Louisiana Voice

A practice that has existed in Louisiana for more than 175 years has come to the attention of the U.S. Justice Department with the announcement that it has opened a statewide investigation into the state’s prisoner work release practices.

Originally known as CONVICT LEASING, the practice actually pre-dates the Civil War in Louisiana, but its popularity mushroomed following the loss of slave labor after the war as southern politicians saw it is as a thinly disguised successor to the real thing. It was no coincidence that the vast majority of “leased” convicts were African-American.

Private concerns profiteered off prisoners and they still do, even if in methods that are a little subtler. And the practice is sanctioned, encouraged even, by the political establishment.

And just to make sure the skids continued to be greased, lawmakers from the halls of Congress to state legislatures annually pile on more and more bills calling for stricter and stricter sentences for even non-violent offenders, thus ensuring the beds in those privately-run prisons and sheriff-run parish jails will stay full. This in turn guarantees that the payments from the feds and the state will keep rolling in and those prisoners can be farmed out to private companies.

In reality, it is a system that feeds on itself.

Convict leasing, simply defined, is a method of control and distribution of convict labor practiced mainly in the southern states, including Louisiana. Contractors would pay the state a bargain basement price to take control of a given number of prisoners. Some of these private concerns, desperate for labor, included planters and manufacturers. Some contractors used the convict labor in their businesses while others were nothing more than labor brokers, or middle men, who sublet the prisoners to other concerns.

Unlike other southern states, convict leasing in Louisiana continued almost non-stop from 1844 to 1901.

It wasn’t until 1892 that efforts began in earnest to abolish the practice. Gov. Murphy J. Foster (does that name sound familiar?) supported those opposed to the leasing practice. The Louisiana Constitution of 1898, passed during his administration, abolished both convict leasing and the Louisiana lottery, which had become a notorious source of corruption. The last lease for convict labor expired in 1901 and the state took over operations of what is now the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.

The investigation by the Justice Department will examine the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections’ policies and practices for ensuring the timely release of state prisoners in the custody of the Louisiana Department of Corrections who are incarcerated in state and local correctional facilities, including practices related to prisoners who are eligible for immediate release.

The department has not reached any conclusions regarding the allegations in this matter. The investigation will be conducted under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA). Under CRIPA, the Department has the authority to investigate violations of prisoners’ constitutional rights that result from a “pattern or practice of resistance to the full enjoyment of such rights.” The department has conducted CRIPA investigations of many correctional systems, and where violations have been found, the resulting settlement agreements have led to important reforms.

The Civil Rights Division’s Special Litigation Section is conducting this investigation jointly with the U.S. Attorney’s Offices for the Eastern, Middle, and Western Districts of Louisiana. Individuals with relevant information are encouraged to contact the department via phone at 1-833-492-0097 or by email at community.louisianadoc@usdoj.gov.

The background for the federal investigation is that a series of lawsuits brought by the Law Office of William Most, Casey Denson Law, Bizer & DeReus, the MacArthur Justice Center, and others have disclosed that thousands of inmates in Louisiana are held past their release dates each year, costing the state millions of dollars in housing costs alone. See Louisiana routinely jails people weeks, months, years after their release dates

Most said, “We welcome the involvement of the Department of Justice, and thank federal agents like AUSA David Sinkman for seeing this injustice for what it is. Louisiana’s government must end its illegal, unjust, and expensive practice of holding thousands of people for weeks or months past the end of their sentence.”

Maya Lau wrote an excellent STORY for The Shreveport Times about one work release inmate in the Caddo Parish Sheriff’s Department’s work release program prior to moving to the Baton Rouge Advocate. Lau, now with the Los Angeles Times, reported that the inmate was paid $7.75 an hour, barely more than minimum wage. Of that amount, the sheriff’s office claimed up to 62 percent right off the top. Multiply that by the number of total hours all prisoners in the program work in fiscal year 2011-12, the latest year data were available for Lau’s Jan. 7, 2015, story and you come up with a cool $500,000 added to the Caddo Sheriff’s Department’s general fund.

That was in addition to the $25 per day the sheriff’s office was paid for housing state inmates and $65 per day per prisoner paid by the Federal Bureau of Prisons for federal inmates, most of whom have committed no greater crime than being illegal aliens.

Moreover, there are those commissaries operated by the private prisons that reach deeper into inmates’ pockets. With literally a captive clientele, private prisons were able to charge $4 for a Honey Bun and $5 for a cold drink. That’s according to Baton Rouge Public Radio reporter Sue Lincoln, who did an outstanding series on THE PRICE OF JUSTICE  in 2017. It’s no wonder, then, that Correct Commissary, LLC, of Ruston approached the Lincoln Parish Police Jury several months ago about constructing a 50,000-square-foot commissary warehouse on the site of the former Ruston Municipal Airport. The company packages snack boxes that it sells to prison inmates, according to An April 2, 2017 article in the Ruston Daily Leader.

Correct Commissary is listed at the same address as LaSalle Corrections of Ruston, according to corporate records on file with the Louisiana Secretary of State.

LaSalle has experienced considerable legal problems, including lawsuits over wrongful deaths and injuries to inmates as well as having been singled out by regulatory agencies for taking shortcuts with training programs and falsifying records attesting that employees had completed training when in fact, they had not.

LaSalle also has come under fire for allegedly performing unwanted hysterectomies on federal detainees at its Georgia facility. It was recently announced that its contract to run a county jail in Texarkana, Texas, would be terminated in January.

After 11 weeks, the prisoner about whom Lau wrote, took home a grand total of $416, or about $37.82 per week.

And what about businesses who employ work release inmates?

Well, besides the low wages, there is the obvious benefit of not having to pay for medical insurance or contribute to retirement funds—or to pay each such employee two weeks’ vacation pay each year. One could make the case that using this cheap prison labor could be knocking non-inmates out of jobs.

But that’s not the only consideration. For every work release inmate employed, the state gives the employer a whopping $2,400 tax credit. That’s not a tax deduction, but a full-blown tax credit, meaning that amount is lopped right off the top of the company’s tax bill. So, a company like the Foster Farms chicken processing plant in Farmerville in Union Parish, which uses up to 200 inmates from work release, gets an instant reduction of up to $480,000 off its state tax bill.

A 2016 AUDIT by the Legislative Auditor’s Office revealed that there were 8,700 prisoners in work release programs across the state. That computes to nearly $21 million in tax credits—and that’s in addition to the $80 million or so the state pays private and parish prisons for housing inmates.

And while the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 may have abolished plantation slavery, it may have unwittingly opened the door to another form of slavery that while flying below the radar, nevertheless remains legal more than a century-and-a-half later, enriching the modern slaveowner, aka private and parish prisons.

So, it is understandable in that context, perhaps, that Caddo Parish Sheriff Steve Prator was so furious at the new Louisiana sentencing and parole laws that went into effect on Nov. 1, 2017. The new law meant the release of about 1400 non-violent offenders. He will, he said at the time, lose some of his best CAR WASHING prisoners.

So, now Trump wants to issue “PREEMPTIVE PARDONS” to Donnie, Jr., Ivanka, Eric and perhaps Jared.

And we learn that RUDY GIULIANI has approached Trump about the possibility of a “preemptive pardon,” even though he has yet to be charged with a crime.

Michael Flynn? Well, we now know that Trump’s PARDON of his former National Security Adviser, who pleaded guilty not once, but twice, to lying to the FBI, was broader than Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon in that it granted him immunity to “any and all possible offenses” connected to the Mueller investigation.

If that’s not enough for you to chew on, the Justice Department (that would be Bill Barr’s Justice Department) is investigating a possible “PARDON FOR SALE” scheme whereby beaucoup money may have been funneled to the White House or some related political committee in exchange for a presidential pardon.

Admittedly, it’s going to be kind of difficult to narrow the field down since several of Trump associates, including the aforementioned Rudy, are pitching pardons for themselves as President Tweet Thang heads toward the exit.

And while Rudy may well need a pardon for his hands down his pants cameo in the latest Borat movie or for using shoe polish for hair dye which subsequently ran down the side of his face like sweat after a strenuous workout, he most definitely needs one for the shameless way he has comported himself in the myriad legal challenges to the Nov. 3 election.

But the burning question here, the real brain teaser, is this:

If Junior, Eric, Ivanka and Jared have done nothing wrong, why would they need pardons? Does Daddy Trump know something about the four adolescents masquerading as adults that he’s not telling us?

Could Ivanka have possibly been in violation of some law when she negotiated with the Chinese government to grant her those 18 TRADEMARKS linked to her and Daddy back in 2018?

Did Jared breach some law or even profiteer somehow when he directed ventilators and other PERSONAL PROTECTIVE EQUIPMENT (gloves, masks, etc.) to corporate interests for re-sale last spring rather than directly to hospitals that desperately needed them?

Hell, Donnie and Eric need pardons just for being themselves. Remember, they both boldly predicted that the coronavirus would “disappear” on Nov. 4 and we’d never hear about it again. If for nothing else, they need pardons for being dumber than a bag of hair.

Of course, Trump is also considering an attempt to pardon himself – a move that would raise all sorts of questions, assuming someone might know where to even begin asking.

But not to fear. ANDY BOROWITZ, who writes thoughtful if somewhat barbed parodies (well, they wouldn’t really be parodies if they weren’t at least a little pointed, now would they?) for The New Yorker, has saved us a lot of anguish, hand-gnashing and teeth-wringing by figuring the whole thing out for us:

“In an effort to insure an orderly rollout of pardons, the Trump Administration announced that the first recipients would be essential frontline criminals,” including “all White House staffers and Cabinet members who have spent the past four years receiving improper emoluments, destroying evidence, and subverting democracy.”

There you have it.

You can thank me later.

I’m no economics professor, but if food banks are rationing food because of record demand while billionaires gained a record $1 trillion in combined wealth, it might be time to reconsider our system.”

—Tweet by Dan Price of Seattle.

More than a quarter million people have died from the coronavirus as the number of cases of the virus hit new records daily. But there are other far-reaching effects as well:

One in eight Americans often do not have enough to eat. That’s 26 million people.

As many as 30-40 million people in America are facing eviction because they can’t pay their rent.

About 30 million Americans are unemployed, which in turn, leaves families unable to pay rent or buy groceries.

Yet, diehard Trump devotees, their loyalties seriously misplaced, have poured an estimated $170 million into his “election defense fund” that he shamelessly hawks via a daily email blitz.

This is a man who boasts about being a billionaire and who, in 2016, said he would self-finance his presidential campaign.

So, why does he need a defense fund to continue to challenge an election that is doubtless settled?

That’s a very good question and one to which we have yet to receive an answer.

All we get out of Tweet Thang is his baseless claim that Biden, the Venezuelans, the Democrat Party, Dominion voting machines (take your pick) stole the election.

Actually, there is a web page that quite succinctly explains precisely how Biden stole the election. (To view the full explanation, click HERE.)

On election day, I received 31 emails from Trump (24) Mike (Casper the Ghost) Pence and Eric Trump (2 each), Melania and Lara Trump and Sarah Huckabee Sanders (1 each).

Beginning on Nov. 4 and continuing through yesterday (Nov. 30), I received 308 from Trump, 27 from Pence, 21 from Eric, 15 from Laura, 9 from Newt Gingrich and 6 Rudy updates. If you’re counting, that’s 386 emails in 27 days – just over 14 per day.

Conspicuously absent from this barrage was Donald Jr.

All of the emails had two things in common:

Each one was addressed personally to me by name (until a few days ago when my name was mysteriously changed from Tom to Ben. I’m at a loss as to how I suddenly took on a new identity).

Each one was literally begging for money – even stooping so low as to offer special Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals in exchange for my contribution. Nov. 30 was the deadline for contributing but thankfully, the offer has been “extended” (whatever that extended offer may be).

On Monday, for example, there was this:

Ben,

You’ve always been one of my TOP supporters, and now I have an EXCLUSIVE offer just for YOU.

For TODAY ONLY, I’m giving YOU a FREE TRUMP GIFT to show you just how much you mean to me. This Trump Cyber Monday offer is meant for YOU, Ben, and is not intended to be shared.

You have 1 HOUR to claim your FREE TRUMP CYBER MONDAY GIFT before I release it to the next Patriot in line. Don’t wait.

Please contribute at least $35 IMMEDIATELY to claim your FREE TRUMP CYBER MONDAY GIFT. >>

I want you to know how much you mean to me, Ben.

You’ve always been there when I needed you the most, and I know you’ll continue to be there for me while we work to DEFEND the Election.

Contribute $35 RIGHT NOW and my team will send you your FREE Trump Cyber Monday Gift.

Thank you,

Donald J. Trump

As of Tuesday, Dec. 1, he has collected $170 million via his email scam in which he paints such a rosy picture of him being able to overturn the results of the election. $170 million! Of course, he neglects to mention that 60 percent of everything he collects goes right into his pocket to do with as he pleases. The disclaimer on his solicitation says so. If you read far enough into it, it’s there for you to see. That’s a lot of Big Macs, folks, especially when 26 million Americans are going hungry because of a pandemic that he ignored for way too long.

He could even use that money to pay himself a million or so a year as well as his deadbeat kids, especially given the fact that there are 30 million unemployed Americans, many of whom don’t know where they’ll be sleeping next week.

There’s just something patently obscene about this fund drive.

If you voted for Trump, that’s your business and yours alone. I have nothing to say other than I don’t agree with your choice. Still, it’s your choice as a free American.

But if you fall for these B.S. “personalized” emails and you cough up one red cent to support this parasitic charlatan who has never had to struggle, who has never given a fleeting moment thinking of you or your fellow Americans who are out of work, going hungry and looking at the very real possibility of being homeless, then shame on you.

Who else but Donald Trump would be thinking only of himself at times like these?

Stop and think about it for just a doggone second. If he’s really such a filthy rich billionaire as he would have us believe, why is he begging for $5, $10, $35, $50, $100 contributions like some cheesy televangelist? Is that Cyber Monday deal he’s offering a prayer cloth or a genuine splinter from the Cross?

Think for just a minute how much better spent your $5 or $10 would be if you gave it to the local Food Bank. If you are so weak-minded that you would fall for such a scam, if you are so callous as to give money to the Tangerine Toddler when your neighbor, your relative, the kids down the street, are going without their supper, then you damn well deserve just such a president because you are as morally corrupt as he is.

Random6018111

Ruston-based LaSalle Corrections is throwing in the towel at a trouble-plagued it has been operating for a decade in Texas.

When its current contract to run Bowie County’s Bi-State Jail in Texarkana, the facility will be turned back over to Sheriff James Prince, according to a STORY by Associated Press.

It was not immediately clear as to whose decision it was for LaSalle to pull out of running the jail that sits on the Texas-Arkansas line, but the facility has been beset by numerous lawsuits and has been the target of criticism from Texas regulators for the lax manner in which it has been run.

LaSalle took over operation of the facility in 2010 and since that time has become embroiled in a number of lawsuits involving at least two wrongful death claims and negligent injury.

Along the way, LaSalle or its employees have been found guilty of falsifying records, failure to complete training courses, lying about those courses, negligence, beating prisoners, denying medications, avoiding reporting in-custody deaths by releasing prisoners to hospitals or families prior to their deaths, and, in the case of its Georgia facility, filthy conditions and the performance of unwanted HYSTERECTOMIES on female detainees and exposing Louisiana employees and prisoners to coronavirus.

LaSalle operates nine facilities in Louisiana under contracts with local authorities. Those jails and their occupancy capacities are:

• Catahoula Correctional Center in Harrisonburg (835 beds);
• Jackson Parish Correctional Center in Jonesboro (1252);
• LaSalle Correctional Center in Olla (755);
• Madison Parish Correctional Center in Tallulah (334);
• Madison Parish Detention Center in Tallulah (264);
• Madison Parish LTCW (Louisiana Transitional Center for Women) in Tallulah (535);
• River Correctional Center in Ferriday (602);
• Southern Correctional Center in Tallulah (564);
• Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield (1576).

LaSalle’s legal problems haven’t been limited to Texas, however. Just last month, the company was PENALIZED more than $125,000 by the U.S. Department of Labor for failure to pay fringe benefits for 122 contract employees at its Olla facility.

LaSalle is run by the McConnell family in Ruston, headed by father William McConnell and son Clay.

The elder McConnell presides over myriad limited liability corporate entities, including WMC Enterprises, Medical Supplies, LaSalle Corrections West, LaSalle Corrections, LaSalle Corrections VI, LaSalle Correctional Center, Catahoula Correctional Center, Red River Center, Bayou Correctional, River Correctional Center, Richwood Correctional Center, Jackson Correctional Center, Lincoln Correctional Center, McConnell Southeast Holdings, McConnell Southeast Corrections, and LaSalle Management.

Clay McConnell is also involved in a number of corporate ventures. A Methodist minister, he was a director and vice president of the now-inactive Rush Ministries in Bossier City.

He also was president of Polytech Ammunition Co. of Ruston, which holds a patent to a lead-free, composite polymer-based bullet and cartridge case, and is the registered agent for Correct Aviation, LLC, also of Ruston.

Editor’s note: The following was written by Canadian Chelsea Chisholm. She is married to scientist Michael Becker. I met his aunt and uncle in Austin a couple of years ago. Both are PhDs and are currently living in Switzerland. He formerly worked for BBC and participated in expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic and is described as “one hell of an athlete and an incredible diver.” (See the video HERE). Despite both the robust health of each, they both fell victim to Covid – not once, but twice. She shares their story below:

By Chelsea Chisholm

This post is mainly aimed at people in Canada, as I see a lot of confusion and anger running riot on social media back home. For those of you who don’t know, Michael and I contracted Covid back in Feb/early March.

I wrote a fb post then, detailing what it felt like to go through it and asking people to consider others’ safety during the pandemic. I had some fever and chest pain, and after a week they disappeared. Michael had only a slight dry cough, but soon after developed a case of pericarditis, or inflammation of the pericardium, the sack that surrounds the heart. He spent a month with chest pain akin to a mild heart attack, a lot of this time in bed, and was then put on strict orders not to stress his heart for another four months after his inflammation kept returning. Our doctor’s main concern was that he would develop myocarditis, an inflammation of the muscle of the heart which can cause permanent damage.

We slow biked our way through spring and luckily his heart healed. Michael ran an ironman in September after his recovery. I say this not to show that you can bounce back from Covid, but simply to point out that the man was fit. He was not in an at-risk group for Covid. He had no pre-existing conditions. He was 34.

Fast forward 7 months to October. Throughout the summer Michael and I needed to socially distance as much as possible to prevent catching another cold or flu that could trigger his pericarditis. But as he started to feel better, and as the summer had seen such low case numbers in our region, we made the decision to start seeing a few more people. This was around the time that weather was cooling off, sending more people indoors and cases skyrocketing, so I would say this was a poor decision on our part.

Keep in mind that “seeing a few more people” meant expanding our bubble from ~2 to 6. Because a few of those extra people were not limiting their interactions with others, our bubble actually went from 2 to many, and they showed up for dinner at our place infectious (but not yet showing symptoms). We caught Covid again, and for those of you who are wondering, it was not easier the second time around. Michael had a raging fever, was in bed for a week, and after eight weeks now his smell and taste are still gone. His heart rate has been all over the place, making normal things like a short run difficult.

And as for me, I was diagnosed with pericarditis, the same thing Michael had during our Covid 1.0. I’ve been told to lay off strenuous exercise for 6 months, and I’ve yet to go for more than a short walk/run since my diagnosis 8 weeks ago (it still hurts, and simple things like walking uphill are physically exhausting).

Cases this past week in Switzerland were in the top five worst in the world per capita, and we’ve now entered a second (soft) lockdown. Doctors will start triaging patients, choosing who gets to have an ICU bed and who is sent home because there simply isn’t enough space. My family doctor has had to move to the hospital to assist the ICU doctors.

This is in one of the richest countries, with one of the best medical systems, in the world. I’ve watched debates around the pandemic rage back and forth in Canada. It’s the same thing that happened here and continues to happen through the lockdown. Cases are rising steadily in Canada, just as they did here.

The funny thing about exponential growth is that things seem under control until they are not. It will get much worse in the coming weeks. I am not a medical doctor, but I am a scientist, and the stuff I do know a little about, the data, is troubling.

I’m going to ignore the usual arguments, that this is the same as the flu (it is definitively not) and that it only affects the elderly (sorry grandparents?), and focus in on the demographic that seem to vocalize the most around the pandemic. Studies vary but thus far suggest that 5-10% of people aged 18-50 who contract coronavirus will suffer long-term symptoms. This ignores other categories of people who are more at risk due to pre-existing conditions or age, in which case the probability would be higher.

You might look at that and say, that’s quite a low risk. Think of it this way. If cases continue to rise, as they did in Switzerland, one or two (young) people who catch Covid out of every twenty are likely to experience long term symptoms. That means someone in your friend group, a few people in your family, a few people at work. We’ve seen this happen already as a lot of our work colleagues and friends have been laid out with Covid, with some still not back to work or working at half capacity.

A few of these people may even go on to have permanent damage that they will have to live with for the rest of their lives. It could be us. We don’t know, and that’s even more scary.

From what I read online, people are upset about the infringement on their rights and freedoms, either through the cancellation of social activities or the requirement to wear a mask inside. The worst is when I see people calling the pandemic a hoax. I don’t want to get in a screaming match over facebook, I’ve seen enough of that already, and honestly, it’s heartbreaking (no pun intended). For those of you who have questions about what Covid is like, or whether it is real, or whether it is indeed worse than the flu (yes), I’d be happy to talk about our own personal experiences, if only to put a face to this. I am also happy to share resources about what measures appear to be working to reduce spread (see the bottom of this post).

The pandemic is hard, and some of us are luckier than others, as I’m sure a lot of struggling small business owners will attest. But I would say almost all of us reading this post are pretty well off compared to the rest of the world. We have access to medicine or live in a place where self-isolating is possible. And many of us are being asked to do our part through very simple actions, like limiting our gatherings and wearing a mask to the grocery store so that elderly people can feel more safe shopping for food. While masks are not 100% effective (neither is birth control, I might add), they help to reduce the risk of spreading the virus from you to others. These things are not that hard, and are the least we can do to help reduce the load on the many doctors and nurses who are are working tirelessly to save others during this time.

And if this feels like too big of an ask, I’d suggest reflecting on how good you must have it, that wearing a mask in a store is your biggest hurdle in life right now…

For those of you who want resources, here’s an excellent graphic on how masks can work to reduce spread: https://www.nytimes.com/…/wear-mask-covid-particles-ul…

 A National Geographic study shows that mask wearing during your day to day (transport, shopping) can really help to protect you and others. It also shows that the longer you are in a room with someone (public/private gatherings), the more likely you are to catch it, even if everyone is wearing masks, so limiting indoor gatherings is really important.

A recent paper that suggests limiting small gatherings, shutting schools and increasing availability of PPE are the most effective measures that governments have taken thus far to reduce the spread of the virus.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-01009-0).