September Call for JOB Comments

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The Jail Oversight Board is meeting next week, and online comments are OPEN. 

For one week, from Wednesday 8/25 to Wednesday 9/1 at noon, members of the public can submit comments and questions to the Board. The meeting itself is Thursday 9/2 at 4pm. (I'll be livetweeting over at @alleghenyJOB, and will publish a recap of the meeting afterwards).

Please take a moment to submit a comment or question about ACJ's new contracts for militarized trainings and shotguns-- or about Martin Bucek's death, or COVID, or Medication Assisted Treatment, or food quality, or medical care, or commissary prices, or...

Some possible questions to ask & points to raise:

I know I have PLENTY of questions related to Joseph Garcia, CSAU, and the contracts, but I wanted to mention some other important things up top:

photo of Martin Bucek, provided to Brittany Hailer by Dolly Bucek

  • Martin Bucek -- Mr. Bucek died on July 3rd and almost no information about his death has been made public.  It's been almost two months since his death so the Medical Examiner should have finished the investigation. What happened to Mr. Bucek?
    • In-Custody Death Reporting-- Related to Mr. Bucek, what is the Jail's reporting procedure for deaths? Why wasn't the Board told about his death immediately? Why have they been left uninformed about other deaths in the past?
  • COVID-19-- There's another COVID outbreak at ACJ, rumored to be started by a staff member. Less than half of staff and just over half of incarcerated people at the Jail are vaccinated. The Jail was operating on a lockdown schedule of 23 hours in, 1 hour out per day for most of the pandemic, and Harper had only recently begun to allow people more out of cell time. Are incarcerated people back on 23/1 lockdown? What is the Jail's virus mitigation plan?
  • Shuman Closing-- Shuman Juvenile Detention Center (Pittsburgh's own "juvenile hall") has had its temporary license revoked and is set to be closed. Read Bethany Hallam's statement on the closing here. Ideally, the 20 or so children currently detained at Shuman will simply be released back into the community and allowed to go home to await trial..... but it's possible they could be moved into the Allegheny County Jail instead. (There are already children incarcerated at ACJ. The number is usually around 10 but according to Hallam there were 32 minors incarcerated in the Jail as of 8/23.)


    • A major factor for the food shortage is that incarcerated people work in the kitchens. Summit is apparently contractually required to provide some staff to work in the kitchen, and it is apparently not doing that. When there is a COVID outbreak, kitchen workers often end up needing to quarantine... leaving no one to prepare and distribute the food. 
  • Commissary prices-- Summit Foods doesn't just provide regular meal service at the Jail... it also runs the for-profit commissary. Incarcerated people are often forced to subsist off of commissary items because the jail food is so inadequate. In July, Brad Korinski of the Controller's Office and Jail Oversight Board investigated claims that commissary prices in the Jail were too high. He found that they were actually in violation of the contract with Summit Foods, which I imagine will be part of the Controller's Office's investigation.
  • Suicide Prevention implementation -- On August 18th, a man being released from the Jail attempted suicide by jumping off of the visitor's bridge outside of ACJ. It's been rumored (and seems quite likely) that Mr. Bucek's death was also suicide, although the Jail denied it at the August 5th Oversight Board meeting. Harper presented on his progress implementing the recommendations of the Suicide Prevention Assessment report last month but provided no evidence for his claims that things have improved.
  • Medication Assisted Treatment -- The Jail continues to drag its feet on implementing Medication Assisted Treatment for people with substance use disorders. Withdrawing from substances without medical help is painful and can be deadly, due both to medical factors (seizures, dehydration, etc) and psychological factors (people undergoing withdrawal are at greatly heightened risk for suicidal behavior).
    • An elderly man named Jerome Maynor was forced to detox from 75mg methadone recently at ACJ-- the Jail does not allow people with a MAT prescription to continue receiving MAT in Jail, unless they are pregnant.
  • Water -- There have been some recent reports of water at the Jail shutting off unexpectedly, as well as reports of mold coming out of the sinks. 
  • Jail Inspections -- The Board has not done a jail inspection or "walkthrough" of ACJ since 2019. According to the statute that created the jail oversight board structure, the Board is supposed to inspect the jail twice a year. In early May some members of the Board did a training with James Cavallaro of the University Network of Human Rights to prepare for the task, but here we are 5 months later and the Board has yet to do a jail inspection (or at least, if they have done so they have not informed the public).


Contracts

NOTE: On Tuesday 8/24, the Abolitionist Law Center announced its intent to sue the County if the contracts are not cancelled immediately. It's getting real. Let's keep the pressure ON!

Graphic via ALC twitter account

  • Corrections officers in the Allegheny County Jail are already armed with tasers, which they use at every opportunity. It's inevitable that they'll do the same with guns.
  • The total cost of these contracts with CSAU, Lightfield, and KelTec is nearly half a million dollars-- $471,332. The bulk of that-- $376,322-- is going to CSAU and its owner Joseph Garcia. Garcia has no known qualifications or credentials and has caused scandals all over the country.

  • Warden Harper claimed at the last meeting that CSAU will help jail staff "de-escalate" potentially volatile situations at the Jail. However, the following quote describes the training corrections officers received from Garcia at Sheriff Al Cannon Detention Center (SACDC) in Charleston, South Carolina:

Deputies with the jail’s Special Operations Group were trained to use aggression and intimidation to control inmates, seemingly ignorant of de-escalation techniques that are particularly critical to working with mentally ill inmates. 

Earlier this year, members of the SACDC Special Operations Group killed a mentally ill man named Jamal Sutherland when they used violence to subdue him in the midst of a mental health crisis. They did exactly what they were trained to do, and the results were fatal. Joseph Garcia does not teach de-escalation.
  • Harper ordered 35 guns in the contract with KelTec. 16 of the firearms are rifles and 19 are shotguns, and each of them is compatible with both "less lethal" ammunition and live rounds. The following are images of the 3 models of guns the Jail purchased:

KelTec catalog pages by Allegheny JOB Watch


  • The ammunition that Harper purchased through the Lightfield contract includes flash grenades and slugs designed for "wildlife control." And none of it is suitable for use with rifles.......... 

 

Well. Personally, that leaves me with a few questions. Let's ASK the Wardens and Board to explain!

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