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Number of ICE detainees in Louisiana increases threefold in six months: it’s a cash-cow enterprise driven by pure greed

November 1, 2019 by tomaswell

Last May, The New Orleans Advocate published a STORY that put the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees in Louisiana at 2,800.

Today, just six months later, that number has trebled to 9,000.

That dramatic increase could be tied to the sudden disappearance of thousands of detainees in Brownsville, Texas, who were rumored to have been quietly transferred to Louisiana which now ranks second only to Texas in the number of ICE detainees.

A big part of the reason for the surge is pure economics.

The Louisiana Department of Corrections pays local sheriffs and private prisons $24.39 to house its prisoners while ICE’s rate is more than double that, at $65 a day.

And the profits don’t stop with the daily rates paid by ICE. Exorbitant rates charged by private telephone companies, private- or sheriff department-run commissaries that gouge prisoners for snacks and soft drinks, and private companies that provide ankle monitors are cashing in on both DOC prisoners and ICE detainees.

In short, local facilities, whether operated by private companies like LASALLE CORRECTIONS, headquartered in Ruston (even its EMPLOYEES give it overall poor reviews), GEO, or local sheriffs—and the aforementioned affiliated suppliers—have discovered a cash cow.

One privately-run local prison no longer even takes DOC prisoners, choosing instead to go for the bigger payout.

And of course, the private companies that run prisons, operate telephone services, sell concessions and provide the ankle monitors haven’t forgotten to grease the skids via generous campaign contributions to the elected officials who continue to approve the arrangements and everyone comes away happy.

Almost everyone, that is.

Forgotten in the ringing of the cash registers for those entities has been the general welfare of the detainees.

With 1,600 detainees in Jena, 1,000 each in Richwood, Basile, and Jonesboro, 1,400 in Winnfield, 1,100 in Pine Prairie, 835 in Ferriday, 755 in Jena, and 250 in Plain Dealing, overcrowding is a real issue. And little has been done to address that problem.

At Richwood, for example, 98 detainees are housed in a single room and there are only four toilets with no privacy. Beds are stacked three high along the walls of the room with bunk beds placed down the middle of the room. Detainees are awakened at 4 a.m. for breakfast and are given only 40 minutes per day outside. One observer said the men “get so hopeless and desperate, they just start screaming.”

Hardened criminals at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola receive better treatment.

Recently, the warden at Richwood was replaced after a detainee committed SUICIDE.

Other atrocities attributed to LaSalle were cited in an ONLINE STORY by Vice.com. These included moldy food, poor training of guards, physical abuse of migrants, and lack of medical care.

A demonstration is planned tomorrow (Saturday) at Richwood for whatever good it might do. If a detainee is identified by the media, he is at risk for reprisals, according to the observer who spoke on condition of confidentiality for that very reason.

Nell Hahn, a retired Lafayette attorney with the Louisiana Advocates for Immigrant and Detention (LA-AID), spoke to a group of detainee advocates at the Ruston Presbyterian Church last Saturday.

She said billions of dollars are being wasted on imprisoning those “whose only offense is that they have no legal documentation. They have committed no crimes,” she said.

The detainees are housed in such remote places as Jonesboro, Jena, Ferriday, Winnfield, Pine Prairie, and Oberlin in part because keeping them in such remote places makes it difficult for them to obtain legal representation from attorneys like Lara Nochomovitz of Cleveland, Ohio, who, nevertheless represents clients at Richwood, Plain Dealing and Jonesboro.

The Southern Poverty Law Center purchased a house in Jena in order to serve as a place for attorneys to stay while working on cases—and for immigrants’ families to stay free of charge.

Still, immigration judges who hear Louisiana cases have unusually high rates of denials of petitions for asylum from detainees.

It’s one thing to protect our borders and no one would argue that. But to keep detainees, including children, in inhuman conditions with inadequate toiletries, bedding, food and exercise, caged like rats, is not what this country is supposed to be about.

And lest the argument crops up that the illegal immigrants are taking jobs from Americans, let’s be clear: They have not taken a single job. Those jobs were “taken” by the employers who run the roofing companies, construction companies and the chicken processing plants, and who give the jobs to the illegals.

As long as they give the low-paying jobs to illegals, the problem will persist.

Like the futile war on drugs, as long as there is a demand, there will be a supply.

 

Posted in Corruption, Courts, Ethics, Politicians, Prison | 13 Comments »

Online ads link LABI, Rispone candidate for 36th Senatorial District to Ashley Madison online extramarital dating service

October 31, 2019 by tomaswell

I read a joke somewhere once that defined “priceless” as the expression on someone’s face the moment he realized he was wrong.

The same might be said of U.S. Sen. John Kennedy, U.S. Rep. Mike Johnson, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and other family values conservatives who may have backed the wrong horse in the Senate District 36 race.

All the right names (and that would be the “far-right”) have thrown their support and their money into electing challenger Robert Mills over incumbent Ryan Gatti because (gasp) Gatti, like Mills, a Republican, has a bipartisanship voting record as opposed to voting the straight party line.

In party politics (and I’m talking about both parties now), walking in lock-step with the party line has somehow become more important than cooperation and compromise with those across the aisle in order to do what’s best for state and country.

And it’s that spirit of party over progress that has so sharply divided this country and this state to the point of political paralysis.

We witnessed eight years of a Jindal administration in which a Republican legislature rolled back funding for higher education, public education, mental health programs, and privatized other programs. Once Democrat Edwards entered the governor’s office, he was opposed by the Republicans at every turn.

And now, big money with far too much influence in our electoral process is trying to tip the scales even further in favor of big business, big banks, payday lending, nursing homes, private prisons, big oil, and big pharma, just to name a few of the heavy hitters in Baton Rouge.

Behind those efforts are political action committees with names like East PAC, West PAC, North PAC, and South PAC, all political action committees of the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry (LABI), begging the question of why does one lobbying organization need four separate political action committees? To make LABI’s political influence four times greater, perhaps?

And they have Gatti in their crosshairs.

People and organizations like the Republican State Leadership Committee, the Louisiana Student Financial Aid Association, Eddie Rispone, Koch Industries, Donald Bollinger, and relatives of Republican (would-be) kingmaker Lane Grigsby, among others, have joined LABI’s directional PACs to dislodge Gatti, whose senate district comprises all of Webster and parts of the parishes of Bossier, Bienville and Claiborne.

Just since January 1 of this year, they and others have coughed up more than $250,000 to get their boy elected. $250,000 for one little rural senatorial district.

The Louisiana Committee for a Conservative Majority, led by Kennedy and Landry, is pushing hard for Gatti’s defeat. “Sen. Gatti seems to have proven time and time again to choose the governor’s wishes over the Republican Party’s platform,” Landry said. The committee has raised more than $1 million to boost its candidates, Mills included.

But their boy—and by extension, his well-heeled supporters—may have a problem.

That problem goes by the name of ASHLEY MADISON. For those who may not know, that’s the online dating service designed specifically for married people seeking a discreet affair.

And Robert Mills’ name pops up on the website:

MILLS LISTING

…and an online AD has already popped up asking Mills about his name appearing on the Ashley Madison site:

Is it the same Robert Mills? That is, after all, a fairly common name. Not so much as John Smith or Joe Jones, but common nevertheless. And more so than say, Sterdly Thrunch.

We have no way of knowing, but whoever placed those two ads online seem to be pretty confident it’s the same Robert Mills.

If it is, those family-value conservative Republicans—Rispone included (he gave $2500 to Mills)—have to feel they’ve picked a loser.

Mills garnered nearly 48 percent of the vote in the first primary, finishing a full 10 points ahead of incumbent Gatti, but that big edge could evaporate in heavily-Protestant northwest Louisiana if it turns out Mills, who, four-times married and thrice divorced, according to one of the ads, turns out to be the same one trolling for an online hookup for a one-night fling.

Or maybe not.

That stigma certainly didn’t keep them from voting for Donald Trump.

But when the late Tip O’Neill said all politics is local, he wasn’t talking about a presidential candidacy.

And state senator doesn’t get much more local and the more local it gets, the more the perception of immoral behavior could figure in the final outcome.

Mills’ supporters have spent a lot of money and time trashing Gatti because he had the nerve to vote with Democrat Edwards from time to time.

That sin could pale by comparison to an Ashley Madison tie to their anointed candidate.

By all political logic, they should have a difficult time squaring their support for Mills if indeed, he is the one seeking warmth and companionship for the coming cold north Louisiana nights. But then, logic has seldom factored into the equation of Louisiana politics.

Posted in Politics | 2 Comments »

Two publications, two versions of dispute between Judge Lori Landry & District Attorney Bo Duhé in Iberia Parish

October 30, 2019 by tomaswell

Iberia Parish continues to generate negative publicity that only serves to underscore the racial divide in that parish. This time, though, it’s not the sheriff’s office but the office of District Attorney Bo Duhé and instead of silencing African-American prisoners, Duhé’s office is attempting to undercut the authority of an African-American judge

Sarah Lustbader, writing for http://theappeal.org/, described on Tuesday the legal effort of the DA’s office to force the recusal of 16th Judicial District Judge Lori Landry from more than 300 criminal cases.

On Wednesday, Katie Gagliano, writing for the Acadiana Advocate, put a slightly different spin (the DA’s spin, as contained in Duhé’s office’s legal filings) on the same story.

While Gagliano’s STORY dealt with confrontations between Judge Landry and attorneys for the district attorney’s office, Lustbader chose to hard statistics that reflect harsher penalties for blacks who commit felonies than for their white counterparts. You can read that story by going HERE.

But there’s more to the story—as there nearly always is.

And it’s not that First Assistant DA Robert Vines, who is white, filed the recusal motion—the same Robert Vines who was named LEAD PROSECUTOR in a case involving alleged illegal manipulation of the Cypress Bayou Casino’s employee and payroll databases.

Cypress Bayou Casino is run by the Chitimacha Indian Tribe in St. Mary Parish and in June 2016, the tribe’s chairman, O’Neil Darden, Jr., was arrested by State Police on charges of felony theft, accused of stealing from the tribe by tinkering with the casino’s data bases that resulted in his receiving an “annual bonus” of several thousand dollars to which he was not entitled.

The only problem with Vines serving as lead prosecutor in that case is that Darden hired Vines in January 2016, six months before his arrest, as prosecutor for the Chitimacha Tribal Court.

Apparently, the question of recusal never came up in that case.

Of course, the Cypress Bayou Casino case is not related to the latest controversy arising in the DA’s office, but it does illustrate how the district attorney’s office—along with the office of Sheriff Louis Ackal—operates as a law unto itself.

As further illustration of the manner in which justice has been turned on its ear in Iberia, there is the case of DONALD BROUSSARD. In July 2016, Broussard, who had begun a drive to recall Sheriff Ackal, was rear-ended in adjacent Lafayette Parish by a hit-and-run driver named Rakeem Blakes.

Broussard followed Blakes, getting close enough to read the license number, which he gave to a 911 dispatcher before falling back. Moments later, after entering Iberia Parish, Blakes was killed when he collided with an 18-wheeler.

Broussard was subsequently indicted for manslaughter by Duhé and sentenced to four years hard labor. Thus, the message was sent loud and clear: Broussard, a black man, should have known better than to initiate a recall of Ackal.

So, there is obvious acrimony between Judge Landry and Duhé’s office, but when one looks beyond the legal motions filed by Vines and analyzes the data provided by Lustbader, it’s easier to understand why there might be some undercurrent of resentment in Iberia Parish’s black community.

There is a real disparity in the manner in which justice is meted out and there has been little effort to address that disparity.

The Appeal is a non-profit media organization that produces original journalism about criminal justice that is focused on the most significant drivers of mass incarceration, which occur at the state and local level.

Its job is to address that disparity.

Duhé’s job, apparently, is not.

 

Posted in Corruption, Courts, Ethics, Judges | 1 Comment »

Fall fundraiser in final week but we also solicit news tips

October 25, 2019 by tomaswell

As LouisianaVoice enters the final week of its fall fundraiser, we still need your help.

Obviously, there is the financial aspect of keeping this blog viable and we do humbly solicit your generous contributions.

Because we are a 501(c)(3) non-profit, your contributions are fully tax-deductible and anyone giving $100 or more gets a free signed copy of my newest book, Louisiana’s Rogue Sheriffs: A Culture of Corruption.

You may contribute by credit card by clicking on the yellow oval DONATE button in the column to the right of this post. It looks like this:

Donate Button with Credit Cards

But don’t click on this image because it won’t work. Go to the button in the column to the right.

Or you can contribute by sending your checks to:

LouisianaVoice

P.O. Box 922

Denham Springs, Louisiana 70727

And as much as we need and appreciate your financial support, we also ask that you provide us with information about any kind of official misconduct on the part of any public officials or agencies, be they state, parish or municipal. Corruption at all levels should be exposed and that’s what we’re about at LouisianaVoice.

We’re not interested in pursuing a personal vendetta but we will investigate any official wrongdoing.

You may email information to us at louisianavoice@outlook.com

Thanks for nine years of support and let us hear from you.

 

Posted in Politics | Leave a Comment »

Louisiana author Aimee Edmondson’s book ‘In Sullivan’s Shadow’ examines landmark case vital to press freedom

October 25, 2019 by tomaswell

For those who prefer the fast-paced action of James Patterson, John Grisham or James Lee Burke, In Sullivan’s Shadow isn’t for you.

But if you are a political junkie with an eye for a scholarly work about a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that was key to the simultaneous support of the First Amendment and the American civil rights movement, then you will definitely fine In Sullivan’s Shadow riveting reading.

Author Aimee Edmondson, a native of East Carroll Parish, never really appreciated the stark reality of having grown up sheltered from exposure to blacks, attending as she did, an all-white private school, until she bumped into an African-American student from her home town her freshman year at LSU. Only then did she realize that even in a small town like Lake Providence, they had grown up worlds apart. When she innocently observed that she didn’t attend public school back home, he simply shook his head and said, “No s**t.”

Edmondson, who teaches journalism at the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, has crawled back through the legal archives of civil rights litigation to give us a long-awaited examination of SLAPP (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation) lawsuits used as weapons against national publications like Time, The New York Times, Look, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, and even The Ladies’ Home Journal and bold local editors who saw resistance to the civil rights movement for what it was: a desperate attempt to keep blacks “in their place” while preserving the comfortable—and separate—lifestyles of whites.

While local television stations in the South would display “Technical Difficulties” on viewers’ screens whenever their networks would air footage of blacks being beaten in Southern bus stations, the national publications—and to a lesser extent, courageous small town editors like Hodding Carter, Buford Boone and Hazel Brannon Smith—were providing graphic coverage that left people like Lester Sullivan, Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, Lawrence A. Rainey, and retired Army Gen. Edwin Walker in a litigious mood.

Sullivan was Commissioner of the Police and Fire Department of Montgomery, Alabama, Connor was Birmingham Police Commissioner, and Rainey was Sheriff of Neshoba County, Mississippi.

In a series of separate SLAPP filings, they launched a full-scale attack on the national publications, CBS News, CBS reporter Howard K. Smith, himself a native of Ferriday, Louisiana, and local newspapers that dared to take a stand against arrests, beatings, arson, and even murders. And of course, black newspapers and civil rights leaders were not exempt from the costly litigation.

Edmondson calls up some familiar names when she describes how the struggle for equality made its way to Baton Rouge. Names like Police Chief Wingate White, U.S. District Court Judge E. Gordon West, 19th Judicial District Court Judge Fred LeBlanc, and District Attorney Sargent Pitcher, Jr., Mayor John Christian, and Rev. Arthur L Jelks surface in her recounting of the volatile struggle.

She even manages to provide us with a brief account of the ongoing battles between blacks and Iberia Parish Sheriff Louis Ackal.

But more than just a rehashing of police dogs, fire hoses and clubs, Edmondson’s book focuses more on the legal struggles that came out of the multitude of SLAPP actions brought by Sullivan, Connor, Rainey, and Walker.

In frightening detail, she shows how these lawsuits bullied CBS into a public apology for Smith’s reporting and how editors at The New York Times genuinely feared for the financial existence of the publication should it lose its landmark case brought by Sullivan.

But then, in 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that even if a publication had factual errors in its reporting on a public official, that public official must show that the publication new its story was false and published it anyway, with malice and reckless disregard for the truth.

But then, when Gen. Walker sued over stories that he instigated rioting during the integration of the University of Mississippi, the Supreme Court went a bit further in declaring that Sullivan protected publications from litigation not only from public officials, but from public figures, as well, thus cementing the right of freedom of the press.

In Sullivan’s Shadow is a must-read for political junkies, especially in a time when the adversarial relationship between the media and public officials–particularly on the national stage—is more acrimonious than it’s been since Montgomery, Birmingham and Neshoba County.

 

Posted in Book Review, Corruption, Courts, Lawsuits, LSU, TV News | 1 Comment »

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