LaVia had only two months to pay off the debt, the invoice warned, until it would be turned over to a collection agency. 

He didn’t have anything close to that amount of money, and even if he did, he was disinclined to pay because the demand seemed ridiculous; a jury had just found him not guilty of the charges that had landed him in the notoriously brutal Harrisburg jail to begin with. After all that time inside, it felt especially insulting for the county to hound him to pay for his own confinement even following his acquittal. 

LaVia and his loved ones tried to put the debt out of their minds, but it hampered his chances at successful re-entry, his mother told Bolts recently. “It’s hard to be a productive member of society when you have $17,000 over your head,” Judi LaVia Jones, said. Her son is 50 years old and has long struggled with addiction and mental health issues, and can ill afford the additional burden of state-imposed debt, she added: “Try applying for an apartment with that. Try starting a business. It is always hanging over you.”

In September, Dauphin County’s commissioners voted to forgive the nearly $66 million in pay-to-stay debt looming over formerly incarcerated people and their families. The move, championed by a commissioner who won in 2023 after running on jail reform, followed a 2022 decision by the commission that ended pay-to-stay fees but had not erased people’s previous debts for jail stays. 

LaVia Jones said the decision to finally forgive the outstanding jail debt will help her son move on with his life, calling it “a huge relief.”

“The longer you sat in jail, the more debt you incurred, the more debt your family incurred. People sit there pretrial for one year, two years. It’s so wrong,” she said. “So this really helps him to move on with his life.” 

Local groups that advocate for incarcerated people in Harrisburg argued for years that the pay-to-stay scheme worked against efforts at successful re-entry for people released from jail, who are typically poor and who are almost always more concerned with basic survival and staying free than with settling debts. 

Derrick Anderson of Harrisburg says that after he got out of jail a few years ago, the nearly $3,000 bill the county sent him for his stay seemed unreal and unworkable. “Even just $30 in my pocket felt like a lot,” he told Bolts. “It made the difference between me staying out here and me going back to prison. I could buy me something to eat, catch a bus, catch a cab. Something in my pocket. It makes a difference, and I’m telling you from experience. And they want to take it from you, and release guys with absolutely nothing.”

Lamont Jones, a Harrisburg City Council member who was formerly incarcerated, and who is running for mayor this year, was active in pushing for the county to erase people’s jail bills last year, saying such debts effectively work to encourage recidivism and degrade public safety. “In the scramble for survival, a lot of times, out of necessity, people will turn to a life of crime, not necessarily because they want to be a criminal. How can they figure out another way to pay?” he told Bolts.

Jones, who was released from incarceration in 2008, said it took him 15 years beyond then to pay off his debts to the system. He considers himself fortunate for not having succumbed to what he described as a financial “pressure cooker.”

“These fees, plus probation and parole constantly asking you for your supervision fee, plus the fines you owe, plus you may have child support, plus you need to feed yourself, clothe yourself—there just isn’t enough money in the pot,” Jones told Bolts. “And a lot of people, if they can’t find their way out of it, end up going back to the same thing that got them incarcerated in the first place.”

The jail-debt policy that Dauphin County finally ended last year is hardly unique. Such pay-to-stay schemes exist in some form in at least 43 states, according to Captive Money Lab, a research project of several universities that tracks economic punishment in the U.S. criminal legal system. The Associated Press reports pay-to-stay policies exist in many parts of Pennsylvania. 

The practice of charging people for their time in lockup is but one contributor to a vast array of fines and fees that extracts money from people at virtually every stage of the criminal legal system—starting with jail booking and often lingering, through probation and parole, for years or decades after someone has been released, and affecting even those charged as children.

Cities, counties, and states try to collect such fees to fund government operations. But by reaching into the skinny accounts of incarcerated people and the family members who support them, these governments place vulnerable people in financial ruin while often failing to generate sustainable revenue streams. 

In Pennsylvania, as in every other state, people dogged by fines and fees in the criminal legal system are disproportionately poor and non-white, a result of persistently classist and racist disparities in rates of arrest, prosecution, and incarceration. (The jail population in Dauphin County is majority-Black, even though the overall county populace is under 20 percent Black.) The fact that so many incarcerated people are poor ensures that pay-to-stay debts, and those for many other fines and fees, are unlikely to yield much return for the governments and collectors that call for them.

“It is unbelievably ineffective,” Dylan Hayre, national advocacy and campaigns director at the Fines and Fees Justice Center, told Bolts. “It’s one of those things where even surface-level scrutiny reveals the fact that this is not a smart thing to do.”

Justin Douglas, the Democratic commissioner who scored a shock upset win in 2023 on an uncommon platform of reforming the Dauphin County jail, and who championed the recent debt forgiveness, says that the county was spending about as much, if not more, on collecting those jail fees as it was taking in. 

“This is fake debt to begin with, in that we’re never going to recoup $66 million, and it’s comical to think we would,” Douglas told Bolts. 

Even those counties that put in serious effort to recoup criminal-legal debt can still struggle. Bucks County, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia, spent the last four years carrying out a Delinquency Recovery Program that county leaders report has brought in less than 1 percent of the total debt owed there.

It was not any moral calling, but rather frustration over the county’s failure to recoup most jail fees, that first prompted Dauphin County to end pay-to-stay charges at the jail in 2022, when the commission moved to instead charge people a one-time booking fee. 

To ensure it actually received money for the booking fee, the county started automatically taking $125 from everyone who entered the jail, at the moment of entry. For those who could not afford that fee upfront, the county would garnish funds that loved ones sent incarcerated people to buy marked-up commissary items and to make costly calls to family and friends on the outside.

The jail has been garnishing funds for other debts for years, pre-dating the booking fee. “If I got $100, they were taking $25. I had a $25 money order come in, they took half of it. You’re essentially being robbed,” Jerome Coleman, who’s been incarcerated multiple times in Harrisburg, and free since 2017, told Bolts. He now runs a small local business at which he employs other formerly incarcerated people. 

Even as Dauphin County has now relieved all past pay-to-stay debt, it continues charging the $125 jail booking fee and continues to garnish funds to pay for it. Advocates hope the commissioners will abolish that system as a follow-up act to last year’s debt forgiveness, but they aren’t holding their breath. 

Douglas, the commissioner who put debt forgiveness on the county’s agenda last year, said it has been difficult to bring about even modest reforms since his election. In the last year, for example, the county let incarcerated people go outdoors, briefly, for the first time in decades. The county is also putting out a bid for a new medical services contractor at the jail for the first time in almost 40 years, following repeated complaints against the current, longtime provider.

“This year,” Douglas said, “I’ve learned a lot about the lane I live in, and it has certain levers I can pull. I don’t set bail. I don’t determine the length of stay for somebody in jail. The fee is something that does fall under our purview. Building a coalition takes a long time, though.” 

He added, “Dauphin County prison has some massive obstacles in front of it. We have earned our reputation, in a lot of ways.”

People formerly incarcerated in Harrisburg agree. 

“It’s a shithole,” Anderson said. 

Coleman remembered the food: “The meat they used to give us was green and pink.” 

“When it got cold, there was ice inside my son’s cell,” LaVia Jones said.

Douglas flipped the board to Democratic control with his 2023 election, but that by no means signalled a progressive turn. Douglas said he finds he and his fellow commissioners have “different value systems” regarding the jail they oversee.

When the three-member board voted on forgiving the pay-to-stay debt, the other Democratic commissioner, George Hartwick,  did not support the reform. It only passed, advocates told Bolts, because Douglas and a persistent outside advocacy campaign won over Republican Mike Pries, with whom Douglas is now forging an unusual power-sharing agreement. 

In an email to Bolts, Pries said it was “an easy decision” to vote with Douglas on debt forgiveness because the debt was undercutting other county programs meant to reduce recidivism. “We were literally spending money on a good conceptual idea and goal,” Pries wrote, “but at the same time keeping individuals from reaching that goal by making it almost impossible to get credit, unable to get a mortgage, unable to rent an apartment, unable to get a car loan. That then becomes a cycle of despair and many times forces them to make decisions that put them right back where they started.”

Hartwick did not respond to an interview request or emailed questions from Bolts about the debt forgiveness and the booking fee.

Even though Pries described his vote in September as a no-brainer, Onah Ruth Ossai, an abolitionist organizer in Harrisburg, said she’s skeptical the issue would have come to a vote at all had Douglas not joined the board. “Having someone like Justin Douglas in office, at least we start to be able to shed a light on what’s happening. We felt completely in the dark before,” Ossai said.

She believes the booking fee must be the next target. Douglas told Bolts he “definitely” wants to abolish that fee, and that he’s planning a push, but that he does not believe he has support yet from his board colleagues to approve the change. That reform would be even more politically challenging than the debt forgiveness because the booking fee, unlike the pay-to-stay fee before it, actually does generate consistent revenue for the county, as a result of the garnishment policy.

In its most recent annual report, published in May, the county said it took in an average of 17 new detainees per day. That comes out to more than $2,000 extracted daily from people who, with rare exception, are detained pretrial—that is, still presumed innocent because they have not been convicted of the charges that landed them in jail. Cash bail amounts set by judges in the county ensures many are kept in the jail only because they cannot afford freedom. 

In his email to Bolts, Pries said he’d be open to eliminating the booking fee, but only if the county comes up with a way to replace the money the fee generates. “If an alternative that does not negatively impact the county can be found, I will certainly consider that,” he wrote.

The organizers who sought the debt forgiveness say they will press now to end the booking fee and that they are encouraged by having an ally on the board in Douglas.

“What a light of hope this has been,” said LaVia Jones, Chad’s mother. 

She told Bolts that she spent 27 years working in law enforcement in Pennsylvania, mainly investigating cases of alleged medical fraud. Since retiring and bearing witness to the financial exploitation and general suffering of her son and others in jail in Harrisburg, however, she has had a change of heart.

“I was always proud to say I worked in law enforcement,” she said. “When I got a true picture of what it’s like to be poor and to be incarcerated, I started to say to myself, ‘Boy, this criminal justice is not so just.’”

The post This Pennsylvania County Wiped Out Millions in Jail Debt appeared first on Bolts.

There are many paths to elected office, Justin Douglas quips, “but fired pastor is not one.” 

A year ago, he says, he could not have named the three men who serve on the county commission of Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, his home since 2015. This powerful body, with control of a $222 million budget and a county government workforce of 1,700, meets Wednesdays in downtown Harrisburg, in a building that Douglas had never entered. 

Still, he got a call in February from Run for Something, an organization that recruits progressive candidates for local elections, to see if he’d be interested in running for a seat on the county commission. The last time the office was on the ballot, in 2019, Douglas did not vote. He’d just been fired from his job as pastor at a local church for appearing in a promotional video welcoming LGBTQ+ people to join the congregation. He, his wife, and their three kids were forced out of the home, which was owned by the church. All this time later, Douglas, 39, is still working three jobs to make up for what happened: he’s a pastor at a new church and a fitness instructor, and last year he drove more than 2,000 miles for Uber. 

His stand at the church fit with what he describes as his longtime activist streak. A mainstay in various corners of Dauphin County where matters of social equity and justice are concerned, Douglas grew active in recent years in protest of conditions in the local jail, an aging and oppressive facility where people die at an alarming rate. The county commission has vast power over that jail, a significant factor, Douglas says, in his decision to take Run for Something up on its proposal. He still felt like an imposter when he decided in March to enter the race.

By any standard measure, his campaign seemed doomed from the start: He had no paid staff or office. His team of volunteers, a few friends of his with zero combined campaign experience, met in the corner of a Starbucks in Hershey. He ran without institutional backing or money; while his opponents combined to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, Douglas reports spending only about $12,000.

And he centered his campaign around denouncing the fact that so many people have died in Dauphin County’s jail—an unusual focus, to say the least, for a political candidate. 

He spent roughly a fifth of the little campaign money he raised on a single, highway-side billboard highlighting the lethal lock-up, which sits between Harrisburg and the Douglas family home near the southeast edge of the county. Dauphin County has admitted at least two jail deaths in each of the last four years, a pace that stands out even by terrible national standards. 

“Eighteen prisoners dead since 2019,” Douglas’ billboard read. “Vote for change on Nov. 7.”

In most states, jails are run solely by sheriffs. In Dauphin County, as in most of Pennsylvania, jails are managed directly by local bodies that each feature all three county commissioners, plus some other officials. That gives Dauphin County’s commission a potent vantage point from which to force change, but local advocates have long been angry at what they see as commissioners’ indifference in the face of this death crisis. 

Douglas hammered that message relentlessly—on social media, at candidate forums his opponents didn’t bother to attend, and on the few occasions journalists reached out to interview him. The day before the election, Douglas posted on TikTok urging people to vote, a standard campaign move with an atypically specific appeal: “What got me into this race is prison reform,” he said. “Restorative justice is the solution, and we need that throughout Dauphin County.” 

The following day, on Nov. 7, Douglas defied all expectations to win a seat on the commission, ousting Republican Commissioner Chad Saylor by just 184 votes. A video captures Douglas’ reaction when he learned his win: “Are you kidding me right now? Oh my gosh. Is this for real?” he says, pacing the parking lot outside of the restaurant where he’d gathered with his team.

His victory flipped Dauphin County’s three-person county commission to Democrats. This is the first time the party has won a majority here since at least the Civil War, and an exclamation point on a strong election night for Pennsylvania Democrats generally. Dauphin County now leans blue in federal politics, with Joe Biden carrying it by 9 percentage points in 2020, but Democrats have struggled down-ballot.

The upset has brought Douglas, who’ll be inaugurated on Jan. 2, a lot more attention. He says his calendar is suddenly jammed with people who’d never looked his way but now want to meet, and that he is invited into rooms he could not previously access. He’s been plunged into a new role, one that he hadn’t imagined he’d actually win, and must now figure out how to shake up the local political establishment from the inside. 

When I first talked to Douglas last month, he was still processing his unlikely victory, and planning with his allies how he could turn their newfound clout into better conditions—and a greater voice—for the people detained in Dauphin County. 

We met in downtown Harrisburg, early on a frigid Wednesday just before the weekly commissioner’s meeting, which he chose to attend—as a spectator, for now. He’s instantly recognizable as almost anything but a successful politician: he’s got gauge earrings, 42 tattoos, and dresses in jeans, band tees, and Nike sneakers. The morning we met, he’d put on a collared shirt and a blazer because, he said, he’s trying to look the part these days. 

When we arrive at the county building, a local NAACP chapter leader joins us in the elevator and gives Douglas a hey–aren’t-you-that-guy look, then asks to grab coffee some time. Douglas takes a seat in the back row of the commissioners’ meeting room, and tells me he feels a bit out of place. 

Later that morning, as he readies for an interview with Harrisburg’s CBS station, Douglas confesses that he’s got a lot to learn; that he’s not convinced the Democratic majority will work well together; that he feels icky about attending the inauguration on Jan. 2 at a fancy hotel downtown; that he’s having trouble trusting all the folks who now want to be his friend; and that he isn’t sure how, exactly, he’ll navigate the political terrain to bring about change inside the county prison that was the focus of his campaign. 

The TV crew leaves and he asks me how he performed, then ponders how to best articulate his ideas going forward. “I’m figuring it out. I’m figuring out how I’m going to move differently now,” he says. “Not in morals or in authenticity, but if this is a simulation and we’re in a video game, I leveled up and skipped a few levels. I’m the dude off the street.” 

Douglas is not alone in navigating these questions. He is brainstorming next moves with Lamont Jones, a like-minded reformer and political newcomer who won a seat on the Harrisburg city council in November. And he is in conversation with other central Pennsylvania advocates who are eager to build on this moment. 

Onah Ossai, an organizer with Pennsylvania Stands Up, is watching attentively. She thinks Douglas’s ascent was catalyzed by the protests for social and racial justice in 2020 that, in her words, “primed people” in Dauphin County to view the jail as an everyday scandal. 

“There was activism that made a candidacy like this viable,” Ossai, who met Douglas at a Juneteenth rally this year outside the jail, told me. “No one else was running on the prison or talking about it before. Justin put up a billboard, he came to prison events, he came to prison board meetings. I think people really understood that he was someone who was at least paying attention, that he was a real outsider.”

Despite its name, the Dauphin County Prison operates more like a common jail. Most of the roughly 1,000 people detained there on any given month have not been convicted and are held pretrial. Many are there because they can’t make bail, or due to violations of probation or parole. The average length of stay at the jail is 120 days, the county reports. 

While the county hasn’t recently published demographic information about the people it incarcerates, many who’ve been inside of it told me the detained population skews disproportionately Black, which is in keeping with the county’s historical trends.

Many Pennsylvania jails are deadly for the people who churn through, but Dauphin County’s jail death rate still exceeds statewide and national averages, PennLive determined in a recent investigation. More broadly, the county’s own numbers show over 2,000 incidents since 2019 in which staff used physical force or deployed chemical agents on people held at the jail. 

“You don’t have to live in Dauphin County long to know this is a problem,” Douglas tells me. “It’s hard to miss.” 

In addition, local journalists have found that the county has often misreported its jail deaths—in some cases, covering up its own responsibility. 

In one such instance, Dauphin County reported the death of Herbert Tilghman as a “medical event,” which, PennLive found, obscured the fact that prison staff failed to take Tilghman’s stomach pains seriously, providing minimal treatment and even accusing him of faking illness shortly before he died. In a separate case, the county initially said Ishmail Thompson died in a “medical episode,” failing to note that officers had placed Thompson in a restraint chair, and a hood over his head, then pepper-sprayed him soon before he fell unconscious and, ultimately, comatose.

A dozen people I interviewed for this story with knowledge of conditions inside the jail spoke of nearly round-the-clock lockdowns, and neglect for people’s mental and physical health needs.

“It’s disgusting,” Harrisburg’s Doniesha Bell told me this month, shortly after she was released. Though she hasn’t been convicted of any crime, she spent six months in jail because she could not make bail. She said she was staying at a local shelter, having no stable place to live.

“You have to sit in a cell and eat where you have to use the bathroom. You’re locked down 23 hours a day, and that’s if the guard feels like letting you out,” Bell said. “I was locked up with people who’d seen people die in there, and I get it: you’ve got to bang on the door because there’s no way to get ahold of the [correctional officers]. … The one day my blood pressure was up, they just told me to deal with it, to wait. And they never called the nurse.”

John Hayden, a local watchdog with a Quaker-led citizen group called the Harrisburg Advocacy Team, said the prison’s running crisis is the result of policy choices—namely, contracts with profit-driven companies Aramark and Primecare Medical to provide food and healthcare.

“The way they make more money is by providing lower-cost food and low-wage employees,” Hayden says. “They’ll go several weeks in a row with bologna sandwiches for lunch every day. Sometimes they’ve had bologna sandwiches for all three meals.”

These stories have spurred deep local activism. Meetings of the jail board are well attended, and some advocates have successfully pushed their way into unofficial oversight roles; the nonprofit Pennsylvania Prison Society takes regular tours of the prison and reports back to the community on what it’s seeing. Destiny Brown, a member of that group, tells me she and others in her advocacy corner were pleasantly shocked that Douglas won, and that they “hope and pray this brings change.” Her Prison Society colleague, John Hargreaves, adds that Douglas winning is “injecting a note of optimism. People feel somewhat hopeful now, whereas they didn’t before.” 

Douglas told me, “I’ve moved in activist communities in this area pretty much since I got here, and there are a lot of people who’ve come before me, who are much louder than me, who have educated me on this issue.”

While I was in town to see him, Douglas toured the prison for the first time. He reports back to me following the visit: Certain cell blocks don’t ever go outside, he learned. Rather, he says, they have gym time, which the jail counts as “outdoor” time because air flows in through barred windows. Douglas says he observed in the gym that some of the basketball hoops have no rims, and learned that the jail’s juvenile unit has no working showers. He says he saw leaking water from corroded pipes throughout the kitchen, and a man naked in a cell, defecating on the floor. 

He says he met another man on suicide watch, under supervision of an officer who told Douglas she is overworked and was filling in for a colleague on that day’s assignment. Douglas tells me, “That’s not a place I’d want to be in if I were in mental health crisis. That would not aid in my betterment.” 

He was escorted during his tour by the county’s director of criminal justice, John Bey, a longtime Pennsylvania police chief who was hired by the county earlier this year to oversee its correctional system. Commissioners touted him as an agent of change, and Bey himself said at the time of his hiring, “My position embodies transparency.” 

And so, when we spoke by phone this week, I was curious to hear how Bey feels the county can better communicate what happens inside the jail. He immediately rejected my premise and suggested that the county has been forthcoming about jail deaths, despite thorough PennLive reporting to the contrary. He acknowledged the jail’s poor reputation, but insisted conditions are improving and that “at no time in the history of this place” has accountability been higher.

“I can assure you that as a facility, as an institution, we take the care of our inmates here very seriously and we work closely with PrimeCare to ensure that inmates and those under our care receive at the very least adequate medical care to ensure they’re thriving as much as they can be, given whatever maladies they enter the prison with,” he said.

He added, “They’re not housed in their cells locked down 23, 24 hours a day.” I mentioned Bell’s claim that she had been locked in for that long. “I’m not going to say that that lady is lying,” Bey replied. “We do feed inmates in their cells. They’re very small cells.”

Douglas says he met more than 20 people detained at the jail during his tour, and some knew he’d been elected. He recounts one prisoner saying, “You’re coming in here to fix this place.” He responded, “I’m going to do what I can.” 

Douglas will soon have some real power over the jail. When he is inaugurated, he will automatically join the county’s prison board, the facility’s governing body, on which all three commissioners have a seat alongside four other local officials. The board proposes contracts and settles policy questions in the jail, and it regularly holds meetings to take public input.

The three-member commission, as a separate, standalone body, has final say on budget questions and on contracts for health care, food, and other services. Douglas has been critical of the county’s relationship with those vendors, suggesting that local leaders are influenced by campaign donations from potential vendors. 

None of the current commissioners—Democrat George Hartwick and Republican Mike Pries, who will stay in office next year, plus Saylor—responded to my interview requests. 

Douglas vows that he’ll use his new standing to demand major improvements in detention conditions, from fixing the broken pipes to restricting solitary confinement. 

He’s also aware that the best way to keep someone from dying at the jail is to make sure they never get there at all. He insists that focusing on improving economic conditions throughout Dauphin County would have that effect. He thinks the county should detain fewer people pretrial, a reform that other parts of Pennsylvania have adopted, and hopes to partner with the Dauphin County Bail Fund, a local anti-carceral organization, to highlight punitive bail practices.

But Douglas knows change will be difficult. Many of his ideas have gotten little visibility from the local political establishment until now. On the prison board, he’d need to form a broad coalition to force changes; for decisions made by the commission, he’d have to win over at least one of his colleagues.

Douglas is the first to concede that he isn’t anywhere close to functioning majorities in favor of bold jail reforms. While Douglas and Hartwick will form the board’s new Democratic majority, and could shift policy on some issues, like access to voting, Douglas is skeptical this will easily extend into criminal justice policy; the two men have little relationship so far.

“I don’t trust that everything’s better,” Ossai says. “We’ll see if they’re able to work together, and to what end, and we’ll see who holds the power. Justin’s new, he’s outside.” 

But Douglas thinks his activist background is an asset and says that he is prepared to use his bully pulpit to disrupt normal proceedings in the county, forcing other officials to reckon with the deaths and the suffering happening under their watch.

He says he’ll frequently and loudly talk about what goes on in the jail. He wants public meetings on that and other topics to be understandable to the public—that is, no more sailing through agenda items without discussion. He wants meetings of the prison board to be events and hopes to invite more voices of activists, including currently and formerly incarcerated people, into those spaces. He says he’ll take journalists on jail tours and that he plans to pop in often for his own tours, sometimes without warning. 

He tells me, “The prisoners whose hands I shook—I’m going to get to know their names. They’re going to see me regularly.”

Inside a coworking space in Harrisburg, which serves as Douglas’s office for the time being, he ponders these power dynamics in a meeting with Jones, the incoming Harrisburg city councilor. 

Jones, too, overcame tremendously long odds to reach these heights. He’s formerly incarcerated, including two stints inside the Dauphin County jail. He’s Black, was raised in poverty in Harrisburg, and by 15 was selling cocaine. Now 48, he voted for the first time at age 39; like so many in the country, he says, he spent years wrongly assuming his felony record meant he could not vote. He’s got a close perspective on the dangers of the local jail: his cousin, Ty’Rique Riley, died after being detained there in 2019—one of 18 names behind the statistic on Douglas’s billboard.

When Jones decided to run for Harrisburg’s council this year, local Democratic power players  conspired to keep him off the ballot, arguing his criminal past should disqualify him. Jones prevailed in court and again on Election Day. 

In this heavily Democratic city within this light-blue county, Jones says, he has a hard time talking about his path to the ballot without crying.

“We’re in the era of criminal justice reform, right? Here, I’m someone who has exemplified that enough to be elected into a position to give hope to people who didn’t think they could do anything with a felony, who didn’t think they could get out of the situation. But none of those people who talk about criminal justice reform was willing to stand beside me,” he says.

I listened as Jones and Douglas considered how they can work together to reduce poverty, criminality, and incarceration. They know they’ll need to build consensus in circles that have upheld a status quo that is deeply punishing for communities like the one Jones was raised in.

“We’re going to have to make some relationships with some people that we don’t even care for,” Jones tells Douglas. “We may have to take some losses.”

The two men feel politically lonely and they’re already bracing for blowback, but they’re also focused on building power on the outside. “It can’t stop with just him and I,” Jones tells me. “We’re going to need more people.”

Upon my return from Harrisburg, Douglas contacts me with news of two local developments: 

First, another man has died inside the prison. His name was Christopher K. Phy, he was 38 years old, and he hanged himself. PennLive reports this is the county’s 19th jail death since 2019. 

Second, the county has agreed to a $4.25 million settlement with the family of Ishmail Thompson, the man who died after jail staff restrained and pepper-sprayed him. 

Douglas is disgusted, furious. I ask him how it’ll feel after he’s inaugurated, if and when someone else dies in there, or the county is made to pay for its violence against a future detainee, and reporters or members of the activist base from which he’s risen call him demanding answers. He tells me local officials are already advising him to not talk openly to the media, because too much sunlight could expose him or the county to liability.

“I’m not going to cost the county anything,” Douglas tells me. “What actually happened is what’s costing the county money.”

He continues, “I’ll lose this job and they can sue the hell out of me, if that’s the consequence of being honest and transparent. Let’s be honest: the county just paid a family $4 million because they murdered somebody. If that happens again on my watch, I’m going to want to say a lot.”

The post His Shock Win Flipped a Pennsylvania County. Now He Vows to Raise Hell over Its Lethal Jail. appeared first on Bolts.

For one, Democrats swept the state’s judicial elections, including a decisive win in a hotly contested supreme court election, which gives them a stronger position when election lawsuits inevitably emerge next year.

They also celebrated a wave of wins in county commissions, which double as boards of election nearly everywhere in Pennsylvania and have a startling amount of discretion to shape ballot access in their counties, from deciding whether to install any ballot drop boxes allow voters to fix mistakes on mail ballots. Democrats defended all the local gains they made four years ago in what was already a historically excellent election cycle, and also appear to have flipped two more populous counties away from Republican control. 

Some Pennsylvania counties have drop boxes for voters to conveniently deposit absentee ballots and proactively notify voters who make mistakes that risk invalidating their ballot, such as leaving the outer envelope undated or unsigned—a policy called ballot curing. Other counties choose not to have drop boxes or ballot curing processes since state law leaves that matter entirely up to local officials. While these differences do not neatly break along party lines, populous counties run by Democrats have been more likely to set up drop boxes and allow ballot curing.

“You can have boards of elections that are 15 minutes apart and yet the rules are so different,” says Kadida Kenner, executive director of New PA Project. 

The resulting patchwork frustrates voting rights advocates who want the state to enforce stronger standards, but for now it compounded the importance of Tuesday’s elections for ballot access in Pennsylvania. “We’re heartened by the fact that, because of these elections, voters will have greater confidence that curing provisions and ballot drop boxes will stay in place in many places where they currently are,” Philip Hensley-Robin, executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania, told Bolts on Wednesday. 

Tuesday’s results would also make it tougher for the Trump campaign to try to invalidate results, if the former president, who is the frontrunner for the GOP’s presidential nomination, attempts to overturn an election as he did three years ago. 

They mean that the former president would face an even more uphill climb in state courts. And they leave him with nowhere to turn in this state if he tries to reprise his 2020 strategy of pressuring counties that went for Joe Biden to block certification, since Democrats have now secured control of all such counties across Pennsylvania. 

“Pennsylvania voters soundly rejected candidates that ran on platforms that supported the Big Lie, that supported the idea that our elections are unsafe or any idea that we should restrict access to the ballot,” said Nick Pressley, Pennsylvania director for All Voting is Local. “We saw that up and down.” Pressley lives in Centre County, an area that Biden carried by 5 percentage points in 2020 and where Democrats easily defended their majority on Tuesday. 

Still, election deniers and Republicans who have amplified Trump’s election conspiracies and resisted past election results did score some victories on Tuesday. 

These candidates largely won in red-leaning areas where they were favored to prevail as soon as they won the Republican primaries, as Bolts reported in May. In some counties like Berks, Fayette, and Lancaster, the incumbent commissioners who secured new terms already played with the election system last year by briefly refusing to approve election results. 

These jurisdictions may emerge as hotspots for litigation once again next year, a looming prospect that explains why Democrats are relieved to have buttressed their supreme court majority as they did. But they are also a reminder that the Republican base has shown little inclination to punish politicians for toying with election conspiracies.

“It doesn’t seem to me like they’ve even gotten over 2020 yet,” says Duncan Hopkins, a local organizer with the group Lancaster Stands Up, who confronted Lancaster County’s two Republican commissioners at a 2022 public meeting about their ties to election deniers. He said of the commissioners, “If they try to pull what they pulled last year with their blatant attempts to disenfranchise voters, we’re absolutely going to organize folks to stand up to them.”

Heading into Tuesday, Democratic operatives in Pennsylvania were nervous about losing some counties, with several pointing to Bucks, a populous swing county in the Philadelphia suburbs, as a critical battleground. 

Trump in 2020 sued the county’s Democratic commission, demanding that they toss thousands of mail ballots, and the chair of the Bucks County Republican Committee, Pat Poprik, signed up as a fake Trump elector in 2020, which fueled Democratic concerns about losing control of election administration in that county this year. Another fake Trump elector, Sam DeMarco, is a commissioner in Allegheny County (home to Pittsburgh), and he would have found himself in the majority on Allegheny’s board of election had the GOP won the county executive race on Tuesday.

Instead, Democrats kept their majority in Allegheny and Bucks counties, as well as in four other counties that they flipped from GOP control in 2019: Chester, Delaware, Lehigh, and Monroe. 

Some of these counties, like Chester, had swung Democratic for the first time in decades four years ago, so Democrats were relieved to extend their streak this year. They also held off a Republican surge in Allegheny County, where they only prevailed by 2 percentage points in the executive race after statewide Democratic officials rallied for their nominee. 

This secures Democratic control throughout the populous ring of suburban counties that surrounds Philadelphia, as well as in the state’s other urban core in western Pennsylvania. Democrats also expanded their majority in Erie County, a swing jurisdiction in northwest Pennsylvania.  

Democrats also appear to have flipped two new counties. They regained a majority on the Northampton county council, which they’d lost in February when a Democratic commissioner joined the GOP. And they’re on track to gain a new majority in Dauphin County, home to Harrisburg, the state’s capital city; they currently have a lead there, pending the final count of provisional ballots next week. 

If Democrats hold their lead and win in Dauphin, this would be the party’s first time with a majority on the county commission in at least 100 years, according to The Pennsylvania Capital-Star. It would also mean Democrats have a governing majority in every county that Joe Biden carried in 2020.

Justin Douglas, a Democratic candidate and political newcomer who would join Commissioner George Hartwick as the second Democrat on the three-person commission, told Bolts that he is eager to expand ballot access next year and will propose that the county install more ballot drop boxes to ensure they are accessible to more voters. “We have to be mindful that voting access can always be improved,” he said.  

Unlike many of its neighboring counties, Dauphin County did not allow ballot curing in 2020 and 2022, denying voters who made a mistake a chance to correct their ballots before they got tossed. The county’s elections office did not reply to questions about its current policy or whether it reached out to people this fall whose ballots may otherwise be rejected.

Douglas says he wants to ensure that Dauphin County enables ballot curing in 2024 and that it proactively reaches out to voters to inform them of any problem. “The county should be making every effort to call those people and have them come down to the board of elections or a local polling place,” he says. “I just think that we should be doing everything so every vote counts.”

Hensley-Robin, of Common Cause, hopes to persuade local officials throughout the state to embrace similar positions.

“Any newly elected county commissioner should look at providing notice to voters—some counties are not providing notice at all—and provide a means to cure ballot errors,” he told Bolts. “We would go to newly elected county commissioner, Democrat or Republican, and argue that the voters in their counties should have as many opportunities as voters in any other county.” 

Against this patchwork of ballot access, with each of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties deciding how easy it is for people to vote, advocates have sought statewide reforms. Common Cause is currently asking state lawmakers to pass legislation that would clarify that all counties must allow voters to correct their ballots. 

In the meantime, voting rights advocates think the result in Tuesday’s state supreme court election may open the door for stronger protections for voters throughout the state. 

During last year’s midterms, Pennsylvania tossed thousands of mail ballots that had no date on the envelope, or an incorrect date, because the Pennsylvania supreme court deadlocked 3-3 over whether it should order counties to count them; the seventh seat on the court was left vacant when Democratic Chief Justice Max Baer died last year. 

On Tuesday, Democrat Daniel McCaffery prevailed 53 to 47 percent in the race to replace Baer against Carolyn Carluccio, the Republican nominee, after a campaign that broke fundraising records. 

The result gives Democrats a 5-2 lead on the court. Election cases haven’t always been party line on this court, as with last year’s 3-3 decision on undated mail ballots. Voting rights advocates hope that the court will revisit that decision and others like it to rule in a manner more favorable to ballot access.

McCaffery, the incoming justice, told Bolts before the election that he would take an expansive view of how to treat ballots.

“If we’re going to err, we should always err on the side of including votes, as opposed to disqualifying votes for technicalities, or perceived technicalities,” he told Bolts. 

Democrats on Tuesday also flipped the majority on Pennsylvania’s Superior Court, an appellate court that largely deals with criminal cases; their nominees won two seats that were held by GOP judges. Republicans will retain a 5-4 majority on the Commonwealth Court, the other intermediate appellate court that is likely to hear appeals in election cases, but a Democratic candidate on Tuesday also won a GOP-held seat on that court and narrowed Republicans’ edge.

Beyond cases dealing with mail voting, the supreme court result also hands Democrats a buffer for any cases that may emerge after the 2024 presidential election if Trump, who is on track to again be the Republican nominee, attempts to contest another possible loss in the state.

Carluccio, the Republican nominee, echoed some of Trump’s unfounded allegations of fraud during this year’s campaign, saying that mail voting had provoked “hanky panky” in past elections. She also seemed to invite a new legal challenge against Act 77, the bipartisan law that authorized no-excuse mail voting in 2019. 

Asked by the Inquirer editorial board in October who won the 2020 presidential election, Carluccio replied that she did not know, before trying to modify her answer upon seeing startled reactions from board members. 

Pennsylvania Democrats attacked Carluccio during her campaign for her statements echoing election conspiracies. J.J. Abbott, a Democratic strategist active in this year’s campaigns, told Bolts that the threat of election denialism remains a strong motivator for his party’s base—an important factor in off-year elections where pumping up turnout is critical. 

“That’s going to continue to be an issue for Republicans, and I think it’ll be even more acute if Trump is the nominee,” he said. 

Questions remain, though, about a string of counties where Republican county commissioners have made moves in recent years that are in lockstep with Trump’s efforts to sow doubt about the election system. 

In the spring of 2022, three GOP-run counties refused to certify the results of their primaries; the  six Republican commissioners across those counties—Berks, Fayette, and Lancaster—said they disagreed with the state’s rules on mail ballots and wanted to exclude valid ballots from the count. The matter escalated until courts forced the commissioners to reverse course and certify the election results. All six commissioners secured reelection on Tuesday. 

Several voting rights lawyers in Pennsylvania told Bolts that they’re confident the state courts would quickly intervene again if these counties, or any other, try to stall certification next year. But they’ve also expressed some anxiety that a rogue commission could at least open the door for the Trump campaign to falsely claim the election is unresolved and try to escalate matters in federal court. 

Dante Santoni was elected to the Berks County commission on Tuesday as the sole Democrat, and he will now join Republicans Christian Leinbach and Michael Rivera, the commissioners who voted to block certification last year. (Leinbach and Rivera have also opposed allowing ballot curing in Berks.) 

Santoni told Bolts he’d be vigilant about any attempt by his colleagues to stall the election results next year. “That will not be met with quietness for me,” he said. “I will scream from the mountains that we will make sure that Pennsylvania will not be one of those states that drags things out.” 

He added, “When the legitimate votes are tallied, we will certify those votes, and if my Republican colleagues refuse to do that, I will raise hell.”

Alex Burness contributed reporting for this article.

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