If California’s senior senator and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee Diane Feinstein’s physical embrace, sans mask, of Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham and his handling of the Judge Amy Coney Barrett confirmation hearing are any indication of her position on court expansion, opponents have nothing to fear.
Over the course of her twenty-seven-year tenure in the Senate, Feinstein has emerged as one of the cagiest and stealthiest conservatives in Senate history. Elected by one of the most progressive states in the country, Feinstein wields her weight behind the scenes to thwart progressive initiates with remarkable regularity and little scrutiny.
Feinstein has traditionally preferred to work behind closed doors whenever possible. She’s a throwback to the days when deals that had significant public impact were made out of public view. Easier to get things done when the passengers are safely strapped to their seats.
It’s a pretty safe bet Feinstein didn’t heap lavish praise on Graham and then wrap her arms around him for good measure in front of the entire press corps without considering the implications. She was sending a message.
Feinstein has her eyes on the Judiciary Committee chair. If the Democrats take back the Senate, she is in line to get that post. Far from resigning, she is poised to ascend the ladder of power. As Judiciary Chairwoman, Feinstein would be in a prime position to influence judicial policy in a Democratic Senate and in a Biden White House.
Why break Senate tradition and pack the court when the Chairwoman can negotiate what’s best for the country in Senate Chambers? It’s far more civilized and efficient, right?
It’s important to bear in mind that if the Democrats gain control of both chambers of Congress and the White House, they will have a historic opportunity to effect fundamental change. But it’s likely to be a narrow window. The Senate strongly favors red states, both electorally and in terms of influence on policy. The odds are that Democratic control will be short-lived.
The opportunity to make a lasting impact may not be longer than two years. If the court is going to be righted, it’s going to have to happen quickly. If Feinstein and the Democrats decide to “work something out” instead if rolling up their sleeves and fixing the problem, the fate of the court will be sealed for a generation.
The Democrats would argue publicly that they want a court that sees constitutional law through the Ginsburg lens. But there are some Democrats in the Senate who don’t, and who, given the chance, would welcome the convenience of having a conservative court to blame the failure of progressive initiatives on.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
'It Needs to Stop': Whitmer Condemns Rhetoric at Trump Rally, Chants of 'Lock Her Up' Hannah Knowles, The Washington Post Knowles writes: "Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) on Saturday slammed President Trump's rally in her state where people chanted 'lock her up,' denouncing it as promoting 'exactly the rhetoric that has put me, my family and other government officials' lives in danger while we try to save the lives of our fellow Americans.'"
The chants — a familiar refrain deployed against political foes at Trump’s campaign events — came a little more than a week after authorities revealed a foiled plot to kidnap Whitmer, allegedly motivated in part by the belief that Michigan’s government was violating the Constitution with its coronavirus restrictions. Trump has repeatedly condemned Whitmer’s pandemic response as overly strict with calls to “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” and he reprised his criticisms at his Saturday campaign event in the swing state.
“You have got to get your governor to open up your state, okay?” he said to huge cheers at the rally in Muskegon, Mich. “And get your schools open.” The crowd began to chant for Whitmer’s imprisonment, and Trump shook his head at one point but did not tamp them down.
“Lock ’em all up,” he said, as the chants continued amid a sea of red hats.
Tori Saylor, deputy digital director for Whitmer, immediately criticized Trump’s behavior as dangerous.
“I see everything that is said about and to her online,” Saylor tweeted. “Every single time the President does this at a rally, the violent rhetoric towards her immediately escalates on social media. It has to stop. It just has to.”
Whitmer had the same message, tweeting Saturday evening: “It needs to stop.”
The alleged kidnapping plans detailed earlier this month fulfilled the worst fears of those who worried that the vitriol against Whitmer and her pandemic policies could escalate, while highlighting the threat of violence from extremist groups. According to the FBI, the plotters referred to Whitmer as a tyrant, experimented with explosives and discussed plans to storm the Michigan Capitol.
After the plot went public, Trump continued to condemn the Democratic governor, saying she has done a “terrible job.” Whitmer has defended her policies, saying she made “tough choices to keep our state safe.”
Trump seemed to reference the recent threat against the governor at one point Saturday, as he addressed supporters in Muskegon.
“And then I guess they said she was threatened, right?” Trump said. “And she blamed me! … And our people were the ones that worked with her people, so let’s see what happens. Let’s see what happens.”
He went on to say the FBI “has to start looking at antifa.”
Members of an extremist group that trained for an anti-government uprising called the “boogaloo” are implicated in the plot against Whitmer, according to authorities. People connected to the right-wing “boogaloo bois” movement have been charged with killing a security guard and plotting to use explosives amid protests in the summer.
But the president has continued to focus on left-wing groups and movements such as antifa.
Whitmer was not the only political rival that drew Trump’s ire Saturday. At the rally, he also repeatedly criticized Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), appearing to mispronounce her name. The moment came a day after Republican Sen. David Perdue (Ga.) was called out for mocking the first name of his Senate colleague and Democratic vice-presidential candidate Kamala D. Harris (Calif.).
Trump on Saturday claimed that Omar “doesn’t love our country too much, I don’t think.” He accused unspecified people of craving power and then said, “God help us if they ever did get it … you just have to look all over the world in different places.”
Omar is one of four liberal congresswomen of color whom Trump infamously told to “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” in comments many decried as racist. Omar became a U.S. citizen as a teenager, and the other three were born in the United States.
“When [Trump] tells four American Congresswomen to go back to their countries, he reaffirms his plan to ‘Make America Great Again’ has always been about making America white again,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) responded at the time on Twitter.
A drive-through voting station in Houston on Friday. Gov. Greg Abbott put in place a policy that limits each county in the state to a single drop box. (photo: Go Nakamura/NYT)
Federal Appeals Courts Emerge as Crucial for Trump in Voting Cases Jim Rutenberg and Rebecca R. Ruiz, The New York Times Excerpt: "This month, a federal judge struck down a decree from Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas limiting each county in the state to a single drop box to handle the surge in absentee ballots this election season, rejecting Mr. Abbott's argument that the limit was necessary to combat fraud."
Federal district courts have tended to rule for Democrats in litigation over how to run the election, but appeals courts, well stocked with the president’s nominees, are blocking them.
Days later, an appellate panel of three judges appointed by President Trump froze the lower court order, keeping Mr. Abbott’s new policy in place — meaning Harris County, with more than two million voters, and Wheeler County, with well under 4,000, would both be allowed only one drop box for voters who want to hand-deliver their absentee ballots and avoid reliance on the Postal Service.
The Texas case is one of at least eight major election disputes around the country in which Federal District Court judges sided with civil rights groups and Democrats in voting cases only to be stayed by the federal appeals courts, whose ranks Mr. Trump has done more to populate than any president in more than 40 years.
Harvey Hill's family: Mother Betty Hill and sisters Ella Anderson, Katrina Nettles and Cassandra Hill. They say the jail didn't disclose Hill's beating. (photo: Linda So/Reuters)
passing and jailed on suspicion of a misdemeanor offense that could bring a $500 fine.
TURNAROUND, TRAGEDY: Harvey Hill’s life was on track, his family said, before his trespassing arrest. REUTERS/Hill family handout
It was a death sentence.
The next day, May 6, 2018, Hill’s condition worsened. He flew into a rage at the Madison County Detention Center in Canton, Mississippi, throwing a checkerboard and striking a guard with a lunch tray.
Three guards tackled the 36-year-old, pepper sprayed him and kicked him repeatedly in the head. After handcuffing him, two guards slammed Hill into a concrete wall, previously unpublished jail surveillance video shows. They led him to a shower, away from the cameras, and beat him again, still handcuffed, a state investigation found. The guards said Hill was combative, exhibiting surprising strength that required force.
Video showed Hill writhing in pain in the infirmary, where he was assessed by a licensed practical nurse but not given medication. Mississippi law dictates that a doctor or higher credentialed nurse make decisions on medical interventions. But Hill was sent straight to an isolation cell, where a guard pinned him to the floor, removed his handcuffs, and left him lying on the cement. Hill crawled to the toilet. Then he stopped moving.
No one checked him for 46 minutes. When they did, he didn’t have a pulse. Within hours, he was dead. And he had a lot of company.
Hill’s is one of 7,571 inmate deaths Reuters documented in an unprecedented examination of mortality in more than 500 U.S. jails from 2008 to 2019. Death rates have soared in those lockups, rising 35% over the decade ending last year. Casualties like Hill are typical: held on minor charges and dying without ever getting their day in court. At least two-thirds of the dead inmates identified by Reuters, 4,998 people, were never convicted of the charges on which they were being held.
Unlike state and federal prisons, which hold people convicted of serious crimes, jails are locally run lockups meant to detain people awaiting arraignment or trial, or those serving short sentences. The toll of jail inmates who die without a case resolution subverts a fundamental tenet of the U.S. criminal justice system: innocent until proven guilty.
“A lot of people are dying and they've never been sentenced, and that's obviously a huge problem,” said Nils Melzer, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture and other inhuman punishment, after reviewing the Reuters findings. “You have to provide due process in all of these cases, you have to provide humane detention conditions in all of these cases and you have to provide medical care in all of these cases.”
The U.S. Constitution grants inmates core rights, but those provisions are hard to enforce. The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees fair treatment to pre-trial detainees, but “fair” is open to interpretation by judges and juries. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel punishment forbids “deliberate indifference to serious medical needs of prisoners,” but proving deliberate negligence is difficult. The Sixth Amendment assures speedy trials, but does not define speedy.
The Reuters analysis revealed a confluence of factors that can turn short jail stays into death sentences. Many jails are not subject to any enforceable standards for their operation or the healthcare they provide. They typically get little if any oversight. And bail requirements trap poorer inmates in pre-trial detention for long periods. Meanwhile, inmate populations have grown sicker, more damaged by mental illness and plagued by addictions.
The 7,571 deaths identified by Reuters reflect those stresses. Most succumbed to illness, sometimes wanting for quality healthcare. More than 2,000 took their own lives amid mental breakdowns, including some 1,500 awaiting trial or indictment. A growing number – more than 1 in 10 last year – died from the acute effects of drugs and alcohol. Nearly 300 died after languishing behind bars, unconvicted, for a year or more.
As with much of the U.S. criminal justice system, the toll behind bars falls disproportionately on Black Americans, such as Hill. White inmates accounted for roughly half the fatalities. African Americans accounted for at least 28%, more than twice their share of the U.S. population, a disparity on par with the high incarceration rate of Blacks. Reuters was not able to identify the race of 9% of inmates who died.
Jail deaths typically draw attention locally but escape scrutiny from outside authorities, a gap in oversight that points to a national problem: America’s system for counting and monitoring jail deaths is broken.
A broken system of federal oversight
America’s 3,000-plus jails are typically run by county sheriffs or local police. They often are under-equipped and understaffed, starved for funds by local officials who see them as budgetary burdens. A rising share have contracted their healthcare to private companies.
Yet there are no enforceable national standards to ensure jails meet constitutional requirements for inmate health and safety. Only 28 states have adopted their own standards to fill the gap. And much of the oversight that does exist is limited by a curtain of secrecy.
The Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics has collected inmate mortality data for two decades – but statistics for individual jails are withheld from the public, government officials and oversight agencies under a 1984 law limiting the release of BJS data. Agency officials say that discretion is critical because it encourages sheriffs and police to report their deaths data each year.
The secrecy has a cost: Local policy makers can’t learn if their jails’ death rates are higher than those in similar communities. Groups that advocate for inmates’ rights can’t get jail-by-jail mortality data to support court cases. The Justice Department’s own lawyers, charged with taking legal action when corrections facilities violate constitutional standards, can’t readily identify jails where high death counts warrant federal investigation.
“If there’s a high death rate, that means there’s a problem,” said Julie Abbate, former deputy chief of the Justice Department’s Special Litigation Section, which enforces civil rights in jails. Publicizing those rates “would make it a lot harder to hide a bad jail.”
The Justice Department does issue broad statistical reports on statewide or national trends. But even those fatality numbers don’t always tell the full story.
Some jails fail to inform BJS of deaths. Some report them inaccurately, listing homicides or suicides as accidents or illnesses, Reuters found. Justice Department consultant Steve Martin, who has inspected more than 500 U.S. prisons and jails, said that in all the cases he's investigated, he recalls only one homicide being reported accurately. The others were categorized as “medical, respiratory failure, or whatever,” he said.
Other jails find other ways to keep deaths off the books, such as “releasing” inmates who have been hospitalized in grave condition, perhaps from a suicide attempt or a medical crisis, so they’re not on the jail’s roster when they die. Sheriffs sometimes characterize these as “compassionate releases” that allow inmates’ families a chance to spend their final hours together without law enforcement supervision.
In all, Reuters identified at least 59 cases across 39 jails in which inmate deaths were not reported to government agencies or included in tallies provided to the news organization.
The Justice Department has grown more secretive about the fatality data under the Trump administration. While BJS never has released jail-by-jail mortality figures, it traditionally has published aggregated statistics every two years or so. The 2016 report wasn't issued until this year.
And, a Justice spokesman said, there are “no plans” to issue any future reports containing even aggregated data on inmate deaths in jails or prisons.
The report delays are “an outrage,” said Representative Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat who co-authored the original reporting law in 2000 with a Republican colleague. Scott said secrecy was never the goal. He co-authored a 2014 update, which restricts federal grant money when jails don’t report deaths and shifts data collection to a different Justice Department agency that would not be restricted from releasing jail-by-jail data. The updated law has yet to be implemented.
“The whole point,” Scott said, “is we suspect a lot of the deaths are preventable with certain protocols – better suicide protocols, better healthcare, better guard-to-prisoner ratios. You’ve got to have information at the jail level. You have no way of really targeting corrective action if you don’t.”
Because the government won’t release jail-by-jail death data, Reuters compiled its own. The news organization tracked jail deaths over the dozen years from 2008 to 2019 to create the largest such database outside of the Justice Department. Reporters filed more than 1,500 records requests to obtain information about deaths in 523 U.S. jails – every jail with an average population of 750 or more inmates, and the 10 largest jails or jail systems in nearly every state. Together, those jails hold an average of some 450,000 inmates a day, or about three out of every five nationwide.
One finding: Since the last Justice Department report, for 2016, the death rate in big jails has continued to climb, leaving it up 8% in 2019, the highest point in the 12-year period of 2008-2019 examined by Reuters. In that time, the suicide rate declined as many facilities launched suicide awareness and response initiatives. But the death rate from drug and alcohol overdoses rose about 72% amid the opioid epidemic.
The data also reveals scores of big jails with high death tolls, including two dozen with death rates double the national average.
Such data “would have actually been very helpful for enforcement purposes,” said Jonathan Smith, who ran the Justice Department’s Special Litigation Section from 2010 to 2015.
Rare scrutiny, reform
Detailed insight into jail deaths can save lives.
In 2016, the Justice Department began investigating the Hampton Roads Regional Jail in Portsmouth, Virginia, after state Attorney General Mark Herring and local civil rights groups called for a probe following several inmate deaths. Reuters found the jail, which serves five jurisdictions, averaged 3.5 deaths per thousand inmates over the years 2009 to 2019, more than double the national average of 1.5 deaths.
In December 2018, the Justice Department said the 900-bed jail violated inmates’ rights by failing to provide adequate medical and mental healthcare. The regional authority that manages the jail agreed to a “consent decree,” enforced by a federal judge, to ensure improved treatment of prisoners.
Inmate deaths dropped after the agreement, which required increased staffing, better training and enhanced medical services. The jail reported two fatalities in 2019 and one through this May, down from an average of five a year in the prior four years.
That was one of the Justice Department’s last jail investigations. From 2008 to 2018, the department opened 19 investigations into jails, three during President Trump’s tenure.
Yet since 2018, it hasn’t opened any. A memo circulated in November 2018 by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions put hurdles in the way of entering consent decrees for overhauling jails. In a telephone interview, Sessions told Reuters the policy he set forth adhered to Supreme Court standards on when consent decrees could be entered, allowing them when “appropriate” and “justified.”
In the absence of federal oversight, states have a patchwork of guidelines.
Seventeen states have no rules or oversight mechanisms for local jails, according to Reuters research and a pending study by Michele Deitch, a corrections specialist at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. In five other low-population states, all detention facilities are run by state corrections agencies. The other 28 have some form of standards, such as assessing inmates’ health on arrival or checking on suicidal inmates at prescribed intervals. Yet those standards often are minimal, and in at least six of the states, the agencies that write them lack enforcement power or the authority to refer substandard jails for investigation.
Deitch said these gaps make comprehensive nationwide statistics all the more important. “You can’t have good policy without good data,” she said. “Data tells us what is going right and what’s going wrong.”
The Fossil
Without jail-by-jail mortality data, even jails with extraordinary death rates can escape official intervention for years, and local officials can remain blind to the seriousness of problems their facilities face. One example is the Marion County Jail in Indiana, a decrepit 65-year-old facility nicknamed “The Fossil” within the sheriff’s department.
Overfilled and understaffed, the Marion County jail had at least 45 deaths from 2009-2019. Yet local officials rejected pleas from two consecutive sheriffs for additional funding to bolster staffing and build a new facility.
Reuters found that the jail is among the two dozen with an average death rate, 3.5 deaths per 1,000 inmates, at least double the national average from 2009 to 2019. And its record was troubling on one of the most challenging problems plaguing jails: suicide, which accounted for more than a quarter of all U.S. jail deaths.
Thomas Shane Miles, a married father of two, struggled for years with mental illness and opioid addiction when he was arrested in 2016 on a misdemeanor drug possession warrant. On his second day in jail, he flung himself down a stairway and swallowed the contents of a chemical ice pack.
Put on suicide watch, Miles was given a “suicide smock” – a heavy hospital-style gown closed with Velcro – and placed in a monitored cell. The jail’s policies, as well as American Bar Association guidelines, dictate that suicidal inmates be monitored continuously.
On Day 6, Miles was given a jail uniform for a hearing and escorted down an underground hallway to a holding cell below the adjacent court building – a cell with no video monitor or clear sightlines for deputies. Left alone, he tore a strip of cloth from the collar, looped it over a door hinge and hung himself. He was found unconscious 30 minutes after entering the cell. An internal inquiry said the supervising officer logged his rounds after the fact, leaving it unclear when Miles was checked.
In a wrongful death suit that settled this September, Miles’ family argued that despite being identified as a suicide risk, he was given the means and opportunity to kill himself. The sheriff’s office denied misconduct and said it admitted no wrongdoing in the settlement; details were not disclosed.
Miles’ suicide was the jail's seventh in just under 15 months. The Fossil’s suicide rate ranked it among the top 20 jails in the Reuters study.
In 2016, the sheriff called the suicide problem an “epidemic,” but county officials denied requests for more funding. While the county knew it had a suicide problem, there was no way to know how it compared. Like all other officials, Marion County’s leaders had no access to the Justice Department figures.
The sheriff’s jail-management mission often “came in second” in a budget system that pits it against the Indianapolis police department’s law enforcement duties, said Frank Mascari, who sits on the City-County Council. “We knew there were some deaths” at the jail, he said, “but we didn’t have the statistics” to know the rates were extraordinary.
From 2015 to 2017, the sheriff’s budget grew just over 1% a year, audit figures show. The inmate population rose 12% in that time, due to a rise in arrests and to state legislation dictating that some low-level felons serve their sentences in county jails, not state prisons.
The sheriff launched suicide-prevention efforts, hired social workers and trained deputies in spotting suicide warnings. From 2017 to 2019, the number of suicides dropped to two a year, but staffing remained critically low as deputies routinely left for better paying jail jobs in nearby suburbs.
Jail deaths remained stubbornly high despite the decline in suicides, reaching six last year, the heaviest toll in more than a decade, driven in part by drug and alcohol overdoses. Still, there has been no state or federal intervention.
In July 2018, Kyra Warner, 30, went quiet about 90 minutes after arriving at the jail. As her limbs twitched, cellmates called for help, telling nurses and deputies that Warner said she had been using methamphetamine and anti-anxiety drug Xanax.
Jail video shows Warner unable to walk on her own as deputies moved her to a monitored isolation cell, where they left her on the floor, still twitching. She lay unresponsive as they checked her periodically over two hours – until medical staff found no pulse. She died of an accidental overdose.
“The officers that are watching aren’t medically trained,” said Rich Waples, a lawyer handling the family’s ongoing wrongful death lawsuit against the sheriff and Wellpath, the company providing the jail’s healthcare. “If she’d gotten prompt care, they could have reversed the effects of those drugs.”
Jail officials denied wrongdoing and noted in their response to the suit that deputies checked on Warner numerous times, but added they are not medical professionals. Wellpath, also contesting the ongoing suit, denied any misconduct.
“We’re not built to be the largest mental health hospital in the state,” said Colonel James Martin, who oversees the jail. “We’re not built to be the largest detox facility in the state.” Yet the jail has “more detox beds than any single hospital in the state.”
The jail’s shortcomings have been documented, including a county-commissioned review in 2016 that found the Fossil “antiquated,” with inadequate staffing and design flaws that severely hamper inmate monitoring. In 2018, after another independent study highlighted the jail’s challenges, the county approved a new $580 million criminal justice complex, with dedicated facilities to treat mental illness and substance abuse. In 2022, the Fossil will be history.
Another flaw in the U.S. system for monitoring jail fatalities is misleading disclosure. The John E. Polk Correctional Facility in Florida's Seminole County reported one death to the Justice Department in 2019. But at least one other death at the jail was not reported in its official filings.
On June 2, 2019, Thomas Harry Brill, 56, was found hanging by a bed sheet in his cell. Staff tried but failed to resuscitate him, the jail said. He was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital. Sheriff’s spokeswoman Kim Cannaday said he “was released out of our custody” before he died. “Therefore, it would not technically be considered an in-custody death.”
Brill’s sister, Tracy, was shocked to learn his death was excluded from the jail’s official count. “They’re trying to avoid responsibility,” she told Reuters. “They’re playing with the numbers. That’s just wrong.”
Brill graduated from Eastern Michigan University with a mathematics degree and lived on a sailboat for years, she said. He had been wrestling with mental illness when he flew from his home in San Diego to look at a boat in Florida. Out of money, he was found in a stolen car and arrested, but couldn’t afford bail. He died unconvicted of the charge. “He needed $500 to get out,” she said. “It was an awful, ridiculous waste that he died.”
A death in Mississippi
The Reuters death database also points to another benefit of collecting and publishing jail mortality rates: It can identify an unusual number of fatalities at jails that typically have few. One is Mississippi’s Madison County Detention Center, where Harvey Hill died after being beaten by guards.
The jail had occasional deaths, and in several years reported none. Yet in 2018, it had two deaths, including an inmate who died of complications from an ectopic pregnancy. Few other jails its size had multiple deaths that year.
Hill grew up in the poorest county in the poorest state in America. West, his town of 185 people, is intersected by a four-lane highway in Mississippi’s rural Holmes County. He did landscaping work an hour’s drive south in Canton, a city of 13,000 in the state’s wealthiest county, where 19th Century antebellum shophouses packed with antiques line a postcard-perfect downtown square.
When he was 18, Hill was arrested on charges of sexual battery and robbery. He pleaded guilty and served 14 years in prison. Friends and family say he began piecing together his life after his 2015 release, taking landscaping jobs with business owner Finnegan. “He was an incredible worker,” said Finnegan.
Through the winter of 2017 into the spring, Hill showed signs of mental illness, displayed flashes of paranoia and complained of insomnia, said Finnegan. After he let him go in 2018, Hill started showing up at his home, claiming his old boss owed him millions of dollars. “Harvey, if I had taken your millions, I wouldn’t be landscaping. I would be on an island,” Finnegan recounts telling him.
Hill kept returning. In May 2018, Finnegan called the Madison Police Department. If he wanted Hill removed, he had to press charges, Finnegan said he was told, so he did. “That’s not something I really wanted to do,” he said. “Harvey needed to be in a mental hospital.”
At the station, Finnegan told the officer he’d drop the charges and take Hill to a mental health facility if they could find a room. Instead Hill was booked into Madison County’s jail that Friday morning. “I’ll pick you up on Monday,” said Finnegan. “And we’ll get you some help.”
The Madison Police Department said there were “no remarkable or extraordinary events related to his arrest.” Mississippi has no standards or oversight for jails.
In their response to a family lawsuit, the guards said their actions were proper under jail policy. Michael Wolf, an attorney for one of the guards, James Ingram, told Reuters that Hill bit and then tried to head butt an officer, “and continued to resist and exhibited unusual strength. The control techniques were consistent with the County use of force continuum.” The other guard named in litigation, James Buford, declined to comment.
The family believes the force was unjustified. “Harvey Hill was in handcuffs and beaten to death,” said Derek Sells, a lawyer representing the family. “Someone needs to be held responsible.”
Hill’s death was one of four Reuters identified at the jail over the 12-year period. After he died, the jail filled out a form for the BJS with Hill’s name and details including his race, age and charges. The box for “homicide” was left unchecked. Two years later, no “cause of death” has been sent to the BJS, the jail said, citing an ongoing investigation by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation. No one has been charged.
The family said the jail lied about his death. “They just told us that Harvey had passed and he had had a heart attack,” said Katrina Nettles, his younger sister. The jail did not respond to requests for comment. Its medical contractor, Quality Correctional Health Care, and the nurse who treated Hill denied wrongdoing in litigation.
An autopsy ruled Hill’s death a homicide, however. The report showed that abrasions speckled his head and chest. Severe internal bleeding swelled his neck. His liver had been lacerated.
The state medical examiner, citing a backlog, didn’t release the findings to the family until this June, 25 months after he died and 13 months after the statute of limitations had expired for litigation involving assault. The family filed its ongoing lawsuit last February, before receiving the autopsy.
Told by Reuters of the autopsy’s grim findings, Finnegan bent forward and choked back tears. “God Almighty,” he said, dragging a hand over his face. “Harvey was a friend.”
How Reuters tracked and analyzed deaths in America’s largest jails
The Reuters examination of deaths in U.S. local jails represents the largest collection and publication of inmate mortality data undertaken outside the federal government.
The news organization filed more than 1,500 public records requests to collect data on inmate populations and deaths from more than 500 local jails. That universe includes the 10 largest jails in each state, as well as any jail in the country with an average daily population of 750 or more inmates.
In all, the Reuters data captures about 60% of the total inmate population in the nation’s 3,000-plus jails. Similarly, Reuters data accounts for about 60% of all inmate deaths nationwide, based on the latest national data collected by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. BJS issues national-level and state-level data on jail deaths, but no statistics for individual jails. The Reuters investigation is the first to provide individual jail death data on a national scale.
Reuters calculated annual death rates at more than 500 jails by dividing the total number of deaths in a given year by the average daily population in the same year – the same formula used by BJS and other experts in criminal justice statistics.
States and local law enforcement agencies have varying definitions for what constitutes a jail death. Reuters counted all deaths that occurred in a jail, as well as deaths of inmates who were hospitalized for injuries or conditions incurred at the jail. When inmates are in life-threatening condition, some jails release them and do not count their subsequent death as an inmate fatality. Reuters, like many jurisdictions across the country, included those cases in its tally of jail deaths.
Reuters received responses from more than 95% of the jurisdictions from which it sought public records. Not all jails were able to provide accurate data on inmate populations for every year covered by the analysis, particularly the earlier years. Data was not available on race for about 9% of inmates who died and for conviction status for about 17% of fatalities. In cases where data was available for adjacent years, Reuters used that information to estimate inmate populations for the years in which no data was provided – a statistical method also used by BJS.
Reuters also used court records and news accounts to identify deaths that were not documented in jails’ responses and, in many other cases, to augment information jails did provide. Several dozen unreported deaths were identified in this manner and added to the Reuters tally. Court records and other official records, such as autopsy reports, also were used when available to fill in data that some jails declined to provide, such as cause of death or age.
Reuters also collected information on how healthcare services are provided in each jail, identifying those that relied on private companies to manage and deliver that care. Reuters only considered jails to have privatized or contracted care if they relied on a company to manage and staff the facility’s entire healthcare operation. If a jail contracted with individual practitioners for discreet medical services or hired staffing agencies to provide clinicians, Reuters still considered that care to be publicly managed, just as it would if the jail was running its own healthcare operation or relying on a public health agency.
The data captures jails in 44 states plus the District of Columbia. It does not include six other states – five where all detention facilities are managed by unified state corrections agencies (Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Rhode Island and Vermont), and Alaska, which uses a hybrid model that also relies largely on a network of state-run facilities.
Voters at Christian City Welcome Center in Union City, Georgia, during the state's June primary. For some residents, it was a five-hour wait. (photo: Dustin Chambers/Reuters)
Why Do Nonwhite Georgia Voters Have to Wait in Line for Hours? Stephen Fowler, Georgia Public Broadcasting Fowler writes: "She asked that her full name not be used because she fears repercussions from speaking out. 'I'm wondering if my ballot is going to count.'"
The state’s voter rolls have grown by nearly 2 million since the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, but polling locations have been cut by almost 10%, with Metro Atlanta hit particularly hard.
athy spotted the long line of voters as she pulled into the Christian City Welcome Center about 3:30 p.m., ready to cast her ballot in the June 9 primary election.
Hundreds of people were waiting in the heat and rain outside the lush, tree-lined complex in Union City, an Atlanta suburb with 22,400 residents, nearly 88% of them Black. She briefly considered not casting a ballot at all, but decided to stay.
By the time she got inside more than five hours later, the polls had officially closed and the electronic scanners were shut down. Poll workers told her she’d have to cast a provisional ballot, but they promised that her vote would be counted.
“I’m now angry again, I’m frustrated again, and now I have an added emotion, which is anxiety,” said Kathy, a human services worker, recalling her emotions at the time. She asked that her full name not be used because she fears repercussions from speaking out. “I’m wondering if my ballot is going to count.”
By the time the last voter finally got inside the welcome center to cast a ballot, it was the next day, June 10.
The clogged polling locations in metro Atlanta reflect an underlying pattern: the number of places to vote has shrunk statewide, with little recourse. Although the reduction in polling places has taken place across racial lines, it has primarily caused long lines in nonwhite neighborhoods where voter registration has surged and more residents cast ballots in person on Election Day. The pruning of polling places started long before the pandemic, which has discouraged people from voting in person.
In Georgia, considered a battleground state for control of the White House and U.S. Senate, the difficulty of voting in Black communities like Union City could possibly tip the results on Nov. 3. With massive turnout expected, lines could be even longer than they were for the primary, despite a rise in mail-in voting and Georgians already turning out by the hundreds of thousands to cast ballots early.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Shelby v. Holder decision in 2013 eliminated key federal oversight of election decisions in states with histories of discrimination, Georgia’s voter rolls have grown by nearly 2 million people, yet polling locations have been cut statewide by nearly 10%, according to an analysis of state and local records by Georgia Public Broadcasting and ProPublica. Much of the growth has been fueled by younger, nonwhite voters, especially in nine metro Atlanta counties, where four out of five new voters were nonwhite, according to the Georgia secretary of state’s office.
The metro Atlanta area has been hit particularly hard. The nine counties — Fulton, Gwinnett, Forsyth, DeKalb, Cobb, Hall, Cherokee, Henry and Clayton — have nearly half of the state’s active voters but only 38% of the polling places, according to the analysis.
As a result, the average number of voters packed into each polling location in those counties grew by nearly 40%, from about 2,600 in 2012 to more than 3,600 per polling place as of Oct. 9, the analysis shows. In addition, a last-minute push that opened more than 90 polling places just weeks before the November election has left many voters uncertain about where to vote or how long they might wait to cast a ballot.
The growth in registered voters has outstripped the number of available polling places in both predominantly white and Black neighborhoods. But the lines to vote have been longer in Black areas, because Black voters are more likely than whites to cast their ballots in person on Election Day and are more reluctant to vote by mail, according to U.S. census data and recent studies. Georgia Public Broadcasting/ProPublica found that about two-thirds of the polling places that had to stay open late for the June primary to accommodate waiting voters were in majority-Black neighborhoods, even though they made up only about one-third of the state’s polling places. An analysis by Stanford University political science professor Jonathan Rodden of the data collected by Georgia Public Broadcasting/ProPublica found that the average wait time after 7 p.m. across Georgia was 51 minutes in polling places that were 90% or more nonwhite, but only 6 minutes in polling places that were 90% white.
Georgia law sets a cap of 2,000 voters for a polling place that has experienced significant voter delays, but that limit is rarely if ever enforced. Our analysis found that, in both majority Black and majority white neighborhoods, about nine of every 10 precincts are assigned to polling places with more than 2,000 people.
A June 2020 analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School found that the average number of voters assigned to a polling place has grown in the past five years in Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina — all states with substantial Black populations that before Shelby needed federal approval to close polling places under the Voting Rights Act. And though dozens of states have regulations on the size of voting precincts and polling places or the number of voting machines, the analysis found that many jurisdictions do not abide by them.
Georgia’s state leadership and elections officials have largely ignored complaints about poll consolidations even as they tout record growth in voter registration. As secretary of state from 2010 to 2018, when most of Georgia’s poll closures occurred, Brian Kemp, now the governor, took a laissez-faire attitude toward county-run election practices, save for a 2015 document that spelled out methods officials could use to shutter polling places to show “how the change can benefit voters and the public interest.”
Kemp’s office declined to comment Thursday on the letter or why poll closures went unchallenged by state officials. His spokesperson referred back to his previous statements that he did not encourage officials to close polling places but merely offered guidance on how to follow the law.
The inaction has left Black voters in Georgia facing barriers reminiscent of Jim Crow laws, said Adrienne Jones, a political science professor at Morehouse College in Atlanta who has studied the impact of the landmark Shelby decision on Black voters.
Voter suppression “is happening with these voter impediments that are being imposed,” Jones said.
“You’re closing down polling places so people have a more difficult time getting there. You’re making vote-by-mail difficult or confusing. Now we’re in court arguing about which ballots are going to be accepted, and it means that people have less trust in our state.”
In August, on the 55th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, the Democratic Party of Georgia, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and three Georgia voters sued the state and more than a dozen counties in federal court, alleging that some of the state’s most populous areas have disenfranchised voters for more than a decade with long lines caused by inadequate staff, training, equipment and voting locations.
The suit, which was dismissed after the judge ruled the parties had no standing to file, warned of upheaval during the Nov. 3 election.
“As bad as the situation would be in normal circumstances, the burden is made far worse by the global pandemic,” the lawsuit stated. “Absent judicial intervention, Georgia is set for more of the same (and likely far worse than it has ever seen) in November.”
Republican Brad Raffensperger, who took over as secretary of state in January 2019, has called for more resources and polling places, but he has been unable to push these changes through the GOP-controlled legislature.
Raffensperger’s office blames Democrats and county elections officials for opposing his efforts to improve access. “As Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger pushed legislation that would force counties to expand polling locations and directly address these issues,” Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs said in an email.
“Unfortunately, every single Democratic Senator and Representative voted against this proposal saying that it would cause ‘confusion.’ Georgia voters deserve to know who is actually holding back progress and it isn’t the Secretary of State’s Office.”
Democrats and voting rights groups said they opposed the Raffensperger-backed bill because they believed it weakened state election supervision and made it harder for people to vote. The proposal shifted even more responsibility for elections from the state to counties, “without the necessary training, funding or support,” Lauren Groh-Wargo, chief executive of Fair Fight, a voting rights group founded by former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, said at the time.
A History of Discrimination
Georgia’s history of voting violations stretches back more than a century, with poll taxes, literacy and citizenship tests, and intimidation that disenfranchised many Black citizens.
Under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Georgia and eight other states with histories of discrimination were required to seek federal approval before making changes such as eliminating polling places in Black neighborhoods or shifting polling locations at the last minute. Dozens of counties and townships in six more states also had to seek pre-clearance.
Then in 2013, in a case brought by Shelby County, Alabama, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the method for determining which jurisdictions had to seek prior approval, saying it was unconstitutional because it was outdated. The court suggested that Congress could pass new guidelines, but lawmakers have been unable to reach agreement, leaving the pre-clearance requirement unenforceable.
Jones, the Morehouse professor, said the recent changes would clearly have required federal approval if not for the Shelby decision.
“All of these kinds of exercises … would have had to be considered by the Department of Justice — or would not have been suggested because it would have been clear that the Department of Justice would have dinged them,” she said. “And part of that has to do with the importance of Black voters, particularly in the Democratic Party.”
Exacerbating Shelby’s impact in Georgia was an explosion in voter registrations. Thanks in part to the state’s “motor voter” law that updates records whenever a voter interacts with the Department of Driver Services, the state’s voter rolls have swelled by a third since the 2012 presidential election. In two metro Atlanta counties, Gwinnett and Henry, the voting population shifted from majority white to majority nonwhite, contributing to Georgia’s transition from red state to purple.
As the number of voters was swelling, county officials across the state began a steady stream of closures of polling locations.
By June 2020, Georgia voters had 331 fewer polling places than in November 2012, a 13% reduction. Because of added pressure from the coronavirus pandemic, metro Atlanta alone had lost 82 voting locations by the time June’s primary rolled around. Nearly half of the state’s 159 counties had closed at least one polling place since 2012.
Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, and DeKalb County realigned dozens of precincts after some municipalities were annexed or newly established. Other counties cited changes in voter behavior, or tight budgets, but the Georgia Public Broadcasting/ProPublica analysis found only nominal savings.
In Union City, about 20 minutes southwest of Atlanta in Fulton County, the number of active voters has grown about 60% since 2012.
Three polls were open for the June primary, with 9,000 voters assigned to the Christian City Welcome Center. Two additional polling places are being set up for the Nov. 3 election, including one that will reduce the burden on the Welcome Center. Three others, however, will still have more than 5,000 voters each.
In a September county elections board meeting, Fulton officials said the goal had been to add more polling places in 2020 to accommodate population growth. The coronavirus pandemic resulted in closures or relocations, but most sites have been reopened.
Urban Congestion at the Polls
The influx of voters meant that already overburdened polling places got even busier.
Statewide, the number of voters served by the average polling place rose 47%, from 2,046 voters in 2012 to 3,003 as of Oct. 9, according to the analysis. Some rural counties have as many as 22,000 voters assigned to a single polling place.
Forsyth County, one of the fastest-growing counties in the nation, has grown its voter rolls by nearly 60% — or 60,000 voters — in the last eight years. Forsyth, a mostly white county about 45 minutes’ drive north of Atlanta, now averages about 8,000 voters per polling place. Officials cut nine of its 25 polling places in 2013 and another after the 2016 election, but added back five locations in 2019. No additional sites are expected to be opened for the November election.
Fulton County added nearly a quarter-million voters while consolidating voting locations. When the coronavirus struck, the last-minute unavailability of two polling places forced the assignment of 16,000 people to vote in June at Park Tavern, a restaurant/event space that reported 350 voters in line before the first vote was cast.
Six of Gwinnett County’s seven most congested polling places serve predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods. In Lawrenceville, home to one of the largest Black populations in the county, a judge ordered polls at the Gwinnett County Department of Water Resources to stay open late during the primary for the nearly 7,000 voters assigned there. It was one of 16 polling locations with missing voting machines on the morning of the primary election.
Angela Maddox, a health care worker, cast her ballot there for the Aug. 11 primary runoff, when only local rather than statewide races were on the ballot. She said she was grateful that equipment was in place and low turnout meant no lines. The reports of voters waiting six hours or more in the primary were “disgusting,” she said.
“I know it’s a big problem and it seems to continuously happen in Black communities,” she said. “That’s where you tend to see a lot of the machines breaking down, or fewer machines, or any and everything to not count our vote, which is not fair.”
Gwinnett County officials obtained federal approval in 2010 — before the Shelby decision — to reduce the number of polls from 163 to 156, citing cost savings and operational efficiency. Since then, the county has kept the same number of polling places while adding more than 175,000 active voters. The average polling place handled 3,649 voters in the June primary and is set for 3,719 for November.
Who’s to Blame?
Since the Shelby decision, the Georgia State Election Board, chaired by Raffensperger, has been the primary body for investigating and potentially sanctioning counties found to have violated election laws and procedures.
But the election board has rarely investigated the sort of violations that the U.S. Department of Justice once stepped in to review under the Voting Rights Act.
**Since 2010, when Kemp began his eight-year stint as secretary of state, the board has heard hundreds of cases, citing individuals for such violations as wearing political gear to the polls, and rebuking counties for mishandling voter registrations or absentee ballots. But it has taken no action to examine the poll closures that have been approved post-Shelby and has allowed a backlog of dozens of complaints to accumulate. In 2015, Kemp’s office sent the letter to county elections officials that included advice on closing polling places.
In September, with Georgia in the national spotlight over its handling of elections, the board cleared a backlog of nearly 100 outstanding cases dating back to 2014, and referred several to the attorney general’s office for further review. Among those was Fulton County’s alleged mishandling of the June primary. The attorney general’s office is still investigating.
In early October, the secretary of state’s office told four counties that had long lines, absentee ballot problems and late opening or closing polls in the primary — Fulton, DeKalb and Gwinnett in the metro Atlanta area and Chatham County in southeast Georgia —to avoid a repeat by providing weekly updates on poll worker training, polling places and line management plans.
Besides the board’s actions, the Georgia Senate considered a proposal filed in February and endorsed by Raffensperger. It would have required county elections supervisors to add more equipment or poll workers, or split up any precincts with more than 2,000 voters, if there was a wait longer than an hour measured at three different points on Election Day.
More than 1,500 of Georgia’s 2,655 precincts have at least 2,000 voters — many of them in urban Democratic counties — and Raffensperger said at the time that voters should never have to wait more than 30 minutes.
But the bill, SB 463, was opposed by Democratic lawmakers and voting rights groups, who argued that any revamping in an election year would cause confusion and create more ways to keep people from casting their ballot.
“Do you have any concerns about trying to change the rules of the game in the middle of an election cycle when we have so much litigation that is currently pending with respect to the state’s handling of previous elections?” state Sen. Jen Jordan, a Democrat from Atlanta, asked during the floor debate.
The bill originated in the state Senate, which approved it. The proposal then went to a state House of Representatives committee, where Republicans substituted a version that didn’t address the polling place issue and barred the secretary of state and county elections officials from sending absentee ballot applications to voters. Their redesign never reached a floor vote, eliminating any prospect of legislative changes in the 2020 session, which ended in June.
That same month, after the primary election, Raffensperger held a press conference in Fulton County outside Park Tavern, which had processed more voters than 96% of the state’s polling places. Flanked by posters highlighting recent election woes, he urged local officials to add poll workers and voting locations while improving technical support and training.
“We know that we need a more diverse pool of voting locations to spread the load of voters that we are anticipating,” Raffensperger said.
Nikema Williams, chair of Georgia’s Democratic Party, said that while state officials took little or no action to stop widespread voting problems in non-white communities, local elections officials are also responsible, since they ultimately decide whether to close or open more voting sites.
“We added counties as a defendant in the [August] lawsuit because we want to make sure that we’re getting this right,” she said. “And at the end of the day, what matters to us is that voters are not negatively impacted at any level of the electoral process.”
Although the judge chided Democratic officials for offering vague remedies and failing to provide sufficient evidence that long lines are likely in November, Phi Nguyen, litigation director for Asian Americans Advancing Justice Atlanta, said there is plenty of evidence in plain sight.
Nguyen’s organization has challenged a number of Georgia election laws in court, including the “exact match” policy that blocks voter registrations that do not exactly match a state or federal database. AAAJA also filed a lawsuit that forced Gwinnett County to change its process for rejecting absentee ballots.
She said the metro Atlanta counties’ election administrators have not kept up with the wave of newer, more diverse voters, increasing the chances of disenfranchisement.
Nguyen was a poll monitor at the Infinite Energy Center arena for the primary and did not leave until the final votes were cast, well after polls closed at 7 p.m. “Georgia made national news because of the breakdown in our election systems,” she said. “Long lines are certainly an issue and they happen more often in under-resourced places, which tend to be where communities of color live.”
Changes Before Election Day
Some counties in the metro Atlanta area have tried to increase polling locations before the November election.
Just weeks before Nov. 3, Fulton County approved 91 new polling places, focusing on areas where the lines were longest for the June primary. Fourteen polling places — including two of the four polling places in Union City — will still have more than 5,000 voters assigned, but that’s a sharp drop from the 60 sites that had more than 5,000 voters assigned for the primary election, said Fulton County Elections Director Rick Barron.
“If you have fewer people assigned to a polling location, you have fewer people that are going to go to that location,” he said. “We had some polling places in June where we had 9,000-17,000 voters assigned to these locations, so what this does is it spreads everyone out amongst many more locations.”
The more than 16,000 primary voters who were assigned to Park Tavern are now split among five polling places, ranging from fewer than 1,500 voters to nearly 5,500. Park Tavern will remain a polling site, with about 4,300 voters.
But widespread rejiggering of polling locations just weeks before a presidential election comes with its own risks. A 2018 study of North Carolina voters from Stanford University found that relocating polling places decreases turnout, especially for younger voters.
For now, Fulton County officials are hoping for an 80% early voting rate to minimize voter confusion and other problems on Election Day, when the nation’s eyes will once again be on Georgia. And they have doubled the election budget to $34 million, purchasing two mobile voting buses as polling sites to alleviate early lines and launching a massive outreach campaign to change voter behavior.
There are more than 30 early voting locations, including a mega-voting site at Atlanta’s professional basketball arena equipped with 60 check-in computers and 300 voting machines. On the first day of in-person early voting Monday, Oct. 12, officials recorded the second-highest single-day total in recent years. Statewide, a record 128,000 Georgians braved long lines that first day.
Still, Kathy in Union City is worried that her vote won’t be counted.
“When you look at the systemic issues that plague us as a society, oftentimes we’re screaming but we’re not being heard,” she said. “Historically, we have seen that services and resources for Black communities have always been very inadequate, and this is just an extension of that. ... How could there be such a huge disparity?”
Sunday Song: Leonard Cohen | Everybody Knows Leonard Cohen, YouTube Cohen writes: "Everybody knows that the war is over. Everybody knows the good guys lost. Everybody knows the fight was fixed. The poor stay poor, the rich get rich."
Lyrics Leonard Cohen, Everybody Knows From the 1988 album, I'm Your Man
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed Everybody knows that the war is over Everybody knows the good guys lost Everybody knows the fight was fixed The poor stay poor, the rich get rich That's how it goes Everybody knows Everybody knows that the boat is leaking Everybody knows that the captain lied Everybody got this broken feeling Like their father or their dog just died
Everybody talking to their pockets Everybody wants a box of chocolates And a long stem rose Everybody knows
Everybody knows that you love me baby Everybody knows that you really do Everybody knows that you've been faithful Ah give or take a night or two Everybody knows you've been discreet But there were so many people you just had to meet Without your clothes And everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows That's how it goes Everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows That's how it goes Everybody knows
And everybody knows that it's now or never Everybody knows that it's me or you And everybody knows that you live forever Ah when you've done a line or two Everybody knows the deal is rotten Old Black Joe's still pickin' cotton For your ribbons and bows And everybody knows
And everybody knows that the Plague is coming Everybody knows that it's moving fast Everybody knows that the naked man and woman Are just a shining artifact of the past Everybody knows the scene is dead But there's gonna be a meter on your bed That will disclose What everybody knows
And everybody knows that you're in trouble Everybody knows what you've been through From the bloody cross on top of Calvary To the beach of Malibu Everybody knows it's coming apart Take one last look at this Sacred Heart Before it blows And everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows That's how it goes Everybody knows
Oh everybody knows, everybody knows That's how it goes Everybody knows
Ramón Cruz is the first person of color to serve as president of the Sierra Club in the 128-year history of the nation's largest environmental organization. (photo: International Transport Forum)
Ramón Cruz, a Brooklyn activist originally from Puerto Rico, is the first Latino to head the country’s oldest and largest environmental organization.
It announced its new emphasis during the height of the summer's racial justice protests triggered by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
With the country in the midst of a racial reckoning, reassessing monuments to Confederate soldiers and other supporters of slavery and racism, it was time, the Sierra Club, announced, "to take down some of our own monuments, starting with some truth-telling about the Sierra Club's early history." It denounced its founder, John Muir, for his racist writings, and pledged to diversify its leadership and its environmental campaigns.
Ramón Cruz, who was elected president of the Sierra Club in May, is the first visible manifestation of the Sierra Club's public commitment to diversity and environmental justice.
Cruz, a 44-year-old activist living in Brooklyn, is the first Latino to hold the position in the Sierra Club's 128-year history.
InsideClimate News talked to him about the Sierra Club's new priorities.
What is the significance of the Sierra Club disavowing its founder, John Muir, because he was a racist who made derogatory statements about Black and Indigenous people?
I don't think people should be edified or made holy, when they are just humans with virtues and flaws. I think some people definitely made a lot of contributions, but it doesn't mean they're perfect heroes.
When talking about our founder, John Muir contributed so much—his writings about the sacredness of nature and the need to protect the environment and nature are so important—but it doesn't mean that he was a perfect human. I have to understand and reexamine history and learn from it. I wouldn't want to get rid of John Muir's contribution, but there are things that you need to put out there to become a more inclusive organization that is more consistent with the values that we profess.
In the past, people like me probably wouldn't be accepted in membership in some of the Sierra Club chapters, as it was done through invitation only.
Within the Sierra Club, there have been a lot of people embracing the change toward equity and justice. I came of age in a generation that sees that as essential and intrinsic. Maybe others, not so much. It is a journey for everyone.
What is the most urgent issue, or what are the most urgent issues, for the Sierra Club today?
Everyone would agree that climate change is the most urgent issue we face because it really encompasses everything in terms of land, water, air, pollution, environmental justice, in terms of how disadvantaged communities are affected the most.
We know that fossil fuels are not the future and that fundamental change is needed in an economic system that has been based on the burning of fossil fuels since the industrial revolution. There are ways of switching—and switching is taking time. In the same way, you still had slavery for many years even after it was obviously immoral and not necessary. It could have been replaced by other ways to continue the economic system. Similarly, there are a lot of people who benefit from this system with money and power. We've known already, for over 25 years, that we needed to make a change, that there were already technologies, like wind and solar. But we've had people like the current president undermining that change.
That said, with an organization as big as The Sierra Club we're working on many different issues.
We had had several campaigns in the past like closing coal plants—even now with how much Trump has been providing life support to the fossil fuel industry, over half the coal plants have closed or are scheduled to close. We see how coal has already turned the page although the president is not giving up. They opened the Arctic wildlife refuge when five of the six major U.S. banks have pledged not to fund these efforts.
You mention getting President Trump out of office as part of the Sierra Club's mission. How is the Sierra Club pitching in this campaign season?
Certainly, with weeks left until the election this is the most important election in modern history.
We pledged a while back, over a year ago, to dedicate as many resources, energy and people as possible in a way we have never done before to defeat Donald Trump. This has been somewhat changed by Covid-19. The traditional way of organizing—knocking on doors, having rallies—has changed.
There have been millions of texts, phone calls and letters that have been done—for six months or more already, we have letter writing parties every week. We're definitely behind the Biden-Harris ticket and we're going to do everything we can to get him elected so we can also hold him accountable to stick to a climate minded agenda.
Jemez principles for democratic organizing, drafted in 1996 during a conference sponsored by the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice in Jemez, Mexico, include the following principles for environmental organizations: Be inclusive; emphasize bottom-up organizing; let people speak for themselves; work together in solidarity and mutuality; build just relationships amongst each other; maintain a commitment to self-transformation. The Sierra Club adopted the principles in 2014.
We're not perfect, but we're working on these principles and in a journey to become a better organization consistent with its values. Our staff and volunteers have been going through training about dismantling racism and "growing for change." In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, we started doing solidarity fundraising, where everything that we fundraise goes to organizations that can make better use of the funds because they are involved in direct disaster relief, first response or may have better grounding in the community. The same thing happened with Covid-19 and the Movement for Black Lives. We're trying to move faster to center everything we do in equity and justice. We need to make sure we're addressing environmental racism so we are channeling part of our fundraising towards that goal.
How does the Sierra Club plan to address environmental justice as a major issue—since it is not known for doing so? Is disavowing the organization from its founder the first step?
The traditional environmental movement or the mainstream national movement, the Green Group, has had a complicated relationship with environmental justice organizations. Because sometimes they have not seen eye to eye and that has many levels of complexity. Some of it is a national versus local debate, wealthy versus non-wealthy or white versus nonwhite. For many years, mainstream environmental organizations were complacent and complicit with systems that have favored exclusion and that were full of inequities.
An example: Sometimes when the big green groups have advocated for emissions trading, the EJ community was very much against it because you have then all the permits concentrated in all the areas that are poorer and nonwhite. The big green groups were not sensitive to that in the past, disregarding claims by groups that were mostly poor and nonwhite.
We have to break with that. To maintain the current system, the premise is that you have areas that can be sacrificed for the quote unquote betterment of society. But these sacrificed areas have people in them that are deemed disposable. And you cannot have a notion of disposable without the notion of supremacy or racism. We're definitely convinced that we cannot reach our goal of protecting the environment unless we dismantle racism and white privilege.
We cannot do that unless we become better partners with the EJ community. We have been working to improve relationships with EJ groups. To that end, we have adopted Jemez principles as guidelines to become better partners and build relationships that are based on respect and mutuality, focused on bottom-up approaches and let people speak for themselves.
What is the Sierra Club doing to advance the Green New Deal, a plan of particular interest to young people and people of color for its environmental justice emphasis?
We've released a report during Covid-19 on how to use this opportunity to boost the economy and create jobs that are in line with the Green New Deal. It has even more relevance now during Covid with unemployment reaching the levels of the Great Depression. We think we can get there. We'd like to make electric cars more affordable. If we replace lead pipes, we can do more green building. We want to make sure we don't leave the Paris agreement (which Trump has renounced). Basically, what Trump did was hand China on a silver platter the leading of the global transition to a green economy that will happen anyway. It's amazing that what Trump is doing is really the opposite of making the country greater just because of his ignorance. He is leaving the U.S. out of the possibility of leading the future of the world.
We're very glad that Biden has tapped into that and now we have the most aggressive pro-environment campaign that we have ever seen in any candidate in the past. That's partly thanks to (Sen.) Bernie (Sanders) and (Sen.) Elizabeth Warren and AOC (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez)—three big champions of the Green New Deal.
We're very supportive of candidates listening and willing to change...that's why we're also very excited about (Biden's) presidential campaign. From what we've seen, it's very willing to listen and make positive changes.
How will the Sierra Club help harness the energy and enthusiasm of college age (and younger) climate activists?
We're trying through social media and technology to attract the interest of that generation and we certainly hope to be a dynamic organization. We have so much to learn from the new generation. Not only the energy and enthusiasm but also the knowledge and their way of understanding the world. They're not debating whether climate change is real. They know it's real. So they are much more clear in their thoughts and in their knowledge about these issues. If anything, the question is how can we learn from this generation and bring their energy?
We're centering everything we do on equity and justice and it's partly a consequence of that generation becoming active in the Sierra Club. It's a chicken and egg question. We need to change to attract them but we need to have them to change. This is a 128-year-old organization; we wouldn't be here if we wouldn't be able to change and adapt to new times and circumstances. Becoming a more inclusive and anti-racist organization is part of the change to respond to the needs and claims of this new generation.
How did you get started in environmental issues?
I'm originally from Puerto Rico. My mother was a big influence on me. She was a marine biology teacher and had an ecology club where people were recycling when nobody was recycling. That was a big influence. I had access to the outdoors. That's key to making people more sensitive.
As an adult, I came to the environmental movement through social activism. I was a big fan of 20th century social movements in Latin America. I met a leader of a guerilla movement in Uruguay and she was describing how she was frustrated with those movements that relied on protagonists and people that can be corrupted in the future. The environmental movement is kind of a faceless movement. I think Greta (Thunberg, the 17-year-old Swedish climate activist) is the closest thing to an icon that the environmental movement has had in the last 50 years. I prefer movements that do not rely on protagonists or big egos.
What drove me also to the environmental movement was that I became active in the effort to get the Navy out of Vieques. Years later, I became the deputy director of Puerto Rico's environmental regulatory agency for two years, which was in charge of the clean-up of that bombing range. The U.S. Navy, which is supposed to finance the remediation of decades of pollution, has dragged its feet, trying to do the least bit possible. Twenty years later there is still a lot of clean-up to do.
athy spotted the long line of voters as she pulled into the Christian City Welcome Center about 3:30 p.m., ready to cast her ballot in the June 9 primary election.
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