Month: May 2019

Who’s the Lawbreaker?  State Laws vs. County Jail Accounts

On any given day there are hundreds of local families with loved ones caged in the Broome County jail. Talk to any of them and you quickly find out how costly it is to sustain the lives of those inside.  Want to call your neighbor locked up inside?  A recent call of less than 7 minutes to my local phone ran $11.00. Want to keep your young friend fed, when he, like others, tells you of the thin meals leaving him hungry all the time?  You need to send in money so he can buy Ramen from the jail commissary.  Want your partner to have soap or shampoo? The incarcerated have to pay for it, one way or another.

Dig a little deeper, and you find out one reason for all these cross-cutting costs:  the corporation that profits from commissary deposits (Access Corrections) provides the food services (Trinity) and care packages (Access Securepak): it’s a vertical monopoly.

Try to bypass all this and mail in a bra, as permitted by state law? Forget that:  it is returned to Amazon, rejected by jail authorities.

Deposit money in your young Black friend’s jail account and you think he will then get to buy Ramen or shampoo?  Don’t count on it, for if this teenager was sent to solitary for an unknown reason (as is often related to be the case), and has a charge from years ago,  that’s a lingering $25 charge, for each solitary trip, even if the charges are years old.  Puzzled by why so many incarcerated persons in the visiting room  have unkempt, wild hair?  Well, if your son needs a haircut and you have put money in his account, that’s a $10 charge.  He’d rather forego the haircut and spend the $10 on food, stamps or soap. Want the clothes, wallet and cell phone your daughter came into jail with mailed back to you? That’s a $20, $30, $40 charge. And so it goes.

Deposit $50 or $100 in their jail account, and your friend or loved one may not see a penny of it.

And hundreds of local residents linger for months and months in the jail, with 80% of them unconvicted.  Even if there are no fees or charges, many families don’t have the money to support and stay in contact with their loved ones.  This is a poor person’s, a debtors’ prison, particularly for Black and Latinx residents of the county.  Most inside are trapped by high bails, coming as they do from Binghamton, with a poverty rate (33%) much higher than New York City (20%).

Profiting from Hunger, Profiting from the Poor Incarcerated

But where does the money friends and family send in to jail accounts go?  It is hundreds of thousands of dollars every year. How much is charged in fees, and who uses the money? We don’t know. Some basic facts are emerging from documents gotten from Freedom of Information requests, leading to yet more questions about the jail’s finances and the lack of local and state oversight.

The State Commission of Corrections mandates that jail and prison commissaries must be organized to produce “a modest return above costs.”  This doesn’t seem to apply to the Broome County Jail. The prices the Sherriff pays for goods are hidden, but surely must be bulk rates from what little we can find out. Compare jail prices to similar food and hygiene purchases at the local Walmart/Sams Club, where the profit rate is 2.1% on sales, and what does one find?

The jail’s profit ranges from 230% for a Bible to 560% for Ramen to 600% for a towel

And what was the” modest profit” produced? It’s hard to tell: we need more information on kick-backs from contracts and overall profits.  But records obtained in response to a freedom of information act request on profits show disbursements from commissary of over $102,000, on sales of $318,000.

If Sheriff Harder was Sam Walton, this $100,000+ would be reduced to less than $7,000.

Has the Sheriff not read state laws and regulations?

Such vampire profits contravene state law. The State Commission of Corrections sets clear regulations for county jails, including the provision of hygiene items, accounts for the incarcerated, and the handling of commissary sales and profits.  It is hard to see how Broome County follows them.

Consider the following, starting with commissary regulation 9 CRR-NY 7016.1.  The state is clear, “The prices of any items offered for sale shall be set by the sheriff… and will provide a modest return above costs.” So why are prices 2, 3, 4 times higher than costs, and profits so massively excessive?

Where do the profits go?  The state is clear here too: “Profits resulting from commissary sales shall be… utilized only for purposes of prisoner welfare and rehabilitation” (emphasis added).  That sounds good. But are they? Where did the profits from selling over $45,000 of cheap Ramen go? Were they spent on education materials?  Job training? Books?

It is hard to tell. But here are a few of the items that the Sheriff reported being spent from commissary funds last year, (taken from a Freedom of Information request):

Three garden tractors                            $ 9,357
Indigent hygiene, intro packs          $ 24,000
Agway lawn & garden supplies:        $ 2,238
Flares                                                               $ 2,523
Haircuts                                                         $ 1,800
Copier lease:                                                   $ 960
Tires and parts for a trailer                    $ 700

Garden tractors and lawn supplies as meeting welfare needs of the incarcerated?  There is no food garden, although one could be used.  Flares to light the way to further rehabilitation? Copier leases provide for the incarcerateds’ welfare support, when persons inside already pay 25 to 50 cents per copy in the law library? And $24,000 for hygiene/indigent packs given to people when they are processed into the jail? Is it possible? Has anyone read state regulations 9 CRR-NY 7005.6NY-CRR and 9 CRR-NY 7005.4 that require the facility to provide  food, hygiene, and indigent haircuts at facility expense?

It gets worse.  This year the jail withdrew from commissary, for reasons that local citizens and even legislators cannot discern, the ability to buy from the commissary clean underwear, bras, and thermal shirts (necessary in the underheated cells of the jail where the use of blankets is banned during the day)–and this even though the most recent commissary list provided by the county shows them on sale.

Persons working in laundry confirm that underwear is old, stained by body fluids, and not adequately cleaned.  Bras, laundry workers have stated, are so old, torn, and dirty that they are almost unrecognizable as they go through the wash.  State regulation 9 CRR-NY 7005.7 clearly states that bras are permitted to be sent to women from outside vendors. But when even this was attempted from Amazon, an approved outside vendor, the jail refused delivery.

These miserable situations have been reported to the county executive and local legislators to no avail.

Who will enforce state rules and a common sense of decency for women and men in the jail?

What happened to the County Auditor?

It isn’t the county, which says it is fully aware of state regulations.  State regulations require regular audits of the jail.  And year after recent year the Broome County Department of Audit and Control, headed by Comptroller Alex J. McLaughlin and the Chairman of the Legislature, has dutifully fulfilled this responsibility to ascertain, in their own words, “whether commissary funds are being used and accounted for properly in accordance with State Corrections Law.” The findings?  “Based on the results of our examination, it is our opinion that the Sheriff’s Office is in compliance with State Law regarding the commissary fund.”  Is there something missing in the jail records and accounts that might sustain such a conclusion?

Ask the County and the Attorney General

It is time to ask county and state authorities, including the New York State Office of the Attorney General which oversees jail operations, and the State Comptroller which oversees contracts, to investigate–and ensure the county and Sheriff follow state law, if not common standards of humane treatment for those suffering in the jail.  There are too many anomalies, too many accounting irregularities.  We need to know:

• Why are jail prices for commissary items so high, and profits so excessive?
• Why are profits not spent on “rehabilitation and welfare” as required by state law?
• Why does the jail not provide basic food and hygiene needs as required in state law?
• Why have annual audits by the county not enforced state laws?
• Where does the money sent to inmate accounts go? How much is charged in unaccounted fees?
• What is the return on jail contracts for food, telephone, and commissary purchases—and why aren’t contracts posted on the county purchasing website like other contracts?

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Note:  this post will be updated and corrected as as more information arrives, particularly regarding county jail profits and contracts with private firms operating in the jail.

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).

[4] Authors Redacted, 18.

[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.