Alabama sheriffs pocket money meant to feed county jail inmates
By Shelley Connor
20 February 2018
Three
sheriffs in Alabama have admitted to pocketing money allocated for feeding
inmates in county jails in response to a lawsuit brought against 49 county
sheriffs by poverty advocacy groups.
On
January 5, the Southern Center for Human Rights (SCHR) and the Alabama
Appleseed Center for Law and Justice (AACLJ) jointly filed a lawsuit against
the sheriffs for failing to comply with a public records request concerning
their usage of jailhouse food funds.
Many
sheriffs contend that their usage of these funds is legal under Alabama law.
"I
do it just like the law tells us to. That's about all I have to say about
that," Monroe County Sheriff Thomas Tate told AL.com last week. "We
feed all our inmates good and the excess goes to the sheriff. If you declare it
excess, you take it and you pay taxes on it."
The
ledgers Tate handed over in response to the lawsuit reveal that of the
$423,364.60 of federal, state, and municipal funds allocated to feed inmates in
his jail between 2014 and 2017, $110,459.77 was declared “excess.” Monroe
County jail’s excess food funds rose each year between 2014 and 2016.
"The
law says it's a personal account and that's the way I've always done it and
that's the way the law reads and that's the way I do business," Etowah
County Sheriff Todd Entrekin responded. "That's the way the law's
written."
Although
Entrekin protested that he asked the County Commission to handle the funds for
feeding inmates, he has still not turned over his records. Entrekin paid a high
school student to mow his lawn with checks marked “Sheriff Todd Entrekin Food
Provision Account,” and the address on the checks is his home address.
The SCHR
and AACLJ disagree with Tate and Entrekin on the legality of such practices.
“Our position is that this practice is illegal now, but it's clear that many
sheriffs believe its legal for them to do this,” Aaron Littman, a staff
attorney for the SCHR, said in an interview with AL.com.
"Clearly
this is a practice which is problematic because it creates an incentive for
sheriffs to spend as little as possible on feeding folks... and obviously, when
a minimal amount of money is approved for something and less than that is
spent, the quality suffers."
This
issue is not a new one for Alabama. In 2009, a US District judge ordered court
security to arrest Morgan County Sheriff Greg Bartlett after prisoners
testified about meals consisting of thin bologna, cold grits, and corn dogs.
Bartlett testified that he and a sheriff from a neighboring county split the
costs of an 18-wheeler full of corn dogs, which they fed to the inmates in
their jails twice a day; Bartlett pocketed the excess of the money allocated
for inmates’ food—about $112,000 over three years.
US
District Judge U.W. Clemon stated in his ruling that, while he was bound to
rule only upon a court order, dating from 2001, he thought that the Alabama law
was “probably unconstitutional.” Inmates at the hearing appeared visibly thin
and provided evidence to show that they spent hundreds of dollars of their own
money at a for-profit jailhouse store because they were so hungry. One inmate’s
records showed a weight loss of 35 pounds over three months.
In 2017,
Morgan County Sheriff Ana Franklin was held in contempt of court for violating
the consent decree in Clemon’s 2009 judgment. A series of posts on a blog
called “The Morgan County Whistleblower” raised concerns over discrepancies
between what Franklin was paid to feed inmates and the quality of food the
inmates were offered. Franklin had siphoned $160,000 from the funds earmarked
for jailhouse food, investing $150,000 into a car dealership—which subsequently
went bankrupt—run by a convicted bank swindler.
Franklin’s
own testimony revealed that she had been aware of the consent decree,
explaining that she had asked, before winning the election, if Clemon’s consent
decree in the Bartlett case applied to her. According to Franklin, she said she
did not believe she was bound by the decree, even though the decree specifies
that the Morgan County sheriff is required to spend all allocated funds,
including the excess, on inmate nutrition only.
The law
cited by the sheriff dates to the Depression era. Alabama’s constitution, by
design, gives county sheriffs great leeway; lawyers for the Southern Poverty
Law Center have compared Alabama counties to feudal “fiefdoms” where the
sheriff is given broad license—at the expense of residents—to profit from
county funds. Like many aspects of Alabama’s constitution, it is based upon a
concept of local sovereignty that has undergirded laws designed to
disenfranchise poor black and white residents.
The
sheriffs remain a force unto themselves. The Alabama Attorney General’s office
has deferred all the media’s requests for comments to the Alabama Sheriff’s
Association (ASA) while the ASA has declined to be interviewed on this issue.
Their position, however, is well known; after “Corn-dog Sheriff” Bartlett was
jailed, the organization’s director told reporters that prisoners all around
the state complained about the food, then dismissed the complaints, saying,
"You're never going to be able to satisfy them.”
Inmates
continue to speak about the poor provisions in Alabama’s county jails.
A young
mother living in Decatur, Alabama, in Morgan County, related to the WSWS how
she was recently taken into custody in the neighboring county for unpaid
traffic fines. She was placed a cold jail cell when she could not pay the $200
bail in addition to her fines and forced to sleep on a Styrofoam mat on a
concrete floor in jail.
“Food was
barely food,” she said. “Off-brand bologna with every meal, just milk and later
only water to drink.” Neither she nor the other inmates were provided with
basic toiletries, either; the only amenity was bar soap. She recalls struggling
to wash her hair with the bar soap, then sitting wet and cold in a poorly
heated cell until a nurse could look her over.
The young
mother mentioned above is currently homeless and, although she was released
after spending a night in jail, hundreds of dollars have been added to her
traffic fines and court fees, and should she be unable to pay those, she will
end up in jail again. It is at the expense of these people that sheriffs such
as Thomas Tate, Todd Entrekin, Ana Franklin, and 46 others line their pockets.
“The
Alabama Public Records Law exists so that we can hold our government
accountable. Unfortunately, a number of sheriffs have decided that our public
records law does not apply to them,” SCHR’s Frank Knaack stated in a press
release. Alabama’s sheriffs, though, are accustomed to an impunity that they
will not hand over easily.
Two Baltimore police officers convicted of racketeering, robbery and fraud
By Harvey Simpkins
Two Baltimore police officers convicted of racketeering, robbery and fraud
By Harvey Simpkins
16 February 2018
Two Baltimore police officers were convicted in federal court on Monday of racketeering, robbery and fraud associated with their activities working for the now-defunct Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), supposedly tasked with reducing the number of illegal guns in Baltimore.
Daniel Hersl and Marcus Taylor, along with six others who pled guilty to racketeering charges last month, engaged in a wide range of criminal and unconstitutional activity, including repeated armed home invasions of city residents, where they stole money, drugs and guns, only to resell the drugs and guns on the streets.
In addition, these thugs with badges routinely planted guns on innocent residents, chased and searched people without probable cause, and lied under oath, leading to the conviction of innocent people. The Baltimore Public Defenders Office believes there may be over 3,000 tainted cases dating to 2008 because of the involvement of the convicted officers. To date about 125 cases have been dropped.
Debbie Katz Levi, head of special litigation for Baltimore’s Office of the Public Defender, told the Associated Press, “Beyond the sheer credibility issues that should have been raised at the time, given how embedded their crimes were in their police work, all cases involving these officers are tainted.”
One of the victims of the GTTF, Andre Crowder, was wrongly pulled over in 2016 by three of the now convicted officers. On February 2, Crowder told a press conference at his attorney’s office that the officers pulled him over for an alleged seat belt violation, then searched his car, finding a gun. The officers then proceeded to his home, where they took $10,000 from him. He was jailed for three days before he could post bail. During that time, his three-year-old son passed away.
“It’s bigger than the charge they put on me,” Crowder said. “The mark they put on my record, the cash that was took, all of that, it doesn’t matter, because I wasn’t there to spend the last moments of my son’s life with him because of this situation.”
Another victim, Jamal Walker, described a 2011 encounter with the convicted leader of the GTTF, Wayne Jenkins. Walker was sitting in his vehicle when Jenkins and a partner told him to get out. Inside, Walker had $40,000 in cash; only $20,000 was reported seized by the officers. “The more it went on, the worse it got,” Walker said. He said the officers thought “like cowboys—we do what we want to do.”
All told, the eight convicted members of the now-defunct GTTF stole more than $300,000 in cash, three kilograms of cocaine, 43 pounds of marijuana, 800 grams of heroin, and jewelry worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
At the trial of Hersl and Taylor, the leader of the GTTF, Wayne Jenkins, was described as a violent and corrupt officer who led the unit on a continuous quest to shake down city residents and find big-time drug dealers with assets to steal.
Jenkins also stole and sold prescription drugs that were taken during the protests that erupted following the 2015 police murder of Freddie Gray. At the time, police blamed the drugs recirculated by Jenkins for a sharp increase in murders. Prosecutors also introduced two bags of items that Jenkins accumulated for the GTTF to use in robberies, including balaclava ski masks, black clothing and shoes, and tools such as a crow bar, battering ram, and a rope with a grappling hook.
In further testimony at the trial, a dozen other officers and an assistant state’s attorney were accused of engaging in similar criminal activities or helping to cover them up as they interacted with the convicted officers. The accused include the head of the police department’s Internal Affairs, an officer who investigates robberies, and another assigned to the police training academy. A fourth accused officer, Sean Suitor, was a city homicide detective who was fatally shot with his own gun under mysterious circumstances the day before he was to testify before a federal grand jury in the case involving the GTTF. Many of the accused officers remain on the job.
Not surprisingly, Baltimore’s mayor and police commissioner have both tried to paint the latest revelations of police corruption as “a few bad apples.” The usual whitewash investigations and “anti-corruption” units have been promised to supposedly “clean up” the department and ensure that similar incidents do not happen again. None of these promises should be taken seriously.
In 2016, the Obama Justice Department released a report showing that Baltimore police engaged in widespread violations of constitutional rights, including unjustified stops and searches, arrests without cause, racial profiling, use of excessive force, sexual discrimination, and retaliation against actions protected by the First Amendment, including detaining and arresting people simply because they used speech perceived by officers to be critical or disrespectful towards the police.
The Justice Department report stated: “There is reasonable cause to believe that BPD [Baltimore Police Department] engages in a pattern or practice of conduct that violates the Constitution or federal law.” More specifically, the 2016 report noted, “During stops, BPD officers frequently pat-down or frisk individuals as a matter of course, without identifying necessary grounds to believe that the person is armed and dangerous. And even where an initial frisk is justified, we found that officers often violate the Constitution by exceeding the frisk’s permissible scope. We likewise found many instances in which officers strip search individuals without legal justification. In some cases, officers performed degrading strip searches in public, prior to making an arrest, and without grounds to believe that the searched individuals were concealing contraband on their bodies.”
The revelations of the extreme corruption of the GTTF police officers fit into the pattern, established in the Justice Department report, of a police department that systematically stampedes on the basic constitutional rights of Baltimore’s working-class residents. Only a mass political movement against capitalism, based in the working class, can put an end to these rampant violations of fundamental democratic rights.
No comments:
Post a Comment