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American Jails Are Wretched Hell Holes for the Mentally Ill |
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Wednesday, 26 March 2014 14:35 |
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Excerpt: "In the latest gruesome dispatch from the clusterfuck that is America's corrections system, the Associated Press reported last week that Jerome Murdough, a mentally ill former Marine, 'basically baked to death' in his 6'-by-10' cinderblock cell in Rikers Island."
Orleans Parish Prison, in New Orleans, is a cesspool of rape and violence. (photo: Bart Everson/Flickr)
American Jails Are Wretched Hell Holes for the Mentally Ill
By Grace Wyler, Vice
26 March 14
 n the latest gruesome dispatch from the clusterfuck that is America's corrections system, the Associated Press reported last week that Jerome Murdough, a mentally ill former Marine, “basically baked to death” in his 6'-by-10' cinderblock cell in Rikers Island. According to the AP, Murdough, who was homeless and on anti-psychotropic and anti-seizure medication, had been at Rikers for about a week, after being picked up by police in February on a misdemeanor trespassing charge for sleeping on the roof of a Harlem housing project. On the night he died, Murdough had complained of being overheated. Because he was housed in a special unit for mentally ill inmates, officers were supposed to check on his cell every 15 minutes, but instead he was ignored and left alone. When his cell was finally opened, four hours later, Murdough was already dead, and his internal body temperature and the temperature in his cell were at least 100 degrees.
The incident is horrifying, but also perhaps unsurprising, given the grim—and often deadly—conditions for mentally ill inmates at big urban jails like Rikers Island. The number of mentally ill people housed in American prisons and jails has “skyrocketed” over the past few decades, said Bandy Lee, a professor of psychology at Yale University who specializes in violence at prisons and jails. Murdough’s death, Lee said, “is actually a natural consequence” of putting mentally ill inmates in facilities that are neither designed nor equipped to deal with them. “It’s evidence of the level of ignorance that corrections officers have of the mentally ill.”
In a statement, New York City's acting correction commissioner Mark Cranston said that the department is conducting a "full investigation of the circumstances surrounding Mr. Murdough's unfortunate death, including issues of staff performance and the adequacy of procedures." While the cause of death is still under investigation, Cranston did confirm in his statement that there were "unusually high temperatures" in Murdough's cell, and said that "remedial action" has been taken to resolve mechanical issues in the immediate facility.
But the problems at Rikers Island extend beyond faulty temperature control. On Monday, federal agents announced that they had arrested and charged a New York City corrections officer with "deliberate indifference" in the death of a mentally ill inmate who ate a toxic soap ball and then pounded on his cell door for hours begging for medical help.
As Lee and other experts and prisoners'-rights advocates have noted, both deaths underscore the challenges city jails face in dealing with growing populations of mentally ill prisoners. At Rikers, the proportion of inmates with a diagnosed mental illness has jumped to 40 percent, up from 20 percent just eight years ago, according to the Department of Corrections. Jails are neither designed nor equipped to be mental institutions and, unsurprisingly, locking up people who are in need of psychiatric care has resulted in mayhem. A New York Times investigation into conditions at Rikers Island, published just one day before Murdough’s death was reported, found that at least 12 inmates have been slashed or stabbed since New Year's Eve. According to internal reports obtained by the Times, inmates and corrections officers have suffered lacerations, concussions, punctured eardrums, and fractures to noses, eye sockets, jaws, and hips. The investigation found that in the past ten years, the use of force by corrections officers has jumped 240 percent, even as the Rikers population has declined 15 percent.
The Times report notes that officers are also regularly abused by inmates—in one incident this month, an officer was stabbed in the face with a pen. According to the Corrections Department, mentally ill prisoners are responsible for about two-thirds of infractions at New York City jails.
“With that number of people who are mentally vulnerable in very stressful situations, of course there is going to be more disruptive behavior and escalation of violence,” Lee said. "Corrections officers are trained to respond with punitive measures or more violence, expecting that individuals will be in control of their behavior. But of course, with the mentally ill, for most of them there is a high probability that they won't be. Rather than follow rules and behavioral guidelines, they will act even more unpredictably. And the corrections officers panic and respond with more violence.”
The chaos isn’t limited to Rikers. Jails and prisons have become the country’s de facto mental institutions, thanks to decades of deinstitutionalization policies that have gutted federal funding for mental health facilities and moved thousands of people out of mental hospitals and into community treatment facilities, homeless shelters, jails, and prisons. As of 2010, there were 43,000 psychiatric beds in the US, or about 14 beds per 100,000 people—the same ratio that existed in 1850, when the country first started to push for humane care for the mentally ill. Meanwhile, the US incarceration rate has jumped 350 percent since the 1970s, according to Department of Justice statistics. Studies have found that the increase in the prison population has actually been almost directly equal to the decrease in the number of people in mental institutions—in other words, the percentage of the population that is institutionalized has stayed constant, but just moved from mental hospitals to prisons.
“Jails, especially large urban jails, have become the default mental health hospitals for their cities,” said Amy Fettig, the senior staff counsel for the ACLU’s National Prison Project. “It’s a job that they are in no way prepared for, trained for, or resourced to handle.”
The situation has exacerbated what experts say is an epidemic of violence in big-city jails. Due to lack of state or federal oversight of local correctional facilities, there is little comprehensive data on what goes on inside jails. But in Los Angeles County, where the daily jail population averages 22,000—the largest in the country—reports from the ACLU have found a pervasive use of excessive force by deputies in the corrections system. A 2012 study, for example, reported that 64 people had witnessed incidents in which deputies struck an inmate in the head—in 14 cases, the inmates suffered broken facial bones, three inmates had to receive emergency operations, and one inmate was blinded in one eye. The ACLU reports have also found an alarming lack of adequate mental health treatment in the LA County jails, along with a jump in the number of suicides among inmates with diagnosed mental illnesses. This past fall, the Department of Justice announced it was opening an investigation into the jails' treatment of mentally ill inmates, citing the jump in suicides at LA jails in 2013 and the "obsolete and dilapidated conditions" for inmates diagnosed with serious mental illnesses. In New Orleans, a federal monitor said Thursday that the high rates of violence, rape, and shoddy mental health care at the Orleans Parish Prison are “the English definition of mayhem.”
“This is a very toxic mix,” said Fettig. “It’s a toxic mix for the prisoners, toxic mix for the staff, and unfortunately it's also a toxic mix for the public, because an institution that's designed to protect public safety can't do that when it's asked to be a mental health hospital.”
In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio has taken incremental steps to reform the treatment of mentally ill inmates at Rikers and other city jails. In January, the Department of Corrections announced that it would end the use of solitary confinement as punishment for mentally ill prisoners and instead house that population in special treatment units, according to the New York Times. But Murdough was housed in one of those special treatment facilities. His death last week prompted de Blasio to call for further improvements in mental health treatment and training for corrections officers.
To spearhead those efforts, de Blasio has tapped Joseph Ponte, a veteran corrections official who is currently the head of Maine's prison system, as the city's new corrections commissioner. Ponte, who has a reputation for turning around violent jails and prisons, is known among prison-reform advocates for his successful efforts to curb aggressive treatment of prisoners and decrease the use of solitary confinement. So far, though, it is not clear how he plans to deal with the growing population of mentally ill people in the city's prisons. (Ponte's office in Maine did not respond to interview requests.)
But other attempts to reform large urban jail systems have been slow-going, and their success has been marginal, at best. In New Orleans, for example, the US Justice Department has ordered the prison to start implementing reforms that at the very least bring conditions up to minimum constitutional standards, but the city and the sheriff's office have been tied up in court battles over who will pay for the changes. In Los Angeles, the Sheriff's Department has implemented only a handful of recommended changes to improve conditions and curb inmate abuse at county jails, after two years of stalling reforms.
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FOCUS | Putin Announces Historic G-1 Summit |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Wednesday, 26 March 2014 13:03 |
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Borowitz writes: "Russian President Vladimir Putin made history today by scheduling the first-ever summit of the newly formed group of nations called the G-1."
Russian President Vladimir Putin (photo: AP)
Putin Announces Historic G-1 Summit
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
26 March 14
The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report."
 ussian President Vladimir Putin made history today by scheduling the first-ever summit of the newly formed group of nations called the G-1.
The summit, which Putin has set for June in Sochi, is expected to be attended by the G-1 member nation Russia.
Putin pronounced himself delighted by Russia’s attendance, telling reporters, “It is an auspicious start for the G-1 to have the participation of all its member nations.”
In addition to what he called “a free exchange of ideas on issues of importance to the G-1,” the summit is expected to elect the first president of the G-1, a position for which Putin is widely considered the frontrunner.
Putin denied he was a candidate for the post, but added, “It’s an honor just to be in the mix.”
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FOCUS | The New Billionaire Political Bosses |
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Wednesday, 26 March 2014 11:30 |
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Reich writes: "America is not yet an oligarchy, but that's where the Koch's and a few other billionaires are taking us."
Economist, professor, author and political commentator Robert Reich. (photo: Richard Morgenstein)
The New Billionaire Political Bosses
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
26 March 14
 harles and David Koch should not be blamed for having more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of Americans put together. Nor should they be condemned for their petrochemical empire. As far as I know, they’ve played by the rules and obeyed the laws.
They’re also entitled to their own right-wing political views. It’s a free country.
But in using their vast wealth to change those rules and laws in order to fit their political views, the Koch brothers are undermining our democracy. That’s a betrayal of the most precious thing Americans share.
The Kochs exemplify a new reality that strikes at the heart of America. The vast wealth that has accumulated at the top of the American economy is not itself the problem. The problem is that political power tends to rise to where the money is. And this combination of great wealth with political power leads to greater and greater accumulations and concentrations of both — tilting the playing field in favor of the Kochs and their ilk, and against the rest of us.
America is not yet an oligarchy, but that’s where the Koch’s and a few other billionaires are taking us.
American democracy used to depend on political parties that more or less represented most of us. Political scientists of the 1950s and 1960s marveled at American “pluralism,” by which they meant the capacities of parties and other membership groups to reflect the preferences of the vast majority of citizens.
Then around a quarter century ago, as income and wealth began concentrating at the top, the Republican and Democratic Parties started to morph into mechanisms for extracting money, mostly from wealthy people.
Finally, after the Supreme Court’s “Citizen’s United” decision in 2010, billionaires began creating their own political mechanisms, separate from the political parties. They started providing big money directly to political candidates of their choice, and creating their own media campaigns to sway public opinion toward their own views.
So far in the 2014 election cycle, “Americans for Prosperity,” the Koch brother’s political front group, has aired more than 17,000 broadcast TV commercials, compared with only 2,100 aired by Republican Party groups.
"Americans for Prosperity" has also been outspending top Democratic super PACs in nearly all of the Senate races Republicans are targeting this year. In seven of the nine races the difference in total spending is at least two-to-one and Democratic super PACs have had virtually no air presence in five of the nine states.
The Kochs have spawned several imitators. Through the end of February, four of the top five contributors to 2014 super-PACs are now giving money to political operations they themselves created, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
For example, billionaire TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts and his son, Todd, co-owner of the Chicago Cubs, have their own $25 million political operation called “Ending Spending.” The group is now investing heavily in TV ads against Republican Representative Walter Jones in a North Carolina primary (they blame Jones for too often voting with Obama).
Their ad attacking Democratic New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen for supporting Obama’s health-care law has become a template for similar ads funded by the Koch’s “Americans for Prosperity” in Senate races across the country.
When billionaires supplant political parties, candidates are beholden directly to the billionaires. And if and when those candidates win election, the billionaires will be completely in charge.
At this very moment, Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson (worth an estimated $37.9 billion) is busy interviewing potential Republican candidates whom he might fund, in what’s being called the “Sheldon Primary.”
“Certainly the ‘Sheldon Primary’ is an important primary for any Republican running for president,” says Ari Fleischer, former White House press secretary under President George W. Bush. “It goes without saying that anybody running for the Republican nomination would want to have Sheldon at his side.”
The new billionaire political bosses aren’t limited to Republicans. Democratic-leaning billionaires Tom Steyer, a former hedge-fund manager, and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have also created their own political groups. But even if the two sides were equal, billionaires squaring off against each other isn’t remotely a democracy.
In his much-talked-about new book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” economist Thomas Piketty explains why the rich have become steadily richer while the share of national income going to wages continues to drop. He shows that when wealth is concentrated in relatively few hands, and the income generated by that wealth grows more rapidly than the overall economy – as has been the case in the United States and many other advanced economies for years – the richest receive almost all the income growth.
Logically, this leads to greater and greater concentrations of income and wealth in the future – dynastic fortunes that are handed down from generation to generation, as they were prior to the twentieth century in much of the world.
The trend was reversed temporarily in the twentieth century by the Great Depression, two terrible wars, the development of the modern welfare state, and strong labor unions. But Piketty is justifiably concerned about the future.
A new gilded age is starting to look a lot like the old one. The only way to stop this is through concerted political action. Yet the only large-scale political action we’re witnessing is that of Charles and David Koch, and their billionaire imitators.
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The Todashev Case |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Tuesday, 25 March 2014 14:55 |
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Pierce writes: "He was shot and killed while he was being interrogated in his Florida apartment by the FBI and the Massachusetts State Police in connection with a triple homicide in Waltham, Massachusetts in which, it was alleged, Todashev was involved with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the two brothers suspected in last year's Boston Marathon bombing."
Charles Pierce. (artwork: Boston Globe)
The Todashev Case
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
25 March 14
 he case of the death of Ibragim Todashev has always been a curious one. He was shot and killed while he was being interrogated in his Florida apartment by the FBI and the Massachusetts State Police in connection with a triple homicide in Waltham, Massachusetts in which, it was alleged, Todashev was involved with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the two brothers suspected in last year's Boston Marathon bombing. Just before he was going to sign a statement to that effect, it was reported, Todashev went berserk and attacked the agents, forcing one of them to shoot him seven times. Today, the prosecutor appointed by the state of Florida to investigate the case cleared the FBI of any wrongdoing.
The letter said that two Massachusetts state troopers and the FBI agent interviewed Todashev for 4½ hours during which he admitted "some involvement in the triple homicide that was under investigation." One of the troopers left the room after Todashev agreed to prepare a written statement describing his involvement. Todashev's demeanor changed at that point, the letter said. While neither the trooper nor the agent left in the room was looking, a coffee table "is propelled into the air" striking the FBI agent in the head. Todashev ran to the kitchen and could be heard rummaging through drawers, apparently looking for something, the letter said. The trooper then allegedly saw Todashev "moving in his direction carrying a long pole of some sort ... with the end of the pole pointed toward him as if intended to be used to impale rather than strike," the letter said. The FBI agent fired three to four shots from his .40-caliber Glock 23 pistol at Todashev as he advanced. Todashev was dropped to his knees but was not incapacitated and "immediately sprung toward the officers in what the [trooper] describes as a low angled lunge." The FBI agent fired three to four more shots, incapacitating and killing Todashev, the letter said.
The Orlando Police surrendered jurisdiction entirely to the feds, and the FBI agent in question was not interviewed by the prosecutor but, instead, submitted a written statement in which he related his account of what happened in the apartment, including what he says was Todashev's decision to fight rather than to flee.
The law enforcement agents knew of Todashev's history as a skilled martial arts fighter, having reviewed his fights on video. They were also aware of recent violent confrontations he had been in in both Florida and in Massachusetts, the letter said. At the moment of the final fray, Todashev had easy access to a door behind him to flee, but instead of fleeing, he appeared to choose to fight, the letter said. "We learned much about Mr. Todashev during our investigation," Ashton wrote. "The one common thread among all was the observation that he was, at his core, a fearless fighter. Regardless of how beaten down he was, he simply didn't have any quit in him. Perhaps on this occasion, he simply reverted to that basic aspect of his personality and chose to go down fighting."
(The FBI's internal investigation already had cleared the agent, which should come as a surprise to approximately nobody.)
YMMV on this, but there seems to me to be more than a little mind-reading going on here, not to mention an odd equation between MMA fighters and superheroes. Nevertheless, the whole saga has been bizarre from the start. As related in this Boston Magazine piece, the triple murder itself was savage, three men with their throats cut with marijuana sprinkled all over their bodies. Moreover, it appears, the local cops shined on the families of the deceased until the bombs went off in Boston, at which point everybody yelled "terrorism!" and it was all hands on deck. That's what led the FBI to Todashev's apartment. It can be argued with no little credibility that, had the local police really busted ass on the original murder investigation, then Tamerlan Tsarnaev might've been in jail last April, and not walking down Boylston Street with a pressure cooker in a bag, his little brother in tow. That should bother all of us.
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obby Lobby doesn't want to cover its employees' birth control on company insurance plans. In fact, they're so outraged about women having access to birth control that they've taken the issue all the way to the Supreme Court.
