain and Alka Pradhan.
Fionnuala Ni Aolain is the lead author of the recent UN report on Guantánamo Bay. She is the UN Special Rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, University Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota, and faculty director of the Human Rights Center at the University of Minnesota School of Law. Alka Pradhan is Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania. She is an expert on the application of human rights and humanitarian law in counterterrorism situations, and on the impact of torture on fair trials. Pradhan is currently Human Rights Counsel at Guantanamo Bay Military Commissions and has represented over a dozen of its detainees. She currently represents one of the defendants in the capital case United States v. Khalid Sheikh Mohammad.
Pre-Production: David Kattenburg Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Transcript
David Kattenburg: Hello, and welcome to The Real News Network. I’m David Kattenburg. Guantanamo Bay, two words synonymous with cruelty and injustice. This past Jan. 10, on the 20th anniversary of the opening of that notorious military prison on the Eastern tip of Cuba, the United Nations top human rights office issued a report describing Gitmo in graphic terms, “A site of unparalleled notoriety.” The report’s 14 experts wrote, and these continue on with quotations, “Defined by systematic torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment against hundreds of men deprived of their most fundamental rights. A horrific detention and prison complex. A stain on the US Government’s commitment to the rule of law.” Quotes continue, “An ugly chapter of unrelenting human rights violations, state sponsored torture, and impunity” end of quote. And I add, with no end in sight. The Americans call the place Camp Justice.
Today, two guests join me to talk about the Guantanamo Bay facility and its unfortunate inmates. Fionnuala Ní Aoláin is lead author of the United Nations report. She is the special UN rapporteur on the promotion and for protection of human rights while countering terrorism. Ní Aoláin is a university regents professor at the University of Minnesota and faculty director of the Human Rights Center at U Minnesota Law School. Ní Aoláin is also a professor of law at Queens University of Belfast. She joins us today from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Alka Pradhan is adjunct professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania. She’s an expert on the application of human rights and humanitarian law in counterterrorism situations, and on the impact of torture and unfair trials. Pradhan is currently the human rights council at Guantanamo Bay and has represented over a dozen of its detainees. She currently represents one of the defendants in the capital case United States v. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The so-called 9/11 case.
Warning to listeners, some of the stuff we’re going to talk about today is disturbing. So, warning. Fionnuala, can you give us a rundown on the history of the facility and its detainees? I mean it began in 2002, the first detainees arrived in 2002 shortly after 9/11. Since then, in 2006, more folks arrived from America’s black sites. There have been something like a total of 800 detainees there charged over these years. I’m wondering, have any of them actually been charged with a specific crime, been tried or convicted over the past 20 years? And where do things stand at the moment?
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin: Well, I think there’s a lot of questions in there. To start, to say, at least the first official notice we have of a person being transferred to Guantanamo is in 2002 officially. What we know is that the United States chose this site specifically because they thought it would be outside the ambit of the law. That it would be a place where law would not reach. Where the reach of the courts would not touch and therefore safe to continue to engage in the kinds of practices that had predated men’s experiences before they arrived in Guantanamo. We know that hundreds of individuals were brought there. They were rendered through various cooperating third states. Some of them democratic, some not democratic. The 2010 report, issued by my mandate and three other UN special procedure mandates, detailed at least to that extent what we knew at that time, which was the scale of collaboration and support that the United States received in order to engage in these wholesale practices of rendition and transfer.
More information has continued to come into the public domain in the past 20 years, including from court cases in the European court of human rights, in investigations by the European parliament, and some information that’s come out through the highly redacted forward to the Senate investigation and Senate’s intelligence committee’s investigation into the events of that time. But we really have never had a full accounting of everything that has happened in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. We do not know exactly what happened there. And that makes the release, in particular of the Senate’s intelligence committee report, all the more compelling. Of the hundreds of men who were transferred there, only a handful – And Alka will keep me right on the numbers – I believe 12 have ever been charged with a crime. But many of us, UN experts, have deep concerns about the process which led to that charging. Namely that anyone who was charged with a crime had been the subject of torture, and any of the information upon which such charges are based is a torture-induced basis.
The whole process by which those people were charged with crime is fundamentally flawed. In the meantime – And again, Alka will speak to this – Guantanamo, although there’s been a number of efforts to ensure that people are transferred out of Guantanamo, I think two points can be made about that. Not a single person who was rendered into Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who experienced torture, arbitrary deprivation, the loss of the most fundamental rights a person can have, has ever been adequately compensated for what happened to them. No one, not a single person of all those hundreds
David Kattenburg: Many of them were brutally tortured at these black sites.
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin: Indeed. I mean, we have evidence, we know that people were subject to persistent, pervasive acts of systemic brutality, including waterboarding on multiple occasions
David Kattenburg: Sexual assault, sexual humiliation at the hands of women guards and police, and sexual assault, and hanging from ceilings. It’s a horror show.
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin: Well, it’s a catalog of serious sustained brutality. More importantly from a legal perspective, what is deeply concerning is that these methods were authorized. These weren’t things happening by virtue of rogue individuals. This was a systemic process of the use of certain methods which were authorized by law. Fundamentally, despite the fact that we’ve had a repudiation of torture methods by the United States, those individuals who experienced that torture have never had a remedy for it. Not only do we have a small cohort of individuals remaining in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but we have hundreds of men living overseas returned either to countries of origin or third countries who’ve had their lives entirely shattered and no remedy, compensation, acknowledgement, criminal process, apology, or even the means for many of them to reconstruct their lives in an adequate way has ever been put in place.
David Kattenburg: How many of them actually are there right now? I read that there are like 39 of them there. Of these only, I don’t know, a half a dozen have been actually charged with anything. 13 have been cleared for release, but who knows when they’re going to be released? What’s the current status, the numbers we’re looking at?
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin: Well, we have an official tally of 39. An additional individual has recently been cleared for return to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Of that number, as you say, a sizable portion have been cleared for return. The challenge is that we have a concept in international law called non-refoulement. You cannot return a person to a place where they are likely to be the subject of torture. Many of these individuals, particularly Yemenis, who have been cleared, do not have a safe third country to go to. We should also just make clear, while there’s plenty of blame to go around here, the United States has certainly its fair share of blame, but no third countries, including the countries who were responsible for the cooperation in the rendition and torture process, are stepping up to take these men. If they cannot be returned safely to their home countries, a third country has to step up and the conditions have to be made possible for them to be safely taken out of Guantanamo. There’s both responsibility for the United States, but there’s a broader global responsibility for the failure to address the rights of these individuals.
David Kattenburg: Alka Pradhan, you are an attorney, a human rights lawyer. You’ve represented over the course of the past years, I think, something like 10 Guantanamo detainees, you’re currently representing one of them. Before these military commissions, it’s plural, is there one military commission or are there various military commissions? What are these military commissions? You’ve said that practicing law at Guantanamo is something of an oxymoron. Tell us quickly about these military commissions and how they work.
Alka Pradhan: Sure. Well, what happened is, and Fionnuala, I think encapsulated the problem very well. You yourself had mentioned, David, that a number of so-called high value detainees were brought from the black sites to Guantanamo in 2006. When they were brought to Guantanamo, there was a decision made that something had to be done with them. Their disappearance for several years at a time had to be justified. At that point, we already had this concept of military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, which really are… The concept of military tribunals is not new, right? In war time, you’re allowed to try combatants before military tribunals and the jurors are members of the military. You try them under the laws of war. The difference with this is that this is not a traditional war.
It involves non-state actors like Al-Qaeda. And so this is really the first time that you have people who, certainly the defense would argue, but I think even the ICRC have argued should be civilians being tried on terror charges, being tried in regular courts, instead being tried in these sort of brand new military commissions – They’re called military commissions – At Guantanamo Bay for which a courtroom was built at Guantanamo. Really, the purpose of trying them in a military commission at Guantanamo Bay is so that they could write an entire new set of rules for these particular trials at Guantanamo. There are different standards of evidence than you would find in a normal courtroom in the United States. There are completely different conditions of confinement at Guantanamo than there are in prisons in the United States. That’s not to defend prison conditions in the United States, which are horrific. It’s a completely different system made of whole cloth just specifically to prosecute Muslim men brought to Guantanamo Bay, which is illegal.
David Kattenburg: The US Supreme Court rendered a ruling in June of 2006. The quote from that US Supreme Court ruling was that the commissions “Lack judicial guarantees recognized as indispensable by civilized people.”
Alka Pradhan: Yeah, that’s right. So that was in the Hamdan decision in 2006. What happened was after that, the Bush administration scrapped the first set of military commissions and then the detainees just sat there for a few years. There wasn’t really anything being done. Then, the Obama administration, after the failure to bring them to the United States for prosecution, reconstituted the military commissions again under a new statute, and that was in 2009. The new statute really didn’t have all that many improvements, in my opinion, from the old statute. For example, there’s still a provision in that statute, that we’re now laboring under, that allows the use of evidence that we consider to be torture acquired, that was taken from the men shortly after they were tortured at the black sites when they didn’t have legal representation and were being held in the same conditions of confinement that they were held in at the black sites. Things like that, that’s why I say that it’s sort of kafkaesque or an oxymoron to say we’re practicing law at Guantanamo. Because the entire place, and certainly the military commissions themselves, were built to be outside of our recognized system of law.
David Kattenburg: I’d like to get back to these arcane theories of, well, the exclusionary principle and a law that you can’t use evidence that was procured through the use of torture. It’s tainted evidence. But then this counter theory – Well, it’s a theory, the exclusionary theory – Or no, the attenuation theory. Let’s get back to that in a moment. But Alka, can you tell me about Ammar? Ammar al-Baluchi, the gentleman who you are now representing, the one person you’re now representing. Who is he and what’s his story? I mean, it’s a huge story, one could go on. Could you describe him and his story kind of concisely?
Alka Pradhan: Of course. Ammar al-Baluchi, he’s a Pakistani citizen. He lived most of his life in Kuwait and then in the United Arab Emirates, he is turning 45 this year. Goodness. Yeah, he’s turning 45 in August. He’s just a few years older than me. He was arrested in 2003 in Pakistan and very shortly thereafter transferred to CIA custody. In CIA custody he was, we were talking about earlier, just brutally tortured, and actually his specific torture and the techniques used on him were depicted in the film Zero Dark 30. The first 20 minutes or so of that film show a detainee being abused, tortured with water, hung by his wrists in a site code named Cobalt. That is Ammar. They call him Ammar in the film, what happened to the detainee in that film is what happened to Ammar.
David Kattenburg: He was used as a “training prop.”
Alka Pradhan: That’s correct.
David Kattenburg: Talk about that.
Alka Pradhan: And that is so interesting because we had one of the architects, or what we would call the architects at the torture program, Dr. Mitchell, on the witness stand a couple of years ago. We asked him about what happened to Ammar. He didn’t personally torture Ammar, but we told him what happened to him. He said, the people who did these things to Ammar – Even though Dr. Mitchell himself sanctioned the techniques as a whole, he said, the way they were applied to Ammar was as if they were experimenting on him. As if he was being used as a training prop for interrogator certification so that these new interrogators could literally be certified as people authorized to do these techniques. They were practicing on him, which is how he ended up with a traumatic brain injury from having his head bashed into a wall dozens of times at this site.
He was detained by the CIA in multiple sites for three and a half years during which he was sleep deprived. He was sleep deprived for nearly three of those three and a half years. He had 24 hour fluorescent lights on him. Such that he now cannot sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time. He’s been at Guantanamo since September 2006, so more than 15 years now. What we’ve seen in the past two years is a really alarming decline in his cognitive abilities. I’ve been working with him for about six and a half years. When I started working with him we could converse for hours at a time. I could show him motions, sometimes really lengthy motions we were about to file. We could talk about advocacy strategies. Now, it’s really difficult for him to write letters that are more than a couple of lines at a time.
It’s difficult for him to read long documents. He has to wear dark glasses often because of that fluorescent light that – He’s in a prison setting and in the courtroom, it’s fluorescent light. So he has to wear dark glasses most of the time. It’s horrific to watch someone deteriorate in front of you in real time. It speaks to not just the torture that happened to him years ago, but the ongoing conditions of confinement at Guantanamo and the withholding of what Fionnuala pointed out, not just reparations, but any kind of medical care for the torture that he suffered.
David Kattenburg: I was reading in one of the articles that you wrote about, and this is brings us to this idea, this theory of attenuation, that if you wait a certain number of years after people have been tortured, they kind of recover. Then you can start to ask the same questions you did in the beginning, and they’re okay, that’s admissible, but there was something. Let’s talk about that in a second. But this idea of neurotoxicity, that torture actually inflicts long-term, if not permanent damage that amounts to actual… I don’t want to say destruction, but toxic effects, long-term permanent effects on the nervous system. I’m not sure how much you can talk about that. Let’s talk about these ideas of the exclusionary principle. What is the exclusionary principle Fionnuala? This counterposed theory that people are cooking up about attenuation. Can you talk about these two?
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin: Sure, and maybe just to add on the comment around the idea that torture victims are somehow, that they rehabilitate in a short period of time. Which is really a convenient excuse. It’s like a charter for torturers to continue to do their work. I think there’s zero, the evidence – We have a lot of knowledge about torture because we’ve been tracking torture in the international human rights community for decades. We have organizations like the Center for Victims of Torture and rehabilitative centers for torture victim survivors in parts of the world where, actually, we understand as both a physiological, as a neurological matter. Torture victim survivors struggle for the rest of their lives with the harm that has been done to them. We know this from Holocaust survivors who were tortured and who survived. The long-term impacts on them, but also on their family members, which is a form of secondary trauma survival and sometimes meets the threshold for torture, inhuman, and degrading treatment in its own right in terms of being generationally subject to the harm, the extreme harm experienced by individuals. There’s little or no, I think, scientific legs in the theory that individuals can somehow be put back into the saddle of torture and that that’s okay. And that, in fact, being subject to the same kinds of patterns of behavior over the long run is sort of negligible harm for them. One of –
David Kattenburg: This is actually a theory that’s being put forward, isn’t it? It’s been put before courts and there’s, I gather, case law regarding attenuation theory that people get over their torture.
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin: I defer to Alka on the litigation, so maybe she’ll want to say something about that. But I can tell you from an international human rights perspective, in terms of the treaty law we have and the kind of jurisprudence of international courts, these theories are not accepted. I’ll pass over to Alka on what domestic courts are saying about it.
Alka Pradhan: Absolutely. I have to say, I’ve been working on this case at Guantanamo for a few years, and I’m actually also working on a case of the international criminal court with similar issues. The problem is that the courts are split on this theory of attenuation, right? Scientifically, as Fionnuala mentioned, the science doesn’t support the theory of attenuation. The theory is basically, years down the line, given a enough time, change in circumstances, medical care, change in interrogators, you can get a person to a point where their statements will be reliable and not the product of their torture.
David Kattenburg: They’re trying to use this at Guantanamo.
Alka Pradhan: Exactly. And so the science doesn’t support this anyway, but there is a body of case law, both domestically and in certain regional courts, where they’re sort of analyzing criteria as in, how long has it been? Was there a real change in interrogators such that the detainees would understand that they were no longer in the same danger from the same group of people? Really super subjective criteria. At Guantanamo, the way this is applied is they’re brought from the black sites in CIA custody to Guantanamo Bay, they’re told they’re now in military custody, although they’re being held at a camp that was purpose-built for these CIA detainees. Still, as we know from the Senate report, still under operational CIA control. Then, they’re left alone for a few months by and large. And a few months later FBI interrogators come in, introduce themselves as FBI, give them McDonald’s hamburgers and french fries and desserts, and say, eat as much as you want and now we’re going to ask you a few questions. They ask them the same questions they were asked at the black sites –
David Kattenburg: They have access to those questions that got asked that’s black sites –
Alka Pradhan: Not only do they have access to them, they wrote those questions. Those exact interrogators, the FBI agents, wrote the questions that were sent to these men to be asked of them while they were tortured at the black sites. So they know the answers that they gave under torture at the black sites and they know how to ask the questions again. To us, it’s one long interrogation. There’s no attenuation whatsoever. The government’s argument though, is that it’s a totally different location. They’re told they’re in different custody. They’re not being tortured. They’re very comfortable, they’re smiling. All of this is voluntary, right? We’re really having to combat this. I’ll tell you, the government has a decent amount of domestic case law on their side in this. It’s not just domestic case law.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights is one of the regional courts that actually says, attenuation is not possible. Don’t try it. We don’t buy it. The European Court of Human Rights has actually carved out this standard to kind of judge, okay, well, when is attenuation enough? How can you determine when that change has taken place? The International Criminal Court at the moment, in my other case, is turning out a whole bunch of new decisions that adopt that attenuation standard. That say, look, even if the prosecutors interview these detainees while they’re in torturous custody, as long, the interviewers are not torturing them, that’s acceptable. You know –
David Kattenburg: The bottom line in all this is, of course, that they’ve got the 39 detainees still at Guantanamo and they really want to try them. I guess top of the list is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, number one. They can’t put them on trial in anything other than the most absurd kangaroo court situation in a gulag because the evidence has been acquired under torture and it’s completely inadmissible.
Alka Pradhan: That’s the dirty secret, right? That the United States can’t admit to the population. It’s incredibly embarrassing that you cannot really try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind, or anybody we think was associated with 9/11, because the whole case has been tainted.
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin: It’s also the case that one presumes that a trial is wanted. I think that really one has to ask, interrogate quite consistently, the presumption. Because states that want to move quickly to trial release evidence. If you’re a defense lawyer – And I think Alka can speak to this – The challenges that defense lawyers have had to have documents released, the slow walking of evidence, the slow way in which the proceedings have played out. I think it’s important to stress this isn’t a lawless court. It’s not a gulag. Law is extremely important to this process because law provides the cover by which, in fact, serious human rights violations take place. In fact, there are many, many, many places where the most extreme violations occur under cover of law. This is what makes Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, particularly challenging as a site of… Because it shows what can be done under cover of law.
David Kattenburg: Do you think that it’s in a certain real sense that, under cover of law, this supposed Camp Justice is a little bit of a legal fraud? It’s this huge legal fraud. Maybe that’s not the way you’d put it, but it’s really a miscarriage of justice.
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin: I think it’s certainly a miscarriage of justice, but I think we shouldn’t underestimate how law is used. One of the long-term legacies of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is not even so much what’s happening in Guantanamo, but in other sites where indefinite detention is taking place under the framework of law. For example, the mandate I hold has done quite a bit of work on Xinjiang, China. We are very closely watching the ways in which legal process can justify the arbitrary detention of hundreds and thousands of people. The reason, again, is that law is put into the service of the state in a way that actually undermines the rule of law. It’s one of the extraordinary challenges of our time. That the moment, the post World War II moment in which, in some sense, the triumph of the rule of law through the UN charter, through human rights treaties, is in fact being done away by a thousand cuts when law itself comes into the service of undoing the fundamental human rights of individuals. I think in that sense, the impact of Guantanamo is not only felt by the hundreds of individuals who came through it, but also for the broader impact on the rule of law across the world.
David Kattenburg:Well, this brings me to my possible penultimate question. That, given the huge gravity of the situation and situations we face here in 2022, that all involve profound human rights issues and the violation of fundamental norms of international humanitarian and human rights law. I mean, think about Uyghurs, and you think about the horrible situation that Syrians are facing at the hands of the regime there. You think about allegations of apartheid in Israel. You think about the situation that First Nations people face in Canada that’s been described by the government itself, genocide happened in the past. And the situation facing people of color in the United States. I mean, international law, human rights are huge, huge. My question to you is, Fionnuala and Alka, what impact, what damage do you think this whole Guantanamo experience over the last 20 years is having on the integrity of international law? On the integrity of human rights law and international law, kind of at large? What’s at stake when you look at Guantanamo?
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin: I mean, what’s at stake is the rule of law, which is a quite big thing. Also, I think on the one hand, I think we would all recognize some of the challenges that have existed for the US executive to address the situation in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. That includes a Congress which is unwilling to accept transfer of individuals and that has put obstacles in place to prevent resolution. At the same time, my mandate continues to hold the view that the United States executive is under an absolute obligation to take every single measure open to it, which includes releasing individuals unilaterally, that they are unable to convict or charge expediently with the crimes that they’ve been charged with. That is both politically unpalatable, but morally necessary when you have subjected people to the scale of harm that has been meted out to these individuals. The broader challenge we see is when the leading democracy engages in these practices, and neither holds anyone accountable.
Not a single person has been charged with any crime as a result of the scale of torture that took place. No one who performed torture, acquiesced in torture, enabled torture, or authorized torture has been held accountable. The signal that that sends to states across the globe is that impunity rules. That you can engage in mass torture practices with no consequence. The second thing that we’ve seen is the failure to ensure reparations or remedy to the individuals who experienced torture, who were sent back to their countries of origin or third countries, many of whom exist with serious financial, many of them live in penury. Many of them have, as Alka has described, longstanding health and psychosocial challenges because of the torture they received. None of them have received adequate remedy. Thirdly, we have not put in place, in my view, adequate systems to prevent the recurrence of transporter rendition as took place in 2000.
Again, my mandate closely follows events in other parts of the world. We’ve been tracking the evolution of extraordinary rendition to what is now lawful transfer, where states make deals with one another to lawfully transfer one person to another jurisdiction based on allegations of terrorism. In many cases, which are used to transfer dissidents, to transfer human rights actors, to transfer people who simply disagree with their governments. The sum of that is to say the failure to address Guantanamo in all of its dimensions has had serious, profound repercussions for the rule of law around the world.
David Kattenburg:Alka Pradhan, I’d like to finish with you. You’re engaged in this process that you’ve described as reconstructing personhoods. When you deal with folks that you’ve been representing, detainees, and thinking about Ammar al-Baluchi, you aim to try to reconstruct personhoods in the course of your counseling work. Can you talk briefly about that?
Alka Pradhan: Sure. I mean, the way I see Guantanamo and certainly what happened at the black sites, but Guantanamo writ large, it’s just a big experiment in dehumanization of people. I tend to draw a straight line between, for example, the fact that the American public has gotten very, very comfortable withholding specifically a group of Muslim men in this kind of offshore prison for so long. A straight line between that and the fact that we eventually got comfortable with holding women and children and families on the border. People of color again. Everybody was up in arms for the first few weeks, months, and then it petered off. It’s still happening. I think that eventually the government’s campaign of dehumanization is so profoundly successful in the worst ways, that in order to be able to represent these men you really do have to reconstruct who they are as people. Because they themselves don’t always see themselves as people anymore.
They’re sort of going through the motions. It can take a long time and it can be very difficult through no fault of their own. You really do have to strip away what’s happened to them and what the government is saying about them and what perceptions are of them and get back to who they are fundamentally, which is separate from what they have or have not done. No one is only one thing. No one is only one action in their lives. You have to reconstruct them as a whole human being in order to represent their interests.
David Kattenburg: Fionnuala Ní Aoláin is a lead author of the January United Nations report on Guantanamo Bay. She’s the special United Nations rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights while countering terrorism. Alka Pradhan is adjunct professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania and Human Rights Council at the Guantanamo Bay military commissions, representing Ammar Al-Baluchi, one of the defendants in this case entitled United States v. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 case. Alka and Fionnuala, thank you so much for joining me.
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin: Thank you.
Alka Pradhan: Thank you very much.
David Kattenburg: Before you go, please don’t forget to subscribe to The Real News YouTube channel and head on over to the realnews.com/support to become a monthly Real News sustainer. Your contributions help us keep bringing you important coverage and conversations like this one. Thank you so much for joining us. Take care. Bye bye.
Charles Hopkins, better known as Mansa Musa, is a 70-year-old social activist who was released from prison on Dec. 5, 2019, after being locked up for 48 years, nine months, 5 days, 16 hours, and 10 minutes. Now a free man and cohost of TRNN’s original show Rattling the Bars, Mansa Musa speaks with Executive Producer Eddie Conway about how the two met while they were both incarcerated, joining the Black Panthers, and about Mansa’s life before, during, and after prison.
A new transparency law meant to make police disciplinary records quickly available to the public is coming under scrutiny as departments have stonewalled requests for information and charged exorbitant fees. PAR decided to test the law by filing a request for body camera footage from one of Baltimore’s most notorious cops accused of making multiple illegal arrests. On this week’s episode, we give audience a look at what we found.
Transcript
The transcript of this video will be made available as soon as possible.
Like many former lawyers, I remember representing a client whose case embodied such a gross miscarriage of justice that I now use it as an example to explain the unfairness of the law to others. My client, whom I’ll call Bobby, was an elderly man with a recent traumatic brain injury that had left him disabled and unable to find stable housing. I was working with him to secure a place in assisted housing and was in contact with him on an almost daily basis. At some point, though, for about a week, he vanished—no notice, no clue regarding his whereabouts. He just disappeared.
When Bobby finally arrived back in my office, he told me that he had been arrested. He had been robbed, and during the robbery his prescription heart medication was taken. The robbers, presumably after discovering it was not a drug with street value, threw his prescription onto the street in front of him. A witness to the attack had called the police, but when they arrived the robbers were long gone. Bobby, however, was still at the scene trying to pick up his medicine from the ground. Bobby was arrested by the officers for possession of prescription medicine outside of a proper container.
Since the non-profit organization that I worked for couldn’t handle criminal cases, Bobby was assigned a public defender. He sat in jail for a few days before meeting with his lawyer, who explained that if Bobby pled guilty, he would be placed on probation for a year and the charge would be dropped at the end of that time. Bobby, who wanted to leave jail as soon as possible, agreed to this and thought that the matter was resolved.
As Bobby told me this story, I immediately began to worry about his housing situation. The assisted housing facility would not allow people who were on probation to reside there. After several calls with his public defender, I realized that there was not much that could be done. Bobby, after all, had admitted his guilt in front of a judge and had waived any rights he had to appeal. So he had to wait a year, living in substandard housing, before he would be eligible for the assistance he desperately needed, all because he had made his guilty plea without understanding the full consequences.
“Defendants don’t know what’s what,” said Dan Canon, author of the new book Pleading Out: How Plea Bargaining Creates a Permanent Criminal Class, when discussing Bobby’s situation with me. “You take a poor or working-class person that gets swept into the criminal justice system and is accused of a felony or something like that and the defense attorney is like, ‘You need to plea…’ and they can’t weigh the strengths and weaknesses of their case—they can’t tell what’s a good deal and what’s a bad deal.”
“When you are doing post-conviction stuff, you see where the system has really failed people in one way or another, guilty people or innocent people. I’ve counseled lots of people in post-conviction cases that were just sort of frog-marched into a plea bargain because that’s what they were supposed to do.”
Canon, a civil rights attorney, law professor at the University of Louisville, and one of the attorneys who represented plaintiffs in the Obergefell v. Hodges case that legalized gay marriage in the United States, has seen many cases like Bobby’s that inspired him to write about the evils of plea bargaining. “I do a lot of post-conviction work,” said Canon. “When you are doing post-conviction stuff, you see where the system has really failed people in one way or another, guilty people or innocent people. I’ve counseled lots of people in post-conviction cases that were just sort of frog-marched into a plea bargain because that’s what they were supposed to do.”
97% of criminal convictions in America are the result of a guilty plea, with the vast majority of those pleas resulting from plea bargaining. And yet, the fact that plea bargaining is the primary mechanism for processing charges in the US criminal justice system has not received much discussion in ongoing public debates about criminal justice reform.
“There hasn’t been a serious public conversation about plea bargaining and what it’s doing to the criminal justice system, and that is because we have just gotten so used to it,” said Canon. After the Bordenkircher v. Hayes case in 1978, which allows prosecutors to punish a defendant for refusing to take a plea, “you’ve got the academy at that time just laying down its pens and saying, ‘That’s the way it is… let’s just adjust to this new reality.’”
The systemic overreliance on plea bargaining, Canon explains, is a uniquely American way of dispensing justice. “It seems perfectly natural to us, and yet no place else in the world that I know of tolerates the kind of discretion that we give to our prosecutors in trying to get somebody to give up their right to go to trial,” said Canon.
In the book, Canon further argues that the use of plea bargaining is essential to the repression of working-class solidarity in America, and he does so by tracing its use to the start of the industrial revolution in Boston. “You’ve got people living on top of each other in these concentrated environments for, really, the first time,” said Canon, explaining how the more trial-focused criminal justice system switched to one that ran primarily on plea bargains. “[Workers] are developing class consciousness and starting to talk to each other like, ‘Hey, this is bullshit. Why do we have to do this?’ And that became dangerous to the ruling classes.”
97% of criminal convictions in America are the result of a guilty plea, with the vast majority of those pleas resulting from plea bargaining.
Business and political elites, needing to quash any sign of radicalizing worker consciousness or solidarity, started exerting their influence to turn a justice system that was primarily based on trials or guilty pleas offered with no pre-negotiation into a justice system based almost entirely on plea bargaining. Plea bargaining is a much more effective and callously efficient means of dispensing with criminal cases, and it allows for a massive increase in the number of cases that can be processed—an increase that has never stopped. This vicious vortex has sucked more and more people into an ever-expanding class of criminals.
The creation of this criminal class was an essential assault on working people and working-class solidarity in a long-running class war, Canon argues. “There is this notion in our brains of the criminal class and what criminals look like and what they do; and you don’t work with them, you don’t collaborate with them, you don’t let your kids date them,” said Canon. “There’s a stigma attached to that label, and that stigma is very effective at preventing solidarity. And it’s one thing to apply that label to a small percentage of society, but when you’ve got a full one-third of the adult population in the United States that has some sort of a criminal record… Nothing really crumbles the cookie of solidarity like a criminal conviction.”
Plea bargaining, Canon argues, is the perfect tool for ensuring that many people become part of this criminal (or criminalized) class, because all professionals in the justice system benefit from its use. Because almost every case is resolved prior to trial, Canon explains, police officers can raise their solved crime statistics by overcharging defendants, regardless of how well those charges would hold up at trial. Prosecutors can point to high rates of convictions by offering plea deals designed to ensure that defendants plead guilty, lest they face much more dire consequences at trial. Defense attorneys can present a plea to their client as a good deal that will help them avoid larger charges or more time in jail. Judges are able to have fast dockets in which their main role is merely signing off on pleas that were already agreed to.
Because almost every case is resolved prior to trial, Canon explains, police officers can raise their solved crime statistics by overcharging defendants, regardless of how well those charges would hold up at trial.
“It is the sort of mass-produced coerced confession. We’re really outraged [when police] put a kid in a room under the hot lights and threaten to beat him up with a phone book or whatever and he says, ‘I did it, I did it, just let me go,’ and that’s outrageous,” said Canon. “But that’s exactly what the system is doing to thousands of people every day. They are just doing it in this sort of dry, procedural, legitimized fashion.”
This use of pleas does not ensure that guilty people are more likely to be punished. Canon points to the fact that 75% of the people on death row are there because they did not accept a plea to lesser charges. “Not only are you less likely to take a plea [if you’re innocent] but you’re more likely to get hit with the death penalty,” said Canon. “It makes sense that if you’re innocent you’re less likely to take a plea… but I think the shocking thing is: You’re more likely to get a prosecutor seeking the death penalty in your case because you don’t take the plea, because you’re innocent.”
Canon points out that this plea process also fails to serve crime victims any better than the trial-based system.“If you accept that expedience is the fundamental guiding principle for the [whole system], then the victim and the victim’s wishes just sort of become an annoyance that everyone needs to just speed through because the victim is going to slow down the process,” he said.
Canon thinks that his book lays out an argument that while plea bargaining is currently accepted as an inevitability in the American justice system, it does not need to be. We are capable, he argues, of creating a more just system. “If you look at the roots of the system, a lot has changed in America over the last 200 years and not a lot about the justice system has changed,” said Canon. “If you look from the 19th century until now, what was the big change, what made the shift from the 19th century to now that was this earth shattering egalitarian shift in the criminal justice system in the United States. I can’t find it, I don’t know what it is.”
A police officer who works for a department under scrutiny for aggressive ticketing and a series of controversial arrests has been charged with domestic violence.
The charges against Milton police officer Andrew Lawhon were uncovered during an ongoing investigation into the town’s policing practices by the Police Accountability Report (PAR), the weekly investigative show we host on The Real News Network. Lawhon is facing one count of misdemeanor domestic battery related to an incident that occurred in his home in Barboursville, West Virginia, on Feb. 7.
Court documents state that Lawhon struck his partner’s face with an open hand, then grabbed her legs to prevent her from leaving their home. Lawhon was released on $2000 bail.
In 2012, Milton collected roughly $234,577 in court fees and fines while its police department budget was $484,000. Over the next decade, the fees and fines nearly tripled, reaching roughly $600,000 in 2020. Meanwhile, police spending has nearly doubled to $1.1 million in 2019.
Misdemeanor domestic battery carries a maximum sentence of one year in prison.
Prior to the publication of this article, Milton Police Chief Joe Parsons did not respond to an emailed request for comment on Lawhon’s current employee status and whether he still has police powers. In West Virginia, anyone convicted of domestic violence charges is prohibited from carrying or possessing a firearm.
Milton residents continue to come forward with complaints about the police department of the small West Virginia town in response to our reporting on the dubious arrests of Coty Cecil and Caleb Dial. A follow-up PAR investigation also found that Milton has markedly increased fines and court fees while ramping up policing spending.
In 2012, Milton collected roughly $234,577 in court fees and fines while its police department budget was $484,000. Over the next decade, the fees and fines nearly tripled, reaching roughly $600,000 in 2020. Meanwhile, police spending has nearly doubled to $1.1 million in 2019.
An analysis of similarly sized towns in West Virginia found that Milton has the highest police spending among its peers.
These numbers first came to light during PAR’s investigation into the arrest of Coty Cecil in December of 2021. Cecil parked his RV in a private campground when Milton police conducted a raid. On a video livestreamed during the incident, Cecil repeatedly asked police for a warrant. The officers outside Cecil’s front door repeatedly assured him that a warrant was forthcoming, but did not provide it at the scene. So far, according to Cecil, that warrant has not materialized, though he said he did find an application for a warrant in his RV after he was released from jail.
Police confiscated roughly a dozen immature marijuana plants from the trailer—grown in his home state of Michigan, where they are legal—along with grow materials, a checkbook, business cards, and books on how to cultivate pot. Cecil was charged with possession of a controlled substance, possession with intent to distribute, and transportation of a controlled substance over state lines.
Since Cecil’s arrest, several other questionable cases involving Milton officers have been brought to our attention.
Caleb Dial was charged in August 2021 for resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, and felony evasion after he called police to a relative’s home to mediate a domestic dispute. That was the official account from the Milton police, at least. However, a Ring camera on the front porch captured the encounter and showed Dial was not combative or disorderly. Based on the unearthed Ring camera video, prosecutors dropped all charges and asked Dial to not sue Milton police.
Dial does not intend to grant prosecutors’ request and has vowed to hold the department accountable. “I am currently looking for an attorney,” he told PAR.
The controversial arrests and increased ticketing have come as the town government has prioritized policing, residents say.
Sources told PAR the city council received monthly reports listing the number of tickets written by individual officers. PAR has filed a West Virginia Freedom of Information Act request for copies of those reports, along with a more detailed breakdown of the court fines and other law enforcement-related fees.
The tactics regularly employed by the Milton police department have made life harrowing for some residents of the small town near the border of West Virginia and Kentucky, according to testimonies shared with TRNN. A vast majority of residents who have contacted PAR with claims of police harassment have expressed fear of retaliation for coming forward, a sentiment Dial says is justified.
“Milton is a very small town, and if you’re poor in that town, it’s hard to go anywhere in the city and not encounter an officer,” Dial said. “With officers blatantly behaving how they do and consistently and constantly getting away with what they do in Milton, I can understand why people are fearful.”
Conservatives in America have long argued that the death penalty is a necessary fixture of our legal and carceral system, both as a “crime deterrent” and as a means of serving justice. But more conservatives today are questioning the moral, fiscal, and practical justifications for this barbaric practice. TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway and Charles Hopkins, better known as Mansa Musa, speak with Demetrius Minor about the new generation of conservatives who are joining the fight to abolish the death penalty.
Eddie Conway: Welcome to this episode of Rattling the Bars. There’s been a campaign afoot in America to abolish the death penalty, and it’s been going on for centuries, in fact. Recently, 20-some years or so ago, conservatives have joined this fight. And in the last couple of decades the number of conservatives has increased tremendously in support of abolishing the death penalty. Joining me today to help us understand what’s happening is Demetrius Minor, the national manager of Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty. Demetrius, thanks for joining us.
Demetrius Minor: Thank you for having me. Glad to be with you.
Eddie Conway: Okay. You could start off maybe, if you will, by giving us an overview of the conservative push to make changes to the death penalty.
Demetrius Minor: Absolutely. Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty was founded in 2012 in the state of Montana where some Republican lawmakers wanted to get together and raise concerns about the death penalty and how it has been implemented. So basically, we take our message to audiences that’s made up of conservatives, whether it be social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, or whatnot. And our main message is to get them on board to see the death penalty repealed. And so that is a state-by-state campaign. And we have had a visible presence in multiple states as we seek to abolish the death penalty.
Eddie Conway: Well, what’s the argument that you use? Conservatives have always been pro-death penalty even though they’re pro-life. They’ve always been with the stand-your-ground or stop-and-shoot, three strikes. They’ve always been hard toward criminal justice. What do you use to argue to make them change their minds?
Demetrius Minor: So actually there has been a shift. A monumental shift, I would say. So I’m going to point to three key arguments as to why the death penalty should be repealed.
Argument number one. Let’s take the moral case, and that is being pro-life. It’s not enough just to say, okay, I’m pro-life, against abortion for the innocence of the unborn child. Being pro-life is about the totality of life and that includes lives that are lived drastically different than ours. So if I’m pro-life I cannot be simultaneously pro-death. It causes a moral conflict and therefore causes a moral contradiction of my values and of my principles. But the problem with that, or I don’t want to say the problem, but an issue is that morality is subjective. So what’s moral to me may not be necessarily moral to you.
But number two, when you talk about the fiscal component of the death penalty, how it is costly ineffective. From my understanding, this show is based out of Maryland. Before Maryland repealed the death penalty, it spent $186 million on roughly five executions. Five executions, $186 million. That’s an astronomical amount. But what if that number, what if those funds were reallocated elsewhere such as law enforcement, training and resources for them, services and benefits for the victims’ families, mental health training? There’s a plethora of things that money could have been used for instead of the death penalty. So from a fiscal perspective, the death penalty is costly, ineffective. Okay?
And then number three, the death penalty is actually an extension of big government. I do not trust the federal government to give me updated COVID numbers. I don’t trust the federal government to handle healthcare. I don’t trust the federal government to balance a budget. I don’t trust the federal government to even address the deficit. Why would I trust the government with a matter of literally – And no hyperbole – Life and death? So for these reasons alone we have seen a shift in conservatives supporting the death penalty to opposing it.
Eddie Conway: Mansa?
Charles Hopkins: Yeah, Demetrius, let’s dial down on the message. How do you take your message – And it’s a good message as you outline your three points – How do you take your message and coalesce with other people that are not necessarily conservative but have the same concerns that you have in the same light that you have? Moral, economic, and the other one. How do y’all, or have y’all, looked in that direction to build a coalition along those lines?
Demetrius Minor: Sure. So I believe in meeting people where they’re at. And again, people can oppose the death penalty for whatever reason, different reasons: morally, fiscally, racially, culturally. Whatever stance that they have, if they have concerns about the death penalty or if they just want to repeal it, all right, we welcome them on board.
Let me give you an example of some of the coalitions that we’re building. In the state of Ohio. Ohio is a political bellwether state. Ohio has a Republican-controlled legislature including the House and Senate and a Republican governor. Ohio is positioning themselves to repeal the death penalty and the coalition is pretty broad. It includes progressives, it includes conservatives such as our organization, Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty, but even progressive organizations such as the ACLU or the NAACP, just to name a few.
So the repealing of the death penalty is actually a bipartisan approach. It’s a bipartisan matter. But it is met with Republican leadership. Let me tell you very quickly about the three states, the last three states to repeal the death penalty. I’m going to start with Colorado. Colorado repealed the death penalty because there was a trio of Republican senators who were very instrumental in getting it passed. In the state of New Hampshire the Republican governor actually vetoed the death penalty legislation. However, 40% of the Republican caucus voted to override the governor’s veto. A Republican governor’s veto, that’s very important.
And then the state of Virginia, which just elected a Republican governor in November, it repealed the death penalty last spring. And that was due to the leadership of some Republican members who were very instrumental in getting that passed. In Utah, even though it came one vote short in the committee, Utah came very close. A deep red state, because Republican leadership wanted to get the bill through to their members. So all across the board, all across the nation, there is a paradigm shift happening in Republicans and conservatives and they’re taking the lead and repealing the death penalty.
Charles Hopkins: Okay. On the note of how do you reconcile this push with the fact of the victims, how do y’all coalesce with the victims? Victims of these crimes that have been committed that result in the death penalty, are y’all networking with them, talking to them, educating them, or getting their input on the positions that y’all are taking?
Demetrius Minor: That’s a great question. Victims’ families, murder victims’ families are actually a key instrumental component in our message. I was just in Ohio two weeks ago. I was meeting with political leadership there and trying to get the bill passed. But one of the individuals I met with the was Reverend Dr. Crystal Walker, and her son was murdered. What makes her story so compelling is she actually knows the perpetrator of the crime, and this person has not been arrested for whatever reason, lack of evidence and so forth. But she looked me in the eye and she said this. She says, I don’t wish this on my worst enemy. She says, because do you know what the death penalty would do? It is just going to repeat a cycle of trauma and grief. She says, I may be hurting right now, but if the death penalty is implemented that means someone else’s family is going to have to go through the grieving process. And it does not bring the loved one back. It’s not going to resurrect that life again.
So a lot of people may think that murder victims’ families automatically advocate for the death penalty. That’s not true. Many victims’ families are advocating for the abolition of the death penalty because all it does is repeat the grief cycle and trauma. And that is something they don’t want to have to go through over and over again.
Eddie Conway: Tell me, what other states are you campaigning in and what’s the nature of those campaigns? And third, how successful is the progress so far?
Demetrius Minor: Sure. Well let me start with the state that I reside in. That is the state of Florida. Now, this is moreso laying the groundwork for 2023, but they are trying to get those who have severe mental illness exempt from the death penalty, which is an instrumental and incremental way of getting the death penalty abolished in its entirety. But sometimes you have to do it step-by-step instead of trying to tackle it all at one time. That’s one example.
There has been some legislation introduced in states such as Georgia, Kentucky, Wyoming, deep red states that are going to be introducing legislation either this session or next session tackling the death penalty. Some other states that are sort of in our peripheral include Nevada and Arizona. Those western states are looking to get rid of it. It is my hope that Ohio will abolish the death penalty by the end of this year. If that happens, what I believe we’ll see is a domino effect in neighboring red states and red states all across the United States that will start to look at the death penalty and say, it’s costly, ineffective. It actually does not serve as a deterrence to crime. And most importantly, it does not line up with the value of life. And hopefully we’ll start to see red states repeal the death penalty following Ohio’s lead.
Eddie Conway: Okay, this is not a personal question, but what’s the reception when you go in front of a conservative audience and you make this argument? I noticed you said there was a shift, a tremendous shift apparently, because from 2000 to now, you can talk about the numbers, but it’s been a great increase. What’s the reception for you in front of these audiences?
Demetrius Minor: So, just like any other issue, any other subject whether it’s taxes, whether it’s education, whether it’s labor, whether it’s national security, you’re going to have different views. You’re going to have opposing views on whatever issue you decide to address.
Here’s why I’ve been receiving a very good reception to these issues. I just attended CPAC, which stands for Conservative Political Action Conference. It is the largest gathering of conservative activists, policy makers, and legislators in the entire nation. For the first time in this conference’s existence, the death penalty was on the docket. It was on the agenda. And I was in a room full of conservative policy makers, conservative activists from all across the country. And I’m telling you, there was a shift that was happening in that room, where people were raising concerns, where people were asking really good questions about why it doesn’t work, and why it is still being used.
I actually saw and heard a former US Senator’s wife stand up and testify that she used to be pro-death penalty until she became an attorney, until she saw how the system does not work for everyone. She started to see the fallacies of the criminal justice system and then she became opposed to the death penalty. That’s just one conversation that I saw in the room. But I’m starting to see this conversation take place. Personally, among my peers, I’ve seen this conversation taking place through our social media outlets. And so therefore I’m getting a really positive reception when I talk about the death penalty.
Is everyone I talk to against it? No, there are some that are for it. But I also have heard some that says, well I’m for it in extreme cases but I’m also open-minded to hear more information about it. That tells me that people are starting to see it as a government program, a government entity that has not been working that has many flaws. We’ve seen innocent people be put to death and therefore people are starting to raise legitimate concerns about it.
Eddie Conway: Mansa?
Charles Hopkins: I noticed, and I want to talk about some of the bills that were introduced. I think I read the bill that was submitted in Utah. I’m looking at the language in the bill, and I want to know how instrumental are y’all in terms of crafting this language? More importantly, you interject in life without parole. But in this particular bill they had alternatives in addition to life without parole. So what are your views on the alternatives?
Demetrius Minor: So, in my role I do not write the bills. I do not sit with legislators and craft out language of the bill. We do have a separate team that is involved in my work. My work is simply to promote it amongst conservative audiences. So whether it’s in Utah, whether it’s in Ohio, whatever state it is in, I reach out to the constituents there, I reach out to the leaders, the policy makers, the advocates, those who have a feel for what’s going on on the ground, those who are involved in the grassroots process. And that’s how I go about my work. I’m not involved in the crafting of the bill.
Charles Hopkins:Let me follow up then, and stay right there in terms of the constituents. Eddie asked for the response from the policy makers. What kind of feedback are you getting from the people on the ground, the grassroots, the people that’s affected by it and ultimately conservative in terms of the criminal justice system? What kind of feedback are you getting when you’re going to these areas?
Demetrius Minor: Yeah. So conservatives in general believe that the criminal justice system is very flawed. The criminal justice system needs to be reformed, if not transformed. Conservatives in general want to see rehabilitation, want to see redemption, and want to see people having access to good education and able to be a part of the workforce. And if that’s going to happen, that means that we need to look at the criminal justice system and acknowledge that it’s ineffective the way that it is currently constructed.
So again, I want to say that the reception that I’m getting is very positive. It’s just a matter of moving from point A to moving to point B, getting the legislators to push the bill forward, to get committee hearings on it, to bring the bill to the floor. And when you’re talking about that process, that doesn’t happen overnight. But the conversations that I am having are very fruitful and very productive.
Eddie Conway: Okay. Well, just a final question. Is there anything our audience can do to support your effort or any place they need to contact?
Demetrius Minor: Absolutely. I’m glad you asked that question. I would encourage your audience to please go to www.conservativesconcerned.org. Please sign up. We send out monthly or biweekly newsletters giving people updates on the campaigns and our work nationwide. And then also they can add to the extended list of conservatives who have lended their voice and opposition to the death penalty. So if they want to go to conservativesconcerned.org there’s more information there on how they can be involved.
Eddie Conway: Yeah. And I will say this as a final thing. Their information is protected by your privacy policy and so they don’t have to worry about you selling their names to Starbucks. Just for instance.
Demetrius Minor: Correct.
Eddie Conway: Okay. Demetrius, thanks for giving us that overview and update. Thanks for joining us.
Demetrius Minor: Absolutely. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you for having me, guys.
Eddie Conway: And thank you for joining this episode of Rattling the Bars.
Are Texas police laying the groundwork to thwart cop watchers by sending them to jail for simply using cellphone cameras to film them? This is the serious question raised by a series of charges that accuse a group of Texas cop watchers of engaging in organized crime. In this episode of the Police Accountability Report, hosts Taya Graham and Stephen Janis investigate the basis for the accusations and possible consequences for the First Amendment, YouTube activism, and the future of citizen auditing, and speak to one of the men facing decades in jail for filming police to understand just how far police will go to evade accountability.
Pre-Production: Stephen Janis Studio/Post-Production: Stephen Janis, Dwayne Gladden
Transcript
The transcript of this video will be made available as soon as possible.
Closing prisons and reducing the incarcerated population should be a good thing, but when local economies become dependent on the prison industry it creates many perverse incentives for keeping our inhumane system of mass incarceration going. Residents of Susanville, California, are experiencing this firsthand after the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced the impending deactivation of the California Correctional Center. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Charles Hopkins, better known as Mansa Musa, is joined by Nicole D. Porter to discuss the prison closure in Susanville and how expanding the prison-industrial complex is neither a just nor viable method for reviving local economies.
Nicole D. Porter is the Senior Director of Advocacy at The Sentencing Project, managing state and local advocacy efforts on sentencing reform, voting rights, and eliminating racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Her advocacy has supported criminal justice reforms in several states including Kentucky, Missouri, and California. Porter was named a “New Civil Rights Leader” by Essence Magazine for her work to eliminate mass incarceration.
A series of explosive investigative reports has revealed a crisis of police abuse in rural America. This week, Police Accountability Report hosts Taya Graham and Stephen Janis held a live discussion about police overreach and the consequences faced by rural communities across the country, and took questions from viewers about what their investigations have uncovered.
Transcript
A transcript of this video will be made available as soon as possible.
This story originally appeared in Jacobin on Feb. 12, 2022. It is shared here with permission.
In June 1882, a Boston lawyer noticed a man named John Burns leaning against a lamppost in Beacon Hill. Burns was drunk, but seemingly harmless, when a Boston police officer approached him from behind and knocked him “prostrate into the street” with a club to the head. The particulars of the case were quickly lost in a tangle of competing narratives. Was Burns disorderly and resisting arrest, or were these fabrications to cover up yet another instance of indiscriminate police clubbing?
Stripes on coat sleeves are not armored vehicles, but when we place the training, and equipment of police in their historical context, the persistent militarized nature of American policing comes into focus. It’s not a 20th-century evolution in policing—it was there from the start.
News stories like these were standard fare in the late 19th century, but this particular instance prompted one writer at the Boston Globe to reflect on the material culture of the police. Alongside new vice laws, the Boston Police in 1882 acquired “handsome helmets” and “increased efficiency . . . by the introduction of stripes upon the coat sleeves.” The very notion of uniformed police in the 19th century often invited comparison to a standing army, which people from a broad cross section of American society commonly perceived as an affront to their democratic sentiments. At least in northern cities, police power in the 1880s was as contested as it was presumed, although the rhetoric of law and order would prevail in the coming decades.
This Boston Globe columnist continued that the police had been attending regular drills “in club exercise, superintended by the military member, familiarizing the men with the use of their weapons.” We know that military drills were common in this period, as in New York City where Commissioner Abram Duryée was “something of a fanatic with regard to the military nature of police work . . . fond of drilling the force to the point of exhaustion.” The militarism of early American policing was even clearer in the case of 18th-century slave patrols and urban city guards — the latter of which, Frederick Law Olmstead observed when visiting Charleston in 1860, deployed “police machinery as you never find in towns under free governments.”
In the wake of high-profile police killings and subsequent protests in the last decade, more Americans than ever before are asking when and how our police became so militarized. The prevailing narratives are unsatisfactory, usually identifying some recent turning point and obscuring the long arc of police militarism in the United States. To the extent that “the militarization of the police” indicates a fundamental change to the institution over time, the term is a misnomer. Sure enough, stripes on coat sleeves are not armored vehicles, but when we place the training, and equipment of police in their historical context, the persistent militarized nature of American policing comes into focus. It’s not a 20th-century evolution in policing—it was there from the start.
Riot Act
Sierra Pettengill’s new film Riotsville, USA, which premiered at Sundance last weekend, enriches our understanding of police militarism in the United States. The documentary is made up entirely of archival footage, supplemented by onscreen text and narration written by Tobi Haslett and voiced by Charlene Modeste. Riotsville centers on two fake towns constructed in 1967 on military bases in Virginia and Georgia, the purpose of which was to train military and police in riot response tactics and technologies. As told by the film, these sites were both material and symbolic indicators of the intensifying militarization of American policing in response to black rebellion in the 1960s.
There’s something unnervingly comedic about soldiers playing protesters, dressed in hippie costumes and wigs, chanting antiwar slogans—both disturbing and amusing.
Riotsville, USA is an impressive feat of archival recovery. Six years in the making, Pettengill and her team developed the film alongside the mainstreaming and expansion of the Movement for Black Lives. Their production collapses the 1960s into the 2010s, even as Pettengill maintains her historical focus, emphasizing both our failure to respond to the demands of those 1960s rebellions as well at the importance of revisiting archival material to understand why we failed.
Pettengill refrains from interrupting the archival material with excessive cutting, allowing footage—presumably recorded for training and posterity by the military—to run for extended periods, immersing the viewer in the social conflicts of the 1960s. The opening scene is an extended cut of fake protesters marching through the street of a fake town. Some critics have taken issue with the film’s lack of contextualization, but Riotsville’s power owes precisely to the strange and unsettling quality of the archive laid bare.
One need not be an expert in the history of this decade to appreciate the dystopian nature of fake riots tearing through fake towns, overseen from grandstands by military and law enforcement leaders. There’s something unnervingly comedic about soldiers playing protesters, dressed in hippie costumes and wigs, chanting antiwar slogans—both disturbing and amusing. One wonders what’s going through the soldier-actors’ heads. At one point, a Black soldier yells out the side of a bus after being fake-arrested, seeming to carry on the scene a bit too long as the voyeurs in the grandstands applaud. Is there something authentic in his performance of Black rebellion?
Throughout the film, archival media footage and narration remind us that the dramatizations enacted at Riotsville were technocratic responses to real protests. In reconstructing this moment, Pettengill is precise in her framing and language. The decision to term the 1960s uprisings as rebellions throughout the film is significant. Elizabeth Hinton writes that “riot” is a misnomer for understanding this period, robbing activists and common citizens of their political agency.
On the other hand, to refer to the hundreds of Black rebellions that occurred in the 1960s as “civil disturbances” or “unrest” reflects a liberal squeamishness for direct action. These uprisings involved violence and destruction, as have the uprisings of the 2010s. Eliding that fact does not bring us closer to justice and equality, it merely makes the political consciousness of the rebellions more palatable.
The Long Arc of Militarization
The narrative put forth by Riotsville hinges on the Kerner Commission, an 11-person committee appointed by President Johnson in 1967 and tasked with explaining what had happened, why it had happened, and what the government could do to prevent future uprisings. The commission is probably most famous for its conclusion that the United States was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” That prediction was no revelation for many Americans, but to have it stated so candidly by a presidential commission was still remarkable.
The decision of the Kerner Commission to comment on racial inequality so explicitly was not, however, unanimous. In an interview with Jelani Cobb last year, the only surviving member of the commission recalled that half of its members wanted to cite “intolerance or discrimination” instead of explicit racism as the root cause of racial inequality and the 1960s Black rebellions. That faction lost in a narrow 6-5 vote.
While neither of these commissions considered race in a meaningful way, both concluded with scathing indictments of police abuse—and nevertheless, both yielded ballooning police budgets for training and technocratic solutions instead of improved police accountability or solutions to poverty.
Riotsville’s narrator tells us that “A door swung open in the late ‘60s. And someone, something sprang up and slammed it shut.” True enough. The opportunity for dramatic change as recommended by the Kerner Commission certainly existed, an opportunity which promised a refocus on root causes and solutions to poverty and inequality rather than the so-called punitive turn that followed. If we widen the historical scope, however, it is clear that someone, something has always sprung up to prevent substantive change.
To truly understand what happened in the 1960s, we need to look further back, to Herbert Hoover’s 1929 Wickersham Commission and, further yet, the New York State Lexow Committee in 1894. While neither of these commissions considered race in a meaningful way, both concluded with scathing indictments of police abuse—and nevertheless, both yielded ballooning police budgets for training and technocratic solutions instead of improved police accountability or solutions to poverty. Commissions such as these have consistently served to fortify police power through expanded training, reform, and professionalization. Whether or not this has occurred by design is another question, but we cannot escape the fact that police have always been further militarized in the process.
Riotsville’s emphasis on the Kerner Commission inadvertently reinforces the idea that police militarization occurred in the aftermath of the Black rebellions, when in fact it is woven into the DNA of American policing and has been steadily fortified since the 19th century. Nonetheless, the film succeeds in telling the story of Kerner Commission’s ultimate legacy.
Some of its members pressed for increased funding for police, resulting in the only tangible outcome of the commission: the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA). Via the LEAA, the government opened a firehose of federal dollars to local police, which had actually begun earlier via the often conflated, but smaller scale, Law Enforcement Assistance Act in 1965. This marks an important moment that some historians refer to as the “punitive turn,” when the Lyndon Johnson administration turned more definitively away from solving poverty to waging a war on crime.
One of the key tools in this pivot, highlighted in Riotsville, was tear gas. While some considered the emphasis on tear gas a point of digression in the film, the technology is an essential moment for understanding the militarism of police in this period. As Stuart Schrader makes clear in Badges Without Borders, tear gas captures the technocratic approach to American policing that drew on imperial interventionism in order to address domestic challenges. In other words, it brought together militarism abroad and policing at home.
Pettengill demonstrates the point well, using military footage, scenes from Riotsville itself, and the unrestricted use of tear gas to pacify American neighborhoods. In some of the film’s most convincing and unsettling moments, we see tear gas streaming from helicopters or from the end of an officer’s cannon walking down an empty street, blanketing the front porches of suburban communities.
The More Things Change
The key to understanding the trajectory of American policing is to avoid relying on the idea of turning points, even if the so-called “punitive turn” was an important historical moment.
Riotsville is a valuable and meaningful contribution to our understanding of policing in response to the 1960s rebellions, when the militarization of the police definitively expanded and took on new form. Still, abrupt turning points belie the fundamental nature of policing. Would policing be better today if not for the LEAA and the “punitive turn?” Probably, but policing reform has never meant to fundamentally change the police, and more often it has expanded budgets or given them fancier tools.
Likewise, American resistance to policing has always existed, despite the widespread impression that we’ve recently abandoned a tradition of praising law enforcement.
Slave patrols in the 18th century operated as militia forces, and their urban equivalents in Charleston roamed in companies of 30 mounted men, “headed by fife and drum.” Police in Boston and New York used military rankings to organize their departments from the outset. Just after the Civil War, the New Orleans Metropolitan Police deployed Gatling guns and canons against protesters (granted they did so in the name of Reconstruction). During WWI, the New York Police Department donned military uniforms and marched with mounted machine guns down Fifth Avenue.
When we consider the long history of policing the United States, it would be wise to heed the reflection of historian Mark Haller, who wrote that “In more than a century from the Civil War to the present, city police have undergone little change in organization or function. Those changes that have occurred have resulted primarily from technology.” It is easy to claim that police have become more militarized, but the reality is that they have always been militaristic in their tools and internal structure. The changes we see reflect evolution in the technology and tactics of force more than evolution of the police.
Likewise, American resistance to policing has always existed, despite the widespread impression that we’ve recently abandoned a tradition of praising law enforcement. We are rightly disturbed by Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles (MRAPs) and full body armor in 2022—just as Americans were disturbed by stripes on blue uniforms in 1882. Police technology constantly changes, but the tendency toward militarization and the public’s discontent have stayed much the same.
Like Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Rachael Rollins in Boston, and Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, Manhattan’s new District Attorney Alvin Bragg was elected after campaigning to bring a more progressive approach to the criminal justice system; he also pledged to reduce the population of people held pre-trial on the infamous Rikers Island jail complex. After two months in office, however, supporters are worried that Bragg’s progressive messaging is already giving way to the same brutal system they elected him to change. TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway speaks with Olayemi Olurin about Bragg’s first months in office, the ongoing crisis at Rikers, and how “progressive” a District Attorney can be in a broken system designed to protect the wealthy and criminalize the poor.
Olayemi Olurin is a public defender and staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society and an analyst at the Law & Crime Network.
Eric Lurry’s death was a mystery to his family until a police whistleblower leaked damning evidence implicating the Joliet, Illinois, police department. Now Sgt. Javier Esqueda, who came forward with the video evidence, is facing a possible 20-year prison sentence for exposing his fellow police officers. In this episode of the Police Accountability Report, we examine the mechanics of a police coverup and the ramifications of holding police accountable, and ask Sgt. Esqueda what he witnessed that made him risk his career and his freedom by becoming a whistleblower.
Pre-Production/Studio: Stephen Janis Post-Production: Stephen Janis, Dwayne Gladden
Transcript
Taya Graham: Hello. My name is Taya Graham, and welcome to the Police Accountability Report. As I always make clear, this show has a single purpose: holding the politically powerful institution of policing accountable. And to do so, we don’t just focus on the bad behavior of individual cops. Instead, we examine the system that makes bad policing possible.
Today we will do so by showing you a video of police brutality that would’ve remained secret had not someone behind the blue wall of silence decided to make it public. It is a troubling tale of police brutality caught on camera that would never have seen the light of day had the man, that we will talk to later, not risked his career and freedom to leak it.
But before we get started, I want you watching to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct or brutality, please email it to us privately at par@therealnews.com and please like, share and comment on our videos. You know I read your comments and appreciate them. And of course, you can always reach out to me directly @tayasbaltimore on Facebook or Twitter. And of course, if you can, please hit the Patreon donate link pin below in the comments, because we do have some extras there for our PAR family. Okay. Now we’ve gotten all that out of the way.
Now, as many of you who have watched the show know, there is an underlying purpose behind what we do. We hope that by reporting on actual police malfeasance and revealing the underlying imperatives which drive it, eventually the institution of policing can be reformed. But the purpose comes with a caveat. That’s because, as we said from the onset, the system that enables bad policing can sometimes be worse than the behavior itself. In other words, the power and the imperative of policing ensconced in a system of rampant inequality flourishes because it has become systemic and therefore harder to expose.
There is no better example of this idea than the video we are showing to you right now. It is a video of a man who died in police custody, but whose death could have been prevented. It’s a stark example of how policing is ill-equipped to deal with the social ills that proliferate in this country, but well-suited to cover up their misdeeds when they occur. If you do not wish to see this police violence, please feel free to forward through the first few minutes.
The video you are seeing now shows Joliet, Illinois resident Eric Lurry in the back of a police car suffering from an apparent overdose. Police had placed Mr. Lurry in the backseat after charging him with drug possession. But after he was handcuffed and placed in the police vehicle, it became increasingly clear that Mr. Lurry was facing a medical crisis, which is the point of the show today. Because as you can see, instead of getting medical attention for him, the officers on the scene appear to make things worse. Let’s watch.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Officer: Hey, wake up. Open your mouth. Open your mouth. Open your mouth. Open your mouth. Open your mouth.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: For reasons yet to be explained, police appear to cut off Mr. Lurry’s ability to breathe for a minute and 38 seconds and only worsen the medical crisis he was facing with their inexplicable actions. Let’s watch.
[Video clip plays. No dialogue]
Taya Graham: As it becomes even more apparent that Mr. Lurry’s condition is getting worse, cops double down, apparently more concerned about the evidence in his mouth than the condition of his body. But while you’re watching this video, I’m going to have someone explain what we’re seeing who might surprise you. He’s not an advocate or a lawyer or a family member, but rather a police officer who, when he saw this in-car camera footage, did something extraordinary. He leaked it to the public, even though the department wanted to keep it secret.
His name is Javier Esqueda, and he is a veteran of the Joliet, Illinois, police department. He was also a training supervisor, a cop responsible for teaching other officers how to follow the law. But when he saw this video he was so shocked by the conduct of the officers involved that he did something that has had repercussions for his life that are hard to fathom. Before we get into what happened to him, let’s let the Sergeant describe what we’re seeing.
Javier Esqueda: [talking over video] The officers are assisting the drug unit on an arrest. Apparently they claim that Lurry struggled with them and they picked him up, put him in the squad. At that time, they were already saying that they thought he had drugs in his mouth, and that was 10 minutes from the station. A Sergeant comes on and says to them, don’t worry about it. We’ll take care of it when we get to the station.
Our policy, when they know that immediately you are supposed to render aid. They should have called for an ambulance or did something. Instead, they transported him, drove him about five to 10 minutes to the station on the East side.
As you’re watching the video, you see Eric slumped over. He’s facing that way – You remember, the camera’s reversed. So he’s chewing on something. The officers acknowledge, look, he’s chewing on something, Still do nothing. Get him to the station. The officer goes back there. There the recruiter officers then say, let’s not do this. Come on, and they start giving him a chest rub. He goes and tells the supervisor of the Drug Unit, which is Doug May, that, hey, it looks like he’s not responsive. Sergeant May comes around on the other side, says, hey, hey, and he winds up, slapping Eric Lurry, and says, hey, wake up, bitch! At the same time, goes for his throat, looks up at the camera. And as he looks up at the camera, the audio gets cut out. He goes for Lurry’s nose and he’s holding his nose.
Well, if you got something in your throat, what’s going to happen if I cut off your airway? You’re either going to try to open your mouth or you’re going to suck in what’s in your throat. What’s obvious, he doesn’t open his mouth because whatever was in his mouth is now down his throat. A minute and 38 seconds, you see him go incoherent. Officer comes in, which is a recruit at the time, which is McCue, and sticks a dirty baton in his mouth, an ASP, and they’re sweeping his mouth and all the baggies or whatever it is is dropping out.
Now, there’s no way that they knew it was fentanyl. It wasn’t tested. It could have been crack cocaine, heroin. They right away said it was fentanyl. There’s no way. They’re assuming what the drug was in his mouth. The baggies drop out, and the next thing you know you see the glove reach in and this huge long baggie comes out. But where do you think that was at? In his mouth or down his esophagus?
Taya Graham: Tragically, Mr. Lurry died, but that’s not where the story ends because, not surprisingly, the leak was apparently more troubling for the department than what occurred on the video itself. That’s because once the video was made public by him, action against the sergeant was swift and vengeful. He was charged with multiple felonies of official misconduct and the police union turned on him even while publicly and vocally supporting the officers seen abusing Mr. Lurry. But it gets worse, much worse. That’s because elected officials didn’t speak up either. The people put into office to control or otherwise manage the police kept silent. And so, the city of Joliet stood by as an important whistleblower was turned into a potential felon.
That’s right. They charged Sergeant Esqueda with four counts, felony counts, of official misconduct. In fact, they twisted the law so that what would’ve been administrative violations ended up being indictments by a grand jury, which threatened to put him behind bars for 20 years. And for what, you ask? Just the fact that he leaked a video that shows how horrifyingly cruel American policing can be. That’s because not only does Sergeant Esqueda face criminal charges, but the police union, the institution that generally runs to the aid of cops, literally abandoned him. That’s right. Sergeant Esqueda was discarded by the very power structure which we have cited again and again as the primary instigator of problematic American policing.
Police commanders, politicians didn’t reward Sergeant Esqueda for ensuring the circumstances surrounding Mr. Lurry’s death would not remain secret and that he gave the Lurry family a chance at closure. Instead, they condemned him and they indicted him. So now we can see in all its ugly clarity how American policing continues to perpetuate bad behavior and destructive policies.
Now, we are going to hear more from Sergeant Esqueda later, but before we do, I’m joined by my reporting partner Stephen Janis who has been delving into the details of this case. Stephen, thank you for joining me.
Stephen Janis: Taya, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Taya Graham: Stephen, what are the indictments for, specifically? What are the charges and how many years is he facing?
Stephen Janis: Well, it’s a four-count indictment that goes from two to five years. They’re charges of official misconduct, which is part of the Illinois Criminal Code. They’re pretty much specifically related to conduct in office. If you’re like a police officer or a politician or someone who holds an official office, it’s related to that.
Taya Graham: Stephen, you have been reaching out not just to the police department, but the political leaders in Joliet and asking them about the case. What did you find out?
Stephen Janis: Well, I specifically reached out to the prosecutor’s office who did send me the indictments, but my question was very specific. If you look at the Illinois Criminal Code, it says that police officers can be charged with misconduct in office for leaking or revealing information pertaining to a criminal case. I asked the question, what was he doing that was related to a criminal case? Was this related to criminal charges pending against the officers who had led to the death of Mr. Lurry? I have not heard back, but it’s a very interesting question because if you look at the Criminal Code, it’s very specific that it has to do with releasing information pertaining to a criminal investigation, and that’s clearly not the case here.
Taya Graham: We did a documentary about a Police Chief in Pocomoke City who actually instituted community policing, but when he was fired and later prosecuted, the same police unions abandoned him. Do you think these two cases have anything in common?
Stephen Janis: Absolutely. It shows that, I think, one of the scariest things about law enforcement in this country is that unlike other types of entities or political organizations, they have the tools of criminality to retaliate against people that speak out against them or buck against their business. I think in the case of both Kelvin Sewell in Pocomoke City and in this case, you have officers who have revealed damning information or fought back against the economy of policing, and policing has used the tools of criminality to retaliate. It’s terrifying. It’s not like if you or I have a business and someone charges less for pizza down the street I can go arrest them and steal their equipment, but that’s essentially what police can do. They’ve robbed them of their careers, their livelihoods, and they’ve criminalized them. The tools that police have, and white police, have to be held accountable at a different level than other agencies, institutions, or corporations. It’s terrifying.
Taya Graham: Now we are joined by Sergeant Javier Esqueda who will discuss how this entire ordeal has affected his life. Javier, thank you for joining me.
Javier Esqueda: Like I said, I just wanted to make sure that the story gets out and that they don’t forget Eric Lurry. It seems like through the shuffle of everything, they’re making it about me and they’re forgetting about what they did to him.
Taya Graham: When did you know that you had to release this video? When did you make this decision?
Javier Esqueda: May 30, I’m at the station. I’m doing my FTO work in the watch commanders office where sergeants and lieutenants hang out to do their stuff, read reports and stuff like that. I decide I’m going to log in and do my field training work. As I’m logging in to the computer like normal, I decide I’m going to watch videos and I’m going to watch that video finally. I click on it, go to watch it. I fast-forward it to the back seat of the squad because that’s what I was told was disturbing. I watched it. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t pay attention to who the recruit was, the officer sticking the ASP in the mouth, because I was too fixated on what was going on. So behind me – Say I’m on the computer with you right now – Behind me is my Lieutenant at time, which is Lieutenant Malec.
She’s looking over my shoulder and she says to me, I’ve never seen the video, but I’ve heard about it, but I’ve never seen it. She could hear what was going on and I looked at her. I said, I can’t believe this. That day I was very disturbed by it, and I didn’t know what to do. I’m telling myself, this is wrong. How come I haven’t heard of any internal being done on the officers involved? Something’s wrong here. So I wait on it. I wait on it. I talk to several officers. Hey, have you guys heard about this video? Yeah, I tell them it was disturbing for me. It was disturbing. I saw it. Other people had already seen it. Other people at the department. However, the logs don’t show anybody else watching the video except for me. And I’ll explain that.
You fast forward to June 10. That’s the second time I watched the video. I go in my car, go home. I then go to my squad car and I get my computer out of my squad car. Got to unlock it with the key. I go in the house and I start. I watched the video from beginning to end and I realize, wow, it is my recruit, McCue, who had the ASP in his mouth. No wonder that Sergeant Blackburn was telling me I needed to watch this video. I was like, wow, that is just bad. I started crying. I said, I can’t believe this.
When I heard again that the video got cut out, I knew right away there was some type of tampering. I copied the video. Then at that time, June 12, two days later, I go back to work. I’m in the watch commanders office, a little after eight in the morning, and I’m doing FTO work, signing in this new stuff. I get called in by a captain saying, hey, the other captain wants to see you, who’s the captain in charge of the field training program.
I walk in. I say, hey captain, what’s going on? He said, hey, I wanted to let you know that Deputy Chief Rosado wants an interoffice memorandum in reference to why you watched a flagged video. I’m like, flagged? Him being my superior officer, the captain in charge of the FTO program, I go back and I say, hey, Captain Larson, I need to talk to you about what I saw in this video. It’s very disturbing. You need to close the door. He says, oh no, stop right there. Whatever you do, don’t tell me anything. Write your interoffice memorandum, make it short and brief and to the point. I said, Captain, you’re my superior officer. I need to tell you what’s on that video. It’s very disturbing. It involves my recruit and his FTO. Shut the F up right now. Don’t say anything else, write your to-from again, make it short and brief. I walk over to the computer that I was sitting at originally doing my FTO work. I type up a short interoffice memorandum and give it to him.
Then I’m contemplating on what I’m going to do. Remember I got a copy of the video now. I copied the video because it looked like there was something very disturbing, like it was a cover up. To preserve the evidence because it looked like it was being tampered with. So I was right in what I said that they were trying to tamper with the video.
Taya Graham: What were the repercussions? I mean, did you have any idea how bad the retaliation might be?
Javier Esqueda: I knew what was going to happen to me. I knew that if I did the right thing, they were going to come back and try to do horrible things to me. I prayed for so long as to what I was going to do. I needed the strength to do this.
Taya Graham: Oh, okay. Well, you also share with me a personal story about you standing in a grocery line and having a chance encounter with a little boy that was pivotal?
Javier Esqueda: As I’m standing in line, there’s a young woman behind me. The young woman taps me on the back. She says, hey officer, my son wants to say something to you. I said, oh, I’m sorry ma’am, I thought I was a little girl because of the dreads. We all had masks on so I couldn’t tell. I said, hey little man. I get down on one and I say, hey, little man, what’s going on? Well, how could I help you? And he says to me, he reaches over in my ear and he whispers, thank you.
When that happened, I knew what I had to do. That’s why I had to tell the story. I look up at his mother and I say, ma’am, do you mind if I hug him? You don’t know what you guys did for me today. I hugged him and I said, ma’am you and your son are my angels. I know what I have to do. I said, you guys don’t know what you did for me today, but you guys have been my angels today. I know what I have to do. I said, I’m here for people like you, the people of Joliet I swore to protect. If you only knew what I’ve been going through. So I pay for my Combos. I go and sit in the squad what I normally do and I pray to God, you know what, God? I know it’s going to be hard, but I have to do this.
Taya Graham: Exactly what kind of charges are you facing? I know you’re facing four counts of misconduct in office. I hate to ask, but how much time in prison are you looking at?
Javier Esqueda: They charge me with four counts of official misconduct, and it has to do with, they claim I tampered with the computer to watch this video that was locked. They claim the video was locked.
Taya Graham: Do you have any regrets about coming forward?
Javier Esqueda: I thought this was going to be a good thing to do the right thing. And don’t get me wrong. If I knew then what I know now, would I have changed anything? Nope. I’d have still done it.
Taya Graham: What do you think this says to the public about how difficult it is to hold police accountable when a cop does the right thing? I’ve seen this happen to other whistleblower cops. They get kicked off the force. They get ostracized. They face criminal charges, face legal fees, and the police union abandons them. I mean, what does this tell you about holding police accountable?
Javier Esqueda: Through all this, it was hard of course, but knowing what they were going to do, everything that happened, how it was treated, they did it for a reason. They wanted to show other officers in our department this is what happens to you if you cross that line. Yes, it’s honest. Yes, it’s integrity. But guess what? We’re not going to make it that way either. We’re going to make our own narrative.
Taya Graham: Now, the story of a police officer whose career is in ruins and faces 20 years of prison time over revealing a startling case of apparent police misconduct is more revealing than it seems to be on the surface. I mean, we all remember the old phrase “don’t shoot the messenger.” Well, in this case, they’re actually trying to lock him in the cage so the world never hears from him again.
But what does it say about policing as an institution if its very essence is inimical to transparency? I mean, what do we think about a form of governance that when wrongdoing is exposed, actually turns on the person who brought it to light in the first place? Well, I think there’s a lot to learn from this case.
What do I mean? Well, as I’ve discussed on this show before, Stephen and I actually spent six years documenting a very similar case of retaliation against a police officer. His name is Kelvin Sewell and he was the first Black police chief of a small town on Maryland’s lower Eastern Shore called Pocomoke. Sewell was a former Baltimore City homicide detective who left his job and took over the department of a town of roughly 4,500 residents in 2011. But when he got there, he did something very different from the way the cops usually approach policing.
He ordered his officers to get out of their cars and walk and talk to the community. But that wasn’t all. Because he also tried to not just arrest people, but to help them. In other words, he worked to assist troubled kids by helping them apply for college. He tried to defuse the war on drugs by pushing back against a drug task force that constantly raided the town and hauled people off to jail for minor drug infractions. He tried to provide opportunity for a community that had been previously abandoned by the powers that be. I mean, Stephen and I spent days driving around the town’s poorest neighborhoods. And like many similarly situated communities in the US, the residents there told us they were accustomed to two things from the government: arrests and social neglect.
Perhaps that’s why the law enforcement community pushed back. Because in 2015, Sewell was fired without explanation and then state investigators launched a broad investigation into every facet of Sewell’s tenure in Pocomoke. They investigated his sex life and rumors that he got a drug dealer pregnant, which weren’t true. They put 24-hour surveillance on his home. They went over each and every ticket he issued. They interviewed dozens of people, turning over every rock they could, and still they found nothing. Except for one case: an accident where a driver hit two parked cars and drove three blocks home before calling the police. That’s the egregious case state investigators used to charge Sewell and destroy him. For not charging the driver, who they claimed Sewell knew from a previous membership of a Mason’s chapter, but evidence revealed he had no relationship with.
Now, the reason I bring up this case is because what I really think is going on here was not Sewell’s decision to forgo charges against the driver. I mean, think about it. Do we really want police to charge every single person they encounter? Do we want cops to go out and enforce laws to the letter to the point that everyone potentially commits a crime every day? At least, we don’t. But I think the rule Sewell really broke was an unspoken code of law enforcement that helping people is simply bad for business. I think that’s why I believe that the trial of Kelvin Sewell was not about not charging a man for running into a parked car. No, I think Sewell’s original sin was fighting back against the law enforcement-industrial complex by refusing to make poor people criminals.
So what am I trying to say here? One of the things we learned when we investigated the case was that the drug task force that had been going into Pocomoke and arresting people for minor drug violations were also some of the highest paid cops in the county. They were the typical plain clothes unit that we saw throughout the country, notorious for disrupting communities and making bad arrests. In fact, they were so notorious that a former member of the drug task force working in the same area actually told us they were so corrupt they would do financial workups on people before they raided their homes. Let’s listen.
[AUDIO CLIP BEGINS]
Speaker: A lot of times we were deciding upon what car to go after or what target to go after, what person to go after, we were making that decision upon the value of their assets. We do financial workups on people. Now, it wasn’t always about how much dope you’re bringing into the county.
[AUDIO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: Which is why Sewell’s case has so many similarities to the story we just reported on. When you push back against the business and power of law enforcement, police use the tools of criminality not to just silence you, but to destroy you. No institution has as much power in America to retaliate in ways that are as thoroughly devastating to the person they are focused on. No other government agency can put you in a cage or take your assets or force you to hire a lawyer. No other institution can literally comb through your life and find anything or any pretext to put you behind bars or destroy your career. That’s why law enforcement often seems so out of control in this country, because the tools they have to silence all of us are simply too powerful to be in the hands of any individual without vigilant accountability.
That’s why on the show we spend so much time investigating the mechanisms and the processes that keep policing both insular and, ironically, above the law. That’s why we ignore law enforcement rhetoric and investigate like we did in the case of Cody Cecil, who was arrested in the small town of Milton, West Virginia, a city where police wrote hundreds of thousands of dollars of tickets for a town of just 2,500 people. That’s why we took six years to do a documentary on what happened to Sewell in a film called The Friendliest Town – Which, incidentally, you can watch for free by clicking on the links pin in the comment section below. Not just because we want to document the legal travails of a police chief in a small Eastern shore town, but because of what it says about the project of policing as a whole, how it is in some ways antithetical to a democracy.
I mean, how can policing and our free republic coexist if the police who have done wrong can fight back with the devastating tools of incarceration and financial ruin? What public institution can be both productive and responsive to the community if they can literally rob the political agency of the people they purport to serve? That’s the problem we see in both these cases and that’s why it’s so critical to examine the power and the politics of policing in-depth. Because if we don’t, the story of a whistleblower cop being silenced is just the beginning of how a badge becomes a shield from the truth and a license to punish those who least deserve it.
I want to thank our guest Sergeant Esqueda for his time and for coming forward with the truth about Eric Lurry’s death. Thank you so much, Javier. And of course, I want to thank intrepid reporter Stephen Janis for his writing, research, and editing on this piece. Thank you, Stephen.
Stephen Janis: Taya, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
Taya Graham: I want to thank friend of the show Noli Dee for her support. Thanks, Noli Dee. And I want to give a very special thank you to our Patreons. We really do appreciate you. I want you watching to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct or brutality, please share it with us and we might be able to investigate. Please reach out to us. You can email us tips privately par@therealnews.com and share your evidence of police misconduct. You can also message us at Police Accountability Report on Facebook or Instagram, or @eyesonpolice on Twitter. Of course, you can always message me directly at @tayasbaltimore on Twitter and Facebook. And please like and comment. You know I read your comments and appreciate them. We do have a Patreon link pinned in the comments below if you feel inspired to donate. We do not run ads or take corporate dollars, so anything you can spare is greatly appreciated.
My name is Taya Graham, and I am your host of the Police Accountability Report. Please be safe out there.
The Baltimore Police Department’s decades of gun seizures have not reduced violent crimes such as nonfatal shootings and murders. Through public information requests, Battleground Baltimore obtained the police department’s gun seizure numbers and other related police and crime data between 1990-2021—a time period of 31 years in which the city surpassed 300 homicides per year 17 times.
A close look at the data reveals what more and more people working in the criminal legal system across the country have argued: Seizing “illegal” guns does not reduce violent crime, although gun seizures and gun possession arrests remain metrics frequently cited by police (and praised as a prime example of “proactive policing”).
Not only are gun seizures not reducing crime, the tactic destabilizes Black communities where “gun interdiction” is prioritized and almost exclusively enforced.
“The current intense focus on illegal gun possession without a license is having no effect on the gun violence crisis,”Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner wrote in a report released in December that looked at 2,000 shootings.
Comparing Baltimore City numbers from 2019, the year with the most homicides over the past 30 years, with 2011, the year with the least murders during the same time period, shows Krasner’s argument is true in Baltimore, too.
In 2019 in Baltimore City, there were 348 murders, 2,203 gun seizures, and 1,161 weapons possession arrests. In 2011, there were 196 murders, 2,178 gun seizures, and 1,224 weapons possession arrests.
The graphs below show, year-to-year, the number of gun seizures and weapons possession arrests and the number of murders and nonfatal shootings (only available since 2000).
Readers should note that the Y-axis for each graph above is significantly different, but splitting the data across two graphs makes the year-to-year fluctuations more apparent. Battleground Baltimore has also provided a graph at the bottom of this article that puts all four of these parameters on the same graph.
Additionally, numbers for nonfatal shootings are not available before 2000. According to the Baltimore Police Department, nonfatal shootings before that year were categorized as “aggravated assault” and fell in with a number of other violent crimes. As a result, the exact number of nonfatal shootings—a core metric of police violence reduction—is not easily accessible. The general trend since 2000, however, has been that the number of nonfatal shootings at least doubles the number of murders.
Gun seizing is a Sisyphean task
It is not possible to seize enough guns to counter the number of guns currently out there, let alone respond to new legal or “illegal” guns introduced into the world. In 2021, Americans purchased nearly 19 million guns.
A year after Baltimore City’s GTTF was federally indicted, and amid city and state-level conversations about police reform and ending plainclothes policing, gun seizures actually increased.
Former Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld told me in 2018 that he began to realize that seizing guns was a bit like fighting the drug war. It felt “endless,” he explained.
“In Baltimore, at the peak of when we were seizing guns—when we were really effective going after guns and trying to get guns off the street—Baltimore PD would take in about 2,500 to 3,000 guns,” Bealefeld said. “Every year in the state of Maryland—every year—30,000 brand-new guns were being sold. We would seize 4,000 and high-five and claim victory and have photographs. But we can’t even keep up with the flow they sold that year.”
Bealefeld was commissioner from the middle of 2007 to about the middle of 2012, a period in which Baltimore City famously reduced arrests while also reducing homicides. In 2006, Baltimore Police made 90,283 arrests and the city endured 276 homicides. In 2011, Bealefeld’s last full year as commissioner, Baltimore Police arrested 60,009 people and there were 196 homicides, the lowest the city has seen since 1977 when there were 171 homicides.
Gun seizures and weapons possession arrests also dropped during this 2007-2012 “Bealefeld era.” In 2006, there were 3,055 seizures and 1,348 weapon possession arrests. In 2011, there were 2,178 seizures and 1,244 weapon possession arrests.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has also questioned the efficacy of focusing on gun possession. “We need to recognize that not every person charged with possessing an illegal gun in New York City is a driver of violence,” Bragg wrote on his campaign website. “My dad had an illegal gun not because he liked guns or because he was ‘dangerous’; he had a gun because of crime in the neighborhood. This was not an idle notion.”
Daniel Carlin-Weber, a Baltimore-based firearms instructor and gun rights advocate who is white, told Battleground Baltimore “that Black citizens have the laws disproportionately enforced” against them when it comes to gun possession.
“Maryland is continuing to effectively eliminate the Second Amendment for whole classes of people who deserve to be able to exercise it like anyone else,” he said.
During a State Senate hearing on “ghost guns” this week, State Senator Will Smith noted that he is “struggling mightily” with navigating additional gun laws and increased penalties for possession because this increases already racially disproportionate policing.
“A lot of the laws we’d put into place for gun safety would disparately impact Black and Brown communities,” Smith said. “Some of the legislation we’ve got before us puts more Black and Brown young men essentially into jail.”
Gun seizing cops create chaos
Not only are gun seizures not reducing crime, the tactic destabilizes Black communities where “gun interdiction” is prioritized and almost exclusively enforced.
Data obtained by Battleground Baltimore shows that since 1990, the annual homicide clearance rate has significantly declined. In 1990, the clearance rate was 75.7%. In 2021, it was 42%.
Baltimore City has seen some of the worst of what gun policing has to offer. The Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), a plainclothes investigative unit formed in 2007 specifically to go after the so-called “bad guys with guns,” was federally indicted in 2017 for criminal conspiracy. Publicly, the unit was praised for its gun seizure numbers (very few of which stood up to enough scrutiny to take to trial). In reality, the task force was using its gun-seizing mission to terrorize citizens, often illegally stopping people and then robbing them.
In 2016, the last full year GTTF was active, there were 2,124 gun seizures. In 2017 (GTTF was indicted in March 2017) there were 1,917 gun seizures. A year after Baltimore City’s GTTF was federally indicted, and amid city and state-level conversations about police reform and ending plainclothes policing, gun seizures actually increased.
In 2018, the number of gun seizures nearly doubled at 3,911.
The behavior of Baltimore’s gun unit was extreme, but corruption among so-called “hard-charging” gun units is common. Last year, a former Metropolitan Police Department commander reached out to me because of the behavior they had seen within the Gun Recovery Unit, or “GRU,” in Washington, DC.
“Leadership focuses on how many guns GRU recovers and if an arrest is made with the recovery,” the former commander told me. “There is very little, if any, review of how the gun was recovered or how the arrest was made.”
Following George Floyd’s murder and nationwide demands for police accountability, New York City announced it would be disbanding its so-called “Anti-Crime” units, which operate similar to gun units in Baltimore and DC.
“The Anti-Crime units’ aggressive mentality seeded resentment. Frequent car stops and daily frisks in Black and Latino neighborhoods bred anger over a perceived disregard for residents’ constitutional rights,” George Joseph and Gabriel Sandoval wrote. “Because of the combative nature of their assignments, Anti-Crime and other plainclothes officers generated numerous civilian complaints and were at the center of a disproportionate number of fatal police shootings.”
As Fordham University Law Professor John Pfaff noted in Slate this week, New York City Mayor Eric Adams “promises to revive the NYPD’s undercover ‘anti-crime units’—disbanded in 2020 amid concerns about unconstitutional stops and excessive violence—and rechristen them ‘Neighborhood Safety Teams,’ deploying 400 to 500 officers on the streets to focus on ‘gun removals.’”
More broadly, Pfaff’s article is about the Philadelphia shootings report and how Krasner’s commentary and data analysis counters Adam’s much-ballyhooed tough-on-crime plan.
“Gun violence is an immediate concern,” Pfaff wrote. “But much of the data provided by the Philadelphia report…caution[s] that a broad-brush effort to stop the flow of guns may accomplish little on its own terms, and may even exacerbate some of the underlying causes of violence.”
Baltimore Police’s plummeting clearance rate
Locally, the most vocal critics of this gun-grabbing, statistics-driven strategy have been gun rights advocates, such Maryland Shall Issue. In testimony provided to legislators earlier this month, Maryland Shall Issue cited gun seizing’s inability to reduce violence as reason for opposing laws that would increase penalties for possessing a “ghost gun.”
“There is no correlation (much less cause and effect) between guns seized and violent crime. A more relevant statistic is the clearance rate for serious crimes,” Maryland Shall Issue’s statement reads. “BPD’s arrest clearance rate for murder in 2020 was a merely 28.7% and only 44.9% in 2011. By comparison, the nationwide clearance rate for murder is 54.4%. Baltimore’s clearance rate for homicides is plainly abysmal, a reality that does not go unnoticed by violent criminals and law-abiding citizens alike.”
Data obtained by Battleground Baltimore shows that since 1990, the annual homicide clearance rate has significantly declined. In 1990, the clearance rate was 75.7%. In 2021, it was 42%. Arrests for murders have also plummeted. In 1990, there were 347 arrests for murder. In 2020, there were 102 (Baltimore Police did not provide Battleground Baltimore with 2021’s number).
Krasner has argued that going after gun possession “distracts from successfully investigating shootings” and gets in the way of actually reducing violence through solving cases.
Consider the machinations police in Baltimore are willing to go through to seize just one gun. In a high-profile 2017 arrest, Baltimore Police Officer David Burch searched a Black man named Rasherd Lewis inside of a convenience store because, according to Burch, he had a tip that Lewis had a gun on him. Burch, who said he discovered where Lewis was via Citiwatch surveillance, approached Lewis, claimed he smelled cannabis on him, and used the cannabis smell to search him, where he found a handgun.
Additionally, the police’s inability to reduce violence no matter the number of guns seized puts people at risk, and that means they are more apt to obtain a gun for protection—“illegally,” if they must.
“Most [at-risk youth] possessed or used guns out of a generalized fear of being victimized or a specific fear of retaliation. A history of violence victimization also informed the decision to carry a firearm,” the National Institute For Justice wrote last year. “Many also reportedly felt a pervasive fear of the state, particularly law enforcement.”
Baltimore City Police Department Commissioner Michael Harrison has frequently focused on gun seizures. Following a series of shootings around Memorial Day 2021, Harrison spoke to local television affiliate Fox45 and said that crime in Baltimore is the way it is because there is “a lack of consequences for carrying guns.”
Harrison pretty much said the same thing in 2019 after a burst of troubling shootings around Memorial Day. Then, he promised that police would be “aggressive” about going after guns.
Recently, Mayor Brandon Scott bemoaned an especially deadly January, with 36 homicides and 49 nonfatal shootings, but stressed that police were working on it. There were 111 “gun arrests” in January, he boasted.
One of the reasons for seizing guns is not only to get them “off the street” but to use them as evidence and trace them to other crimes. But last week, when Baltimore City Police Commissioner Michael Harrison was asked how often guns that are seized are traced back to crimes, he said he did not know.
“I don’t have those statistics at my disposal at this moment,” Harrison said.
Pre-release and minimum security facilities connect incarcerated individuals to essential resources for re-entering society and to opportunities for work release, special leave, compassionate leave, and family leave. In the state of Maryland, there are nine separate pre-release and minimum security facilities for men; for women, there are zero. “At the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women (MCI-W) in Jessup, Maryland,” as noted by the grassroots nonprofit Out for Justice, “as many as 1 in 10 women have achieved pre-release status. However, as many as 30% of the women on pre-release status have not been assigned to a work opportunity.”
In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Eddie Conway and Charles Hopkins (Mansa Musa) speak with Nicole Hanson-Mundell, executive director of Out For Justice, about the Maryland Gender-Responsive Prerelease Act and the fight to add the construction of a standalone, community-based prerelease facility for women to the Department of Public and Correctional Service budget during their hearing on Feb. 17, 2022.
When a small town police department came under fire for a series of questionable arrests, PAR dug deeper into the finances of Milton, West Virginia. What we uncovered reveals how economic inequality fuels bad policing, and how prioritization of law enforcement over other communal needs is often at the root of bad public policy.
Pre-Production: Stephen Janis Studio/Post-Production: Stephen Janis, Dwayne Gladden
Transcript
Taya Graham: Hello. My name is Taya Graham, and welcome to the Police Accountability Report. As I always make clear, this show has a single purpose: holding the politically powerful institution of policing accountable. And to do so, we don’t just focus on the bad behavior of individual cops. Instead we examine the system that makes bad policing possible. And today we will do so by digging deeper behind the scenes of a town and its police department which has been at the center of several controversial arrests caught on video. We are following up because after we published our stories we received multiple calls and complaints about the Milton Police Department and the city itself. And what we uncovered illustrates exactly what we’re talking about when we promise to examine the system that makes bad policing possible.
But before I get started, I want you watching to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct, please email it to us privately at par@therealnews.com, and we might be able to investigate for you. And please like, share, and comment on our videos. You know I read your comments and appreciate them. And of course you can always reach out to me directly @tayasbaltimore on Facebook or Twitter. And of course, if you can, please hit the Patreon donate link pinned in the comments below, because we do have some extras there for the PAR family. Okay, we’ve gotten that out of the way.
Now, as you may recall, in our last show we showed you this video, the arrest of Caleb Dial by a Milton, West Virginia, police officer. As we revealed on the show, the report the officer filed depicted a completely different version of events than what was captured by a Ring camera outside the home where Caleb was arrested. In fact, the difference between what happened and the report was so stunning we felt compelled to dig deeper into the town of Milton and what is going on with policing over there. But before I get to that, I want to review once again the disturbing video that shows how the police officer conjured a completely different set of facts surrounding the arrest of Caleb than what was caught on camera.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Police Officer: [inaudible] Turn around for me. [inaudible] officer safe. Okay?
Caleb Dial: Yeah, that’s fine.
Police Officer: You’re not under arrest.
Caleb Dial: I know.
Police Officer: You understand [inaudible].
Caleb Dial: I understand.
Police Officer: What’s going on?
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: “I observed the defendant struggling to stand. As I began to speak with the defendant, he became very agitated and kept on raising his voice at me. I asked him several times to calm down and then decided to detain him for officer safety.”
But since we aired this video, we have been overwhelmed by calls and emails from people who say they have had similar experiences with the Milton police. In fact, we received so many complaints we felt like we had to revisit this town once again and try to understand what’s going on there. We wanted to dig deeper, not just into a small West Virginia town, but how rural policing works in tandem with the government to extract wealth from those who can least afford it.
But before I get into those details, I want to update you on the first story that brought Milton police to our attention. It involves a young man named Cody Cecil. He was parked in a Milton, West Virginia, campground when police raided his home without showing a warrant. Let’s watch.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Cody Cecil: I need a warrant.
Officer: I know what you need.
Cody Cecil: See what I’m saying? Why isn’t that my Constitutional right?
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: Cody was arrested and is now facing five charges, among them possession with intent to distribute and transporting drugs across state lines. All because he had eight immature Delta-8 hemp plants in his RV. Cody was initially given a $100,000 bail. But after we started making phone calls and sending emails, it was mysteriously reduced to $20,000. And that’s when a friend of Cody’s and one of our viewers decided to go to West Virginia and bail him out. It was a harrowing experience, which he recounted to us via Zoom from West Virginia. Let’s listen.
[VIDEO CLIP BEGINS]
Christopher Shellhammer:The first obstacle was being sent to the wrong offices by security at the front. After we were finally directed to the proper office and handed them the bail order that we were working with, they noticed that the date, the return date for this order had already passed because he had a hearing a few days ago. So without changing the return date on that bail order, they could not allow me to post the bail.
[VIDEO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: Cody was eventually released. And we’ll be talking to him later for the very first time since he was let go. But of course Cody’s ordeal is just the beginning of the story, not the end. Because as I said, after we published stories on the arrest of both Cody and Caleb, the complaints about Milton were overwhelming. Every day we receive new comments and concerns from viewers about what’s going on in the small West Virginia town. And before I get into our investigation regarding what we’ve uncovered, I’m going to share with you just some of the discussion we’ve had with people who have suffered because of this town’s emphasis on law enforcement. Just a note, many of these people did not want to go on camera out of fear of retribution. So we’re just going to play their audio so you can hear what they had to say or read relevant excerpts from their emails.
For example, one of our viewers has simply stopped visiting Milton because he’s been pulled over so many times. And in fact, a single stop led to nearly 1000 dollars in tickets. Let’s listen.
[AUDIO CLIP BEGINS]
Speaker 1: We [inaudible] along and we were going down the road and they pulled us over. And they were just real rude and hateful. And they wouldn’t verbally tell why they pulled us over.
[AUDIO CLIP ENDS]
Taya Graham: Now, I want to read an excerpt from an email that was sent to us by a viewer. It also recounts abuse at the hands of Milton County police. Let me read them to you on the screen. And again, we are protecting the identity of the person who sent it out of fear of retaliation.
“Thank you for covering the Milton Police Department. They have been corrupt for years and everyone knows it, but there’s nothing anyone could do.” And another. “I live in Milton. The whole government is corrupt. The mayor had the police hold people’s ID when they impound cars.”
And this email, which seems to hint at other problems in the town that, as we noted at the beginning of the show, point to broader problems that come with an overemphasis on law enforcement. “Also, another big issue in Milton is the water. There is always something wrong with the water, and after increases in taxation, nothing has improved. There is more to the water situation that needs to be investigated. I’ve heard that there’s a private investigation going on with the water.”
Which led us to dig even deeper into the finances of the town and why policing was so aggressive. The point is that all the information we received didn’t just reinforce the idea that Milton’s police department was problematic, but also pointed to other problems in the community that had been overlooked while the city built a new police department headquarters, pictured here. So to go through what we uncovered, I’m going to be joined by my reporting partner Stephen Janis to break this down. Stephen, thank you for joining me.
Stephen Janis: Thanks for having me, Taya. I appreciate it.
Taya Graham: So first I want you to review the information about the town’s finances that we uncovered in our initial investigation just for background. What did we learn and why does it matter?
Stephen Janis: Well we learned that there were two things going on. There was an increase in fines which was almost exponential, or was exponential, and then an increase in the size of the police budget. So fines went from a couple hundred thousand to almost 500,000 to 600,000 per year. And the police budget went from a couple hundred thousand to 1.2 million to a million dollars a year. So these two things rose in tandem and that’s what we found.
Taya Graham: So the next thing I want to discuss with you is a public information request you sent to the city. What was the information you were seeking and what has the response been?
Stephen Janis: Yes, I sent a three part information request. Number one and number two was a breakdown in fines, whether they’re court costs, whether they’re related to towing vehicles, so we could just get a sense of what these fines were for, what kind of tickets they’re writing, how many tickets they’re writing. Very specific breakdown.
The other thing I asked about was what kind of contract they had with A-1 Wrecking, which is a towing company which the city prefers to use or has been using in the past. Which, according to media reports that we looked at, the mayor actually owned at one point. So both of those things, I wanted to get as much detail as possible so that we could report back to you to give you breakdowns saying what fines were levied and how much money is going to this company.
Taya Graham: Now we also have been looking into the problem with the water system. You have been digging into EPA records. What have you found? And what have you learned about the city of Milton and its alleged water issues?
Stephen Janis: Well, there’s several things going on. There are multiple citations, EPA violations that have been cited over the past couple years due to a water compliance report that’s been compiled by a nonprofit organization. They’re also, since 2019 they haven’t filed a community water report on the quality of water. And so those two things raise big concerns. We also found out that they have filed an application request to obtain money from the American Recovery Act to pay for an overhaul of the water system, about 7.9 million dollars. Which raises another question as to why or what they did with the money that they got from raising the rates for people. In other words, why did they raise the rates if they’re now seeking money from the federal government to pay for the entire overhaul of the water system? We don’t know if that grant’s been approved. We have asked, but it does raise a lot of questions about the water system.
Taya Graham: And what, if anything, are they doing about it?
Stephen Janis: Well, I think this is the equivalent of a municipal hail Mary pass. That they’re trying to get all the money that they didn’t spend on improving the water system from the rate increase to do the water system overhaul from the American Recovery Act. So really I think, in a sense, it raises great questions about what happened to the money from the raised rates.
Taya Graham: Now there is more you uncovered when you were looking into the financing behind the new hotel in town. They were giving a $10 million tax break called a TIF. Can you explain what a TIF is and how it works? And what would your concerns be as a resident about this TIF?
Stephen Janis: Well, a TIF is what’s known as a tax increment finance. And a really shorthand way of explaining it is it means that money is captured from increased assessed value of property and put back into the property. So in other words, if you put an addition on your house and your house went up in value, the new taxes in your house would go to you to make that addition. So it’s really a way of allowing a developer to use the taxes he or she would pay to pay for their property. And that’s what’s happening with the hotel.
The thing that’s really weird about it is I can’t find any documentation on the deal. Generally speaking TIFs have reports, [but for] analysis, things that looked at whether or not this TIF is justified. Because they’re supposed to go in blighted areas. So what we can’t find out is anything on the deal, how much money has been allotted to certain aspects of the deal and how the deal’s being financed. I can’t even really find the bond reports. So I’ve been spending a lot of time talking to officials in the West Virginia Development Corporation and other places to try to find the information. We’re going to keep working on it. Raises a lot of concerns, but we’re going to keep on it.
Taya Graham: So in part of your research, you also uncover something really startling which is a deal that was done in Cabell County. The same county which contains Milton, where Cody Cecil was arrested for the possession of cannabis plants. What did you find out?
Stephen Janis: Well, the county signed a huge development deal with the Trulieve Corporation to grow marijuana and to manufacture medical marijuana in the same county where Cody was essentially arrested. And this is really interesting because, here’s this big deal. They’re pouring a lot of money into a huge corporation, which is one of the biggest medical marijuana providers in the country. And meanwhile, we learned that when the police raided Cody’s trailer they took his checkbook, his business cards, all of his growing supplies, materials, books on growing marijuana. I mean he was like a budding – No pun intended – Weed entrepreneur who was going around the country sort of speaking the gospel of keeping weed in small businesses. And here they are, they arrest him. They confiscate almost everything of value that has to do with his business. At the same time, that same county is giving money to a huge corporation. It just shows you how this country works and how the political economy of policing keeps the poor poor and makes the rich richer.
Taya Graham: Okay. Wait. So I’m supposed to believe that the county made a deal to open a legal pot grow and yet they arrested Cody for having plants. What does this tell you about the political economy of policing?
Stephen Janis: Yeah. Yeah. Taya, it’s really kind of stunning, but it also is really an example of what goes on in this country. You have small entrepreneurs like Cody who are sitting in jail, who are now facing multiple charges, distribution. But right down the road the government’s literally financing people to do the same exact thing. I mean, how crazy is that? And I think how unfortunate that is, that a small business owner who wants to try to make it in the weed business is being incarcerated and charged as a drug dealer. When, down the road, a major corporation with major Wall Street backing is getting financing from the government to do the exact same thing. It shows how hypocritical this country is and how schizophrenic we are when it comes to marijuana and other things.
Taya Graham: And now I am finally joined by Cody Cecil to talk about his arrest and the difficulties his friends and family have had in trying to bail him out, and their on the ground experience of Milton. Cody, thank you so much for joining me. And also I want to welcome your friend Christopher Shellhammer, who was essential in helping bail you out.
Cody Cecil: Oh, thank you. Thank you. I’m actually super glad to see you.
Taya Graham: So first, Cody, just tell me how you feel. I mean, your mom reached out to us. And hundreds of thousands of people watched what happened to you and they reached out on your behalf. And then also many residents alleged misconduct by the Milton Police Department. How do you feel right now?
Cody Cecil: A little shell shocked to be honest because the police brutality is just, it was shocking to begin with. So I was completely unaware and caught off guard. And I felt as if it just was done completely horribly wrong. It wasn’t, just didn’t seem American. And I just didn’t understand why. It’s just, I’m glad that everyone’s been able to help and I’m very appreciative of it. And I wanted to give a thank you to you and everybody here, and everything that’s been going on. And I’m just glad that it can finally get out, that the horrible stuff that’s been going on, and it was able to be caught on camera and I was just fortunate enough to do so.
Taya Graham: What were the conditions like in the jail?
Cody Cecil: Yeah, the jails were shitty. Absolutely horrible. So I mean, but it’s just another broken system in America. I’ve been to jail in Detroit, so it’s quite the same, but at the same time it’s… The system shouldn’t be that way. It’s not any type of punishment. It’s just re-institutionalizing people and herding them along for the next paycheck. It’s all monetized. So that’s what it’s turned into. Another government official is just reaching in and collecting their dollar for keeping people cattled together.
Taya Graham: How much was paid to get you out of jail? I mean, how difficult was it to post bail? What were the obstacles?
Cody Cecil: My people on my team’s been working on trying to help me and get me out for the last two weeks. And they were down here once before. It took X amount of hours and time and money to drive out of here and take their time to do that. Then they got turned around then because they had to get a different type of bond. It was just all the runaround. Then they were down here for the last two days having to get hotels and stay. And finally later on this evening I was released.
Christopher Shellhammer: The actual bond amount was a $20,000 bond, which we paid 10% of plus fees. And then you also need to factor in the cost of the travel down here, the hotels, food. [crosstalk]
Cody Cecil: Everything. And this is for two weeks, they came down the last time.
Taya Graham: What charges are you facing now?
Cody Cecil: It’s too much of a list. And when you go into the jail, they don’t –
Christopher Shellhammer:Yeah. They stacked them up pretty good.
Cody Cecil: Yeah. And then when you go into the jails they don’t even get you any paperwork to go back with.
Taya Graham: How important did you think it was to film the officers and how did you know it was so important to record them?
Cody Cecil: I just felt like it was the right thing to do. If they’re supposed to be able to do their job then I should be able to protect myself and do mine. And that was my due diligence to do so.
Taya Graham: So Cody, this might surprise you, but we found a legal pot growing operation in West Virginia in Cabell County, the same county that has Milton. The county just approved support for a 100-acre marijuana growth facility. How does that make you feel, to know that they are approving a major dispenser to grow while you’re locked up for your plants?
Cody Cecil: This is the question that I’ve been wanting to talk about. This is welcome to the monopolization of America’s first big green industry that we could have had. But people are letting it walk away. This is the fight that I’m out here fighting for in the Cannabis Freedom Act. This is a plant that should be for the people, and given to the people, and monetized by the people. But it’s something that the government’s stripping from us in front of our faces, and I’m not going to stand around and let it happen. And I’ve been traveling and proclaiming my act in this and people didn’t quite understand until now, I guess.
Taya Graham: And just on a personal note, what I think we see with Cody Cecil and Caleb Dial and the many others that reached out to us privately, is that the politicians of Milton have bent to the will of the wealthy. City hall has been renovated, the police have a new headquarters and doubled their budget, but many of the people of Milton have told me that they themselves feel like they’re being run out of town. While a grand luxury hotel and a golf course is being built, people in Milton don’t have safe, clean drinking water. And while the police department has tripled and the amount of court fees and fines that they bring in have doubled, we’re told that the elderly in the community are losing their houses. This is what happens when law enforcement represents the will of the elites, and their wants are prioritized over the needs of the people.
Now, this is usually the part of the show where I try to tie together all the elements of the story we have just told and then tease out the parts that are most relevant to the overarching issues with American policing. Meaning, I like to examine what a specific story tells us about law enforcement that might not be readily apparent and how that fits into the larger context. I guess you could call it my own attempt at a post reporting analysis. But today I’m going to do something a little different. I’m not going to talk about policing at all. I’m going to focus on an institution that I think has more to do with what we see in Milton than aberrant police powers and an ineffectual city council. I’m going to talk about journalism, or the lack of it. Because I think the story has more to do with the consequences of not having independent journalists than just a bunch of overeager or bad cops.
I mean, what we see in cities like Milton and other communities we cover across the country is a single common denominator: a singular lack of independent journalists to hold people in power accountable. Now it’s worth noting there are many heroic cop watchers and auditors who are trying to fill the gap. People armed with cell phones and cameras and YouTube channels who do the hard work that journalists used to do. But to be fair, cop watchers can’t be everywhere. And sometimes a cell phone video isn’t enough to battle City Hall which has plenty of tools at its disposal to make the work of citizen journalists nearly impossible. That’s why I think the lack of journalists is so critical to what’s happening in Milton. Consider the link I’m showing you on the screen. It’s a link to a story posted by a local television station, West Virginia WCHS, or Fox 11, on the false and possibly illegal arrest of Caleb Dial.
As you can see, the story depicts Caleb as a criminal charged with felony escape. The photo is the same picture posted on the department’s Facebook page that we’ve already pointed out completely violates the Constitutional right of being presumed innocent before trial. But what’s even worse is that after the charges were dropped against Caleb, he contacted the station and asked them to take the story down, but they have not even taken the time to reply. In fact, we reached out to the newsroom and asked them to explain why they won’t respond to him, and guess what? We haven’t heard back either. Now I’m not going to give the station a hard time just because they reprinted a press release from a police department without getting comment from the subject of the story. I mean, it is part of the police propaganda mechanism we discuss so often and it’s also why people don’t trust mainstream media in general. But the facts in the press release were unfortunately true at the time, even though they were based upon a sworn statement from an officer that we have seen with our own eyes was nothing if not inaccurate.
What my real problem with this particular television station and mainstream media in general is how sometimes they simply ignore the communities they are supposed to serve. I mean, why didn’t someone at the station at least address Caleb’s concerns? Why wouldn’t they be interested in speaking to the subject of their breathless story that Caleb was a dangerous felon. I mean, don’t we always want to get both sides of the story? Which brings me back to my point about the media and what the lack of viable local journalists means for towns like Milton and beyond. Because along with our reporting on Milton’s penchant for collecting fines and perhaps lax management of its water supply, another interesting fact has emerged about its ambitions to build a luxury hotel. That’s because it turns out the beneficiary of the tax break to build the resort is none other than Jeff Hoops.
Hoops is not an unknown entity in West Virginia, but his background apparently didn’t receive a lot of attention during the vetting process to approve the deal. Hoops is best known for running Blackjewel Coal, a firm which declared bankruptcy after the West Virginia environmental authorities said it was too reckless to keep mining. But it’s also the company that has been accused of stiffing coal miners for back pay in Kentucky amid allegations reported by The Wall Street Journal that Hoops used shell companies to sign contracts with companies controlled by families and friends, which allowed him to extract millions from the now bankrupt firm. And now he is building a luxury resort with an Olympic size swimming pool, a 500-seat ballroom, a 400-seat steakhouse, and a golf course, right in Milton. And already has a second resort planned with an amphitheater that seats 3,500. That could cause a lot of change to a small town.
Now, the point is that what the city of Milton lacks is not people who care about their community or people who want to hold their government accountable. What they lack are dedicated journalists to bring them the information they need to make informed decisions. I mean, the outpouring of comments from the people of the city exemplifies a community that is both engaged and concerned. What they need are reporters who will amplify their voices and tell their stories and report the facts that will enable them to have a say in how they are governed. And let me say this to the people of Milton and all the other small towns that are off the radar of the mainstream media conglomerates. It’s a message that resonates from the core of my commitment as an independent journalist: we hear you. We are listening, and what you say to us matters. And we will do all that we can with the limited resources afforded to us to continue reporting your stories.
We will work as hard as possible to inform you and to provide you with context on what drives policy in your community, even if we are hundreds of miles away. The point is we respect your voice and we care about your concerns, and we will continue to do stories like these as long as you continue to need us to do them. Which is why I will end the show with a comment from a viewer who sent us this. “Thank you for taking the time to read this. And also thank you for covering West Virginia. That is a forgotten state.”
Well we have not, nor will we, forget the people of Milton, West Virginia, or any of the other people who need us.
I want to thank my guest Christopher Shellhammer, who went to bail out Cody, for his time and for keeping us up to date. Thank you, Christopher. And I also want to thank Cody Cecil for sharing his story with us. I know so many people are relieved that you have finally been released from jail, and we wish you the very best. And of course, I have to thank intrepid reporter Stephen Janis for his writing, research, and editing on this piece. Thank you, Stephen.
Stephen Janis: Thanks for having me, Taya. I appreciate it.
Taya Graham: And I want to thank friend of the show Noli Dee for her support. Thanks, Noli Dee. And a very special thanks to our Patreons. We appreciate you. And I want you watching to know that if you have evidence of police misconduct or brutality, please share it with us and we might be able to investigate for you. Please reach out to us. You can email us tips privately at par@therealnews.com and share your evidence of police misconduct.
You can also message us at Police Accountability Report on Facebook or Instagram or @eyesonpolice on Twitter. And of course you can always message me directly @tayasbaltimore on Twitter and Facebook. And please, like and comment. You know I read your comments and that I appreciate them. And we have a Patreon link pinned in the comments below. So if you feel inspired, please donate. We don’t run ads or take corporate dollars. So anything you can spare is greatly appreciated. My name is Taya Graham and I am your host of the Police Accountability Report. Please be safe out there.
Under gray skies so dense they seemed impermeable, Gloria Williams was escorted out of the custody of Louisiana’s Department of Public Safety & Corrections on Jan. 25, 2022. At age 76, the longest-held female prisoner in Louisiana and the last living female 10/6 lifer was paroled after 51 years.
Williams, better known as “Mama Glo,” was leaving a lot of friends behind, in flesh and in spirit, including Mary Turner, a sister lifer who’d died in 2017 shortly before her scheduled release. Turner motivated her. Only 16 years old when charged, Williams’ co-defendant Carolyn Hollingsworth, who died inside 15 years ago, also motivated her.
Williams clutched a manila envelope stuffed with papers, cards, and photos in one hand, and a small sack nearly filled with amber plastic bottles of pills in the other. The guard walking with her carried a compact, rolled canvas tote and a single white plastic garbage bag containing all of her worldly possessions, accumulated over five decades.
Williams had been preparing for her release for 918 days, ever since July 22, 2019, when she’d received the Louisiana Board of Pardons & Parole’ 5-0 vote of confidence. During that two-and-a-half-year limbo she caught COVID twice and almost didn’t make it back from the ICU. Double pneumonia has taken its toll. Her overall health is diminished, and she requires oxygen most evenings.
Mary Smith-Moore, her younger sister who’d come from Houston with Williams’ sons James and Darrel to collect her, said she didn’t think any of this was going to be easy for her. “The family will help her through.”
Williams clutched a manila envelope stuffed with papers, cards, and photos in one hand, and a small sack nearly filled with amber plastic bottles of pills in the other. The guard walking with her carried a compact, rolled canvas tote and a single white plastic garbage bag containing all of her worldly possessions, accumulated over five decades.
Her feet were so swollen, her gait so unsure, that just putting one foot in front of the other to get off of prison property seemed a minor miracle. Well-wishers awaiting her at the prison exit shouted their support: “Yaaas, baby! Walk, girl.” From alpha to omega, Mama Glo’s incarceration story, which has spanned 10 US presidencies, was bookended by monstrous thefts. 918 days snatched at the end, tens of thousands of days lost overall. She’d done her sentence, times five. “Waaaaalk!”
Mama Glo leaving prison after over half a century of incarceration on Jan. 25, 2022. Photo Credit: Participatory Defense Movement NOLA.
Before her fate was swept up like so much detritus in the radical reforms to the state’s criminal code in the post-Jim Crow period, Williams had reason for hope. When she was convicted in 1971 by an all-white jury and sentenced to life, she was certain she’d be doing ten years and six months—and, with good behavior, would be eligible for parole. It had been that way since 1925. But state lawmakers revoked the possibility of parole in a well-plotted bait and switch. Without a pardon from the governor, life meant life. All of it.
Before there was Mama Glo
In 1971, Williams was under the influence of a second husband who’d exposed her to heroin. This, according to her younger sister, was her undoing.
“He took her to a dark place; he took her down,” Smith-Moore told The Real News just before the Pardons & Parole Board’s final Zoom hearing on the matter of her sister’s release. Williams was convicted of second-degree murder after what was supposed to be a dramatically staged robbery at a grocery store, including one fake and one unloaded gun, turned into a fatal scuffle with the grocery store owner, Budge Cutrera. “That wasn’t who she was.”
Much like the lives of those who were swallowed into the carceral abyss as a result of a failed and racist 50-year ‘war on drugs,’ Mama Glo’s incarceration has written into it a dark history of white power exerted through the criminal justice system.
One of 12 siblings, Smith-Moore used to visit her older sister every summer back when she was with her first husband. “The house was immaculate, the clothes were washed, the food was cooked when her husband got home,” she recalled. “She was a country girl, a housewife, a mother.”
Much like the lives of those who were swallowed into the carceral abyss as a result of a failed and racist 50-year ‘war on drugs,’ Mama Glo’s incarceration has written into it a dark history of white power exerted through the criminal justice system. Throughout the South, around the time Williams was sentenced, those with the power to rewrite society’s rules to maintain their material advantages—advantages that were temporarily threatened by the legal termination of Jim Crow—were doing just that. And Baton Rouge was no exception. Lawmakers (and the people they listened to) were especially focused on the criminal code.
They whittled away at parole laws in 1973, in 1976, and they revoked the practice altogether in 1979. For the many Black men who were completely innocent of any crime but had entered into plea agreements as an alternative to worse outcomes meted out by racist juries, there was no way out. The same would be true for Williams and her co-defendants. They were the collateral damage of a state asymmetrically warring against its own captured citizens.
Waiting for the hearing to start, Darrell Robertson, Mama Glo’s youngest son, was not yet two years old when his mother was incarcerated for life in 1971. Photo taken on Jan. 25, 2022, by Frances Madeson.
In the context of the convict exemption in the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution, lengthier sentences are simply good business, more bang for the buck: the longer a person can be held, the more the state agencies and corporations that contract prison labor benefit in reduced training costs for a stable, skilled, and captive workforce.
In Louisiana, as Michael Sainato recently reported for The Real News, “[i]n fiscal year 2021, private corporations spent $2,997,984.68 on contracts leasing prison labor, and the state prison labor system reports more than $29 million in operational sales (for example, the sale of agricultural products or livestock raised by state prisoners).”
The state itself uses prison labor. As Julia O’Donoghue reported in 2018, “Under current law, with the governor’s permission, state inmates are allowed to do custodial work on state grounds and at state facilities. Inmates are regularly used to clean, cook and do gardening work at the state Capitol, governor’s mansion and several office buildings in Baton Rouge.”
Sometimes governors grow fond of their servants and reward them with commutation, as was the case with Williams’ other co-defendant, Philip Anthony “Pee-Wee” Harris. He was put to work in the governor’s mansion as a cook for Governor Bobby Jindal, who pardoned him in May 1977.
But gubernatorial commutations are dispensed annually in the dozens, not hundreds or thousands. And as Louisianans subjected to draconian sentences then grow old and sick now, the state faces a moral catastrophe.
That’s when she started escaping
For Williams—who didn’t have a lot of schooling as a youngster, got married at 14, and was a mother of five small children at the time she was sent to Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women (LCIW)—the impossibility of parole induced a panic so intense that she accomplished what few women in Louisiana penal history have ever attempted: she escaped twice in 1973, and attempted again on Independence Day, 1985, until the impulse to try was quite literally tortured out of her with a long stint in solitary.
Her escapes were recounted in the February/March 1995 issue of The Angolite, a newspaper started in 1953 at Louisiana’s largest prison.
“Back then I didn’t know any other way,” she told them. “I just wanted to be free.”
In May 1973, she walked away from guards at Charity Hospital in New Orleans and made it out to Los Angeles, but after about six weeks her brother-in-law turned her in for a small reward. In August of the same year she cut through the prison fence with a wire cutter, again got out to Los Angeles, then traveled with her second husband to Houston, where they were arrested for robbery; she spent eight years in prison in Texas before being returned to LCIW in 1982. In her last attempt, on July 4, 1985, she slugged a guard with a sock full of billiard balls and tried to walk through the lobby, but “[g]uards subdued her before she made it out the front door.”
“Back then I didn’t know any other way,” she told them. “I just wanted to be free.”
The year after Williams was released from solitary confinement, Kathy Randels founded the LCIW Drama Club. The only secular enrichment program available in the prison, the club meets weekly every Saturday and, barring lockdowns at the prison, did so continuously since 1996, until COVID forced a hiatus.
James Robertson, Mama Glo’s eldest son, and Mary Smith-Moore, her younger sister, reacting to the news that Mama Glo would be released after 51 years. Photo taken on Jan. 25, 2022, by Frances Madeson.
Mama Glo joined the group a couple of years later. Randels remembers that, from the beginning, she went deep in the work and pulled no punches. But the first piece where she “really connected to the power of performance” was when her mother died.
“She was not able to be present at the death or the funeral, and she put all of that in her piece,” Randels recalls. Williams’ mother had raised three of her five children, taking them in when her last three teenagers were still at home. Baby Darrel was just one year old. Her debt to her mother was infinite, and to not be allowed to be there by her dying mother’s side to comfort or honor her brought infinite sorrow. “She went through it in front of us.”
Afterwards a young woman told the club, “Y’all sacrifice your lives and stories for the rest of us to learn something.”
“There’s no place you can go where love can’t find you.”
Ausuetta AmorAmenkum, Randel’s partner in the LCIW Drama Club since 2000, says she’s never felt it to be a sacrifice.
“They give me that sense of knowing that there’s no place you can go where love can’t find you.”
They’re not supposed to touch the women, but “we always hug them”; they’re not supposed to talk about any outside stuff, but “we always talk about our lives,” AmorAmenkum said.
Mama Glo told her one day, “When y’all tell us about the outside, we go with you.”
Bonds unbroken
“Sister, my sister,” Williams called out to Mary Smith-Moore as she stepped shakily past the prison gate.
Since the sisters were last physically together, Williams’ youngest daughter, oldest grandson, their brother, a sister, two nieces, and a nephew had all died, and Smith-Moore buried her husband just days prior.
The women embraced for the first time in two and a half years and held on tight. Even as Williams took her first steps of freedom, there was a palpable sense of disbelief among those gathered at the gate. Given the carceral system’s caprice and the relative powerlessness of those held captive within it, nothing was guaranteed. (75-year-old Bobby Sneed, for instance, was held nine months past his release date on flimsy grounds after being locked up in Angola Prison for 47 years. He finally got out in January.)
Looking into each other’s eyes, they were counting blessings and losses, especially of kin: since the sisters were last physically together, Williams’ youngest daughter, oldest grandson, their brother, a sister, two nieces, and a nephew had all died, and Smith-Moore buried her husband just days prior.
“That’s who we are,” Smith-Moore said about their family’s ability to meet this moment together, to carry her elder sister out of Louisiana to safety despite so much fresh grief. “We came from a very strong foundation.”
That day’s parole hearing, billed in advance by some familiar with the process as a near formality, was nothing of the sort. The hearing was painful and draining, especially for the shock it delivered to the victim’s family.
Budge Cutrera, the 64-year-old Italian-American grocer killed by shots fired with his own gun, which he had raised in defense during the 1971 stickup, was supposed to retire a few weeks after the robbery took place. How could he have known that the pistol Williams was holding was her son’s toy, or that the rifle wrapped in a coat and held by Harris wasn’t loaded? Hollingsworth struggled with him over the gun and three shots did their worst.
Though Williams’ finger wasn’t on the trigger, Mr. Cutrera’s son and two grandchildren opposed Williams’ release. What tore them up the most was that in all this time she had never expressed any remorse to them. What they didn’t know was that she has always been strictly prohibited upon punishment by law from contacting them—for any reason. They learned that for the first time in the hearing.
“No one ever told them ‘that’s never going to happen,’” Katie Hunter-Lowrey, crime-survivor organizer at The Promise of Justice Initiative in New Orleans, said after the hearing. “Both the unforgiven and the unforgiving suffer,” she explained. “They’ve been waiting all these years for something that could have been healing, but that the criminal legal system prevents from happening.”
In Louisiana there are mechanisms that could’ve brought the Cutreras the kind of healing they were deprived of. For instance, they could have had a mediated sit-down. “But,” Hunter-Lowrey says, “the system doesn’t inform people. We don’t have a state budget that reflects a society that cares about healing or what happens to survivors of violence. Which is why the cycles are repeated.”
Kathy Randels, Julia Menhati, and Ausuetta AmorAmenkum of the LCIW Drama Club wait for Mama Glo, who’d participated in the club for over 20 years. Photo taken on Jan. 25, 2022, by Frances Madeson.
In a criminal legal system where the state prosecutes crimes against itself, neither the needs of the people who have been hurt or those who have perpetuated the harm are centered.
“Incarcerated people have also experienced violence and lost family members to violence, and that’s not really taken into consideration,” she explained. “But it should be.”
Smith-Moore said she felt for the Cutrera family. Though she hadn’t shopped there, she knew of their grocery store in Opelousas and who they were, and had grieved for the senseless loss of Budge Cutrera when it happened.
“We all did,” she said.
Gubenatorial clemency is not going to cut it
Kerry Myers, deputy director of Louisiana Parole Project, which provided legal and wraparound service to Mama Glo, says they’re working to bring the remaining 55 10/6 lifers home alive.
That’s the first tranche; then they want all lifers who’ve served 20 years or more to be given another look—and there are thousands of them.
The data shows that there’s no public policy imperative to keep them incarcerated, but the only way out by law is the commutation process. But that’s exclusively under the office of the governor’s control. In the simplest and most practical terms, the process has been outstripped by the enormous need, and it does not and probably cannot work fast enough to stave off a humanitarian crisis.
“By virtue of executive function, he is not bound by any timeframe,” Myers explained.
Participatory Defense Movement NOLA hosts Mama Glo’s family and supporters at the Wildmark Hotel in Baton Rouge to watch via Zoom the Louisiana Board of Pardons and Paroles’ final confirmation of Mama Glo’s release. Photo taken on Jan. 25, 2022, by Frances Madeson.
Governor John Bel Edwards could’ve prioritized signing all commutations as they came over one by one from the Pardons & Parole Board, especially during the pandemic. Or he could have taken action on May 8, 2020, when 150 signatories including Myer’s own organization, respectfully begged him to let Mama Glo (and 144 others) go with a stroke of his pen. This was near the beginning of the coronavirus (which rages still throughout Louisiana’s prisons). Or, because it’s totally within his office’s discretion, he need never act.
LPP is advocating for legislation to be introduced in the upcoming March 2022 legislative session.
With over 2,500 lifers over 60 years old, a full 5% of the state’s prison population, the state needs to start moving a lot of people through the system a lot more quickly.
“We’re so glad Mama Glo got to go home,” Myers said. “But we were way past the point in her sentence that her continued incarceration did anything to serve public safety. Keeping her locked up was a waste.”
With 2.1 million incarcerated people, the United States has the largest prison population in the world. But America’s prison system is part of a larger social apparatus that predominantly targets, criminalizes, and polices poor people and people of color. As the monstrous reach of our carceral system extends further into our daily lives, so too have forms of resistance grown in communities around the country and beyond. At this moment in history, what creative possibilities exist for revolting against these institutionalized forms of capture, policing, and criminalization?
In 2021, TRNN Executive Producer and host of Rattling the Bars Eddie Conway joined a blockbuster panel of scholars and activists for the American Studies Association (ASA) to discuss these very questions. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, with permission from the ASA and the panel participants, we are publishing the video recording of this panel, which is entitled “Revolt Against the Carceral World” and is hosted by Professor Dylan Rodríguez.
Jennifer Marley is Tewa, from the Pueblo of San Ildefonso, and has been a member of The Red Nation since 2015. In 2019 she completed her BA with a double major in Native American Studies and American studies from the University of New Mexico, where she served as Kiva Club president from 2018-2019. Marley is currently a PhD student in the American Studies department at the University of New Mexico.
Rachel Herzing lives and works in Oakland, CA, where she fights the violence of policing and imprisonment. She is a co-founder of Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization dedicated to abolishing the prison-industrial complex, and the co-director of the StoryTelling & Organizing Project, a community resource sharing stories of interventions to interpersonal harm that do not rely on policing, imprisonment, or traditional social services.
Sandy Grande is Professor of Political Science and Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Connecticut with affiliations in American Studies, Philosophy, and the Race, Ethnicity and Politics program. Her research and teaching interfaces Native American and Indigenous Studies with critical theory toward the development of more nuanced analyses of the colonial present. She is the author of Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought and a founding member of New York Stands for Standing Rock, a group of scholars and activists that forwards the aims of Native American and Indigenous sovereignty and resurgence.
David Hernández is Faculty Director of Community Engagement and Associate Professor of Latina/o Studies at Mount Holyoke College. His research focuses on immigration enforcement with a particular focus on the US detention regime. He is the co-editor of the anthology Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader and is completing a book manuscript tentatively titled Alien Incarcerations: Immigrant Detention and Lesser Citizenship.
This week, during a hearing that was abbreviated so that city employees could attend the funerals for three Baltimore firefighters, the Board of Estimates quickly approved a little over $31,000 for a durable and lightweight kind of surveillance technology called “a throwbot.” The $31,290 in city funds will go to ReconRobotics Inc. There was no need to look for another vendor because, as the BOE agenda notes, ReconRobotics Inc. “is the sole manufacturer and distributor of these devices.”
Indeed, throwbots seem to be one of a kind. The small rolling device—it looks like two wheels on an axel—is able to capture video and audio and broadcast it back to a small hand-held device in real-time; the device can also be thrown and withstand the force of impact, including 30-foot falls. This makes the technology, which is battery operated and weighs a little over a pound, useful for police who can send it into someone’s home, for example, and surveill the location, or to inspect a “suspect” close-up without putting the police in as much risk. Additionally, the throwbot uses infrared technology, letting law enforcement see in the dark. Primarily, throwbots have been used by police for situations involving SWAT.
Like so many of the toys American police departments get to play with, throwbots were developed as military technology and have slowly trickled down into police departments nationwide. After it was used in Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s, this technology spread to police departments starting in 2011 after ReconRobotics applied to the FCC for a spectrum use waiver, allowing the technology to transmit its live video feed. The technology, like so much military-to-police tech, was introduced along with plenty of advocacy by police and fawning news coverage in many of the towns that purchased throwbots.
Like so many of the toys American police departments get to play with, throwbots were developed as military technology and have slowly trickled down into police departments nationwide.
Last year, Baltimore Police killed one man and shot another during the kind of potential barricade or hostage situation ReconRobotics says their technology can help to end more swiftly—and, they say, “peacefully”—than kicking in a door or throwing flashbang grenades into a home. It is not clear how a citizen enduring a behavioral crisis would know that a “throwbot” tossed through a window or down a hallway is different from a flashbang or any other police weapon.
On Aug. 9, 2021, Marcus Martin, 40 years old, was shot and killed by Baltimore Police Officer Jeffery Archambault of SWAT. Police had been called to the scene because of an assault reported by someone in the home. When police arrived, others in the home were able to leave, and Martin was left alone with a shotgun, surrounded by police officers.
The use of a large, roving police robot escalated the situation between cops and Martin, who, family members said, had lost his job days earlier. Body-worn camera footage of the shooting shows cops discussing bringing the “robot” out and worrying that Martin, who had a shotgun, might shoot at the robot. And that’s exactly what happened: Martin fired at the robot, which was at the front door of his home. That meant Martin was essentially firing at police. No officers were shot by Martin, but soon after Martin shot the robot, Archambault sniped and killed him.
Because the situation began as a call over an assault, it was not diverted to mental health professionals who work for the city. BPD’s Crisis Response Team, trained to better handle behavioral crises like the one Martin was experiencing, were not available because they operate between 11:00AM and 7:00PM.
(In another incident that occurred on Christmas Day last year, 50-year-old Barron Coe was shot and injured by police. Police were called to Coe’s house because of a disturbance. As police on the scene spoke to him, Coe suggested he may have had explosives in the home, said he was armed, and warned of “a major situation.” He told them to get back-up. Then, police said, not long after, Coe had a gun in his waistband and raised it, at which point he was shot by police. For a week after the shooting, police maintained the story that Coe had fired at them, but on Jan. 3 they finally admitted that Coe did not fire his weapon at all. In fact, Coe’s gun had no firing pin and could not fire. BDP’s Crisis Response Team was also not present during Coe’s shooting.)
As Battleground Baltimore has reported, police spending as of late has included $18 million for new police helicopters; $100,000 in additional funding to Metro Crime Stoppers; $759,500 to continue a contract with AI-based audio surveillance tech ShotSpotter; and $6.5 million in red light camera revenue to help BPD balance its budget.
Credit to @ScanthePolice, the local Twitter account dedicated to police transparency, for calling attention to throwbots and for running down the rest of this week’s proposed police spending.
Partial credit for making it easier to get a sense of city spending must also be given to Baltimore City Comptroller Bill Henry. Since he was elected to the comptroller position last year, Henry has been active in calling attention to each week’s agenda and sometimes live-tweeting the BOE meeting. In emails sent out by his communication team, Henry often highlights some of the notable (and egregious) expenditures.
During this week’s BOE meeting where the throwbots were approved, Henry also announced that there is a bid opening up later this month for SWAT tactical vests.
A small-town police department in Milton, West Virginia, is facing more scrutiny after another troubling video surfaced of a questionable arrest. The newly obtained video contradicts the sworn statement of a Milton police officer who said the man who was arrested resisted arrest and tried to escape. PAR investigates the case and delves deeper into the finances of the town, which has nearly doubled its collections of court fines and fees over the past decade.
Pre-Production: Stephen Janis Studio/Post-Production: Stephen Janis, Dwayne Gladden
Transcript
The transcript of this video will be made available as soon as possible.
