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Civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump on Thursday said that former NFL quarterback and racial justice activist Colin Kaepernick will pay for an independent autopsy for Lashawn Thompson, a mentally ill man who died last September in a filthy, insect-infested cell in an overcrowded Atlanta jail.

Crump spoke at a rally and news conference outside the Fulton County Jail, where Thompson, who was arrested last June for alleged misdemeanor simple battery, was held for three months before his death.

“We want to thank Colin Kaepernick for helping this family get to the truth and soon,” Crump said, flanked by Thompson’s relatives.

“What happened to Lashawn Thompson is a human rights violation,” the attorney added. “If we don’t ask the questions and we don’t get the answers and we don’t get to the truth, then next time it could be your loved one. This isn’t just about Lashawn Thompson. This is about every citizen in Fulton County, Georgia.”

Thompson, who suffered from mental health issues, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and transferred to the jail’s psychiatric wing. According to jail records, on September 13 an officer saw Thompson slumped over in his cell, which was so dirty that a staff member who entered it wore protective gear. Inside, Thompson lay dead with his eyes open, his body covered with what Crump said were over 1,000 insect bites. Thompson was 35 years old.

u201cThese are the DEPLORABLE and inhumane conditions Lashawn Thompson had to endure during his stay in the psychiatric wing of the Fulton County (GA) Jail. After his death, he was found with insect bites all over his body. We cannot look away, we must demand justice!u201d

— Ben Crump (@Ben Crump)
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Jail records show that medical and correctional staff repeatedly noted—and voiced concerns about—Thompson’s deteriorating health but did not help him.

“They literally watched his health decline until he died,” Michael Harper, another attorney representing Thompson’s family, said in a statement.

Harper asserted that Thompson “was found dead in a filthy jail cell after being eaten alive by insects and bed bugs.”

An official autopsy could not determine the cause of Thompson’s death but noted an “extremely severe” insect infestation on his body.

“Can you imagine him screaming and him hollering, saying ‘They biting, they biting’ and nobody come,” Thompson’s aunt, Mamie Norman, said at Thursday’s rally. “Nobody. Nobody. I still have no understanding until y’all find out what happened to him.”

u201cBrad McCray u2014 #LashawnThompsonu2019s brother u2014 speaking TRUTH to power about the bug-infested conditions Lashawn was forced to live in at the Fulton County Jail. #JusticeForLashawnThompsonu201d

— Ben Crump (@Ben Crump)
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A report obtained last year from NaphCare—an institutional healthcare services contractor repeatedly accused of neglect—revealed widespread medical negligence in Fulton County Jail’s mental health unit, where more than 90% of inmates were so severely malnourished that they developed cachexia, a wasting syndrome often associated with diseases like advanced cancer or AIDS.

Additionally, “100% of inmates” in the unit “had either lice, scabies, or both.”

Fulton County Sheriff Pat Labat—who called Thompson’s death “absolutely unconscionable”—earlier this week asked for and received the resignation of three top jail officials, including Chief Jailer John Jackson.

“It’s clear to me that it’s time, past time, to clean house,” Labat said in a statement on Monday.

An October 2022 investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution revealed that a record number of inmates are dying in Georgia’s five largest county jails, and that Fulton County Jail has led the state in such deaths since 2009.

Overcrowding and understaffing plague the facility, where around half of the more than 3,000 inmates have not been charged with any crime. Labat admitted that more than 400 inmates were sleeping on the floor because of overcrowding.

“The type of infestations that contributed to Mr. Thompson’s death are going to be a recurring problem in a jail where hundreds of detainees do not have cells and have to sleep on the floor,” the sheriff said on Thursday.

u201cAlmost half of the 3,000 people held at the Fulton County jail have not been formally charged with a crime. There is no amount of money in the world for new jails that can redeem this. Let people go home. nn@elizabethweill nnhttps://t.co/7cNT2VTjqku201d

— Clara T Green (@Clara T Green)
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Sakira Cook, vice president of campaigns, policy, and government at the racial justice group Color of Change, said Thursday in a statement that “like Lashawn Thompson, countless individuals are currently enduring completely inhumane conditions at the severely overcrowded Fulton County Jail—often waiting for months at a time for frequently minor offenses and small amounts of cash bail.”

“This must end. Despite years of scrutiny, the neglect and inhumane conditions within the jail have persisted, with little to no meaningful changes in prosecutorial practices or conditions,” Cook added. “The current dark reality of mass incarceration is not accidental, but rather the consequence of intentional policies crafted by a dominant white culture that perpetuates and profits from the suppression of Black individuals through the jailing system.”

On Thursday, U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), who chairs the Senate Human Rights Subcommittee, announced the launch of an inquiry into conditions of incarceration in Georgia and nationwide. Previous Ossoff-led probes of U.S. carceral conditions revealed nearly 1,000 uncounted deaths, widespread sexual crimes, corruption, abuse, and misconduct at prisons and jails across the nation.

According to the Sentencing Project, an advocacy group, there are nearly 2 million people locked up in U.S. prisons and jails—a 500% increase over the past 40 years and more than any other country in the world, by far.

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Attorney General Dave Yost is now suing the Norfolk Southern rail company on behalf of Ohio for the reckless endangerment of residents’ health. The recent train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio required locals to evacuate their homes, adding to the ongoing list of recent environmental disasters in the US. Since then, the crisis has garnered much-deserved attention, including a federal attempt to utilize multiple agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Department of Transportation to support the community following the event.

What most people don’t know is that less than 15 miles from East Palestine, there are two federal prisons housing thousands of incarcerated individuals and employing a large correctional staff to support its operations—a population unable to quickly escape such a disaster.

Unfortunately, it is nothing new that those who live and work within correctional facilities are exposed to environmental hazards. In fact, 134 federal and state prisons are located within a mile of a Superfund cleanup site, which are known to release toxins that are harmful to human health. Documenting this risk, recent research shows that correctional facilities in the Southwest are nearly six times more likely to have excess arsenic in their water systems than surrounding communities.

These environmental hazards aren’t without health impacts, which could be one reason why both those impacted by incarceration and those who work in correctional facilities have shorter life expectancies than the general public. One such study provides evidence for this connection by showing that 13% of deaths in Texas prisons were related to excessive heat in facilities without air conditioning.

Environmental injustice examines how environmental hazards, such as air pollution and waste contamination, disproportionately impact racial/ethnic minority and poor communities as a result of intentional policies and lack of regulations. For example, researchers from the EPA have documented that Black individuals are at higher risk of being exposed to air pollution, confirming environmental injustice as a form of structural racism.

Further, while attention has been given to social phenomena such as redlining and zoning codes as key tenets of environmental injustice, the carceral state has not received as much attention in its role in exposing minority populations to environmental hazards. This is surprising given that correctional facilities are located in places that are unhealthy for humans and also that incarceration disproportionately impacted communities of color. Nearly 1 in 3 Black men will be incarcerated during their lives, and Black and Latinx are disproportionately represented in the corrections occupation. Thus, addressing environmental injustice requires attention towards abolishing mass incarceration.

Advocacy around these issues is being led by those most impacted, including JustLeadershipUSA—a national advocacy organization led by those who have been involved in the criminal legal system. I support the organization’s call for the passage of the Correctional Facility Disaster Preparedness Act, a bill introduced by Senator Duckworth which would require the Bureau of Prisons to generate annual reports of disaster damage to Congress.

Further, the Biden-Harris administration has a unique opportunity to prioritize those within the carceral system in its environmental regulations and preparedness planning. A national gathering of those formerly and currently incarcerated as well as correctional staff and unions should be convened to discuss how to systematically include and prioritize them across parts of the administration focused on occupational and environmental health hazards, such as the EPA.

Last, in the case of East Palestine, Ohio, those who live and work in the nearby prisons must not be excluded in any legal actions taken moving ahead. A decade ago, a coal industry watchdog filed a lawsuit suing a company for dumping coal ash which was impacting nearby communities in rural Pennsylvania. The lawsuit included the 50 families in the town but failed to include the incarcerated individuals in the men’s prison nearby. Under no circumstances should this be the case for lawsuits regarding the environmental health negligence in Ohio.

Mass incarceration has been woven into the fabric of American society, especially for Black, Brown, and poor communities. With our current climate crisis, another environmental disaster will probably happen sooner than any of us would like. Achieving environmental justice requires prioritizing and including those who live and work in correctional facilities as a high-risk population for environmental hazards – and it has to start now because answering the calls for justice is long overdue.

If we don’t care about prisoners on any normal day, then why would we care about them when a pandemic is spreading through the system?

The first comprehensive study of prisoner deaths during the Covid era shows that deaths in federal and state prisons rose nearly 50 percent during the first year of the pandemic, and in six states, they more than doubled.

The New York Times reports that deaths in America’s prisons during 2020 showed more than twice the increase compared to deaths in the United States overall, and they even exceeded deaths in nursing homes, which were among the hardest hit sectors across the country.

The Times found that it was not just the fact that Covid swept through already overcrowded prisons. It was also that prisoners are routinely subjected to substandard medical care. That’s the norm. That, coupled with crowded facilities and an aging inmate population combined to make the worst public health crisis in American prisons since the 1918-1919 Spanish flu pandemic.

And the states with the highest death rates are the states with the worst prison conditions, the worst medical care and the longest sentences: Alabama, Arkansas, South Carolina and West Virginia. In all of those states deaths in 2020 were up more than 100 percent over the previous year.

As an aside, the federal prisoner death numbers are incomplete. Despite a 2013 law that requires the federal Bureau of Prisons to keep data on deaths, health and safety, the BOP stopped doing that in 2019, citing bureaucratic changes within the Justice Department. Don’t like the law? Just ignore it. Nobody will do anything about it.

Aging Prison Population

“Public health is freeing the aged in Pa’s prisons.” Philadelphia protest on June 7, 2020, calling on Pennsylvania Gov. Wolf to free vulnerable prisoners during Covid. (Joe Piette, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

A companion study of American prisons is showing that the prison population nationwide is aging significantly. Due primarily to tough sentencing laws during the 1980s and 1990s, Americans are incarcerated for longer and longer periods.

In 2009, about 10 percent of all prisoners were 50 or older. By 2019, that portion had jumped to 21 percent. According to the Department of Justice, prisoners are considered to be “elderly” by the time they reach 50. Their lifespans are shortened by their years in prison, and, in many cases by drug abuse, poverty and a lack of appropriate medical care.

High rates of depression, obesity and suicide make the situation even worse. For example, of the 46 prisoners who died in West Virginia in 2020, 42 were older than 50. In Michigan, which has the oldest prison population in the country, 90 percent of the 248 prisoners who died in 2020 were older than 50.

Aerial view of Federal Correctional Institution, Loretto, Pennsylvania. (Prison Insight/Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

I spent my 50^th birthday in the Federal Correctional Institution at Loretto, Pennsylvania, after blowing the whistle on the C.I.A.’s torture program.

On the day that I arrived there, the prison, which was designed to hold 675 prisoners, instead held 1,425. Cells built for four men held six or eight, and bunkbeds lined the halls.

“Health care” was provided by physicians’ assistants from the National Health Service, a bureau of the Department of Health and Human Services. After nearly a year without a doctor, we finally got a disgraced physician from Cleveland who had had his license temporarily suspended after he was accused of taking liberties with a child.

No matter a prisoner’s malady, the go-to medication in prison was Tylenol (acetaminophen). I can tell you that I personally saw four prisoners just in my housing unit die in the 23 months I was in prison, all from undiagnosed cancers. You can be sure, though, that they had all been prescribed Tylenol by the incompetent boobs in charge of taking care of them.

Near the end of my sentence, an African man in the cell next to me was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He wasn’t isolated. He wasn’t moved to a cell in the medical unit. And none of us were provided with masks. When I asked the physician’s assistant to whom I was assigned what to do, he said, “I guess just hold your breath when you walk past him.” That’s healthcare in the American prison system.

State & Local Prisons Even Worse

Living facilities in California State Prison, July 19, 2006. (California Department of Corrections, Wikimedia Commons)

If it sounds like I’m being harsh about the federal prison healthcare system, let me tell you that the state and local prison systems are even worse. Look at it this way: Many state and local prisons are private; managed by for-profit companies that the states and localities hire to cut costs. How do these prisons cut costs? They do it by cutting the money spent on food and on medical care. Animal-grade food costs less than human-grade food, and it’s served in prisons across America every day.

And when a prisoner needs a name-brand or otherwise expensive medication, you either let him have it, which happens rarely, or let him die, which happens daily. If nobody cares about America’s incarcerated men and women and there is no price to pay when they die due to neglect, then there’s no reason to change the policy.

If we don’t care about prisoners on any normal day, then why would we care about them when Covid is spreading through our prison systems? I was shocked by The New York Times report, but I wasn’t surprised. I doubt anybody else who knows about mass incarceration in this country was either.

This story was originally published by Prism. “America is revealing a visage stark with harshness. Nowhere is that face more contorted than in the dark netherworld of prison, where humans are transformed into nonpersons, numbered beings cribbed into boxes of unlife, where the very soul is under destructive onslaught.”–Mumia Abu-Jamal Whatever we allow to happen to people incarcerated in prisons…

Source

Texas officials claimed that no prisoners have been killed by heat. A new report shows they’re wrong

Four states voted to ban slavery on Election Day, closing a loophole in the 13th Amendment that allows for draconian prison labor practices.

The 13th Amendment of the Constitution bans slavery or involuntary servitude, except when used as punishment for a crime. About 800,000 prisoners across the U.S. are forced to work, often in cruel conditions and for little or no pay.

Tennessee, Vermont, and Oregon all passed amendments to their state constitutions Tuesday eliminating language that allows slavery as punishment in prisons, by 79.7 percent, 89.2 percent, and 54.3 percent of the vote in each state, respectively, according to The New York Times.

In Alabama, 76.6 percent of residents voted to recompile the state constitution, which will remove racist language and legally irrelevant provisions, including prison labor. The referendums do not automatically change the state of prison labor, but they do make it easier for legal challenges over the treatment of prisoners.

Unfortunately, in Louisiana, 60.9 percent of state residents voted to keep the language allowing slavery as punishment for inmates.

The U.S. prison system has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and Black people are disproportionately imprisoned, according to the ACLU.

Prison workers produce about $2 billion worth of goods per year, and more than $9 billion in services annually, the ACLU found in a report. California has long used inmates as firefighters, some of whom are sent out with insufficient equipment.

These workers are paid an average of 52 cents per hour nationally—seven states pay them nothing at all—but they don’t get to keep all of the money they do make.

They end up pocketing less than half of what they earn after deductions are made for taxes, room and board fees for the prison where they are locked up, and other costs.

Any inmates who refuse to work are often punished, UCLA law professor Sharon Dolovitch and Stony Brook University associate history professor Robert Chase told The Washington Post, such as with solitary confinement or the removal of sentence reductions for good behavior.

Colorado was the first state to close the loophole in 2018, followed by Nebraska and Utah in 2020.

A demonstrator waits in her car before a rolling protest caravan departs for the west gate of San Quentin State Prison to demand more protection against the COVID-19 coronavirus for prisoners in Larkspur, California, on Saturday, May 9, 2020.

In 2020, San Quentin State Prison in California had some of the worst rates of COVID-19 infection in the nation. At least 23 people died from COVID-19 after contracting it at the prison. Prisons, jails, and detention centers across the US proved similarly vulnerable to the pandemic, which easily spread among incarcerated populations and into surrounding communities due to the already abhorrent health, sanitation, and human rights conditions of such facilities. Two years later, COVID-19 remains a challenge for San Quentin and California officials. While prisoners are tested regularly multiple times a week, guards and other prison staff are exempted from testing. Sanitation within the overcrowded prison remains atrocious, and prisoners who are exposed to COVID-19 are often quarantined in solitary confinement units. Although California has a more rigorous COVID-19 policy than much of the nation, the state’s inability to protect prisoners is a reflection of the fundamental violence of the mass incarceration system. Incarcerated journalist Juan Moreno Haines calls in to Rattling the Bars from San Quentin prison with his colleague, journalist Katie Rose Quandt, to discuss COVID-19 policies at the prison, how the ongoing pandemic has made life considerably worse for prisoners, and why freeing people could be a better solution than the band-aid solutions California has attempted thus far.

Juan Moreno Haines is an award-winning incarcerated journalist and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists. He is the editor of the San Quentin News.

Katie Rose Quandt is a freelance journalist who writes about criminal justice, incarceration, and inequality. She is a senior editor at the Prison Policy Initiative, and a writer and editor at Solitary Watch.

Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino

Transcript

The transcript of this interview will be made available as soon as possible.

A fence stands at Elmore Correctional Facility in Elmore, Ala., June 18, 2015

AP Photo/Brynn Anderson, File

Slavery is still legal in the US if it is used as a form of punishment in some prisons.
Voters in Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, Oregon, and Vermont will be voting on changing this legislation.
The very amendment that freed the slaves has a clause to re-enslave them, said a historian.

Voters in the November midterms in five states will be balloted on outlawing slavery, more than 150 years after it was abolished after the Civil War.

The landmark 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified on December 6, 1865, officially abolished slavery but allowed it to continue as a punishment in prisons against convicted felons.

Nearly 20 states have constitutions that include language permitting slavery and involuntary servitude as criminal punishments, and voters in Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, Oregon, and Vermont will be asked to change the loophole as part of a national push for prison reform, AP reports.

For states in the former Confederacy, the loophole was a tool to maintain the dynamics of slavery, post-abolition, said AP.

More than 80,000 inmates perform prison labor in the US, with the average wage for inmates working for the state prison industry being just 52 cents per hour, according to the ACLU, which says that prisoners produced roughly $2 billion worth of goods and services in 2021.

But in some states, including Alabama, inmates get paid nothing for their work.

Prisoners in Alabama recently went on strike to protest cruel labor conditions. Swift Justice, an inmate at the Fountain Correctional Facility in Atmore, a small town bordering Florida, told Insider’s Taiyler Simone Mitchell, “I’m just a slave. I’m inside the prison system.”

Convicts at the Limestone Correctional facility are placed back onto the chain gang when they leave the prison grounds for their daily labor as road crews in July of 1995 outside of Huntsville, Alabama. The state of Alabama brought back the chain gang to demonstrate to the media and the public that they were tough on crime, even though it is an impractical relic of the past for prison work crews

Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

Raumesh Akbari, a member of the Tennessee Senate, told AP that she was shocked to find out that slavery was legal as a form of punishment.

“When I found out that this exception existed, I thought, ‘We have got to fix this and we’ve got to fix this right away.’ Our constitution should reflect the values and the beliefs of our state,” she said.

Talking to the Washington Post, Robert Chase, an associate professor at Stony Brook University and the director of Historians Against Slavery said the amendment that freed the slaves has a clause to re-enslave them.

“For an entire generation, it put Black men and women back into slavery by incarcerating them and selling their labor to private corporations,” said Chase.

Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises, a criminal justice group working to remove the loophole, told the Post that “The idea that you could ever finish the sentence ‘slavery’s okay when … ‘ has to rip out your soul, and I think it’s what makes this a fight that ignores political lines and brings us together.”

Read the original article on Business Insider

“Despite earning tens of billions of dollars each year, the public knows little about the prison industry and those that profit from it.”

“The DOJ’s intervention has done nothing to shift conditions inside Alabama prisons,” said one supporter. “They remain incredibly unsafe, inhumane, and exploitative.”

Archive for category: #PrisonIndustrialComplex

Aging Prison Population

State & Local Prisons Even Worse

Transcript

A fence stands at Elmore Correctional Facility in Elmore, Ala., June 18, 2015

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