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WV opioid settlements could pay county jail bills

A portion of West Virginia’s nearly $1 billion opioid settlement fund can be used to pay regional jail bills that have strained county budge

For a decade, multi-billion dollar companies increased their bottom lines at the expense of West Virginians by pumping opioids into the state: here, people fatally overdosed at rates higher than anywhere else in the country. The fallout has persisted into the 2020s; recent data estimates that, between June 2021 and 2022, drugs caused the death of nearly four West Virginians every day. 

Many of those companies have paid settlements to West Virginia over the past year and a half for their role in catalyzing the crisis. Those funds, eventually estimated to total upwards of a billion dollars, are intended to benefit West Virginians—like to connect more people like Ford to counseling and medication-assisted treatment programs, or to prevent children in schools from initiating opioid use.

But while the funds could be used that way, there's no guarantee they will be. The contract agreed to by Attorney General Patrick Morrisey and the state’s local governments allows counties to use their shares, expected to be around $150 million, to pay regional jail fees instead. 

These rising jail costs—exacerbated in part by people jailed on charges related to substance use disorder—are a problem in many West Virginia counties, and many county commissioners have said they feel stifled by the $48.25 daily cost to keep someone behind bars. 

But for public health experts, allowing settlement funds to be spent on incarcerating those with substance use disorders would further the epidemic.

"If someone wanted to increase overdose rates, what they would do is simply round people up and arrest them," said Dr. Dan Ciccarone, a professor at the University of California San Francisco who specializes in treating opioid addiction. "Because the number one predictor of overdose . . . is recent release from incarceration."

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this nervous paradise, bone and muscle of this extraordinary life

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Children's league meeting, DPRK (courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration)

[communistpoetics]

To "enact" the revolution through the collective has multiple meanings in this context—at the most basic level to endorse it, but more specifically to ordain it into being by representing and acting it out, and in that process of performing the revolution to become its very embodiment. Revolution in North Korea certainly included the overturning of previous social relations as the very definition of what a social revolution is, but what this meant in concrete terms for everyday life was a new collective life that had its own distinctive qualities, with its own set of identities and practices, irreducible to its parts. Not simply the aggregate effect of individuals, organizational life created different forms of agency that were represented in new forms of discourse and different configurations of time and space. Daily schedules and the pace of work changed as meetings and study sessions had priority over the production line. Communal spaces took on novel significance as Japanese mansions were turned into kindergartens and Shinto shrines became public parks. People now addressed each other as "comrade" rather than with the familial hierarchical terms of appellation. Thus, to be part of a collective and to live an organizational life was to enact the revolution into concrete reality, making the revolution visible through everyday practices.

Suzy Kim, Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950

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. . . the happiness and well-being of the individual was to be found through the collective, and this meant living an "organizational life" (chojik saenghwal). According to the text, capitalism fostered competition between individuals and social alienation by valuing profit over social need. Only through a collective life under communism would the true nature of social relations be revealed, in which "the new person holds dear the struggle for the general welfare of the people and values the ability to labor." A new kind of social life with different forms of social relations was to emerge from a collective organizational life.

Suzy Kim, Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950

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Complete freedom is not gained by juxtaposing the individual self to the collective, but can only be found by way of the collective . . . Every individual guarantees one's individuality by acting as part of a collective. We struggle actively against individualism . . . Democratic virtue does not undermine the happiness and wellbeing of the individual, but is achieved only when everyone enjoys happiness and well-being together as a collective.

T'ae Sŏng-Ju, "Problem of Educating Democratic Virtues," North Korean Teachers and Cultural Workers Occupation League (1949)

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North Korea's revolution in the everyday began with the transformation of the basic foundation of social relations through one of the most rapid and radical land reforms in history as peasants took to the streets to demand a new relationship to land. Once completed, the decommodification of land imbued the process of agricultural production with social meaning as peasants collectively managed the production and distribution of their harvests. The momentum was sustained through the institutionalization of the people's committees, creating an everyday that was "public through and through," lived in the streets, publicity halls, and people's committee offices. Empowerment required both the initial spontaneous thrust of the peasants striking out into the public arena and the tools that came later in the form of political representation and education, through which they learned to participate in a sustained revolutionary process. Increasingly empowered and confident, large numbers of peasants, women, and youth took up leadership positions. In fact, peasants, women, and youth, who together represented the vast majority of the population, created the three largest social organizations for a collective life that was integral to instilling a sense of social purpose.

Suzy Kim, Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950

[communistpoetics]

The [literacy] campaign prescribed at least two literacy schools per village, and a personal instructor was to be sent directly to those who could not make it to school because of family circumstances. As women's enrollment posed the greatest challenge, if a woman failed to attend school regularly, members of the women's league were called on to look into her family situation to see whether her husband or parents-in-law were prohibiting her from attending school. In October 1948, it was discovered that there were still 1,454 illiterate women in Inje who had been unable to attend school because it was too far away or they had infants to nurse and were busy with household chores. The women's league took responsibility for these women, placing one member in charge of each illiterate woman to give them one-on-one instruction in her own home. By March 1949, when the final national literacy test took place, illiteracy in the county had reportedly been eradicated, with the exception of 309 people who were considered too old or mentally ill.

Unfortunately, even those who had passed the test often reverted to being illiterate when they stopped going to school since most people had learned to read but not to write. At the end of 1948, the Inje County Women's League was still struggling with nine hundred illiterate women within their own ranks. To get the remaining women to learn to read, bulletin boards were put up at public places where women were likely to gather, such as around the communal well, with basic reading lessons they could recite while doing laundry. Signs were also posted on the doors of the homes of illiterate people as a way to exert peer pressure and public shame, adding extra incentive to learn. To sustain the results of the literacy campaign, a decision approved on December 18, 1946, standardized the public education system to mandate a year of kindergarten beginning at age six, followed by five years of elementary education, three years of middle school or technical school, and three years of high school or specialty school. Students could pursue higher education thereafter in four to five years of college or two years of teachers college, followed by postgraduate research. Such formal schooling was supplemented by various programs targeting adults and workers for vocational training.

Suzy Kim, Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950

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The fervor for education ran deep among peasants, who had had little opportunity for education before. Internal party documents, not meant for public consumption and therefore of limited propaganda value, are replete with stories about people who gave the little they had to make education possible: donating materials they were saving up to build their own homes for the construction of a new school, peasants donating their prized animals, children donating the savings from their piggy banks, and elderly women boarding carpenters and workers in their homes during the construction of local schools. Illiteracy was considered the "enemy of civilization," and as peasants learned to read and write, taking up positions in the local administration of the people’s committees, party branches, and social organizations, they were inspired by their newfound abilities. As one party member commented exuberantly, "Realizing the need to learn to read and write, today I have come to gain the ability to compose the minutes with my own hand as a result of diligent self-study." Those just learning to read and write were now becoming leaders, writing up reports and party records. Indeed, empowerment was to be found in the routine, everyday practices that were newly adopted by the previously dispossessed members of society who were now in positions of leadership.

Suzy Kim, Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950

[communistpoetics]

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Responding to peasant desire for ownership, care was taken to make sure peasants retained control over the management of their own plots; any hint of outside control was prohibited, including the use of names that might be reminiscent of colonial-era labor mobilization. The confiscated land was not taken over by the state and nationalized, but distributed to the peasants in order to satisfy "their centuries-old hunger for land." By leaving agricultural management and production in the hands of the peasants, the emerging North Korean state not only satisfied peasant hunger for land but in that very process enabled peasants to identify themselves as revolutionary agents whose productive activities were seen to serve a social purpose. This view was reinforced by leaving 75 percent of the harvest under peasant control, entrusting them with the management of both production and consumption. The land reform effectively eliminated the landlords, who had fled to the south in record numbers by the following month, from posing the staunchest opposition to the revolution. Most important, it signaled the decommodification of land and the empowerment of the rural majority, bringing together production and consumption as part of a "socially productive life" in the peasants' everyday lives.

Suzy Kim, Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950

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Despite such challenges, the reform was hugely popular and successful by all measures. It was reported that "meetings were held at which Korean peasants . . . expressed their warm thanks to the Provisional People's Committee for enacting the law . . . [which] received 30,000 letters of thanks in the first month after the law had been enacted." Another telling example of peasant approval was the dramatic increase in membership in the North Korean Communist Party (forerunner to the North Korean Workers' Party), which doubled from 4,560 in December 1945 to 9,058 in March 1946, almost tripling to 26,000 by the next month. There was a steady increase thereafter to 105,000 members in July, 276,000 in August, and 750,000 members by March 1948, initiating the transformation of the North Korean Communist Party from a vanguard party of experienced revolutionaries to a mass party of peasants. With the enthusiasm generated by land ownership, agricultural production increased by as much as 50 percent in some provinces; for example, in South Hamgyŏng Province grain production increased from 1,260,790 sacks in 1945 to 1,885,200 sacks in 1946.

Suzy Kim, Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950

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As with any reform of such magnitude, clarification was necessary and the Provisional People's Committee issued directives, including the Law on Temporary Measures for the Enforcement of the Land Reform and Regulations Relative to the Application of the Land Reform Law. Punishment was mandated in cases of hiding, destroying, purchasing, or otherwise disposing of materials slated to be confiscated. Landlords were also allotted plots if they chose to work the land themselves, although they were given land in other counties in order to sever the traditional ties between them and the villagers, isolating them from their former base of power. True to the slogan "land to the tillers," those who owned more than five chŏngbo of land were allowed to keep it if they had worked all of it themselves. The drafters of the reform law were strategic "on the question of with whom to ally, whom to oppose, and whom to isolate." In order to ensure the broadest support for the reform while isolating the minority of landlords, the law was applied so as not to alienate the middle or rich peasants.

Suzy Kim, Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950

[communistpoetics]

More than half of the 1,860,000 chŏngbo of arable land in North Korea was confiscated by the reform. Over 60 percent of the confiscated land came from households with medium-sized holdings that had owned no more than five chŏngbo but had rented out part or all of their land. Nearly all of the confiscated land was redistributed, with less than 2 percent kept under state ownership. By the end, a total of 1,050,000 chŏngbo of land had been confiscated and 980,000 chŏngbo of it was distributed to 710,000 peasant households for free—all within twenty-five days. In short, 99 percent of rented land was confiscated without compensation, benefiting over 70 percent of all peasant households in North Korea. The land reform broke the power of the landowners, many of whom were tainted as Japanese collaborators, while gaining popular support for the new regime from the large stratum of landless and poor peasants. For landlords, it was a difficult pill to swallow, as one former landlord remembered years later:

"The new Communist government took away all our land overnight and gave it to the tenant farmers. They called it Land Reform Number One, saying the land should belong to the people . . . Overnight we lost all our ancestral land. They did let us keep the Big House and three rice paddies that lay between our house and the church. For the first time in my life, we had to do some work . . . That is the first time I ever put my foot right into the rice beds—leech beds, I called them."

In effect, the land reform had legitimized what already had been under way at the initiative of local people’s committees and peasant unions shortly after liberation. It reinforced the revolutionary nature of the reform, which not only satisfied peasant demand for land but more important brought down landlord power that had held sway for centuries. A relatively fixed elite status, which combined landed wealth with official government positions going back for generations, had been sustained under colonial rule. Landlords collaborated with the Japanese to maintain their power and wealth while colonial authorities found landlords useful in administering the countryside. The basis for an elite status that had lasted the five hundred years under the Chosŏn Dynasty into the colonial period had thereby finally come to an end.

Suzy Kim, Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950

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It is within this context of the anticolonial guerrilla struggle in Manchuria and the trauma of the Minsaengdan Incident that Han Hongkoo claims we must understand the development of Juche ideology and Kim Il Sung's repeated emphasis on independence as the "lifeblood of the nation"—that the "master of the Korean revolution is the Korean people." As the only communist leader in history to have been imprisoned by both Chinese and Soviet communists, Kim Il Sung was keenly aware of how expendable revolutions in small countries such as Korea could become when weighed against the national interests of larger powers such as China and the Soviet Union despite communist principles of internationalism.

Suzy Kim, Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950

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Through these committees, revolutionary justice was meted out to colonial authorities and their collaborators, at times violently. The "enemies" were defined in terms of their association with the colonial government: landlords who had been protected by the colonial government to control the countryside, local government officials and the police, and rice collection agents carrying out the orders of the colonial administration. Regardless of political affiliation, the primary targets were all those organs that had constituted the colonial machinery. People's committees took over local governance in the vacuum left by the collapse of the Japanese colonial government, punishing "national traitors" and criminals in people's courts, distributing grain, and maintaining local security. Peasants, who made up the vast majority of the population, dominated the PCs. It was reported that peasants, refusing the orders of district officials, obeyed only the people's committees, and that peasants controlled most police stations.

In the south, this period of autonomy did not last. The PCs were seen to threaten the power of the American occupation forces, which refused in principle to acknowledge any preexisting Korean authority. To make matters worse, PCs took on a reputation as left leaning when they advocated land reform and the nationalization of major industries owned by the Japanese. The beginning of the United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) thus spelled eventual doom for the southern committees, although this was by no means a forgone conclusion. Depending on the relationship between the local American occupation forces and the committees, many PCs lasted into the fall of 1946, especially in the villages, because the occupation forces were not able to penetrate very far below the provincial level.

By contrast, the people's committees in the north were aided by the Soviet occupation, which largely consigned the administration of its occupation zone to the institutions set up by Koreans. Through information culled from the press and informants, an American intelligence report described how "when Soviets entered north Korea in late August 1945 they found that after surrender of Japs, Koreans had formed local 'self rule councils' in many places . . . A council of 27 members was formed in each of the five northern provinces." As in the south, northern committees were formed through village assemblies, or at the initiative of village leaders. Rather than seeing them as threats, however, the Soviets supported and fostered the PCs. They became structures on which to build a government that had popular support and was friendly toward the Soviet Union, which was ensured by Soviet backing of leftist political figures. Soviet influence notwithstanding, there was no Soviet military government set up in the north comparable to the U.S. military government in the south. The primary Soviet objective was not to occupy Korea, but to set up a buffer against Japan and retrieve the Sakhalin region that had been lost after the Russo-Japanese War of 1905.

Suzy Kim, Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950

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In light of two different characterizations of the everyday, is everyday life "a realm of submission to relations of power or the space in which those relations are contested (or at least negotiated in relatively interesting ways)?" The simple answer is that it is both. The materiality of things and the subjectivity of individuals dialectically constitute the everyday in concrete terms. The everyday is both the product of capitalist modernity and the site of its resistance. It brings together the material conditions within which subjects maneuver and by which subjects are negotiated, simultaneously enabling various subjectivities to emerge through those interactions. In other words, the everyday is where choice and constraint meet. What makes it subversive is the possibility for unintended consequences at the intersection between structural mechanisms and individual contingencies.

Suzy Kim, Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950