JUST Talk

Commentaries on Local Justice by Bill Martin

Tag: jail visitation

Fully open county jails to visitation

December 11, 2022 / / 0 Comments

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.

Where’s the Sheriff? In Contempt of the Supreme Court

October 31, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Binghamton Bridge
October 31, 2022
By Bill Martin

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.

***

All court documents may be found at https://bit.ly/3fdmQET.

Further information and media coverage can be found the JUST website (www.justicest.com ), Facebook page, and Instagram pages. A report by WIVT is here and WSKG here.

Broome County Jail’s Secret $ millions:  profiting from COVID and incarcerated families

June 3, 2022 / / 2 Comments

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 $
2019303,722690,360
2020309,779704,129
2021528,9001,202,190

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.

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