But now Torres is nervous about what 2025 may bring. A lawsuit threatens to unwind the law against immigration jails, and the attorney general’s directive is still not codified into law, meaning that a new official who is more hostile to immigrants’ rights could quickly undo it. And New Jersey is electing many of its state and local leaders this year in a host of races that will test much more than just candidates’ openness to immigration detention.

“Somehow I have been dreading 2025’s cycle for even longer than I did 2024’s,” Torres told Bolts about New Jersey’s upcoming elections. “It’s not guaranteed that we’re going to get the protections that these communities deserve.”

The coming year indeed carries high stakes for policing and criminal justice, in New Jersey and beyond. There will be roughly 160 elections for prosecutor and sheriff this year. Most are concentrated in just four East Coast states—New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

Filing deadlines are still months away. But at this early juncture, there are already several elections to keep an eye on including the re-election bids of Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner, the former civil rights attorney turned prosecutor, and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, fresh off prosecuting Donald Trump. This year will also see important elections for prosecutor in Brooklyn and several Virginia cities, as well as sheriff races in Buffalo and New Orleans. (The full list of prosecutor and sheriff races is available here.)

Sheriffs and prosecutors are central to local criminal legal systems, with wide discretion over a large range of issues from sentencing to detention conditions, so Bolts closely tracks them each year. But criminal justice policy also hinges on offices that have broader purviews. This year, New Jersey and Virginia are selecting their state governments. The partisan or ideological majorities on Pennsylvania and Wisconsin’s supreme courts are also on the line.

Plus, dozens of cities are electing their mayors and city councilors in 2025, including places with major recent conflicts over policing like Atlanta, Minneapolis, and New York City.

Today Bolts is launching its coverage of these races by fleshing out six storylines that will define the cycle.

1. How will two prosecutors emblematic of the reform movement fare against national headwinds?

Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan DA who brought Trump to trial this spring on felony charges of falsifying business records, famously secured 34 convictions against him. With Trump now headed back to the White House, this may well remain the only criminal trial Trump sits through. 

This has earned Bragg the intense enmity of conservatives nationwide, who have attacked his prosecution of Trump, as well as his affinities for criminal justice reforms. In 2024, a Republican prosecutor in Arizona even refused to extradite a suspect to New York, citing Bragg’s politics. When he first ran in 2021, Bragg positioned himself as a reformer and courted progressive voters, though his proposals were not as far-reaching as some of his rivals. 

MAGA fury is unlikely to mean much in a Democratic primary in Manhattan, which is the main hurdle standing between Bragg and a second term this year. Despite the New York Post’s negative coverage of Bragg as responsible for crime, he has touted the decline in shootings, homicides, and property crimes in the borough over his time in office. 

And some local progressives have distanced themselves from his policies. Eliza Orlins, a public defender who ran for DA against Bragg in the 2021 Democratic primary, has criticized him for breaking his campaign promises to scale back the tactics that ballooned incarceration locally, such as heavy prosecution of low-level offenses. “The political landscape has shifted significantly since 2021,” she told Bolts. “However, I think there’s still room to shape the debate—especially in races like the one for Manhattan DA,” she added. “Reformers need to push back against the fear-based narratives and ensure that the real impact of policies like bail reform and decarceration is part of the conversation.”

Just 100 miles away, in Philadelphia, Larry Krasner came to embody the “progressive prosecutor” movement after his 2017 victory. He curtailed prosecutions of low-level offenses, restricted the scope of probation, overturned many wrongful convictions, and clashed with police unions for taking a harder line on officer misconduct.

Krasner also comfortably won reelection four years ago despite a major push to oust him, and then also survived a GOP effort to remove him from office. However, as he now approaches his second reelection race, the national context has changed. Losses by high-profile reform DAs in California have put progressives interested in prosecutor reform on the defensive. Krasner may also face several challengers this year, including local judge Patrick Dugan, who recently divulged that he plans to run. 

Heavy spending against California reformers by the tech and real estate industry was a key factor in their losses in the state. And Krasner might have an even bigger target on his back: Last fall, he tried to stop Elon Musk’s electioneering schemes on Trump’s behalf in Pennsylvania. Musk has recently said he wants to fund campaigns against reform DAs, and he spent heavily in a failed effort to oust Austin’s chief prosecutor last year, fueling speculation of new confrontations between Musk and Krasner this year.

2. Can proponents of prosecutor reform keep or expand their footing in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia? (Plus, who will even run?)

Even if the other prosecutors on the ballot this year don’t have such national profiles, their fates still matter for local criminal justice policy.

DA Eric Gonzalez is also up for reelection in Brooklyn, which is the biggest county with a prosecutor race anywhere in the nation this year. A self-proclaimed ‘progressive prosecutor,’ Gonzalez has unveiled policies to shield some immigrants from deportation and dropped cases against hundreds of against sex workers, among other reforms, while also facing criticism from the left for not being bold enough. He ran for a second term unopposed in 2021.

In upstate New York, reformers in 2024 got rid of David Soares, one of their more vocal foils. Soares spent years railing against pretrial reforms as DA of Albany County and former president of the state’s DA association. Reformers have a similar opportunity in 2025 in Orange County, where David Hoovler, another former president of the DA association and critic of pretrial reforms, is up for reelection. Also on the ballot are Nassau County DA Anne Donnelly and Suffolk County DA Raymond Tierney, two Republicans who oversee Long Island’s two populous counties and keep calling for the state to roll back its 2020 bail reform.

In Virginia, a group of 11 reform-minded prosecutors formed an alliance in 2020 to advocate for statewide criminal justice reforms like ending mandatory minimum sentences. But the group’s agenda was sidelined when Democrats lost their governing majority in late 2021. 

Several members of this alliance face reelection in 2025. They include Stephanie Morales, the Portsmouth prosecutor who helped spearhead the creation of the reform alliance five years ago and who clashed with police during Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, as well as Ramin Fatehi, the Norfolk prosecutor who faces critics who favor a more punitive approach to prosecution. If they survive this year, they could reprise their statewide advocacy, but that could also hinge on Democrats regaining control of the state government (more on that below).

Finally, roughly a third of Pennsylvania’s counties are electing their DA, including populous Bucks, Westmoreland, and York counties. As is often the case with prosecutors, the first test will be who even files by the March deadline; in the state’s most recent DA races, in 2023, most races saw a complete lack of competition, with candidates running unopposed across the state.

3. Will sheriff races question the harsh status quo on jail deaths, detention conditions, and collaboration with ICE?

The jail in Buffalo, New York, has drawn lawsuits and scrutiny for the mounting deaths of people in custody. When longtime Erie County Sheriff Tim Howard, a named defendant in these lawsuits, retired in 2021, his preferred candidate, Republican John Garcia, narrowly prevailed in the race to replace him. Deaths have steadily continued in the lock-up under Garcia, and local activists say detention conditions have remained just as gruesome as under Howard. 

In the city of Virginia Beach, an investigation conducted this fall revealed that a man died earlier this year due to the way in which he was restrained by sheriff’s deputies. 

And in Monmouth County, New Jersey, the sheriff’s office was hit by a lawsuit in 2024 that alleged that it was covering up drug-related deaths and overdoses in custody.

Each of these three jurisdictions is electing its sheriff this year, which could at least give local advocates a platform to further expose these detention conditions. And similar questions could surface in the other sheriff’s races taking place in New York and Virginia, plus parts of New Jersey. (Note that Pennsylvania also votes for sheriffs but in that state, as well as in some New Jersey counties, jails are run by the county board and the sheriff’s authority is much more narrow.)

Local detention conditions are also worrying advocates in Louisiana, which adopted legislation last year that is set to balloon local jails. New Orleans, which has a long history of deadly conditions, is the only parish to hold a sheriff’s race this year. Sheriff Suson Hutson, who won with the support of many local reformers in 2021, broke with the other state sheriffs who cheered the 2024 legislation and warned that it would create an “unmanageable population explosion in the New Orleans jail.” 

Sheriffs who run jails also have leeway in deciding how much to collaborate with federal immigration agents; for instance, many get to decide whether to rent out their space to ICE to detain people. Amy Woolard, chief program officer of the ACLU of Virginia, who is tracking how this issue plays out across her state’s 38 sheriff’s races this year, says it’s often difficult to even ascertain where sheriff candidates stand on it. 

“I would ask them, point blank, what are their policies and practices for working with ICE; what are their intentions around protecting immigrant communities in their jurisdictions” Woolard told Bolts. “I think having that knowledge is going to help immigrant communities understand what they may be facing depending on where they live.”

4. How will city elections impact policing? 

This year, 23 cities of at least 250,000 people will elect their mayor, a position that often comes with some control over the local police department. 

The most obvious highlight is the mayoral race in New York City, where incumbent and former police officer Eric Adams is preparing to run for a second term while under indictment on federal corruption charges. 

Under Adams, the New York Police Department has been rocked by incessant scandals and resignations, including over corruption and sexual misconduct allegations. Adams has championed more aggressive police tactics such as adding armed officers to public transit and reviving plainclothes police squads. He has already drawn a wide field of challengers, including a pair of progressive state Senators, Zellnor Myrie and Jessica Ramos, who have each been more critical of the NYPD. The possible candidacy of former Governor Andrew Cuomo may still rock the race. 

Then there’s Atlanta, where Democratic leadership remains locked in a battle with local activists over plans to construct a police training center widely known as “Cop City.” Mayor Andre Dickens has championed the proposal and secured the city council’s approval; these officials also blocked a ballot initiative that would have asked Atlantans to weigh in on Cop City. This year, Dickens is running for reelection; all city council seats are on the ballot as well. 

Minneapolis sparked nationwide protests in 2020 after the police killing of George Floyd. Mayor Jacob Frey has agreed to reforms over the years but has drawn scrutiny over their faltering implementation. He has also resisted more ambitious overhauls; he won reelection in 2021 on the same day as voters defeated a proposal to replace the police department, which he vocally opposed. 

Omar Fateh, a progressive state lawmaker who backed the 2021 policing referendum, has announced that he’ll challenge the mayor in 2025 and has signaled that he’ll run to Frey’s left.

Other cities with mayoral elections in 2025 include Boston, where first-term Mayor Michelle Wu promised to reform policing but backtracked on some key commitments like ending a controversial police surveillance center. In Pittsburgh, a mayor who is generally allied with local reformers is up for a second term. In Omaha and Seattle, candidates who ran on growing their local police departments and defeated more left-leaning opponents in 2021 are again on the ballot. Plus, Bolts will track similar dynamics in cities ranging from Buffalo and Cleveland to St. Louis and Oakland. 

5. Will conservatives flip supreme courts in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania?

Just two years after a liberal takeover that paved the way for fairer election maps, control of Wisconsin’s supreme court is again on the ballot this spring. An open race to replace a retiring liberal justice, Ann Welsh Bradley, could flip the court back to the right. 

Conservatives have a similar opportunity in Pennsylvania, where three Democratic justices are up for reelection this year; Republicans need to win two of these seats to secure a majority on the court, and their chances largely depend on whether any incumbents retire.

The stakes around control of these courts are most clear around abortion rights, labor issues, and redistricting. But on criminal cases, these supreme courts also hear individual appeals and decide broader questions like the constitutionality of punishments. In Pennsylvania, cases currently on the supreme court’s docket include a challenge to draconian life sentence schemes and a dispute over an effort by Krasner to vacate a death sentence. 

But the Democratic majority on Pennsylvania’s high court has not delivered consistent wins for criminal justice reformers—for instance, declining to consider the legality of the death penalty.

And Wisconsin’s court, typically split by ideological conflicts, is strikingly uniform when it comes to justices’ professional backgrounds. Five of its seven members are former prosecutors; none is a former public defender. The 2025 front-runners, conservative Brad Schimel and liberal Susan Crawford, have both stressed their prosecutorial experiences as a former attorney general and former deputy attorney general, respectively.

6. Who will come to govern New Jersey and Virginia? 

Voters in New Jersey and Virginia will each elect their next governor and lawmakers this year.

Amy Torres, the New Jersey advocate for immigrant justice, says that, depending on who wins Democratic primaries and then the November elections, she could see New Jersey become more acquiescent toward the Trump administration. Or alternatively, she says, “There’s an interesting opportunity for New Jersey to be the voice of what resistance looks like.” She stressed that her state’s outlook feels especially uncertain due to a legal ruling last year that revamped primary ballots and loosened the control of party machines.

One unusual layer to the governor’s race: New Jersey does not elect local prosecutors, so the discretion to set prosecutorial policies rests largely with the attorney general, another office that itself is not elected but rather appointed by the governor. New Jersey has been under full Democratic control since the 2017 elections. 

Meanwhile, Virginia’s government has flipped back and forth during that time, with major ramifications for criminal justice policy.

In their brief stint running the state from 2019 to 2021, Virginia Democrats abolished the death penalty, banned life without parole sentences for kids, and ended prison gerrymandering, among other changes. But their agenda came to an abrupt halt in 2021 with the election of Governor Glenn Youngkin, a Republican who effectively froze voting rights restoration and parole grants and vetoed other reform legislation. Another Republican, Attorney General Jason Miyares, has also targeted local reformers but lacks legislative allies to preempt their policies. 

These issues are sure to come to a head in 2025. Youngkin is barred from seeking a second term as governor. Miyares is running for reelection as attorney general. And legislative races will decide which party can pursue its priorities, from Democrats hoping to codify voting rights for people with felony convictions to the GOP pushing to ramp up policing of immigrants.

Amy Woolard with the ACLU of Virginia says the 2025 elections could be an opportunity to expand criminal legal reform in her state, but that some of the rhetoric around public safety makes the work tough. “It’s tough to get people to listen to community members inside the legislature. It’s tough to push back against the fearmongering,” she told Bolts.

But she is also excited about a new generation of officials who first came into office in 2023 and whose ranks she hopes expand this year. She said, “They brought with them a kind of excitement, fearlessness, energy around having candid conversations around excessive sentencing, about the racial implications of our criminal justice system.”

The post The Local Elections That Will Define Criminal Justice Policy in 2025 appeared first on Bolts.

In Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth, Republican sheriff Bill Waybourn secured his win over Patrick Moses, a reverend and retired federal law enforcement official, with 54 to 46 percent of the vote. The race had been dominated by the high number of jail deaths during Waybourn’s tenure, with at least 65 people dying since he came to office in 2017, compared to 25 deaths in the jail in the eight years that preceded him. Local advocates and family members have protested outside the jail and filled county commissioners meetings in recent years to demand action from elected officials and basic information about how their loved ones died. 

Waybourn’s local critics have long accused the Trump-aligned sheriff of neglecting his duties at home in pursuit of right-wing celebrity. A campaign ad from Waybourn this cycle touted that he is “enforcing deportations, working with ICE, and building a wall around Tarrant County.” He spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally after the 2020 election and last year helped form an “election integrity task force” with other far-right county leaders, despite there being no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Tarrant County. This year, he received an award from the Claremont Institute, an extremist organization tied to Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the election in 2020. At a rally for Ted Cruz this week, Waybourn told the crowd that Election Day was “our D-Day, we need to be loaded up and ready to go, locked and loaded and ready to go.” 

Waybourn’s win was part of a rightward shift in Tarrant County, statewide, and nationally. The most populous GOP-controlled county in the U.S. narrowly voted for Joe Biden in 2020, but lurched right again with the election in 2022 of a far-right county executive who has reshaped local government. Bud Kennedy, a longtime columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, wrote on Wednesday that Waybourn, who won a larger share of votes in the county than Trump or Cruz, “had it easy,” saying that the Tarrant County Democratic Party “​continues to exist on paper but rarely in public.”

Crisis conditions at the Tarrant County jail began to dominate local headlines under Waybourn, who first won office in 2016. The county has been forced to pay out millions of dollars in recent years to settle lawsuits alleging horrific treatment of vulnerable people in his jail—including a pregnant woman who gave birth alone in a cell to a baby who would later die, a man with seizure disorder who died in his cell and wasn’t found for hours because guards lied about doing mandatory cell checks, and a woman with severe mental illness who died of apparent dehydration after months in the jail.  

Last month, Bolts reported that the sheriff has also been flouting a state law requiring independent law enforcement investigations into all deaths in custody, instead having the Fort Worth Police Department simply review investigations done by the sheriff’s office’s own staff into more than 20 deaths over the last three years. The Texas Commission on Jail Standards, a state agency charged with regulating county jails, was not aware of the violation until informed by Bolts’ reporting, and has since told the sheriff’s office they must seek independent law enforcement investigations. 

Waybourn, who was defiant on the issue of rising jail deaths ahead of the election and has insisted he’s following state law, has previously tried to erode state oversight of jail deaths. As Bolts reported last year, Waybourn has previously pushed for legislation to gut a law meant to ensure that Texas sheriffs don’t investigate themselves after jail deaths—a key reform in the Sandra Bland Act that state lawmakers passed in 2017.

Jail reform advocates say those independent investigations, which regularly show dehumanizing and dangerous treatment that can lead to preventable deaths, are critical and often the only window into what really happened after someone dies behind bars. 

While Texas jail regulators have put Waybourn on notice for violating state law, the jail commission has been largely deferential to local sheriffs in the past. The governor-appointed commission has minimal staff and a shoestring budget but is tasked with inspecting more than 200 jails across the sprawling state. A 2021 state audit found that the commission fails to hold jails accountable due to limited enforcement power.  

Waybourn did not respond to a request for comment for this story, but he has repeatedly blamed the high number of deaths on people coming into the jail already sick. In an election night interview, the sheriff told WFAA that most people “really died in the hospital,” saying, “I can’t raise people from the dead and I can’t keep people from having bad diets and 30 years of heroin use and all of a sudden their heart can’t take it anymore and there’s not much we can do about that.” 

While county commissioners could exert influence over the sheriff through budget decisions, that hasn’t really happened, Democratic Commissioner Alisa Simmons told Bolts last month. Simmons accused Republican members who hold a majority on the commissioners court of trying to shield Waybourn from more scrutiny after they abruptly canceled their regular meeting scheduled for Election Day—during which officials were slated to discuss topics related to jail conditions, including hiring attorneys for jailers named in a lawsuit filed by the family of a former Marine with schizophrenia who was killed by guards in April.

Local advocates say they’ll continue pushing for changes at the jail under another term with Waybourn as sheriff. “We are in this work not because we thought we would win elections, but because it’s the right thing to do,” said Ryon Price, a pastor with Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, who worked with other local activists to file a complaint with the Department of Justice last year requesting a federal investigation into conditions at Tarrant County Jail. “We never set out to put all of our eggs in the basket of electoral politics,” he told Bolts, pointing to recent changes that he says followed public pressure and advocacy, like the resignation of the jail chief in the wake of the former Marine’s death this spring, and the indictment of two of his jailers on murder charges. 

“Public officials are ultimately accountable to the public, but they are also always to be accountable to the rule of law,” Price said. “There are courts, there are rules of law, there are state laws, there are the basic human rights as declared in the UN charter. All of these things should still hold the sheriff accountable.”

The post A Scandal-Plagued Sheriff Wins Another Term in North Texas appeared first on Bolts.

Later in the meeting, LaMonica Bratton, the woman’s mother, walked up and placed a red urn with a silver rose on the podium before introducing herself to the Tarrant County commissioners seated in front of her: “I’m Ms. Bratton, Chasity Bonner’s mother.” Then she tapped the urn. “This is Chasity Bonner.”

“Because you are failing at your job, this is where my baby is,” she said.

The procession of grief and anger during the commission’s early October meeting speaks to the spike in deaths at the jail under Tarrant County Sheriff Bill Waybourn, and the rising public pressure and outcry over jail conditions as he faces reelection in November. Since Waybourn took office in January 2017, at least 65 people have died in Tarrant County jail custody, compared to 25 jail deaths during the 8-year period that preceded him. Most of the people held in the jail are pre-trial, meaning they have never been convicted of their alleged crime.

As Waybourn faces increased scrutiny from local advocates, his office also appears to be flouting a state law requiring sheriffs to commission outside law enforcement investigations into all deaths in their jails. After Bolts filed a public records request for those investigations with the Fort Worth Police Department, which the sheriff’s office has listed as the agency looking into more than 20 jail deaths over the past three years, a police spokesperson said there were no responsive records. When asked about the discrepancy, the spokesperson wrote in an email, “I’m told that the Tarrant County Sheriff Department investigates those.”  

Waybourn, who did not respond to requests for an interview or questions for this story, has said his office is working on improvements and blamed the deaths on people entering custody who are already sick or intoxicated, calling his jail the “largest psychiatric hospital in Tarrant County.” 

In recent years, Tarrant County has paid out millions of dollars to settle lawsuits alleging horrific treatment of vulnerable people in Waybourn’s jail. One case, the largest settlement in the county’s history, involved a pregnant woman with a slew of mental health disorders who deteriorated in the jail for months until she became non-verbal, and eventually gave birth to her daughter alone inside her cell. The baby died ten days later. This fall, the county settled another case with the family of a woman with severe mental illness who died of apparent dehydration after five months in jail, one of three people with mental illness who died of thirst in the jail in recent years. Another lawsuit filed this year that’s still pending says an intellectually disabled woman with epilepsy was refused proper treatment and seized repeatedly in an unpadded cell during her week and a half in jail. According to the lawsuit, the woman left the jail covered in bruises and had to be hospitalized for weeks on a ventilator in the ICU. 

Advocates for better jail conditions in Tarrant County have long accused Waybourn, a Republican, of neglecting his core duties at home as he cultivated his celebrity status in far-right politics. Waybourn has expanded his office’s involvement in immigration enforcement and has testified in Congress about border security despite his county being hundreds of miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. Last year he helped form an “election integrity task force” following pressure from North Texas election deniers to increase investigations of voter fraud—even though local election administrators had been lauded for running secure elections. 

“He came in here to make his base happy, to be a law and order sheriff, to put his foot down on ‘illegal aliens.’ And in so doing, he has wrought havoc on this community,” said Pamela Young, executive director of United Fort Worth, a group that has protested Waybourn and called for his ouster for years over the allegations of brutality and neglect at his jail. “He is a regular guest on conservative talk radio, podcasts, TV,” said Young, noting he headlined a Stop the Steal rally in the wake of the 2020 election, and posed for a photo with Kyle Rittenhouse at a fundraiser last year. “Instead of making sure that the people in his jail are safe, making sure that his jail is not overcrowded, making sure that people in the jail are not getting beat,” she said. 

Young is part of a group of local organizers, faith leaders and families of people who died at the jail who have held protests outside the lockup in recent years and flooded county commission meetings to demand intervention from other officials. In early June, a sister of Anthony Johnson Jr., the former marine who was pepper-sprayed and killed by guards in April, was kicked out of a commissioners meeting by the far-right county executive after she confronted elected officials during the public comment period. Later that month, two of Johnson’s jailers were indicted on murder charges, and 15 are now named in a lawsuit filed by his family. During a July commission meeting, a Baptist pastor in Fort Worth who often speaks out about jail deaths was also kicked out for going eight seconds over his allotted three minutes, and banned from attending for a year. (He successfully appealed and has since returned to commission meetings.)  

Advocates point to a pattern of people with mental illness being jailed instead of taken to a medical facility, and then facing neglect and brutality behind bars. In May, many showed up to a commission meeting to urge for the release of Kai’Yere Campbell, an intellectually and developmentally disabled 21-year-old who had been arrested from his group home and spent six months in jail despite being deemed incompetent to stand trial. “Here is a laboratory demonstration of how people with mental health issues die in our jail,” one speaker told commissioners, describing how he deteriorated in lockup and lost significant weight. “If you just wait, if there’s no intervention, we will be here before long about the death of Kai’Yere Campbell.” He was released to a state-supported living center the following month. 

Last year, local advocates worked with the civil rights clinic at Texas A&M University’s law school to file a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice and ask for a federal investigation into the jail. “The Tarrant County jail is a danger to the Tarrant County community,” the complaint stated. “This system of violence, failure to provide medical care, and failure to adequately investigate is characteristic of a culture of secrecy and coverup.” 

During a county forum in January about conditions at the jail, Waybourn insisted that deaths in custody are appropriately investigated and displayed a photo showing stacks of documents—an image of papers that he said represented thorough inquiries into jail deaths. “If you’re talking about conspiracy to cover up, there’s probably 100 people who have written reports in that thing—it’s just impossible,” the sheriff said, pointing to the photo on the screen behind him. “And I don’t know, maybe you’re a conspiracy theorist. I’m not, I believe Oswald killed the president.” 

Patrick Moses, Waybourn’s Democratic challenger in the November election, confronted the sheriff when it was time for audience questions, asking why taxpayers were funding an “election integrity” unit without evidence of fraud. “You just mentioned to us, sheriff, that you dont chase conspiracy theories,” Moses said. “While neglecting the people that are dying in the jail, you’re part of this great conspiracy.”

Moses, a Fort Worth pastor and retired federal law enforcement officer, didn’t respond to an interview request for this story. He has pointed to reducing jail deaths as one of his top priorities.

Waybourn won an overwhelming 81 percent of the vote in 2016 when he first ran for sheriff in Tarrant County, the last urban stronghold for the Texas GOP. But politics in Tarrant County have seen a shift in recent elections, with a majority of the county’s voters choosing Beto O’Rourke over Ted Cruz in the 2018 election for U.S. Senate. In 2020, Donald Trump lost Tarrant County, the first time a Republican presidential candidate failed to carry it since 1964, while Waybourn won re-election that year by just 5 points.

As deaths in Waybourn’s jail have increased, the sheriff has pushed for legislation to erode a key element of the Sandra Bland Act, a reform law Texas passed in 2017 that was meant to bolster accountability. The law mandates independent law enforcement investigations into jail deaths, a requirement that Waybourn said was often time-consuming and unnecessary when he testified in 2022 at a state Senate committee for legislation to limit outside investigations. The resulting bill, which did not pass, would have absolved sheriffs of having to commission these third-party investigations whenever deaths are blamed on “natural causes or occurring in a manner that does not indicate an offense has been committed.” 

These independent investigations, meant to ensure that sheriffs don’t investigate themselves, regularly document dehumanizing conditions and treatment that can lead to preventable deaths, and provide important evidence of wrongdoing, including criminal activity, even in cases where the deaths were ruled “natural.” 

But even so, they still sometimes echo the same pro-police bias that such investigations are supposed to prevent. For example, when 38-year-old Robert Miller died in 2019 after Tarrant County jail guards pepper-sprayed him, the Texas Rangers, the detective arm of state police, were called to investigate. The Ranger who investigated Miller’s death, Clarence “Trace” McDonald, didn’t watch any surveillance video from the jail, instead asking a sheriff’s deputy to review it, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The report he filed also did not include mention of the inconsistencies in guards’ accounts, or note speaking with jail hospital staff or medical experts about Miller’s cause of death, which a medical examiner ruled was “natural,” due to sickle cell crisis—an explanation that outside experts later challenged. 

McDonald, who as a Ranger investigated at least 20 jail deaths under Waybourn, was hired by the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office in 2021. Since then, the sheriff has mostly picked the Fort Worth Police Department for outside investigations into jail deaths, according to reports the jail must file with the Texas Attorney General’s Office after every death. Yet when Bolts filed a request with Fort Worth police for records of all investigations into Tarrant County jail deaths, the department said it had none.  

Brandon Wood, executive director of the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, which regulates county jails across the state, told Bolts that he wasn’t previously aware of the discrepancy and would look into the matter further. In at least some cases, he said, it appeared that the police department simply reviewed the investigation done by the sheriff’s office, rather than conducting their own. “That is not what is supposed to be occurring,” Wood said. “There’s supposed to be an outside law enforcement agency investigate deaths in custody. There’s nothing that prohibits the county from also conducting their own investigation. But the statute clearly states that it shall be an investigation—not simply a review, not a cover sheet on an investigation that Tarrant County did.”  

A legislative agency that audits state departments wrote in a 2021 report that the Texas jail commission largely fails to hold jails accountable due to unclear regulations and limited enforcement power. While sheriffs continue to run dangerous jails with little accountability or oversight, county commissions still have a role in operating local lockups, such as powers over funding and contracts for operating the facilities. 

Local county commissions in many large Texas counties have responded to jail overcrowding by approving multi million dollar contracts to ship people in jail custody to for-profit prisons. Over the past two years, Tarrant County commissioners approved more than $40 million to send people hundreds of miles away to a private prison in West Texas; last year, a man sent there from Tarrant County died of leukemia. But after North Texas public radio station KERA reported on state jail commission records showing neglect at the private prison, commissioners voted unanimously to end the contract early. The company that operated the West Texas prison shut down the facility on Sept. 30, the same day Tarrant County’s contract ended.  

As circumstances surrounding deaths inside the Tarrant County jail remain opaque, local advocates pushing for more transparency have looked to other county officials for help. Alisa Simmons, one of two Democrats on the five-member Tarrant County commission, organized the January town hall about deaths at the jail and has joined the calls for Waybourn to resign and for a federal inquiry into his jail. 

Simmons told Bolts that “the only people who can fire [Waybourn] are the voters,” but added that county commissioners could be doing more to force changes at the jail. “We need to, as a court, utilize the power of the purse strings and withhold funds from the sheriff’s office until conditions improve in the jail,” she said. Otherwise, “Tarrant county taxpayers are going to continue to pay a heavy price to subsidize that dehumanizing culture in our jail.”

The post North Texas Sheriff Running for Reelection Faces Grief and Anger Over Rising Jail Deaths  appeared first on Bolts.

In February, as the Louisiana legislature debated Senate Bill 3, which would move all 17 year olds charged with a crime out of the juvenile justice system and back into the adult system, Will Harrell, an advisor to New Orleans Sheriff Susan Hutson, went to update the department’s Prison Rape Elimination Act coordinator on the proposed changes. He watched as tears came to her eyes. Teenagers are uniquely vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse in adult jails, and federal law requires they be separated from the adult population, which often translates to solitary confinement conditions. “She knows what that means for these kids,” Harrell told Bolts. 

The bill quickly passed and was signed into law by Louisiana’s new governor Jeff Landry on Wednesday. Now, Harrell is scrambling to figure out how to absorb dozens of 17 year olds into the already-overburdened Orleans Parish Justice Center once SB 3 takes effect in April. “We’re already at capacity. We’re under a consent decree,” he said. “I talked to deputies who were there seven years ago when they had kids. And they were like, ‘oh, this is just going to be a mess.’” 

“In conjunction with other legislation pending during this special session, we anticipate a massive, unmanageable population explosion at OJC,” Hutson wrote in a statement.

Landry sailed into the governor’s office last November after a campaign filled with crime-and-punishment rhetoric. Despite the fact that Louisiana already has the nation’s highest rate of incarceration, he made one of his first acts as governor convening a special legislative session on crime. In an extraordinarily fast nine-day session which ended last Friday, Republican lawmakers passed all 37 bills under consideration, a grab bag of tough-on-crime proposals that included restricting post-conviction relief, increasing law enforcement immunity, and legalizing execution methods such as nitrogen gas and the electric chair. 

Sarah Omojola, the director of the Vera Institute of Justice’s New Orleans office, called it a “one hundred percent” rollback of the Justice Reinvestment Initiative, the raft of bipartisan criminal legal reforms passed under former Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards in 2017. “In some instances, this isn’t just a rollback,” she added. “This is taking us back to the early 2000s, late ‘90s.”

Observers are just starting to take stock of what this flurry of new legislation will mean for crime deterrence, and for the state budget. But Omojola, Harrell, and others are already certain that several different measures will work together to significantly grow the state’s pretrial populations, as well as the number of people sentenced and serving time. Other bills effectively eliminate parole, vastly restrict “good time” credits, and mandate prison time for technical violations of parole and probation. 

“Of course it’s going to balloon the prison population. Every single time these kinds of laws go into play, the incarceration rate jumps,” said Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, a University of Kentucky geography professor whose 2023 book, Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana, examines incarceration in the state. “That’s just basic math.” 

And in Louisiana, that means, once again, a profound and reverberating impact on parish jails and sheriffs. Owing to a unique arrangement designed to address overcrowding and bad conditions at Angola prison back in the 1970s, Louisiana’s local lock-ups house more than half of its state prisoner population. 

Jails operate as sort of a carceral shadow system: deadlier than the state prison system, lacking many of its resources and offerings, and run by sheriffs, who are comparatively unaccountable to state officials. East Baton Rouge Parish Prison, a dangerous jail that has for 15 years running been presided over by the same notorious sheriff, for instance, does not allow in-person visits, even though some of the people held there have been incarcerated for years on end. If someone dies in custody in a Louisiana jail, officials have no responsibility to notify their loved ones.

The Louisiana Sheriff’s Association, which lobbies on behalf of the state’s 64 sheriffs, testified in favor of SB 3, despite Hutson’s opposition. “It’s not just a bill that we are supporting, this is a bill that is part of our plan,” spokesperson Mike Ranatza told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “This is what we asked the governor to entertain for us in the special crime session…this is what the overwhelming majority of our sheriffs have asked for.” 

The jail system runs on “per diem” payments that the state grants local law enforcement in exchange for jailing people who have been sentenced to state prison, payments which this year will total $177 million. More prisoners means more money for sheriffs across the state—and likely future efforts to expand jails, according to Pelot-Hobbs. 

“Louisiana law enforcement agencies are uniquely invested in incarceration” because of the per-diem system, Omojola told Bolts. “They financially benefit from people who are being held in their jails without providing any of those programs or resources.” 

The origins of today’s jail arrangement has its roots not in tough-on-crime policies, but in a lawsuit filed by four Black Angola prisoners challenging the conditions of their confinement. In 1975, in response to the lawsuit, a federal judge limited Angola’s population. Rather than build new prisons, it was cheaper and easier for the state to transfer some prisoners to local jails to serve the remainder of their sentences. At first, Pelot-Hobbs writes in Prison Capital, sheriffs protested. But after the per diem system was instituted, they began to consider their new prisoners a boon, even asking Angola to send them more people.

By the 1990s, Pelot-Hobbs argues, jails had gone from being a “temporary spatial fix” to “the long-term geographic solution for the Louisiana carceral state.” Sheriffs, now reliant on the per-diem money, organized for jail expansion to hold more state prisoners. Between 1999 and 2019, the state added some 14,000 jail beds. “Other parishes built out huge jails that they’ll never need for their local population,” said Harrell. “It’s like a hotel. You open up the hotel, DOC sends you some kid from New Orleans, they pay you for the hotel rooms. And that literally is why you have the jail.”

This system may financially benefit local sheriffs and the state department of corrections, but it comes at the expense of the people locked up in their jails. “There’s nothing on the inside,” said Amelia Herrera, an organizer with Voice of the Experienced’s Baton Rouge chapter who spent time in the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison in 2015 and has a loved one currently incarcerated there. Officials, she said, “will say the reason there’s no type of programs inside of this facility is because it’s a pre-trial facility…But when we have people in there for six and seven years?” 

“You can’t visit,” she added. “They make it almost impossible to keep a connection with the outside.”

As it stands, providing no programming or visits even for people locked up for years on end is legal. Louisiana’s regulations governing how people should be treated while incarcerated in its jails are notably minimal and vague. While the state has a set of “basic jail guidelines” that apply to facilities that house state prisoners, a 2023 report by the University of Texas at Austin’s Prison and Jail Innovation Lab found that they fell short compared to regional counterparts like Texas and Florida. The report determined that the state’s jails have little to no requirements regarding transparency around in-custody deaths, adequate heating and cooling systems, or in-person visiting rights, and that their regulations around discipline are the least comprehensive of anything they reviewed. It also noted that the family members of incarcerated Louisianans contend that the regulations that do exist are routinely flouted. 

The state legislature had commissioned the report, which concluded with a set of recommendations for jails to adopt guidelines prohibiting corporal punishment and the denial of basic needs like water or sleep. But when the lab’s director, Michele Deitch, and her team submitted their work last fall, the Louisiana Sheriff’s Association immediately sent a letter expressing appreciation for the work but signaling they would not follow the bulk of their recommendations, citing concerns over security plus limited capacity. 

The report was completed several months before Landry took office. Now the new raft of bills passed during the special crime session threatens to turbocharge Louisiana’s cycle of jail expansion, exacerbating the problems already on display in the report’s pages before the state does much to try to remedy them. 

Omojola highlighted three bills proposed by Republican Senator Debbie Villio, HB 9, 10, and 11, which, taken together, “essentially work to make sentences much much longer—and therefore fill our prisons and our jails,” she said. HB 9 aims to abolish discretionary parole in most cases, HB 10 limits the accumulation of “good time” credits meaning that an individual would be required to serve at least 85 percent of his sentence without exception, and HB 11 increases the penalties for even technical violations of parole or probation. 

Harrell noted that HB 9 and 10 may have an indirect impact on the pretrial population as well, because they take away people’s incentive to accept a plea offer. With vastly reduced prospects of getting out on parole or getting a sentence reduced with “good time” credits, people may be less keen to accept a conviction and start getting their time over with, and more likely to wait out a trial date in jail. “When that’s taken away from them, they are like, ‘Well, then why should I leave? I’m just gonna stay here in jail and roll my dice and hopefully somebody on a jury will decide that I’m not guilty,’” he said. 

Villio, the bills’ sponsor and an ally of Landry’s, contends that these laws won’t increase prison populations as long as judges adjust their sentencing decisions accordingly. In a text message to Nola.com, she said, “It requires a mind-reset on sentencing that in the end should result in a wash. We, of course, will be monitoring that.” When Bolts asked how this sort of paradigm shift for judges would work in practice, Villio said, “I have the utmost confidence in our judiciary,” noting she believes that trainings have already been scheduled. 

The Crime and Justice Institute, a policy analysis group, has studied other states’ implementation of similar determinate sentencing laws; Leonard Engel, the group’s director of policy and campaigns, told Bolts their research shows that judges do not ultimately adjust their sentences anywhere enough to make up the difference in years served.

HB 11, the bill dealing with technical violations of probation and parole, is also alarming to reform advocates like Bruce Reilly of Voice of the Experienced. Under the terms of the bill, people on parole or probation who are merely re-arrested, not even convicted, could get sent to prison. “That’s really where the sheriff and jails are gonna get their bread and butter,” Reilly said.

The special session also passed a law requiring 20 year mandatory minimums for carjacking cases that involve bodily injury and established financing to establish a state trooper force for New Orleans. “That’s gonna rack up a whole bunch of new arrests,” Harell said of the state trooper force. “Where do you think those people are gonna be housed?”

Overcrowding is likely to lead to an expansion of the footprint of local jails in what Pelot-Hobbs predicted could be a repeat of the same patterns of the 1980s and 1990s. The Crime and Justice Institute estimates that the additional prison time people in a given year serve under HB 9 and 10, instead of getting out on “good time” credits or parole, will cost the state upwards of a billion dollars over time. And that’s before any budget increases sheriffs could ask for—and they are likely to ask, Pelot-Hobbs said. “We’re going to see sheriffs organizing and pushing to expand their jails for this moment,” she said. “We are going to see sheriffs mobilizing and organizing to get either property taxes or millages or sales taxes to get more jail space to incarcerate the state prisoners. I also think we’re likely going to see them lobbying the state legislature for higher per diem rates.” 

Advocates worry that the growth of local budgets and contracts, combined with Landry’s efforts to reduce accountability for law enforcement, will add to the state’s problems with cronyism. “It’s going to fuel the corruption, the closed circle of sheriffs and the folks who contract with them, who will know that there’s more money to be had if they can land the contracts for this jail expansion and for the increased services needed for a larger population,” says Julien Burns, the communications lead for Sheriffs for Trusting Communities. Along with Common Cause, the group has documented how sheriffs receive millions in campaign contributions from guard uniform makers, telecoms and bail bonds companies, and contractors that may hope to secure lucrative contracts with the department. 

In the waning days of the special crime session, a discussion finally arose about the collective impact of these bills on Louisiana’s jails, with even conservative lawmakers such as Villio, the sponsor of HB 9, 10, and 11, expressing an awareness of the need for greater programming and services in the jails. “Everybody’s on record, saying the right thing—like if we’re gonna do this, we can’t just warehouse [people]. We’re gonna have to address the issues,” said Harrell. The legislature now moves to its regular session, where some of these issues could be hammered out. 

Dramatically expanding jail programming, of course, would mean an even greater expansion of the carceral budget in Louisiana. Pelot-Hobbs said that she doubts that substantive programming will actually materialize in the jails. “I just think it’s a false promise,” she told Bolts. “And even if the promise came true, it’s still just acquiescing to the general kind of commitment to incarceration as the solution.” 

Still, in Harrell’s view, allocating such resources is crucial given the vastly restricted terrain for criminal legal transformation in the state as long as Landry is in office. “These tough on crime Republicans are running the show,” he said. “There’s no going back right now, at least for the next four years. And so to the extent people are concerned about the health and safety of people who are currently incarcerated, who will soon be incarcerated under these legislations, they need to understand that programming resources matter.”

Nola.com reported this week that the exact costs of the laws that have already passed in February are uncertain because lawmakers rushed them through, suspending usual rules that would have entailed more attention to the budget. 

The state’s decision to double down on incarceration, Pelot-Hobbs added, will affect public spending in other areas, too. “As money gets more and more directed towards these kinds of expenditure projects, less funds are going to be available for road construction, levy construction, schools,” she said. “The criminal legal system never operates in a silo.” 

The post “We’re Going to Be Overwhelmed”: How Louisiana Just Ballooned Its Jail Population appeared first on Bolts.

Cheh, who was a Washington D.C. City Council member at the time, says a tour she took of the D.C. Jail that summer that led her to introduce the Inmate Segregation Reduction Act of 2015, which attempted to limit solitary confinement throughout the District’s correctional facilities. 

In December of that year, advocates with the National Religious Campaign Against Torture erected a full-size replica of a solitary confinement cell in the Foundry United Methodist Church in Northwest D.C. to raise awareness for Cheh’s bill ahead of a council vote. Cheh, who visited the church one Sunday that month to speak about the proposed reforms, says the image of the cell’s cramped confines has stuck with her ever since.

“It really took the activism of groups to point out to me the ills—the absolute horror, even—of solitary confinement,” she told Bolts. 

But Cheh’s bill never made it to a vote. In fact it never made it out of the judiciary committee where it was first referred. Cheh tried twice more to pass laws reducing solitary confinement before leaving the council in 2022, but those proposals died as well. 

Then in September 2023, D.C. Council member Brianne Nadeau took up the baton by introducing the ERASE (Eliminating Restrictive and Segregated Enclosure) Solitary Confinement Act. Nadeau’s office worked with the local chapter of Unlock the Box, a coalitional advocacy campaign seeking to end solitary confinement nationwide, in drafting the language of the bill. It aims to comprehensively ban solitary practices in the D.C. Department of Corrections’ facilities, but it remains to be seen whether Nadeau and her co-sponsors on the Council will be able to generate the political will to get it passed this time. 

Despite calls to end it over the intervening years, solitary confinement has remained a regular practice in the D.C. Jail, which holds between 900 and 1,300 residents at any given time. Most are pretrial defendants or people serving short sentences for misdemeanor convictions. 

In fact, D.C.’s Department of Corrections has been shown to use solitary confinement more than many other correctional systems around the country. An agency memo reported that eight percent of its population were held in solitary confinement in 2018, and nine percent in 2017—three times the national average, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report released in 2015. And at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, the agency reportedly held 1,500 people in prolonged isolation for nearly 400 days.

Solitary confinement—defined as prolonged isolation with little to no human contact—has been decried by governments and activists the world over for exacerbating the harmful behaviors that often land people in solitary in the first place. In 2015, the United Nations classified solitary confinement beyond 15 consecutive days as torture for the damage it does to inmates’ physical and mental health. Studies have shown that some residents held in solitary confinement become “actively psychotic and/or acutely suicidal.”

“It creates a situation where if somebody is already suffering from a mental illness, it exacerbates those conditions,” Jessica Sandoval, national director of the Unlock the Box, told Bolts. 

“All of the research out there and all of the personal experience we hear people share shows that putting someone in solitary is likely to make them more violent, not less,” said Emily Cassometus, former director of government and external affairs at DC Justice Lab, part of the Unlock the Box D.C. coalition. “Towards themselves, towards other people in the facility, staff and residents included, and more likely to be victims of violence, to be victims of self-harm, and to commit violence once they’re released.”

The D.C. Jail has leaned on isolation as a strategy to deal with inmates experiencing mental health crises in particular, yet publicly contends that it doesn’t put people in “solitary confinement.” In 2022, then-DOC spokesperson Keena Blackmon told a local outlet that the D.C. Jail “does not operate solitary confinement within its facilities,” and only uses “restrictive housing” for suicide prevention. 

These are known as “safe cells,” designed to keep suicidal inmates from environments that could endanger their safety. But advocates have argued that these restrictive housing units are just isolation by another name, and say these units more closely resemble punishment than medical care. 

“Jail authorities are very clever and they give different names to solitary confinement, but it’s still solitary confinement,” Cheh told Bolts. “They could call it whatever they want.”

A lawyer representing people formerly incarcerated in the D.C. Jail told Bolts of numerous complaints emanating from the restrictive housing cells over the past decade. People incarcerated in these units have complained of being held for 23 hours of each day isolated inside their cell; that they had no access to showers or running water; that they slept on plastic blocks due to a lack of mattresses; that bright fluorescent lighting blazing all day inside their cell made them lose track of time; that they were stripped of all their clothes and personal belongings, including religious material, and even thrown in cells with feces on the walls—likely from past residents who’d covered themselves in it trying to force officers to let them shower. 

Between November 2012 and August 2013, four residents of the facility committed suicide, which jail officials at the time said was three times the national average. So the department commissioned suicide prevention expert Lindsay Hayes to survey the area in order to prevent further self-inflicted harm.

In his report published September 2013, Hayes found the conditions “overly restrictive” and “seemingly punitive,” and suggested that the agency avoid isolating at-risk residents to prevent further self-harm.

“Confining a suicidal inmate to their cell for 24 hours a day only enhances isolation and is anti-therapeutic,” he wrote.

While the jail has updated their practices based on Hayes’ suggestions, residents are still reportedly held for up to 22 hours a day in severe conditions. And the suicides haven’t stopped.

Nadeau’s bill makes note of the “deplorable conditions at the District’s jails and restrictive housing units—including flooding, lack of grievance procedures, lack of mattresses, and more.”

The bill seeks to prohibit “segregated confinement” outright within the D.C. Jail. But it still makes an exception for safe cells; it would “strictly limit” their use for suicide prevention, allowing for people on suicide watch to be put in “safe cells” only if “immediately necessary”, and sets a 48-hour maximum limit for holding a person there continuously. It also puts in place other guardrails, such as frequent checks by a medical professional. 

This stripped back version, which didn’t include juvenile detention facilities the way Cheh’s bill did, was introduced in an attempt to ease its way to passage.

But even if the bill is passed, the reforms would need to be regularly enforced by an independent oversight body or risk becoming toothless. The D.C. Corrections Information Council was created for such oversight, but in recent years it has received sharp criticism for its inattention to conditions in the D.C. Jail.

“Sixteen years on the Council taught me a few things,” Cheh told Bolts, “and one of them is that you can pass all the laws you want, but if people aren’t enforcing them, then they’re not worth the paper they’re written on.”

The legislation hasn’t progressed much in the new year. In fact, the city council seems to have moved in the opposite direction on criminal justice, passing an omnibus anti-crime bill in early February that would among other things create harsher penalties for gun crimes and theft, with a focus on retail theft in particular. The ERASE Solitary Confinement Act was referred to the judiciary and public safety committee back in November, but there hasn’t been any movement on the legislation since.

Cassometus says she fears that to many D.C. leaders, the invisible nature of solitary confinement is a feature, not a bug. “It’s really hard to draw attention to an issue that no one can see, hear or smell,” she told Bolts. “Solitary confinement has been talked about as a solution to problems but it’s not. It’s locking our problems in a smaller box inside the jail and wishing that they would go away without actually proposing any solutions.”

The post “An Issue No One Can See”: Watchdogs Fault D.C. for Ongoing Solitary Confinement appeared first on Bolts.

“People are talking about how life-changing it’s been inside to be able to make some choices about what they’re watching on TV, or what music they’re listening to—to be able to listen to music at all,” Kinnon said. Plus, incarcerated people have tens of thousands of choices within the free eBook and audiobook library, which contains more than 63,500 titles. Some inmates with vision issues can now read almost anything in large print, when they were previously limited to the small selection of large-print books. Other inmates with low levels of literacy take advantage of audiobooks to open up the world of books to them.

Media services like these are often offered in other jails, but as they’re typically controlled by for-profit prison telecom companies, they’re often exorbitantly expensive. In most places any form of communication used to keep incarcerated people connected to the outside world, be it phone calls or tablets, has also been used to control incarcerated populations and generate profits for jails and their contractors.

San Francisco has offered jail tablets and their content at no cost to incarcerated people, part of a wave of institutions starting to decouple carceral communications from a profit motive. The free tablet program was introduced in May of 2023, a logical follow-up to San Francisco making jail phone calls free in 2020, the first county in the country to do so and the second city after New York.

Before 2023, the San Francisco jails had never implemented any tablet program for all inmates. When the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department decided to dip its toes into providing the devices, Michelle Lau, the acting director of the Financial Justice Project within the San Francisco treasurer’s office, recalls that the very first iteration of the bid request was similar to others across the country—riddled with charges for tablet services.

She remembered thinking, “We just did this whole thing with jail phone calls—why are we doing basically the same thing on a tablet?” The San Francisco Jail Justice Coalition, a coalition of community groups, pushed for a completely free tablet program. “Some [community members] even said if there were any charges, they would prefer no tablet, rather than one with high charges,” Lau said.

Tablets have been trickling into prisons and jails over the past several years, with the devices first launched in 2012 by prison communications company JPay, now owned by prison telecom giant Securus. Soon prisons and jails began hailing “free” tablets for their inmates, as these companies would indeed often distribute tablets to inmates at no cost. But once incarcerated people actually used the tablets, they were far from free.

Music might be $1.99 per song, as it is for the most expensive songs in Washington State. In Pennsylvania state prisons, eBooks cost between $2.99 and $24.99. E-messaging can be as much as Arkansas’s $0.50 per message. Or, tablet costs may rack up based on how much the tablet is used; in Minnesota’s Fillmore County, tablet use costs $0.25 for each minute, which adds up to more than $30 to watch a typical movie on a tablet screen.

Meanwhile, most incarcerated people earn little money, if any, to pay for these services. As a result, families, many of whom are indigent themselves, may support them financially. And because of the disproportionate share of Black inmates in prisons and jails, much of these fees are paid by low-income Black women, either mothers or girlfriends or wives.

Over the past two and a half years, five states have made prison phone calls (though not necessarily jail phone calls) free. The latest one, Massachusetts, just passed a law in November. A handful of major cities in addition to San Francisco have also made jail phone calls free, including New York, Miami, Louisville, and Los Angeles. 

Change will soon happen on the federal level, too. In early January 2023, President Biden signed the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act of 2022, which allows the FCC to regulate in-state prison and jail phone calls as well as out-of-state phone calls. Under federal regulation, which is set to begin sometime in the latter half of 2024, the price of prison and jail phone calls nationwide will likely fall significantly. 

In San Francisco, Sheriff Paul Miyamoto had already supported free phone calls, so it wasn’t surprising when his office ultimately released a request for proposals for a completely free tablet program. Alissa Riker, the sheriff’s office’s director of programs, said free tablets were “a long time coming” given the office’s “philosophy of not charging the folks in custody and their families.”

Lau says San Francisco received bids from the two major prison telecoms, Securus and ViaPath (formerly GTL) for the project. They also received one from Nucleos, a new company focused on prison education programming that seemed excited about a free tablet program. The company recently transitioned to a public benefit corporation, which requires it pursue both profits and positive social benefits.

In the end, Nucleos won the contract. 

Most jails and prisons, however, are contracted with either Securus and ViaPath for their tablets. Together, the companies hold roughly 80 percent of the prison communications market valued at more than $1 billion. And Securus and ViaPath have been tracking the recent and growing trend toward free phone calls

“Some of the companies running jail phone calls, they see the writing on the wall” about the looming unprofitability of jail phone calls, said Joanna Weiss, co-executive director of the Fines and Fees Justice Center. “They are often making up the money through the use of tablets.”

In 2015, a Securus presentation to potential investors noted that the company has “successfully decreased its exposure” to new regulation by “investing in businesses that are not regulated.” These businesses are any number of ancillary services like e-messaging, eBooks, movies and TV show rentals, and music that the company can then charge inmates to use on a tablet. (The Martha Wright-Reed Act clarifies that the FCC may now regulate video calls.)

But companies aren’t the only ones that profit—prisons and jails can earn commissions on tablet services just as with phone calls. “We’re always looking for ways to bring in additional money to the county,” Pennsylvania’s Westmoreland County Jail Warden John Walton told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, commenting on the jail bringing in $161,000 in tablet commissions in 2019.

Riker, from the San Francisco sheriff’s office, noted that this is what sets San Francisco’s free program apart. “Money is why other sheriff’s offices aren’t doing it,” she said. 

Typically, an institution’s profits from jail communications, whether via tablets or phones, are intended to fund inmate programming (though they sometimes simply shore up budgets or go to dubious purchases). Riker told Bolts that she’s gotten calls from people working at other jails who were astonished that San Francisco could afford to fund free tablets and give up that funding stream—regardless of the fact that the money is sourced from vulnerable prisoners and their families. 

In 2023, the mayor’s office committed to using approximately $500,000 annually from the city’s general fund to support free tablet services for people in jail. As the San Francisco sheriff’s office’s annual budget is just under $300 million, the tablet program makes up roughly 0.2 percent of the department’s total budget.

The move has been part of a citywide shift away from prison profiteering. In 2020, San Francisco’s board of supervisors passed an ordinance to bar the city from profiting off of goods and services purchased by prisoners, which led to free jail phone calls as well as the end of markups on commissary items.

But even as tablets may be an important tool for people behind bars to connect with the outside world, carceral institutions also use them to replace in-person services like classes and visitation, and even to help better control a jail or prison population. Miami-Dade County jails, like many jails across the country, suspended in-person visitation during the initial months of the Covid-19 pandemic. But also like many other jails, Miami-Dade has yet to reinstate in-person visits almost four years later.

“Visitation right now is only video calls,” said Katherine Passley, the co-executive director of Beyond the Bars, a Miami activist group organizing families of incarcerated people and pushing for changes at the jails. Passley’s father is incarcerated at a Miami-Dade County jail. Even though the county offers free 15-minute video calls, the service itself is “horrible,” Passley said, not only because of Miami’s internet connection problems—the National Digital Inclusion Alliance ranked Miami one of the worst cities in the country for internet connectivity—but also because the video contract with ViaPath precludes the use of Apple iPhones for video calling. The vast majority of Beyond the Bar’s membership can’t even access video calls, she said.

As for prison programming, the sheriff’s office in San Francisco considers the tablets a supplement to in-person classes and programming and explicitly refuses to use them as a replacement. This is not necessarily the case in other jurisdictions, which may see tablet services as an affordable replacement for educational programming. Low staffing issues in South Carolina prisons partly inspired a tablet program with educational services so the state could “use technology to deliver services to these folks in their cells,” as Department of Corrections Director Bryan Stirling told the Greenville News. 

Plus, many wardens have extolled the virtue of tablets for keeping incarcerated people busy—and keeping them under their thumbs. “It’s a great tool for us, because number one it keeps them occupied, but number two it’s something that we can take away from them for behavior modification purposes,” Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna County Jail Warden Tim Betti told The Scranton Times-Tribune in 2020.

In Miami, Beyond the Bars has concentrated on tackling fee elimination in the jails, following in the footsteps of San Francisco. For instance, they’ve successfully advocated for the county to get rid of a $2 daily fee that pushed inmates into debt and commit to providing free 90-minute phone calls each day for people in jail. The group is currently working to reintroduce in-person visitation in the jails to ensure that incarcerated people and their families aren’t only able to see their loved ones through a screen.

Beyond the Bars has also recently pushed for free tablet services in Miami-Dade County jails. The tablet program outlined in the county’s request for proposals is not quite as ambitious as San Francisco’s but is better than that of the vast majority of jails nationwide. When the Miami-Dade County jails implement the program, the plan is for inmates to get their own free tablets with access to a limited number of free resources, such as an eBook library and one free movie a month. More specific details of the tablet program, however, will likely be up to the as-of-yet unannounced contractor. Beyond the Bars reached out to the local public library, which has agreed to work with them similarly to the San Francisco library—but it’s unclear if the library will ultimately be part of the program.

Kinnon, the San Francisco librarian, said she’s fielded inquiries “every week or two” from libraries interested in replicating San Francisco’s model. But she notes most of these libraries are in jurisdictions contracted with Securus or ViaPath—companies that would have to give up their profits on books and music, unlike the newcomer Nucleos. Kinnon said that from what she understands, ViaPath and Securus “have not expressed any openness or interest in working with public libraries.” Kinnon mused that one possible, though clunky, workaround would be for carceral systems to offer two tablets, one with free library services and one with the telecom provider’s services.

Companies like ViaPath and Securus “need to feel pressure…to be more open to do this and make it work,” said Kinnon, adding that San Francisco and Nucleos needed to work together to find creative ways to make the free tablet project happen. 

“But we did it,” she said. “And that means it could happen anywhere.”

The post San Francisco Expands Free Jail Communications by Adding Tablet Services appeared first on Bolts.

Evan Lee had trouble getting the medication he needed for mental illness and other health issues after being booked into the Harris County jail, just three days from Christmas in 2021. As a result, Lee’s family says he deteriorated during his time inside the hulking lockup in downtown Houston, until March 9, 2022, when he was badly beaten and injured by another inmate.

According to a lawsuit Lee’s family filed against the county earlier this summer, it took two days for jail officials to give him any medical care despite visible injuries like facial bruising. Even then, according to the lawsuit, jail medical staff “simply looked at Mr. Lee and sent him back to his cell without any treatment, observation or further diagnostic testing.” On March 18, more than a week after the fight, jail staff finally sent Lee to a hospital because of how disoriented he was. Doctors found serious head injuries, including two areas of bleeding in his brain, and pronounced him brain-dead two days later. 

Lee, 31, was one of at least 28 people who died after being in Harris County jail custody in 2022, when Texas’ largest jail system saw a record wave of deaths. Alongside other mourning parents, his mother Jacilet Griffin-Lee now religiously attends meetings held by the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, a state regulatory agency. For more than a year at these hearings, Harris County has been called to the carpet for violating minimum safety standards, including for lapses in medical care and monitoring of people in custody. Griffin-Lee and other family members drove the 160-mile trip from Houston to Austin for the jail commission’s last hearing on Nov. 2 and stood at the back of the room, holding poster-sized photos of loved ones lost to the jail as an entourage of Harris County officials testified about efforts to improve conditions. 

After Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez left the hearing room, Griffin-Lee peppered him with questions in the basement level of the Texas capitol building. “It’s a horrible facility, it just hurts for people to get the death penalty while they’re waiting for their case,” she said as other grieving mothers circled the sheriff. “We should not be getting the kind of letters we’re getting from inmates that are there and what they’re witnessing.” 

Harris County officials have largely blamed the jail crisis on overcrowding and short staffing; as of the November hearing, more than 9,000 people were detained inside a Harris County jail system that had more than 200 vacant jailer positions. And yet they haven’t announced major new efforts to shrink the population they wish to jail. Instead, in response to the jail commission’s escalating pressure, they’ve started shipping even more people in their custody to for-profit lockups far from Harris County. 

Last month, after the state jail commission threatened to reduce Harris County’s jail capacity if it didn’t comply with minimum standards, the county’s governing body—its five-person commissioners court—unanimously approved a $11.3 million contract to send up to 360 people to a private prison in Mississippi. That’s on top of the roughly 1,300 people whose detention the sheriff’s office already outsources to other private lockups outside the county. 

Any pretrial detention, which accounts for more than 70 percent of the county’s jail population, separates families; it also makes mounting a defense more difficult, putting pressure on people to plead guilty. But those challenges multiply when people are sent hundreds of miles away. It may even compound the backlog in criminal cases that has contributed to the overcrowding crisis. According to county data, people now spend on average nearly 200 days in Harris County jail custody, most waiting for their case to be processed, which is far greater than the national average jail stay of 33 days. Defense attorneys say more outsourcing could add to delays in cases as more people must be transported back to the county for court hearings.

“It’s hugely expensive, it draws things out, and it destroys relationships between clients and lawyers and clients and their families,” Alex Bunin, Harris County’s chief public defender, told me. “It creates just all kinds of anxieties that can play out later and affect things like recidivism and getting a job and getting back into society.”

The outsourcing, ostensibly a response to dangerous jail conditions in Harris County, will put even more people in the hands of private prison companies with their own histories of abuse. 

CoreCivic, the private prison giant that inked the new contract with Harris County last month to detain people in one of its Mississippi lockups, has long been accused of short staffing, excessive force, and poor treatment at its facilities. Another company Harris County contracts with to house up to 500 people in one of its Louisiana prisons, LaSalle Corrections, has a similarly troubled track record; in 2020, the company lost its contract to run a bi-state jail on the Texas-Arkansas border following years of lawsuits over deaths on its watch. 

Harris County detainees shipped to the LaSalle Corrections Center in northwest Louisiana, nearly 300 miles from home, have already warned of dangerous conditions. Rahan Atia, a Houston defense attorney, told me that he started hearing complaints of extortion and threats of violence after he took over the cases of several defendants held there. 

In September, Atia asked a Harris County judge on one of his cases to prevent the sheriff’s office from sending a client back to LaSalle after he’d been brought to Harris County for a hearing. (Atia asked that his client not be named to protect his privacy.) The request prompted a hearing over whether to keep the defendant in Harris County. 

Lawyers for the county opposed the motion. “The same people that are out there are here,” said Graylon Wells, a lawyer with the Harris County Attorney’s Office, according to a transcript I obtained of the hearing. 

Wells said that the jails managed by the county also present dangers, questioning whether the defendant would be any safer staying in Harris County. “My confusion here is inmates rotate from LaSalle to here, so why is he safer here than he is in LaSalle?” Wells asked. Victoria Jimenez, a lawyer with the sheriff’s office, told the judge, “It is nearly impossible to prevent any type of extortion from happening … What if something happens to him here?” 

“Is something going to happen to him here?” the judge, Natalia Cornelio, asked. “God forbid, no. Hopefully not,” Jimenez replied, then added, “Things happen every day in that jail.” 

Atia told me the hearing felt like a troubling admission by the county that it couldn’t ensure safety for anyone in its custody, whether in the facilities they run directly or elsewhere. He credited Cornelio for taking the matter seriously and granting his request to keep the defendant in Harris County after the extortion attempts, but he added that other judges refused to even hear similar complaints. “Other judges went, ‘Well you know, it’s just the culture,’” he said. “No, it’s not just the culture. We need to stop this.” 

Neither the sheriff’s office or LaSalle representatives responded to my requests for comment or questions sent by email for this story. 

The outsourcing also decreases oversight of the conditions under which people are detained. Jails inside the state fall under the regulation of the Texas jail commission and are required to hold independent law enforcement investigations into each death in custody and report them to the state attorney general. (As I wrote earlier this year, some Texas sheriffs have tried to undermine these requirements.) 

But those requirements stop at the state line. 

Andrea Armstrong, a law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans who works with her students to compile information about deaths in custody across Louisiana, says that her state has comparably weak jail regulations and oversight. She pointed to the case of Billie Davis, a 35-year-old man who died after Harris County sent him to the LaSalle Correctional Center last year. Had he died in Texas, Davis’ death would have triggered a report to the Texas AG as well as an independent police investigation. After Davis died in Louisiana, Texas jail reform activists struggled for months to find out what happened to him. This year, activists finally tracked down a coroner’s report, which concluded that Davis died from the result of “multiple blunt force traumatic injuries during a fight in custody” and ruled his death a homicide. 

Armstrong said Louisiana law doesn’t require any particular investigation into deaths in custody other than by a coroner, so it’s unclear what, if any, other inquiry occurred into Davis’ death. (Sheriff’s officials in LaSalle Parish, where the facility is located, didn’t respond to my questions for this story.) “In our work documenting deaths in Louisiana prisons and jails, one of the most difficult facilities to obtain information from is privately operated facilities,” Armstrong told me. “My students often end up in extended conversations with legal counsel. It’s a difficult undertaking.” 

Brandon Wood, executive director of the Texas jail commission, acknowledged the outsourcing of detainees may decrease oversight of the conditions in which they’re detained. “I don’t know if I want to use the term, ‘black hole,’” he told me, “but it is one of those things where once they are no longer within the state of Texas, we lose a lot of our authority regarding those inmates.” 

Advocates for jail reform in Harris County have urged local officials to prioritize reducing the jail population over more outsourcing. Krishnaveni Gundu, executive director of the Texas Jail Project, which monitors jail conditions and advocates for incarcerated people and their families, says there have long been other options. 

For instance, she pointed to a 2020 consulting report commissioned by the county that recommended prosecutors dismiss all non-violent felony cases older than nine months in order to cut the county’s case backlog—especially since more than half of those cases eventually wound up dropped or deferred anyway.

Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg has balked at such recommendations, calling them unrealistic. Ogg, who faces a heated primary challenge to keep her seat next year, was also admonished by her own party earlier this month, with Harris County Democratic Party precinct chairs voting overwhelmingly to pass a resolution that condemns her for, among other things, “[standing] in the way of fixing the broken criminal justice system.” Ogg has also clashed with local judges who have supported bail reform and pursued efforts to relieve the local jail.

Gonzalez, the local sheriff, has said that outsourcing is “not a preferred solution” and has made halting efforts to release people—including flagging people in his jail system who present no public safety risk for consideration by the DA’s office and judges. “We incarcerate way too many people,” the sheriff told the grieving families who had gathered in November to confront him. “Right now, law enforcement is on the front lines of three things in this country: mental health, addiction and poverty,” he said. “We should not be on the front lines, we should find other alternatives to that, instead of people ending up incarcerated.”

Even with such rhetoric from officials, Harris County continues to double down on jail-based solutions to the crisis. In addition to the increased outsourcing, the county earlier this year approved an additional $645,000 to expand services for people in the jail who have been found incompetent to stand trial—a program that county administrators have proposed expanding even further. Gonzalez himself has suggested that the county should seriously consider new jail construction. 

All five members of Harris County’s governing body, even those who have clashed with the DA, approved the new outsourcing contract last month. County Judge Lina Hidalgo, who leads the county government and supported the contract, told Houston Landing that it “breaks my heart” and that she wants to be “figuring out a solution.” But, she added, “I don’t have it yet. It’s a little scary to say I’m working on one and I don’t know if we’re going to find one.” (Hidalgo’s office didn’t respond to my questions for this story.)

But Gundu insists there are many alternative policies for the county to pursue. “Instead of lining the pockets of private prison companies, we could be investing those taxpayer dollars in robust evidence-based solutions that actually promote public safety,” she told me. “Such as access to affordable and stable housing, crisis respite centers, psychiatric ERs, community based mental health care, guaranteed income programs, equitable access to healthcare—any of these solutions is guaranteed to keep our communities safer than a jail.” 

Meanwhile, families of people who died in Harris County jail custody say they will continue to pressure officials for accountability, including by attending the next state jail commission hearing. “I want to let the commissioners know that we’re watching and we care about our loved ones, even when they are in their worst state,” Lee-Griffin said after the last commission hearing. As it approaches two years since her son’s death, Lee-Griffin told me she tries to focus on good memories of him, like his love for sports and for his community. 

For others at last month’s jail commission hearing, the pain of losing a child to jail still felt fresh. Dianne Bailey Rijsenburg showed me photos of her 30-year-old son, Ramon Thomas, who died after being incarcerated at the jail this summer. Tears welled in her eyes as recalled praying to herself and pacing around her house after she got the call that he had died this summer, as if trying to stabilize herself with movement and faith.

“How can those people come and rip your children from you like that, like they’re nobody?” she asked, holding a photo of her son bordered by blue flowers. 

The post Out of Sight 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.

When Los Angeles Sheriff Alex Villanueva lost his reelection bid in November 2022, it seemed to mark a default cessation of hostilities between him and the Board of Supervisors, the county’s five-member governing body. The conflict spanned his four-year tenure, from an early clash over Villanueva’s rehiring of a deputy fired for allegations of domestic abuse to his dispatching a team of deputies armed with battering rams to raid one of the supervisor’s homes just before the 2022 election. There was no shortage of choice words, either: At one point, the sheriff said the supervisors “need to be taken to the shed and they need to be beat down so they start doing their job.” 

Recently, though, Villanueva has reemerged from retirement with a novel provocation: He is seeking to join the ranks of the body he long antagonized. In September, he announced his bid for county supervisor, running against Janice Hahn, a centrist Democrat with deep roots in LA politics. Perhaps predictably, the other four sitting supervisors have endorsed Hahn, who promptly issued a statement calling Villanueva “a fraud and a failure.” In response, Villanueva told Bolts: “Janice Hahn is a fraud and a failure, hands down.” 

All this feuding can seem petty, but the stakes are quite literally life and death for some Angelenos. 

Jail deaths steadily increased each year Villanueva was in power. “Under Villanueva, the conditions in the jails deteriorated significantly,” said Claire Simonich, associate director at Vera Action, “[there were] people with serious mental illness being chained to chairs for days at a time, dozens of people being crammed together in overcrowded facilities.” 

In response to a request for comment on the jail deaths, Villanueva emailed Bolts: “Aw gee, did something called the pandemic happen during my tenure?” He also touted his efforts to reduce the jail population during the pandemic. However, a UCLA report found that despite an initial decline in the population, overall people were actually held in custody pretrial longer during the pandemic, in part due to the sheriff department’s practices. 

But the crisis has continued since Villanueva’s exit. At least 46 people have died inside LA County jails or elsewhere in the sheriff’s custody thus far in 2023. These numbers make the jails in Los Angeles deadlier than Rikers Island, the New York lockup that frequently makes national headlines for its intolerable conditions. An 18-year-old also died in one of the county’s juvenile detention facilities in May.

Part of the responsibility falls on Villanueva’s successor, Sheriff Robert Luna. But the county’s Board of Supervisors also possesses an extraordinary amount of power over this situation: it sets the county’s $46.7 billion budget, including how much money goes toward incarceration and how much goes to alternatives to incarceration like inpatient mental health treatment, and holds oversight power over county jails and the sheriff’s department.

“On the flip side,” Simonich said, “the board does have responsibility to build up the types of services that will prevent crime from happening in the first place and invest in housing, invest in mental health care, invest in substance use disorder treatment.” The supervisors have dragged their heels on funding for the mental health beds the county desperately needs, and continuously failed to close the dangerous and dilapidated Men’s Central Jail, a move they first committed to in 2019.

The showdown between Hahn and Villanueva, then, underscores just how drastically the sheriff’s department and the board alike have failed to protect the people in their care.

Their race may be resolved as early as the March 5 primary if a candidate receives more than 50 percent across District 4, an area in the county’s southern part. That’s a strong possibility, with only two lower-profile candidates in the race. Otherwise, Villanueva’s comeback bid may continue into a Top 2 runoff in November.

But local advocates are also eying the two other seats on the board that Angelenos will decide this election, hoping to put in place a stronger alliance next year willing to finally flex the board’s power to improve jail conditions. 

“The Board of Supervisors, apart from when they are forced to discuss in-custody deaths, have been entirely silent,” said Ambrose Brooks S., the campaign and advocacy manager for Dignity and Power Now, a member of the Justice LA Coalition. “This is urgent, this is an emergency, and their silence is not going to make us stop advocating for them to do something.” 

Thanks to a state transparency law that went into effect on New Year’s Day, 2023, the LASD now maintains an in-custody death tracker. As of December 18, the list includes 45 names: men between the ages of 20 and 91, most of them pretrial, who allegedly died by suicide, because of illness, or a drug overdose, or, in three instances, at the hands of another person. But the majority of deaths listed are attributed to “natural causes” or are pending a final autopsy report.

There is at least one person whose death is nowhere to be found on that list: Stanley Tobias Wilson, Jr. Wilson was a talented athlete who attended Stanford and went on to play football in the NFL. But unresolved trauma from childhood sexual abuse combined with CTE from years of football proved devastating to his mental health, his mom, Dr. D. Pulane Lucas, told Bolts. Last November, Wilson was deemed incompetent to stand trial for a recent break-in. Unbeknownst to Lucas, a judge ordered that her son be moved from where he was being held at Twin Towers, the county’s second largest jail, to Metropolitan State Hospital, which specializes in psychiatric care, by no later than Dec. 5. 

Nearly two months later, he was dead. A County Medical Examiner employee initially told Lucas he’d been found unconscious in his cell. “And then the story changed,” Lucas said. Now, they were telling her he’d fallen out of a chair and died of a pulmonary embolism while waiting to be admitted to Metropolitan. Lucas, who runs a policy nonprofit in Virginia, flew to Los Angeles to try to figure out what had happened, visiting the sheriff’s department to request records, then to Metropolitan, where her son had allegedly collapsed. “And that’s when they told me that they’ve never had anyone by the name of Stanley T. Wilson Jr. admitted,” she said. “I was blown away…now all of a sudden to get the message in person that Stanley did not die there and was never a patient there?”

Lucas sought another autopsy. “There’s blatant evidence of violence against him,” Jason Major, an autopsy technician who performed the independent death review, told Bolts. “He had a footprint on his face that’s clearly visible…he had abrasions on his knuckles, on his knees.” 

To Lucas, it is impossible to square the simple answer for her son’s death—a pulmonary embolism—with the errors, shifting narratives, and obfuscations surrounding Wilson’s death that she received from the County Medical Examiner’s office. (The office did not respond to a request for comment). Major and Lucas both believe that the truth is closer to the County Medical Examiner’s original version of the story; that Wilson collapsed and possibly even died at the jail, and that deputies transported him to the hospital after realizing that they were in flagrant violation of the judge’s order to transfer him months earlier. “They never even checked him in,” Major said. “He basically was dropped off, like Weekend at Bernie’s.” 

Nick Shapiro, the director of the Carceral Ecologies lab at UCLA, says that Wilson’s case is characteristic of jail deaths in LA County. Fatalities that get chalked up as natural often stem from a complicated interplay of factors such as poor mental health treatment, racialized violence, and negligence, he told Bolts. “The Black population has been subject to specific racial violence from deputy gangs [within the jails]… there’s been very long-term, documented gang related activity in the mental health ward.” 

In a 2022 analysis of 58 autopsies of people who died in LA county jails between 2009 and 2018 (just a small fraction of the total number owing to the county’s refusal to release most records), Shapiro and his co-author, Terence Keel, the founding director of the UCLA Lab for BioCritical Studies, found that more than half of the deaths classified as “natural” exhibited signs of violence on the body. They also found that Black people’s deaths were much more likely to be categorized as “natural” than those of other races. “There’s a problem in thinking about ‘natural death’ being the same for incarcerated populations that have no free will to choose what they eat, to choose what they drink, to bathe themselves on their own schedules, to wear appropriate clothing for the weather,” said Shapiro. In a recently published follow-up report, the researchers conclude that these classifications serve to downplay the responsibility of deputies and other jail staff for these deaths, whether through negligence and deprivation of care or outright violence—essentially blaming incarcerated people for their own demise. 

“What we’re looking at is really capital punishment through other means,” Keel told Bolts. 

To Lucas, one of the most suspicious aspects of her son’s death was how the official story changed and coalesced over time: “They’re telling their story after the fact and it appears that they’ve all gotten together because they’re all saying the exact same little story, you know, word for word.” (Lucas said that LASD has refused to release video footage she’s requested). 

Lucas told Bolts that Wilson’s omission from the official LASD tracker leads her to suspect that there are other deaths missing, too. (She recently wrote an editorial for The Appeal exploring this issue). “Within one month of when they started counting—here’s Stanley,” she said. “The beacon to say: look, some of us aren’t being counted. And here’s Stanley with a mama who’s not just going to accept the medical examiner’s statement of how he died.” 

In September, Lucas flew once more to Los Angeles to attend a vigil for those lost inside county jails. The following day, she gave public comment at the Board of Supervisors meeting. “While it’s too late for Stanley, I’m here to speak to the importance of providing needed services for inmates with mental health services, and also to support alternatives to incarceration,” she told the board. 

The board has a complex record on both of these issues. “Historically, the board has taken first steps to establish ‘care first’ practices in Los Angeles,” said Simonich of Vera Action. They’ve pledged to shut down Men’s Central Jail, established an “Alternatives to Incarceration” working group to explore implementing a variety of services that can preclude jail time, and created a Justice, Care, and Opportunities Department to one day move pretrial services out of the Probation department and instead develop community programs to support people awaiting trial. “Where the board continues to falter is on follow-through.” 

Simonich told Bolts she wanted to see the board immediately commit to a clear timeline to close Men’s Central Jail, which has been responsible for a disproportionate share of deaths this year. “It’s now been more than two years since the board commissioned the report on how to close Men’s Central Jail, and no actual plan has been adopted. No timeline has been put in place,” she said. 

For Brooks S. of Dignity and Power Now, the single most important intervention to alleviate the jail death crisis would be for the Board of Supervisors, in collaboration with the County CEO, to fast-track funding for more county mental health beds. Dignity and Power Now has been working with a woman whose son was jailed about a year ago while suffering from paranoid schizophrenia ; a judge ordered him released to inpatient mental health treatment this fall, but he’s still in jail, and won’t be released until sometime this month because there are so few spaces available. “If there was no waitlist, all of the people who were ordered by the court for mental health diversion could go the day that the order is made,” Brooks S. said. “That would drastically decrease the jail population.” 

The board could see a serious shakeup in several directions during the 2024 elections, from the arrival of Villanueva to the replacement of its most conservative member by a staunch progressive. Two supervisors besides Hahn are up for reelection: Holly Mitchell, whom Justice LA considers the foremost champion of the ’Care First, Jails Last’ agenda, and Kathryn Barger, the board’s lone Republican. 

Mitchell faces three challengers, at least one of whom is questioning her support for criminal justice reforms; the consensus among local observers is that she’ll be the clear favorite in a district that covers South Los Angeles and western portions of the county.

Barger, whose district encompasses LA County’s relatively conservative, exurban Northeast but also includes left-leaning cities like Pasadena and Burbank, faces a challenge from two progressive Democratic candidates, Assemblymember Chris Holden and Burbank Mayor Konstantine Anthony. Two other candidates, Perry Goldberg and Marlon Marroquin, are also in the race. (Here too, the top two candidates will face off in November if no one receives more than 50 percent on March 5.)

Though Hahn has dismissed Villanueva’s candidacy, her political choices in recent months appear directly influenced by his presence in the race. After the former sheriff blamed her for voting for a hiring freeze on deputies in 2022, Hahn spoke emphatically at a recent event against defunding the sheriff’s department, noting that the Board has increased LASD funding by over a billion dollars over the past decade, even boasting that her office had stepped in to pay for extra patrols in some unincorporated communities. Recently, she cast the lone vote against moving parking enforcement out of the sheriff’s department and into the department of public works, which would remove some funding from the sheriff. “To me, that suggests Hahn tacking to the right and specifically playing into law enforcement,” Brooks S. said. 

A spokesperson for Hahn emphasized to Bolts that the supervisor was concerned about rushing the measure without prior study. She added that fully funding LASD and investing in mental healthcare, job training, and youth programs was “not a contradictory effort.” 

One of Hahn’s other challengers, Rancho Palos Verdes City Councilor John Cruikshank, is also running to her right, calling for more detention and support for sheriff officers.

Meanwhile, Barger has recently demonstrated more serious interest in investing in mental health care in the county. But the supervisor has also long expressed support for building a locked mental health facility in place of Men’s Central Jail, which organizers have denounced as a jail by another name. When Supervisors Hilda Solis and Lindsay Horvath introduced a motion seeking to immediately reduce the jail population in April, both Barger and Hahn expressed their opposition, citing public safety concerns. (Solis ultimately withdrew the motion). “We are desperate for Supervisor Hahn and Supervisor Barger to take the situation in the jail seriously,” said Brooks S. 

In a statement to Bolts, Barger reemphasized her stance on closing the jail. “I believe Men’s Central Jail should be permanently closed and I stand by my belief that we need to replace it with a state-of-the-art facility that is secure, safe, and provides high quality care for those who pose a danger to themselves and the community,” she wrote.

Anthony, the Burbank mayor running against Barger, criticized her record in an interview with Bolts, including her support for a locked mental health facility to replace Men’s Central Jail. “On day one, if it hasn’t been agendized, I will agendize the closing of Men’s Central Jail,” he said. “I will absolutely vote for a speedy timeline. It’s well overdue.” Anthony also told Bolts he’d move to fast track mental health beds, as long as they weren’t supplied through Care Courts, a novel form of court-ordered mental health treatment championed by Governor Gavin Newsom that has drawn criticism from disability rights and civil liberties advocates. “We can build outreach centers…that the county simply funds, and [are] run by the local city or jurisdiction. We need to spread out the help,” he said. 

Holden, Barger’s other challenger, didn’t respond to multiple requests for an interview. He has supported police and prison reform at the state level, writing a bill known as the “George Floyd law” to establish greater consequences for police who fail to intervene when a colleague is using excessive force, and most recently sponsoring the Mandela Act, which would bring California in line with U.N. restrictions on the use of solitary confinement—including in the local Los Angeles jails. 

Anthony said he hoped to hasten the Board of Supervisors’ halting advancements towards a county system that prioritizes care over incarceration. “By running in this race and getting elected, I’ll be able to flip one of the seats that is preventing a lot of this progress, and hopefully that will get rid of many of the barricades that we’re seeing,” he told Bolts. 

Los Angeles faces the strange possibility of emerging from these elections with four supervisors who have expressed a commitment to advancing criminal legal reform at the county level—and Alex Villanueva. And while it may seem that just one supervisor couldn’t do much to throw a spanner in the works, Simonich of Vera Action cautioned that each member of the Board holds enormous power, from choosing what to place on the agenda for public hearings, which can have significant policy ramifications, to appointing commissioners, including to two separate boards with oversight power over LASD and the jails—and positions such as the Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner. 

Keel, the UCLA researcher, hopes that the March primaries spur a broader reconsideration of how the county responds to these deaths. He wants the Board of Supervisors to establish an independent medical board to provide a secondary autopsy for everyone who dies in state custody, “whether that’s in jail, or on the streets.” 

 “We are not helping to create a better county if we continue to just assume these people died as a result of their own will and their own poor biology, rather than saying, No, we’re culpable, we’re accountable,” he said. “We need to be thinking differently about inequality—and how the ultimate cost of inequality is death.” 

Correction (Jan. 2024): This article has been updated to reflect the final version of Terence Keel’s and Nicholas Shapiro’s report on LA County Jail autopsies.

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Jenny had been locked up for several years by the time Ujevich arrived at West Virginia’s all-women Lakin Correctional Center and Jail. There, Ujevich says, Jenny had complained of a persistent pain in one of her breasts, but struggled to get staff to take that problem seriously. In fact, Ujevich says, the staff hardly paid her any mind until Jenny’s condition sharply and visibly worsened. Only after that point did Jenny learn she had breast cancer. 

Ujevich still fumes over how long it took Jenny to obtain that diagnosis, and over what came next: “She couldn’t get her chemo on time,” Ujevich told Bolts.

Jenny was released in late 2016. She spent Christmas with her family, then died in January.

Ujevich is now free and heading a nonprofit project called West Virginia Family of Convicted People, where she advocates for changes to the state’s prison system, including improvements in health care. She’s nervous that a new state law, passed during a special session last month by West Virginia’s GOP-run legislature and signed by its Republican governor, could lead to more cases like Jenny’s.

Senate Bill 1009 bans the use of state funds for any health care for incarcerated people that isn’t deemed “medically necessary.” The policy leaves it to state Corrections and Rehabilitation Commissioner Billy Marshall—a career law enforcement agent who has said incarcerated people are lying when they allege inhumane treatment by the state—to define “medically necessary” and makes clear that this definition can supersede guidance from health professionals. “A provider of health care prescribing, ordering, recommending, or approving a health care service or product does not, by itself, make that health care service or product medically necessary,” the law reads.

West Virginia already routinely fails to provide basic, essential care in its jails and prisons, several formerly incarcerated people told Bolts. Kenneth Matthews, who was locked up for more than eight years and has been free since 2020, says he lived this firsthand, as a diabetic person with high blood pressure. 

In prison, he said “I didn’t get insulin, and they didn’t give me medication for my high blood pressure either. They said maybe if I lost some weight and worked out more, my blood pressure and diabetes would correct itself.”

And Zoey Hott, a trans woman who was incarcerated for about 18 months and released August 1, said people needing gender-affirming care feel this struggle acutely. She told Bolts she was promptly taken off hormone therapy when she arrived at jail and then denied this treatment as she was transferred to several different jails. The interruption, she said, caused physical discomfort and profound mental health issues. 

“It took me five months to even be evaluated,” Hott added. “They don’t really look at it as something of significant importance for anybody. I feel like they view it as an elective procedure.”

Stories like these abound, JoAnna Vance, an organizer with the West Virginia Economic Justice Project, told Bolts. “Health care in jails and prisons is not good. ‘Mental health services’ is just throwing people in solitary. We just had another death in one of our jails this morning. I know people who’ve been having seizures in jail and the correctional officers ignore them or tell the other inmates to deal with it. Lord, there’s so much.” 

West Virginia contracts with a private company, Wexford Health, for medical care in its jails, prisons, and juvenile detention centers. All over the country, from Arizona to Illinois to West Virginia, incarcerated people and their advocates have complained for years of medical dangers resulting from government partnerships with Wexford. Most recently, a lawsuit filed in July accused the company of denying thousands of incarcerated West Virginans medication for opioid use disorder. 

In the treatment of addiction and so much else, health care in U.S. carceral facilities is typically abysmal—even as the people locked in those facilities are, on average, much more medically vulnerable than the population at large. The situation grows even more dangerous where care is outsourced to private companies, like Wexford, a broad Reuters analysis found.

But even against this national backdrop, West Virginia stands out: it led the nation in prison deaths per capita in 2020, and, that same year, the Reuters analysis found that its jails had the highest death rate between 2009 and 2019, among dozens of regions around the country that the news agency surveyed.

And so it is alarming to those critical of this deadly system that the state has passed a new law that could soon curtail what little public funding the state currently allocates for health care in jails and prisons. Advocates worry now about what SB 1009 will mean for incarcerated people seeking gender-affirming care, contraception, disability accommodations, or anything else the state might try to argue is not “necessary.”

“I think this has the potential to be extremely abused. I really do,” Ujevich said. In West Virginia jails and prisons, she added, “They just do not give a shit about your medical care. Not one shit.”

It’s hard to know how, exactly, SB 1009 will change the status quo. The enrolled bill is less than 500 words long and leaves many blanks to be filled. Notably, it does not specify any forms of health care that are being provided today that might be eliminated under this policy and leaves broad authority to the state Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation to set new rules moving forward. 

And while the law does require the division head to consult with a “medical professional” before deciding whether a given instance of medical care is indeed “necessary,” it neither defines “medical professional” nor compels the division to accept professionals’ advice.

Delegate David Kelly, the Republican chair of West Virginia’s House Jails and Prisons Committee, told Bolts the point of the bill is to make carceral health care rules uniform across the state system—that is, he said, whether or not someone receives a certain type of medical care while locked up should not depend on their facility. But he was unable to say whether there is a lack of uniformity in the system today, and could not identify any particular procedures or benefits the state funds today that he believes should not be covered in the future.

With few specifics written into the law and such broad powers granted to prison officials, a dozen different lawyers, lawmakers, advocates, and formerly incarcerated people interviewed for this story told Bolts the best they can hope for is that the policy change won’t much affect West Virginia’s standard of care in jails and prisons. But, “worst-case scenario, it will prevent even more medical care for incarcerated people,” said state Delegate Mike Pushkin, a Democrat who voted against SB 1009.

Pushkin and several others said they believe this law could open West Virginia to lawsuits. Recent successful litigation accused Corrections officials of inadequate medical and mental health care, and a new suit filed this month in federal court alleges 10,000 people in the state’s custody live in inhumane conditions.

“The United States constitution sets the minimum floor as to what the state has to provide to people who are incarcerated, and there’s no statute that the West Virginia legislature could pass that would somehow remove that obligation,” said Lydia Milnes, deputy director at Mountain State Justice, which has sued the state over health care for incarcerated people. If SB 1009 leads West Virginia officials to deny even more basic health care in jails and prisons, Milnes said, “There can and will be more litigation.”

SB 1009 could also be a cost-saving measure for a state jail and prison system dealing with critical staffing issues—Commissioner Marshall said over 1,000 positions are vacant in West Virginia jails and prisons, twice as many as before the COVID-19 pandemic—that advocates say contribute to the state’s deadly carceral conditions. But the special legislative session last month resulted in much more discussion of pay raises for jail and prison staff than of ways to ensure safety and wellbeing for incarcerated people.

“I think they’ve barely chiseled away at the edges,” said Pushkin, one of just 11 Democrats in the 100-member state House. “You need safe places for people who are incarcerated. And we don’t have that here in West Virginia.”

Republican Governor Jim Justice called the special session, which began on the same afternoon he announced it. SB 1009 was one of the 44 bills that Justice included on his call, directing the legislature to take it up.

He requested for the session to begin at 4 p.m. on a Sunday, and some state lawmakers told Bolts they didn’t get a peek at the legislation being proposed until about 3:30 p.m. The process left many people directly concerned with or affected by the slew of legislation no time to assess it, much less to testify on it. 

“The lack of transparency during the special session was completely appalling, and it’s not the way democracy is supposed to work,” Pushkin said.

Kelly, the Republican delegate, pushed back, telling Bolts that SB 1009 had been brainstormed for “several months.” If so, that’s news to many people who work closely on and are directly affected by the issue of health care in jails and prisons in West Virginia.

This policy change concerning “medically necessary” care received only one public hearing before it became law, in a 35-minute discussion of the House Judiciary Committee. The Republicans backing the bill made little effort to identify the need for this change, and Brad Douglas, the executive officer of the Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation, offered little information when he testified under oath. 

In a private meeting the day the special session began, the Republican legislative leadership said this reform was needed “because of nose jobs and knee replacements” for incarcerated people, Democratic state Delegate Evan Hansen told Bolts. “They did not present any backup data or evidence.”

Among the few substantive public remarks any elected West Virginia Republican has made on this policy, state Delegate Brandon Steele voiced support during the committee hearing for state funds being used on voluntary sterilization of incarcerated people.

“If one of these individuals wanted to get a vasectomy or hysterectomy or something like that, I think that it’s good public policy to allow them to do that,” Steele said, in a remark that went unchallenged at the hearing. (Steele isn’t the first to advocate along these lines: GOP state Senator Randy Smith recently suggested West Virginia should shorten jail and prison sentences for anyone who agrees to be sterilized, so that those people “don’t bring any more drug babies into the system.”)

At one point in the hearing, Democratic Delegate Joey Garcia, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, pressed Douglas to identify any procedure or medical benefit that the state is funding today, but may not fund under SB 1009.

“So, you don’t have any examples?” Garcia asked.

“I do not,” responded Douglas.

Only when asked directly about West Virginia’s extreme rate of jail and prison deaths did Douglas even acknowledge them. “It would be accurate to say we’ve had inmates die in jails, yes,” he said. When asked if that is a “problem,” Douglas said only, “It’s never good if any inmate passes away.” 

SB 1009 passed the legislature the following day. It passed the Senate unanimously, including with support from Democratic members. The House passed it on a margin of 86 to 9, with eight Democrats and one Republican opposing. 

“The guy was playing dumb,” Hansen said of Douglas. “But that happens with a lot of bills in the legislature in West Virginia, now that the Republicans have a supermajority. They work things out in their caucus ahead of time, and it’s very rare for someone from the majority party to slow things down by asking questions.”

For the previously incarcerated people who spoke to Bolts, SB 1009 has reaffirmed their feeling of abandonment by the state and renewed their outrage with what they perceive to be indifference by state officials to the lives and livelihoods of those locked up in West Virginia. 

“It’s horrible, to say the least,” Matthews said. “I think they’re putting a lot of men and women’s lives at risk over the sake of potentially saving some money. Somebody’s life shouldn’t have a dollar amount attached to it.”

Soon after he was released, Matthews was hospitalized with diabetic ketoacidosis, a life-threatening condition. “My endocrinologist told me I should have been on medication for a long time,” he said. “I asked, ‘What’s a long time?’ and he said at least the last five or 10 years. I said, ‘That’s interesting, because I was incarcerated for most of that time.’”

Matthews said that his own experience underscored for him that whether a particular procedure or treatment is considered elective or necessary can depend on the whims of whomever gets to make the call.

“It would have been very easy for them to get me on medication to control this early, but I guess they didn’t feel that it was ‘medically necessary,’” he said. “A lot of guys’ life expectancy is shortened because of this. I could’ve died in my sleep because they didn’t take my issues seriously.”

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