First the good news: after much national protest and pressure, the Federal Communication Commission has trimmed back the super-profits of jails and prisons from telephone and video calls. These incredible rates have been generating $ millions for the BC jail’s private contractor and the Sheriff’s own slush fund (he rakes off a 44% cutback as reported here). A new schedule of maximum charges will come into effect on April 1, 2025. For Broome County this would reduce the cost of telephone calls from 25¢ (often much more due to fees) to no more than 7¢, and for video calls from 25¢ or much more to 12¢. All still far too much. More information is here in the report by Prison Policy Initiative.
The sad news: yet another report of an unnecessary death in the BC jail due to medical maltreatment, in a story laying out the malfeasance of the jail’s private medical provider that pursues profit at the cost of death. This time the story from NYFocus starts with the Broome County Jail and covers the whole state:
“Brandon Loori had been locked up in the Broome County Jail for less than a week in May 2022 when he called his mom…”
Perhaps its time for local legislators and pastors to provide some oversight and visit the jail, unannounced, as they are allowed to by state law? Or perhaps the health department might investigate? And where is the County Legislature review inquiry mandated by The State Commission of Correction? The SCOC report on Loori’s deathends with this directive to the Chair of the BC Legislature: “the County Legislature shall review the above findings and conduct an inquiry into the fitness of the currently designated provider.”
As in the past, County Legislators fail to act.
***
Extracts from a highly redacted State Commission of Correction report on Loori’s death (full text here)
FINDINGS:
1. Branden Loori was a 38-year-old male who died on 6/13/22 due to septic emboli to the lung from infective endocarditis following his release from the custody of the Broome County Sheriff at the Broome County Jail (CJ). The Medical Review Board has found that there was a failure by medical staff to perform adequate assessments and recognize clinical indicators that hospitalization was necessary. The Board opines that had Loori been properly assessed and timely transferred to a hospital for diagnosis and treatment, his death may have been prevented….
The Medical Review Board opines that Loori exhibited clear signs of an acute illness, consistent with a possible PE and/or acute coronary syndrome and should have been immediately sent to the hospital for an evaluation at that time….
The Medical Review Board opines that there was a complete failure by the medical staff to properly assess and provide treatment for a gravely ill individual….
The Medical Review Board opines that there was an unacceptable delay of over 48 hours in obtaining hospital level care for Loori and his documented worsening condition. Had Loori been timely sent to a hospital for diagnosis and treatment, his death could have been prevented….
TO THE CHAIR OF THE BROOME COUNTY LEGISLATURE:
As the appointing authority for the delivery of jail incarcerated individual health services pursuant to Correction Law section 501, the County Legislature shall review the above findings and conduct an inquiry into the fitness of the currently designated provider….
Get ready: Governor Hochul is now building a mass surveillance system across the upstate region. And it’s coming this month to your local police department and county Sheriff. The end product? Cameras that can record and track every car entering and moving about Broome County, with results transmitted to the regional intelligence center in downtown […]
On April 18, 2024 Legal Services filed a lawsuit against Sheriff Frederick J. Akshar, Broome County Jail administrator Robert Charpinsky, Corrections Officer Philip Stephens, Broome County, and Trinity Services Group (the jail’s food subcontractor headquartered in Florida). It charges them with enslaving free persons, forced and unpaid labor, harmful and unlawful coercion, and violating state labor laws. Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier has issued a press release with more detail and a call to action. Further reading on prisons, jails and forced labor may be found here.
The Broome County Jail and its Sheriff have lost successive lawsuits over wrongful deaths (Alvin Rios, Salladin Barton, the outstanding Thomas Husar case), sexual and racial abuse (most recently the Holland case), and the beating of youth (the Vega and Legal Services youth case) as reported on this blog and elsewhere in the media. The continuing problem: there is no active oversight as this latest lawsuit shows us yet once again. The State Commission of Correction, consisting of a retired Sheriff and a former NYC Department of Corrections administrator, has proven to be more adept at forcing the building of new jails than protecting the unfortunate persons who end up in county jails. The result is that even the thin laws and regulations formally protecting those in the hidden cells and cages of county jails are widely ignored. The damage is widespread–and thanks to local activists and activists increasingly coming to light.
We need systemic solutions to a systemic problem. JUST closes it press release by (1) calling on local legislators to cosponsor and promote two bills before the State Assembly and Senate that would end slavery and provide new oversight of labor in state prisons (but not jails in the bill, yet), and (2) asking “County and State officials, including the Attorney General, Comptroller and our elected representatives, to provide independent oversight of the jail and its operations as they are empowered to do under state laws”.
Here are three areas that show the systemic problem in three critical areas covered by limited existing laws and regulations: sexual and racial abuse, medical and health violations, and financial malfeasance imposed on those in the jail as it has become the center for displaced, discarded, ill and impoverished residents of the county.
The incarcerated and formerly incarcerated, their families, and local activists have long written state and county authorities, legislators, and the press in all these areas. The Comptroller, Attorney General, and State and County Health Departments should at the very least do their legal duty. State law empowers all local Assembly and Senate members to make unannounced inspection visits to jails. Some state legislators have done so in their counties. But not yet in Broome County. They need to do so.
Sexual and Racial Abuse
Public records provided by successive and successful lawsuits by families (wrongful deaths), Legal Services of Central NY (youth and Vega abuse cases), and NYCLU (Makkyla Holland case) have documented in detail rampant and continuing racial and sexual abuse in the Broome County jail. Yet the abuse continues and abusers go unpunished. Officers continue to abuse persons of color with the ready use of the n-word, while sexually abusive treatment and language are directed toward women, men, and LGBTQ persons alike. Allegations of rape circulate. Not a single person has ever been disciplined for these behaviors. Complaints and grievances by incarcerated persons of violations of the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 are not allowed to be filed; grievances of any sort are regularly denied contrary to state law as documented yearly by the State Commission of Correction, including in the most recent March 2024 inspection report.
March 2024 State Commission of Correction, Minimum Standard Evaluation of Facility Operations for the Broome County Jail, “Commission staff reviewed several grievance packages and found that the grievance coordinator continues to issue determinations that grievable grievances are non-grievable.”
Bill Martin, Truthout, March 24, 2024, “In NY Jails, Prisoners Must Submit Their Abuse Grievances to Their Abusers,” Can openly transphobic and homophobic jailers be relied upon to enforce nondiscrimination settlements? Can disabled and injured youth, especially young Black men, depend upon legal settlements to end abuse in our jails?
Medical and Health Violations
State law now requires medically assisted treatment for persons with substance use, and the Broome County Jail handbook lays out procedures for MAT. Yet these are not followed. JUST members and family visiting the incarcerated are regularly told of instances of persons detoxing without MAT; attempts by persons to get on methadone are denied for weeks and months, despite appeals to UHS and OASAS offices in Broome County and regional headquarters. Media reports, most recently in NYFocus, document the problem in detail. Unsanitary conditions and severe shortcomings in medical procedures are regularly reported, even by the State Commission on Correction’s own annual inspections with no external oversight and follow-up provided. State law requires county health departments to inspect the jail but as the Sheriff has reported to the State Commission of Correction every year, the BC Health Department has not provided any inspection reports and apparently refuses to inspect the facility.
March 2024 State Commission of Correction, Minimum Standard Evaluation of Facility Operations for the Broome County Jail, “Commission staff spoke with administration and noted that the facility is consistently requesting the health department inspection, however the Broome County Department of Health has yet to complete such inspection.”
State regulation 9 CRR-NY 7015.3 “The chief administrative officer shall request that the local health authority with jurisdiction over the facility perform annual inspections of the facility. The results of such inspection shall be recorded in writing, together with a summary of the action taken to address any deficiencies, and maintained on file at the facility.”
Financial Malfeasance
Despite a significant drop in the number of persons incarcerated, the budget for the jail has steadily grown while funding for community health and social services has steadily been cut. There remain however no oversight of jail finances and financial irregularities that contravene state law persistently appear. The sheriff recently had to admit that the county had been billed for and paid their out-of-state medical provider $250,000 for services that were not provided. There were no fines or investigation. In order to meet basic hygiene and food needs, the incarcerated and their families spend $ millions at the jail commissary. State regulations require the Sheriff to spend his considerable profits (up to 44%) from unconscionable costs for commissary, telephone, video and tablet use –e.g. calls to family cost 4 cents/minute from state prisons, but 25 cents per minute from the BC jail—on the rehabilitation of inmates. Yet there is no accounting of the $ millions accumulated from these fees; past investigations reveal purchases range from lawn tractors, trailers, to retirement party costs. State and county authorities need to investigate and conduct an audit of jail purchases and expenditures.
State regulation 9 CRR-NY 7016.1 “
(b) The prices of any items offered for sale shall be fixed by the sheriff, or official in charge, to the extent that the commissary operation will be self-supporting and will provide a modest return above costs.
(c) Profits resulting from commissary sales shall be deposited in a separate bank account and shall be utilized only for purposes of prisoner welfare and rehabilitation.”
JUST May 13, 2019 letter to County Executive and SCOC (unanswered), “an examination of the county records regarding jail commissary and related accounts suggest significant irregularities. We request that you conduct a thorough examination and audit of the accounts for at least the last three years.”
Rozann Greco and Bill Martin, Guest Columnists Reproduced from Press and Sun Bulletin (Binghamton), Feb 9 2024 Opinion
Make no mistake: there is a new sheriff in town. David Harder, who ruled over the jail for 25 years, has finally left office. The election of Frederick Akshar gave us a very different person: 35 years younger, more energetic, an accomplished politician, and a hands-on officer. Recently, Akshar distributed a first-year progress report. It was big news, extensively covered by local media.
A new food contract has also been signed, and fruit for the first time in memory has appeared on jail trays. Here again, this comes after widespread demands by families and hunger strikes by the incarcerated.
Akshar also celebrated the hiring of 31 new correctional officers. But was this wise? The number of persons in the jail has steadily fallen from over 500 to around 300. Here the county missed an opportunity to right-size the jail and transfer funds and jobs to county services where they’re most needed − particularly the Department of Social Services, which has over 80 unfilled, poorly-paid staff positions. One unannounced result of all this new funding: the yearly cost to keep one person in the jail is now the highest ever: $97,000. For one person the county could pay full tuition for 18 students at SUNY Broome.
Equally puzzling is Akshar’s claim that the county saved money by his discovery of $250,000 in overcharges by the private medical provider. Isn’t this simply theft from the county treasury? How long has this been going on? Why are there not criminal charges? Shouldn’t there be a county audit of jail finances as activists have long demanded?
More financial losses are coming. The Sheriff’s office and the county have recently lost two more abuse lawsuits, and more are underway. One settlement discovered a blatant coverup by jail officials of the beating of a young Black man. Another settlement required extensive changes in how the jail treats sexuality and gender, from housing locations to medicines to verbal, physical and sexual harassment. None of the specific policy changes have found themselves into the new jail handbook. None of the 16 officers mentioned have been disciplined or fired. What stops more abuse and more lawsuits?
Progress? Only in the sense of modernizing mass incarceration in response to a decade of protest by community organizations, and further centralizing county health care and finances in the jail for which there is little if any oversight. This is not a model for the future.
Rozann Greco is an Endicott resident and Bill Martin is a Johnson City resident.
****
(Links added to original text)
Appended note: And on the same day the newspaper published another (yes another, just by chance?) op-ed by the Sheriff on how in partnership with local NGOs he protects female domestic violence victims–this from the man who, after a Black woman with a substance use problem miscarried under his care, stated to the press “that if it were up to him, he would charge X with the child’s death, but that is no longer an option due to New York’s 2019 Reproductive Health Act.” Yes, he is part of the fetal personhood movement, which pursues laws that grant fetuses the same legal rights as any person with the aim of making all abortions murder. The 2019 Reproductive Health Act protects access to reproductive rights throughout the state after Roe vs Wade was overturned]
Some good news: NYCLU is suing the SCOC to get records of abusive correctional staff. Local activists have long fought to reveal the SCOC as an operation run by and on behalf of Sheriffs and mass incarcerators. A somewhat dated background piece is on the Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier website here.
The SCOC operates in almost complete secrecy: its January 3, 2024 meeting lasted all of one minute and six seconds, simply to go into closed, private session; the January 24th meeting lasted less than 3 minutes before going into private session. It rejects 97% of the thousands of grievances it receives from county jails, taking 8 seconds to review each one. That’s the state of NY justice under the SCOC.
Giving the SCOC more funds as some propose will not address this problem. An independent oversight agency with representative members of the incarcerated community is what we need.
Recent local evidence of abuse is all too clear from the Vega and Holland lawsuits. Taej’on Vega won his lawsuit, filed by Legal Services of Central New York, documenting the jail administration’s and correctional officers’ coverup of his beating and mental and sexual abuse (read a summary here).
Makkyla Holland, a Black trans woman, won her lawsuit for discrimination and abuse on the basis of her sex, transgender status, and disability. NYCLU filed on her behalf against Broome County, the County Sheriff, the jail’s medical staff, and almost a dozen correctional officers. Officers beat her, subjected her to illegal strip searches, and denied prescribed medications including antidepressants and hormone treatments.
“Strip, N-word!” That’s what Broome County correctional officers told the prone and handcuffed African American teenager as they dragged him across the floor to his cell two years ago. It got more brutal quickly, leaving Taej’on Vega naked, badly bruised, unable to breathe, coughing up blood, and sexually and mentally traumatized. And yet: a courageous mother and son triumphed in the end against all odds.
For this week a court decision came down and their lawsuit against Broome County and Correctional Officers was successful. The County and its officers were judged to have violated Taej’on’s rights and deliberately covered up evidence of the beating. A financial settlement is yet to come.
It has been a long road to some justice. At the time of the beating Taej’on’s grievance was found to have “no merit” and denied–as is almost always the case. Despite being aware of his mental health issues, he was like many others denied the multiple medications he was prescribed prior to entering the jail in October 2019. Like all, incarceration meant he was no longer working to support his family.
In the wake of the assault, unlike others, his mother managed to take video snapshots of his bruised body and pressed his case. Members of Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier (JUST), including the author, visited Mr. Vega as part of a program that visits vulnerable persons who don’t have family nearby and often need a watchful presence. Just wrote letters to legislative leaders, calling for investigations. And then in June lawyers for Legal Services of Central New York filed the lawsuit against the county and the correctional officers, including the sergeant in charge at the time.
Doom County Jail?
It is rare that families have the resources or find lawyers to press such cases. But they keep coming.
Makyyla Holland recently won a stunning award for abuse in the jail, with the jail and county now required to roll back discriminatory practices, rules, and cultures against trans persons and LGBTQ persons generally. Several families have won wrongful death suits, with the Husar family’s $5 million lawsuit outstanding. An investigation by NY Focus reporters this month revealed that the introduction of more medically assisted treatment in the jail has been an abusive disaster. As the headline put it, “‘Doom County Jail’: Dysfunction Plagues Program for Incarcerated Opioid Users.”
What are the incarcerated and their families to do? Medically assisted treatment in the jail for substance users was, after all, announced with great fanfare as a major successful reform. The Holland settlement relies upon persons filing grievances as the sole enforcement guarantee. Yet those with problems like Taej’on or Makylla still only support legal claims if they exhaust, and get exhausted by, the grievance process. The evidence is clear: incarcerated persons have long been denied access to grievance slips as long reported by advocates to the local press. In 2022 an assessment of the grievance process published in the community newspaper Binghamton Bridge found that in the previous six months not a single grievance filed in the jail was forwarded to the oversight review committee of the State Commission of Correction (SCOC)—which rejected 99.7% of grievances that reached it.
The recently released 2022 Broome County Sheriff’s Annual Report confirms this continues: in the last year the vast majority of filed grievances were rejected outright, with not a single grievance about the staff, legal issues, or grievance polices and services being passed upward to the SCOC. One grievance about medical services was forwarded. And officers named in the lost lawsuits and settlements remain unpunished, in the jail, and on full pay. Lacking any real reform, how will abusive, transphobic and homophobic officers still on the payroll enforce the Holland settlement?
“All the juveniles spoke of the harsh and abusive practices [of] the Correctional Officers (COs) with many identifying in exquisite detail the beatings they endured at the hands of the COs’…. [a] youth spoke of an incident in which he was restrained in a restraint chair and then pepper sprayed while he was restrained. Still another youth spoke of the COs carrying batons they used to beat the kids; they reported that the COs refer to the baton as their “n-word [sic] beaters.”
As more lawsuits are lost by the County and the abuse continues, it is time for elected officials to exercise their oversight powers and investigate, including visiting the jail unannounced as they are legally empowered to do. Can they speak for basic human rights, and report their findings to the community? We all also need to thank the Taej’ons and Makyylas for their bravery and persistence.
This week we celebrate Juneteenth, with our attention directed to Texas where the end of chattel slavery came two years after the end of the Civil War. Locally, the Black community hosts celebrations of the belated coming of freedom and the ongoing struggle for justice—as demonstrated by the popular renaming of Columbus Park as the Assata Shakur Park.
Local media, scholars, and elected officials with hardly an exception invariably cast Juneteenth as a fight won in a distant time and place. Little is said or recorded about the two centuries of slavery in New York State. It goes unmentioned that Binghamton was founded by a white man who brought slavery to the region. Or that his benefactor, after whom the town was named, became fabulously rich, far wealthier than even plantation-owning founding fathers, by capturing and selling persons into slavery. No one dares mention that both Joshua Whitney and William Bingham supported and expanded slavery, and were attended daily by enslaved persons. There are a multitude of hidden histories here (for a brief suggestion see a previous post here).
William Bingham Census Reports
Given this, it is thus unremarkable that the only two statues surrounding Binghamton’s historic city hall represent white men complicit in slavery: Senator Dickinson, who prior to the Civil War was a staunch defender of the enslavement rights of Southern States, and a man whose statues have been torn down elsewhere for his role in intercontinental conquest and enslavement, Christopher Columbus.
Commemorating Enslavers on Campus
Absent such historical knowledge, the commemoration of enslavers goes unchallenged. Such are the fruits of living, willful amnesia: every day Black students at SUNY-Binghamton head into classrooms and new dormitories named after persons who may have captured, bought, sold, or owned their ancestors: Joshua Whitney and William Bingham.
Gardening with Forced Labor Today
Casting Juneteenth as sealing up the moral faults of the nation also makes it impossible to pursue the unfinished business of the unilateral declaration of independence of 1776 and the 1787 United States Constitution. For as readers of the constitution should know, the Thirteenth amendment ratified in 1865 did not fully abolish slavery—it explicitly legalized slavery for those convicted of a crime, a clause immediately turned against Black people in the post-Civil War era. It also provided a critical foundation for the rise of mass incarceration in the last three decades.
Millions of persons, predominantly of color, have found themselves in prisons, impressed into forced labor, often to earn pocket change to buy basic hygiene necessities and food. When paid, the wages are pitiful, ranging from 10 to 60 cents per hour.
Broome County, like a handful of states, doesn’t even pay a penny an hour. As incarcerated residents have long discovered—and one should remember that Broome County regularly has the highest jail incarceration rate of all 62 counties in the state—if you don’t work in the jail, you get sent to solitary and lose privileges.
Who benefits? Forced local jail labor has long been used to clean and groom, free of charge, county and private facilities, roads, cemeteries, and church lawns. And the money to buy commercial lawnmowers, landscaping supplies, and the like? It came from the profits the Sheriff has skimmed off vastly overpriced commissary goods and telephone calls.
As part of the effort to legitimize and modernize mass incarceration, farming has now been added to the list of jobs for unpaid, incarcerated labor. Broome County’s new Sheriff Akshar has trumpeted setting up a new garden inside the jail, constructed with the assistance of Cornell Cooperative Extension, a local union, and the Broome County Council of Churches. Who could be against gardening? As WBNG TV reports here, the garden is supposed to teach the incarcerated employable skills, although what those skills are and who might employ them is left unsaid. WIVT TV tells us all the veggies grown there will be sent to Broome County Council of Churches’ food pantry, CHOW. It isn’t clear why they aren’t used in the jail, where the lack of food has long been an issue; people can linger for months and even years awaiting trial without ever seeing a piece of fruit, even the cheapest canned fruit cocktail. No one mentions the history and practice of forced labor, and the constitutional clauses that endorse incarcerated slavery.
Incarcerated Labor fights back
It is getting harder to keep such practices invisible, for across the country incarcerated men and women have been protesting forced incarcerated labor, hunger, and abuse. In 2016 a national prison labor strike mobilized under the call of a “Call to Action Against Slavery in America.” In 2018 incarcerated workers launched a national prison labor strike over forced and abusive and labor, arguing they were treated like animals, “a systematic problem born out of slavery.” Last October incarcerated works across Alabama launched yet another strike.
The incarcerated in Broome County jail have done the same, conducting their own ad hoc hunger strikes. Lacking any oversight and access by the public, such appeals do not reach beyond family and friends, and are most often silenced by retaliation against those who dare even try to file a grievance.
Juneteenth Lives
And so, what does Juneteenth mean to us in Binghamton in 2023? We celebrate surely the end of chattel slavery, and not only in the South and Texas. But Juneteenth is a call to much more: a revelation and reaffirmation of the living, daily struggle for racial justice in Binghamton, New York State, and the nation. To be faithful to those who have fought for freedom is to continue their work, to ally with those pursuing liberation—and there is much to be done.
Continuing declines in crime rates and incarcerated populations pose the question: what to do with our increasingly empty jail cells? The trends are unmistakable for the smaller cities and towns of the state. Index (serious) crime rates for counties outside NY City have fallen by 39% since 2012. County jail populations have correspondingly fallen by 42% in the last ten years. As county budgets come under increasing pressure, questions about fiscal overreach are emerging.
Thus the questions posed by the Ulster County Comptroller to his elected officials: why is the county jail so large, so heavily staffed, and over-funded given the drop in incarcerated populations? Aren’t there better uses for the county money? His recommendation: “a reduction in facility capacity and commensurate staffing” and an “examination of the costs of operation to ensure that they are commensurate with the needs of the community”.
Broome County, regularly ranked as the top county in the state for jail incarceration, faces similar trends—and equally daunting fiscal dilemmas given looming state budget cuts. In the last ten years index crime rates for Broome County have fallen steadily, dropping by 35 percent–even as the number of guns and gun violence has risen.
And jail capacity and populations? In 2015 the county was convinced by jail authorities and an external study they commissioned to spend $6.8 million to expand jail capacity from 536 to 600 persons. The expected boom in jail numbers, projected to hit 700, never came. Average daily jail population has fallen instead from 500 to below 300, half the capacity of the jail. In January, 296 persons were housed in the jail, including 26 held on behalf of federal authorities (and of the 296 only 50 were convicted and sentenced for a crime).
The result? As in Ulster, a dramatic increase in the cost to keep a person in the county jail, rising from $45,000 in 2012 to $109,000 now.
For the cost of jailing one person on misdemeanor charges, the county could offer free tuition to SUNY-Broome to twenty local youth. Or hire two mental health counselors. Or offer incentives to respond to the staffing crisis at the county’s debilitated Department of Social Services, with over 80 vacant positions. Local elected officials appear oblivious to these needs, expanding instead the jail budget yet again this year, and empowering the newly elected Sheriff to hire up to 38 more correctional officers by offering $5,000 bonuses and lowering educational requirements.
As in Ulster the story is straightforward: its time to ask local legislators and auditors to investigate and adjust staffing at the county jail—and release funds to where they might further reduce crime, as in supporting underfunded mental health, housing, and youth services.
William Martin is a Johnson City resident and professor emeritus at Binghamton University.
What would you do if someone gave you an unexpected $37 million? A once-in-a-lifetime bonanza?
That was the delicious dilemma faced by the Broome County Executive and Legislators when the Federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) was passed in March 2021. ARPA allocated $350 billion to municipal, county, state, and tribal governments to assist in COVID recovery. COVID had eliminated jobs, impoverished families, overwhelmed public health services, and destabilized the mental and physical health of youth, adults, and seniors alike. ARPA monies were intended to address the public health, economic, and housing needs arising from the epidemic. ARPA guidelines for spending were flexible, but emphasized prioritizing vulnerable groups and equitable economic recovery (Federal guidelines are here).
How did Broome County spend the money? We don’t know. Neither the press nor county government has provided a list or tabulation of funded projects. When the local Press and Sun-Bulletin newspaper reported on the use of $163 million in ARPA funds across the Southern Tier, Broome County had only one, unspecified commitment mentioned.
Binghamton’s $46 million in ARPA: where did it go?
The City of Binghamton was no clearer on how it was spending its $46 million. Like the county, the city did not hold any community public hearings, get public input, or provide any transparent accounting. Thanks to investigations by community activists we now have the details on a new website, #bingamtonslushfund, which tracks the city government’s ARPA decisions.
It’s not a pretty picture. The group’s conclusion: ARPA dollars were recklessly laundered into a slush fund controlled by the Republican mayor and city council members. They then funded pet projects unrelated to COVID, from a parking garage to a luxury housing project downtown. Judge for yourself by looking at the funded projects detailed on their website here.
Broome County’s $37 million: where did it go?
Paulus Housing Project Johnson City $4.7m in tax rebates
County finances receive far less attention by the press and community groups. A freedom-of-information request to the county asking for ARPA expenditures was submitted in September 2022. It finally received a response in January 2023. It may be downloaded here.
The summary results? While lots of groups were funded, no substantial money went to address the health impacts of COVID, the local housing crisis, or the mental and physical health aftermaths of COVID. In the midst of the fentanyl/tranq epidemic exacerbated by COVID isolation and poverty, we cannot fund, for example, the community-based initiatives other cities and counties have launched.
Who were the big winners? Developers and the Sheriff–and a distant third group, county parks.
Here are some of the developers’ pet projects, all charging commercial, market rate rents:
Sparc Corp JC Oakdale Mall $7,170,000 19 Avenue B Housing Project & Phoenix/Huron $2,800,000 Conifer & LeChase (IBM proje3ct) apartments $1,000,000 Paulus Development (JC EJ building) apartments $750,000 SEPP Group Endicott apartments $670,000 K Mart Plaza $1,000,000
None of these projects are contingent on providing the numerous living-wage jobs and low-income housing we need. Indeed as has happened in both Binghamton and Johnson City, they are likely to decrease affordable housing for poor and Black residents as gentrification and expensive housing projects continue to proliferate around new SUNY downtown buildings–and displace existing lower-rent housing. As reported in the SUNY campus newspaper Pipedream, “BU has acquired over 30 plots of land throughout Broome County to expand the school, demolishing the 50 single-family homes and apartments in them.” Lacking customers due to gentrification driven by the SUNY Nursing school, the last supermarket in downtown Johnson City closed, driving people to overwhelmed, nearby pantries. Faced with public debate over the impacts and cost of student housing, SUNY Chancellor John King in a visit to Binghamton this past week coldly asserted this was the cost of “economic development.”
50 Front St Luxury Apartments $16.8m tax rebates
And most of the ARPA projects already have been underwritten by state, county, or municipal funding . The most egregious diversion of public funds? Up to thirty years of tax exemptions through so-called PILOT agreements provided by local development agencies as reported by the press. In Broome County these have granted property and sale tax rate reductions and exemptions, most notably for one luxury housing development after another. As recorded in cost-benefit analyses by the Broome County Development Agency, these include $4.7 million in rebates for the EJ Victory Building in Johnson City (156 apartments) and, in Binghamton, rebates worth $7.5 million for the Ansco building on Emma Street (100 apartments), $16.8 million in tax abatements for the owners of the “50 Front Street Luxury Apartments” (122 apartments, opening with the highest local rents), $3 million for Chenango Place on Court Street (94 apartments), $6.5 million for the gated, luxury student apartments next to the SUNY Downtown Center (127 apartments), and another $9.4 million rebate to the developer of the Oakland Mall—to mention but a few. ARPA adds more fuel to the bonfire elimination of corporations’ tax bills, while, like new, tax-exempt SUNY and hospital operations, increasing demand for more city services.
Up on the Hill: The Sheriff’s $ 7 million
Pushed aside and out of sight, where will the homeless and people with health problems go? For far too many the jail has emerged as the county’s major substance use and mental health “treatment center.” And that’s what the county funded from ARPA, giving $7 million to the Sheriff for unspecified purposes.
The Sheriff has a $42 million budget, with the jail accounting for $32 million. Why the additional $millions? The need for road patrols surely did not increase under COVID. Nor did jail numbers. Indeed due to lower crime and criminal justice reforms the jail population has been dropping for years. Built and expanded to incarcerate 600 persons, the local jail population rarely exceeds half that number. Last month there were fewer than 300 local residents in the jail (and only 52 convicted of a crime). The number of Correctional Officers had also fallen proportionally.
And yet an additional $7 million was allocated from ARPA funds. Democratic and Republican County Executives and Legislators have for decades privileged the jail. But what are the $7 million being used for? A hiring boom for up to 38 more Correctional Officers is apparently underway according to the press. How is this justified?
This is a costly commitment, for correctional officers are expensive. Of the 46 county employees who earned over a $100,000 in 2021 (the last posted year), at least 32 are correctional officers (and all but 5 of the 46 are employed by the criminal justice system). The highest paid employee? District Attorney Korchak. Its the cost of making Broome County, of all 62 state counties, the county with the highest jail incarceration rate.
Elite Capture
It is too late to turn back irresponsible ARPA spending: although ARPA funds may be spent over 5 years, over $32 million of the county’s $37 million has already been spent. We can–as has the community group working on the City of Binghamton ARPA funds–press local officials to hold public hearings, account for their decisions, and reallocate remaining and future county monies to meet community needs.
As the story of county use of ARPA and Broome County Development Agency funds demonstrates, however, the problem is deeper and long-standing. Corporate and political elites–all too often an interlocking web of developers, real estate interests, and lineage politicians–have long captured county and city funds. Overturning this corporate/political complex, and allocating public funds to real human needs like housing and health, will require an equally long-term community struggle.
Recent and continuing community protests in the aftermath of a school police officer knelling on the neck of a young Black man brings to light yet once again the dangers and costs of placing officers in local schools (see video here, fuller story here, and local news reports here and here and protest here at a school board meeting). Immediately below is a reprint from May 2019 that details the history, costs, and research findings on “School Resource Officers”. In this case the cost of the school police officer involved? $99,000 in 2022 (before overtime and benefits), twice the average cost of a Binghamton school teacher.
And here are some questions one might ask about police in schools, including the alliance between the Binghamton Police Department and the SUNY-Binghamton Police Department.
Broome’s Schools & the Cost of Fear, May 4, 2019
How can we best educate Broome county’s kids and protect them from harm? The choices are tough for parents, teachers, and school principals. Do we spend
thin funding on more teachers or nurses? Or a guidance or a mental health counselor? Or when it comes to safety, hardening the schools against armed attack and hiring armed police? Unfortunately fear, and not a rational calculation of where dangers lie, drives today’s calculations.
Fear is a powerful motivator. In the Cold War years, children were drilled to “duck and cover” under their classroom desks to avoid the effects of Soviet atomic bombs. Today students and teachers practice turning off lights, locking classroom doors, pulling down window shades, and huddling quietly in closets to hide from active shooters. Surprise lockdown drills have become the norm, reproducing a climate of insecurity and anxiety. One in three parents nationwide fear for the safety of their child at school, fed by lurid media coverage and politically calculated calls for more state security.
Living in fear imposes costs and choices. Most prominent is the cost of police in our schools. In Broome County, as across the nation, the number of armed School Resource Officers (SROs) and civilian security staff has grown steadily. What does this cost? And has this reduced, prevented, or increased harm to our youth?
There is neither transparency nor much discussion here. School, city, and police budgets provide little help. Incomplete responses to freedom of information requests to local towns, police departments, and the county, in addition to a survey of press and website listings, produce an incomplete total for Broome County schools of $1.3 million per year. It looks like this:
These are very incomplete figures, given that SRO costs remain hidden in many budgets, and even these tabulations do not include in most cases civilian security staff, costs of “hardening” school facilities, staff training, consultant fees, drill practices, etc.
For many of our elected representatives this is not nearly enough. State legislators, led by our Senator (and former Undersheriff and current police officer) Frederick Akshar, have long advocated putting armed officers in schools. Senate Bill S1330 cosponsored by Akshar proposes that the state directly fund a force of retired police officers in all public and private schools outside of New York City—while raising school security officer (SRO) pay over 60 per cent.
The cost? Close to $200 million a year.
As an employment program, adding 4,000 part-time retirees to the state payroll is impressive. Nationwide, we’ve seen billions now spent on policing and hardening schools. Yet glaringly absent are other resources: 14 million students go to a school with a police officer but no counselor, nurse, psychologist or social worker.
Even more critical is the simple fact that adding armed police to school hallways does little to protect youth from the dangers they may face. As multiple reports by security firms,[1] research scholars,[2] and the Congressional Research Service[3] tell us, deaths in schools from active shooters are a minuscule subset of school fatalities, less than 5 percent,[4] and an even smaller percentage of youth homicides or suicides by firearms.[5] Shootings in and around schools are also exceedingly rare. Students know this: their fear of attack or harm while in school has been falling for over two decades.[6] Students in schools do face harm but from sources armed police can do little to prevent or resolve: transport accidents, suicide, bullying, and hate crimes among other causes.
Indeed armed police may exacerbate these problems. They certainly increase the danger of kids ending up in what is commonly called the school-to-prison pipeline. For what we do know is that more policing in our schools is associated with more detention and arrests, particularly of African-American and Latinx students. Incidents previously addressed by teachers, principals, and parents are increasingly turned over to retired police officers, who by training rely upon force and the criminal justice system. Recent protests against Binghamton High School security staff beating down a Black student on Court street, and the strip searching of four young Black girls at East Middle School highlight the problem and the fear some students have of the police and security staff.
Indeed, as local statistics and national surveys indicate, policing in schools reinforces racial disparities, with racially dipropionate rates of detention and arrest feeding directly into the prison pipeline. African-Americans, for example, compose 10 percent of Broome County’s students, but account for 43% of juvenile detentions and 50% of those on probation supervision. Where are the precursors? In the Binghamton School District, which spends the most on armed and private security, African-American students are suspended at 2.5 times the rate for white students and suffer a 26% drop out rate. County-wide, African-American are 10 percent of youth but 43% of juvenile detentions and 50% of those on probation supervision.
It is simply too costly a system: too many police in schools, too many poor, disabled and students of color channeled into the criminal justice system, and too few counselors, nurses, and mental health workers in our schools to really help kids resolve the conflicts and troubles of growing up in these difficult times.
Twenty years ago DARE, the police program in schools to prevent drug use, was shown to be a total failure and it collapsed. We should do the same to its successors, and end, finally, unaccountable mass policing in our schools.
References
[1] Stephen C. Satterly Jr., “Report of Relative Risks of Death in U.S. K-‐12 Schools” (Safe Havens International, August 1, 2014).
[2] James H. Price and Jagdish Khubchandani, “School Firearm Violence Prevention Practices and Policies: Functional or Folly?,” Violence and Gender, March 19, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1089/vio.2018.0044.
[3] Authors Redacted, “School Resource Officers: Issues for Congress” (Congressional Research Service, July 5, 2018).
[5] Price and Khubchandani, “School Firearm Violence Prevention Practices and Policies,” 2.
[6] Lauren Musu-Gillette et al., “Indicators of SChool Crime and Safety 2017” (Washington, D.C: U.S. Department of Education, U.S. Department of Justice. Office of Justice Programs. Bureau of Justice Statistics, March 2018), 105.
Binghamton Press and Sun Bulletin December 11, 2022 Page A12
When COVID hit, the doors to state facilities slammed shut to visitors. Two years later, families regularly visit loved ones in nursing homes, all state prisons and hospitals.
Yet for the many thousands with friends and relatives locked in county jails, the doors remain closed. It is time for county sheriffs to reopen their jails — and do so fully and transparently.
It takes a struggle to do this, as those of us in Broome County know all too well. As the Vera Institute has documented, our county regularly has the highest jail incarceration rate among all the state’s counties. Here, the sheriff, backed by the county lawyer, steadfastly refused to return to visitation, arguing the danger of COVID.
Local activists associated with Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier (JUST), with the assistance of Legal Services of Central NY, filed a lawsuit this past May charging that visitation is a basic right enshrined in the New York state constitution. State Supreme Court Judge Blaise ruled in our favor, ordering a return to the pre-COVID visitation schedule.
This the sheriff appealed. And lost again. Forced to open, he did so on a truncated schedule in defiance of the court. County lawyers in court — the sheriff refused to appear — reported the schedule came from state Commission of Correction. Yet when asked the commission denied in writing any correspondence with the sheriff on the matter.
JUST now awaits a ruling on its filing charging the sheriff with civil and criminal contempt of court and a return to a full, five-days-a-week schedule.
Broome is but the tip of an invisible and worsening harm syndrome across the state. Visitation is still denied in upstate jails. More grievously, the reopening of jails has circumscribed everywhere the rights and basic humane treatment of the incarcerated, including their families. Visitation hours across the state have been seriously trimmed back, making it impossible for people to visit their sons, daughters, wives, children and friends. Families continue to spend millions on ruinous video and telephone bills; calls from jails are commonly 25 cents per minute, versus less than 4 cents from state prisons. Commissary prices have been raised dramatically, and food and hygiene products increasingly limited. Families are no longer able to order supplemental food packages from Walmart or Amazon to be sent to their loved ones. Even the mailing in of bras and Christian crosses, allowed by state regulations, are turned back. The list of new restrictions under the cover of COVID secrecy accelerates unseen, the denial of humane treatment steadily increases.
Criminologists will tell you that maintaining close contact with families reduces both recidivism and violence in jails. It’s time for state and county authorities to do the right thing: act humanely, morally and legally, and transparently reopen jails across the state.
Bill Martin, of Johnson City, is a founding member of Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier, and professor emeritus of sociology at Binghamton University.
NYS Supreme Court Judge Blaise had a straightforward question: Where is the Sheriff? In his defense of County Sheriff David Harder, Broome County Attorney Robert Behnke had no adequate answer. Charged with contempt of court in the motion brought by Justice and the Unity for Southern Tier (JUST), Harder failed to appear.
Law and Ill-Order in Broome County
The members of JUST packing the court knew the answer: as part of a long legal contest, the Sheriff had lost the lawsuit they had brought on behalf of families and friends of those incarcerated in Harder’s jail. In his ruling on July 29th, Judge Blaise ordered Harder to reopen visitation on the pre- COVID schedule posted in the jail’s own handbook. Harder’s officers in the jail had long been telling the incarcerated that Harder wouldn’t let this happen. When the County’s appeal to delay re-opening was denied on September 22nd, Harder was thus forced to finally reopen visitation.
Yet when the County finally opened up the jail doors on September 29th, Harder defied the Judge’s ruling. To the surprise of family members knocking on the door of the jail, visitation hours were posted for highly restricted times. Harder had unilaterally reduced visiting from the pre-COVID schedule of 44 hours a week, to 15, and visiting days from five to three—with none on the weekends for persons who work or live out of town.
On the threshold of retirement, pending election of one of his former deputies, Harder was again refusing to obey state laws–and now the State Supreme Court. To observers of justice in Broome County it was another case of law and ill-order.
The JUST Response
On October 7, on behalf of JUST, Josh Cotter of Legal Services of Central NY, filed a motion and affidavits charging Harder with civil and criminal contempt of court, with personal and financial penalties.
Before the contempt hearing on October 29th, JUST members and supporters rallied in the chilly morning on the steps of the county courthouse. The gathered families and friends of the incarcerated told numerous stories of their inability to visit daughters, sons, fathers, partners, and friends under the posted hours.
Meanwhile, fees for telephone and video calls remained exorbitant. Many of the county’s poorest residents were spending close to $1000/month to maintain contact with family in the jail and provide necessary food and hygiene products. Banning visitation held a warped, punitive, financial logic here: the Sheriff had reaped $ millions in profits from his share of expensive calls and commissary purchases, outside any county control. And he spent it on personal diversions, among them his second, armored personnel carrier.
Statements from incarcerated persons and family members unable to attend the rally due to work or distance repeated these complaints:
“Does this mean my mother can’t visit me?” “I can’t visit since I work and live in Syracuse” “I keep calling but can’t get through to book a visiting hour” “I’ve spent $800-$1000 every month to talk to my husband awaiting trial” “I booked a visit with the Sheriff’s office but when I came was refused the visit” “We need to be paid back for the $ thousands we’ve spent due to him denying visitation”
Demands
JUST’s demands addressed the problems, calling for
Full five days with regular hours for visitation, extended to weekends for those who work
Pay back of exorbitant profits from video & telephone calls, and commissary purchases
Food that meets basic nutrition requirements, including that item never seen in years: fruit!
An end to the incarceration of persons with disabilities and health crises
Penalize Sheriff & County for defying state supreme court and violating the state constitution
At 11 am, after the rally, over 30 JUST supporters went through metal detectors to attend the hearing, where they were faced down by a phalanx of grim, armed court security.
The Court Hearing
At the hearing, Judge Blaise questioned both Josh Cotter of Legal Services of Central NY, acting on behalf of JUST and families, and Broome County Attorney Robert Behnke, defending Sheriff Harder. In earlier legal briefs, the County had defended continued denial of visitation on grounds of COVID precautions. This was, however, increasingly implausible, given that visitation had long since returned to nursing homes, all state prisons, and jails across the state. Indeed, the Sheriff had long shown indifference to COVID, never requiring his staff to get vaccinated. And when visitation opened up on September 29th, there was no social distancing or masking.
The excuse for the Sheriff’s actions put forth submitted in court by Behnke on October 28th was thus a new one: Harder’s restricted hours were said to follow a formula provided by an official of the State Commission of Correction (SCOC). This formula had never been seen before, and certainly wasn’t in any posted regulations of the SCOC. The Commission had not met and approved this application either, as is required for variances or modifications of jail practices. Nor had one of the three SCOC Commissioners, all previous Sheriffs or Wardens, signed off on it. It was, rather, a SCOC administrator who had negotiated the new visitation regime directly with Harder. This was, as the Judge suggested, a last minute invention.
As JUST’s lawyer rightly pointed out: visitation rights are guaranteed in the state constitution, and rights can’t be limited by county officials.
The Judge’s ruling is expected in a week. Stay tuned.
by Judy Arnold, Ruth Blizard, Rozann Greco, William Martin, on Binghamton Bridge
Akshar is a committed, pro-life, anti-abortion politician. As Sheriff will he take responsibility for enforcing NY state laws affirming reproductive rights?
Akshar supports, and will fund, more police in schools. As Senator he proposed legislation for a retired police officer in every school, estimated to cost $200 million. This, despite the local lesson of the Broome County school officer who failed to act on many warning signs about guns and violence of the Susquehanna Valley High School student who shot 13 Black persons in Buffalo.
Akshar will continue to block public reporting of officer wrongdoing. He has repeatedly sought to roll back the state law which requires police and sheriff departments to open up disciplinary records for inspection. He will continue Sheriff Harder’s refusal to release deputy records as required by the state—including past investigations of his own behavior while a Deputy.
Akshar worked for Sheriff Harder for thirteen years as a Deputy and Undersheriff, supporting his regime that resulted in 13 deaths in the jail, state investigations, and several lost lawsuits for wrongful deaths (e.g. 2011, 2015). No comment from Akshar then or now.
Akshar proclaimed in 2018, “Sheriff, you have my unwavering commitment to do everything in my power to ensure that you remain the Broome County Sheriff”–until this year, when Akshar decided to run to replace Harder – Interesting that Harder supports Akshar’s opponent.
Akshar has worked, past and present, to increase funding for the police and jail despite falling crime and decreasing population locally. It now costs over $100,000/year to keep someone in the BC Jail, awaiting trial, double the cost of 5 years ago. No problem here for Akshar. We can look forward to further increases.
Akshar has consistently opposed any criminal justice reforms that would reduce incarceration in general or decrease the racial disparities in local policing, prosecution and incarceration. He would roll back bail reform for even the most minor, non-violent crimes, while wealthy business men and politicians wait for trial at home (e.g. Adam Weitsman, Thomas Libous, Mathew Libous…).
Some good news: Sheriff Harder has lost again. And local activists are celebrating, again. This time it’s not another wrongful death lawsuit, or a state investigation: even worse for the Sheriff and the County, it is the inner workings of the jail.
For years now, County Sheriff Harder has unilaterally prevented hundreds of local residents from visiting their loved ones in his jail. On August 8th, NYS Supreme Court Judge Blaise III decreed that Harder and Broome County had violated the constitutional human rights of those incarcerated in the county jail. Harder has until September 5th to re-open in-person visitation.
The lawsuit was filed by Legal Services of Central New York, on behalf of family members, and Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier, an activist group which had led local protests. When the judge indicated he would rule against the County and Sheriff, Harder disingenuously proposed a few hours of visitation on a few days a week, which would have cut former jail visiting hours by over 80%. The judge rejected this outright, requiring instead a return to the pre-pandemic visiting schedule with social distancing. Those incarcerated in the jail, and their families and friends outside, are ecstatic at the prospect of family visiting again.
Of the 300 local residents in the jail, fewer than 50 are convicted and serving time—almost all the rest are awaiting trial, largely on misdemeanor charges. When COVID struck and courts closed, the jail was closed to outsiders. So years have now gone by without persons able to see mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, and beloved neighbors. Not even lawyers could consult privately with defendants and—unlike in other jails—no confidential phone line has ever been provided for the incarcerated to consult with lawyers.
Public and medical facilities everywhere have now opened up. Masks, social distancing, and temperature checks are familiar in all these places. The courts are now open to the public, with trials being held in county courtrooms without mask requirements. Visitation has long returned at hospitals and even nursing homes. All state prisons and many jails have returned to in-person visitation, including jails in surrounding counties.
But not in Broome County. Why? Is it just stubbornness and meanness on the part of the Sheriff and the county executive and legislators who support and finance him?
Follow the money: how to profit from COVID
One suspects it is financial and political power at stake: there is too much money involved, and one dare not challenge the powerful and unchecked Sheriff, long backed by the County Executive and county legislators. Turning truth on its head, they will tell you visitation is too costly, it would require too many officers to reopen visitation.
What they won’t tell you is that it takes only 3 or 4 officers to staff the visitation room. And that Harder has a budget—over $30 million—that grows every year and now pays for over 190 correctional officers. And he hasn’t got three persons to manage visitation again?
Restricting in-person visitation has a financial logic: COVID was used to channel yet more money into Harder’s hands, some from the county coffers, and over $1 million from families of the incarcerated. How? Well, the county just gave him $7 million more from federal COVID recovery funds, money that might have been directed to the desperately needed and severely underfunded youth, mental health, and substance use programs.
Does any elected official take a look at Harder’s expenditures ? Despite protests by local activists, the jail was expanded in 2016, in order to increase its size to 600 beds, at a cost of another $7 million. In recent years the jail population has fallen from over 500 to below 300 local residents, of which less than 50 are convicted of any crime and serving time. One doesn’t need to look any further than the jail budget to find fiscal irresponsibility. How does funding inexorably get increased while the number incarcerated falls so significantly?
The result? The cost to incarcerate one person is now over $100,000 per year, more than double what it was five years ago.
Year $ per person
2016 $51,447
2017 $53,992
2018 $59,563
2019 $61,282
2020 $90,251
2021 $74,510
2022 $106,881 (Jan-June average)
For the cost of holding one person awaiting trial for a year on a misdemeanor charge, the county could send 17 local youth to SUNY-Broome tuition-free. That’s the price of excess policing, prosecution and incarceration.
And these figures don’t include the Sheriff’s personal slush funds, unaccounted for in the county budget, that nevertheless accumulated rapidly due to COVID. How so? With visitation closed, families turned to expensive phone and then video calls. While it costs less than 4 cents (a minute?) to call your family from a state prison, it costs 25 cents from Harder’s jail. And due to county contracts, the Sheriff skims off 44% of all phone call costs. More flows in from video calls, video viewing, and selling goods at unbelievable prices in commissary (and, yes, outside shipments from vendors were outlawed).
Profits from telephone calls alone doubled from 2019 to 2021, reaching over $1 million per year now, according to FOIL data. Video and commissary profits have to be added on top of that. All this flows into the Sheriff’s private hands. State laws require profits from commissary be spent on the rehabilitation of the incarcerated. So how is Harder allowed to spend his profits on armored personnel carriers, lawnmowers, and retirement parties? Of course, the county auditor won’t follow up. Is it any wonder that COVID has been so good to Harder’s personal piggy bank?
More losses coming, political and personal
JUST’s victory is a strike for justice for the poor and disproportionately Black residents who are channeled into the jail. It follows in the footsteps of a series of punishing state investigations and lawsuits lost by the county. And yet, the county may face more losses:
The Husar family filed a $5 million lawsuit over the wrongful death of their son
The beating of a Black/Latino youth is being contested in a court filing
The abuse of a trans women is contested in another suit
Akshar kicking off Harder’s 2018 re-election campaign
Harder wasn’t among the 75 local officials and Sheriffs in attendance, and hasn’t said anything publicly on the matter since. However, he donated his outstanding campaign funds to his current department spokesperson, Captain Newcomb, who switched party affiliation from Republican to Democrat and is running against Akshar.
So don’t expect much change at the jail, regardless of who wins: both candidates have long records of service in the secrecy and abuse that surrounds the jail. Both have been involved in local scandals as deputies under Harder. Local activists and lawyers are likely to stay busy well after the coming electoral season.
Akshar for Sheriff campaign launch 2021: not a Harder in sight
Last year Broome County was the center of national attention and endless robocalls, all focused on our swing-district, congressional race between Tenney and Brindisi—an election settled by a mere 109 votes. In Broome County, even a few votes win an election.
Getting out the vote under these conditions becomes a big campaign itself. So too is the game of suppressing or denying access to voting. This has been much in the news lately as some states limit access to registration, voting by mail, or weekend voting. It happens here too, where disenfranchisement has targeted far more persons than Tenney’s margin last year: the outright denial by county officials of voting rights to the hundreds of eligible voters held at the Broome County jail.
Voting should be simple: persons in the jail need information, access to registration and absentee ballot request forms, a stamped envelope to mail forms in, and the ability to later send in a mail-in ballot. The rules are clear, and the League of Women Voters has a straightforward voting guide for those who are or have been incarcerated for a felony. And yes, in some jails the rules for voting are posted, and volunteers visit to register persons. In a few jails, voting booths are made available right in the jail.
But not in Broome County.
The Sheriff refuses to permit any arrangement at all. In the past he has told persons to apply through the jail chaplain and the Broome Council of Churches, but this has proven impossible: persons are denied access. Persons inside have actually been threatened for asking about trying to vote.
The situation is well known to local voting experts and advocates, but not the public.
One doesn’t need to go to apartheid South Africa or the US South to see voting disenfranchisement: it is covert county policy. The postmark deadline for registering to vote for November’s elections is October 14th. Long before that date we need county officials, elected representatives, and the Board of Elections to open the doors to voting for all in the county.
Broome County devotes a large share of its budget to maintaining its reputation as having the highest incarceration rate among New York State’s 62 counties. The Sheriff alone gets over $30 million each year for his jail, even as the number of persons incarcerated there has steadily fallen in recent years. Meanwhile the official county budget for the jail increases year after year.
What remains unseen and unaccountable however is additional, rapidly growing funding on the scale of millions of dollars as COVID conditions have been exploited. And the most punishing and hidden funding comes directly from the poorest residents of the county—the families and friends of those incarcerated in the jail.
$7 million in COVID funding
Take for example last month’s County’s allocation of $7 million in Federal COVID recovery funds to reportedly “public safety revenue replacement.” Did these millions go to public health, housing, infrastructure, or youth employment recovery? Far from it: a freedom-of-information (FOIL) request reveals they were sent directly to the Sheriff’s budget for correctional officers—even as the jail, built and expanded to hold 600 persons, now holds less 300 local residents and only 42 persons convicted and sentenced for a crime. How and why $7 million? We don’t know.
Unseen Cell Profits by the $ millions
Even more hidden and unaccountable are the profits generated in recent years by selling cells to the Federal government and other local Sheriffs. Last month the jail housed 25 persons for the federal government, for example, and received $100 to $300 per day for each. That’s $ millions in cell profits over time, not counting payments for holding persons for other counties.
Preying on incarcerated families: another $1 million+ ?
Most punishing are the funds charged to the incarcerated and their family and friends. COVID has had a dramatic impact here as well. Unable to visit in person and desperate to talk to their loved ones, families have been forced to pay for both telephone and video calls. For the Sheriff it’s a lucrative enterprise, as county contracts dictate high commissions to be paid directly to the Sheriff to be used as he decides. Here too it took a FOIL request to uncover the contracts and revenues, and how they were spent behind closed doors.
The pages attached here contain the response from the Broome County Sheriff to the FOIL request that asked for telephone and video revenues for 2019, 2020, and 2021. County contracts dictate that the Sheriff rake offs 44% of all costs from telephone calls to/from the jail, and 20% for all video tablet use (both calls and content). The figures supplied by FOIL show the commission payments to the Sheriff (but exclude the GTL shares, which means that the total charges for families are much larger (2.27 x larger for telephone calls and 5 times larger for video)).
As reported by the Sheriff, telephone calls alone generated these commissions, and by extrapolation the calculated total cost that includes the GTL share (based on the contract commission rate).
Sheriff’s Commission $
Estimated Commission plus GTL charge $
2019
303,722
690,360
2020
309,779
704,129
2021
528,900
1,202,190
Are these excessive costs? You judge. The rate for a one minute phone call for persons in
State prisons: 3.9 cent Broome County Jail: 25 cents
To the telephone figures one must add profits from video calls.
It need not be this way: one could have open competitive contracts, eliminate commission fees, or even drop fees for telephone calls as some jails have done (comparative jail rates are available from the striking reports generated by www.prisonpolicy.org ). Meanwhile all state prisons and surrounding jails have restored in-person visits, which Sheriff Harder refuses to do—ensuring a continuing flow of profits under his control.
And where did the Sheriff spend these funds? As reported elsewhere, telephone and video profits were spent on everything from retirement party banners to a second, $273,000 armored personnel carrier.
Broome County Bearcat, funded by the incarcerated
Super profits from Commissary
And even that is not enough. Cut off from families, and denied access to outside vendors, those languishing in the county jail under COVID became even more dependent upon food, hygiene products, and other basic goods purchased from the jail commissary run by a private corporation—and from which the Sheriff skims off yet more profits.
State regulations dictate that profits be modest and be spent on the welfare and rehabilitation of the incarcerated. As the attached foil demonstrates, under COVID profits accelerated by 50% to over $300,000 a year–and were spent on purchases that had nothing to do with rehabilitation or welfare, from carpeting and vacuum cleaners, to religious plays, to gardening supplies and lawn tractors. When Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier in 2019 asked the County Executive and State Commission of Correction to investigate these misappropriations, they declined to respond–as did the NYS Attorney General and Comptroller to whom copies were sent.
Demanding Oversight
The lesson here is straightforward: excessive $ millions are secretly spent every year on the jail, much directly taken from the pockets of the poorest Broome county residents. There is no accountability, no county or state oversight. The solution? Independent community oversight.
What is a Bearcat? Mention the word in Binghamton and most will think of the mascot of SUNY-Binghamton’s sports teams.
For police chiefs and the sheriff it’s another animal altogether: an armored personnel carrier, most often used to carry SWAT teams into action or counter civil protest. And where there was one, there are now two.
Produced by the Lenco Corp for military use worldwide, BearCats are personnel carriers with armored steel bodies, ballistic glass capable of multiple high-powered weapon hits, and blast-resistant floors. The first local BearCat was obtained in 2019 by the Binghamton Police Department and introduced with celebration by the Republican Mayor, the Democratic County Executive, and our Republican State Senator:
Mayor David, State Senator Akshar, County Executive Garnar and BPD BearCat team
The City was playing catch up here: over five years earlier the Broome County Sheriff got himself an armored personnel carrier, a surplus apartheid war machine, a South African Casspir:
Not to be outdone by the City, Sheriff Harder has apparently retired the Casspir and purchased his own BearCat for his own SWAT team–at the cost of $273,000.
Broome County BearCat
It isn’t clear at all what such a war vehicle will do. Last year the Broome SWAT team was primarily used for drug raids on unarmed persons—and the constant policing of protests and parades. Indeed, the most notable use of the BearCat according to the Sheriff’s own annual report was its dispatch to a Black Lives Matter protest in Troy NY (2020 Annual Report, p. 36).
And where did the $273,000 come from? You won’t find it in Broome County Budget sheets. It took a freedom-of information request to find the source: the pockets of the poorest residents of the county, those incarcerated in the Sheriff’s jail.
Out of sight and unmonitored, the Sheriff reaps huge profits from running a monopoly telephone and video exchange for those incarcerated in the jail. A 15 minute call that costs 65 cents from a state prison costs at least $3.75 from the Broome jail and can run up to $9.95 with setup and billing charges. The Sheriff skims off 44% of revenues from all telphone calls and 20% of all video tablet use. Profits in 2020 came to $373,000 and paid for everything from the BearCat to retirement party banners to outfitting conference rooms. Under COVID, profits rose to $655,000 in 2021.
These revenues rest on the exploitation of families desperate to remain in contact with loved ones locked behind closed doors, out of sight. As state and local authorities relax COVID restrictions it is harder and harder to justify keeping in-person visitation closed. State prisons have long ago reinstated in-person visitation with social distancing. County jails across the state, including those in nearby counties, have done the same. In an effort to force the same, Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier and families of the incarcerated have filed a lawsuit with the assistance of Legal Services of Central NY demanding a return to family visits.
Sheriff Harder has refused to comment, so far. County officials are silent as well.
The Sheriff and County have lost a regular series of lawsuits over wrongful deaths and the abuse of the incarcerated, and face ongoing lawsuits over the beating of youth, another death, and the abuse of trans women in the jail. Those with family members in the jail look forward to JUST winning this lawsuit
It will not be easy to deter the militarization of local police forces: State Senator Akshar, sponsor of the Binghamton BearCat, recently announced the retirement of Sheriff Harder and his candidacy to replace Harder (Harder himself has said nothing). His democratic opponent is, like Akshar, a veteran Sheriff’s Deputy and long-term Harder supporter.
In an interview with USA Today, Broome County District Attorney Michael Korchak defended his inaction over white supremacist threats. It was up to the Susquehanna Valley school and the State Police, and not his office he said, to act on the mass shooting threats made by student Payton Gendron:
“The school did what they were supposed to do and called state police” Korchak said. “And state police did what they were supposed to do and referred him for a mental health evaluation”… “What more could have been done?”
Indeed. What more?
There is more than a bit of white-washing going on here.
Perhaps Korchak has forgotten that he funds retired police officers’ jobs in schools all around Broome County—including in the Susquehanna School District where a former Vestal Police officer and SWAT team leader has worked for 12 years as a school resource officer. What does all this policing and surveillance directed by his office produce?
Korchak is not alone for policing Broome’s schools is big business. Last December Broome County Sheriff Harder, who runs his own school officers, responded to reports of social media threats by reassuring the public and press that there was “no evidence” behind the rumors. Local school officials did the same.
People and the press need to ask questions.
What do these police officers patrolling schools do, day in and day out? Perhaps they don’t hear or report violent threats from within the school? Do they not know when the State Police are investigating their students? Or perhaps they are incapable of hearing, much less acting on, violent racist threats?
Might their training and experience in all-white police forces be a factor?
Or are they simply representing and enforcing the county’s racialized record of arrests, prosecution, and incarceration?
The Color of Justice Broome County Black Incarceration Rate: 2,076 Broome County white incarceration rate: 292 NYS white incarceration rate: 158 NYS Black Incarceration Rate: 1,123
Or might racist behavior be the norm and legitimized? Reports from inside the county jail are especially grim, as in one man’s statement to a local activist organization that
“I’ve been called Nxxxx, monkey, and other degrading names… when we speak up we get punished by being put in the Box… animals get treated better than Broome County inmates.”
Its a common report by incarcerated Black persons. A licensed clinical psychologist with over 25 years of experience in juvenile correctional settings testified in a recent lawsuit that “youth spoke of the Correctional Officers carrying batons they used to beat the kids; they reported that the COs refer to the baton as their ‘nxxx beaters’.” The Sheriff and County lost that lawsuit.
Another ongoing lawsuit recounts how a local teenager was stripped and beaten while being told “do what you’re told, N-word”).
Might it be that constant protests and lawsuits against overtly racist behavior by city, county, and university police and schools need to be recognized and pursued?
And these are only a sample of the cases that have been publicly reported in the press and to county legislators, the NYS Attorney General’s office, and elected officials.
***
There is a lesson here that local and state officials are working mightily to cover up: the problem of racism cannot be isolated to “exceptional” or “evil” individuals, it is systemic, reproduced daily by the forces and administrations of the city, county, and state.
On Violence in Broome County: Why is gun violence increasing? And crime not?
That’s a paradox that you won’t hear from local media or elected officials. The stories they bleat at us repeat a fearful line: violent crime is escalating and threatens us all, daily. And people across the county and state clearly have a heightened fear of crime as a result. Sheriffs, police chiefs, and elected officials now amplify this fear to demand we rollback criminal justice reforms and refill emptying jails and prisons. But have criminal justice reforms had this effect, and what do we do?
Sheriff Harder and Regional Sheriffs vs. Reforms
Bail reforms passed in 2019 eliminated bail for most misdemeanor and non-violent charges. Opponents propose new legislation to grant judges more autonomous power to incarcerate “dangerous” persons and imprison those with substance use and mental health problems. State Senator Frederick Akshar and past Binghamton Mayor Richard David have launched a statewide campaign towards this end, as have current Sheriff David Harder and regional Sheriffs.
Rolling back reforms would be accompanied by more funding for police, prosecution, and incarceration. New York’s New Mayor Adams and President Biden agree. Governor Hochul and conservative Democrats, including Broome County Executive Jason Garnar, have conceded and proposed their own 10 point program to rollback recent reforms.
None of these advocates for more incarceration have produced systematic evidence or analysis of the impact of reform to support their legislative proposals. Simply put, the facts and data we have don’t match these fearful visions—as suggested by the seeming paradox between fears of rising crime and actual crime rates. To unpack these contradictions we need to take a straightforward look at crime and violence.
Crime? What Crime?
Start with the crime situation. New York State statistics show that index (serious) crime rates for Broome County have steadily declined over the last four decades and actually fell significantly from 2017 to 2020 (2021 county figures are not yet released).
Source: NYS, Division of Criminal Justice Services
The apex violent crime, murder, is rare in Broome County, averaging but five a year over the last thirty years, including the last five years. Robbery, property theft, burglaries, and motor vehicle theft are also down over the last five to ten years.
One conclusion: the propagated fear of a widespread crime wave due to bail and other reforms doesn’t match the reality we face.
What has notably increased in the last year is the incidence of gun violence. This reverses recent downward trends: state data for the City of Binghamton show that the number of persons injured or killed by gun violence fell from 7 to 4 over 2017 to 2020, but rose to 11 and 14 respectively in 2021.
Broome County is not exceptional here: similar increases have been reported from around the country.
Here we have problem.
Why? Guns, Poverty, Policy
Why is gun violence up? And what might be done about it?
There is little if any evidence that reforms have systematically produced more violent crime. Increases in gun violence have occurred equally in city and states that have and have not adopted bail and related reforms. Data analysis from the Brennan Center concludes simply that “there is no clear connection between recent crime increases and the bail reform law enacted in 2019, and the data does not currently support further revisions to the legislation.” Revised state data are more explicit, confirming that less than 2% of nearly 100,000 released related to the state’s changed bail laws resulted in a rearrest on a violent felony charge while another case was pending. And that’s down from nearly 4 percent from the prior data set.
Would locking up more persons help, as the blustery rhetoric of politicians insists? The clear answer is no. Indeed a good case can be made that jail time increases crime and violence. When people get sent to jail to await trial, overwhelmingly for misdemeanor charges, they most often lose their jobs, apartments and belongings, and become unable to support themselves or their family. Jailing the poor generates poverty, homelessness, and social instability–while the powerful and wealthy post bail and go home from court to their families.
There are many local examples, although few make it in to press. Charged with 87 accounts of bank fraud for kiting 3,600 checks, local billionaire Adam Weitsman awaited trial at home (and was able to afford to settle with a $1 million federal fine and 8 months in prison out of a possible 30 year sentence). As the local Press and Sun-Bulletin editorialized on the case, “the US justice system has long been more lenient with ‘clever businessmen’ than street criminals” (January 16, 2004, p.10) Senator Thomas Libous, charged with a felony account of lying to the FBI, and his son Mathew charged with federal tax fraud, awaited trial at home as well by each paying $50,000 bail. Absent reform, this is how the system works: the poor go to jail and the rich go home. We see these disparities every day in local courts. Bail reform for misdemeanors and non-violent felonies has begun to correct these inequities.
Has “defunding the police,” that vilified phrase, led to a permissive crime spree? Despite all the fearful talk by politicians and law enforcement officials, funding for the police, prosecutors, and the courts has increased everywhere. Defunding certainly hasn’t happened in Broome County where the number of deputies and district attorneys and funding for them has steadily increased under both Republican and Democratic County Executives—despite falling crime and a drop in the daily jail count from over 500 local persons to below 300 recently. The use of force by police has hardly been hamstrung despite the wave of protests before, during and after Black Lives Matter. Far from it: the number of persons killed by police has steadily risen across the county and set a record number in 2021.
Common sense and work by justice studies scholars point to more plausible forces behind increasing violence and particularly gun violence. In all these areas we need more hard-headed research.
Weapons matter as scholars, police and their critics all agree. A recent profusion of guns into our streets and cities has been noted by many. That’s certainly true locally. Almost ten years ago the County Sheriff reported 23,000 pistol permits alone, and the number has been rising significantly recently. Neither local nor state authorities release data on guns, so the trend is hard to analyze. What we do know is that rising gun purchases nationwide during the covid outbreak have been directly associated with rising violence.
Rising unemployment and poverty, sub-standard wages, and a lack of housing and basic services have long been recognized as correlates of increased insecurity and violence. Broome County is especially susceptible along these dimensions: our poverty rate is the second highest of the state’s 62 counties. Affordable housing is in very short supply as regularly reported by the press and local activists. Homelessness has reportedly increased over 200% in the last decade. And as with incarceration, these factors are directly correlated with not just poverty but race.
And almost all analysts point to the as yet uncertain impact of COVID, which considerably exacerbated the sources and likelihood of conflict. It should not surprise us that even road rage shootings are double what they were prior to the pandemic. As we all know personally, social isolation and the ever-present threat of serious illness and death have heightened the levels of anxiety, anger, and conflict that exacerbate violence. These factors overlap with poverty, coalescing as in the past in poor neighborhoods, where rising levels of violence have often been concentrated.
What is to be done?
What has worked? There is almost no evidence that more policing, already at historically high levels, offers relief. Police invariably enter after shootings and violence, and lack the ability and resources to treat persons in mental or substance use distress. Introducing armed and uniformed persons to confront unarmed persons undergoing a psychotic crisis all too often results in more violence and even death—as occurred in the only incident resulting in the death of a county or municipal officer in near twenty years.[i]
What might alleviate social causes of violence has been an increasing concern nationwide. In both large and small cities innovative projects exist, often with proven track records. Two examples demonstrate the work being done.
Most common and effective have been community-based violence interrupter programs that have spread across the country with documented success. Composed of trusted survivors of youth and gun violence, interrupters unlike police are skilled and trained community members who intervene and reach out to those at the center of gun violence. Interrupters work to address incipient conflicts in their neighborhoods through non-violent means—and provide links to supportive services for housing, education, and employment.
Locality, trust, and respect matter here. Interrupters come from and live in their disadvantaged neighborhoods. This is in stark contrast to local police departments and the county sheriff, who have few members from or live in Black, Latinx, or disadvantaged communities (Broome County has even removed the requirement that county employees including officers live in the county).
A second group of new programs tackle how to work with persons in mental health and substance use distress. Currently police are the first responders, and the local jail has become the de facto mental health and substance use treatment center—a process that cannot but fail to address root causes as indicated by ever-rising substance use and deaths in and outside the jail. Cities across the state and county are increasingly relying trained mental health and substance use response teams which call upon police only in the infrequent cases involving weapons. These project take different forms, from independent and community-based stabilization centers for those in distress, to teams of street-level mental health and substance use social workers on call and dispatched by 911 and other agencies.
Providing alternatives to law enforcement are critical for persons in distress and conflict—including both victims and survivors. Many in our poorer and most marginalized communities are unwilling to access services directed by or tied to the police—as is current the case in Broome County where current and former police direct mental health outreach services. This reluctance is particularly the case among Black, Latinx, LGBTQ, immigrant and domestic violence survivors.
Moving Forward
In recent weeks, social workers and community activists have pressed the Governor and elected officials to abandon the failed policing and incarceration projects of the past, and turn to long-term, community-centered responses to harm and violence. The recent call from over 100 organizations across the state laid this out clearly: invest $1 billion in community-led gun violence programs and other victim and survivor services. This past month Black-led marchers against gun violence in Harlem demanded the same. We need to abandon the incarceration policies that have failed us in the past and pursue more productive and just policies in the coming years. Wise policymakers and representatives realize we can’t afford to do otherwise.
Harlem March vs. Gun Violence Feb 3 2022
Notes
[i] The reference here is to the tragic case of Johnson City Officer David Smith confronting James Clark, an unarmed medical technician undergoing a psychotic break outside Wilson Hospital in Johnson City in 2014. Clark was able to seize Officer Smith’s gun and kill Smith; Clark was then shot and killed by Officer Louis Cioci. A 204 page investigation by the police force itself produced no explanation; the family of Clark sued Binghamton and Johnson City for failing to follow protocols and training on how to handle persons in mental distress. Smith was the last local county or municipal police officer to be killed while on duty since 2002 (Binghamton, Johnson City, Endicott, Vestal, Whitney Point, Broome County Sheriff).
A related op-ed was published in the Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin, April 10, 2022
Friends and family of persons incarcerated in the Broome County jail regularly hear disturbing accounts of physical, disability, and medical abuse. The official county, state, and legal recourse for incarcerated persons is for them to file a grievance. That has proven very difficult. Often persons report they are denied a grievance slip, which eliminates a paper trail for any later legal action, and if they manage to file a grievance, it is denied by jail authorities. Reports of retribution for filing grievances are common. In 2019 Judy Arnold detailed the impossibilities of filing grievances in an article in the community newspaper the Binghamton Bridge. More recent lawsuits, evidence, and public testimonies amplify the charge of an unaccountable system of abuse.
There’s no problem: witness the 99.7% rejection rate
The state oversight body for the jail and grievances is the State Commission of Correction (SCOC). It has a “Citizens’ Policy and Complaint Review Council” which evaluates grievances from county jails. Few grievances from Broome County seem to be considered: a check of reports for the last six months show no grievances made it to Albany from Broome County at all.
And statewide? Below is a table of spot checks of recent SCOC annual reports and spot checks of monthly reports. As you can see, the rejection rate of county jail grievances that make it to the SCOC has risen from the already remarkable rate of 95% to 99% currently.
Date
Grievances accepted
Grievances accepted in part
Denied
Percent Denied
2019 annual
4
21
3829
98%
2020 annual
1
47
3620
99%
Feb 2022
0
1
131
99.7%
Mandated SCOC inspection reports of the BC jail obtained by freedom-of-information requests do however reveal that grievance and disciplinary procedures in Broome County are riddled with irregularities in violation of state regulations. A 2016 review shows for example that reviews of grievance records and records of the use of force and chemical agents were incomplete, inconsistent with investigations, and lacked interviews (SCOC, March 2016, pp. 3, 5, 6).
Nor were many violent events reported. The inspection team found for example that reportable incidents (injury, death, emergency, disturbance) and discipline reports demonstrated that “staff are not consistently documenting significant events that occur,” and a “review of discipline hearing documentation indicated that hearing officers are not consistently documenting the evidence relied upon to reach a finding and how that evidence supports the finding” (SCOC, March 2016, pp. 3, 4)
Other state authorities report these failures at the level of the SCOC itself. Writing in anticipation of a lawsuit filed against the jail, the local Press and Sun-Bulletin newspaper reported the following on a NYS comptroller investigation:
“Though it received thousands of inmate grievances between 2014 and 2016, the state Commission of Correction (SCOC) didn’t analyze or track the grievances, and as a result, wasn’t able to identify trends at certain facilities or throughout the system, the audit says.
The commission’s new grievance software system can’t produce reports showing resolution of complaints and grievances, or how long it took for them to be resolved. It also can’t track individual complaints or grievances between the time they’re received by the commission and the time they’re resolved.”
The result? Only costly and thus rare lawsuits bring cases of abuse to light, as shown by the county losing its own record of successive wrongful death and physical, medical, and disability abuse cases. Cases related to the abuse of youth are particularly grievous, as in the 2018 case the Sheriff and County lost. As one expert witness testified,
“All the juveniles spoke of the harsh and abusive practices [of] the Correctional Officers (COs) with many identifying in exquisite detail the beatings they endured at the hands of the COs’…. [a] youth spoke of an incident in which he was restrained in a restraint chair and then pepper sprayed while he was restrained. Still another youth spoke of the COs carrying batons they used to beat the kids; they reported that the COs refer to the baton as their “n-word [sic] beaters.”
This pattern repeats itself. Last year another lawsuit was filed on behalf of another young man revealing the continuation of brutal and racial abuse in the jail, while a new $5 million wrongful death lawsuit was filed.
The inescapable conclusion: local oversight and reforms to the SCOC? They have failed us.
Disciplinary Records Reform to the Rescue? Rolling the 50-a statute back and forth
Might other avenues and records assist in responding to pleas from the hidden corners of the Broome County Jail?
In June 2020 the State Legislature, under pressure from several years of public protest over police misconduct and endangered Black lives, repealed the 50-a statute that shielded police disciplinary records from any public scrutiny. The repeal also opened up records on correctional officers in county jails.
Sheriffs, police chiefs, and officers’ unions immediately deployed, as reported in local media, an array of strategies to delay and forestall opening any records on officers’ misconduct. By late 2021 however they the largely lost the legal battle. USA Today then launched an effort to construct a statewide database through FOIL requests—but ran aground as requests were rejected, leading to lawsuits targeted county by county. Broome County was not one they chose to sue.
Sheriffs’ Joint News Conference vs. 50a repeal July 15 2020
Harder’s final solution is simple: he denies there are any records that might cover any of the numerous allegations of abuse, including charges of the official discipline and demotion of officers for sexual relations with the incarcerated, repeated beatings by several handfuls of identifiable officers, firings for drinking on the job, and so on. His and the county’s response to freedom-of-information requests on general or individual disciplinary records is simple: no such records exists.
More than the abuse of the incarcerated is involved. Might disciplinary records of past as well as current officers come to light—most notably the current State Senator and former Broome County undersheriff Frederick Akshar? As widely reported in the press, he was involved in the investigation of a 2009 crash where his then girlfriend and Sheriff’s Deputy, Kathleen Newcomb, intervened on behalf of her “highly intoxicated” nephew. Reports by the County District Attorney were turned over to the Sheriff’s office at the conclusion of the investigation. Senator Akshar is currently running for County Sheriff in the next election as a Republican, while his Democratic opponent is Captain Newcomb.
Hochul joins Harder
It gets worse. This week at Governor Hochul’s behest a repeal of the 50-a reform is being proposed. It would allow police and sheriff agencies to deny access to records if they, rather than a judge, declare the officers are involved in ongoing investigations. The record of the police policing themselves is dubious. More realistically, Broome County has repeatedly used the rationale of an “ongoing investigation” to deny access to official records. That Hochul and others present this change as a ‘minor technical correction’ is not just shameful, it’s fantastical.
Take for example FOIL requests for records of deaths in the jail: access to records on years-old deaths have been denied, and justified by an “ongoing investigation.”
Similarly, as the local press has reported, state mandated reports on the jail’s private medical care provider, Correction Medical Care, were withheld in 2017 due to the Attorney General claiming that the disclosure would “interfere with law enforcement investigations or judicial proceedings.” This occurred despite the fact that these reports were required as a condition of the state’s 2014 settlement with CMC for medical malfeasance.
As Hochul’s changes go forward this month, supported by both Republicans and Democrats, all sheriff and police agencies need do is to claim “ongoing investigations.”
Looking Forward
There is only one conclusion. We cannot rely upon the County, the SCOC, or the Governor’s office to protect individuals made invisible in county jails. Their actions to date have served to cover up inhuman conditions, injury and death.
We need an independent investigation of the Broome County Jail and an independent oversight board.
_______________
Bill Martin is a founding member of Justice and the Unity for the Southern Tier, and Professor Emeritus, State University of New York at Binghamton. They blog at: www.justtalk.blog
For those fighting mass incarceration in Broome County the past two years have been tumultuous, combining repeated street protests, legislative reforms and rollbacks, falling and rising incarceration numbers, and fear-inducing responses by the police, sheriff, and elected officials.
Much revolves around our jails, the gateways for mass incarceration. What is happening, where are we headed? Delayed figures from the NY State Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) show that in the last year the number incarcerated in jails has risen about 10% in New York City (NYC) and outside NYC. Far more persons are now incarcerated outside NYC (9,744) than in NYC (5,270, mainly Rikers).
Broome County: up, down, and highly racialized
Broome County, with one of the largest jails outside NY City, has long had the scandalous record of having the highest jail incarceration rate among all the state’s 62 counties including New York City. In December 2021 the number of persons incarcerated stood at 398, a 4% increase over a year ago. These numbers represent a slow uptick after years of pressure to push jail incarceration lower. In 2017 the average daily jail population was over 500, by April 2020 it had fallen below 300. These trends reversed after reforms, rollback of reforms, and COVID as the following graph of long-term trends suggests.
One result of the recent increase: incarceration in Broome County is now even more racialized. Black persons are 6% of the county population. Data Vera obtained by a freedom of information request (FOIL) show that the Black percentage of the incarcerated rose from 33% before bail reform in March 2019, to 38% in February 2020 after bail reform went into effect, and 42% in June 2020 after COVID hit. The figures are even more disproportionate for those sent to state prison from Broome County: 46% were Black, and 5% Latino (4% of county population).
And women? We don’t know since that record, like so much about the jail, is hidden—it takes a lengthy Freedom of Information Request. Vera obtained past figures that get us to mid-year 2018, before legislative reforms and COVID. The rising numbers are undeniable however:
More recently the passage and coming implementation of the Less is More act, which reduces persons incarcerated for technical parole violations (e.g. missing a parole meeting), promises to reduce the number of parole violators.
Update on Gender and Race (February 17, 2022)
A freedom-of information-request subsequently submitted to the State Commission of Correction generates updated gender and race figures for the last five years. Women represented the following percentages of persons incarcerated in the jail at the end of these years, with slight falls during the Covid era:
Among women admitted to the jail over the whole year from Broome County, Black women remain over represented:
Black persons, 6% of the 2020 county population, are vastly over represented as these figures for black men and women admitted to the jail from the county indicate:
COVID Impact?
April 2020 COVID: Sheriff dispatches unmasked deputies to shut down distanced protest
COVID exacerbated deadly conditions in Broome County’s jail: social distancing was impossible, PPE was rarely provided, infection rates were exceedingly high, and testing and vaccination rates remain low as reported here. Community organizations led by Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier (JUST) launched a long series of outdoor, socially distanced and masked rallies outside the County Executive’s media briefings, pressing for releases and better conditions inside.
COVID’s impact increased the incarcerated population as courts closed, the number of persons awaiting trial swelled, and the state stopped transfers of sentenced persons from jails to state prisons. It will take more study, but the timing and impact of reform, rollback, and COVID are clear in month-to-month jail figures:
Rising Costs and Profiting from Selling Cells
Despite falling numbers in the jail, the number of staff and funding have both risen steadily under Democratic and Republican County Executives alike. The cost of keeping a single person in the jail for a year has risen to $90,000 in 2020 from $51,000 in 2016. As explicitly expressed every year in the county budget, a key county aim has been to profit from selling “available space to generate revenue by housing prisoners for the U.S. Marshall’s Service, U.S. immigration, and Customs Enforcement “(2020, p. 157). The county now gets more than $200,000 in payments for December 2020 alone–especially from the 27 Federal and 35 state readies awaiting transfer to state prisons ($100/day).
Looking forward: a bigger or small jail? A larger or reduced incarceration budget?
Successful lawsuits against the jail, marginal improvements in medical treatment, and above all reducing the number of persons incarcerated by 20 to 40% only came about through a combination of large, repeated local protests over abuse and deaths, local investigations, protests and a hunger strike by the incarcerated, and pressure on county officials–all backing deep statewide reforms and efforts. Today we face blowback: a counter push to roll back reforms that could, if unchallenged, lead to a larger jails, new jails, and even higher jail budgets.
The Governor, NYC mayor, and most elected Republicans and Democrats have stated they agree on the need to roll back bail reform. Implementation of the HALT act which severely limits solitary in prisons and jails is likewise being promoted and resisted, primarily in NYC. Strong coalitions of advocates across the state are working to defend HALT, bail and parole reforms, and pass additional parole and related reforms. Closer to home, Binghamton Mayor David and State Senator (and likely next Sheriff) Akshar have been active locally and statewide, mobilizing forces to roll back reforms in alliance with other elected officials and guard unions. An alliance of elected officials backing rollbacks, Republican and Democrat, from NYC to upstate towns, is in formation.
JUST protest outside Wilson Hospital vs jail doctor
Jail Budgets and Reform
Falling jail populations have not led to smaller jails or smaller jail budgets. Despite reforms like Raise the Age, which removed juveniles from the jail, Broome County has repeatedly increased the number of jail officers and the jail budget. (Note: Governor Hochul has put provisions in her new budget to bring many youth back into adult jails.) This is part and parcel of the build-it-and-they-will-come effect. A big new BC jail was authorized and opened in 1996 and expanded again in 2015 to hold 600 persons using, as stated in even this year’s county budget, “the use of double celling, where possible, to control costs.” This is now justified in practice by turning single-celling into a COVID necessity. Will the State Commission of Correction, which has long dictated jail expansion and staffing, use this logic to require the expansion of current jails and even building new ones? We don’t know.
Sheriffs and elected officials have also been adept at turning medical, mental health, and disability ‘reforms’ to increase the funding and power of county jails, police, and courts. No one to my knowledge has examined the possible impact upstate of the HALT bill that restricts solitary, a bill community organization including JUST strongly support. HALT requires large jails like Broome County’s to create additional treatment units and protocols for the young and those with mental illnesses and disabilities. How this will be done outside NYC is unknown. It can easily be translated into more special units in jails, requiring more guards, pods, dorms, and funding. While NYC and the state can be forced to fund these new units in their jails and prisons, the lack of funding means struggles will erupt in small counties. The expansion of medical assisted treatment in the face of the opioid epidemic and deaths looms even larger as a site of power and contestation. Sheriffs have responded to revelations of medical abuse and deaths by demanding (1) increased medical services in jails under their control and (2) tying local mental health and disability responses on our streets to police control—something likely to further advance our jails as de facto county treatment center for the poor, homeless, disabled, and Black folks.
Looking forward, we celebrate and aim for fewer and fewer persons in our jail, and greater public scrutiny over the dismaying conditions in which friends and family are trapped. Community protest continues.
U.S. Department of Justice. Bureau of Statistics, “Historical Corrections Statistics in the United States,” 1850- 1984. Washington, D.C: U.S. Department of Justice, 1986.
On the eve of the declaration of independence in 1776 twenty-four-year-old William Bingham set sail from Delaware Bay. His destination? Martinique, the brightest jewel in the French colonial crown, more valuable to the royal treasury than all of French Canada for which it was exchanged in a settlement with Great Britain. Third son of a deceased Philadelphia merchant, Bingham would return to the United States as one of the richest men of the newly independent United States, becoming a founder of the nation’s first bank, a land speculator on a grand scale, and a host to every important personage in nation.
Yet Bingham is dimly remembered today. In the city named after him there is no statue or plaque to mark his place in history. In the mid-1960s his name reappeared briefly when Harpur College was recast as the State University of New York at Binghamton. More recently a new student residence was named Bingham Hall. These are small footnotes to a personage known only to older biographers and local historians who write his history as a far-sighted and vigorous supporter of the American revolution.
What might constitute the meaning and value of Bingham’s achievements depends very much on where one stands. For many, Bingham is the glorious history of a man whose wealth supported the struggle for independence from Great Britain and the principles celebrated in the Declaration of Independence. For others, Bingham and July 4th are marred by the limits of independence and whom it benefited: rich and wealthy slaveowners, eager to shelter their position and wealth from a predatory colonial power.
And Binghamtonians should make no mistake here: William Bingham was an owner, trader and exploiter of enslaved Africans as were his more famous friends General Washington and Thomas Jefferson. When he walked the streets of Martinique, he was preceded by an African who held an umbrella over his head.[1] When he left the island, he took a young African with him as a personal servant. When he paid taxes on his property at home, before and after independence, he duly reported his personal slaves:[2]
Bingham’s wealth did not however come from running a plantation with hundreds of slaves like his compatriots. He was more predatory: his head-turning prosperity derived from four short years in Martinique spent capturing and selling Africans and the products produced with slave labor.
This was his charge from the Continental Congress: to buy and dispatch war supplies for General Washington’s army, to win France over to the colonial rebels’ cause, and to harry and disrupt Britain’s lucrative Caribbean trades. It was the last that provided him a golden opportunity as piracy was legitimized as privateering on behalf of the new nation.
Just how lucrative privateering could be was demonstrated on his passage to Martinique, when his sloop-of-war Reprisal captured a merchant ship flying the Union Jack. Its cargo of rum, cocoa, coffee and sugar were the free fruits of war to be sold and the proceeds shared among officers and seamen. Two more captures followed shortly before the Reprisal reached port.
Bingham learned his lesson quickly. He was soon buying and selling goods on his private account across the war zone while outfitting privateers of his own. Men of his standing were well-prepared by temperament, training and the merchant’s instinct. Bingham’s friend, confidant, and fellow-banker Alexander Hamilton learned his comparably keen skills at King’s college (renamed Columbia College after independence) where his math professor, Robert Harpur of Harpur College fame, set his students the problem of calculating in multiple currencies the value of sugar for the East Indies trade.[3]
Once in Martinique Bingham turned privateering into a commercial operation: he would buy a ship, sign up a captain and crew, and deploy them to attack and seize British shipping. Proceeds from the sale of captured ships and their contents were shared among the captain, the crew, and the outfitter, in this case Bingham. These were extremely lucrative operations, and soon hundreds of British vessels were captured by privateers. The capture of two slave ships in one operation alone in 1777 made Bingham part owner of a cargo of ivory and 284 enslaved men, 45 enslaved women, and 146 enslaved boys and girls. All were auctioned off to great profit.[4]
From such profits came the monies to fund Bingham’s life after his return home, from founding the first national bank to the 1786 purchase of the 36,000 acres that would constitute the town of Binghamton, the buying of 340,000 acres in central Pennsylvania in 1792, and eventually the control over 3,000,000 acres in Maine.[5] His mansions and luxurious lifestyle were legendary.
Joshua Whitney
William Bingham never set foot in Binghamton. His land agent in the area, Joshua Whitney, would name the new town in his honor. It was a slave-holding community. Whitney, no less than Bingham, fully believed and profited from slavery: he bought and owned Black men and women, including a young woman Elinor, his coachman James Patterson, and George and Phoebe Dorsey.[6]
*******************
On July 4th 2020 flags celebrating the founding of a new nation fly proudly all over the city. On my block they include a militia flag and a Black Lives Matter flag. In this contested climate we might pause and ponder the meaning of freedom embodied in the historic and celebrated names of our cities, towns, schools, and streets. To paraphrase Frederick Douglass we might ask, as we struggle to realize that Black Lives Matter: what to a Black person is the 4th of July? Douglass’ challenge remains in front of us: “a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”[7]
Endnotes
* Note: this essay will be updated and extended after libraries and archives reopen.
[1] Robert Alberts, The Golden Voyage: The Life and Times of William Bingham, 1752-1804 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 39.
[2] Brooke Krancer, “Miscellaneous Trustees, Slave Ownership, William Bingham,” Penn & Slavery Project, Slave Ownership, accessed June 23, 2020, http://pennandslaveryproject.org/exhibits/show/slaveownership/earlytrustees/misctrustees.
[3] Sharon Liao, ““A Merchants’ College:” King’s College (1754-1784) and Slavery,” Columbia University and Slavery, accessed July 4, 2020, https://columbiaandslavery.columbia.edu/content/merchants-college-kings-college-1754-1784-and-slavery.
[4] Alberts, The Golden Voyage: The Life and Times of William Bingham, 1752-1804, 52, 485.
Binghamton and surrounding towns and cities face mayoral elections.
It’s time to ask: what are the biggest problems we face?
Many of us might respond: COVID and our ranking last year as 52nd out of 62 counties on health measures? Deep poverty and the lack of living wage jobs? A shortage of affordable housing and exploitative landlords and developers? Providing treatment amidst the opioid crisis? Turning back the highest incarceration rate in the state?
What do the candidates offer us? Here is a start, thanks to WBNG, which started by asking Binghamton’s mayoral candidates.
Question: What are the biggest issues facing the city?
Kraham (Republican): “The two biggest issues are crime and public safety”
Burns (Democrat): “the deterioration of a lot of our neighborhoods (and) we have a high crime rate”
Its fear vs facts here: there is no dramatic, rising crime rate. The number of major (index) crimes for Binghamton has fallen over the last four years and stands where it was in 2016, as reported by the NY State. Among violent crimes, murders are down 75% and robberies by 45%. What of gun violence, aggressively touted by both candidates? If anything, it is well below the average of the last ten years. Here again are the official state figures for Binghamton:
And Police Reform?
Many large protests and community meetings in recent years have called for an end to yearly, large increases in funding the police and jail, and a transition to re-funding health and community services. Yet last year alone Binghamton’s police budget jumped by a million dollars.
Neither candidate addresses the call for police reform. Both are proud supporters of yet more funding and the current mayor’s use of reform to expand a highly racialized police force. Indeed, more unaccountable, and racially unequal policing, surveillance and incarceration is seemingly on order:
Kraham: I’m proud to have the endorsement of the Binghamton Police union, who’ve recognized my track record… I think what we should be doing is adding resources to make sure our police officers have the resources they need… increase the number of cops we have on any given shift, which means adding more police officers.
Burns: I support the police department, 100%; anything the chief has asked for on city council I have voted yes for…. I don’t believe in defunding the police and I have no intention of doing that…. My voting record on city council is the exact opposite…. We opened up the Crime Analysis Center at the city. I’m in favor of that. I was on the police collaborative and we did a lot of work on that. We passed it and I voted for it.
We will doubtlessly hear of more fear in the months to come.
“Strip, N-word!” That’s what Broome County correctional officers told Taej’on Vega after dragging the prone and handcuffed Black/Latino teenager across the floor to his cell. It got more brutal quickly, leaving Vega badly bruised and traumatized.
Similar stories have for years been repeated from cell to cell, from incarcerated persons to parents and friends. In this case, however, evidence exists. For Vega and his mother are courageously persistent, and Legal Services of Central New York admirably stepped in and filed a lawsuit on behalf of Mr. Vega.
Violence vs Black Youth, Again
Vega was not alone: women, Black, Latinx, and the poor are vastly overrepresented in the jail, and those with medical and disability conditions are even more vulnerable. Mr. Vega, at the age of 19, was in that difficult position: his fiercely dedicated mother couldn’t visit, and the jail would prove a punishing place.
Mr. Vega had attended Johnson City High School with a recognized disability, including Bipolar Disorder and ADHD, but had not graduated. When he entered the jail he was knowingly denied meds for his previous prescriptions of Adderall, Geodon, Lexapro, and Risperdal.
What happened on February 10th is detailed in the lawsuit. As part of a shakedown search, correctional officers entered his unit in riot gear. Vega was ordered to lay down flat on the floor—and he did, on his stomach. As officers passed by, he asked how their day was going. For that, an officer pressed his knee on Vega’s neck and pressed his thumb on the nerves there. Sergeant Daniel Weir then ordered two officers, Richard Hrebin and Corey Fowler, to take Vega to his cell. They handcuffed him, dragged him to his cell by his outstretched arms, and proceeded to beat and slap him on the head, body and back steadily calling him the n-word. They then uncuffed and told him to “strip, n-word,” and proceeded to perform a search of his genitals and anus to humiliate him.
Court papers with these details recount that he was held so tight he could not breathe, was shaken twice, and told “do what you’re told, n-word.” After all this, they destroyed his few personal items in the cell, including family pictures, and repeatedly flushed his sheets in the cell’s toilet. Vega was then left naked in his cell, traumatized and in pain, and coughing up blood. Other officers heard Vega being pounced on, dragged to his cell and the noise of the beating, but did not intervene.
Punishing Grievances, Institutionalized Racism
On February 12th Vega filed grievances at the urging of his mother, who obtained the following pictures of his bruised and swollen face and body from a video call.
These injuries were also visible to members of the community organization, Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier (JUST), including the author, who visited Mr. Vega as volunteers, as part of a program that visits vulnerable persons in the jail who don’t have family and often need a watchful presence.
On February 14th his grievance was found to have “no merit” and denied.
This is not an isolated case. Persons incarcerated in the jail have, in the past, openly commented on the institutionalized racism there, reporting to local organizers that officers refer to their batons as “n-word sticks,” and that they have “been called N-word, monkey, and other degrading names… when we speak up we get punished by being put in the box [solitary]”.
“All the juveniles spoke of the harsh and abusive practices [of] the Correctional Officers (COs) with many identifying in exquisite detail the beatings they endured at the hands of the COs’…. [a] youth spoke of an incident in which he was restrained in a restraint chair and then pepper sprayed while he was restrained. Still another youth spoke of the COs carrying batons they used to beat the kids; they reported that the COs refer to the baton as their “n-word [sic] beaters.”
Taej’on and his mother have considerable courage, for it is well known that even attempts to file a grievance often result in retaliation by correctional officers. To pursue any public or legal case, however, one must legally have filed grievances. This Taej’on did, with retaliation that followed. There is no expectation of grievances being heard, even at the state level: those that get filed and sent to the State Commission of Correction are so often denied in their entirely that the State Comptroller in 2018 investigated and denounced the SCOC’s almost total rejection of all grievances.
Medical Maltreatment and Death
JUST May 23, 2019 protest outside UHS Jail Doctor’s Office
The County and the medical provider, Correctional Medical Care, have also lost a series of wrongful death suits, brought in the rare instances when families can mount a long and expensive legal case. These include the 2011 death of Alvin Rios who was left “in an emergent, life-threatening status without appropriate medical attention” before dying in his cell on July 20, 2011. Questioned about multiple deaths and the lawsuit, County Sheriff David Harder blew it off, telling the media that deaths “will happen.” In 2015, Salladin Barton, developmentally disabled and well known and liked on the streets of Binghamton, pleaded with his family: “The guards are going to kill me. You gotta get me outta here.” He died shortly thereafter. The Sheriff’s response to Barton’s family lawsuit was equally cold and blunt: “It’s a bunch of crap.”
A Federal Court judge had the last word however, issuing a blistering judgement in favor of Salladin’s Barton’s mother, Rose Carter, declaring
As a result of the ongoing failure by CMC to provision appropriate medical care to inmates at the County Jail, and the failure by these policymaking defendants to intervene to correct it, Barton died while in the County’s custody.”
The Judge went much further, declaring
“Sheriff Harder and/or Administrator Smolinsky, in their roles as policymakers for the Jail, possessed abundant knowledge about CMC’s egregious misconduct, knew that CMC was actively engaged in this misconduct at the County Jail, and yet failed to take any corrective action to prevent the substantial risk of harm those policies and practices posed to the inmates in their custody.
Another case, by the parents of Thomas Husar, is underway, seeking $5 million in damages for the death of their seriously ill son. His cries for help were ignored for at least 12 hours by correctional officers on November 2019—pleas echoed by other inmates. Lawsuits, like those on behalf of Thomas Husar and Taej’on Vega, remain the lonely possibility for unearthing brutality and corruption: there is not even the most minimal county or state oversight of jail operations. A recent state law requires police departments and county sheriffs to release disciplinary records, as might be filed for officers investigated and discharged for sexual abuse, regular drinking on the job, or bringing methamphetamines into the jail in exchange for thousands of dollars—all allegations reported to those with family members in the Broome County jail. Sheriff Harder refuses however to release any records, declaring in defiance of state law that he possesses no disciplinary records at all—as seen in multiple, denied replies to freedom-of-information requests.
And Now? Fire Harder, Terminate CMC, Investigate
The formerly incarcerated, the families of the incarcerated and the dead, and local community organizers have now collected and reported a long list of abuses and deaths to state authorities, including to the NY State Attorney General. They have testified before the state legislature. Letters have been written to legislative leaders in Albany again regarding the brutalities meted out to Taej’on Vega. This June local community organizations called upon the Governor to remove the Sheriff from office and terminate the county’s contract with the private medical company. Independent, open, and community-based investigation and oversight is dramatically needed. It is far past time for our elected officials to act. How many more beatings, how many more deaths, must pass before they take action?
Bill Martin is a founding member of Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier and Bartle Professor in the Sociology Department of the State University of New York at Binghamton.
yet another report of an unnecessary death in the BC jail due to medical maltreatment, in a story laying out the malfeasance of the jail’s private medical provider that pursues profit at the cost of death. This time the story from NYFocus starts with the Broome County Jail and covers the whole state:
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