Just the Facts 2021 all you wanted to know about mass incarceration Broome County style

Cover-ups and COVID-19 in the Broome County Jail

Who wrote Rob Card’s Death Sentence?

     “I’m TERRIFIED, I fear for my life”
JUST COVID ALERT Broome County Jail
                    January 17, 2021

The sheriff calls the Broome County Jail the safest place to be in these COVID times.

Here is a sample of what we hear from people inside:

“There are 20 positive cases in H pod and they are refusing B and E Tests even though they are showing symptoms and one of the correctional officers said some are looking awful like death”

“We found he [a person removed from the pod] is in the hospital and tested positive for corona…”

“I don’t understand. They are not testing everyone in a pod when someone ‘has covid’.  They either test us all or test every CO coming on shift. This is quite ridiculous!”

“I was quarantined for 9 days because of covid in the pod… and now again a few days later because another in here tested positive…. I am TERRIFIED, and I fear for my life!…

“I am in the jail on a parole violation. Since I’ve been here I’ve been in three quarantines. There have been numerous outbreaks in this jail. They are not testing the officers and not testing the inmates either.  Some officers are not wearing masks.  I have asthma…”

“They just turned off our phones so we can’t make any calls right now!“

“We are quarantined for 10 more days. I was just threatened by the CO”

“This jail runs on men and only men”

“A bunch of us are going on a hunger strike”

People inside are now very desperate to get the news out.   Family and friends make anxious calls daily to lawyers, the press, and state officials.

Contrary to statements by county officials, the jail remains a COVID hotspot.  Day after day, week after week people inside report cases of COVID infection among both the incarcerated and staff.  This is by policy design and deception.  Brutal unsanitary conditions and treatment worsen.

No one knows the extent of the infection since the county tests only those who report severe symptoms.  How many staff and incarcerated folks are tested?  The county has yet to report the number of tests, but it seems very very few over the last eleven months.  This past week one person was secretly hospitalized and only then tested—positive.  There is one instance where the county was forced to test a whole section of the jail, the section with those who do all the laundry and cooking for no pay. They needed the coerced labor. The result?  They found large numbers of cases.

The Sheriffs response to the unchecked spread of COVID in the jail (and then outside it) has been to impose illegal group punishment.  Solitary confinement is imposed on everyone if someone gets sick. Persons in multiple pods report being placed in solitary confinement in their cells for all but 45 minutes a day (to shower, contact lawyers or family, etc.), contravening state regulations. No one knows who is sick. Correctional Officers are often reported as delivering food rather than incarcerated workers due to COVID outbreaks.  Many inside report COs who regularly wear no masks.  Masks are few, sanitizer is lacking, cleaning has often been abandoned, and the heat seems to have been turned off in key pods (sections) of the jail. Persons unfortunate enough to be in the two dormitory pods (one for men, one for women) are stacked on bunk beds, with no ladders to get to the top bunk, and less than 3 feet from the next bunk bed–all while using common and unclean showers and toilets. Given the closure of courts, persons are now held interminably awaiting trial; there is no guarantee of a speedy trial, ever.  Persons who are convicted have not been transferred to state prisons, lingering in the far worse conditions in the local jail.  Indeed, many women report they would have been released for time served if they had been transferred to state prisons but are stuck for months and months in the jail, lacking basic hygiene products.

What can we do?

Tell the press to investigate and report on these conditions. If reporters in New York City can call into the jail, locals can as well. Write the press including:

Press and Sun Bulletin: Ashley Biviano ababbitt@gannett.com
WSKG: Gabe Altieri, galtieri@wskg.org , Jillian Forstadt jforstadt@wskg.org
WIVT: Jim Ehmke JimEhmke@nc34.com  
SUNY-Binghamton Pipedream: Nicole Kaufman nkaufma2@binghamton.edu
NY Post:  Gabrielle Fonrouge GabrielleFonrouge@gmail.com

Write to your elected county officials,

    County Executive Jason Garnar CountyExecutive@BroomeCounty.US  
    Your legislative representative list and finding guide here
and tell them they need to:

• Investigate jail conditions openly
• provide testing and vaccines to persons in the jail
• release as many persons as possible particularly those on short-term and technical parole violation charges

Write and tell the Governor and Attorney General they need to do the same.

Support JUST’s work:

• Send us copies of your messages: southern.tier@gmail.com
• Report news you hear to us: southern.tier@gmail.com
• Donate to help persons inside: JUST donation
• Join our next rally

http://www.justtalk.blog/index.php/2021/01/11/got-covid-get-punished/

Suspected of COVID?  You get punished. That’s the rule at the Broome County Jail.  Under the current administration it can’t be otherwise.  There are too many persons in the unsanitary jail, on too many minor charges. Too many persons are kept locked up due to untreated substance use and mental health illnesses.  Too many are awaiting trial, often for over a year; refuse to plead guilty and accept a punishing criminal record, and you will stay seemingly forever.  And above all too many are housed, in crowded COVID conditions, for other counties, the state, and the federal system–all to make money for the county, from $100 to $300/person per day.

Mass Solitary

What happens if someone reports they are ill?  They are dispatched to isolation in the medical unit, a fate worse than formal solitary. There they lose all communication with the outside world, access to regular exercise, conversation and contact with other human beings. Test positive, if you are tested–for very few tests have been administered and the county refuses to release positivity rates–and you remain in super-solitary for 10 to 14 days. After that period in medical solitary, you are sent to an intake “pod” or section of the jail, to quarantine for another 10 to 14 days with more restrictions. Facing a month of solitary, quarantine, and restriction, is it any wonder that so few will admit to being ill?

And it’s group punishment:  your friends and fellow incarcerated in your home pod are deemed as threats, ill or not, and put in lockdown.  For most people that means being locked in your cold cell alone for 23 hours and 15 minutes a day—you will have 45 minutes at best to phone someone to tell them you are still alive, shower, exchange a book, grab a very short conversation. It’s simply solitary on a mass basis.  Its so widespread that correctional officers have regularly been forced to deliver food across the facility, facilitating even more spread out into the community.

It’s a cold fate literally, for cells, especially in the women’s sections, are by multiple accounts very very cold.  Persons inside report the heat seems to have been turned off and they have been provided an extra blanket as compensation.

There is one exception to the solitary rule: there is a big dormitory room, now split into two quarantine sections, one for men and one for women.  There you sleep and live on a bunk bed, less than 3 feet from everyone else, sharing communal showers and toilets.

Pain and Protest

Dec 12, 2020 JUST Protest Outside Jail

To people inside and friends and family outside, unable to help, these are painful times. 

Is it any wonder that women speak out from inside the jail at inhumane conditions, the lack of basic hygiene, privacy and clothing needs, the inability to access any programs?  What official decided to stop friends and family, even before COVID times, from sending in from Amazon s bras and basic Christian crosses? Should it surprise anyone that threats of retribution and more are meted out regularly to grievances over food by teenagers and diabetics, the lack of masks and sanitizer, the failure to provide adequate time out of cells and access to phones and tablets to contact loved ones?  Or that hunger strikes have now broken out in the jail?

So many persons are suspected of infection, and so few tested, that most of the jail has been in COVID solitary conditions for weeks on end.  People inside have called out to multiple community organizations, the press, their lawyers, and the courts for relief.  Protests occur regularly still outside the jail and county offices.  To date, to no avail:  our elected officials and health department see no evil, hear no evil, fail to act at every turn. Meanwhile the pain, and protest, build.

“Thank you , it is SO good to have books”

Its amazing what a simple used $5 novel can do.  For its desperate times in our COVID hotspot jail.  Most sections are locked down, meaning women and men often spend 20 hours or more locked in their cages.  Its mass solitary confinement endangering everyone’s health and sanity.  After freedom now, persons inside most often ask for books.  Science fiction, novels of every description,  history books, dictionaries, large print bibles and Korans.  The joy they bring is incalculable:

“Having crossword books is wonderful… I get to actually engage my brain and think! It is a mindless sad existence here… thank you again”

Please help us respond to these requests.  The requests are numerous, and for $15 we can often send three $5 used novels from discount bookstores. 

Donate via our paypal/credit card button

or by check paid to “Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier”, JUST, POB 93, Bible School Park, NY 13737

Press Sun Bulletin 12 11 20 article

JUST Senate Testimony Sept 22 2020

and the story is here

In response to requests, posts on COVID from the JUST pages are here, and with some overlap posts from www.justtalk.blog are here.

Bill Martin

July 4th, 2020

William Bingham

On the eve of the declaration of independence in 1776 twenty-four-year-old William Bingham set sail from Delaware Bay.  His destination?  Martinique, the brightest jewel in the French colonial crown, more valuable to the royal treasury than all of French Canada for which it was exchanged in a settlement with Great Britain.  Third son of a deceased Philadelphia merchant, Bingham would return to the United States as one of the richest men of the newly independent United States, becoming a founder of the nation’s first bank, a land speculator on a grand scale, and a host to every important personage in nation.

Yet Bingham is dimly remembered today. In the city named after him there is no statue or plaque to mark his place in history.  In the mid-1960s his name reappeared briefly when Harpur College was recast as the State University of New York at Binghamton. More recently a new student residence was named Bingham Hall.  These are small footnotes to a personage known only to older biographers and local historians who write his history as a far-sighted and vigorous supporter of the American revolution.

What might constitute the meaning and value of Bingham’s achievements depends very much on where one stands.  For many, Bingham is the glorious history of a man whose wealth supported the struggle for independence from Great Britain and the principles celebrated in the Declaration of Independence. For others, Bingham and July 4^th are marred by the limits of independence and whom it benefited:  rich and wealthy slaveowners, eager to shelter their position and wealth from a predatory colonial power.

And Binghamtonians should make no mistake here:  William Bingham was an owner, trader and exploiter of enslaved Africans as were his more famous friends General Washington and Thomas Jefferson. When he walked the streets of Martinique, he was preceded by an African who held an umbrella over his head.[1] When he left the island, he took a young African with him as a personal servant.  When he paid taxes on his property at home, before and after independence, he duly reported his personal slaves:[2]

Bingham’s wealth did not however come from running a plantation with hundreds of slaves like his compatriots.  He was more predatory:  his head-turning prosperity derived from four short years in Martinique spent capturing and selling Africans and the products produced with slave labor.

This was his charge from the Continental Congress:  to buy and dispatch war supplies for General Washington’s army, to win France over to the colonial rebels’ cause, and to harry and disrupt Britain’s lucrative Caribbean trades.  It was the last that provided him a golden opportunity as piracy was legitimized as privateering on behalf of the new nation.

Just how lucrative privateering could be was demonstrated on his passage to Martinique, when his  sloop-of-war Reprisal captured a merchant ship flying the Union Jack. Its cargo of rum, cocoa, coffee and sugar were the free fruits of war to be sold and the proceeds shared among officers and seamen. Two more captures followed shortly before the Reprisal reached port. 

Bingham learned his lesson quickly. He was soon buying and selling goods on his private account across the war zone while outfitting privateers of his own. Men of his standing were well-prepared by temperament, training and the merchant’s instinct.  Bingham’s friend, confidant, and fellow-banker Alexander Hamilton learned his comparably keen skills at King’s college (renamed Columbia College after independence) where his math professor, Robert Harpur of Harpur College fame, set his students the problem of calculating in multiple currencies the value of sugar for the East Indies trade.[3]

Once in Martinique Bingham turned privateering into a commercial operation:  he would buy a ship, sign up a captain and crew, and deploy them to attack and seize British shipping.  Proceeds from the sale of captured ships and their contents were shared among the captain, the crew, and the outfitter, in this case Bingham. These were extremely lucrative operations, and soon hundreds of British vessels were captured by privateers. The capture of two slave ships in one operation alone in 1777 made Bingham part owner of a cargo of ivory and 284 enslaved men, 45 enslaved women, and 146 enslaved boys and girls. All were auctioned off to great profit.[4]

From such profits came the monies to fund Bingham’s life after his return home, from founding the first national bank to the 1786 purchase of the 36,000 acres that would constitute the town of Binghamton,  the buying of 340,000 acres in central Pennsylvania in 1792, and eventually the control over 3,000,000 acres in Maine.[5] His mansions and luxurious lifestyle were legendary.

Joshua Whitney

William Bingham never set foot in Binghamton.  His land agent in the area, Joshua Whitney, would name the new town in his honor.  It was a slave-holding community. Whitney, no less than Bingham, fully believed and profited from slavery:  he bought and owned Black men and women, including a young woman Elinor, his coachman James Patterson, and George and Phoebe Dorsey.[6]  

*******************

On July 4^th 2020 flags celebrating the founding of a new nation fly proudly all over the city.  On my block they include a militia flag and a Black Lives Matter flag. In this contested climate we might pause and ponder the meaning of freedom embodied in the historic and celebrated names of our cities, towns, schools, and streets. To paraphrase Frederick Douglass we might ask, as we struggle to realize that Black Lives Matter: what to a Black person is the 4th of July? Douglass’ challenge remains in front of us: “a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”[7]

Endnotes

* Note: this essay will be updated and extended after libraries and archives reopen.

[1] Robert Alberts, The Golden Voyage: The Life and Times of William Bingham, 1752-1804 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 39.

[2] Brooke Krancer, “Miscellaneous Trustees, Slave Ownership, William Bingham,” Penn & Slavery Project, Slave Ownership, accessed June 23, 2020, http://pennandslaveryproject.org/exhibits/show/slaveownership/earlytrustees/misctrustees.

[3] Sharon Liao, ““A Merchants’ College:” King’s College (1754-1784) and Slavery,” Columbia University and Slavery, accessed July 4, 2020, https://columbiaandslavery.columbia.edu/content/merchants-college-kings-college-1754-1784-and-slavery.

[4] Alberts, The Golden Voyage: The Life and Times of William Bingham, 1752-1804, 52, 485.

[5] Alberts, 228–29.

[6] Marjory Barnum Hinman, Bingham’s Land: Whitney’s Town (Binghamton NY: Broome County Historical Society, 1996), 112.

[7] “Frederick Douglass Speech,” accessed July 4, 2020, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2927.html.

Link to Justtalk article

Defunding the Police and Sheriff June 10 2020 post

Mayor Richard David, State Senator Frederick Akshar
and the BPD Swat team with their new “Bearcat”

For Broome County, its been quite simple: year after year, by Republicans and Democrats alike, funding for the county sheriff has been aggressively expanded particularly for the massive jail complex.  Year after year the number of guards and the sheriff’s and jail budget has grown.

In 2014 county legislators voted for a $7million expansion of the jail despite protests.  They built a jail and staffed it with officers to incarcerate 600 persons daily. 

Yet despite the best efforts of city and county police, district attorneys, and local judges to arrest and incarcerate as many local residents and especially as many Black men as possible, the official crime rate has been falling.  Propelled in part by growing pressure by community organizations, the number of incarcerated persons is falling. In recent months the jail has held fewer than 300 persons. It’s half empty.

And now big budget cuts are coming to the state and county. 

Here is one place to start: defund the jail.  It is a threat to public safety.

Last month only 34 persons of the 277 housed in the jail were convicted of any crime.  And for this we pay $30 million a year? 

The vast majority inside are arrested for misdemeanors.  And by all accounts a majority have been criminalized for substance use and mental health diseases.  Many more have disabilities.  Instead of treatment they get locked down and punished, and come home to us in much worse health.  And now the jail is a local hotspot to incubate the coronavirus among not just the incarcerated, but also the hundreds of guards, medical, and food staff, who daily move into and out of the sheriff’s complex and then into the community.

It is really quite simple:  defund the jail and use the funds for community-based and controlled health and education services that have been so severely cut by successive county administrations.

From Justtalk.blog by Bill Martin, June 6 2020