10 October 22
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How Oath Keepers Leader Stewart Rhodes Became a ‘Brownshirt for Trump’
Arun Gupta, The Daily Beast
Gupta writes: "The far-right militia boss’ descent into violence and madness was a long time coming, his ex-wife says."
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Brazil's President and candidate for re-election Jair Bolsonaro looks on after the taping of a television advertisement for his presidential campaign in Brasilia, Brazil October 7, 2022. (photo: Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters)
In a now viral video of a 2016 interview, the Brazilian president claims he would eat human flesh
“I’d eat an Indian, no problem at all,” Jair Bolsonaro bragged to a foreign journalist in 2016, as he described a trip to an Indigenous community where he had purportedly been offered the chance to consume human flesh.
Indigenous leaders have rejected Bolsonaro’s boast as yet another lie from Brazil’s far-right president. The Yanomami people from the territory Bolsonaro claims to have visited say they have never engaged in such acts.
However, footage of Bolsonaro’s cannibalism comments – first broadcast on his official YouTube channel six years ago – has gone viral on social media and been seized on by Brazil’s opposition as further proof of the president’s depravity.
“Bolsonaro has revealed that he would eat human flesh,” a television advert produced by Bolsonaro’s leftist rival, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, declared on Friday after the remarks were unearthed.
Lula nearly beat Bolsonaro in the first round of Brazil’s presidential election last Sunday and hopes to finish the job when 156 million Brazilians vote in a second-round showdown between the two men on 30 October.
In its efforts to re-elect Lula, Brazil’s president from 2003 to 2010, his campaign has dug deep into Bolsonaro’s extensive back catalogue of callous and inflammatory pronouncements.
One recent Lula advert shows Bolsonaro shoving a female politician and calling her a “bitch”. In another scene the rightwinger mocks Covid victims and pretends to be gasping for air.
But Friday’s campaign ad was perhaps the most shocking to date.
Bolsonaro’s communications minister, Fábio Faria, called Lula’s advert “fake news” and claimed the comments had been distorted. Bolsonaro’s lawyers demanded electoral authorities ban the ad.
An analysis of the full 76-minute interview with the New York Times journalist Simon Romero leaves little doubt about the nature of Bolsonaro’s remarks.
After describing the destitution he witnessed during a visit to Haiti, Bolsonaro moves from discussing “unhygienic” Haitian women offering sex to making claims about cannibalism allegedly being perpetrated in the Amazon’s Yanomami territory.
“There was this time I was in Surucuru … and an Indian had died and they were cooking him. They cook Indians. It’s their culture,” Bolsonaro claims to the correspondent’s apparent befuddlement.
“Their bodies?” the journalist replies.
“Their bodies,” Bolsonaro confirms.
“But not to eat?” the journalist asks.
“Yes, to eat,” answers Bolsonaro, then an obscure congressman. “They cook it for two or three days and then eat it with banana. I wanted to see an Indian being cooked but the guy said if you go, you have to eat it. ‘I’ll eat it,’ I said. But no one else in my group wanted to go … so I didn’t go. But I’d eat an Indian, no problem at all. It’s their culture.”
Yanomami leaders and anthropologists denounced Bolsonaro’s “delirious” and prejudiced claims. “My people aren’t cannibals … This doesn’t exist nor has it ever existed, not even among our ancestors,” the Yanomami activist Júnior Yanomami told the Folha de São Paulo newspaper.
“Bolsonaro is a compulsive liar,” tweeted Sônia Guajajara, an Indigenous leader who has just been elected to congress.
Lula denied spreading misinformation. “I saw the footage … It’s no invention, we’re simply letting people know what our opponent is like,” he told supporters, claiming foreigners were shunning Brazil “for fear of the cannibal”.
On Saturday a preliminary ruling from an electoral judge ordered Lula’s Workers’ party (PT) to withdraw an advert that risked damaging Bolsonaro’s reputation and affecting “the integrity of the electoral process”. The judge argued that Bolsonaro’s remarks “referred to a specific experience in an Indigenous community, lived according to the values and morality existing in this society”.
The decision appeared to close the stable door after the horse had bolted. By Sunday, social media was awash with mentions of “Cannibal Bolsonaro” and memes likening the president to Hannibal Lecter and the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. The footage of Bolsonaro’s declaration had been seen millions of times.
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Wayne Hsiung, right, and Paul Picklesimer, center, on trial in Utah’s Fifth District Court. (photo: St. George News)
The nation’s largest pork producer argued that the removal of two sick piglets was a case of theft and burglary. DxE called it a rescue.
Wayne Hsiung and Paul Picklesimer, members of the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE, removed two sick, severely underweight piglets from Smithfield in March 2017. They named the pigs Lily and Lizzie, brought them to receive veterinary care, and took them to a sanctuary for rescued farm animals in Colorado. Later that year, as The Intercept reported, the FBI chased the piglets across state lines and raided the sanctuary where they were living, bringing with them veterinarians who sliced off a piece of Lizzie’s ear to perform a DNA test and confirm that she was the property of Smithfield Foods. (The animals were not removed from the sanctuary and still live there to this day.)
Activists who traveled to St. George, Utah, to watch the trial were jubilant over the decision, describing it as a turning point for the animal rights movement. “They just let a guy who walked into a factory farm and took two piglets out without the consent of Smithfield walk out of the courtroom free,” Hsiung told reporters outside the courthouse. “If it can happen in southern Utah, it can happen anywhere.”
Prosecutors alleged that the baby pigs, who were barely a week old when the activists removed them, were worth $42.20 each, or $84.40 in total, to Smithfield. The U.S.-based pork producer is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Hong Kong-based pork company WH Group, which reported $24 billion of revenue in 2019.
The verdict is the first jury acquittal for DxE, which Hsiung co-founded in 2013. Going into the trial, Hsiung and Picklesimer both faced two counts of felony burglary, which each carry up to five years in prison, and one count of misdemeanor theft, which carries up to six months. (One of the burglary charges was dismissed by the judge due to a lack of evidence.)
“Smithfield has an enormous amount of financial interests that are wrapped up in this,” said Hadar Aviram, a professor at UC Hastings Law who testified in favor of the activists. “They have an enormous amount to lose if this trial becomes public, and they cannot afford, or maybe they think they cannot afford, to give an inch to these people.”
The long-awaited trial was a test case for DxE’s theory of change, which relies on a tactic they call “open rescue.” The group openly removes animals suffering on factory farms, vivisection labs, and other places where they’re exploited for profit, inviting confrontation with the legal system. Hsiung and Picklesimer aimed to persuade a jury of their peers that it makes no sense to imprison people for saving suffering animals, thereby opening the door to a legal “right to rescue.”
“Against the advice of my co-counsel and pretty much all the attorneys I’ve talked to, I’m going to tell you exactly what we did on the night in question because I believe in the people of this country and the people of Utah to make the right choice,” said Hsiung, an attorney who represented himself, in his opening statement to the jury. Animal rescue “is not the worst part of us as human beings. It’s the best of us.”
“Today is a good day for somebody in particular, and that’s Lily and Lizzie, two pigs who are living their best lives in the sunshine right now, who are priceless,” Picklesimer said after the verdict. “They got the right to be rescued today. There are billions of animals who don’t have that right yet, and we’re going to keep working for them.”
Hsiung and Picklesimer, along with three other activists who have since pleaded out of the case, entered Circle Four Farms, Smithfield’s factory farm complex in Beaver County, Utah, in 2017 to investigate the company’s pledge to stop using gestation crates, which confine pregnant pigs in cages too small to let them turn around.
When the activists arrived at the massive facility, they found it filled with rows of pregnant pigs caged in the crates the company had sworn off. They also entered a facility packed with farrowing crates — similar to gestation crates, but with just enough additional room to fit nursing piglets — where female pigs are moved when they’re ready to give birth. The group found dead and rotting piglets inside the facility, as well as visibly ill and injured ones like Lily and Lizzie.
“Whenever I think about the condition Lily was in and the desperation we felt when we saw her there, struggling and so small and so sick, a little baby in such a horrible, awful, brutal place,” Hsiung said in a video posted Thursday to Instagram, “we just wanted to get her out.”
A key part of the defense’s case was that the piglets were on the verge of death when Hsiung and Picklesimer took them, and Smithfield routinely throws sick or dead animals away. Had the animals remained in the company’s possession, the defense argued, they would have been worthless.
Both piglets were a fraction of the weight of their littermates when they were found at Smithfield. Lily had scars on her face and a foot injury that prevented her from walking and accessing food; Lizzie’s face was covered in blood because her mother’s nipple was shredded and bleeding. At the trial, veterinarian Sherstin Rosenberg, who cares for pigs and other farm animals at Happy Hen Animal Sanctuary, testified that Lizzie’s mother had a condition called hypogalactia, which meant she wasn’t producing enough milk.
Rosenberg said both piglets had a vanishingly small chance of surviving at Smithfield. The prosecution’s $42.20 estimate of their value, which comes from a USDA standard market price index, had “no relevance at all” to these specific animals, she said: The veterinary care needed to keep them alive would have cost hundreds of dollars. She added that both piglets also had diarrhea, almost certainly caused by an infection, which made them a liability to Smithfield because they could spread disease to other animals.
In the pork industry, throwing away sick and dead animals is a cost of doing business. As a witness for the prosecution, Utah state veterinarian Dean Taylor confirmed about 15 percent of piglets don’t survive past weaning by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s estimate.
At trial, Hsiung attempted multiple times to ask Smithfield manager Richard Topham whether his claim that piglets have value to the company applies to those they throw into dumpsters. But the prosecution objected, and Judge Jeffrey Wilcox of Utah’s Fifth District Court didn’t allow the line of questioning. “I don’t want you mentioning that again,” he told Hsiung.
Wilcox didn’t allow DxE’s 2017 footage to be shown to the jury because, as Utah Assistant Attorney General Janise Macanas argued for the prosecution, it would “cause an improper and emotional reaction within the jury.” But Smithfield’s side still used it as a major source of evidence, referenced repeatedly throughout the trial. In July 2017, when DxE published the video and the New York Times covered it, Smithfield claimed that the video “appears to be highly edited and even staged.” Hsiung later told The Intercept: “The video speaks for itself. I don’t know how we can fake a rotting piglet.”
Picklesimer said they ultimately thought the judge’s decision to suppress the video ended up helping the defense’s case. “It makes the jury feel like they are being treated like babies,” they said.
While Wilcox did allow spoken references to the video footage, he blocked Picklesimer’s attorney, Mary Corporon, from describing Smithfield’s facilities as “industrial.” When Hsiung tried to question Smithfield representatives and Chris Andersen, an FBI agent who investigated the case, about whether corporate public relations concerns were the reason for the prosecution, the judge blocked most of the questioning.
Andersen testified that approximately eight FBI agents had been on the case. When Hsiung pressed him on whether any other theft cases involving less than $100 worth of property had multiple FBI agents working on them, Andersen acknowledged that he couldn’t think of one from personal experience. FBI documents obtained during discovery revealed that Andersen had discussed the incident with executives from Smithfield and Costco. “Smithfield is concerned how this incident and the news coverage of it will affect Smithfields [sic] reputation and relationships with clients,” read one, which was based on an interview with Smithfield Senior Vice President Keira Lombardo.
DxE had sought disclosures of Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes’s potential financial ties to Smithfield, arguing that he could have a conflict of interest in the case. A Salt Lake Tribune story found that Smithfield donated at least $10,410 to the Republican Attorneys General Association in 2014 and gave Reyes a $500 direct contribution in 2020.
“This verdict is very disappointing as it may encourage anyone opposed to raising animals for food to vandalize farms,” Jim Monroe, Smithfield’s vice president of corporate affairs, said in a statement. “Following this 2017 incident, we immediately launched an investigation and completed a third-party audit after learning of alleged mistreatment of animals on a company-owned hog farm in Milford, Utah. The audit results showed no findings of animal mistreatment.”
Rick Pitman, a California-based turkey farmer, testified in favor of the defendants. His position likely came as a surprise: In 2018, DxE activists took his turkey from a farm in Utah and exposed cruel conditions maintained there, which were then covered by the Salt Lake Tribune.
“There’s a difference between stealing a turkey and causing damage to the property or economic damage to me, or whether he’s trying to rescue a turkey that’s suffering,” said Pitman. He added that talking to DxE has helped him improve living standards for his animals.
Leading up to the trial, Wilcox ruled that the case could only focus on the narrow legal issues of burglary and theft. He didn’t allow the defense to discuss general animal welfare conditions at the factory farm, but he did allow them to testify to the health of Lily and Lizzie because of its relevance to the prosecution’s claim of monetary value.
At one point, Wilcox allowed the defense to show a screenshot from their footage of Lizzie’s face covered in her mother’s blood, but not of the bleeding mother next to her. The prosecutors, Macanas and Beaver County Attorney Von J. Christiansen, objected many times to mentions of animal welfare at trial.
In his closing arguments Friday night, Christiansen compared the piglets to inanimate objects. “Suppose you were in the grocery store and you saw a can with dents in it,” he said. “And you thought to yourself, ‘Oh my goodness, that can has a dent, it has the potential of going bad. I better rescue that can.’”
“I think it’s bigger and past just the animal rights issues, to the whole question of government overreach and prosecutions in the service of large corporations,” Corporon said. “I have never seen an FBI agent sit through a six-day trial in state court in Utah, ever.”
In the 1970s and ’80s, Aviram said, anti-nuclear activists who broke into nuclear facilities made arguments known as a “necessity defense,” wherein the defendant proves that their action was intended to prevent imminent harm. “In those years, you could actually go to a small town in Nevada where the test sites are, and you would win a necessity defense,” she said. “These avenues of political necessity are now closing down for activists. It’s a lot more difficult to prevail in local courts with these kinds of arguments.”
In court, DxE activists have had mixed results: Last December, Hsiung was convicted of two felonies and given a suspended sentence for removing a sick baby goat from a farm in North Carolina. In January, DxE activist Matt Johnson had all charges against him dismissed right before trial in an Iowa case pertaining to his investigation that found the pork company Iowa Select Farms was roasting animals to death as a cull method.
In the trial that ended Saturday night, Wilcox barred activists from arguing a necessity defense, but they still raised related points in their successful arguments before the jury. “You call it ‘rescue,’ but really it’s taking, isn’t it?” Macanas posed.
“No,” Hsiung said. “I’d compare it to a dog in a hot car. They are in need of urgent care.”
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Gavin Newsom. (photo: Yahoo)
The governor’s press office said in a tweet that Newsom is calling for the session on Dec. 5 to “hold greedy oil companies accountable” with a windfall tax on their profits.
A windfall tax is a one-time additional tax placed on companies when economic conditions result in large profits, according to the Tax Foundation, a think tank.
After gas prices soared to record levels nationwide and the national average surpassed $5 per gallon, the average price dropped consistently for weeks, but prices remained high in California and some other western states.
The American Automobile Association (AAA) reports that the average cost of gas in California is about $6.36 per gallon.
Newsom at a press conference on Friday said that California’s major environmental regulations are not the cause of the high prices. He said all the environmental related costs do not equal the roughly $2.50 per gallon more that Californians are paying for gas than the average American.
AAA states that a gallon of gas costs an average of about $3.90 nationally.
Newsom said most states have gas taxes that average about 30 cents while California’s is 54 cents, which he said does not add up “anywhere close” to $2.50.
“This is just rank price gouging,” he said. “They can get away with it. They’re fleecing. They’re taking advantage of you, every single one of you, every single day.”
He said the oil companies are taking hundreds of millions of dollars per week and then “polluting this planet.”
“It’s time to get serious,” Newsom said about the special session. “I’m sick of them defining the terms, defining the narrative.”
He said the tax will not materialize “overnight” and he expects litigation, but “we’re just trying to get this right.”
“We’re done with them,” he said. “We’re done with OPEC+, the petro-dictators that are out there manipulating markets, manipulating your pocketbook.”
OPEC+, composed of 13 OPEC nations and 11 non-members, announced a decision this week to cut oil production by 2 million barrels per day. The White House has slammed the decision, saying it will increase gas prices.
Frank Macchiarola, the senior vice president of policy, economics and regulatory affairs for the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association representing the oil and gas industry, criticized Newsom’s plans in a statement.
“Policymakers should be focused on increasing energy supply and reducing costs for Americans,” he said. “Imposing new taxes on our industry will do the exact opposite and only discourage investment at a time when it’s needed most.”
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Thomas Barrack, a billionaire friend of Donald Trump, arrives at the Brooklyn federal courthouse in Brooklyn, New York, on 3 October. (photo: Brendan McDermid/Reuters)
The legal woes of investor Tom Barrack, accused of secretly lobbying for the Emirati regime, add to the image of a Trump circle beset by influence-peddling and corruption
The meaning of those words, and the intent behind them, are at the center of the latest court case to roil Trump’s circle. Prosecutors have said that the “HH” in Barrack’s email referred to His Highness Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the current leader of the United Arab Emirates, and that Barrack was trying to secretly and illegally trade his access to Trump’s ear for the graces of the Emirati government and its vast pool of investment money.
The US government has charged Barrack, whose trial began last month in New York, with acting as an unregistered foreign agent – lobbying Trump on the Emirates’ behalf, over several years, and feeding confidential information back to the small but powerful Middle Eastern petro-state.
Barrack denies the charges against him, which his attorneys have called “nothing short of ridiculous”. They argue that he was trying to be useful as an intermediary, and was engaged in wholly legal wheeling and dealing. “He did things because he wanted to,” Michael Schachter, a defense lawyer for Barrack, said last month. “The idea that Tom Barrack was controlled by anybody is nonsense.”
Although there is no evidence that Trump was aware of Barrack’s alleged wrongdoing, the case adds to the mounting pile of legal woes afflicting the Trump camp. They now include Congress’s hearings on the US Capitol attack, a federal investigation into whether Trump illegally kept classified White House documents, a New York state lawsuit accusing him of fraudulent business practices, and a New York state prosecution of Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser, for allegedly defrauding people who donated to a campaign to build a wall on the Mexican border.
The prosecution of Barrack as an alleged semi-spy for the Emiratis is yet another scandal involving foreign influence on the Trump campaign and administration, which were dogged by impeachment proceedings and special investigations over alleged collusion with Russia and inappropriate pressure on Ukraine.
Barrack co-founded a pro-Trump fundraising group, Rebuilding America Now, with the lobbyist Paul Manafort, who later pleaded guilty to bank fraud, witness tampering, and conspiracy to defraud the United States in charges stemming from the Robert Mueller investigation. The US senate intelligence committee has said that Manafort’s interactions with Russian nationals constituted a “a grave counterintelligence threat” and created openings for “Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump campaign.”
Mike Flynn, Trump’s national security adviser during his campaign and his first White House national security adviser once in office, was forced to retroactively register as a foreign agent after admitting that he had done lobbying work for the government of Turkey. He resigned less than a month into his tenure, after serious questions were raised about his close relationship with the Russian ambassador.
Barrack has been a business associate and confidant of Trump’s for decades. They met through their mutual work in real estate, and in the 1980s and 1990s, Barrack, Trump, and the socialite and sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein formed a trio of “nightlife musketeers”, the journalist Michael Wolff wrote in his book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. When Trump ran for president, Barrack, working with Manafort, raised millions of dollars for his campaign.
Barrack began colluding with the Emirati government before Trump had even taken office, according to prosecutors. In May 2016, Manafort gave Barrack a draft speech of Trump’s and, according to the New York Times, asked, “Are you running this by our friends?”
Barrack shared it with Saudi and Emirati officials. “They loved it so much! This is great,” Barrack’s Emirati contact, Rashid al-Malik, told him. As the speech was revised, Barrack worked to make sure it remained favorable to the Emirates’ geopolitical interests.
Barrack, who is of Lebanese descent and speaks Arabic, liked to think of himself as someone who understood the Middle East better than most American officials and could act as a broker between the Gulf states and the US.
This became particularly salient when Trump, shortly after entering office, angered the Middle Eastern world by banning people from numerous Arab and Muslim-majority countries from entering the US. Saudi Arabia and the Emirates were also keen to influence Trump against their rival, Qatar.
Less than two weeks after Trump entered the White House, Barrack tried to persuade Steve Bannon to support a plan that would supply high-level American nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia. Barrack argued that this would help “balance the current noise” caused by Trump’s travel ban.
At the same time, according to the New York Times, Barrack was trying to get Saudi officials to pressure the US to appoint Barrack as a Middle East envoy. The nuclear plan never happened, and Barrack was not made an envoy.
From 2016 to 2019, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates disbursed about $1.5bn to Barrack’s real estate company, Colony Capital, which is now called the DigitalBridge Group. In 2017, for example, Emirati sovereign wealth funds put $374m into two deals arranged by Colony Capital.
In February 2019, while at a conference in Abu Dhabi, Barrack appeared to excuse Saudi Arabia’s murder of the Saudi-American journalist Jamal Khashoggi. “Whatever happened in Saudi Arabia, the atrocities in America are equal, or worse,” he said, though he later apologized for the remark.
Barrack’s ties to the Gulf states were reported by the US House Committee on Oversight and Reform in 2019. “With regard to Saudi Arabia,” the committee’s chair, Elijah Cummings, said, “the Trump administration has virtually obliterated the lines normally separating government policymaking from corporate and foreign interests”.
As foreign influence on Trump’s court became the subject of increasing scrutiny, Barrack came under investigation. Prosecutors have accused him of deceiving federal agents who interviewed him in 2019.
The messy case has sucked in other people. Barrack’s Emirati contact, al-Malik, was charged as an accomplice, but has avoided trial because he is not in the US. Barrack’s assistant at Colony Capital, Matthew Grimes, has been charged with a lesser crime related to lobbying.
Barrack “illegally provided a foreign nation with access and influence at the highest levels of the United States government,” a prosecutor, Hiral Mehta, declared during the government’s opening statement last month. “The actions they took were not business; they were crimes.”
Witness testimony recently began, with Rex Tillerson, Trump’s former secretary of state, called to testify. Tillerson said that he did not know Barrack well, that he did not know of his connection to the Emiratis, and that his influence on the US state department was minimal.
Regardless of the outcome of Barrack’s corruption trial, it seems unlikely that it will do anything to improve the already murky legacy of the Trump White House.
“I believe it unprecedented in any US administration for so many of the closest circle of persons around the president to have been shown to be conmen, grifters and base criminals,” Patrick Cotter, a former federal mob prosecutor, told the Guardian in 2020.
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A sign reading 'HELP' hangs in the window of an inmate cell at Holman Correctional Facility, in Atmore, Alabama. (photo: Kim Chandler/AP)
In 2020, the Department of Justice sued the state for running prisons that were “riddled” with violence. Since then, things have got worse.
Beth Shelburne is a journalist in Alabama who has been covering the state of Alabama’s prisons. As part of the A.C.L.U.’s Smart Justice Campaign, she is also the author of many of the organization’s reports on Alabama’s prisons. (Her Substack column is called “Moth to Flame.”) We recently spoke by phone. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the historical roots of the current problems in Alabama’s prisons, why conditions have deteriorated in the past several years, and divisions among the prisoners about how far to take their current protest.
There have been concerns about Alabama’s prisons for a long time. What was the impetus for this protest to happen now? What pushed things over the edge?
It’s been percolating for many, many years. It’s important to frame what’s happening right now in the prisons correctly. Most of the coverage has portrayed the event in terms of incarcerated people uniting against the prison system, but I think the situation is much more complicated and nuanced and volatile. I haven’t been calling it a “strike.” Because of these dynamics, I think “work stoppage” is more accurate. I do think that the incarcerated population is in unanimous agreement that the conditions inside the prisons are so dire, so desperate, so violent, chaotic, corrupt, and dangerous, that something absolutely has to change. And any remedy that might have resulted from the Department of Justice just hasn’t happened. The disappointment in things not changing as a result of the Department of Justice coming in has led to this work stoppage.
There are different factions inside the prisons involved in this action, and the tactics being used to achieve the stoppage vary by facility. I’ve talked to people who were involved in the organizing and they’re in complete support of doing this, however long it takes, through any means necessary, even if it ends in bloodshed. I’ve talked to people who support the demands that have been put out but don’t support tactics involving threats and intimidation. And then I’ve talked to people who absolutely don’t support this at all, but they’re going along with it out of fear. There are all kinds of dynamics at play. It’s not exactly a kumbaya moment inside the prisons. There’s a lot of anxiety and uncertainty—and a sense of dread—regarding how this will end, and I fear it will not end well.
To take a step back, how would you fundamentally describe the state of Alabama’s prisons, and how would you say they differ from the prisons in other parts of the country, if you think that they do?
Yeah, I do. The problems in Alabama are different, just because of scope and scale. The problems of overcrowding, understaffing, violence, and corruption are fundamental to our carceral system, and exist in every jail and prison across the United States, but in Alabama they’re all on steroids. In the past ten years or so, which is about the time that I’ve been consistently covering these issues, you have had a hemorrhaging of staff, coupled with an insistence on keeping people in prison as opposed to creating pathways out of prison, and an explosion in the contraband trade that, of course, is facilitated when there’s a lack of staff, or corrupt staff, in place.
Again, these issues exist everywhere, but they are so widespread and so normalized inside Alabama’s prison system that they exist around the clock. Any sentence can turn into a death sentence, and the level of violence, exploitation, sexual abuse, and extortion is just off the charts. It sounds like hyperbole when you start talking to people in the system because you just think there’s no way that all of it can be true. It sounds like “Lord of the Flies.” But I’ve been tracking the data, particularly the death data—it backs up all of these stories about the lawlessness that is pervasive throughout the system.
What data have you collected that particularly stand out to you?
Since 2018, I’ve been looking at the number of deaths inside the prisons, particularly deaths due to prison violence, like homicides between incarcerated people, homicides due to excessive force, drug-related deaths (which include overdoses and things such as disease or sepsis due to long-term I.V.-drug use), and also suicides. Over that period, we’ve seen this astonishing increase in deaths due to these causes.
What has really blown me away is the number of drug-related deaths. That skyrocketed during COVID. These are overdose deaths due to lethal levels of fentanyl, methamphetamines, and synthetic drugs that make their way through the prison. These are widely available, and very easy to obtain. They’re used out in the open, and trafficked by staff and incarcerated people. The people who end up in prison as a result of substance use are really the ones who are suffering, because they are immediately exploited and can very easily end up in debt. Their families are extorted, and they are regularly the victims of assault and murder.
In 2021, I tracked about forty deaths due to these causes. About twenty of them were drug-related. This year, I am at sixty such deaths, and we’ve just started October, so we’ve got three months to go. Forty of the deaths were connected to drugs—the number of drug-related deaths from last year to this year has doubled. These problems persist because there is an unwillingness to admit that the main source of this contraband trade is staff, and you can’t fix what you can’t admit.
The Department of Corrections will publicly announce arrests of officers who are caught with drugs, but I hear time and again from staff and from incarcerated people that those arrests really amount to low-hanging fruit. They have not chopped off the head of the snake, and this corruption is pervasive throughout the agency. It goes all the way up the food chain. Until they do that, these problems will continue.
We’ll link to the A.C.L.U. report that you did on these deaths, but can you explain why you think it’s gotten so much worse since 2018? We know that prisons were particularly hard hit by COVID. What has caused things to deteriorate so much in the last four years or so?
It’s interesting because it times out exactly as the Department of Justice has gotten actively involved in investigating Alabama’s prisons, releasing findings about the unconstitutional conditions, and then ultimately suing the state. You would think that the opposite would happen. You would think that things would improve. That hasn’t been the case.
I think there are a number of factors happening at once. Some of them we’ve already been talking about: the corruption and understaffing, which have only gotten worse. There’s been a real hemorrhaging of staff inside the agency. It’s more nuanced than just staff levels; the administration of the Department of Corrections made some decisions on how to address the understaffing that have not worked out well. Basic correctional officers are limited in their power; some very young, inexperienced, and unqualified people are filling a lot of these empty positions. As you can imagine, that creates a lot of discomfort among the staff. There has been an exodus, not just of officers but of a lot of the more seasoned lieutenants and captains and sergeants, people that are management-level correctional officers, because they’ve grown so frustrated with this dynamic of having to train very young, inexperienced people who have no idea what they’re walking into.
Do you think that the pandemic played a role?
During COVID, the prison population experienced a lot of worry and despair. Just like other states, Alabama was not robust in creating relief through accelerating medical furloughs or paroles. They did the opposite. Some states accelerated paroles, especially in elderly populations or for people who had served decades in prison. Alabama doubled down on denying parole. These few escape hatches that existed were really narrowed during COVID.
Alabama’s D.O.C. was the last in the country to reopen the prison to things like visitation. That became very frustrating to people on the inside, to be cut off from their families. For a long time, there was also a stoppage in place for services such as educational programs and religious services. That really added to the despair and low morale.
With the prison on this semi-lockdown due to COVID, the number of drug-related deaths started going up. People that followed this in Alabama kept asking, “Well, how are the drugs getting in?” It’s only essential personnel—there are no teachers, no lawyers, no visitors, no clergy. But the number of drug-related deaths and emergency-room visits due to drug toxicity was increasing. It seems that the despair from the COVID lockdown was also driving drug use inside prisons. Incarcerated people have a structured environment, where their job or their school is what fills up their day. When that suddenly stopped, and they’re sitting on their bed all day in a locked-down dorm, then, if drugs are available, it’s going to be very hard to say no, particularly if you already deal with substance-use issues.
You’ve written extensively on the parole issue. Why is that so important, and what’s been going on with parole in Alabama?
One of the demands that the organizers on the inside have made is that they want a fair and transparent parole process with mandatory criteria that would be applied evenly and fairly to everyone who’s eligible. Alabama’s parole board has three members, all of whom are political appointees. The governor chooses them, and, right now, all three have backgrounds in law enforcement: a former prosecutor, a former probation officer, and a former state trooper. There’s no representation for criminal defense or any kind of restorative-justice position. And under state law Alabama’s parole board has total discretion in how they make their decisions.
Alabama does have parole guidelines, which are in our state code, and they include some evidence-based criteria, which, in theory, the board is supposed to use in rendering its decision. But this board is flat out ignoring its own guidelines, which it can do. It has total discretion. According to the guidelines, parole is recommended in seventy to eighty per cent of the cases that they consider, but, if you look at the data, this board is only granting parole to a few hundred people a year, which amounts to ten per cent of the eligible people.
Do you have any idea why that is? Has something changed recently in terms of who is on the parole board, or is there a political issue here?
Both, I think. The political issue is that the former board chair, who supported these evidence-based criteria, was replaced with the former assistant attorney general. I should clarify that the former board chair publicly said that she was leaving of her own volition.
Part of it is reactionary to a situation where a man named Jimmy O’Neal Spencer was paroled, and several months later was arrested for the murder of three people. Immediately, the Governor and the attorney general blamed this on the parole board and put a moratorium on paroles for a while, and issued all kinds of statements about how the board was in crisis and never should have let this person out. That’s when these changes happened.
Nobody opposed Spencer’s parole at the time. He had served, I think, twenty-nine years in prison for burglaries, and he had a second-degree assault charge. He was paroled to a program but then left the program, and that’s where the breakdown occurred. It was in supervision. He left the program, and it’s really unclear why his parole wasn’t revoked and he wasn’t arrested then. While the case was horrific, what the attorney general and Governor were really going after was this steadily rising parole rate that had been happening under the previous board. The parole rate had crept up to about fifty-four per cent, which was extraordinarily high for Alabama. Historically, our parole rate has been around thirty per cent.
Can you describe the different factions among people within the prisons about how to respond to these conditions?
It’s important to say that every single incarcerated person I speak to in the prisons is unanimous in the opinion that this agency is in total chaos and crisis. The prisons are in a humanitarian crisis, and they’re asking the Department of Justice to intervene. But, when you’ve got a work stoppage or strike, there are just differing opinions and all sorts of feelings and mind sets that are expressed.
What would a solution from the Department of Justice look like? Do we have a model from other states where such an intervention actually improved conditions?
The D.O.J. has been pretty clear in the findings that it has released. The first were in April, 2019, and the D.O.J. concluded that Alabama’s prisons amount to cruel and unusual punishment, and that they are violating the Constitution. The D.O.J. gave a long list of potential remedies, both immediate and long-term, and laid out a framework for Alabama to follow, and made it explicitly clear that the answer to these problems is not in constructing new buildings. The prison crisis is not an infrastructure crisis—it’s not a crisis of buildings. It’s a crisis of people, involving people. And the D.O.J. said that “new facilities alone will not resolve the contributing factors to the unconstitutional conditions such as under-staffing, culture management deficiencies, corruption policies, training, non-existent investigations, violence, illicit drugs, and sexual abuse.”
The D.O.J. gave a window of time for Alabama to respond, and if the state did not respond there was the threat of a lawsuit. So Alabama responded, and they entered into talks to reach a consensus, and, when the D.O.J. decided to sue, in December of 2020, one of the reasons that it cited in its lawsuit was that they couldn’t reach a consensus. The talks fell apart, and, essentially, Alabama is arguing that things just aren’t as bad as the D.O.J. says.
To your question about whether there is a template or example that the state could follow in implementing recommendations from the D.O.J.: the example can be found right here in Alabama. It’s our women’s prison, Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women. In 2012, there was a federal complaint filed on behalf of fifty women, alleging all sorts of harm, including rapes and sexual harassment by prison staff. The D.O.J. came in, and immediately the state decided to work with them and implement reforms. Tutwiler is still operating under federal monitors because of that complaint, and, by and large, it has improved exponentially.
When I first started covering the Department of Corrections, all the calls I got were from Tutwiler. All the letters I got were from women at Tutwiler. I really don’t hear from them anymore. And it’s not that Tutwiler is perfect or that everything’s great. It’s still a very old prison, and there’s a lot of overcrowding. People incarcerated there are unhappy with some of the things that are going on. But is it unconstitutionally abusive? I don’t think so. Those problems were remedied. When the state wants to work with the federal government, it can.
We haven’t talked about any racial dynamics yet. Alabama is obviously a state with a large Black population—about twenty-five per cent of its total. What percentage of the people in Alabama’s prisons are Black?
They compose half of the prison population. So there’s an extraordinary overrepresentation of Black people in our prison system.
What role does race play in the lack of political will to address conditions in prison?
We have a governor who’s admitted to wearing blackface. That should tell you what the climate is down here. Now, she apologized for it. I don’t know how extensive the talks were between her and the Black legislative caucus, but that is what it is. We’re in the Deep South, and we have an elected governor who has admitted to wearing blackface. That’s just what bubbled up in my head.
You’re naming something that is very true, not just in Alabama but in other states around the country, and in our federal system. But it’s really, particularly gross in the Deep South. The people who have been most impacted by the lack of social services, poor education, and widespread poverty tend to be those whom politicians don’t care about. It’s Black people. It is also just poor people in general, people with mental illness, anyone who’s marginalized. We have this large population of people dealing with opioid addiction who haven’t been getting the attention and services they need.
I’ll give you an example of how politics have prevented reform. This is a death-penalty issue, so it’s a little different from what we’re talking about, but it’s still connected. Alabama had this peculiar practice of allowing judges to override a jury recommendation in capital-murder cases. There was a handful of states left that did it, and then it whittled down to just Alabama. We were the lone state that still allowed judicial override. One of the things that people found in studying this is that the number of death sentences would increase during election years. That is just an ugly look for our criminal-justice system—if we’re sentencing people to death for political gain.
For eleven years in a row, Senator Hank Sanders, a Black man from Selma, Alabama, introduced legislation to abolish the practice of judicial override in our court system. And, eleven years in a row, it went nowhere. In the twelfth year, a white Republican named Dick Brubaker told Sanders that he would carry the legislation, because he believed we needed to abolish judicial override and it was a terrible practice. He knew that he or somebody else who looked like him and was in his party would have to carry it. And so he did, and guess what happened? It passed.
Beth, thanks for chatting.
Can I just add one thing, Isaac? The bottom line is that the Alabama Department of Corrections doesn’t have control over its prisons on a normal day. And so, now that this work stoppage or takeover is in place, the D.O.C. can’t do a damn thing about it. They also don’t want to admit it, which is why they’re using tactics like depriving people of food, making things as uncomfortable as possible, to try to break people down. But the people in their custody are already broken down. They’re already deprived—they’re already uncomfortable, scared, desperate, feeling like the world doesn’t care—and so I don’t see how compounding those realities or just being indifferent to what they’re asking for will improve the situation or lead to a good outcome.
Mississippi's ill-advised governor wants to turn over the city's water system to a for-profit corporation
But Governor Reeves' words gave false assurances about the situation on the ground – and could signal a worrying desire to push a private takeover out of the national spotlight.
In contrast to the governor, residents of Jackson – who have been heroically leading recovery and justice in their communities – were telling a different story: The dangers of lead contamination were still a health hazard, and in many homes the water was clearly not safe to drink. The infrastructure remained fragile.
Year after year, intensifying storms have caused main breaks and water outages. This year it was the near-historic flooding that knocked out the city's main treatment facility; last year, it was a devastating winter storm that left residents without water for weeks. What Jackson needs – like many cities and towns across the country – is money to fix the problems. Writ large, the government has spent decades divesting from infrastructure funding; since 1977, federal funding for municipal water systems plummeted an astonishing 77 percent.
This is especially tragic in areas like Jackson, where decades of racist policies and population and wealth loss – much of it due to white flight following school integration in the 1970s – have hollowed out what little aid could be available. In 2020, Governor Reeves vetoed a bill designed to help the city improve its bond rating to finance new projects after a private meter replacement debacle. That legislation finally became law without his signature last year, yet legislators killed another proposal to help the city raise its own funding for water repairs.
The city's water system needs as much as $1 billion in improvements; last year, the state provided just $3 million – a mere 6 percent of what the mayor requested and less than 1 percent of the projects funded by the state.
What Governor Reese has prioritized, meanwhile, is turning over the city's water system to a for-profit corporation. "Privatization is on the table," he announced early this month, making a more pointed threat days later: "To the residents of Jackson, I would simply say, I don't think it's very likely that the city is going to operate the water system in the City of Jackson anytime soon, if ever."
But privatization is not so much a solution as it is an invitation to new problems. It would exacerbate the city's water affordability crisis, driving up the cost of those necessary improvements to cover corporate taxes and profits. On average, private companies charge 59 percent more than local governments charge for water service. Private ownership is the biggest factor driving higher rates – playing a bigger role than drought or aging infrastructure.
And in an unbelievably callous maneuver, corporate water operators have been weighing in to point fingers. While at least one CEO has admitted that water privatization simply cannot work in Jackson because there is no room for profit, the corporate water lobby continues to exploit the crisis to advocate water privatization and rationalize their higher prices.
Of course, it is not surprising that they would present themselves as the solution. But this kind of shameless public relations might be seen as self-preservation: Local communities have been rising up to fight water privatization deals, and they are winning. Just weeks ago, a corporate attempt to seize a sewer system in Pennsylvania was derailed by robust grassroots opposition led by Neighbors Opposing Privatization Efforts (NOPE). What would have been the largest sewer sale in the history of the country turned out to be a colossal embarrassment for the industry.
All levels of government must continue the emergency mobilization to guarantee clean water in Jackson. Congress provided $20 million last month for Jackson, but this is a drop in the bucket of what's needed. It must step up and appropriate additional direct grants to the city to fund a full recovery. And it's clear that the federal government must stop waiting for catastrophic system failures before making the investments to ensure that every community has safe water. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021 was a downpayment on this vision, but it met just about 7 percent of what communities need to provide safe water and sanitation. The Water Affordability, Transparency, Equity and Reliability (WATER) Act, which would create a $35 billion annual trust fund, is the bold legislation that would help deliver water justice to communities nationally.
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