Tag Archives: california

How to smash solar power records: Harness a heat wave

by LydaMcCorkindal Posted on July 25, 2016

Beat the Heat

How to smash solar power records: Harness a heat wave

By on Jul 25, 2016 3:24 pmShare

California just crushed a solar energy record — thanks to the heat wave currently smothering the state.

At 1:06pm on July 12 — as the Golden State was burning in temps hitting the high 90s — its solar power plants generated an unheard-of 8,030 megawatts of electricity, according to the California Independent System Operator.

That’s enough to power 6 million homes, SFGate reports. Just two years ago, the statewide system could produce only half that amount of electricity. These record-breaking numbers don’t even take into account the 500,000-plus solar arrays installed on California’s private homes and offices, which can produce an estimated 4,000 megawatts of electricity altogether.

On July 12, renewable energy met almost 29 percent of electricity demand when it peaked at 5:54pm. That’s good news for the state’s goal of sourcing 33 percent of its power from renewables by 2020.

When life gives you heat domes, make megawatts of renewable energy, as they say.

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How to smash solar power records: Harness a heat wave

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Bernie Sanders Delegates Threaten Convention Chaos

by DewayneE65 Posted on July 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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“We got her. We got her.”

It’s near midnight. Democratic Party delegates are milling about the lobby bar of the Marriott in downtown Philadelphia. And on the big overhead screen, there’s a CNN report on the news of the day: Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, had given up the post after leaked emails showed that some DNC officials had discussed how to thwart Bernie Sanders’ campaign.

Sanders delegates are cheering wildly. The head of the party apparatus many of them despise is out. It’s a victory for the Sanders revolution. Off to the side, a Florida delegate for Hillary Clinton looks on sadly. “I suppose she had to go,” he says. He then sums up the relationship between Sanders delegates and Clinton delegates with one word: “acidic.”

As thousands of delegates to the Democratic convention hit the City of Brotherly Love (and Sisterly Affection), it was clear that the Clinton campaign’s talk of unity, in the wake of announcing Tim Kaine as Clinton’s running mate, was more hope than reality. Sanders delegates throughout the city were grousing about a series of perceived slights and wrongs: the selection of Kaine, with his centrist reputation; the leaked emails, which showed that, yes, the DNC favored Clinton over Sanders, but didn’t contain evidence of much underhanded activity; and Clinton’s inadequate (in their view) outreach to the Sanders crowd. At a pro-Sanders rally on Sunday afternoon, attendees chanted, “Lock her up,” echoing the mantra of Donald Trump’s convention last week. At a Monday morning gathering of the California Democratic delegation, Sanders delegates booed mentions of Clinton. And Florida Sanders delegates jeered Wasserman Schultz at their breakfast meeting.

Many Sanders folks are still grieving and not accepting Clinton’s triumph. Though Sanders nudged Clinton to the left during the campaign, demonstrated the vitality of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, helped craft the party’s most progressive platform in decades, and won a small concession regarding the future of superdelegates within the party, many of his delegates were openly and vigorously expressing disappointment and voicing their dissatisfaction with Clinton.

Lisa Flyte, a Sanders representative on the convention credentials committee, griped that the Clinton campaign “is still taking jabs at us.” Though she noted she believed that a Trump victory would likely be bad news for low- and middle-income Americans, she said Clinton has “supported policies that hurt middle-income people here and abroad.” She blasted Clinton for supporting “oligarchs overseas and big energy companies.” She was ticked off that the Clinton campaign “is saying we’re unified without real accommodations.” She added, “We’re not ready to move on.”

Jason Brown, the vice chair of the Iowa delegation and a Sanders supporter, was peeved that the Clinton campaign has “not yet reached out to us.” He noted that Clinton’s message was not inspiring Iowans who had volunteered and voted for Sanders. “These people are looking for more from her,” he said. Brown is committed to supporting Clinton, but he remarked, “I’m not sure I can convince the Sanders volunteers with a she’s-not-Trump message. They need more.”

At the start of the convention, Sanders delegates were left to their own devices. The Sanders campaign had created a whip system to provide guidance to its delegates. But as of Monday morning, no instructions were disseminating. “That’s been frustrating,” one Sanders delegate from Florida says. “We don’t know what they want us to be saying or doing. We’re in limbo.” (Sanders was scheduled to address his delegates at a Monday afternoon meeting.) A California Clinton delegate pointed out that within her state delegation, there had been little conversation between Clinton delegates and Sanders delegates. “It’s still very raw,” she said. “They’re processing a death in the family.”

At a press conference on Monday morning, the Bernie Delegates Network, an outfit independent of the Sanders campaign that claims to represent two-thirds of the Sanders delegates, presented Sanders delegates outraged at the DNC and Clinton campaign. They were mad that Clinton has named Wasserman Schultz an honorary chairwoman of her campaign. There was talk of launching protests—”an expression of disapproval”—during Clinton and Kaine’s speeches. This could include delegates booing or walking out.

Norman Solomon, a Sanders delegate, asserted, “There is serious interest and exploration…in a formal challenge” to Kaine. Who might that be? Solomon replied that Sanders delegates have approached several politicians, but that “those who want to eat lunch at the White House, they run the other way.” So any names? “We’re working on it.” (Solomon said he has had “zero connection with the Bernie campaign.”)

At this event, Manuel Zapata, a California Sanders delegate, shared his bitter disappointment. “Since the moment we got here, people have looked down on us as we walked past people with our Bernie swag on—as if he’s not still a candidate, as if it’s wrong for us to support our candidate,” he said. He added, “It is disrespectful that a madman like Donald Trump is reaching out for the progressive vote more than Hillary Clinton is.”

Karen Bernal, a leader of the California Sanders delegation, said there would be nothing wrong with Sanders people jeering Clinton when she comes to the podium. She did note that the Sanders campaign was “pressing us not to be involved in protests and not to be so overt in our expressions…My job is to make sure that the wishes of my delegates are heard, that their opinions are heard…They have never been a group to take marching orders.”

Bernal believes Sanders’ endorsement of Clinton was a mistake. She said, “We can still be mad at Hillary Clinton and still say it’s essential to defeat Trump.” But asked if protests by Sanders delegate would help the effort to defeat Trump, Beral noted, “It absolutely helps,” because it will signal to progressives that there is a place for them within the Democratic Party. She didn’t explain precisely how deriding Clinton and her veep pick would bolster the effort to elect Clinton.

It’s uncertain what sway Sanders will have over the Sanders delegates looking to make noise at this convention. The delegates at this press conference repeatedly noted that the movement transcends the candidate and that the activists within it will determine the strategy this week. If they are asked by Sanders not to do something, Solomon said, “we’ll take that under advisement.” He added that Sanders “is not running the show…The activists at this convention will make the social change.”

Update 1:35 p.m.: Sanders addressed his delegates on Monday afternoon and highlighted the successes he achieved in his campaign, boasting of “the most progressive platform ever written in the history of the Democratic Party” and a “major victory” in reforming superdelegates. But when he told the crowd, “We have got to elect Hillary Clinton,” he was met with boos.

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Bernie Sanders Delegates Threaten Convention Chaos

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Water Out of the Tailpipe: A New Class of Electric Car Gains Traction

by Myrna Posted on July 21, 2016

In California, state subsidies for hydrogen filling stations are encouraging clean-energy advocates to try fuel-cell vehicles. Read More:   Water Out of the Tailpipe: A New Class of Electric Car Gains Traction ; ; ;

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Water Out of the Tailpipe: A New Class of Electric Car Gains Traction

Posted in alo, cannabis, eco-friendly, FF, For Dummies, G & F, GE, global climate change, LAI, Monterey, ONA, organic, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Water Out of the Tailpipe: A New Class of Electric Car Gains Traction

Fracking and immigration activists unite 60 feet above the RNC

by CathyNpykchtei Posted on July 19, 2016

moral highground

Fracking and immigration activists unite 60 feet above the RNC

By on Jul 19, 2016Share

Four anti-fracking, pro-immigrant activists scaled 60-foot flagpoles a few blocks from the Republic National Convention on Tuesday morning, then unfurled a massive banner that read “Don’t Trump our communities.”

What are these two groups of activists doing together? Their issues overlap. In many places around the country, immigrants live in areas where oil companies use hydraulic fracturing to release natural gas and oil. Most of the fracking in California, for instance, happens in the Central Valley, near fields where undocumented workers harvest crops to feed the rest of the country. Fracking sites are more likely to be in neighborhoods of color and poverty.

Emmelia Talarico, an activist who traveled to Cleveland, Ohio from Maryland for the protest, said that “communities directly impacted by oil and gas extraction have come together with immigrant communities being torn apart by deportations to take a stand against an unjust system that targets us all.”

Three of the four activists were arrested and are now raising money for bail.

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Fracking and immigration activists unite 60 feet above the RNC

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Wonky Mr. Potato Head wants you to know it’s not the shape that counts

by Madelai90A Posted on July 2, 2016

what a spud

Wonky Mr. Potato Head wants you to know it’s not the shape that counts

By on Jul 2, 2016Share

“Fugly spud” isn’t the name a self-loving starch wants to be branded with. But Mr. Potato Head will damn well wear it proudly if it makes you stop throwing away ugly veggies.

The toy company Hasbro has partnered up with U.K.-based grocery store chain Asda to bring attention to food waste with the Wonky Mr. Potato Head. Profits from an auction for the limited-edition, dashingly asymmetric fellow will go to FareShare, a nonprofit that redistributes surplus foods, according to the charity’s website.

“It’s the taste, not the shape that counts, and the charities and community groups we support can turn them into delicious meals for people in need,” said Daniel Nicholls, Corporate Development Officer at FareShare, in a statement.

Food waste is undeniably a huge problem. About one-third of the world’s food supply is wasted every year even though 800 million people go undernourished.

Grist’s Nathanael Johnson breaks down our wasteful ways even more:

The United States spends $218 billion a year producing food that nobody eats — amounting to 40 percent of all food grown. We devote roughly 80 million acres to grow food just for the garbage bin — an area three-quarters the size of California.

That’s a lot of squandered food.

A novelty toy isn’t going to solve that problem single-plastic-handedly, but it’s at least a start on the path to less waste — and a victory for self-respecting veggies everywhere.

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Wonky Mr. Potato Head wants you to know it’s not the shape that counts

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Now Clinton and Sanders Are Fighting Over the Democratic Platform

by HelaineNqb Posted on June 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Democratic Party’s platform drafting committee has written a stronger climate change section than the platform had in 2012, but it also rejected a series of more ambitious climate and energy amendments on Friday. That’s raised the ire of Bernie Sanders and his appointees to the drafting committee, like climate activist and author Bill McKibben.

The first draft of the platform, voted on by the 15-member drafting committee, is now complete, though it hasn’t been made publicly available. On July 8 and 9, in Orlando, the full 187-member platform committee will meet and debate further changes before approving and sending its draft on to the party convention, to be held in Philadelphia the last week of July.

Sanders slammed Hillary Clinton’s committee appointees for blocking progressive provisions and pledged to continue fighting for changes to the document. “Despite the growing crisis of climate change, Clinton’s delegates voted against a tax on carbon, against a ban on fracking,” said Sanders in a statement on Sunday. “We intend to do everything we can to rally support for our amendments in Orlando and if we fail there to take the fight to the floor of the convention in Philadelphia.”

How did the platform become a big deal this time?

Drama over the party platform is atypical. Usually the document is just a quietly produced, platitudinous summation of the presidential nominee’s policy vision. But if Sanders gets some of the changes he’s still pushing for, this year’s platform could look very different from the last one, adopted four years ago under a moderate incumbent president with a mixed record on environmental issues.

Sanders’ campaign is dedicated to pushing American politics leftward, so he and his team have been focused on influencing the platform. After making a stronger-than-expected primary showing, Sanders asked for seven appointments to the 15-person drafting committee. The party gave him five, Clinton got six, and the remaining four were appointed by party chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Now that Sanders has lost the fight for the nomination, he and his supporters see the platform as their chief vehicle for having a lasting impact on the party’s direction.

Sanders and Clinton each appointed a climate expert to the drafting committee. Sanders chose McKibben, cofounder of climate action group 350.org (and a member of Grist’s board of directors). Clinton picked Carol Browner, who served as President Obama’s climate czar from 2009 to 2011.

Sanders’ other appointees were all progressives, of course. Clinton and Wasserman Schultz also chose fairly left-leaning slates. In analyzing the appointees, The Nation‘s John Nichols concluded that “the drafting committee has a progressive majority.” That led climate hawks to hope that some of the more aggressive proposals from the Sanders’ camp might pass. But that’s not how things have played out so far.

What they agreed on

The drafting committee members did come together on some critical climate-related decisions. The biggest and most important shift from the 2012 platform was dropping the call for “all-of-the-above” energy development, which reflected the priorities of Obama’s first term. The members also unanimously agreed to call for fully switching to clean energy by 2050.

The draft platform echoes the Paris Agreement in aiming to keep global warming below 2 degrees C (3.6 F) over pre-industrial levels, with the hope of staying below 1.5 C (2.7 F) if possible. It calls for a Department of Justice investigation into fossil fuel companies (read: ExxonMobil) accused of misleading the public about climate science. It backs elimination of fossil fuel subsidies in the tax code and extension of support for renewable energy development, such as the wind production tax credit.

Browner told Grist that the language supporting renewables was written in from the beginning and never even required an amendment. “There was a lot of stuff where there was common ground that was embedded in the conversation,” she said.

And some amendments proposed by McKibben on Friday were passed unanimously, such as a noncontroversial call for more bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure and a statement of opposition to electric utilities’ efforts to quash solar energy. As Browner put it, “The draft has everybody’s fingerprints.”

What they fought over—or, what the Sanders team lost

But while Sanders and progressive climate activists see the current draft platform as a modest step in the right direction, they are far from satisfied. The platform document sets strong big-picture goals for curbing climate change and boosting clean energy, but doesn’t include specific policies that would actually help meet those goals.

“In the draft, everyone agreed that there should be 100 percent clean energy by 2050, but every measure I put forward to actually get us there went down by the same 7-6 vote, with all the Clinton people voting in a bloc against,” said McKibben. Only one non-Sanders appointee, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), who was chosen by Wasserman Schultz, crossed over to vote with the Sanders bloc on the controversial climate change amendments. One committee member was absent, and the chair did not vote.

The half-dozen McKibben amendments that went down to defeat included calls for:

a carbon tax,
a fracking ban,
a ban on fossil fuel extraction on public lands,
elimination of support through international lending institutions for fossil fuel projects abroad,
a declaration that eminent domain should not be used to take private land for fossil fuel infrastructure projects, and
a “climate test” for future domestic energy projects, which would reject ones that contribute to climate change—like the test Obama ultimately used to reject the Keystone XL pipeline.

Only one of those was replaced with compromise language: The Clinton side offered and passed an amendment endorsing a gradual phaseout of fossil fuel extraction on public lands.

Climate Hawks Vote, a political action committee that endorsed Sanders, issued a statement praising the Exxon investigation amendment but also warning, “We’re fighting not just the Republicans, but also the incrementalists within the Democratic Party.”

The Clinton campaign says its reluctance to accept some of McKibben’s amendments reflects legitimate concerns about the policy implications, not mere political calculation. Not all experts agree that a carbon tax is the most effective way to reduce emissions, for example. Mary Nichols of the California Air Resources Board had pointed out in her testimony to the committee a week earlier that a carbon tax does not guarantee emissions reductions, while direct regulation, such as Obama’s Clean Power Plan, does. Clinton supporters rejected a blanket prohibition on lending for foreign fossil fuel development projects on the grounds that the US relationship with any given developing country may have competing priorities, and they opposed the climate test for energy projects because they worried it could prevent necessary projects like transmission lines for electricity that may be partly generated from dirty sources.

There are also obvious political concerns about some of these proposals. A carbon tax, for example, would have no chance of passage in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, but a call for such a tax would hand Donald Trump a potentially effective new weapon, letting him claim that Democrats want to raise energy prices.

It’s unlikely that Sanders’ supporters will be able to change many platform planks in Orlando or Philly. Essentially, they are calling for Sanders’ platform to become the party’s platform. But Sanders lost the primary race, and it stands to reason that the party platform would reflect the views of the candidate who won.

And that candidate has to consider not just the best climate policies in the abstract, but the ones that will help her win in November. “We’re going be facing a group of climate science deniers in Congress,” says Browner. “So what some of us are looking at is, How do we get a president elected and use the tools of government to continue to make real advances?”

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Now Clinton and Sanders Are Fighting Over the Democratic Platform

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Three Quotes of the Day About Donald Trump

by LindseyKempton Posted on June 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here’s what people said about Donald Trump on the Sunday chat shows yesterday. Keep in mind that these quotes are all from Trump’s supporters:

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer on Trump’s repeated statement that Judge Gonzalo Curiel was biased against him because of his Mexican heritage: “I don’t believe that Donald Trump meant it in the manner that he said it.”

Newt Gingrich on Trump’s constant backtracking: “I think he stands for an evolving process of trying to come to grips with really big problems.”

Sen. Mitch McConnell on whether Trump is qualified to be president: “I’ll leave that to the American people to decide.”

And as long as we’re on the subject of Trump, be sure to check out Michael Finnegan’s piece in the LA Times about Trump’s failed condo development in Baja California: “Most of the Trump Baja condo buyers accused Trump and two of his adult children, Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr., of duping them into believing that Trump was one of the developers, giving them confidence that it was safe to buy unbuilt property in Mexico.” It’s yet more of the usual Trump sleaze.

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Three Quotes of the Day About Donald Trump

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Why San Francisco’s Journalists Are Investigating Homelessness

by DwightWight Posted on June 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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This Wednesday, June 29, Mother Jones will join dozens of Bay Area news and media organizations to begin publishing and airing an ongoing series of stories on homelessness in San Francisco. This push is part of the SF Homeless Project, a recently launched effort whose goals are detailed in the open letter below. Stay tuned as we explore the state of homelessness in our city, as well as its history, causes, and potential solutions.

To the city and people of San Francisco:

Like you, we are frustrated, confused, and dismayed by the seemingly intractable problem of homelessness in our city. Like you, we want answers—and change.

We see the misery around us—the 6,600 or more people who live on the streets of San Francisco—and we sense it is worsening. We feel for the people who live in doorways and under freeways, and for the countless others who teeter on the edge of eviction. We empathize with the EMTs, the nurses and doctors, the social workers, and the police. They are on the front lines of this ongoing human catastrophe.

Numerous noble, well-intentioned efforts by both public and private entities have surfaced over the decades, yet the problem persists. It is a situation that would disgrace the government of any city. But in the technological and progressive capital of the nation, it is unconscionable.

So beginning today, more than 70 media organizations are taking the unprecedented step of working together to focus attention on this crucial issue.

We will pool our resources—reporting, data analysis, photojournalism, video, websites—and starting Wednesday, June 29, will publish, broadcast, and share a series of stories across all of our outlets. We intend to explore possible solutions, their costs, and viability.

Though this is a united effort, we do not claim to speak with one voice. There are many lenses through which the issue of homelessness can be viewed. However, we do not intend to let a desire for the perfect solution become the enemy of the good. We want to inspire and incite each other as much as we want to prod city and civic leaders.

Fundamentally, we are driven by the desire to stop calling what we see on our streets the new normal. Frustration and resignation are not a healthy psyche for a city.

Our aim is to provide you with the necessary information and potential options to put San Francisco on a better path. Then it will be up to all of us—citizens, activists, public and private agencies, politicians—to work together to get there.

Signed,

The SF Homeless Project

@bayareahomeless | facebook.com/sfhomelessproject

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Why San Francisco’s Journalists Are Investigating Homelessness

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The Paradox of Immigration: Opposition Is Strongest Precisely Where There Are the Fewest Immigrants

by ReneIBVDadaqo Posted on June 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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James Fallows is in western Kansas around Dodge City, where many of the cities are majority Latino and full of immigrants from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Cuba, and more recently Somalia and Sudan. Here’s what he says:

I can’t let this day end without noting the black-versus-white, night-versus-day contrast between the way immigration, especially from Mexico and other parts of Latin America, is discussed in this part of the country where it is actually happening, versus its role in this moment’s national political discussion.

….Every single person we have spoken with — Anglo and Latino and other, old and young, native-born and immigrant, and so on down the list — every one of them has said: We need each other! There is work in this community that we all need to do. We can choose to embrace the world, or we can fade and die. And we choose to embrace it.

I don’t have actual data on this, but my sense from both the US and Britain is that the most fervent opposition to immigration—legal or otherwise—comes precisely from the regions where it’s had the least impact. Here in the US, for example, immigration from Latin America has been heaviest in the southern sun belt states of California, Texas, Arizona, and a few others. And yet Donald Trump’s “build a wall” narrative played well in places like New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, all of which have relatively small Latino populations. Similarly, Brexit did best in the small towns and rural areas of England, the places that have the fewest immigrants and that depend the most on EU trade.

That’s not to say that opposition to immigration is absent in places like London or San Diego. It’s not. But these places mostly seem to have adapted to it and figured out that it’s not really all that bad. It’s everywhere else, where immigration is mostly a fear, that anti-immigrant sentiment has the strongest purchase. And that’s why peddling fear is so effective.

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The Paradox of Immigration: Opposition Is Strongest Precisely Where There Are the Fewest Immigrants

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Shane Bauer Talks About His Four Months Working in a Private Prison

by StacyCadejiqw Posted on June 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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In December 2014, Mother Jones senior reporter Shane Bauer started work as a corrections officer at a Louisiana prison run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the country’s second largest private-prison company. Here, he talks about what he saw during his four months on the job and what it taught him about life inside a for-profit prison. Read his full story here.

Mother Jones: How did you get the idea for this project?

Shane Bauer: The first time I thought about it was while talking to another reporter about writing about prisons. We were talking about Ted Conover’s Newjack, about his experience working as a guard at Sing Sing. I thought, “I should try that at a private prison.” There isn’t a lot of reporting on private prisons because they are not subject to the same public records laws as publicly run prisons and it’s pretty hard for journalists to get inside them. They’re a corner of the American prison system that we don’t know a lot about.

Why Mother Jones sent a reporter to work as a private prison guard

MJ: You got a job as a guard at the Corrections Corporation of America’s Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana. How hard was it to get the position?

SB: Not hard. I filled out an application online. I filled it out honestly with my real information. There was a list of prisons around the country that they needed people for. I clicked a handful of them, and within a couple weeks I was doing phone interviews and getting job offers. One reason I picked Winn was because it was in Louisiana. Louisiana has more prisoners per capita than anywhere in the world. It seemed like killing two birds with one stone, getting inside a Louisiana prison and a CCA prison. Winn was also the oldest medium-security private prison in the country.

MJ: When you got to Winn, what was your training like?

SB: I went through four weeks of training. We did some physical training, very little, and watched some videos. We were tear-gassed. Generally, somebody would get in front of the class and read from a book on policies like the use of force. A lot of it was spent sitting in the classroom doing nothing because there often weren’t teachers. There were whole days where the cadets would just sit and talk to each other. Maybe we’d have an hour or two of training. I really began learning the job once I started work.

MJ: You were assigned to a unit called Ash. What was your job there?

SB: Ash was a unit of eight dorms. Each dorm had up to 44 men in beds lined up right next to each other in one giant room. The inmates would go out to eat, and sometimes they would go out to a small yard for recreation. But most of the prisoners were in there almost the whole day. So there was a lot tension. A lot of people were frustrated at being stuck in there all day. I was a floor guard. It was just me and one other guard managing these 350 prisoners.

MJ: Shortly after you got to Winn, one prisoner told you that “Inmates run this bitch.” What did he mean by that?

SB: I think he meant that the prison administration didn’t have control over the prison. He and other inmates talked about the way Winn was run like it was a joke. I would ask prisoners who’d been to public state prisons how it compared and they would commonly say there’s was no structure there compared to other places.

MJ: What kinds of things did guards do to get by and make the best of the situation?

SB: Guards would rely on inmates to fill in the gaps since there weren’t enough guards to do all the things that we needed to do. Sometimes inmates would stand outside of a unit and warn us if higher-ups were coming. There was one corrections counselor who had a couple of inmates that she would use as bodyguards because she worked in an office where there weren’t security cameras. Sometimes we had to give out call-out passes—passes for prisoners to go places like school or the gym—and a lot times we would just give them to a prisoner to hand out.

MJ: How did Winn handle medical care and mental health care for prisoners?

SB: Prisoners regularly complained about medical care at Winn. I met a prisoner who had no legs and no fingers. He had lost them within the past year to gangrene. His medical records showed that he had made at least nine requests to see a doctor in that time. He would go to the infirmary and get sent back; the staff was suggesting that he was faking it. He said he showed the warden his feet, which were turning black and dripping with pus. But CCA had to pay to take a prisoner to the hospital, which costs a lot of money, especially when you consider it made $34 a day for each prisoner.

There was one full-time social worker for 1,500 inmates at Winn, and a part-time psychiatrist and part-time psychologist. The social worker said they typically would get to see any given inmate once a month. Another option available for prisoners with serious problems was suicide watch. If a prisoner said he was suicidal, he would get put on suicide watch, which essentially is a solitary cell.

MJ: Toward the end of your time at Winn, the state Department of Corrections (DOC) stepped in and temporarily took over the prison. Why’d that happen and how did things change when the state came in?

SB: Right about when I started working there, a prisoner escaped. Then there were a lot of stabbings and the state started paying attention to what was happening at Winn. Then there was another rash of stabbings. Some buses showed up one day with guards and wardens from public prisons around Louisiana, and they took over. The message seemed to be, “We’re gonna need to show you how to run this prison.” Everything felt different when they were there. The prisoners reacted really differently to them. Normally there was a constant testing of boundaries with the guards, but when these DOC guards came in, they’d say something and everyone did it.

MJ: Why did you quit your job as a guard?

SB: I had recently been offered a promotion. Shortly after that, my colleague James West came down to shoot some video for the story. One night he was filming the prison and he was spotted by a guard. A checkpoint was set up and he was arrested. When he got out about 24 hours later, we packed up and took off right away, and a few days later I called in and resigned.

MJ: After you left, you obtained some documents from the DOC that mentioned the concerns they had asked CCA to address at Winn. Did those echo what you had seen there?

SB: Yeah. The DOC outlined many things that I saw and wrote about—about there not being enough staff, either security staff or medical staff. There were also some things that surprised me: The state said CCA had charged inmates for state-supplied toilet paper and toothpaste and even charged them to use toenail clippers.

MJ: What happened at Winn after you left?

SB: A few weeks after I left, CCA said it would be giving up its contract for Winn. Then it was taken over by another company called LaSalle Corrections. A lot of the same prisoners and staff are still there.

MJ: A big part of your story is how being a prison guard affected you. What did your experience teach you about what it’s like to be a corrections officer?

SB: Even though I went there as a journalist and my main intention was to report on the prison, I got swept up in the mentality of being a guard. I felt in danger a lot of the time, so I was constantly trying to figure out how to manage prisoners. At first I tried to be on good terms with them. Later, I tried to show them they couldn’t push me around. I quickly felt like I was hardening.

As far as what it taught me about being a guard, it’s hard to generalize because you have guards in places like California who are unionized and make a lot more money and have more power in their facilities. Winn was the other extreme, where guards were making nine bucks an hour and didn’t have anything but a radio to protect themselves or break up fights. From what I experienced, it was a pretty crazy job, especially if you’re living off of $9 an hour.

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Shane Bauer Talks About His Four Months Working in a Private Prison

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