Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson is taking on the GEO Group, the multibillion-dollar corporation that runs the fourth-largest U.S. detention center, located in Tacoma, the Seattle Times reports. Ferguson sued the company, which operates the Northwest Detention Center and 140 other such facilities nationwide. The suit accuses GEO of violating state minimum-wage law by paying detainees $1 a day—or sometimes just chips and candy—to work at the detention center. “Let’s be honest about what’s going on,” said Ferguson. “GEO has a captive population of vulnerable individuals who cannot easily advocate for themselves. This corporation is exploiting those workers for their own profits.” GEO projected in 2015 that its Tacoma facility would take in $57 million in revenues annually at full capacity, around 1,575 people. The company earned more than $2 billion in 2016. The Florida-based company uses detainee labor to perform virtually all work at the detention center besides security, says Ferguson. That includes preparing meals, doing laundry and cleaning common areas and restrooms. GEO denied “the baseless and meritless allegations made in this lawsuit,” calling detainee labor a “voluntary work program.” GEO said its wage rates follow standards set “exclusively” by the federal government. That might mean that GEO plans to challenge the state’s authority. Washington’s minimum wage is $11 an hour. Ferguson said the Northwest Detention Center is not a criminal correctional facility; detainees held there are going through civil immigration proceedings. The Trump administration is weighing a policy that would fast-track the deportation of thousands of Central American teenagers who arrived at the southern border unaccompanied by adults, McClatchy Newspapers reports. Attorney General Jeff Sessions wants to avoid creating a new protected class of undocumented immigrants, given how politically difficult it has been for the administration to unwind the DACA program, which protected young people brought by adults to the U.S. illegally when they were children. The new policy would call for expedited deportation of another group — the more than 150,000 children who arrived at the southern border alone, escaping violence and poverty in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. Under the plan, teens in this group would be sent back to their countries when they turn 18 under a fast-track deportation, which means they would not see an immigration judge first. The proposal is being drafted via memos circulated between the Justice and Homeland Security departments. It has set off an aggressive debate inside these departments among staff charged with reducing illegal immigration, government lawyers who worry about legal exposure and political operatives who see the public controversy this could fuel. “This is being viewed as a way to say that there will not need to be a new DACA,” said a former U.S. Justice Department official who is familiar with the planning. “But this is far from decided. The concern is that most people at DOJ know this will likely be viewed as illegal and do not want to have to defend this in court if they can avoid it.” Murkiness surrounding national immigration policy is causing local violations of imprisoned immigrants’ Fourth Amendment rights, say many advocates and attorneys. In recent weeks, advocates say, undocumented immigrants in Ohio’s Hamilton and Butler counties were held 48 hours longer than U.S. citizens for the same charge, allowing them to be seized by federal officers and put into deportation proceedings, reports the Cincinnati Enquirer. Immigrants–even those who entered the country illegally–are protected against illegal search and seizure, meaning they can’t be held beyond the time they are entitled to release. At issue are detainers issued by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which ask local jails to hold undocumented prisoners for 48 additional hours beyond U.S. citizens’ release for the same offense. In Hamilton County, where the sheriff’s department operates the Justice Center, immigration advocates met for more than two hours last week with Sheriff Jim Neil. Some members of the local Immigrant Dignity Coalition say the department has been breaking its own carefully crafted policy by cooperating with ICE in holding immigrant prisoners. Immigration attorney Charleston Wang, attended the meeting and said coalition members were told that the sheriff’s department would make sure its command staff and rank-and-file officers would receive training on the policy. “There may be instances where the policy was exceeded and not followed,” Wang said. Federal courts in California, Illinois and Texas and a state court in Massachusettes have ruled against the use of ICE detainers on grounds of Fourth Amendment violations. They are administrative warrants, judges have ruled, and lack the necessary authority of a warrant issued by a judge or magistrate. Nine elderly patients died after being kept inside a Florida nursing home that turned into a sweatbox when Hurricane Irma knocked out its air conditioning for three days, even though just across the street was a fully functioning and cooled hospital. From the perspective of Gov. Rick Scott and relatives of those at the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills, criminal charges are warranted. Under Florida law, a prosecution might be difficult. Two of three ex-state prosecutors contacted by The Associated Press doubted that Dr. Jack Michel, the home’s owner, or any of his employees will be charged. All agreed that criminal prosecutions will hinge on whether the nursing home staff made honest mistakes or were “culpably negligent.” Florida defines that as “consciously doing an act or following a course of conduct that the defendant must have known, or reasonably should have known, was likely to cause death or great bodily injury.” The home has said it used coolers, fans, ice and other methods to keep the patients comfortable. That might be enough to avoid prosecution. “There is a difference between negligence, which is what occurs when you are not giving a particular standard of care vs. culpable negligence,” said David Weinstein, a former state and federal prosecutor. “So if they are doing everything humanly possible given the circumstances and this all still happened it may be negligent and provide the basis for a civil lawsuit, but not enough for criminal charges.” Former U.S. Attorney Kendall Coffey disagreed. “Given the magnitude of the tragedy and the apparent availability of a hospital 50 yards away, prosecutors are not going to accept that this was an unavoidable tragedy,” he said. Scott Pruitt’s round-the-clock personal security detail, which demands triple the manpower of his predecessors at the Environmental Protection Agency, has prompted officials to rotate in agents from around the U.S. who otherwise would be investigating environmental crimes, the Washington Post reports. The EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance has summoned agents from various cities to serve two-week stints helping guard Pruitt. While hiring in many departments is frozen, the agency has sought an exception to hire additional full-time staff to protect Pruitt. When the former Oklahoma attorney general assumed his post in February, aides requested 24/7 federal protection. “This never happened with prior administrators,” said Michael Hubbard, who led the EPA’s Criminal Investigation Division in Boston. The practice has rankled some employees and critics, who note that the EPA’s criminal enforcement efforts are understaffed and that the Trump administration has proposed further cuts. “These guys signed on to work on complex environmental cases, not to be an executive protection detail,” Hubbard said. “It’s not only not what they want to do, it’s not what they were trained and paid to do.” While the agency does not discuss the number of threats against Pruitt or others at the EPA, it did say investigators have opened more cases this fiscal year than in fiscal 2016. Thirty-two percent were aimed at Pruitt — including “some very personal, ugly threats,” said Patrick Sullivan, the EPA assistant inspector general for investigations — compared with 9 percent directed at his predecessor Gina McCarthy in fiscal 2016. McCarthy and Lisa Jackson, each of whom led the EPA under President Obama and also were controversial, had security teams composed of about a half-dozen individuals. Pruitt’s security detail has swelled to about 18 people. The Coast Guard has set a new record for cocaine seizures at sea for the second consecutive year, an effort that admirals are linking to border security as they look to build new ships while President Trump presses for a border wall, the Washington Post reports. The agency highlighted the record Wednesday in San Diego alongside Attorney General Jeff Sessions as it offloaded 50,550 pounds of cocaine and a smaller amount of heroin from the USCGC Stratton, a 418-foot cutter. The drugs were confiscated by four Coast Guard cutters and the Navy destroyer USS Chaffee in the eastern Pacific Ocean, a longtime trafficking route from South and Central America. The Coast Guard has seized more than 455,000 pounds of cocaine through Sept. 11 in the fiscal year that ends Oct. 1, breaking the record of 443,790 pounds set last year. About 85 percent of that comes from the eastern Pacific. The Coast Guard also has detained at least 681 suspected smugglers in those operations, up from 585 last year and 503 in 2015. Admiral Paul Zukunft, the Coast Guard commandant, said massive offloads of drugs are starting to become “just another day in the service.” The amount of cocaine on the high seas has exploded since the Colombian government halted the aerial eradication of coca plants through spraying in 2015, and rebels with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) encouraged farmers to grow more in anticipation of government aid granted in a peace deal. Parents and police increasingly are encountering toddlers and young children unconscious or dead after consuming an adult’s opioids, the New York Times reports. The children’s hospital in Dayton, Oh., says accidental ingestions have more than doubled, to some 200 intoxications a year, with tiny bodies found laced by drugs like fentanyl. In Milwaukee, eight children have died of opioid poisoning since late 2015, all from legal substances like methadone and oxycodone. In Salt Lake City, a emergency doctor revived four overdosing toddlers in a night, a phenomenon she called both new and alarming. While these deaths represent a small fraction of the epidemic’s toll, they are an indication of how deeply the addiction crisis has cut In August, in the latest sign of the direness of the situation, President Trump said he would declare the opioid crisis a national emergency, a move that could allow cities and states to access federal disaster relief funds. Eighty-seven children died of opioid intoxication in 2015, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, up from just 16 in 1999. By comparison, gunshot wounds kill four or five times as many children each year. At hospitals like Primary Children’s in Utah, drug overdoses now outstrip gun injuries among young people. “There are no pill parties happening in preschools,” said Dr. Jennifer Plumb, the emergency doctor who recently treated four opioid-sick toddlers in a night. “These kids aren’t making a choice because they are trying to get high on a substance. It’s that the pills are everywhere.” Unlike infants born with addiction, these children are coming across heroin and other drugs in the days and years after birth. When someone is shot in Baltimore, police release the details swiftly. If the person dies, the police department publicizes the victim’s name soon afterward. The releases allow the public to track the toll of violence in real time. When it comes to heroin and other opioid overdoses, which in recent years have killed far more people than bullets and knives — more than 600 so far this year, more than twice the roughly 250 homicides — real-time information isn’t routinely available, the Baltimore Sun reports. City Councilman Brandon Scott, chairman of the Public Safety Committee, asked city health and police officials whether they could share more information. He said it would help people understand the scope of the overdose crisis. “One of the problems in my opinion with how people view people taking drugs is they think it doesn’t happen in their neighborhoods,” Scott said. “My personal belief is if we were sharing that data in a public fashion and people could map it on Open Baltimore” — the city’s data website — “they would see that these things are happening across the city and not just in the places where they think they’re happening. It’s different when it’s their neighbor next door and they don’t know why their neighbor died, but we know.” The state Department of Health typically releases overdose numbers quarterly, but the figures are often long delayed. The most recent official numbers are from the first three months of 2017. There are differences between reporting homicides and overdoses. Declaring overdose as a cause of death requires detailed work by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Insiders do have access to preliminary figures before they are released. Deputy Police Commissioner Dean Palmere cited those numbers at the hearing: 1,691 fatal opioid overdoses in the state this year, 632 in Baltimore. For the eleventh year in a row, Iowa legislators this year took up a “stand your ground” proposal, authorizing residents to use lethal means to protect themselves in certain situations. In other states, such laws have disproportionately justified the fatal shootings of African-Americans. What was different now, in 2017, was the measure’s likely passage, reports The Trace. In November, Republicans, who overwhelmingly support the policy, won a majority in the Iowa State Senate, giving the party control of both the legislature and the governorship for the first time since 1998. “Stand your ground” passed, and Gov. Terry Branstad signed it. For four years, between 2012 and 2016, every state that tried to enact “stand your ground” legislation failed. Now the policy is again finding its way into law. Last year, Missouri became the first state to break the logjam, followed by Iowa. Florida is poised to strengthen its law in favor of shooters, shifting the burden of proof in pre-trial hearings to prosecutors, who would have to convince a judge that someone claiming “stand your ground” shouldn’t be immune from prosecution. “The states that passed ‘stand your ground’ early on were low-hanging fruit,” said Christopher Mooney of the Institute of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois. “As Republicans gain strength in states like Missouri and Iowa, the odds of it passing go up.” Twenty-two states have passed versions of the law since 2005. Stand your ground” removes a person’s duty to retreat in the face of grave danger, granting the legal right to use deadly force if the perception of a threat is “reasonable.” (Critics refer to the statutes as “shoot first” laws.) More than 3,000 women are serving time in Oklahoma, which for 25 years has led the nation in locking up women. The state imprisons 151 out of every 100,000 women, says the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics – more than double the national rate. The Frontier and Reveal, of the Center for Investigative Reporting, spent more than a year unearthing the causes. The reporting included obtaining a decade’s worth of state prison data never before analyzed by the state itself. The most common reason women end up in prison is drug possession. Oklahoma dealt out ever-longer sentences for these women, even as other conservative states reduced drug sentences as part of criminal justice system overhauls. In Tulsa County, women’s sentences for some drug crimes decreased over the past seven years. That’s where an intensive program funded by oil billionaire George Kaiser’s foundation works to provide alternatives to prison for women facing long sentences for drug offenses and other crimes. The burden of the state’s high incarceration rate falls hardest on women of color. Black women are incarcerated at about twice the rate of their representation in the state’s adult population. For Native American women, the disparity is almost three times their share of the population. Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin called the state’s No. 1 ranking “a dubious honor … not something I’m proud of.” State voters got tired of waiting for lawmakers to act and passed reforms that became effective in July making possession of drugs for personal use a misdemeanor. It’s unclear how deeply the state understands the problem, because it took a year and a half for Reveal to obtain a workable database to analyze. Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin, discussing criminal justice reform at an event on incarcerated women, said “The more we talk about this as a nation, the more we can help change the laws and change legislation,” The Oklahoman reports. Fallin’s spoke at “Defining Justice,” moderated by The Atlantic’s Alison Stewart. Oklahoma has 61,000 people in its prison system, including more than 26,000 held in state facilities and private prisons, about 1,600 awaiting transfer from county jails and another 33,000 on some form of probation, parole, community sentencing or GPS monitoring. The state’s prison population, at 109 percent of capacity, is 78 percent higher than the national average, and is expected to grow by 25 percent in the next decade without major reforms. That could cost the state an additional $2 billion. Meanwhile, state mental health officials say it costs $2,000 a year, on average, per person for outpatient mental health and substance abuse services, compared to more intensive programs, such as drug court, which costs about $5,000 a year per person. By comparison, it costs about $19,000 a year to hold someone in prison. Fallin lauded Oklahomans for moving the criminal justice discussion beyond mere tough-on-crime talk and into ideas on how to more wisely use taxpayer dollars while keeping violent offenders off the street. Last November, voters passed two ballot initiatives designed to reduce prison overcrowding. One made certain low-level crimes misdemeanors rather than felonies, including simple drug possession and theft of items valued at less than $1,000. The other aims to use money saved by incarcerating fewer people to help fund drug treatment and mental health programs. Those reforms may clash with federal policy. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has signaled a return to increased drug prosecutions and prolonged sentences for low-level offenders. “I need to have a discussion with him,” Fallin said. |
