On today’s BradCast: Sanders is out, and a former federal prisoner tries to sound the alarm about deplorable and deadly conditions in our nation’s prison system as coronavirus turns jail sentences, even for non-violent offenders, into death sentences — not to mention the dangers posed to prison workers and their families in the bargain. [Audio link to show is posted below.]
First up: And then there was one. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders announced the suspension of his Presidential campaign on Wednesday, leaving Joe Biden the last man standing from about 25 or so Democratic men and women vying for the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination. In a live-streamed announcement, Sanders said he was leaving the race, though staying on the ballot in the remaining primary states (if they are ever able to vote amid the coronavirus pandemic) in hopes of leveraging as many delegates as possible at the Democratic National Convention (if it is ever able to happen) to continuing moving his progressive agenda forward. We share an extended portion of Sanders statement today, in which he announces his support for Biden, if not yet an explicit endorsement.
Next: While most Americans continue to hunker down in their homes and maintain physical distancing while outside of the home as COVID-19 cases and deaths continue to rise, there are millions held in state and federal prisons (as well as immigration detention centers) who are unable to physically distance themselves from others. The result, not unexpectedly, is an explosion of infections and deaths for both prisoners and prison staff around the country, even as some states have released thousands of non-violent offenders to try and ease over-crowding that is exacerbating the problem and turning incarceration into a potential death sentence for many.
Former Alabama Governor DON SIEGELMAN contacted us last week in hopes of trying to get the word out about the problem, including at the Federal Correctional Institution in Oakdale, Louisiana, where the former Democratic Governor (and “political prisoner”) served five years of time before his long-overdue release in 2017.
The minimum security facility at Oakdale has seen an explosion of COVID-19 cases and, according to suspiciously low numbers being reported by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons (BOP), currently has more reported cases (35) and deaths (5) than any other federal facility. (Curiously, on its website, the BOP is reporting just 253 federal inmates and 85 BOP staffers infected as of today at more than 40 federal facilities across the country. At the same time, as the NYTimes reported this afternoon, the Cook County jail in Chicago alone has at least 387 cases linked to that one county facility.)
Siegelman, who has been in touch with some of his former cellmates who are now pleading for help, details the conditions that prisoners at the Oakdale facility are forced to live under. “The conditions at Oakdale were bad before the virus started,” he tells me. “If people can imagine living stacked, one on top of the other, basically a warehouse.”
He details one of the areas he was housed in that inmates call “the submarine room” because bunks are stacked three high and it is like living in a submarine. The bunks, he says, are “so close together you can actually reach out and touch the other inmates if you wanted to. It was so crowded. There’s no ventilation. The doors are shut, the windows are locked. There’s nothing to protect an inmate from breathing what other inmates exhale.” With inmates “in such close proximity, there is no way to protect themselves from someone who has the virus, who is a carrier. For the virus, it’s going to be like shooting fish in a barrel.”
Siegelman explains that he has been told the facility has not made adequate changes to deal with the outbreak, which is why the ACLU has filed a lawsuit in hopes of allowing many of the non-violent offenders to be released from the facility. While that has happened in a number of state prisons, the federal system is moving intolerably slowly in taking any action at all. In many cases, Siegelman says, prisoners are locked up during pre-trial, before they’ve been found guilty of anything. In others, they are forced to stay in these dangerous conditions longer than they might otherwise, since many probation and parole boards have been unable to meet due to the pandemic.
He is calling for non-violent offenders, particularly those late in their sentences, to be released immediately. “My question is, why are they there in the first place? If they pose no threat to public safety, if they’re non-violent offenders, if they have only a few months remaining on their sentence, if they are at risk because of health reasons, why not let them out? They should have been out already.”
The once very popular southern state Governor served from 1999 to 2003, after serving as Alabama’s Sec. of State, Attorney General and Lt. Governor. He was charged with bribery-related offenses in which he never received a dime on charges that more than 100 former Democratic and Republican state Attorneys General described as something that was never considered to be a crime until Siegelman was charged with it. He was sentenced by a federal judge who was later arrested and removed from the bench after being found to have beaten his wife.
The evidence suggests, as we’ve covered his story over the years on air at The BRAD BLOG, that it was a political prosecution which included major prosecutorial misconduct during the George W. Bush era, when Siegelman’s Republican rival, Gov. Bob Riley, worked closely with longtime Alabama GOP operative Karl Rove to take him down by any means necessary. That included an almost-certainly stolen election on a Diebold optical-scan tabulator on which results were flipped against him in the middle of the night. All of which Siegelman details in his upcoming book, Stealing Our Democracy: How the Political Assassination of a Governor Threatens Our Nation.
For now, however, Siegelman is fighting for criminal justice reform and imploring listeners to “call your mayors, your governor, and Members of Congress to keep the pressure on to get these people out of jail and out of prisons that pose no public safety risk. They need to say that inmates that are non-violent, that pose no public safety risk, need to be released — or at least placed in another facility where they are separate from other inmates. …. We would hope that the President of the United States would get on board and take this a little more seriously. But don’t hold your breath.”
CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!…
[audio:http://BradBlog.com/audio/BradCast_BradFriedman-SandersOut_DonSiegelman-PrisonCoronavirusOutbreak_040820.mp3]
(Snail mail support to “Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028” always welcome too!)
|
BRAD,
Some of my friends have been circulating this on FB (more claims based on supposed “exit polls”).
But I am led to suspect that these evaluations are not based on legit exit pol data, because there is no way to obtain them, right?
What should I tell my friends about the legitimacy of this? (see link below).
Is there ANY chance they could be legit, at all?
https://tdmsresearch.com/?fbclid=IwAR1FB2QHHR2mtbG8Qy9tgZfmYunIMvYWS3I1YR6G186jn8p4G5hN69Vz5MQ
Thank you so much for the interview with Gov. Siegelman. I only wish that the audio could have been more clear – it was difficult to understand what he was saying through much of it 🙁
DonL @ 1:
I think I responded to you in previous inquiries on those TDMS reports, but you may not have seen it, if I was late in responding. (Or I could be confusing it with the countless responses I’ve given on Twitter or via Email or even on air.)
In any event, the Exit Poll data on all of those analyses is dubious at best, in that it is NOT the raw data. It is already adjusted data that the networks have posted, and that Ted has scraped from their websites as quickly as he can (as far as I can tell), before it is then adjusted again as new results come in.
Moreover, the suggesting that Exit Polls in the U.S are somehow a “gold standard” indication of fraud, because similar polls are used to ferret out fraud in other countries is wildly misleading. U.S. Exit Polls are decidedly NOT constructed to ferret out fraud. They are designed very differently, and meant to tell media outlets entirely different things, such as why various demographics of voters voted the way they did.
If we had the RAW data from those polls, and could compare them — precinct by precinct — with actual results at those precincts, that might tell us something. But, as is, these are “yellow” flags (not “red”) at best.
And with THAT said, here’s the deal. And here’s why I’m never particularly impressed by exit poll comparisons. EVEN IF they suggest some sort of mistally (due to fraud or programming error), the remedy is the same thing that I call for for ANY election. Namely, hand-count the hand-marked paper ballots (where they exist) and find out what the true results are.
As is, there is no way to tell whether the Exits are right or the Results are right without human beings actually counting the ballots, publicly, by hand.
So, in short, I don’t care about the Exit Polls, I care about the results. If you do too, then fight like hell to actually COUNT the ballots, no matter what such dubious comparisons between Exits and Results might suggest (wrongly or rightly.) Those analyses prove absolutely nothing.
Furthermore, they DEFINITELY do not prove that an election was stolen by the DNC or anybody else, as I see so many ridiculously charge. Even IF the disparity was somehow confirmed (though specific comparison at the precinct level of RAW Exit data and reported results), those analyses still tell us nothing about WHO might have tried to game the system or caused the error in the reported results.
So, that’s a lot of “ifs” for a process that would end the same way anyway, with my recommendation to COUNT THE DAMN BALLOTS!
Hope that helps. Feel free to share it wherever you see fit.
Allin @2:
Yeah. Sorry about that, Allin. As more and more folks ditch their LANDLINES, us radio folks are often stuck with sub-par cell phone signals we have to work with. Very frustrating on a daily basis, as some phones and signals prove much better than others.
Unfortunately, not much we can do about it on this end, even as we try to, when possible, to massage the audio quality after the interview whenever and if ever possible. 🙁
Hopefully it was clear ENOUGH, however, to be able to follow him if you listened carefully. That’s what we hope anyway!
Thanks for the substantive response, Brad.
I WILL definitely be linking people to it when they post that TDMS info, on FB, or elsewhere.
You rock!
Happy to help, Don. Please share far and wide as useful! Really need to push back on that one, unfortunately. It’s just really bad and misleading information that folks are all too happy to share without knowing what they’re actually talking about.