JUST Talk

Commentaries on Local Justice by Bill Martin

Tag: covid-19

COVID Denialism and Media Complicity

April 21, 2020 / / 1 Comment
April 12th: Sheriff deputies practicing social distancing with PPE while attempting to shut down a public protest over COVID-19 in the jail

Why is it so hard to get basic facts about the extent of COVID-19 infections and their spread in Broome County? Weeks and weeks of protests and public pressure have finally produced a few details and the naming, reluctantly, of a few local hotspots. Prime among these is the jail, as predicted for months by local community organizations and activists. But what is being done? To listen or watch most local media reports we hear only the official line: don’t worry, be happy, all is good!

The local NPR station WSKG has written and broadcast successive defenses of the Sheriff and the jail (e.g. by Natalie Abruzzo here) as has Channel 12 WBNG (e.g. here). Not to be outdone, today the Binghamton Press and Sun-Bulletin published an article by Anthony Borrelli on the front page of the paper.  It is as fine a defense as one might imagine of the wonderous work done by the county to make the jail, in the Sheriff’s words, the “safest place“ in the county. (One does wonder how it could be so, given the reportedly 22 COVID-19 cases and the many more–numbers unknown–waiting to be tested if the county ever gets an adequate number of tests.)

The article is a clear counter to the New York Post piece from last week which cited the incarcerated at some length about the spread of infection and the lack of safety in the jail.  Of course no person inside was apparently interviewed by Borelli (or WSKG and others), no criticism or critic referenced (JUST’s website and social media list many quotes from persons inside on the coronavirus threat), no physical layout of the jail noted or observed, no oversight body contacted. 

Incarcerated: “Social distancing? our beds are 18″ apart!”

Well, the last is understandable since there is no real oversight, neither by the state nor local authorities like the Broome County Health Department even though the jail is now the prime incubator and spreader of COVID-19 locally. Denialism today has a history: for years the county has has turned a blind eye to medical malfeasance and excessive deaths, even as the county and jail have been steadily losing wrongful death and abuse lawsuits.

All these claims can be denied now as in the past. For as reported by Borelli,

“Harder, on Monday, said the inmates’ claims were false.”

 That’s all the public needs to know. 

This follows the media’s earlier felicitous reporting of the Sheriff’s words that:

“Medically everything is going well, there’s been no infection whatsoever.” (March 24)

and

“[Inmates] are safer inside our facility. They aren’t out in the general public where the disease is prevalent” (March 26)

What do we do now? Even the county has to acknowledge the widespread spread of coronavirus in the jail, while over 300 people move into and out of the building every day. Perhaps someone might ask the County Executive a few pointed questions at his next, closed to the public, press conference? Or really listen to those inside and their families, and investigate in some detail? Denialism now as in the past comes with deadly consequences.

April 14 protest: Who has masks on? Who is practicing distancing?

Denialism: Infecting First Responders

April 6, 2020 / / 0 Comments

Broome County Sheriff David Harder repeatedly tells the media there is no safer place to be than in his jail.  How safe? Flouting COVID-19 state regulations, he puts his own officers and recruits in deadly danger.

We now hear directly from inside that at least two officers have tested positive for COVID-19. At least 9 persons have been pulled from their general population cells, ill and coughing, and been sent to “medical.”  And this from only one of many pods.

No county official will confirm or deny these reports.  How many persons, staff and incarcerated, have been tested, tested positive, and put in quarantine inside the jail itself? We don’t know. The Sheriff, the County Executive, and the Director of the County Health Department refuse to tell us.  Other counties, cities, the state, and the federal government provide answers to these questions, but not local officials.

Denialism has its costs: you don’t protect persons inside, the virus incubates in crowded cells and dormitories and then spreads out into the community as scores of people move in and out of the jail daily, to and from work, to and from court, and through daily releases.  Indeed one of the infected COs was reportedly a transport officer.

Denialism puts everyone in danger.  Our schools, universities, and playgrounds have been shut down; we must all wash our hands, sanitize, keep our social distance.  If you don’t believe the virus is a threat, you don’t do these things.  And so our Sheriff in the last two weeks continues to train future officers from across the region in closed rank files, with no protection equipment, on the jail grounds, on public playgrounds nearby.  Clusters of persons continue to hang out in his parking lot. Here is the evidence in living color:

The rules don’t apply to the Sheriff.  He gets a waiver to putting his people in danger.

This is denied of course. Listen to Broome County Executive Jason Garner at this past Friday’s press conference (April 3, 2020), held in the Sheriff’s building itself:

The Sheriff’s office and Broome Security are going to be stepping up their enforcement of emergency orders… You can’t be on playgrounds, athletic fields. There are no gatherings allowed of any size. These are state emergency orders. They are going to be enforced… We will do anything we can to enforce them. Anything.  Because it is a matter of saving lives.”

Indeed: it is a matter of saving lives, and local denialists are putting us all in danger.

Open letter to BC Health and Emergency Services: Who is infected?

April 1, 2020 / / 0 Comments

April 1, 2020

Broome County Emergency Services Director Michael A. Ponticiello michael.ponticiello@broomecounty.us

Broome County Health Department Director Rebecca KaufmanBCHealth@broomecounty.us

Dear Directors Ponticiello and Kaufman,

I write to request that you track and inform persons, including myself, who have been in close spaces within the Broome County jail over the last month and who may have come into contact with confirmed COVID-19 cases there.

I make this request after reading local press reports yesterday (March 31, 2020) that quote the Sheriff saying that the correctional officer who has been confirmed as a COVID-19 victim fell ill “two to three” weeks ago. Given that presymptomatic transmission of the virus is known to occur widely, and the CDC estimates an incubation period from 2-14 days, the correctional officer may have been transmitting the virus up to 35 days ago (three weeks plus 14 days), i.e. potentially February 26th.  This person may not be the only case as well.

For those living and working inside the facility this is of course of grave concern. I assume persons working in proximity to the officer have been contacted by county officials. This cannot be left to the jail administration, who have failed to provide sanitizer even now (one person inside told me yesterday that sanitizer bottles were in the pods but were all empty and “never refilled”) and who as recently as March 20th were training recruits with no PPE or social distancing practices followed.

It is however those who visited the facility, and who might be missed that concern me.  I along with scores of others visited persons through March 20th/23rd in a visiting room with often 30 to 35 persons and a changing group of 4 correctional officers in very close proximity.  All of these persons may be at special risk, and can be easily notified that they were exposed so they can self-isolate as needed: with few exceptions the personal data of every person entering the visiting room was entered into a data base.

I thus request that I and others who may have come into contact with the infected officer(s) be notified so we may take appropriate protection.  We do not of course need to know the identity of confirmed cases.

Sincerely,

William G Martin

Professor

Virus Denialism in NYS

March 28, 2020 / / 0 Comments
JUST Car Rally Protest March 26 2020

US Attorney General Barr: Prisons = “petri dishes” for the virus, releases at risk prisoners

NY Governor Cuomo: Silence

NY Attorney General James: Silence

Broome County Executive Jason Garnar: Never!

Broome County Sheriff Harder: Got virus? Jails are the safest place!

We’ve been down this road before. Amidst an explosion of AIDS deaths we had a president who could not say the word “HIV”. When the opioid crisis hit, it took local Truth Pharm activists months and months to get county officials to recognize we had an opioid crisis, and then many more months to force the county government to record and release the number of deaths locally.

History repeats itself with the coronavirus. As reports around only the second death in the county reveal, the county government can’t seem to track the number of persons with covid-19, tell families of a death, or follow up and track those in contact with the person that died. Writing on county facebook pages, local residents are puzzled why so little information, by comparison to other counties and even the federal government, is forthcoming. What is there to hide?

And the deaths are coming. As JUST and other activists have continuously warned, the virus will predictably blow through the unclean and overcrowded dorms, double-bunked closed cells, and kitchen of the jail, felling the incarcerated and their keepers alike.

The county response? Worse than denialism. While even Trump’s Attorney General begins to release at least some at-risk prisoners, Broome County Executive Jason Garnar says never. Broome County’s Sheriff Harder is even more brazen: jail is the safest place to be if you have the virus. As before, it is more than denialism: it’s a death sentence for those inside and outside the jail.

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Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier is running a social media campaign to force elected officials, the District Attorney, and local judges to release as many persons as soon as possible–and provide the resources for them to self-isolate in the community.  Link to the campaign here, #FreeBCJ and #Letthemgo. And for more news, head to the JUST webpage.

Coronavirus: Closing out the BC Jail

March 12, 2020 / / 0 Comments

Where’s the Sanitizer?

Go to visit someone in the Broome County jail and you confront a large sanitizing station right before you enter the metal detector. It makes sense: trying to control the flow of illnesses into and out of crowded public institutions is basic preventative medicine. The only problem? Watch: persons headed inside place their hands under a spout–and nothing happens. They shake the spout and it rocks loosely. The sanitizer has been dry, unplugged, and empty for as long any visitors can remember. It’s the state of care and preparation for a flu pandemic in the Broome County jail, as in many upstate areas.  Even the most basic healthy practices are impossible in the jail.

Start with sanitizer inside: guards and the incarcerated have no access to any in the pods where up to 60 persons are housed together. The guard sits at a station without sanitizer.  Guards do have it in their separate bathrooms and in the visiting room, and it exists in the medical pod for staff use. Everywhere else, everyone remains unprotected. Persons incarcerated ten years ago recall that sanitizer was then widely available. Where did it go, and why?

[Update: the day after this post was published online, sanitizer appeared in the visitors’ waiting room. There is still none in the pods where people live and work.]

And soap to wash your hands? Incarcerated persons are given one “indigent hygiene pack” that supplies one 4 oz bottle of liquid soap a week—imagine trying to shower, wash your face, and have any left over for daily hand washings? Impossible. And social distancing? Well, try to avoid other persons when you are in a double occupancy cell (even as there are empty pods and cells). Cover your mouth when you sneeze with a tissue—when there are no tissues to be had? What do you do if you are shackled or handcuffed?

And food and nutrition? Coerced and incarcerated kitchen workers report that for years food has been prepared for both the incarcerated and guards without the private food contractor enforcing basic sanitary regulations.  Little hand washing is said to ever take place in the kitchen, shared dishes and utensils are not sanitized properly in dishwashers, food trays are moldy, meals are served with live insects, and food, staff, and the incarcerated travel everywhere. This not news: the current private food provider has a terrible record as community organizations long ago told the County Executive and legislature. Persons boarded in from surrounding counties are shocked at the quantity and quality of the food. Sick and healthy persons mingle constantly, without care or concern.

These are signs of a broken system that has long been brought to county and state officials’ attention. Public protests at the jail and at county legislative meetings have been constant. Statistics and news reports show excessive death rates, medical shortcomings, and financial malfeasance. Families have filed wrongful death lawsuits with growing numbers and success as in the cases brought by the families of Alvin Rios, Salladin Barton, Rob Card, and now Thomas Husar.

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What is to be done?

The arrival of the coronavirus in our jail threatens not only those in the jail but those in the surrounding community, as we know all too well from brutal and diffusing infection rates China’s prisons, the release of prisoners in Iran to avoid further infections, and ongoing prison revolts and family protests in Italy due to overcrowded conditions and the termination of visiting rights.

What should we do? We can

  1. Improve medical and health care inside immediately
  2. Reduce the numbers in the jail substantially
  3. Fire jail administrators and begin a transition to end the mass incarceration system in the county

1. Improve conditions immediately: for those inside, providing sanitizer, soap and better food (and finally some fruit, any fruit) will help. So too would opening access to worried family and friends, many of whom cannot visit due to work or distance from Binghamton. The county might finally consider having weekend visiting hours. It might open up use of unused, non-contact visiting rooms that allow separation between people. The county should also stop making gross profits from phone calls, and immediately lower prices and allow free calls for indigent persons in need.

2. Reduce the number at risk: short-term measures will not prevent the pandemic from sweeping through the jail and into the community. This calls for more direct action. County jails like Broome’s have tens of thousands of persons who cycle in and out, on short stays, over the course of year.

Locking the jail down is no solution. Family visitors will rightly panic over the fate of loved ones. And that will not stop movement into and out of the community: hundreds of lawyers, service workers, guards and even judges move in and out every day, not to mention persons going back and forth to court every day. And those released are coming home every day.

The most critical action is to reduce the number vulnerable to the virus in the jail and thus reduce the coming demand for complex medical care in the jail and in the community.

 How? We should dramatically reduce the number of persons by these actions:

  • Release all persons with low-level offenses by following the new bail law, reclassifying misdemeanor offences into non-jailable offenses, and using citations for low-level crimes. Can we not accelerate these measures, as has begun with the new bail law, whose implementation matches falling crime rates?
  • Release all pregnant women to community care, particularly those with disabilities and substance use disorders. Do we really think incarcerating pregnant women for minor offenses is in the service of public safety?
  • Release as many as possible elderly, disabled, and medically fragile persons.  Given data on death rates by age and health condition, should elderly and ill persons be left so vulnerable in closed institutions?
  • Release persons with substance use disorders into community-based care. Is the jail really a medical center for treating diseases?
  • Release those committed to jail for technical parole and probation violations. Does it really make sense to send my neighbor’s kid to a long-term stay in the jail for smoking weed?
  • Reduce unnecessary parole and probation hearings. Do we really want many of our poorest and often sick residents travelling by hours on public transport, congregating in large waiting rooms, and talking to officers—all for brief meetings?
  • Stop the jail from being a dumping ground for persons sent from all over the region on behalf of homeland security, ICE, and federal agencies. Does the county really need the profits from boarding in persons for federal agencies?

There is a cost with these measures: letting persons come home and isolate outside the jail would surely require expanded reentry help, most immediately housing and medical care. Community-based agencies to handle medical care and reentry services, if funded, exist. Housing presents a real  challenge, requiring state and county funds to repurpose empty hotels, dorms, and apartment buildings. Whatever the costs of a long-term transition to community treatment and assistance, they would surely be less than forcibly isolating ill persons in group settings and denying them basic medical care.

3. Any long-term, substantive improvement in medical care would begin with the termination and replacement of the private, out-of-state contractor with a new public health and food service.  And no change will occur unless Sheriff Harder, who has constructed and run the jail for over 20 years, and in a recent court ruling was deemed directly and personally responsible for an inmate’s unnecessary death, is replaced.

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What we need: oversight and an end to the jail as we know it

The dilemmas we face are not by chance: Broome County, like upstate counties, is ill-prepared by design. Previous pandemics in jails and prisons have been studied, and national plans to address them have been developed by the CDC and researchers at the Bureau of Justice among others.

You will not however readily find any consideration of these in county emergency operations plans which by law are forwarded every year to the Governor. Unlike other counties, Broome does not even have plans on its website.  Where such plans exist, as on Monroe or Sullivan county websites, they are not reassuring: the separate sections dealing with pandemics rarely if ever consider the needs of institutionalized populations. There is little mention of nursing homes and none regarding jails. Worse, the Broome County Health division tasked with the surveillance and prevention of communicable diseases has seen its staff cut by 20% and its funding by nearly 30% in the last 10 years.

These are the results of savaging the public health system and cutting health budgets in order to fund the expansion of jail, police, and district attorney budgets. The results are in hand: Broome County ranks 57th in health outcomes among the state’s 62 counties, with the jail severed from public health services, and protected from investigation by county officials.

There is an elemental truth here: our large jail system was built without any link to public health services, and lacks basic evidence-based health care and any effective oversight. For those incarcerated, their families and staff, managing COVID-19 under these conditions will be impossible. Now, not in some distant future, is the time to radically reduce the jail population, investigate current failures and abuses, and restructure the facility. The Governor and state legislators could begin this process by opening up an investigation of upstate jails as proposed in Assembly Bill 4373.

These times will test us: do we retreat into self-isolation and fear, or do we maintain a common humanity with those among us, especially with the poorest, the oldest, the ill?

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