#jessica pishko

[odinsblog]

It was something that really began to happen when the United States decided that it would interlock the immigration system with the criminal legal system. So some people call it the criminal immigration system, which is not a term that I coined. It's something that immigration law experts coined.

But when Congress passed a certain series of laws in the 1980s and 90s, what they wanted to do was create a system in which people who were accused of crimes, particularly at the time, drug crimes, would be able to be immediately deported in a way that was basically faster. So they didn't have to be convicted. So normally, if you're accused of a crime, you have a right to a trial, then you might be convicted or acquitted, or you might plea out.

But if you are determined to be undocumented, you can actually be put into deportation proceedings before anyone brings you to trial. So you just are arrested and charged, and you can go immediately into deportation proceedings. And it turned out that this was a pretty effective way for police to interact with the immigration system.

And sheriffs became a lynch point originally because they run county jails.

So county jails are kind of the first stop if you're arrested. If you are unfortunate enough to be arrested, you will go through the county jail, at which point they take your ID, your fingerprints, right?

They take a variety of information. And sheriffs kind of became really useful because they were in the jail already, so they could interview people, ask them where they were from, ask them if they had proof of citizenship, and then help ICE put them into deportation proceedings. And alongside that, sheriffs were also able to make some money by housing people awaiting deportation in their jails.

That's also the benefit for them. The federal government houses about 25% of immigrants in detention in county jails right now. And they pay these sheriffs a per diem.

So they get paid sort of per day to keep people in their jails. And it's one of the ways that sheriffs are able to use that jail kind of as a political tool, right, to make money for their county.

So under Trump, two things happened. One was that anti-immigration groups, so I mentioned the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR. That was a group that was already in existence.

They are an anti-immigrant group. And they began to email sheriffs, especially sheriffs that they knew were kind of constitutional sheriffs or in the far right sheriff atmosphere and say, hey, would you like to help the Trump administration deport more people? And many of them said, sure.

And so using this anti-immigrant group, the Trump administration recruited more sheriffs to join a program called 287G. And 287G is a federal program that essentially deputizes sheriffs and their deputies to act as immigration agents. So under Trump, many, many more sheriffs joined this 287G program.

Now, the 287G program is a bit interesting because it doesn't include any funding for the sheriffs, but it is something that sheriffs used to say that they were tough on immigration.

-Jessica Pishko, The Unchecked Power Of Sheriffs

[trans-axolotl]

"In 1994, the problem of prison sentences that constituted life or de facto life (50 years or more) felt dire to the writers of The Angolite article. They counted 2,099 “long-timers” compared to the then 775,624 total number of incarcerated people, or 0.3%. But those statistics pale in comparison to today’s. Now, that number is over 200,000 out of the 1.4 million total people in prison. According to The Sentencing Project, one in seven incarcerated people are serving a life sentence. The Angolite noted an uptick in 1994, but it increased exponentially from there...

...Prisons are not blackholes nor time warps; those sentenced to be confined in them do not cease existing. Instead, their lives take on new meaning, new routines, and new horrors. Depending on the county or parish, the state law, and the date of sentencing, a “life sentence” can mean a wide variety of things, making the harshness of it feel almost arbitrary. When people commit violence, society condemns them to prison, where unfathomable violence is often committed against them. As those sentenced to die of old age behind bars become frail and feeble, their minds and bodies bear the scars of being entrapped within the “vortex of violence” that is prison. Their situation begs the perennial question: what is the point of prison?"

-The Lives Beyond the Life Sentences by Jessica Pishko

[reasoningdaily]

Salon: Who created the "constitutional sheriff" myth? Hint: It's not in the Constitution

[tjeromebaker]

#DonaldTrump On Day One If Elected | Trump’s Extreme Immigration Plan For Mass Deportations

Some expert commentators have been skeptical about the feasibility of Trump’s plan for “mass deportation,” which, depending on what version you read, also includes challenging “birthright citizenship,” which is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

Source: Democracy Docket By Jessica Pishko July 30, 2024 Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Ex-Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose name is shorthand for anti-immigrant animus, dragged what is left of his 92-year-old corporal form to the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Milwaukee where he was feted like a war hero despite not being on the list of official speakers. Instead, he…

[the-final-straw-blog]

Constitutional Sheriffs (with Jessica Pishko)

This week, you’ll hear an interview we conducted with researcher and journalist Jessica Pishko about the upcoming, September 9th Constitutional Sheriff & Peace Officers Association gathering in Cherokee, North Carolina. For the hour, Jessica talks about the office of Sheriff in the US, the CSPOA and Constitutional Sheriff movement, their ties to militia or other far-right wing and white nationalist formations and related topics. You can find Jessica’s blog at Sheriffs.SubStack.Com.

Transcript

PDF (Unimposed)

Zine (Imposed PDF)

Other sources

SPLC Report

Azcir Report and Film "In The Sheriff We Trust"

IREHR writings on Constitutional Sheriffs

. ... . ..

Featured Tracks:

John Wayne Was a Nazi (Do$age Antifa Breakcore ReMix) by MDC & Do$age

Check out this episode!

[snitnation]

I tell all this as a way of offering my certification into a certain group of people, so that when I say that in her 2010 book The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality, and Law, Vanessa Place, an LA criminal defense lawyer and conceptual poet, is right to consider the rights of the accused — those who commit terrible crimes of torture and rape, those that Place admits are guilty — a reader will not think that I ignore the rights of victims any more than Place does. I hated my attacker(s) as much as I could hate anyone and, quite frankly, try not to give them much thought. But, I also don’t think that I am the right person to decide the direction of their lives, just as I think they should not decide mine.

Especially Heinous: Guilt and the Prosecution of Sex Crimes - Los Angeles Review of Books

[day0one]

A Network Of Local Sheriffs Is Helping To Spread The 'Big Lie' They say they’re for the rule of law. They say they’re nonpartisan. But America’s so-called "constitutional sheriffs" are taking things into their own hands to serve one person, and one person only: Donald Trump. Reporter Jessica Pishko joins Mehdi to discuss these sheriffs and their threat

[myweddingsandevents]

Tweet from Jessica Pishko (@JessPish)

Jessica Pishko (@JessPish) Tweeted:

And don’t forget being pregnant places you at great of homicide (esp in Mississippi where more pregnant ppl die by homicide than bad medical care) https://twitter.com/JessPish/status/1466261845937987588?s=20

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Florida prosecutor who bumbled George Zimmerman trial is really good at putting children in adult prisons for life #1yrago

Angela Corey is state attorney for Florida's 4th Circuit, where she's put children as young as 12 on trial as adults, facing life in prison -- in solitary, because children can't be mixed with adult populations -- without counseling, education, or any access to family.

Corey's Duval County represents 5% of the Florida population and 25% of its death penalty cases -- the highest per-capita rate of capital trials in America. She also leads Florida in sending children to adult prison, based on the discredited, Clinton-era theory of "superpredators." A disproportionate amount of those children are black. Some are on trial for their first offenses.

 Matt Shirk, Jacksonville's public defender, has a close relationship to Corey: he and she are former GOP running-mates for public office, he is her former intern, and she calls him "darling" in public. Before being elected public defender, Shirk had never defended a homicide case. He ran on promises of saving tax-dollars, and boasts that he doesn't use the money allocated to investigating mitigating evidence for his clients. He also has been cited for extreme professional misconduct, including sexual harassment and termination of female staff, and violating client-attorney privilege in press interviews in which he was struggling to clear his reputation after gross negligence in the defense of his underage clients.

Shirk's bumbling assistant, Refik Eler -- hired to replace the experienced PDs that Shirk fired on taking office -- has been repeatedly cited for failing his duty to his clients facing the death penalty (for example, "encouraging clients not to argue that they have reduced culpability due to a mental disease or defect"). Eight of Eler's clients have been sent to death row -- more than any other Florida defender.

In The Nation, Jessica Pishko tells the story of  Cristian Fernandez, a 12 year old child whose mother conceived him after being raped at the age of 12 herself. Corey had Fernandez tried as an adult, facing life in prison, when he was accused of murdering his two year old brother David (a murder whose culpability was very muddy). Fernandez faced life in adult prison if convicted, with at least six years in solitary, in order to segregate him from the adult prisoners, and without access to any services or education, or family (he was a ward of the state, effectively orphaned at 12).

Serving as Fernandez's defender, Shirk failed his client in every way. When Corey added a sexual molestation charge against Fernandez, Shirk allowed Fernandez to be questioned without a guardian or counsel present. Then, after Fernandez's case was taken over by pro bono counsel who were alarmed at Shirk's misconduct, Shirk continued to act as if her was Fernandez's lawyer, giving interviews in which he disclosed facts statements that Fernandez made under client-attorney privilege in an effort to minimize his incompetence.

Corey insists that nothing is wrong, that she is trying to protect the community, and that she is competent and upright. She also spent $800,000 in taxpayer dollars to build a special walkway from her office to the courthouse to protect her from potential assaults, despite the fact that no Fourth District prosecutor has ever been assaulted between the prosecutor's office and the court.

https://boingboing.net/2016/08/24/florida-prosecutor-who-bumbled.html

[izayoi1242]

Why Can’t We Get Rid of Bad Sheriffs?

By BY JESSICA PISHKO They have little accountability and a lot of power. Published: September 27, 2019 at 08:15AM from NYT Opinion https://ift.tt/2nDs41M via IFTTT

[gordonwilliamsweb]

Under COVID Cloud, Prisons In Rural America Threaten To Choke Rural Hospitals

As the COVID-19 pandemic swept into Montana, it spread into the Marias Heritage Center assisted living facility, then flowed into the nearby 21-bed hospital.

Toole County quickly became the state’s hot spot for COVID-19 deaths, with more than four times the infection rate of all other counties and the most recorded deaths in the state. Six of the state’s 16 COVID deaths through Tuesday have occurred here.

But another danger loomed: What if it got into the prison, less than 4 miles away from the hospital and assisted living facility? The county was nearly overwhelmed as it was. Across rural America, prisons and jails sit in places like Toole County that have minimal intensive care unit beds and ventilators and few additional medical resources. Many hospitals there were strained before the pandemic.

More From The Mountain States

View More

This rural, 5,000-person county tucked under the Canadian border might not have seemed like a breeding ground for the contagion. It is a primarily agricultural community almost twice as large as Rhode Island situated in the Great Plains under a big Montana sky. Some areas of the county don’t have cellphone coverage, much less internet, and winters are cold enough that people plug in their cars not because they are electric but because they must heat the engines to keep them from freezing.

“When you look at the per capita infection rate in the county and deaths, unfortunately, in our community, it’s very, very staggering,” said William Kiefer, CEO of the Marias Medical Center, which is affiliated with the assisted living facility. “And the impact is clearly similar to what’s happening in some of the urban areas that have been hit really hard.”

The two original cases of COVID-19 at the assisted living facility exposed 63 staffers at the center and the affiliated hospital. Thirteen tested positive, and one was hospitalized. All of them recovered. It took a monumental effort by the entire county to keep the hospital from shuttering.

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Please confirm your email address below:

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At the worst point, Kiefer and his CFO were the only original staff members not quarantined and able to work. The Montana National Guard helped wash laundry, former employees came out of retirement to fill in, nurses worked as many as five different roles for weeks on end, and quarantined staff coordinated administrative work from sunup to sundown while isolating from their families.

But, through it all, the dreaded coronavirus hasn’t yet crept into the site of one of the community’s largest employers, the Crossroads Correctional Center prison. It holds almost 15% of the county’s total population with a 712-bed facility for both federal and state inmates.

Almost 70% of the nation’s more than 1,100 prisons are located outside of metropolitan areas, according to 2017 research by John M. Eason, an associate professor in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A building boom occurred from 1980 through 1999 as struggling towns eyed prisons as economic salvations.

But in many of those same communities, rural hospitals that would be tasked to care for inmates during a pandemic have since struggled, with more than 120 rural hospitals closing nationwide in the past decade.

(From left) Bonnie Nichols, Julie Ahrens and Sammie Hurtig — quilters at Quilt With Class, in Shelby, Montana — made gowns and masks for Marias Medical Center during a surge of COVID-19 cases.(Courtesy of Marias Medical Center)

“It’s going to be a nightmare because rural communities are so disadvantaged,” Eason said. “We’re going to see a lot of people in prison contract and die of COVID.”

It is not just the inmates behind bars, but also the people in the surrounding community, many of whom work at the facilities, who would be at risk. The employees leaving prisons and jails daily could spread the virus to inmates on the inside and community members on the outside. Already such rural communities on average have sicker and older populations than the rest of the country, even before considering the added risk of close-quartered prisons and jails.

“What is at stake is, in some way, always what’s been at stake,” said Jessica Pishko, the senior legal adviser at the Justice Collaborative, a nonprofit focused on the justice system. “The most vulnerable are already the ones who are the most impacted.”

The Justice Collaborative released a report last month finding that 12% of people held in jails are in counties without intensive care unit beds. In Montana, the report said, over a third of jail detainees are in counties without them. And Toole County has none. Jails, which hold people pretrial, often have a higher rate of turnover of inmates moving in and out of the facility than prisons, increasing the chance of spreading the disease. Still, prisons have similar difficulties with COVID-19 prevention inside facilities.

Of course, not all people infected with the coronavirus end up in need of intensive care, but even a small number of serious cases in a small jail or prison could overwhelm limited resources.

“You can’t just airlift 10 people to another hospital,” Pishko said.

The Marias Medical Center has two ventilators and added a six-bed COVID-19 isolation tent behind the hospital. It has two regular staff nurses. But, like many rural hospitals, it is designed to stabilize patients and then transfer them to other, bigger hospitals, if needed. Those are some 80 and 160 miles away.

COVID-19 has only magnified the existing resource problems of the medical center.

“We almost got pushed to the limit where we didn’t have sufficient staff to maintain our emergency room open, and that would be catastrophic to a community,” Kiefer said.

In normal times, the facility saw about five of the prison’s inmates a month in the emergency room. Now, amid the pandemic, officials from the medical center and county have been coordinating with the company that runs Crossroads to form plans in case a new wave of COVID-19 compromises the facility. Ryan Gustin, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, which runs Crossroads, said they are all sharing information to “strengthen our collective response.”

The Montana Department of Corrections also helped the private prison distribute educational materials, such as newsletters detailing information about the virus and prevention. As of Monday, no inmates had tested positive in Montana state-run facilities and three staff had tested positive.

Even so, Toole County Health Department interim director Blair Tomsheck wrote in an email that “any outbreak has the potential to overwhelm our medical resources.”

Under COVID Cloud, Prisons In Rural America Threaten To Choke Rural Hospitals published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

[stephenmccull]

Under COVID Cloud, Prisons In Rural America Threaten To Choke Rural Hospitals

As the COVID-19 pandemic swept into Montana, it spread into the Marias Heritage Center assisted living facility, then flowed into the nearby 21-bed hospital.

Toole County quickly became the state’s hot spot for COVID-19 deaths, with more than four times the infection rate of all other counties and the most recorded deaths in the state. Six of the state’s 16 COVID deaths through Tuesday have occurred here.

But another danger loomed: What if it got into the prison, less than 4 miles away from the hospital and assisted living facility? The county was nearly overwhelmed as it was. Across rural America, prisons and jails sit in places like Toole County that have minimal intensive care unit beds and ventilators and few additional medical resources. Many hospitals there were strained before the pandemic.

More From The Mountain States

View More

This rural, 5,000-person county tucked under the Canadian border might not have seemed like a breeding ground for the contagion. It is a primarily agricultural community almost twice as large as Rhode Island situated in the Great Plains under a big Montana sky. Some areas of the county don’t have cellphone coverage, much less internet, and winters are cold enough that people plug in their cars not because they are electric but because they must heat the engines to keep them from freezing.

“When you look at the per capita infection rate in the county and deaths, unfortunately, in our community, it’s very, very staggering,” said William Kiefer, CEO of the Marias Medical Center, which is affiliated with the assisted living facility. “And the impact is clearly similar to what’s happening in some of the urban areas that have been hit really hard.”

The two original cases of COVID-19 at the assisted living facility exposed 63 staffers at the center and the affiliated hospital. Thirteen tested positive, and one was hospitalized. All of them recovered. It took a monumental effort by the entire county to keep the hospital from shuttering.

Email Sign-Up

Subscribe to KHN’s free Morning Briefing.

Sign Up

Please confirm your email address below:

Sign Up

At the worst point, Kiefer and his CFO were the only original staff members not quarantined and able to work. The Montana National Guard helped wash laundry, former employees came out of retirement to fill in, nurses worked as many as five different roles for weeks on end, and quarantined staff coordinated administrative work from sunup to sundown while isolating from their families.

But, through it all, the dreaded coronavirus hasn’t yet crept into the site of one of the community’s largest employers, the Crossroads Correctional Center prison. It holds almost 15% of the county’s total population with a 712-bed facility for both federal and state inmates.

Almost 70% of the nation’s more than 1,100 prisons are located outside of metropolitan areas, according to 2017 research by John M. Eason, an associate professor in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A building boom occurred from 1980 through 1999 as struggling towns eyed prisons as economic salvations.

But in many of those same communities, rural hospitals that would be tasked to care for inmates during a pandemic have since struggled, with more than 120 rural hospitals closing nationwide in the past decade.

(From left) Bonnie Nichols, Julie Ahrens and Sammie Hurtig — quilters at Quilt With Class, in Shelby, Montana — made gowns and masks for Marias Medical Center during a surge of COVID-19 cases.(Courtesy of Marias Medical Center)

“It’s going to be a nightmare because rural communities are so disadvantaged,” Eason said. “We’re going to see a lot of people in prison contract and die of COVID.”

It is not just the inmates behind bars, but also the people in the surrounding community, many of whom work at the facilities, who would be at risk. The employees leaving prisons and jails daily could spread the virus to inmates on the inside and community members on the outside. Already such rural communities on average have sicker and older populations than the rest of the country, even before considering the added risk of close-quartered prisons and jails.

“What is at stake is, in some way, always what’s been at stake,” said Jessica Pishko, the senior legal adviser at the Justice Collaborative, a nonprofit focused on the justice system. “The most vulnerable are already the ones who are the most impacted.”

The Justice Collaborative released a report last month finding that 12% of people held in jails are in counties without intensive care unit beds. In Montana, the report said, over a third of jail detainees are in counties without them. And Toole County has none. Jails, which hold people pretrial, often have a higher rate of turnover of inmates moving in and out of the facility than prisons, increasing the chance of spreading the disease. Still, prisons have similar difficulties with COVID-19 prevention inside facilities.

Of course, not all people infected with the coronavirus end up in need of intensive care, but even a small number of serious cases in a small jail or prison could overwhelm limited resources.

“You can’t just airlift 10 people to another hospital,” Pishko said.

The Marias Medical Center has two ventilators and added a six-bed COVID-19 isolation tent behind the hospital. It has two regular staff nurses. But, like many rural hospitals, it is designed to stabilize patients and then transfer them to other, bigger hospitals, if needed. Those are some 80 and 160 miles away.

COVID-19 has only magnified the existing resource problems of the medical center.

“We almost got pushed to the limit where we didn’t have sufficient staff to maintain our emergency room open, and that would be catastrophic to a community,” Kiefer said.

In normal times, the facility saw about five of the prison’s inmates a month in the emergency room. Now, amid the pandemic, officials from the medical center and county have been coordinating with the company that runs Crossroads to form plans in case a new wave of COVID-19 compromises the facility. Ryan Gustin, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, which runs Crossroads, said they are all sharing information to “strengthen our collective response.”

The Montana Department of Corrections also helped the private prison distribute educational materials, such as newsletters detailing information about the virus and prevention. As of Monday, no inmates had tested positive in Montana state-run facilities and three staff had tested positive.

Even so, Toole County Health Department interim director Blair Tomsheck wrote in an email that “any outbreak has the potential to overwhelm our medical resources.”

Under COVID Cloud, Prisons In Rural America Threaten To Choke Rural Hospitals published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/

[dinafbrownil]

Under COVID Cloud, Prisons In Rural America Threaten To Choke Rural Hospitals

As the COVID-19 pandemic swept into Montana, it spread into the Marias Heritage Center assisted living facility, then flowed into the nearby 21-bed hospital.

Toole County quickly became the state’s hot spot for COVID-19 deaths, with more than four times the infection rate of all other counties and the most recorded deaths in the state. Six of the state’s 16 COVID deaths through Tuesday have occurred here.

But another danger loomed: What if it got into the prison, less than 4 miles away from the hospital and assisted living facility? The county was nearly overwhelmed as it was. Across rural America, prisons and jails sit in places like Toole County that have minimal intensive care unit beds and ventilators and few additional medical resources. Many hospitals there were strained before the pandemic.

More From The Mountain States

View More

This rural, 5,000-person county tucked under the Canadian border might not have seemed like a breeding ground for the contagion. It is a primarily agricultural community almost twice as large as Rhode Island situated in the Great Plains under a big Montana sky. Some areas of the county don’t have cellphone coverage, much less internet, and winters are cold enough that people plug in their cars not because they are electric but because they must heat the engines to keep them from freezing.

“When you look at the per capita infection rate in the county and deaths, unfortunately, in our community, it’s very, very staggering,” said William Kiefer, CEO of the Marias Medical Center, which is affiliated with the assisted living facility. “And the impact is clearly similar to what’s happening in some of the urban areas that have been hit really hard.”

The two original cases of COVID-19 at the assisted living facility exposed 63 staffers at the center and the affiliated hospital. Thirteen tested positive, and one was hospitalized. All of them recovered. It took a monumental effort by the entire county to keep the hospital from shuttering.

Email Sign-Up

Subscribe to KHN’s free Morning Briefing.

Sign Up

Please confirm your email address below:

Sign Up

At the worst point, Kiefer and his CFO were the only original staff members not quarantined and able to work. The Montana National Guard helped wash laundry, former employees came out of retirement to fill in, nurses worked as many as five different roles for weeks on end, and quarantined staff coordinated administrative work from sunup to sundown while isolating from their families.

But, through it all, the dreaded coronavirus hasn’t yet crept into the site of one of the community’s largest employers, the Crossroads Correctional Center prison. It holds almost 15% of the county’s total population with a 712-bed facility for both federal and state inmates.

Almost 70% of the nation’s more than 1,100 prisons are located outside of metropolitan areas, according to 2017 research by John M. Eason, an associate professor in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A building boom occurred from 1980 through 1999 as struggling towns eyed prisons as economic salvations.

But in many of those same communities, rural hospitals that would be tasked to care for inmates during a pandemic have since struggled, with more than 120 rural hospitals closing nationwide in the past decade.

(From left) Bonnie Nichols, Julie Ahrens and Sammie Hurtig — quilters at Quilt With Class, in Shelby, Montana — made gowns and masks for Marias Medical Center during a surge of COVID-19 cases.(Courtesy of Marias Medical Center)

“It’s going to be a nightmare because rural communities are so disadvantaged,” Eason said. “We’re going to see a lot of people in prison contract and die of COVID.”

It is not just the inmates behind bars, but also the people in the surrounding community, many of whom work at the facilities, who would be at risk. The employees leaving prisons and jails daily could spread the virus to inmates on the inside and community members on the outside. Already such rural communities on average have sicker and older populations than the rest of the country, even before considering the added risk of close-quartered prisons and jails.

“What is at stake is, in some way, always what’s been at stake,” said Jessica Pishko, the senior legal adviser at the Justice Collaborative, a nonprofit focused on the justice system. “The most vulnerable are already the ones who are the most impacted.”

The Justice Collaborative released a report last month finding that 12% of people held in jails are in counties without intensive care unit beds. In Montana, the report said, over a third of jail detainees are in counties without them. And Toole County has none. Jails, which hold people pretrial, often have a higher rate of turnover of inmates moving in and out of the facility than prisons, increasing the chance of spreading the disease. Still, prisons have similar difficulties with COVID-19 prevention inside facilities.

Of course, not all people infected with the coronavirus end up in need of intensive care, but even a small number of serious cases in a small jail or prison could overwhelm limited resources.

“You can’t just airlift 10 people to another hospital,” Pishko said.

The Marias Medical Center has two ventilators and added a six-bed COVID-19 isolation tent behind the hospital. It has two regular staff nurses. But, like many rural hospitals, it is designed to stabilize patients and then transfer them to other, bigger hospitals, if needed. Those are some 80 and 160 miles away.

COVID-19 has only magnified the existing resource problems of the medical center.

“We almost got pushed to the limit where we didn’t have sufficient staff to maintain our emergency room open, and that would be catastrophic to a community,” Kiefer said.

In normal times, the facility saw about five of the prison’s inmates a month in the emergency room. Now, amid the pandemic, officials from the medical center and county have been coordinating with the company that runs Crossroads to form plans in case a new wave of COVID-19 compromises the facility. Ryan Gustin, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, which runs Crossroads, said they are all sharing information to “strengthen our collective response.”

The Montana Department of Corrections also helped the private prison distribute educational materials, such as newsletters detailing information about the virus and prevention. As of Monday, no inmates had tested positive in Montana state-run facilities and three staff had tested positive.

Even so, Toole County Health Department interim director Blair Tomsheck wrote in an email that “any outbreak has the potential to overwhelm our medical resources.”

from Updates By Dina https://khn.org/news/under-covid-cloud-prisons-in-rural-america-threaten-to-choke-rural-hospitals/

[douglasacogan]

"Protecting Rural Jails From Coronavirus"

The title of this post is the title of this new memorandum from Data for Progress authored by Aaron Littman, Lauren Sudeall and Jessica Pishko. Here is its executive summary:

In the summer of 2015, Louisiana’s LaSalle Parish Sheriff’s Department arrested 19 people in a covert drug operation dubbed “Operation Fielder’s Choice.”  One of those people was Charles Keene, who allegedly sold an informant two pills for $20 . For this, he was arrested and, because Keene could not afford bail, he was jailed until trial.

LaSalle is a rural county and its biggest town, Jena, has a population of 3,000.  Because the public defender’s office was both underfunded and had conflicts with Keene’s case �� two of the public defenders had represented the informant in previous proceedings — Keene was forced to wait in jail as his trial date faced postponement after postponement. Charles Keene believed he was innocent and hoped to challenge the evidence used against him.  But, the judge wouldn’t proceed until Keene was represented by counsel.  For months, Keene wrote letters asking the judge to put his case on the calendar.  The trial didn’t happen until 2017.

For two years, Charles Keene was incarcerated in the county jail where he faced the deprivations of confinement, a lack of adequate medical care, and the near-loss of custody of his children.  Through his case is one that could happen anywhere in the country, the problems Keene faced are representative of the challenges rural criminal legal systems face.

While national headlines have focused on the spread of coronavirus in large, urban jails, the same attention is now turning to America’s rural communities, where the virus is gaining traction through community spread.  Although the largest outbreaks thus far have been in large jails, like those in Chicago, Houston, and New York, it’s quite clear that rural regions are not going to avoid the ravages of this disease. The question is how these communities will respond.

Rural communities have certain traits that make them particularly vulnerable in a pandemic.  On the whole, people living in rural regions are poorer, older, and less healthy. One in three rural counties has a poverty rate over 20%. More than half of all births at rural hospitals are covered by Medicaid.  Rural communities are quickly losing hospitals and health care providers.  Small newspapers are closing across the heartland, and internet access in rural areas is often limited, so rural residents may not have accurate information about the pandemic or how to best respond.

Many of these concerns are amplified in rural jails.  People detained in rural jails are likely to be there because they cannot afford cash bail.  Judges in rural courts often send people to jail for drug possession, in part because there are few diversion programs. Given the paucity of medical providers and other social services in rural areas, the criminal legal system is often used to address a range of social, emotional, and financial problems that elsewhere may be handled outside of the court system through community treatment or other programs. And people inside the jails may have prior substance use or other medical problems that are exacerbated in a pandemic.

Perhaps most alarming, rural jails are frequently located in counties that lack hospital capacity to handle the coronavirus pandemic.  Our analysis shows that a significant percentage of people being held in jails — 12% nationally and over a third in some states—are housed in counties without any ICU beds.  This could have disastrous consequences should an outbreak occur in a jail located in a rural community without access to critical care resources.

The need for reform in both rural and urban jails is urgent.  This report discusses specific challenges and responses to decarceration in rural communities in light of the coronavirus.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8247011 https://sentencing.typepad.com/sentencing_law_and_policy/2020/04/protecting-rural-jails-from-coronavirus-.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

[maxwellyjordan]

Law enforcement for profit roundup

“Addicted to fines: Small towns in much of the country are dangerously dependent on punitive fines and fees” [Mike Maciag, Governing, a publication that will be much missed]

“How diversion programs became a cash cow for DAs in Louisiana” [Jessica Pishko, Politico] New Orleans: “Judge steered defendants to campaign contributor’s ankle-monitor company, report says” [ABA Journal]

Greg and Teresa Almond seizure: “Alabama Cops Raided Their House, Seized Their Cash, and Ruined Their Lives Over $50 of Marijuana” [C.J. Ciaramella, Reason, sequel (more transparency)]

“Chicago Hiked the Cost of Vehicle City Sticker Violations to Boost Revenue. But It’s Driven More Low-Income, Black Motorists Into Debt.” [Melissa Sanchez, ProPublica, and Elliott Ramos, WBEZ Chicago] Related earlier on impound here, here, etc.

Are the big bucks where you expected them to be? “Follow the money of mass incarceration” [Prison Policy Initiative]

“Missouri trial courts send people to jail, charge them room-and-board as ‘court costs,’ then send them back to jail if they can’t pay, yielding — you guessed it — more court costs. Missouri Supreme Court: Cut it out.” [Institute for Justice “Short Circuit” on State v. Richey; Titus Wu, Columbia Missourian]

Tags: Alabama, Chicago, law enforcement for profit, Louisiana, Missouri, New Orleans, petty fines and fees

from Law http://www.overlawyered.com/2019/09/law-enforcement-for-profit-roundup-4/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[djgblogger-blog]

The Drone Center’s Weekly Roundup: 7/31/17

http://bit.ly/2vWfNI6

A U.S. Army soldier launches an RQ-11 Raven during an exercise in North Carolina on July 27. Credit: Staff Sgt. Andrew Lee/U.S. Air Force

July 24, 2017 – July 30, 2017

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Commentary, Analysis, and Art

In an in-depth article at Wired, Jessica Pishko chronicles the rise and fall of the drone startup Lily Robotics.

At Drone 360, Leah Froats uses data provided by the FAA to find out why certain Part 107 waiver requests are denied.

At the National Interest, Paul Scharre argues that drones are challenging international security norms.

Also at the National Interest, Lyle J. Goldstein looks at how the race for air and sea drones could intensify competition between the U.S. and China.

At the Redlands Daily Facts, Sandra Emerson writes that a local police department’s drone program is drawing concerns from residents.

Meanwhile, at the Los Angeles Times, Maya Lau writes that a civilian oversight board is pushing Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department to stop flying its drones.

A study funded by the U.K. Department of Transport found that while airliner windshields could withstand a collision with a drone, other aircraft remain vulnerable. (Gov.UK)

In response to Transport’s report on drone impacts, a coalition of drone manufacturers pressed the government to release the data underpinning its findings. (BBC)

At Shephard News, Richard Thomas looks at how the commercial drone market continues to consolidate.

At Aviation Week, Graham Warwick contends that the development of future low-cost drones depends on the availability of low-cost engines.  

Also at Aviation Week, John Morris writes that the 2017 EAA AirVenture, the world’s largest air show, features drones and other new technologies.  

At Real Clear Defense, Robbin Laird examines the Navy’s approach to manned-unmanned teaming.

Researchers at Stanford University consider whether control of a drone swarm should be centralized or decentralized. (Phys.org)

At Lawfare, Elsa Kania looks at how China seeks to leverage civilian advances in artificial intelligence for military gain.

In the NATO Review magazine, Col. Gjert Lage Dyndal examines legal and ethical issues associated with autonomous weapons.  

At an event in Washington, Gen. David Goldfein said that the Air Force needs better artificial intelligence in order to improve intelligence collection. (DefenseTech)

At an Ars Live event, Lisa Ling discussed her role as a drone imagery analyst for the U.S. Air National Guard. (Ars Technica)

At the National Geographic, Christina Nunez looks at how affordable underwater drones are aiding marine conservationists.

Meanwhile, students at the University of Washington are building underwater drones to study the ocean surrounding Antarctica. (UW)

At Air and Space Magazine, Tim Wright writes that the counter-drone industry could eventually be worth over a billion dollars.

At the U.S. Naval Institute, Lt. Alex Laun argues that the Navy needs a point person to coordinate the development of autonomous unmanned systems.

At Defense One, Caroline Houck looks at the technological advances that could enable “terror drones” to reach U.S. shores.

A drone video by architect Mariana Bisti offers an aerial perspective of Hong Kong’s skyscrapers. (dezeen)

Know Your Drone

Ukraine’s Iskra Scientific and Production Complex unveiled the Spectator-M, a small military reconnaissance drone. (Kyiv Post)

Russian design bureau Sovremennye Aviatsionnye Teknologii has unveiled a concept for a reconnaissance and strike drone based on the SR-10 jet trainer. (Jane’s)

Amazon has been granted a patent for a system by which its proposed delivery drones scan a customer’s home upon delivering a product in order to develop product recommendations for future purchases. (CNET)

British firm FlyLogix broke a national record for the longest beyond-line-of-sight drone flight during an 80km operation to inspect structures in the Irish Sea. (The Telegraph)

Rohde & Schwarz, ESG, and Diehl unveiled the Guardion, a counter-drone system. (Jane’s)

Researchers at Moscow Technological Institute have developed a defibrillator drone with a range of up to 50km. (TechCrunch)

The U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Research, Development, and Engineering Center is developing a robotic refueling system for helicopters. (Shephard Media)

India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation has developed an unmanned tank for reconnaissance and mine detection. (Economic Times)

Using hundreds of plastic ducks, researchers at University of Adelaide in Australia have demonstrated that drones are more effective for counting birds than traditional techniques. (New Scientist)

Drones at Work

A team from Queensland University of Technology in Australia is planning to use drones to count koalas as part of a conservation initiative. (Phys.org)

Matagorda County and Wharton County in Texas are acquiring three drones for a range of operations. (The Bay City Tribune)

The Fire Department and Police Department of Orange, Connecticut have acquired a drone for emergency operations. (Milford-Orange Bulletin)

The Philippine Air Force is evaluating the Hermes 900 surveillance and reconnaissance drone for possible acquisition. (FlightGlobal)

A drone carrying cell phones and other contraband crashed into the yard at the Washington State Prison in Georgia. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

North Carolina has adopted a bill that expands drone rules to recreational model aircraft and prohibits drone use near prisons. (Triangle Business Journal)

Industry Intel

The U.S. Navy awarded Insitu a $19.6 million contract for five ScanEagle systems and support for the Government of Afghanistan. (DoD)

The U.S. Navy awarded Insitu a $3.01 million contract to integrate the Alticam 11 EO/IR Turret on the RQ-21A Blackjack. (FBO)

The U.S. Navy awarded Northrop Grumman a $211,397 contract for software for the MQ-8 Fire Scout. (FBO)

The U.S. Air Force awarded Northrop Grumman a $10.2 million contract for the Battlefield Airborne Communications Node, a sensor on board the RQ-4 Global Hawk. (DoD)

The U.S. Army awarded R.C. Construction a $4.74 million contract for a Tactical Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Facility at Fort Benning, Georgia. (FBO)

Singular Aircraft finalized a contract to test the Flyox unmanned amphibious aircraft at the Pendleton Unmanned Aircraft System Test Range in Oregon. (My Columbia Basin)  

AeroVironment finalized a contract with the Australian Defence Force for the Wasp AE micro reconnaissance drone. (Press Release)

The Department of Homeland Security awarded Colorado-based VTO a $928,541 contract for drone forensics research and development. (Press Release)

The U.S. Air Force awarded the University of Arizona a $750,000 grant to build autonomous drones to patrol the U.S. border with Mexico. (Photonics)

The Dallas Safari Club Foundation awarded Delta Waterfowl, a duck hunting organization, a $10,000 grant to use drones to conduct a survey of duck nests. (Grand Forks Herald)

In a statement, Dassault CEO Éric Trappier said that the French-U.K. collaboration on a fighter drone will continue in spite of Brexit and a new Franco-German manned fighter project. (FlightGlobal)

A U.S. military study found that the cost of the Navy’s MQ-4C Triton program has risen by 17 percent. (IHS Jane’s Defense Weekly)

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