Tag Archives: justice

Trump Just Made Life Harder for Transgender Students

by ChaunceSchurr Posted on February 23, 2017

Mother Jones

On Wednesday, Donald Trump’s administration rescinded Obama era guidance directing schools to treat transgender students according to their gender identity.

While the most talked about part of Obama’s rules allowed students to use the bathroom that aligned best with their identity, the guidance also explained teachers should use students’ chosen name and pronoun and recommended steps to limit access to and amend transgender students’ school records. The move, which comes in a joint letter from the departments of justice and education, rescinds all such protections.

“This is the administration saying very clearly to anti-trans bullies…’These students are not worthy of protection….and we are not going to enforce the law,'” says Mara Keisling, the head of the National Center for Transgender Equality.

The letter claims rescinding the standing rules “does not leave students without protections from discrimination, bullying, or harassment,” and emphasizes that schools are responsible for ensuring all students “are able to learn and thrive in a safe environment.” But unlike Obama’s directive, which specified that a hostile environment could, for example, be established by failing to recognize students gender identity, the Trump administration’s letter gives no such guidance. That nod to bullying and harassment was reportedly added at the urging of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who, according to the New York Times, expressed discomfort at rescinding the guidance. When asked Wednesday about infighting between DeVos and Attorney General Sessions, who pushed strongly to rescind the guidance and who has long history of opposing LGBTQ rights, the administration maintained DeVos supports the move “100 percent.”

Without federal policies, transgender students’ rights will be inconsistent state to state and even between school districts and individual schools. In a statement released shortly after the letter, DeVos argued this “is an issue best solved at the state and local level…Schools, communities, and families can find—and in many cases have found—solutions that protect all students.”

“No child in America should have their rights subject to their zip code,” said Eliza Byard Executive Director of GLSEN, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making schools safe for LGBTQ students.

The Obama administration developed the guidance after the Education Department received questions from educators, administrators, parents, and students about how Title IX, a law which bans sex discrimination in educational programs and schools receiving federal assistance, protects transgender students. Bathroom access proved to be controversial, but it was seen as a key step towards compliance with the law by department officials.

“Students in kindergarten, elementary school classes are made to line up by boys and girls to go to the bathroom,” said Catherine Lhamon, a former assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education who helped develop the guidance. “Transgender students had to face a choice everyday about which line to get in and answering questions from their peers about why they’re in one line versus another, and that causes harm and humiliation to a student to have to explain.”

Private bathrooms can also invite questions from other students, be far from classes, or require an adult to unlock them, which can make students late for class.

“There were physical consequences to students of having to go through extra barriers just to be able to relieve themselves at school,” she says. “There were psychological consequences to students from having to explain who they are inside everyday to other students rather than just being able to be who they are.”

The Trump administration’s decision to roll back the protections comes just weeks before the Supreme Court is set to hear its first transgender rights case. Virginia high schooler Gavin Grimm sued his school board after it adopted a policy barring him from the men’s bathroom. At the center of the case: the question of whether Title IX protections apply to transgender students.

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Trump Just Made Life Harder for Transgender Students

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Defending California Once Again

by yq7izr Posted on February 21, 2017

Mother Jones

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Here is Mike Males in the LA Times this morning:

President Trump has cast California as “out of control” because of proposed legislation that would make the entire state a sanctuary for illegal immigrants, who, he says, “breed crime.” But in reality, as California’s immigrant population has grown, its crime and violence rates have plummeted.

Let’s start with the demographics….Over the last two decades, California has seen an influx of 3.5 million immigrants, mostly Latino, and an outmigration of some 2 million residents, most of them white. An estimated 2.4 million undocumented immigrants also currently live in the state.

….And yet, according to data from the FBI, the California Department of Justice, and the Centers for Disease Control, the state has seen precipitous drops in every major category of crime and violence that can be reliably measured. In Trump terms, you might say that modern California is the opposite of “American carnage.”

It’s true. And since a picture is worth a thousand words, here’s a picture:

Apologies for the ugliness of the chart. Edward Tufte would be appalled. But here’s what it shows. The foreign-born share of the population has increased from 9 percent to 27 percent since 1970. However, from 1995 to 2015, violent crime in California has declined at a faster rate than in the US as a whole.1

So do immigrants cause an increase in violent crime? It doesn’t really look like it, does it? And yet, Bakersfield Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the current House majority leader, continues to warn his fellow Californians that they should be nicer to President Trump. At the same time, Trump continues to justify hiring 10,000 new immigration agents and changing the deportation rules based on the idea that it’s important to get rid of anyone who’s committed even a minor infraction. That might make the base happy, but it’s not going to make anybody safer.

1I was lazy and only looked up the crime rates for every five years. I imagine I could also dig up crime rates by state earlier than 1995 if I really tried, but I didn’t try very hard. If anybody has them, I’ll be happy to pop them into the chart.

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Defending California Once Again

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Does Donald Trump’s Supreme Court Nominee Believe the Constitution Is God’s Law?

by bt88jtv Posted on February 21, 2017

Mother Jones

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During his confirmation hearings, scheduled to begin March 20, Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch will face a thorough grilling about his legal philosophy. Among the topics likely to come up are his views on “natural law” and his relationship with John Finnis, the Oxford University professor who advised Gorsuch on his Ph.D. thesis and one the world’s leading proponents of this arcane legal theory.

Natural law is a loosely defined term, but to many of its conservative US adherents it is essentially seen as God’s law—a set of moral absolutes underpinning society itself. In recent years, natural law believers have invoked this legal theory to defend a range of anti-gay policies.

Natural law has been a source of controversy for at least two previous Supreme Court nominees in recent decades—for dramatically different reasons. In 1991, Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe wrote a New York Times op-ed opposing the nomination of Justice Clarence Thomas because he would be the “first Supreme Court nominee in 50 years to maintain that natural law should be readily consulted in constitutional interpretation.” Reagan nominee Robert Bork, on the other hand, was criticized for not believing in natural law by then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), no less. Biden told Bork at his confirmation hearing, “As a child of God, I believe my rights are not derived from the Constitution…They were given to me and each of my fellow citizens by our creator.”

Bork, who was ultimately rejected by the Senate, had scoffed at the idea that judges could know God’s law and implement it. Later, in a 1992 essay, he warned that if natural law proponents “persuade judges that natural law is their domain, the theorists will find that they have merely given judges rein to lay down their own moral and political predilections as the law of the Constitution. Once that happens, the moral reasoning of the rest of us is made irrelevant.”

Natural law theory dates back to Thomas Aquinas and the Greeks before him. It isn’t necessarily liberal or conservative. Lawyers from the natural-law legal camp helped formulate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, a seminal document in which 48 countries committed to pursuing progressive measures that would protect human rights and fundamental freedoms.

In the United States, natural law has taken on a variety of interpretations. One proponent was David Lane, a white supremacist implicated in the murder of Alan Berg, a Jewish radio talk show host in Gorsuch’s hometown of Denver. Lane’s followers gunned down Berg in his driveway in 1984. Lane, who died in 2007, claimed that natural law justified any act, however heinous, that preserved the perpetuation of a race—in his case, the white race.

American conservatives, including Justice Thomas, use the term “natural law” to suggest that the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were divinely inspired. Former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), now the president of the conservative Heritage Institute think tank, explained in an essay last summer, “Our rights as Americans are considered unalienable only because they were inherent in the natural order of life established by the laws of nature and nature’s God.”

Where does Gorsuch fit into all this? In the 1990s, he studied legal philosophy at Oxford under Finnis. Gorsuch, who received his doctorate in 2004, has remained close to his former mentor, whom he credits in the 2006 book that grew out of his Oxford thesis, The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia. In a 2011 speech at Notre Dame law school honoring the Australian-born academic, Gorsuch fondly recalled the “red ink he poured so carefully—and generously—over the papers we produced.” He declared, “I have encountered few such patient, kind and generous teachers in my life.” (Finnis did not respond for a request for comment. He has publicly declined to discuss Gorsuch, telling the Guardian earlier this month, “I have resolved not to say anything to anyone at all.”)

Finnis, who is 76, is considered a brilliant and influential legal philosopher. In 1980, he published a definitive text on natural-law legal theory, Natural Law and Natural Rights, in which he identified seven “basic goods” that are central to human well-being: life, knowledge, play, aesthetic experience, sociability of friendship, practical reasonableness, and religion. From there, he sought to outline an ethical framework for viewing law and justice. He believes all human life is innately valuable and intrinsically good, and not because it might be useful to others, as some utilitarian philosophers might argue.

Melissa Moschella, an assistant professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of America who knows Finnis, says natural law is “a theory about what’s right and wrong, and it’s based on what, through reason, we can know about what’s good and bad for human beings, so that we act in ways that are always respectful of the well being of ourselves and others.”

On many levels, Finnis’ philosophy is profoundly humane. It led him to oppose the death penalty and to become an outspoken advocate for nuclear disarmament in the 1980s. He believed that even threatening to use nuclear weapons was immoral because it indicated a willingness to kill innocent civilians indiscriminately. Natural law also made him a foe of abortion and assisted suicide. While his work doesn’t invoke the divine, as DeMint and others have, Finnis’ views square with his Catholic faith: He converted to Catholicism in 1962 and has advised the Vatican on Catholic social teaching.

Not long after his conversion, Finnis discovered Germain Grisez, a French American natural-law philosopher and a prominent defender of the Church’s opposition to contraception. Griesz and Finnis began to collaborate, and Finnis’ work grew both more conservative and more focused on sex, particularly gay sex.

In 1993, Finnis testified for the state of Colorado in a case challenging Amendment 2, a ballot initiative that would have banned local governments from passing human rights ordinances or other anti-discrimination laws that would protect LGBT people. State Solicitor General Timothy Tymkovich, who now serves alongside Gorsuch on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, brought Finnis in to explain the allegedly classical roots of anti-gay prohibitions going back to Socrates. In his trial testimony, Finnis compared gay sex to bestiality “because it is divorced from the expressing of an intelligible common good,” according to part of his deposition published by The New Republic.

Martha Nussbaum, a prominent professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, served as an expert for the other side, suggesting that Finnis was misinterpreting the Greeks, who clearly had some acceptance of homosexuality in their culture. Nussbaum’s side ultimately prevailed at trial and at the US Supreme Court in its landmark decision in Romer v. Evans.

Nussbaum says Finnis “is a very fine moral philosopher” and “author of important books that I admire.” But she notes that his work on sexual orientation has less going for it. “Finnis’s book Natural Law and Natural Rights is entirely different from the ‘new natural law’ work inspired by Germain Grisez that he got into later,” Nussbaum writes in an email. “The former is excellent philosophy, the latter arcane and strange conservative argument. In England Finnis on the whole focused on philosophy, and people were shocked by some of the things he published beginning in 1994.”

That year, he authored an article titled “Law, Morality, and ‘Sexual Orientation.'” In it, Finnis insisted that “homosexual orientation” was a “deliberate willingness to promote and engage in homosexual acts—a state of mind, will, and character whose self-interpretation came to be expressed in the deplorable but helpfully revealing name ‘gay.'”

Finnis’ students have deployed his legal theories to battle same-sex marriage in the United States. Among his best-known acolytes is Princeton professor Robert George, who co-founded the anti-gay National Organization for Marriage. George filed a brief in the 2013 Supreme Court case over the same-sex marriage ballot initiative in California, Proposition 8, and he also testified for the state of Colorado in the 1993 anti-discrimination case along with his former teacher.

Gorsuch’s long relationship with Finnis has put him in close company with George and other anti-gay figures. When Gorsuch spoke at Notre Dame in 2011, he shared the stage with anti-gay theorists including George and Germain Grisez. Gorsuch has also worked with George on academic projects, including his tome on assisted suicide, which was part of a series of books George edited at Princeton University Press. George recently wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post supporting Gorsuch’s Supreme Court nomination.

Whether Gorsuch adheres to the same natural law philosophy as George and Finnis about the alleged societal harm of homosexuality is hard to know. His book on assisted suicide mentions Supreme Court cases involving gay rights, but only as reference points for analyzing the court’s thinking, not his own, and its relevance to euthanasia. He’s hired openly gay clerks and attends a liberal Episcopal church in very liberal Boulder, Colorado, and gay friends attested to his openness in a recent New York Times story.

But he also voted in favor of Hobby Lobby, the craft store whose owners sued the Obama administration, alleging that the company’s religious freedom rights were violated by the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that employers provide health insurance that covers contraception. That decision might square with a natural-law view respecting the exercise of religion as a critical human right, but it also may have led to more persecution of LGBT people. The Supreme Court decision upholding that ruling has since been used to defend businesses that have discriminated against LGBT people—a view some lower courts have upheld. The Hobby Lobby case was brought by the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty, a religious nonprofit law firm on whose board George serves.

Catholic University’s Moschella says Finnis makes a distinction in his work between morality and the law. He believes that what a judge does on the bench is not determined by natural law but rather by the laws of that nation. So if Gorsuch really does endorse Finnis’ philosophy, Moschella says, his moral views on abortion, gay rights, and other hot-button issues and what natural law says about them is irrelevant. She says, “What is relevant to his work as a judge is his commitment, which is also a moral commitment, to upholding the law of the land.”

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Does Donald Trump’s Supreme Court Nominee Believe the Constitution Is God’s Law?

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Raw Data: Here’s What Violent Crime Really Looks Like Over the Past Decade

by TashaMathew Posted on February 12, 2017

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump keeps saying that the murder rate is the highest it’s been in 45 years. This is wildly untrue, but other people are joining the bandwagon anyway. Jeff Sessions says the current rise in crime is a “dangerous permanent trend.” Talk show hosts agree. America is a dark and dangerous place, and it’s getting more dangerous all the time.

Aside from outright lies, a lot of this is based on cherry-picked statistics. The murder rate in Chicago has skyrocketed over the past three years. Los Angeles has seen a substantial rise in its violent crime rate. Etc. But if you’re interested in the whole picture, I have it for you below, complete and un-cherry-picked.

You’re all used to seeing long-term crime charts from me because I’m usually illustrating the effect of lead on crime over the past 50 or 60 years. Those charts show national crime rates plummeting in the 90s and early aughts. This time, though, the chatter is all about recent increases in murder and violent crime in big cities. For starters, then, here are the basic numbers for the past decade on violent crime in large cities from the National Crime Victimization Survey:1

The data goes through 2015,2 and shows that big-city violent crime did tick upward slightly in 2015. More generally, though, violent crime has displayed a noisy but steadily downward trend over the past decade. In 2015, violent crime in big cities was nearly a third lower than it was in 2007.

Next up is violent crime from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. This is based on reports from police departments, and includes detailed data at the city level. Here are violent crime rates in America’s ten biggest cities3 through the first half of 2016:4

Some big cities have indeed shown worrying upward trends: Chicago, San Antonio, and Los Angeles are all up over the past two or three years. At the same time, Philadelphia, New York City, and San Diego are all down. More generally, except for San Antonio every single one of these cities has a lower violent crime rate than in 2006, ranging from 4 percent down (San Jose) to 40 percent down (Dallas and Philadelphia). The overall violent crime rate for all big cities is up over the past two years, but still lower than it was in 2006.

Finally, here are the murder rates in our ten biggest cities:

Chicago, obviously, is a big outlier, with a high and rising murder rate (up 53 percent over the past two years). The three biggest cities in Texas have also seen big recent increases. Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and New York City are down compared to 2015.

You can draw different conclusions from this data depending on what you look at.5 However, this is the best data we have. This is reality. Whatever you decide to say about violent crime, it needs to be based on this.

1The NCVS data on violent crime doesn’t include homicide because, obviously, you can’t call up people and ask if they’ve been murdered in the past year. Generally speaking, however, violent crime as a category includes murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.

2Unlike the other charts in this post, this one starts in 2007 because the Bureau of Justice Statistics warns that a change in methodology in 2006 makes it difficult to compare 2006 to other years.

3Because of a dispute over methodology, Chicago has no official numbers for forcible rape before 2015. Because of this, it also has no official numbers for violent crime. However, it’s pretty easy to create a close estimate of the rape rate and then use that to recreate the violent crime rate. That’s what I’ve done here.

4I’ve annualized the rates for the first half of 2016 so they’re comparable to the other years.

5It’s worth mentioning that property crime is also down over the past decade. Ditto for crime in smaller cities and towns. I haven’t shown any of that here because big-city violent crime seems to be the topic of the moment. However, you might be interested in a little-known bit of crime trivia that will surprise most people: violent crime in big cities has fallen so much that it’s actually lower than anyplace else. The safest places in America are the biggest and smallest cities. It’s the medium-sized cities that now have the biggest violent crime problems.

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Raw Data: Here’s What Violent Crime Really Looks Like Over the Past Decade

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It’s official: The city of Seattle is divesting from Wells Fargo.

by WileyFregoso49 Posted on February 8, 2017

The Seattle City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to withdraw $3 billion from the bank, in part because it is funding the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the city’s mayor said he would sign the measure.

The vote delivered a win for pipeline foes, albeit on a bleak day for the #NoDAPL movement. Earlier in the day, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced that it will allow construction of the pipeline’s final leg and forgo an environmental impact statement.

Before the vote, many Native speakers took the floor in support of divestment, including members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Tsimshian First Nation, and Muckleshoot Indian Tribe.

Seattle will withdraw its $3 billion when the city’s current contract with Wells Fargo expires in 2018. Meanwhile, council members will seek out a more socially responsible bank. Unfortunately, the pickings are somewhat slim, as Bank of America, Chase, CitiBank, ING, and a dozen other banks have all invested in the pipeline.

While $3 billion is just a small sliver of Wells Fargo’s annual deposit collection of $1.3 trillion, the council hopes its vote will send a message to other banks. Activism like this has worked before — in November, Norway’s largest bank sold all of its assets connected to Dakota Access. With any luck, more will follow.

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It’s official: The city of Seattle is divesting from Wells Fargo.

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A Conservative Discovers the Racist Right

by Elise9679qdoy Posted on February 7, 2017

Mother Jones

Over at National Review, Jay Nordlinger comments on racism:

The 2016 election cycle made me much wiser, in addition to sadder….All my life, I had heard about racists, anti-Semites, and other such types on the right. Maybe I was sheltered, but I almost never encountered any of them. I thought they were essentially bogeymen, conjured by the lyin’ Left. The people I met were good Reagan conservatives — the salt of the earth.

Then came 2016, in partnership with the social media. The rock was overturned. In a way, I wish the rock had stayed put.

I hope National Review decides to take this institutionally more seriously, instead of commenting on race only when someone is outraged about some perceived excess of the social justice warriors on the left.

Throughout American history, there have been periodic opportunities to make real headway against racism if only both parties had provided a united front. But that’s never happened. One party or the other has always found the votes of white racists too alluring to ignore.

As the number of white racists declines, it should be easier to reject them, but instead just the opposite has happened. In our 50-50 nation, even a smallish bloc is far too large to actively repudiate. Trump may be the last gasp of white racial anxiety in America, or he might represent the start of a global white nationalist movement. I hope for the former and fear for the latter. Either way, it would be nice if both parties recognized the danger.

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A Conservative Discovers the Racist Right

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Go to Jail. Die From Drug Withdrawal. Welcome to the Criminal Justice System.

by LenardVWJV Posted on February 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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When Tyler Tabor was booked in a jail outside Denver on a spring afternoon in 2015, he told a screening nurse that he was a daily heroin user and had a prescription for Xanax. A friendly, outdoorsy 25-year-old with a son in kindergarten, Tabor had started using opioids after he injured his back on the job as a welder. When he was arrested on two misdemeanor warrants, his parents decided not to pay his $300 bail, thinking he would be safer in jail and away from heroin for a few days.

Three days later, Tabor died of dehydration at the Adams County jail, according to a coroner’s report. The alleged cause: drug withdrawal.

A lawsuit filed by the Tabors against the county and Corizon Health, the jail’s private health care provider, describes in chilling detail the three days of missed opportunities and seemingly callous medical care. It draws on video footage, some of which is shown below, from a surveillance camera in Tabor’s cell. By the end of the first day in jail, Tabor was in the throes of severe withdrawal: vomiting, diarrhea, low blood pressure. He was too dehydrated to provide a urine sample. A day later, he could no longer walk or unclench his fingers. When a nurse came by to give him the usual withdrawal medications—a cocktail of things like Gatorade and Pepto Bismol—he fell to the ground, trembling. Later that night, he begged for an IV—he knew from a previous detox that withdrawing from the combination of heroin, an opioid, and Xanax, a benzodiazepine, was particularly risky. But, according to the complaint, he was told IVs were only used when “absolutely necessary.” He died six hours later, leaving behind a wife and a five-year-old son.

“A simple IV would have almost certainly saved his life,” reads the complaint.

Adams County officials declined to comment on the case. Martha Harbin, a spokesperson for Corizon Health, said the allegations in the complaint were “inconsistent with the known facts.” She added, “It certainly is not our policy to deny a patient appropriate and indicated treatment.”

Yet as the nationwide opioid epidemic continues to spiral, more and more inmates who use heroin, painkillers, or methadone are showing up in jails across the country, where withdrawal treatment can be rudimentary. “So many more people are coming in hooked on opioids,” says David Lane, the attorney representing the Tabors. “If the jails are not trained and they’re not ready for it, you get a Tyler Tabor.”

No organization tracks how many people have died from drug withdrawal in jail, but Mother Jones found 20 lawsuits filed between 2014 and 2016 alleging that an inmate died from opiate withdrawal complications. That number likely represents just a fraction of all jail withdrawal deaths, Lane says. In addition to the counties, many families also sue the companies that public jails often contract with to provide health care—like Corizon Health, in the Tabors’ case.

By the time of Tabor’s death, in May, at least four other inmates in jails around the country had died that year from complications of opiate withdrawal, according to lawsuits filed by their families. In March, 37-year-old Jennifer Lobato was booked into Colorado’s Jefferson County jail, just a half hour from where Tabor would die, for shoplifting $57 of merchandise from Old Navy with her son. A guard scoffed at Lobato, a regular heroin user, as she vomited before collapsing, according to a subsequent investigation by the sheriff’s office. A month later, an 18-year-old aspiring artist named Tori Herr collapsed in Pennsylvania’s Lebanon County jail. “I just want something to drink,” she said to her mom on the phone days before she died. “I want lemonade.”

Left: Tori Herr as a high schooler. Right: Herr in the hospital after withdrawal in jail. Courtesy of the Herr family

Jefferson County settled the Lobato case for $2.5 million last fall. County spokesman Mark Techmeyer said the jail’s withdrawal treatment and evaluation protocols changed in response to Lobato’s death; Lebanon County officials declined to comment on the Herr case.

Outside of jails, dying from opiate withdrawal is exceedingly rare because, with few exceptions, it is so preventable. Dehydration, the withdrawal symptom that usually kills people, can be treated with intravenous fluids. It’s nearly unheard of to withdraw from opioids without slowly tapering or having emergency medical care, says Kevin Fiscella, an addiction specialist who sits on the board of the National Commission on Correctional Health Care (NCCHC), which accredits correctional health services. “What’s happening in jails, it’s kind of a natural experiment to see what happens,” he says. “And in fact some people do die.”

When a user quits opioids cold turkey, the body quickly starts to experience the opposite effects of the original drug, resulting in a rarely fatal but often tortuous withdrawal process that can persist for days or weeks. Where opioids reduce pain, withdrawal makes the body hypersensitive to it. Opioids induce euphoria; withdrawal feels like the world is going to end. Opioids cause constipation; withdrawal causes diarrhea and vomiting. If a person going through withdrawal can’t keep fluids down and is not given an IV, he or she can succumb to dehydration.

Fiscella notes that a number of factors can make withdrawal behind bars risky. Inmates don’t always tell nurses during the screening process that they’re drug users; sometimes, withdrawal kicks off a domino effect that makes other health conditions, like heart problems, act up. Lots of opioid users are also on benzodiazepines like Xanax or Valium, known for enhancing and extending the effects of heroin, painkillers, or methadone. Benzodiazepines can make withdrawal much more dangerous.

What’s more, many cash-strapped jails lack basic medications or medical equipment like IVs. And often, Fiscella says, there simply aren’t enough health care staff to check in regularly on each and every withdrawal patient. “In a lot of these deaths, people were simply ignored,” he says.

Of the 20 alleged opiate withdrawal deaths in jails that Mother Jones found, five occurred in jails served by a privately held company called Correct Care Solutions. Based in Tennessee, CCS is one of the country’s largest correctional health care services, providing medical services to 250,000 patients in jails, prisons, state hospitals, and forensic treatment centers throughout the country.

In 2015, the company brought in nearly $1 billion in revenue, according to the Nashville Business Journal. CCS President Patrick Cummiskey told the Journal that the company had “grown 20 percent-plus annually since inception, so growth is our norm.”

Related: Seven Charts That Speak Volumes About the Opioid Epidemic

Despite the company’s robust finances, treating withdrawal can fall through the cracks, according to four jail nurses who currently or recently worked for Correct Care Solutions. Their names have been changed to protect their privacy.

During the evening shift at the Brown County jail in Green Bay, Wisconsin, there is one nurse—and no other medical staff—for roughly 700 inmates, according to nurses who worked at the facility. “I had people detoxing, I had people with chest pain, I had people getting into fights, I had emergencies where people aren’t breathing,” said Abby, who worked at the facility for nine months before leaving last fall. “I can’t assess somebody three times a shift when there’s one nurse for 700 inmates, and do a meaningful assessment, and also provide interventions when I have 20 people on opiate withdrawal.”

Abby says she bought her own medical supplies because the blood pressure cuffs, thermometers, and stethoscopes provided by CCS didn’t always work. She often found herself stuck between a rock and a hard place: There was no IV therapy in the jail, but sending inmates to the hospital was frowned upon. In order to send a withdrawal patient to the hospital, she said, the inmate would “need to be at the point where their vital signs were dropping, their internal organs were starting to become compromised.”

Abby left CCS last fall because she was worried that the quality of care at the jail was so low that she was violating her nursing license. “If I was called into court, I couldn’t say truthfully that I am providing good nursing care,” she said.

Brown County declined to comment for this article.

Greta, a nurse at a different jail served by CCS, described a similar scene. During a typical medical check, Greta had about 30 seconds to take an inmate’s vital signs, hand out medications, and gauge withdrawal symptoms—often in dim lighting and always standing next to a deputy jail guard. On top of it, she said, “You’re using your eyes and your ears because you don’t really have technology. You’re lucky to have a blood pressure cuff.”

Asked about the allegations, CCS spokesman Jim Cheney wrote in an email to Mother Jones, “While it is very difficult to respond to an anonymous source when determining the credibility of their assertion, CCS employs regional executives across the country to ensure that the service standards we have established are upheld. It is difficult to imagine a scenario in which a facility was not provided the instruments necessary for routine healthcare, and should there be a need, our nurses have immediate and direct access to administrative teams who can facilitate those resources in short-order.” He added that the staffing ratio is determined by “facility capabilities,” and the company does not frown upon the use of outside providers. In the event that the medical needs of an inmate fall beyond what the facility can provide, he said, “we rely on our medical partners in the community for support.”

Watch: WDIV investigates the death of David Stojcevski

But in some cases no one calls for support before it’s too late. A video strikingly similar to that of Tabor shows David Stojcevski, a 32-year-old from outside Detroit, losing 50 pounds over 16 days of vomiting, diarrhea, and trembling on the ground before his death in the summer of 2014. Stojcevski had been booked at the Macomb County Jail, also served by CCS, for being unable to pay a $772 fine for driving carelessly. Though he notified nurses of his prescriptions to methadone and Xanax, an opioid and a benzodiazepine, respectively, he never received either medication in jail, according to a lawsuit later filed by his parents.

A Department of Justice investigation of the case found no criminal wrongdoing on the part of Macomb County or CCS, saying there wasn’t enough evidence that jail staff acted with criminal intent to prosecute the case. The lawsuit filed by the family is ongoing; county officials declined to comment on the case. Cheney described CCS’s withdrawal protocol as “one of most advanced and respected in the industry,” adding that CCS follows standards from the NCCHC and the American Correctional Association. He added that “while tragic situations do occur, there are exponentially more circumstances in which our professionals save lives and improve the health of the individuals that they treat.”

Corizon Health, the health care provider in Tabor’s case and the nation’s largest privately held correctional health company, is currently facing at least one other lawsuit alleging an opiate withdrawal death. A year before Tabor died, Madaline Pitkin, a 26-year-old from Portland, Oregon, died of heroin withdrawal after repeatedly requesting help on medical forms, according to a lawsuit filed by her family. In her final request, she wrote, “This is a 3rd or 4th call for help. I haven’t been able to keep food, liquids, meds down in 6 days…I feel like I am very close to death. Can’t hear, seeing lights, hearing voices. Please help me.”

Harbin, the Corizon spokesperson, declined to comment on the specifics of Tabor’s or Pitkin’s cases because of active litigation and patient privacy rules. “One of the most common misconceptions about our company is that we somehow benefit from providing lower quality care,” she wrote in an email. “To the contrary, what makes good medical sense and good business sense is proactive preventive care—intervening early to treat conditions before they become serious and more costly to treat.”

Tabor’s family, meanwhile, is still reeling from their loss. Tyler’s son, D.T., an energetic six-year-old who loves fishing and biking, still regularly asks when his dad will come home. Tyler’s father, Ray, a manager at the local Safeway, tells D.T. that he went to heaven. “It’s one thing to lose a child,” says Ray. “But it’s another thing knowing that he died in a jail cell alone on the floor, asking for help.”

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Go to Jail. Die From Drug Withdrawal. Welcome to the Criminal Justice System.

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Mark your calendars! The March for Science is happening in D.C. on April 22.

by BrandiKirke0 Posted on February 1, 2017

The People’s Climate March will descend on D.C. with an intersectional coalition of green and environmental-justice groups, indigenous and civil-rights organizations, students and labor unions. The march will take place on Saturday, April 29, exactly 100 days into Trump’s presidency.

In January, the Women’s March gathered half a million demonstrators in D.C. alone. There have also been talks of an upcoming Science March, which has no set date but almost 300,000 followers on Twitter.

April’s climate march is being organized by a coalition that emerged from the People’s Climate March of 2014, a rally that brought 400,000 people to New York City before the United Nations convened there for a summit on climate change. It was the largest climate march in history — a record that may soon be broken.

“Communities across the country have been working for environmental and social justice for centuries. Now it’s time for our struggles to unite and work together across borders to fight racism, sexism, xenophobia, and environmental destruction,” Chloe Jackson, an activist with Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, said in a statement. “We have a lot of work to do, and we are stronger together.”

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Mark your calendars! The March for Science is happening in D.C. on April 22.

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Trump’s travel freeze will ice climate science and cleantech

by ClaudeSambell7 Posted on February 1, 2017

Samira Samimi knew she wanted to be a scientist the first time she saw a glacier. “This is what I want to do,” she remembers thinking on her trip to the mountains. “This is who I want to be.”

She was 16 years old, growing up in Iran, where glaciers are less than plentiful. She knew she would have to leave her home country to study them, so she applied to Canadian universities with an eye on the Arctic. Now 30, she’s in her first year of a glaciology PhD at the University of Calgary, and — dream come true — part of a NASA-funded team studying the Greenland ice sheet.

But on Friday, the Trump administration’s ban on travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries threw her planned research trip to Greenland this spring into jeopardy. Her cargo plane flight takes off in April from a U.S. Air National Guard base in Albany.

In the days since President Trump signed the executive order, it has already disrupted science communities in the United States and around the globe. Students and researchers have found themselves trapped out of the country, seen field work plans scuttled, or had long-awaited visits canceled. For many scientists engaged in the work of understanding and addressing the world’s next great challenge — a changing climate and the transition to cleaner energy sources — it’s clear that you can’t stifle immigration without stifling innovation, too.

“Think of the STEM fields as the engine of the American economy. That engine has gotten so big and so powerful that it can’t be fueled by talent within the U.S. itself.”

Moh El-Naggar, biophysicist at the University of Southern California

“We live in an extremely competitive global environment,” says Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Just because we want to do this ‘America First’ thing doesn’t mean the rest of the world is going to stop being entrepreneurial and get out of the way.”

Told one way, the story of America the superpower is the story of innovation. Our history books and homegrown myths are crowded with inventors and entrepreneurs, from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs. In the 20th century, America earned its place in world events, more often than not, by MacGyvering one unlikely technological triumph after another: over disease, over German nuclear physicists and Cold War cosmonauts, over the pull of Earth’s gravity itself. And immigration played a critical role in that progress.

As The Hill pointed out last year, all six American Nobel laureates in 2016 were foreign-born. That’s not unusual: According to a 2014 study by Stanford scientists, the number of U.S. patent filings increased by 30 percent in the wake of Jewish immigrants fleeing Nazi Germany. So did the number of Nobel prizes.

In general, the less open a society is, the more likely its scientists and innovators are to go elsewhere — and for a long time, that “elsewhere” has been the United States.

One in six U.S. scientists is an immigrant, according to a 2013 National Science Foundation report. Of those, a majority are naturalized citizens, but many hold green cards or long-term visas to study and work in the United States. And those 5 million scientists have had a measurable effect on science in their adopted country.

“We’re at a point where changes in our technology are happening so quickly, we can either sit it out, or we can be full participants,” Rosenberg says. “We have some natural competitive advantages, but we could lose them simply by taking this nationalist line.”

A chart from 2011 shows Nobel Laureates by location of affiliation at the time of the win.Jon Bruner/Forbes

“Think of the STEM fields as the engine of the American economy,” says Moh El-Naggar, a biophysicist at the University of Southern California, where he studies the weird things microbes can do — including, potentially, playing a role in renewable energy technologies. “That engine has gotten so big and so powerful that it can’t be fueled by talent within the U.S. itself.”

El-Naggar was born in Libya, one of the seven countries placed under travel restrictions by Trump’s executive order. He’s now an American citizen and worries about the toll of a travel ban on the morale of his fellow foreign-born scientists — and the impact on their research.

“I look at my own work,” he says, “and I feel that almost every good thing that’s ever happened had its genesis in some unexpected conversation in some unexpected conference with some unexpected colleague. We are in a situation where we’ve put barriers on these unexpected conversations.”

Last week’s news came with a personal cost, too. His parents had been planning a trip to California in April to meet their grandchildren for the first time. Now those plans are on hold, indefinitely.

“A lot of people like me ended up in this country, doing what we love, because it was a better place to come to than where we grew up,” El-Naggar says. “So when I say that this looks bad to me right now, I hope that carries extra weight. This is coming from someone who has seen bad.”

U.S. scientific organizations have put out strong statements condemning the entry ban, including a letter sent by the AAAS and co-signed by more than 150 other institutions. Massachusetts Institute of Technology President L. Rafael Reif called the policy “a stunning violation of our deepest American values” in an email to students, while John Holdren, science advisor to the Obama administration, had even stronger words for the executive action, calling it “perverse,” an “abomination,” and a “terrible, terrible idea” in an interview with Nature.

An online petition to lift the restrictions has already been signed by tens of thousands of academics and researchers. Many tech companies — often sponsors of visas for foreign-born engineers, if not founded and led by immigrants themselves — have spoken out against the move, as well.

Their concern is amplified by additional anti-science moves by the Trump administration. In orders leaked last week, the Environmental Protection Agency was ordered to cease all external communication, including scientific releases, until they could be reviewed and approved by a member of the administration.

“You should never get to the point where someone in political power gets to decide what’s the good science and what’s the bad science,” the UCS’s Rosenberg says. “You have to worry about that.”

For Samimi, there’s very specific climate research at stake. She made a trip to Greenland last year, installing instruments in the ice sheet that need to be maintained and adjusted. If she can’t get back, she might have to abandon her PhD experiment.

“If I’m not able to work there …” she says. “I don’t even want to think about alternatives. This doesn’t make sense, you know?” Right now, a lot of the scientific community is reaching the same conclusion.

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Trump’s travel freeze will ice climate science and cleantech

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The Dakota Access Pipeline is creeping one step closer to completion.

by TheresaBitner Posted on February 1, 2017

The People’s Climate March will descend on D.C. with an intersectional coalition of green and environmental-justice groups, indigenous and civil-rights organizations, students and labor unions. The march will take place on Saturday, April 29, exactly 100 days into Trump’s presidency.

In January, the Women’s March gathered half a million demonstrators in D.C. alone. There have also been talks of an upcoming Science March, which has no set date but almost 300,000 followers on Twitter.

April’s climate march is being organized by a coalition that emerged from the People’s Climate March of 2014, a rally that brought 400,000 people to New York City before the United Nations convened there for a summit on climate change. It was the largest climate march in history — a record that may soon be broken.

“Communities across the country have been working for environmental and social justice for centuries. Now it’s time for our struggles to unite and work together across borders to fight racism, sexism, xenophobia, and environmental destruction,” Chloe Jackson, an activist with Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, said in a statement. “We have a lot of work to do, and we are stronger together.”

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The Dakota Access Pipeline is creeping one step closer to completion.

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