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Kevin McCarthy Brags About Making Struggling Americans Work for Food
Peter Wade, Rolling Stone
Wade writes: "After the White House and Republicans in Congress reached a tentative agreement on the debt ceiling, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy went on Fox News Sunday to boast about making struggling Americans work in order to continue receiving food aid."
"We're gonna get America working again" the House speaker said of a nation with record low unemployment
After the White House and Republicans in Congress reached a tentative agreement on the debt ceiling, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy went on Fox News Sunday to boast about making struggling Americans work in order to continue receiving food aid.
Although precise details have not been released, the deal will increase the maximum age at which adults must work in order to receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) food stamps from age 50 to 54. There are exceptions, however, for veterans, unhoused individuals, and those with dependents. The deal also includes changes to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) but those details have not been made public.
“We finally were able to cut spending. We’re the first Congress to vote for cutting spending year over year,” McCarthy boasted Sunday on Fox. “So, you cut that back. You fully fund the veterans. You fully fund defense. But you take that non-defense spending all the way back to 2022 levels. Now you get work requirements for TANF and SNAP. The Democrats said that was a red line.”
At another point in the interview, McCarthy claimed that “We’re going to get America working again,” and that the deal includes “work requirements to help people out of poverty into jobs.” At this, host Shannon Bream pushed back on McCarthy, arguing that the work requirements are not tough enough for the most extreme members of the GOP caucus.
“The White House, that’s an area where they’re celebrating,” Bream said of the work requirements. “They say there are no changes to Medicaid. You referenced SNAP and TANF. So basically, SNAP includes an expansion for veterans and people who are homeless. So there’s an expansion there to some extent… and the changes that you did get will lift the age and the requirements and those kinds of things, but they sunset. So they don’t last for very long.”
It should be noted, though, that the vast majority of Americans are working. Unemployment remains extremely low at 3.4 percent as of this April.
McCarthy also bragged about cutting funding to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “This is the largest recision in American history,” McCarthy said. “You can add up all the recisions from all the other Congresses. This is greater. And what are we pulling back? CDC’s Global Health Fund. So no longer are we sending $400 million of American taxpayers’ money to China.”
According to the CDC, the Global Health Fund supports HIV/AIDS prevention and care, immunizations, and global disease detection and emergency response. On the heels of a global pandemic, cutting this funding seems dangerous, but after seeing their response to Covid, it’s not surprising that Republicans in Congress don’t take global health seriously.
Returning to the topic of work requirements, McCarthy said, “At the end of the day, it saves more money, ’cause what does a work requirement do? It’s only on able-bodied people with no dependents. Instead of borrowing money from China to pay somebody to sit on the couch, we now give them the process to go get a job. Every study has shown when you do that, it puts people to work. And when they work, what happens? More people are paying into social security and Medicare.”
Sure, it may “save” some money in food aid, but at what cost?
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The former president wants to 'immediately' purge the Justice Department's ranks of the officials and agents who've led the criminal probes into his actions. (photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters)
Team Trump Scrambles to Unmask the Feds Investigating Him
Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley, Rolling Stone
Excerpt: "In recent months, the former president has asked close advisers, including at least one of his personal attorneys, if 'we know' all the names of senior FBI agents and Justice Department personnel who have worked on the federal probes into him. That's according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter and another person briefed on it."
The former president wants to “immediately” purge the Justice Department’s ranks of the officials and agents who’ve led the criminal probes into his actions
Donald Trump just needs a few names.
In recent months, the former president has asked close advisers, including at least one of his personal attorneys, if “we know” all the names of senior FBI agents and Justice Department personnel who have worked on the federal probes into him. That’s according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter and another person briefed on it.
Trump has then privately discussed that should he return to the White House, it is imperative his new Department of Justice “quickly” and “immediately” purge the FBI and DOJ’s ranks of these officials and agents who’ve led the Trump-related criminal investigations, the sources recount. The ex-president has of course dubbed all such probes as illegitimate “witch hunts,” and is now campaigning for the White House on a platform of “retribution” and cleaning house.
Separately, the twice-impeached former president has been saying for many months that on “day one” of his potential second term, he wants FBI director Christopher Wray “out” of the bureau, according to another source familiar with the matter and two people close to Trump. It’s an ironic turn, given that Trump appointed Wray in 2017.
(Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump’s 2024 primary rival, has also pledged to fire Wray, telling Fox News last week that he’d do so on “day one.”)
But in the years since, Trump came to deeply distrust Wray. By the end of 2020, Trump was venting to senior administration officials that he would make it a top priority to replace Wray “next year,” blasting the director for not wholesale purging the FBI of non-Trump-loyalists. Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, and thus didn’t get his chance to fire Wray in 2021.
During some of the conversations this year, including at Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago, some of Trump’s close political allies told him that they are working on figuring out the identities of the FBI and DOJ staff and forming lists, two of the sources relay to Rolling Stone.
However, others have complained that the feds aren’t making it easy for them.
In December 2022, the conservative nonprofit Judicial Watch — run by prominent Trump ally Tom Fitton — filed a Freedom of Information Act request demanding information about “all employees hired by or detailed to the office of Special Counsel Jack Smith.” In April, the Justice Department denied the request on the ground that it was an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy” and that it would “interfere with enforcement proceedings.”
“One can only conclude, after seeing the uproar over the anti-Trump, partisan Mueller operation, that the Garland Justice Department has something to hide about Jack Smith and his prosecutors again targeting Trump and other Republicans with unprecedented investigations,” Fitton said at the time.
On Friday, Fitton told Rolling Stone that the DOJ is still “stonewalling” him and his group on the identities: “I don’t understand why it is that the names of prosecutors involved in a criminal investigation are secret. The Durham report shows it’s important we know who’s working there. We don’t want Social Security numbers or personal phone numbers, but certainly senior leaders and others who are pursuing this need to be disclosed.
“We were able to get hiring material for the Mueller investigations, interviews applications and stuff like that,” he added.
Fitton said his group is still seeking the information administratively, but that “ this is the type of lawsuit we typically would pursue.”
Other developments have made it harder for MAGA allies to create a comprehensive list of whom to potentially fire. Prior to Smith’s appointment, full names — in official DOJ email addresses — would appear in emails sent by Justice Department lawyers working on the Trump-related probes, to attorneys for subjects and likely targets of the investigations. But in the time since Special Counsel Smith started overseeing the probes last year, such emails began at times only showing initials for multiple DOJ addresses, obscuring the names of certain lawyers or personnel working on the special counsel’s team, according to a source with direct knowledge of the situation.
The feds, including Special Counsel Smith’s office, are currently investigating Trump and his associates for their efforts leading up to the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol attack, as well as for the ex-president’s hoarding of classified documents after he left office. Trump remains the leading candidate for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination in various polls, and he has already been indicted in a separate criminal investigation in New York. His lawyers are also expecting a federal indictment in the Justice Department’s Mar-a-Lago documents probe soon, and have already briefed Trump as such.
The identities of law enforcement personnel involved in the Mar-a-Lago investigation have been a flashpoint between Trump and the Justice Department since the FBI executed a search warrant on his residence in August 2022. Prosecutors unsealed a copy of the search warrant with the names of agents redacted, but the former president posted a copy of the document with the names of two FBI agents involved in the search.
The search kicked off an “unprecedented” number of threats against FBI agents and an attack by an armed Trump supporter on the FBI’s Cincinnati field office.
Trump’s latest crusade against the FBI coincides with his plans for a complete remaking of the federal bureaucracy. That includes promises to install extreme loyalists like Jeffrey Clark and Michael Flynn, who aided Trump’s anti-democratic efforts to overturn the 2020 election outcome. Trump also has pledged to sign an executive order, dubbed Schedule F, that would make it easier to hire loyalists and fire nonpartisan civil servants.
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the sweeping anti-immigration bill, which is among the strictest in the country, on May 10. It will go into effect on July 1. (photo: Rebecca Blackwell/AP)
Why Florida's New Immigration Law Is Troubling Businesses and Workers Alike
Vanessa Romo, NPR
Romo writes: "Pressure is growing for a boycott of Florida, including Latino truck drivers who vow to stop deliveries across the state and calls for an immigrant labor strike on June 1. Businesses are pledging to shutter their doors for the day to protest Gov. Ron DeSantis' sweeping new immigration law."
Pressure is growing for a boycott of Florida, including Latino truck drivers who vow to stop deliveries across the state and calls for an immigrant labor strike on June 1. Businesses are pledging to shutter their doors for the day to protest Gov. Ron DeSantis' sweeping new immigration law.
For years, the Republican presidential hopeful has railed relentlessly against U.S. immigration policies and newly arrived asylum-seekers. Senate Bill 1718, which takes effect on July 1, will offer a preview of the controversial changes DeSantis has said he'd like to see Congress implement.
Among its provisions, the strict new state legislation limits social services for undocumented immigrants, allocates millions more tax dollars to expand DeSantis' migrant relocation program, invalidates driver's licenses issued to undocumented people by other states, and requires hospitals that get Medicaid dollars to ask for a patient's immigration status.
But the most worrisome measures — for businesses and undocumented immigrants alike — are the host of penalties for those who violate new employment mandates.
Supporters say it will help expel the recent influx of immigrants, stave off future arrivals, and provide more job opportunities to citizens and others in the country lawfully. Critics say it will cost the state billions in lost revenue, while many of the harshest penalties are unlikely to be enforced.
Here's a look at key provisions of the law and how they may impact the state's economy.
E-Verify requirements
What the law says:
To crack down on businesses hiring undocumented workers, SB 1718 will require private employers with 25 or more employees that are making new hires to use E-Verify, the federal online database that employers use to confirm whether someone is eligible to work in the U.S.
What the potential impacts are:
Business advocates across the state are concerned.
Samuel Vilchez Santiago, Florida director of the American Business Immigration Coalition, an advocacy group for immigration reform that benefits businesses, told NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday that the change will likely have a significant impact on Florida's agriculture, construction and hospitality sectors.
"These are industries where immigrants make up the vast majority of workers, and not allowing businesses to be able to utilize these workers will have a really big impact on our economy and their ability to create jobs," Vilchez said.
That's a big problem for Florida, where there's already a widespread labor shortage and the unemployment rate is low — just 2.6% in April.
The Florida Policy Institute, a nonprofit policy research group, estimates that without undocumented workers, the state's most labor-intensive industries would "lose 10 percent of their workforce and the wages they contribute along with them." That could lead to a drop of $12.6 billion in Florida's GDP in a single year — about 1.1% — which would, in turn, cut workers' spending power and reduce state and local tax revenue.
There's been a wave of videos on social media showing images of vacant construction sites and fruit and vegetable fields where harvests remain unpicked and are rotting. According to the videos' narrators, the job sites have been abandoned by people who fear the new bill's E-Verify requirements.
While it's difficult to corroborate the videos, immigrant rights advocates say they've been overwhelmed by people asking if they should continue to show up for work.
"We have heard from a lot of families who have a lot of questions," Evelyn Wiese, a litigation attorney for Americans for Immigrant Justice, told NPR. "The problem with these kinds of laws is that they attack folks in so many different ways. And because they're often very unclear when they first come out, they really do inspire huge levels of fear."
Enforcing the hiring rule
What the law says:
Florida's Department of Economic Opportunity will be responsible for enforcing the E-Verify requirement, and DeSantis has touted new, harsh penalties for employers who violate it.
A graphic on the governor's website states that employers who fail to use E-Verify will be fined $1,000 a day. For workers, it will be a felony to use a false ID to get a job.
What the potential impacts are:
But a closer look at the legislation clarifies that these penalties apply only after an employer fails to use the database three or more times within two years. In those instances, the DEO can also suspend applicable business licenses until the employer provides proof of compliance.
As well, the agency "does not have a robust enforcement section," according to the Florida Policy Institute, and creating new positions to oversee the provisions would result in significant costs.
The CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank, found that other states, including Arkansas and Arizona, which have passed similar E-Verify mandates, are "widely ignoring the mandate."
In Arizona, two-time offenders of the law faced the permanent revocation of the employer's license at the location in question, essentially shutting it down for good. But as of 2015 — seven years after E-Verify became mandatory in 2008 — prosecutors had charged only three businesses, according to the study.
The study also found that the E-Verify requirement doesn't achieve what lawmakers set out to do: It doesn't significantly decrease the employment of unauthorized workers nor deter unlawful immigration. One reason is that people who are undocumented often work under the table to avoid a paper trail altogether. Another is that E-Verify doesn't match against death records, so some people are able to dupe the system by using Social Security numbers belonging to deceased people.
Redefining human smuggling
What the law says:
Under the new law, a person who transports into Florida someone they know (or should have known) is an immigrant who has not been "inspected" by authorities could be charged with a felony for human smuggling.
A person who is found transporting fewer than five immigrants on their first offense could be charged with a third-degree felony. They can be sentenced to up to five years in prison per person or pay a fine of $5,000 per count, with penalties increasing dramatically for a subsequent offense or for transporting more people or children.
What the potential impacts are:
This provision was among the most hotly contested and will likely face strong legal challenges because it's so poorly written, attorney Evelyn Wiese told NPR.
"As someone who has practiced immigration law for many years, I'm not exactly sure what the law means by 'inspected,'" she said.
Wiese noted that the Republican lawmakers failed to define the term in the Florida bill and that it deviates from federal immigration laws. Without clarification, she said, legislators have created a situation that could lead to tens of thousands of people being falsely arrested and possibly detained.
"That's causing a lot of fear for mixed-status families, for mixed-status groups of friends," Wiese added.
The Florida Policy Institute estimates that there are 130,000 U.S. citizens in Florida who are married to undocumented immigrants. It is conceivable that under the law, a U.S.-born spouse traveling from out of state could be charged with a third-degree felony for transporting their husband or wife into Florida. Similarly, farmworkers who travel together or with family could also be charged.
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Frank, a homeless man sits in his tent with a river view in Portland, Ore, June 5, 2021. (photo: Paula Bronstein/AP)
I've Never Seen So Much Vitriol': Activist Paul Boden on America's Homelessness Crisis
Erin McCormick, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "The old system wasn't perfect by any means. But when it existed, you didn't have millions of people living out in your streets."
Leading voice demanding rights for the unhoused discusses the history of homelessness and where the US can go from here
Back in 1983, when a recession and horrible rainstorms thrust homelessness in the political spotlight in San Francisco, Paul Boden was already familiar with life on the streets.
Then 23, he had been squatting, couch-surfing and staying at hostels since he was 16. When he saw people lining up to get spots in San Francisco’s first temporary emergency shelters, Boden volunteered to help out.
Women were sleeping on the cafeteria floors of St Anthony’s food kitchen while men, with their sleeping bags and clothes in tow, were crashing in the chairs and on the rug at nearby Hospitality House.
Four decades later, Boden is still a leading voice in demanding rights for the unhoused.
He served as the director of San Francisco’s Coalition on Homelessness, a non-profit organization fighting to empower those without homes, for 16 years, and now serves as the executive director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project (Wrap), which works to eliminate the root causes of homelessness and demand protection of human rights.
Along the way, he and his colleagues have been documenting the path that led to the devastating problem of homelessness that the US faces today.
There were 582,500 people counted as being homeless in the national one-night head count in January 2022, which Boden says counts only the most obvious cases of homelessness and misses many others. Across the US, only 33 affordable homes are available for every 100 extremely low-income renter households.
The Guardian spoke with Boden about the history of homelessness in the US and what he sees as meaningful solutions. The conversation is edited for length and clarity.
Let’s start at the beginning. You’ve argued that the homelessness emergency the US is facing today is rooted in actions that began in the 1980s. How did it all begin?
It was massive cuts to federal affordable housing programs, part of the Reagan revolution. By 1983, affordable housing funding had basically bottomed out.
Wrap just finished research that shows that there are 438,289 fewer units of public housing available today than there were in 1994. Betty Crocker couldn’t give you a better recipe for how to end up in a situation where people are living out in your streets.
What did public housing look like before the 1980s and what happened to change the direction?
The federal department that we now call Housing and Urban Development (HUD) was created in 1937 in response to massive homelessness (following the Great Depression). The enabling legislation said the government has the responsibility to ensure that all of its citizens have a clean, safe, decent place to live that they can afford.
But in 1998, the legislation was changed to say the federal government cannot be held accountable to ensure that even a majority of its citizens have a place to live. The federal government said: “Oh, no, no, we’re not responsible. We’ve relieved ourselves of this responsibility.”
In 1994 and 95, the Hope VI program under Bill Clinton that aimed to rebuild public housing tore down a lot of public housing and made it mixed-income.
California senator and former San Francisco mayor Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation that overturned the law that said that if the government destroys a unit of federal housing, it is legally required to replace that unit.
Then, in the late 90s came welfare reform, imposing all kinds of caps and limits [on aid to poor families]. Three hundred thousand people were cut off from social security benefits in a single day because they were labeled as “dual diagnosed” (having mental illness coupled with drug dependency). And you could no longer get social security if part of your disability was a drug addiction.
So it was the dismantling of all these different systems: your housing system, your welfare system, your disability systems. At the time we were also wiping out halfway houses and lodges for mentally ill people. Then you wonder why all of these different folks, whose main thing in common is living in poverty, ended up out on your streets.
Weren’t there a lot of problems with public housing basically ghettoizing people of color?
Oh yes, there were all kinds of problems, including redlining. Don’t by any stretch of the imagination think that I’m saying everything was so perfect back in the day. But the current approach is not fixing it.
What has our response been these last 40 years?
In the 1980s, the Federal Emergency Management Agency started funding emergency shelters. These were supposed to be temporary facilities at the time of a crisis. The mantra at the time was basically: we’re in a recession and times are tough for everybody, so people are homeless, but as soon as the recession is over, they’re all gonna go back home. The reality was, there were no homes for them to go back to.
We’ve never gone back to a safety-net program structure or a housing program structure. Today we have program after program, sweep after sweep, security ambassadors, business improvement districts, all of these efforts to mitigate the presence of homelessness without doing a damn thing about what caused the advent of contemporary homelessness in the early 1980s.
Political leaders would say: we have to do something right away. Well, now it’s 40 years later, and the San Francisco board of supervisors just passed a resolution to open up 2,000 more shelter beds.
The old system wasn’t perfect by any means. But when it existed, you didn’t have millions of people living out in your streets.
Instead, they chose the cheapest way that they could show a pretense of caring at all about the human beings that are living out in the street.
But we are still funding subsidized housing, right?
Yes, there are low-income housing vouchers that are privatizing accommodation of affordable housing, so that a private landlord can make a profit off of it. That basically means you have an incredibly poor person who’s homeless and you’re sending them out into the open market to find private landlords that will accept a HUD voucher, and all the bureaucracy that comes with it. If you’ve got a disability, if you’re a person of color, well then good luck! You think racism and classism don’t exist in America anymore, just because someone has a voucher?
What are the current trends you’re seeing in working with the unhoused population?
In the 40 years I’ve been doing this in 13 cities that we work in, I have never seen so much vitriol coming from neighborhood associations, business groups, civic groups and tech groups, saying these people need to go. Those groups are saying: “We’ve been looking at this homelessness for 40 years, and we’re sick of it. We don’t want to see it any more.”
We’ve had non-profits telling us that they’re gonna fix it. We’ve had people running for mayor saying they’re gonna make it disappear. And we have a federal government that says you can’t hold us accountable for the fact that it homelessness even exists any more.
People seem to be saying: “if I don’t see poor people, then I don’t have to worry that there’s too much poverty in America. If I don’t see homeless people, I don’t have to worry that we have a homeless problem. Because if I don’t see it, it’s not a problem.”
How have the numbers of unhoused people changed?
The number of people who are homeless has gone up, yes. But the real change is that the longevity of homelessness and the difficulty of getting through the system is off the hook.
In the early 80s, when senior citizens would come to me, it might take me two weeks to find them a place to live. Now it’s next to impossible. It might take five years. Now you have to be finger imaged to get into the shelter system. You have to call a hotline number and get on a waiting list that has 1,400 names on it.
And then local officials turn around and argue that the homeless people are “service resistant”.
It’s unconscionable. After 40 years, it’s so hard to get our leaders to even admit that what they’ve been doing is never gonna work.
It seems like the government, at least in San Francisco and Los Angeles, has been spending a lot of money building new housing or converting hotels to housing for the homeless. If we are creating all this housing, what’s going wrong?
First, taking a single-room occupancy hotel off the open market and converting it to a homeless program is not creating anything. It’s changing who’s able to live in the hotel. And it’s changing the management of the hotel. They rob Peter to pay Paul. But it’s a lot cheaper than actually building housing.
And mostly, when you hear about new affordable housing that’s being built, if you look at the affordability requirements to live there … it can be people with incomes of like $90,000.
What would you propose as a good way to actually provide deeply subsidized housing?
I would go back to the original legislation from 1937. And I would say the federal government needs to be held accountable to find affordable housing for the poorest people in this country. No waiting list, no intakes. We don’t care where you were born. We don’t care if you’ve ever gone to jail. We don’t care who lives in your house – you’re eligible! You’ve just gotta fund it.
The idea is to create units that are mixed income that are spread across the city that are habitable and that poor people can afford to live in.
That’s a tall order!
Yeah, it’s a tall order. It’s a restructuring of a society that has gone so far off-kilter. That the idea that people even merit a decent place to live regardless of their income is more foreign to us now than it was in 1937.
It’s like, you’re still trying to rearrange the chairs on the deck of the Titanic and you hit the iceberg 40 years ago.
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A hallway at the Tulsa County jail in Oklahoma, which has two units for mentally ill inmates. (photo: Michael Noble Jr./The Wall Street Journal)
With Psych Wards Full, Mentally Ill Accused of Crimes Languish in Jail
Dan Frosch and Elizabeth Findell, The Wall Street Journal
Excerpt: "An exploding number of mentally ill jail inmates is overwhelming space in psychiatric hospitals across the U.S."
Those referred for treatment in order to stand trial can wait behind bars longer than the sentence for the crime they’re charged with
Week after week, Barbara Vassis watches as her daughter sinks deeper into a delusional world while sitting in a Boulder, Colo., jail cell.
Vassis can still picture Erin Brown as a gifted artist and chef who bubbled with energy. But last summer the 32-year-old, who had long battled schizoaffective disorder and struggled with meth addiction, was charged with breaking into her mother’s home. Vassis said her daughter stole tools, electronics and other valuables, as well as her pickup truck.
Brown was found not competent to stand trial. A judge ordered that she receive inpatient psychiatric treatment so she could face the charges.
Nine months after her arrest, Colorado’s state hospitals still have no free bed for her.
An exploding number of mentally ill jail inmates is overwhelming space in psychiatric hospitals across the U.S., a Wall Street Journal analysis of state data shows. It is a mounting crisis as more inmates languish in jail without court-ordered treatment, not convicted and unable to stand trial.
Brown is among around 450 inmates in Colorado alone stuck in this situation, their condition often steadily deteriorating. She now writes rambling letters to her mother, saying she is finishing up details to save the universe and has met her husband, somebody named Brandon.
State mental-health and jail officials are frustrated but say they are struggling against a tide of people in crisis. “It’s such an inept system we are working in...She has been here 226 days, as of today,” the Boulder jail’s mental-health supervisor, Pam Levett, wrote to Vassis in April about her daughter.
The Journal queried all 50 states in March on the number of people accused of crimes who are waiting in jail for inpatient treatment so they can be stabilized enough to stand trial. Of the 39 states that provided complete data, 34 saw their wait lists for such treatment lengthen since before the pandemic. Many of the lists are triple or even quadruple what they were. In some cases, inmates are waiting behind bars longer than the maximum sentence for the crimes of which they’re accused.
In Texas, the number of jail inmates waiting for competency treatment has more than doubled since 2019 to 2,466. That is nearly a thousand more than the number of state psychiatric beds in operation.
Maryland had no jail inmates in 2019 waiting for psychiatric treatment to get them fit for trial. The number grew so high since then—126 as of earlier this year—that state health officials last September formed an “incident command system” to try to reduce it.
Oklahoma’s wait list grew so long that health officials recently scrapped it and began medicating mentally ill inmates in the jails, trying to restore them to competency for trial there.
Among causes of the logjam, the number of people accused of crimes and referred for psychiatric treatment rose as mental health worsened during the pandemic. Covid-related disruptions to community mental-health care and addiction treatment also contributed to more episodes leading to arrests, state officials and mental-health advocates say.
Unlike psychiatric hospitals, jails typically won’t or can’t force inmates to take medication. Prescriptions available in jails are often more limited, adjusting them is more complicated, and practitioners aren’t always on hand to monitor patients. Confinement and the presence of law enforcement can contribute to psychotic delusions, experts said.
Compounding the problem is a scarcity of behavioral-health services and workers that has grown dire, state leaders and mental-health advocates say.
At the Kentucky Correctional Psychiatric Center, staffing shortages mean that only 35 of the 87 beds for jail inmates needing treatment are in use.
In Texas, a new high-security psychiatric unit sat empty for six months because the state couldn’t find employees to open it. The unit has begun accepting patients, but only nine of 70 beds are available due to lack of staff, a state health spokeswoman said. Jail inmates in Texas wait an average of eight months for a state hospital bed, nearly double the time in January 2020.
Last November, a 32-year-old Missouri man set a Bible on fire on the steps of a St. Louis church.
The man—who had a pre-existing diagnosis of schizophrenia, according to his public defender—spent the next five months in jail waiting for a competency evaluation to see if he was fit for trial. That process is typically initiated by defense lawyers concerned about a client’s mental health.
The exam determined he was unable to understand the charges against him. He was placed on a wait list to be transferred to a state hospital for treatment to stabilize him sufficiently so his legal case could proceed.
The man is now among 229 inmates waiting for one of Missouri’s 897 psychiatric-hospital beds, all already occupied.
Given the six-months-plus that inmates are waiting for beds, he may spend more time in jail before getting treatment than the maximum one-year sentence for his misdemeanor charge for setting the fire, said his public defender, Susan Bauer. She said her client isn’t well enough to give her permission to share his name.
Bauer, who is also a licensed professional counselor, said she has seen her client’s delusions worsen while he waits in jail. Initially, he was clearly ill, she said, but she could converse with him. Now he is refusing to take medication, and a recent meeting ended with him banging on the jail doors and yelling at guards to chop off her head, Bauer said.
“The longer he stays in this state, the worse his prognosis becomes,” she said.
Jeanette Simmons, deputy division director at Missouri’s mental-health department, said the agency faced severe staffing shortages during the pandemic alongside nonstop court orders for competency treatment. The state is adding 40 beds to treat more inmates. “Currently, what we’re doing is not sustainable,” Simmons said.
Inmates who are declared fit for trial after a competency evaluation, and those successfully restored for trial in state hospitals, sometimes regress while then waiting in jail for their cases to be heard, counselors said. That triggers the entire process to restart.
In Kentucky, defense lawyers said that a few years ago, their clients could typically get competency evaluations within 60 days of an arrest. Now it can take 10 to 12 months in jail waiting just for that initial assessment, they said.
In central Appalachia, a Kentucky man named Bobby Kilbourne Jr. was arrested in late 2019 after police responded to a call he had made saying he was a federal marshal and was being shot at.
He was declared fit for trial after an evaluation at the state’s correctional psychiatric hospital, but his case was pushed back, and he remained in jail.
In July 2021, 20 months after his arrest, his father, Bobby Kilbourne Sr., sent the jail a handwritten letter saying his son had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, wasn’t able to access his medications behind bars and needed to be sent back to the psychiatric hospital.
The father wrote that he had talked to a judge, who he said told him “Bobby don’t need to be in jail. But there are no places around here to help him.”
“I hope you read this,” the father wrote.
A few days later, another competency evaluation was ordered. This time, the son waited more than a year before being sent to the psychiatric hospital for the evaluation. He was kept there for weeks of treatment and then declared competent a second time.
In January, Kilbourne Jr. was released from jail under the condition that he receive outpatient treatment for mental health and substance abuse for one year, after agreeing to a pretrial diversion program.
Reached by phone, he said his “mental health has nothing to do with me being a federal agent” before hanging up. His father said in an interview that someone had indeed shot at his son before he was arrested. Kilbourne Sr. said his son should have been hospitalized instead of jailed.
The son’s release came more than three years after his arrest.
“He’d been waiting in jail all this time on a crime he’d not been convicted of,” said Bill Melton, a public defender who represented him.
Kentucky health officials didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Health officials in Oklahoma, facing a wait list for state-hospital beds that had jumped to 280 from 41 in 2019, plus a critical report by a legal advocacy group, switched last December to medicating mentally ill inmates in jail. Inmates now may or may not receive inpatient care as part of their state treatment. Thus, the state says, there no longer is a wait list for the state hospital.
“The main reason people are incompetent due to mental illness is due to psychosis, and you treat that with medication,” said Duran Crosby, chief of staff and operations for the state mental-health department.
He said starting medications quickly and keeping them consistent is more important than transferring someone to a hospital. “It’s much cheaper in the long run, and it’s better for the patient too,” he said.
In Tulsa, the new strategy has infuriated prosecutors, defense attorneys, mental-health-care advocates and law-enforcement personnel, who say the state is dumping the problem on local authorities and trying to avoid litigation. Representatives of four jail inmates sued the state in March alleging unconstitutional delays in competency treatment.
Tulsa County District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler and Chief Public Defender Corbin Brewster, both critics of the new policy, meet regularly to discuss defendants whose lawyers have raised competency concerns. Their offices share a color-coded spreadsheet of cases. While the state says there’s no longer a waiting list for competency treatment, the two track where they believe defendants would be in a queue for such treatment in a hospital.
The issue is personal for Kunzweiler. In September, his 31-year-old daughter, Jennifer Kunzweiler, was arrested after she stabbed him, and herself, several times during a psychotic episode. Both were hospitalized.
She was declared fit to stand trial, spent four months in jail and then was found not guilty by reason of mental illness before being committed to the state hospital.
The D.A., a Republican, said the episode heightened his concern for mentally ill jail inmates and left him angry that the state wasn’t pushing to fund treatment in medical settings. “I can’t help being frustrated, as a parent and a taxpayer and prosecutor and a Catholic,” he said.
In the Tulsa County jail, the sickest men are isolated in individual cells, some with posted memos warning that the occupant is “highly assaultive” or “will spit on you.” A back row of cells holds those deemed suicidal, naked and watched by a guard.
On an April morning, some inmates lay motionless in their beds and others sat staring into space, several with trash or crushed food containers shoved up against cell doors.
The 41-year-old man in cell V1 first waved at visitors, then motioned no, furrowed his eyebrows, began talking to himself and dropped his jumpsuit pants.
Accused in 2021 of obstructing a police officer and grabbing a woman’s behind, the man had been waiting in jail 418 days since a judge ordered him transferred to the state hospital for an attempt to restore his competency for trial, according to documents provided by defense attorneys.
Sheriff Vic Regalado, a Republican whose office runs the county jail, said it was no place for people so sick.
“We currently run the largest mental-health facility in the state of Oklahoma and it’s in a jail, and that’s just wrong,” he said.
Several states are under federal court orders or agreements, some from well before the pandemic, to accelerate competency treatment. The surge in mentally ill inmates has made it impossible to meet the mandates.
In Washington, a federal judge in 2015 ordered the state to hospitalize jail inmates for competency-restoration treatment within seven days of a court order. According to the state health department, wait times currently range from about four months to nearly 11 months.
The Washington health department said it has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in new bed capacity. Legislation signed by Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee on May 15 would add mental-health workers in jails to expedite restoration. Inslee said the number of inmates needing competency treatment had grown unmanageable.
Colorado, which has been under a 2019 federal court agreement to speed competency treatment, has since paid $29.7 million in fines for failing to reduce wait times. The money is distributed to mental-health programs aimed at decreasing the backlog.
Leora Joseph, a former prosecutor who heads Colorado’s Office of Civil and Forensic Mental Health, said many jail inmates waiting to have their competency for trial restored in a state hospital are low-level offenders, and about half are homeless. She said the state is seeking to join with private facilities to add beds and is offering bonuses to hire more mental-health nurses.
“We have about 460 people waiting in jail. They haven’t been adjudicated yet, and they’re really sick,” she said earlier this year.
Barbara Vassis, the mother of Erin Brown, spends a chunk of her week sifting through options for her jailed daughter. There’s a chance of getting her released to a community treatment facility that could help restore her competency outside of jail. But beds are rarely available there, and Brown has to consent to go, Vassis said she was told.
Levett, the Boulder jail’s mental health supervisor, said she’d been informed that Brown may finally get admitted to a state hospital soon.
“246, 253, 223, 302…” she said, rattling off the number of days inmates have been waiting for a state-hospital bed. “It’s heart-wrenching for us because we feel hopeless.”
Vassis, a retired state education administrator, said that on a recent video call from jail her daughter appeared worse than she’d ever seen her, talking about how she’d soon be taken to a palace with gold laces, her voice trailing off midsentence.
Vassis still believes Brown could one day be a productive member of society. She doubted her daughter would ever be ruled competent to stand trial until she was out of jail and in a mental-health facility.
“How long does this cycle continue?” she said.
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Lakeisha Lee placed flowers at the base of a monument honoring her late sister Brittany Clardy Thursday, May 26, in Saint Paul. Clardy went missing more than a decade ago and was found murdered. (photo: Dana Ferguson/MPR News)
The First Office for Missing and Murdered Black Women and Girls Set for Minnesota
Dana Ferguson, NPR
Ferguson writes: "Much like offices around the country designed to find Indigenous women and girls, Minnesota's office will investigate cold cases and reopen cases where Black women or girls were declared to have died by suicide or drug overdose if the situation was suspicious."
Alittle more than a month before her late sister's birthday, Lakeisha Lee lays down a pot of purple flowers in front of a monument honoring Brittany Clardy.
Just over a decade ago, when she was 18, Clardy went missing.
Lee and her family notified the police almost immediately when Clardy didn't answer their calls or messages on social media. Lee says officers initially brushed them off.
"We knew something was wrong right away," Lee says. "After they asked us her age and asked us about her demographics, they said, 'Well, she just turned 18, she probably ran away with her boyfriend.' We knew her. We're the experts on our family."
Two weeks later, Clardy was found murdered in the trunk of her car. Lee says she still wonders if she could've been saved if officers had launched an investigation sooner.
Over the past couple of years, Lee has led Minnesota's task force dedicated to understanding why African American women and girls go missing and helping families.
Illinois and Wisconsin have followed Minnesota in implementing task forces to look into disparities around violence against Black women and girls.
But this year, Minnesota enacted a law creating the nation's first Office of Missing and Murdered African American Women and Girls.
Crisis requires the new office, advocates say
Much like offices around the country designed to find Indigenous women and girls, Minnesota's office will investigate cold cases and reopen cases where Black women or girls were declared to have died by suicide or drug overdose if the situation was suspicious. It will also assist police agencies and community groups in active cases and serve as a new point of contact for those reluctant to speak with police.
State Rep. Ruth Richardson, a Democrat, carried the bill creating the new office, saying it could help cut down on disparities in the state. A Minnesota task force last year reported that while African American women and girls comprise 7% of the population, they represented 40% of domestic violence victims. They're also nearly 3 times more likely than their white peers to be murdered in the state.
A little more than a month before her late sister's birthday, Lakeisha Lee lays down a pot of purple flowers in front of a monument honoring Brittany Clardy.
Just over a decade ago, when she was 18, Clardy went missing.
Lee and her family notified the police almost immediately when Clardy didn't answer their calls or messages on social media. Lee says officers initially brushed them off.
"We knew something was wrong right away," Lee says. "After they asked us her age and asked us about her demographics, they said, 'Well, she just turned 18, she probably ran away with her boyfriend.' We knew her. We're the experts on our family."
Two weeks later, Clardy was found murdered in the trunk of her car. Lee says she still wonders if she could've been saved if officers had launched an investigation sooner.
Over the past couple of years, Lee has led Minnesota's task force dedicated to understanding why African American women and girls go missing and helping families.
Illinois and Wisconsin have followed Minnesota in implementing task forces to look into disparities around violence against Black women and girls.
But this year, Minnesota enacted a law creating the nation's first Office of Missing and Murdered African American Women and Girls.
Crisis requires the new office, advocates say
Much like offices around the country designed to find Indigenous women and girls, Minnesota's office will investigate cold cases and reopen cases where Black women or girls were declared to have died by suicide or drug overdose if the situation was suspicious. It will also assist police agencies and community groups in active cases and serve as a new point of contact for those reluctant to speak with police.
State Rep. Ruth Richardson, a Democrat, carried the bill creating the new office, saying it could help cut down on disparities in the state. A Minnesota task force last year reported that while African American women and girls comprise 7% of the population, they represented 40% of domestic violence victims. They're also nearly 3 times more likely than their white peers to be murdered in the state.
"I've been in law enforcement for 19 years as an officer," Kirkland says. "And as a leader, I have seen an increase in incidents of violence within our communities of for Black women and girls, and a decrease in resources and services and dedicated efforts and support to help solve these crimes."
Lakeisha Lee, whose sister Brittany Clardy was murdered, says the office could spur new hope for families of missing and murdered Black girls in Minnesota.
"We can work towards a community intervention model that really serves all families for generations so that the office doesn't have to be a forever office," Lee says. "We can end this epidemic."
And one day, fewer Minnesota families will have to celebrate the birthdays of sisters, mothers or friends without them, Lee says.
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Workers open the gates of the Bonnet Carre Spillway in Norco, La., in March 2018. (photo: Gerald Herbert/AP)
Land Around the US Is Sinking. Here Are Some of the Fastest Areas.
Kasha Patel, The Washington Post
Patel writes: "Imagine Earth's surface is like a stack of pancakes. The pancakes, or layers of soil and rocks, may appear fairly evenly stacked and fluffy. Over time though, the stack can become compressed, thinner and shorter."
Imagine Earth’s surface is like a stack of pancakes. The pancakes, or layers of soil and rocks, may appear fairly evenly stacked and fluffy. Over time though, the stack can become compressed, thinner and shorter.
Scientists observe this downward motion of land, called land subsidence, across the planet. While some regions of land experience uplift, many parts of Earth’s surface are sinking — fast. Scientists are especially concerned for sinking locations near the coast, which are at a higher risk for flooding as sea levels rise in a warming world. Hurricanes and extreme rainfall events can also bring more damage to such low-lying areas.
But understanding this slumping land motion is not simple, scientists say. Even within the same city, some regions may be sinking at faster rates than other areas.
“If we look at the data, we don’t see a city as a whole, uniform society. We generally see regions of hot spots where you can see parts of cities subsiding depending on what is happening,” said NASA scientist David Bekaert, who has analyzed land subsidence in the United States and worldwide.
Some land subsidence, Bekaert said, is related to deep natural processes over long periods of time, such as responding to plate tectonic activity or to the retreating of the glaciers from the last Ice Age. Other sinking is linked to human activity, including extracting oil, water or minerals from underground. In cities, buildings can also add weight and push land down.
Many of the fastest sinking places in the world appear in populated areas in southeast Asia largely because of groundwater extraction, but the United States also faces substantial land subsidence. There, you may not notice land settling around you in your daily life, but scientists found that many places are sinking faster than global sea levels are rising — increasing flood risk in coastal cities. (Sea levels are rising at an average global rate of about 3.4 millimeters, or 0.13 inches, per year.)
Regions with the highest land subsidence in the United States are mainly located along the East and Gulf Coast, but here we selected a few hot spots around the country.
Gulf Coast: Houston
Land subsidence in the Houston-Galveston area is largely caused by groundwater withdrawals. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, removing water from fine-grained silts and clays underground compresses the aquifer and lowers the land surface. Some regions experience high land subsidence rates because of withdrawal of local oil and natural gas reserves.
A smaller portion of land subsidence can be attributed to fault movement in the area.
Gulf Coast: New Orleans
Parts of New Orleans are also experiencing high rates of sinking, due to both human-induced and natural processes. Research showed that rates are highly variable across the city, ranging from 6 to 20 inches (150 to 500 millimeters) over the past 20 years.
Past data from 2009 to 2012 showed the highest subsidence rates along the Mississippi River near industrial areas in Norco and Michoud — experiencing up to 2 inches (50 millimeters) of sinking a year. To the east of Norco, the Bonnet Carré Spillway, intended to reduce flood risk for New Orleans, experienced up to 1.6 inches of sinking a year behind the structure.
NASA reported a primary contributor is pumping groundwater. Subsidence deeper underground is also caused by the shifting of faults, according to the city of New Orleans.
While Houston and New Orleans are notable subsiding locations, other places in the Gulf also experience high rates. In a large area north of Tampa Bay, subsidence rates have been clocked at up to 6 millimeters per year, about twice as much as global sea level rise, from 2015 to 2020 due to groundwater pumping. The Tampa Bay area is also relatively flat, meaning rising seas may overwhelm large swaths of the low-lying area.
East Coast: New York City
With more than 8 million people, New York City is the most populated city in the United States. It’s also sinking about 1 to 2 millimeters per year, on average. People living in subsiding cities like this may see higher sea-level rise — rates up to four times faster — than more stable regions.
“If now the water is going up and your land is going down, then your houses will be flooded,” said Matt Wei, a geophysicist at the University of Rhode Island. “That’s the issue.”
Wei said much of the city’s land subsidence are responses to glacial retreat after the most recent Ice Age. During the last Ice Age, ice sheets weighed heavily on the land and caused the crust beneath places such as Canada and the northeastern United States to stretch and sag. Places on the periphery of those sagging areas, though, such as around New York and the Chesapeake Bay, bulged upward. When the ice sheets began retreating about 12,000 years ago, those sagging areas started to rise back up while the bulging areas are settling back down.
Wei said to think of it like a balloon. If you push down on a balloon, parts near your hand will go down while other parts farther away will go up. Once you remove your hand, the balloon will try to bounce back to its original shape, causing some sections to rise and others to lower. He said the same process plays out on Earth except on “a much larger scale and also a much slower speed.”
For the most part, Wei said land subsidence in New York City is consistent with what researchers anticipated from this glacial rebound. However, some sections of the city showed higher rates of subsidence than expected. In a new study, Wei and his colleagues found that the weight of buildings around New York City are actually pushing down the land in some areas, contributing further to land subsidence. While the average rate in the city is 1 to 2 millimeters per year, some areas are experiencing about 4.5 millimeters per year.
“New York City is sinking not because of the weight of the buildings. It’s mainly because of the glacier rebound,” Wei said. “But there are places suggesting the weight of the buildings might [have] contributed to the accelerated rate.”
Mid-Atlantic: Norfolk
Norfolk has the highest rate of sea level rise on the East Coast. Land subsidence plays no small part. Virginia’s Hampton Roads area is sinking at around twice as fast as waters are rising. In a study from 2020, Bekaert and his colleagues found Norfolk and Virginia Beach were sinking at more than 3.5 millimeters per year, with some sections sinking slower or faster.
Much like New York City, parts of the Mid-Atlantic are also affected by glacial rebound. Norfolk is also experiencing subsidence from a meteorite that created a hole millions of years ago. Softer dirt entered the crater and has since compacted and shifted downward, causing sinking to land around the crater.
Groundwater withdrawals are also exacerbating rates on local levels. Bekaert said historically, paper mills in Norfolk did a lot of pumping, but operations ceased with new regulations. The city is experimenting with a new project that would restore water in the aquifer and reverse long-term pumping.
Norfolk may stand out on the East Coast, but many areas along the coast are also combating high rates of subsidence and sea level rise. The Chesapeake Bay has been experiencing around 4.6 millimeters per year of sea level rise, exacerbated by land subsidence.
West coast: California’s Central Valley
Sinking along the West Coast is comparatively small to the East Coast, but that doesn’t mean land subsidence isn’t a problem.
In the Pacific Northwest, Bekaert said a main driver on a broader scale is tectonic plate activity, where one plate is subducting, or going underneath another plate. Depending on where you are, he said, you may experience uplift or gradual subsidence. As you move further down the coast, the plates start to move next to one another, which doesn’t provide much vertical motion. Instead, human-induced processes take over.
Overall, data along the western coast show rates are mostly below 3 millimeters per year, except near areas like San Diego, which has experienced large amounts of human-induced sinking.
Further inland in California’s Central Valley, excessive pumping of groundwater for agriculture has caused the land to sink significantly. Since the 1920s, sections of the San Joaquin Valley have sank by as much as 8.5 meters. Groundwater pumping becomes even more problematic during droughts, exacerbating subsidence problems. Data from 2015 showed some spots subsided at rates as high as 600 millimeters (2 feet) per year.
“There can be hot spots within cities, where you see different subsidence rates,” Bekaert said. “Often, they are related to the local human-induced fingerprint that is taking place.”
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