@oakfern's sideblog for articles and news. always with alt text, sources, and links. (this is not an attempt to provide 100% up to date news coverage of every issue - these are just articles that i read and wanted to share.)
With “green corridors” that mimic the natural forest, the Colombian city is driving down temperatures -- and could become five degrees coole
"With “green corridors” that mimic the natural forest, the Colombian city is driving down temperatures — and could become five degrees cooler over the next few decades.
In the face of a rapidly heating planet, the City of Eternal Spring — nicknamed so thanks to its year-round temperate climate — has found a way to keep its cool.
Previously, Medellín had undergone years of rapid urban expansion, which led to a severe urban heat island effect — raising temperatures in the city to significantly higher than in the surrounding suburban and rural areas. Roads and other concrete infrastructure absorb and maintain the sun’s heat for much longer than green infrastructure.
“Medellín grew at the expense of green spaces and vegetation,” says Pilar Vargas, a forest engineer working for City Hall. “We built and built and built. There wasn’t a lot of thought about the impact on the climate. It became obvious that had to change.”
Efforts began in 2016 under Medellín’s then mayor, Federico Gutiérrez (who, after completing one term in 2019, was re-elected at the end of 2023). The city launched a new approach to its urban development — one that focused on people and plants.
The $16.3 million initiative led to the creation of 30 Green Corridors along the city’s roads and waterways, improving or producing more than 70 hectares of green space, which includes 20 kilometers of shaded routes with cycle lanes and pedestrian paths.
These plant and tree-filled spaces — which connect all sorts of green areas such as the curb strips, squares, parks, vertical gardens, sidewalks, and even some of the seven hills that surround the city — produce fresh, cooling air in the face of urban heat. The corridors are also designed to mimic a natural forest with levels of low, medium and high plants, including native and tropical plants, bamboo grasses and palm trees.
Heat-trapping infrastructure like metro stations and bridges has also been greened as part of the project and government buildings have been adorned with green roofs and vertical gardens to beat the heat. The first of those was installed at Medellín’s City Hall, where nearly 100,000 plants and 12 species span the 1,810 square meter surface.
“It’s like urban acupuncture,” says Paula Zapata, advisor for Medellín at C40 Cities, a global network of about 100 of the world’s leading mayors. “The city is making these small interventions that together act to make a big impact.”
At the launch of the project, 120,000 individual plants and 12,500 trees were added to roads and parks across the city. By 2021, the figure had reached 2.5 million plants and 880,000 trees. Each has been carefully chosen to maximize their impact.
“The technical team thought a lot about the species used. They selected endemic ones that have a functional use,” explains Zapata.
The 72 species of plants and trees selected provide food for wildlife, help biodiversity to spread and fight air pollution. A study, for example, identified Mangifera indica as the best among six plant species found in Medellín at absorbing PM2.5 pollution — particulate matter that can cause asthma, bronchitis and heart disease — and surviving in polluted areas due to its “biochemical and biological mechanisms.”
And the urban planting continues to this day.
The groundwork is carried out by 150 citizen-gardeners like Pineda, who come from disadvantaged and minority backgrounds, with the support of 15 specialized forest engineers. Pineda is now the leader of a team of seven other gardeners who attend to corridors all across the city, shifting depending on the current priorities...
“I’m completely in favor of the corridors,” says [Victoria Perez, another citizen-gardener], who grew up in a poor suburb in the city of 2.5 million people. “It really improves the quality of life here.”
Wilmar Jesus, a 48-year-old Afro-Colombian farmer on his first day of the job, is pleased about the project’s possibilities for his own future. “I want to learn more and become better,” he says. “This gives me the opportunity to advance myself.”
The project’s wider impacts are like a breath of fresh air. Medellín’s temperatures fell by 2°C in the first three years of the program, and officials expect a further decrease of 4 to 5C over the next few decades, even taking into account climate change. In turn, City Hall says this will minimize the need for energy-intensive air conditioning...
In addition, the project has had a significant impact on air pollution. Between 2016 and 2019, the level of PM2.5 fell significantly, and in turn the city’s morbidity rate from acute respiratory infections decreased from 159.8 to 95.3 per 1,000 people [Note: That means the city's rate of people getting sick with lung/throat/respiratory infections.]
There’s also been a 34.6 percent rise in cycling in the city, likely due to the new bike paths built for the project, and biodiversity studies show that wildlife is coming back — one sample of five Green Corridors identified 30 different species of butterfly.
Other cities are already taking note. Bogotá and Barranquilla have adopted similar plans, among other Colombian cities, and last year São Paulo, Brazil, the largest city in South America, began expanding its corridors after launching them in 2022.
“For sure, Green Corridors could work in many other places,” says Zapata."
Anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate draws on five years of research and ethnographic fieldwork in server farms to illustrate some of t
The flotsam and jetsam of our digital queries and transactions, the flurry of electrons flitting about, warm the medium of air. Heat is the waste product of computation, and if left unchecked, it becomes a foil to the workings of digital civilization. Heat must therefore be relentlessly abated to keep the engine of the digital thrumming in a constant state, 24 hours a day, every day.
To quell this thermodynamic threat, data centers overwhelmingly rely on air conditioning, a mechanical process that refrigerates the gaseous medium of air, so that it can displace or lift perilous heat away from computers. Today, power-hungry computer room air conditioners (CRACs) or computer room air handlers (CRAHs) are staples of even the most advanced data centers. In North America, most data centers draw power from “dirty” electricity grids, especially in Virginia’s “data center alley,” the site of 70 percent of the world’s internet traffic in 2019. To cool, the Cloud burns carbon, what Jeffrey Moro calls an “elemental irony.” In most data centers today, cooling accounts for greater than 40 percent of electricity usage.
[...]
The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes. At 200 terawatt hours (TWh) annually, data centers collectively devour more energy than some nation-states. Today, the electricity utilized by data centers accounts for 0.3 percent of overall carbon emissions, and if we extend our accounting to include networked devices like laptops, smartphones, and tablets, the total shifts to 2 percent of global carbon emissions.
Why so much energy? Beyond cooling, the energy requirements of data centers are vast. To meet the pledge to customers that their data and cloud services will be available anytime, anywhere, data centers are designed to be hyper-redundant: If one system fails, another is ready to take its place at a moment’s notice, to prevent a disruption in user experiences. Like Tom’s air conditioners idling in a low-power state, ready to rev up when things get too hot, the data center is a Russian doll of redundancies: redundant power systems like diesel generators, redundant servers ready to take over computational processes should others become unexpectedly unavailable, and so forth. In some cases, only 6 to 12 percent of energy consumed is devoted to active computational processes. The remainder is allocated to cooling and maintaining chains upon chains of redundant fail-safes to prevent costly downtime.
If we assume eggs must be cheap, we can’t address the twin crises of factory farming and bird flu.
Last summer, I drove out to see an enormous pile of dead hens not far from where I live in Wisconsin. The egg factory farm where the hens originated had recently been hit with a bird flu infection, which meant that the chickens — all 2.8 million of them — had to be rapidly killed, in a process the industry euphemistically calls “depopulation.”By the time I went to the site, a few months after the cull took place, what remained were heaps of bones, crawling with flies and other scavengers and stretching back as far as the eye could see, giving it the ghostly air of a mass grave. Other than nearby residents who were furious that the corpses had been essentially dropped in their backyards, this place was largely unremarked upon.
When you cover a niche subject like factory farming, it’s always a bit startling to see your beat become major national news, as the avian flu outbreak has in the last few months. But the fact that the bird flu has resulted in the deaths and culling of a record-high 58 million poultry birds in the US since last year alone isn’t what’s driven most of the attention. It’s the price of eggs.
Eggs recently reached an all-time high of $4.25 a dozen on average in the US. That’s sent reporters in search of an explanation: “WTF is going on with absurd egg prices?” a Vice story asked. Is it the flu, which has created a shortage of egg-laying hens? Or, as the advocacy group Farm Action argued to the Federal Trade Commission last month, could it be primarily due to industry price gouging and collusion?
The answer is likely both (plus inflationary factors like more expensive chicken feed), and it matters that we can untangle what’s driving the price hikes. But that’s not really what I want to talk about. The problem with the egg price outrage cycle is that it takes for granted the idea that eggs should be abundant and cheap. This ignores the immense externalities of egg production, and it limits the solutions that are available to us for addressing problems like avian flu — which has not only decimated tens of millions of birds and mammals, but is also increasingly regarded as a serious threat to humans. We can’t have cheap eggs without cruel, disease-promoting factory farms where zoonoses thrive and hens suffer.
The bird flu discourse is very confused
Many people now know about the cruelty of factory farming, which is how almost all US meat and eggs are produced, but they’re reluctant to connect it to the cheap food on their plates. It’s not surprising that consumers are caught in this cognitive dissonance, yet I’ve still been surprised to see it reflected by so many journalists, both national and local, in the last several weeks. One Atlantic writer, for example, remarked in a piece recently that she was “indignant” to spend $6 on a dozen eggs. But how much is too much to pay for the product of an animal’s indignity and suffering? This view — that we have an inherent right to cheap animal products — is symptomatic of our inability to distinguish between a necessity and a luxury when it comes to the products of animal agriculture. In a fairer world eggs would be more expensive — but right now they’re expensive for the wrong reasons.
For the last year, bird flu has torn through egg farms, many of which warehouse hundreds of thousands or even millions of hens in one place, confining them in tiny, vertically stacked cages that don’t allow them enough space to spread their wings. When even a single case of flu is detected at a facility, all the animals have to be depopulated, and despite many outlets inaccurately terming this process “euthanasia,” the methods being used to mass kill birds are not pretty; the 2.8 million hens near me, like millions of others, were killed using ventilation shutdown, essentially a fancy term for heatstroke. All this has created a shortage of egg-laying hens and an opportunity for egg companies to increase prices.
Very little US media reporting on the outbreak has asked questions about what’s happening to the millions of factory-farmed birds killed in depopulations. The national conversation has instead fixated on consumer welfare and, more recently, on how to prevent bird flu from jumping to humans and turning into a catastrophic pandemic.
The most realistic prospect for doing that in the near term is to vaccinate both farm animals and humans, among other interventions, and we should absolutely do these things. The disease is highly fatal, after all, for birds and increasingly other mammals. In rare confirmed human cases, this strain of the virus has killed 56 percent of people, according to the World Health Organization. But we should also be clear-eyed about the moral hazard that the vaccination approach creates: focusing narrowly on protecting humans without disrupting business-as-usual in the poultry industry leaves us little incentive to reform the intensive confinement farming system that inflicts extreme suffering on animals and fuels disease spread.
In the egg price gouging discussion, too, I’ve sensed a desire to absolve Americans of responsibility for participating in an indefensibly cruel system. In its letter to the FTC, Farm Action argued that the more than threefold increase in egg prices in a little over a year is tantamount to “extort[ing] billions of dollars from the pockets of ordinary Americans through what amounts to a tax on a staple we all need: eggs.” While the highly consolidated livestock industry should be held to account for unfair business practices, I believe, and others have argued, that progressives’ focus in recent years on factors like collusion and price-fixing in animal agriculture is misplaced. It addresses consumer welfare without contending with the bigger and much more politically dicey problems with animal production: its scale and reliance on extreme confinement. And if we start from the assumption that eggs should be a staple rather than an infrequent indulgence, it forecloses our ability to fix or even correctly identify what’s wrong with factory farming.
What if eggs weren’t so cheap?
If eggs were priced at their true environmental and animal welfare cost, they’d surely be even more expensive than they are now. At a minimum, we would outlaw the worst depopulation methods and stop bailing out the factory farm industry for the cost of mass killing animals during emergencies, as a group of federal legislators led by Sen. Cory Booker recently proposed (you read that right — taxpayers are currently paying for depopulation).
We’d also phase out factory farms, freeing hens from the dismal battery cages where most of them are now kept and prevented from expressing natural behaviors. We’d ban the routine use of antibiotics to prevent disease in farm animals, which is already contributing to antibiotic resistance. We’d slow down reckless high slaughter-line speeds, which endanger meatpacking workers. We’d stop excluding birds from the Humane Slaughter Act, which, although currently poorly enforced, at least notionally requires that distress during slaughter be minimized. We’d stop effectively exempting the livestock industry from landmark environmental quality laws like the Clean Water Act. The list goes on.
But these animals deserve so much more than what can even be envisioned within the current constraints of our political economy. Chickens should be able to touch grass, have ample roaming space, form social bonds, and rear their offspring. They shouldn’t be forced to lay insane numbers of eggs that take a toll on their bodies, as America’s nearly 400 million egg-laying hens have been engineered to do. The red junglefowl, the wild animal equivalent of modern chickens, lays between 10 and 15 eggs per year, journalist Tove Danovich points out in her forthcoming book Under the Henfluence. Today’s domesticated hens easily lay more than 200, which makes them highly prone to painful reproductive diseases.
Fixing all these problems would be incompatible with animals having mere commodity status. But making conditions on egg farms even minimally palatable to most people would raise prices to a level that people would buy fewer eggs, and we’d produce a lot less of them. That’s a good thing — it’s how the price mechanism is supposed to work, making consumer goods reflect the true cost of producing them. As one writer put it in the Guardian earlier this week: “Imagine how you’d revere an egg if it was as rare and luxurious as a truffle: imagine how differently you’d view the creature that produced it?”
Raising the price of animal-based foods is an inherently thorny argument for progressives to make because it reads as, well, regressive. Low-income people spend a larger share of their incomes on food, and eggs are, at least before the bird flu, one of the cheapest high-protein foods available (though plant-based sources like legumes also provide ultra-cheap protein, and they’re packed with fiber). Most Americans are just trying to make ends meet, and it shouldn’t be on them to scrutinize their every food choice. A just country has to guarantee that everyone can easily afford nutritious food — but that needs to be addressed on a level independent from the decisions we make as a society about the optimal consumption levels and and prices of different foods. And that calculus must include ethical, environmental, and public health costs. Although eggs don’t have as high a carbon footprint as other animal-based foods, like beef and dairy, their emissions are still way higher than plant-based protein sources, so their optimal cost would also price in their climate impact. We don’t need abundant eggs to have abundant cheap protein.
We’re far from being able to make egg farming meaningfully more humane, but crises like the avian flu can reveal vulnerabilities in the industry and quickly organize political coalitions around shared goals. We should be clear about what we want to build toward: Confining millions of birds in conditions that endanger public health, and cruelly mass killing and dumping them when the system breaks, is unconscionable. A business model that not only permits this to happen, but treats it as normal and makes the public foot the bill, isn’t worth the cheap eggs.
Critics call the bill "perverse" and say it's like "harvesting organs."
you can get 60 days to a year off your sentence per organ you give up.
not sure how we’re gonna determine how much time your earn off
is it some organ have higher values? is the general health of the prisoner grades like meat quality?
BOSTON - A new bill proposed on Beacon Hill would allow Massachusetts prisoners to donate their organs for reduced sentences.
The legislation would give people anywhere from 60 days to a year off their prison sentence “on the condition that the incarcerated individual has donated bone marrow or organ(s).”
The “act to establish the Massachusetts incarcerated individual bone marrow and organ donation program” is sponsored by Democratic Reps. Judith Garcia, of Chelsea, and Carlos Gonzalez of Springfield.
They say it would “restore bodily autonomy to incarcerated folks” and expand the pool of donors, especially for people of color who struggle to find a match. But critics strongly disagree and say it might even be illegal.
“It’s like you’re harvesting organs. It just doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel humane,” Project Turnaround founder Romilda Pereira told The Boston Globe. “You’re bargaining with vulnerable people over their time.”
State’s new bill goes into effect prohibiting material unless deemed appropriate by a librarian or ‘certified media specialist’
School teachers in Florida’s Manatee county are removing books from their classrooms or physically covering them up after a new bill went into effect that prohibited material unless deemed appropriate by a librarian, or “certified media specialist”.
If a teacher is found in violation of these guidelines, they could face felony charges.
The new guidelines for the Florida law, known as HB 1467, outline the books be free of pornographic material, suited to student needs and their ability to comprehend the material, and appropriate for the grade level and age group.
In order to determine if the books meet these guidelines, certified media specialists must undergo an online training developed by Florida’s department of education.
With only a few or even one media specialist present in each school, the process to vet books is lengthy.
Scrutiny of teaching material in Florida schools heightened under the leadership of the rightwing Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, whose administration says it is actively working to “protect parental rights”, which includes a prohibition on childhood education on gender, sexual orientation and critical race theory.
DeSantis has emerged as a legitimate rival to Donald Trump in the Republican party. The former US president has already declared his 2024 candidacy for another White House run, while DeSantis is widely expected to do so later this year.
As part of his appeal to the party’s rightwing base DeSantis has sought to portray himself as a culture war warrior, cracking down on LGBTQ rights and taking conservative stances on the fight against Covid-19 and a host of other issues such as immigration.
In 2021, he announced the Stop Woke (Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees) Act to “give businesses, employees, children and families tools to fight back against woke indoctrination”.
Teachers have condemned the new guidelines.
The Manatee Education Association union president, Pat Barber, told local TV station Fox 13: “We have people who have spent their entire careers building their classroom libraries based on their professional and educational experience and understanding of the age of the children they teach.”
Barber added: “Now, their professional judgment and training are being substituted for the opinion of anyone who wishes to review and challenge the books. We’re focused on things that cause teachers to want to walk away from education because they can’t focus on their mission of educating children.”
Some teachers are even covering up their library books with paper.
Don Falls, a history teacher at Manatee high school, told the Herald-Tribune newspaper: “If you have a lot of books like I do, probably several hundred, it is not practical to run all of them through [the vetting process] so we have to cover them up.”
More school districts in Florida are expected to follow suit as a result of such policies this year. The state’s education department issued a deadline of 1 July 2023 for when “the superintendent of schools in each district must certify to the FDOE Commissioner that all school librarians and media specialists have completed this training”.
The department, citing evidence uncovered by lawyers representing incarcerated people, concluded that the state has known about the problem
The Justice Department has found that Louisiana’s longstanding practice of detaining more than a quarter of inmates beyond their court-ordered release dates violates the Constitution and accused state officials of ignoring repeated calls to overhaul the unjust system.
The Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections “is deliberately indifferent to the systemic overdetention of people in its custody,” according to a report on a yearlong investigation, released on Wednesday, that examined incarceration patterns of inmates held in state facilities and jails run by parishes, the state equivalent of county governments.
From January 2022 to April 2022, 27 percent of the people who were legally entitled to be released from state custody, some for minor crimes or first-time offenses, were held past their release dates. About 24 percent of those improperly detained had been held 90 days or longer past their release days, the Justice Department found.
Louisiana officials, who cooperated with federal investigators, are discussing a possible agreement with the Justice Department to overhaul the system. But the department, citing evidence uncovered by lawyers representing incarcerated people, concluded that the state has known about the problem for at least a decade and has done little to address it.
“There is an obligation both to incarcerated persons and the taxpayers not to keep someone incarcerated for longer than they should be,” Brandon B. Brown, a U.S. attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, said in a statement accompanying the report. “Timely release is not only a legal obligation, but arguably of equal importance, a moral obligation.”
Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who leads the department’s civil rights division, added that Louisiana’s system also contributed to chronic racial disparities in the state’s criminal justice system.
“In Louisiana, Black people represent 65 percent of the adult correctional population, while only representing 33 percent of the overall state population,” she added.
A spokesman for the official who runs the system, James M. Le Blanc, said the state corrections department was reviewing the report and was continuing to work with the Justice Department.
“Without a full review of the report’s findings and documentation supporting said findings, it would be a challenge to provide a comprehensive response at this time,” the spokesman said in an email.
In December, The Times reported that about 200 inmates are held beyond their legal release dates on any given month in Louisiana, amounting to 2,000 to 2,500 of the 12,000 to 16,000 prisoners freed each year.
The average length of additional time was around 44 days in 2019, according to internal state corrections data obtained by lawyers for inmates. Until recently, the department’s public hotline warned families that the wait could be as long as 90 days.
In most other states and cities, prisoners and parolees marked for immediate release are typically processed within hours — not days — although those times can vary, particularly if officials must make arrangements required to release registered sex offenders. But in Louisiana, the problem known as “overdetention” is endemic, often occurring without explanation, apology or compensation — an overlooked crisis in a state that imprisons a higher percentage of its residents than any other in most years.
The practice is also wasteful. It costs Louisiana taxpayers at least $2.8 million a year in housing costs alone, according to the Justice Department.
A coalition of prisoners’ rights groups has sued the state on behalf of prisoners who have been held past their release dates. Those suits are continuing on a separate track.
“We have known for a long time that the Louisiana D.O.C. is deliberately indifferent to the systemic overdetention of people in its custody,” said Mercedes Montagnes, the executive director of the Promise of Justice Initiative, a nonprofit in New Orleans that has sued the state. “It’s egregious.”
Casey Denson, who is representing Johnny Traweek, a former prisoner in Orleans Parish who served 20 days past his release date, said the Justice Department action makes it more likely Louisiana will change its practices.
“It is clear that the state is unwilling, and unable, to fix it on its own,” she said.
The official curriculum for the new Advanced Placement course released Wednesday removed topics like Black Lives Matter that drew criticism
A revised curriculum for a new Advanced Placement course on African American studies downplays some components that drew criticism from conservatives including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had threatened to ban the class in his state.
In the official framework made public on Wednesday, topics such as Black Lives Matter, slavery reparations and queer theory are no longer subjects to be taught. They are included only on a list of topics that states and school systems could suggest to students for end-of-the-year projects.
The rejection of the course by DeSantis, a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2024, stirred new political debate over how schools teach about race. Florida officials last month issued a chart that said it promoted the idea that modern American society oppresses Black people, was inappropriate, and uses articles by critics of capitalism.
A spokesperson for DeSantis on Wednesday said the state education department is reviewing the revised curriculum for compliance with Florida law.
The course is currently being tested at 60 schools around the U.S., and the official framework is intended to guide the expansion of the course to hundreds of additional high schools in the next academic year. The College Board, which oversees AP courses, said developers consulted with professors from more than 200 colleges, including several historically Black institutions.
The College Board has been taking input also from teachers running the pilot classes as the draft curriculum has gone through several revisions over the last year.
Critics accused the organization of bending to political pressure.
"To wake up on the first day of Black History Month to news of white men in positions of privilege horse trading essential and inextricably linked parts of Black History, which is American history, is infuriating," said David Johns, executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition. "The lives, contributions, and stories of Black trans, queer, and non-binary/non-conforming people matter and should not be diminished or erased."
The course has been popular among students in schools where it has been introduced. At Baton Rouge Magnet High School in Louisiana, so many students were interested that Emmitt Glynn is teaching it to two classes, instead of just the one he was originally planning.
Earlier this week, his students read selections of "The Wretched of the Earth" by Frantz Fanon, which deals with the violence inherent in colonial societies. In a lively discussion, students connected the text to what they had learned about the conflict between colonizers and Native Americans, to the war in Ukraine and to police violence in Memphis, Tennessee.
"We've been covering the gamut from the shores of Africa to where we are now in the 1930s, and we will continue on through history," Glynn said. He said he was proud to see the connections his students were making between the past and now.
For Malina Ouyang, 17, taking the class helped fill gaps in what she has been taught. "Taking this class," she said, "I realized how much is not said in other classes."
Matthew Evans, 16, said the class has educated him on a multitude of perspectives on Black history. He said the political controversy is just "a distraction."
"Any time you want to try to silence something, you will only make someone want to learn about it even more," he said.
The College Board offers AP courses across the academic spectrum, including math, science, social studies, foreign languages and fine arts. The courses are optional. Taught at a college level, students who score high enough on the final exam usually earn course credit at their university.
In a written statement Wednesday, College Board CEO David Coleman said the course is "an unflinching encounter with the facts and evidence of African American history and culture."
"No one is excluded from this course: the Black artists and inventors whose achievements have come to light; the Black women and men, including gay Americans, who played pivotal roles in the Civil Rights movements; and people of faith from all backgrounds who contributed to the antislavery and Civil Rights causes. Everyone is seen," he said.
The African American studies course is divided into four units: origins of the African diaspora; freedom, enslavement and resistance; the practice of freedom; and movements and debates.
In Malcolm Reed's classroom at St. Amant High School in Louisiana, where he teaches the AP class, he tries to be mindful of how the material and discussions can affect students.
"I give them the information and I've seen light bulbs go off. I ask them, 'How does it affect you? How do you feel about learning this?' " he said. "It's also new for me, and I'm just taking it in stride. We're not just learning history, but we're making history."
Physicians are using excuses to intentionally dissuade people with disabilities from their practices, researchers say in a new study exposin
Physicians are using excuses to intentionally dissuade people with disabilities from their practices, researchers say in a new study exposing just how pervasive discrimination against this population is in health care.
In focus groups, doctors described making strategic choices to turn away individuals with disabilities. They reported telling patients with disabilities that they would require specialized care and that “I am not the doctor for you.” In other cases, physicians said they simply indicate that “I am not taking new patients” or “I do not take your insurance.”
The findings come from a study published this month in the journal Health Affairs. It is based on focus groups conducted in late 2018 by researchers at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, the University of Massachusetts and Harvard Medical School with 22 primary care and specialist doctors who were selected from a national database.
Many of the participants described accommodating people with disabilities as burdensome and some used outdated language like “mentally retarded.” Doctors frequently indicated that individuals with disabilities account for a small number of patients, making it hard to justify having accessible equipment. They also had little knowledge of their obligations under the Americans with Disabilities Act, with one suggesting that the law works “against physicians.”
The latest study builds on findings published earlier this year from a survey of 714 doctors that was done by some of the same researchers. Just 56% of physicians who participated in the survey said they welcome people with disabilities at their practices and only 41% indicated that they could provide such patients with a similar quality of care to others. Meanwhile, more than a third of doctors queried said they had little or no knowledge of their legal obligations under the ADA.
“Taken together, the focus groups and survey responses provide a substantive and deeply concerning picture of physicians’ attitudes and behaviors relating to care for people with disabilities,” the study authors note.
The findings suggest that bias continues to greatly influence health care more than 30 years after passage of the ADA, which prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities, including in medical services.
Tara Lagu, a professor of hospital medicine and medical social sciences at Northwestern University and an author of the study, described the doctors’ attitudes toward the ADA in particular as “upsetting and disappointing.”
“Our body of work suggests that physician bias and discriminatory attitudes may contribute to the health disparities that people with disabilities experience,” Lagu said. “We need to address the attitudes and behavior that perpetuate the unequal access experienced by our most vulnerable patients.”
Conservation efforts should consider relationships between cultural groups and the species important to them, researchers argue.
@quasi-normalcy @britomartis @el-shab-hussein
In shallow coastal waters of the Indian and Pacific oceans, a seagrass-scrounging cousin of the manatee is in trouble. Environmental strains like pollution and habitat loss pose a major threat to dugong (Dugong dugon) survival, so much so that in December, the International Union for Conservation of Nature upgraded the species’ extinction risk status to vulnerable. Some populations are now classified as endangered or critically endangered.
If that weren’t bad enough, the sea cows are at risk of losing the protection of a group who has long looked after them: the Torres Strait Islanders. These Indigenous people off the coast of Australia historically have been stewards of the dugong populations there, sustainably hunting the animals and monitoring their numbers. But the Torres Strait Islanders are also threatened, in part because sea levels are rising and encroaching on their communities, and warmer air and sea temperatures are making it difficult for people to live in the region.
This situation isn’t unique to dugongs. A global analysis of 385 culturally important plant and animal species found that 68 percent were both biologically vulnerable and at risk of losing their cultural protections, researchers report January 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The findings clearly illustrate that biology shouldn’t be the primary factor in shaping conservation policy, says cultural anthropologist Victoria Reyes-García. When a culture dwindles, the species that are important to that culture are also under threat. To be effective, more conservation efforts need to consider the vulnerability of both the species and the people that have historically cared for them, she says.
“A lot of the people in the conservation arena think we need to separate people from nature,” says Reyes-García, of the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies and the Autonomous University of Barcelona. But that tactic overlooks the caring relationship many cultural groups – like the Torres Strait Islanders – have with nature, she says.
“Indigenous people, local communities, also other ethnic groups – they are good stewards of their biodiversity,” says Ina Vandebroek, an ethnobotanist at the University of the West Indies at Mona in Kingston, Jamaica, who was not involved in the work. “They have knowledge, deep knowledge, about their environments that we really cannot overlook.”
One way to help shift conservation efforts is to give species a “biocultural status,” which would provide a fuller picture of their vulnerability, Reyes-García and colleagues say. In the study, the team used existing language vitality research to determine a culture’s risk of disappearing: The more a cultural group’s language use declines, the more that culture is threatened. And the more a culture is threatened, the more culturally vulnerable its important species are. Researchers then combined a species’ cultural and biological vulnerability to arrive at its biocultural status. In the dugong’s case, its biocultural status is endangered, meaning it is more at risk than its IUCN categorization suggests.
This intersectional approach to conservation can help species by involving the people that have historically cared for them (SN: 3/2/22). It can also highlight when communities need support to continue their stewardship, Reyes-García says. She hopes this new framework will spark more conservation efforts that recognize local communities’ rights and encourage their participation – leaning into humans’ connection with nature instead of creating more separation (SN: 3/8/22).
The remains of more than 100,000 Native Americans are held by prestigious U.S. institutions, despite a 1990 law meant to return them to trib
America’s Biggest Museums Fail to Return Native American Human Remains
by Logan Jaffe, Mary Hudetz and Ash Ngu, ProPublica, and Graham Lee Brewer, NBC News
Series: The Repatriation Project
As the United States pushed Native Americans from their lands to make way for westward expansion throughout the 1800s, museums and the federal government encouraged the looting of Indigenous remains, funerary objects and cultural items. Many of the institutions continue to hold these today — and in some cases resist their return despite the 1990 passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
“We never ceded or relinquished our dead. They were stolen,” James Riding In, then an Arizona State University professor who is Pawnee, said of the unreturned remains.
ProPublica this year is investigating the failure of NAGPRA to bring about the expeditious return of human remains by federally funded universities and museums. Our reporting, in partnership with NBC News, has found that a small group of institutions and government bodies has played an outsized role in the law’s failure.
Ten institutions hold about half of the Native American remains that have not been returned to tribes. These include old and prestigious museums with collections taken from ancestral lands not long after the U.S. government forcibly removed Native Americans from them, as well as state-run institutions that amassed their collections from earthen burial mounds that had protected the dead for hundreds of years. Two are arms of the U.S. government: the Interior Department, which administers the law, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation’s largest federally owned utility.
An Interior Department spokesperson said it complies with its legal obligations and that its bureaus (such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Bureau of Land Management) are not required to begin the repatriation of “culturally unidentifiable human remains” unless a tribe or Native Hawaiian organization makes a formal request.
Tennessee Valley Authority Archaeologist and Tribal Liaison Marianne Shuler said the agency is committed to “partnering with federally recognized tribes as we work through the NAGPRA process.”
The law required institutions to publicly report their holdings and to consult with federally recognized tribes to determine which tribes human remains and objects should be repatriated to. Institutions were meant to consider cultural connections, including oral traditions as well as geographical, biological and archaeological links.
Yet many institutions have interpreted the definition of “cultural affiliation” so narrowly that they’ve been able to dismiss tribes’ connections to ancestors and keep remains and funerary objects. Throughout the 1990s, institutions including the Ohio History Connection and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville thwarted the repatriation process by categorizing everything in their collections that might be subject to the law as “culturally unidentifiable.”
Ohio History Connection’s director of American Indian relations, Alex Wesaw, who is also a citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, said that the institution’s original designation of so many collections as culturally unidentifiable may have “been used as a means to keep people on shelves for research and for other things that our institution just doesn’t allow anymore.”
In a statement provided to ProPublica, a University of Tennessee, Knoxville spokesperson said that the university is “actively building relationships with and consulting with Tribal communities.”
ProPublica found that the American Museum of Natural History has not returned some human remains taken from the Southwest, arguing that they are too old to determine which tribes — among dozens in the region — would be the correct ones to repatriate to. In the Midwest, the Illinois State Museum for decades refused to establish a cultural affiliation for Native American human remains that predated the arrival of Europeans in the region in 1673, citing no reliable written records during what archaeologists called the “pre-contact” or “prehistoric” period.
The American Museum of Natural History declined to comment for this story.
In a statement, Illinois State Museum Curator of Anthropology Brooke Morgan said that “archaeological and historical lines of evidence were privileged in determining cultural affiliation” in the mid-1990s, and that “a theoretical line was drawn in 1673.” Morgan attributed the museum’s past approach to a weakness of the law that she said did not encourage multiple tribes to collectively claim cultural affiliation, a practice she said is common today.
As of last month, about 200 institutions — including the University of Kentucky’s William S. Webb Museum of Anthropology and the nonprofit Center for American Archeology in Kampsville, Illinois — had repatriated none of the remains of more than 14,000 Native Americans in their collections. Some institutions with no recorded repatriations possess the remains of a single individual; others have as many as a couple thousand.
A University of Kentucky spokesperson told ProPublica the William S. Webb Museum “is committed to repatriating all Native American ancestral remains and funerary belongings, sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony to Native nations” and that the institution has recently committed $800,000 toward future efforts.
Jason L. King, the executive director of the Center for American Archeology, said that the institution has complied with the law: “To date, no tribes have requested repatriation of remains or objects from the CAA.”
When the federal repatriation law passed in 1990, the Congressional Budget Office estimated it would take 10 years to repatriate all covered objects and remains to Native American tribes. Today, many tribal historic preservation officers and NAGPRA professionals characterize that estimate as laughable, given that Congress has never fully funded the federal office tasked with overseeing the law and administering consultation and repatriation grants. Author Chip Colwell, a former curator at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, estimates repatriation will take at least another 70 years to complete. But the Interior Department, now led by the first Native American to serve in a cabinet position, is seeking changes to regulations that would push institutions to complete repatriation within three years. Some who work on repatriation for institutions and tribes have raised concerns about the feasibility of this timeline.
Our investigation included an analysis of records from more than 600 institutions; interviews with more than 100 tribal leaders, museum professionals and others; and the review of nearly 30 years of transcripts from the federal committee that hears disputes related to the law.
D. Rae Gould, executive director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Brown University and a member of the Hassanamisco Band of Nipmucs of Massachusetts, said institutions that don’t want to repatriate often claim there’s inadequate evidence to link ancestral human remains to any living people.
Gould said “one of the faults with the law” is that institutions, and not tribes, have the final say on whether their collections are considered culturally related to the tribes seeking repatriation. “Institutions take advantage of it,” she said.
Some of the nation’s most prestigious museums continue to hold vast collections of remains and funerary objects that could be returned under NAGPRA.
Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, University of California, Berkeley and the Field Museum in Chicago each hold the remains of more than 1,000 Native Americans. Their earliest collections date back to the 19th and early 20th centuries, when their curators sought to amass encyclopedic collections of human remains.
Many anthropologists from that time justified large-scale collecting as a way to preserve evidence of what they wrongly believed was an extinct race of “Moundbuilders” — one that predated and was unrelated to Native Americans. Later, after that theory proved to be false, archaeologists still excavated gravesites under a different racist justification: Many scientists who embraced the U.S. eugenics movement used plundered craniums for studies that argued Native Americans were inferior to white people based on their skull sizes.
These colonialist myths were also used to justify the U.S. government’s brutality toward Native Americans and fuel much of the racism that they continue to face today.
“Native Americans have always been the object of study instead of real people,” said Shannon O’Loughlin, chief executive of the Association on American Indian Affairs and a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
As the new field of archaeology gained momentum in the 1870s, the Smithsonian Institution struck a deal with U.S. Army Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman to pay each of his soldiers up to $500 — or roughly $14,000 in 2022 dollars — for items such as clothing, weapons and everyday tools sent back to Washington.
“We are desirous of procuring large numbers of complete equipments in the way of dress, ornament, weapons of war” and “in fact everything bearing upon the life and character of the Indians,” Joseph Henry, the first secretary of the Smithsonian, wrote to Sherman on May 22, 1873.
The Smithsonian Institution today holds in storage the remains of roughly 10,000 people, more than any other U.S. museum. However, it reports its repatriation progress under a different law, the National Museum of the American Indian Act. And it does not publicly share information about what it has yet to repatriate with the same detail that NAGPRA requires of institutions it covers. Instead, the Smithsonian shares its inventory lists with tribes, two spokespeople told ProPublica.
Frederic Ward Putnam, who was appointed curator of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology in 1875, commissioned and funded excavations that would become some of the earliest collections at Harvard, the American Museum of Natural History and the Field Museum. He also helped establish the anthropology department and museum at UC Berkeley — which holds more human remains taken from Native American gravesites than any other U.S. institution that must comply with NAGPRA.
For the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Putnam commissioned the self-taught archaeologist Warren K. Moorehead to lead excavations in southern Ohio to take human remains and “relics” for display. Much of what Moorehead unearthed from Ohio’s Ross and Warren counties became founding collections of the Field Museum.
A few years after Moorehead’s excavations, the American Museum of Natural History co-sponsored rival expeditions to the Southwest; items were looted from New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon and shipped by train to New York. They remain premiere collections of the institution.
As of last month the Field Museum has returned to tribes legal control of 28% of the remains of 1,830 Native Americans it has reported to the National Park Service, which administers the law and keeps inventory data. It still holds at least 1,300 Native American remains.
In a statement, the Field Museum said that data from the park service is out of date. (The museum publishes separate data on its repatriation website that it says is frequently updated and more accurate.) A spokesperson told ProPublica that “all Native American human remains under NAGPRA are available for return.”
The museum has acknowledged that Moorehead’s excavations would not meet today’s standards. But the museum continues to benefit from those collections. Between 2003 and 2005, it accepted $400,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to preserve its North American Ethnographic and Archaeological collection — including the material excavated by Moorehead — for future use by anthropologists and other researchers. That’s nearly four times more than it received in grants from the National Park Service during the same period to support its repatriation efforts under NAGPRA.
In a statement, the museum said it has the responsibility to care for its collections and that the $400,000 grant was “used for improved stewardship of objects in our care as well as organizing information to better understand provenance and to make records more publicly accessible.”
Records show the Field Museum has categorized all of its collections excavated by Moorehead as culturally unidentifiable. The museum said that in 1995, it notified tribes with historical ties to southern Ohio about those collections but did not receive any requests for repatriation or disposition. Helen Robbins, the museum’s director of repatriation, said that formally linking specific tribes with those sites is challenging, but that it may be possible after consultations with tribes.
The museum’s president and CEO, Julian Siggers, has criticized proposals intended to speed up repatriation. In March 2022, Siggers wrote to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland that if new regulations empowered tribes to request repatriations on the basis of geographical ties to collections rather than cultural ties, museums such as the Field would need more time and money to comply. ProPublica found that the Field Museum has received more federal money to comply with NAGPRA than any other institution in the country.
Robbins said that among the institution’s challenges to repatriation is a lack of funding and staff. “That being said,” added Robbins, “we recognize that much of this work has taken too long.”
From the 1890s through the 1930s, archaeologists carried out large-scale excavations of burial mounds throughout the Midwest and Southeast, regions where federal policy had forcibly pushed tribes from their land. Of the 10 institutions that hold the most human remains in the country, seven are in regions that were inhabited by Indigenous people with mound building cultures, ProPublica found.
Among them are the Ohio History Connection, the University of Kentucky’s William S. Webb Museum of Anthropology, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and the Illinois State Museum.
Archaeological research suggests that the oldest burial mounds were built roughly 11,000 years ago and that the practice lasted through the 1400s. The oral histories of many present-day tribes link their ancestors to earthen mounds. Their structures and purposes vary, but many include spaces for communal gatherings and platforms for homes and for burying the dead. But some institutions have argued these histories aren’t adequate proof that today’s tribes are the rightful stewards of the human remains and funerary objects removed from the mounds, which therefore should stay in museums.
Like national institutions, local museums likewise make liberal use of the “culturally unidentifiable” designation to resist returning remains. For example, in 1998 the Ohio Historical Society (now Ohio History Connection) categorized its entire collection, which today includes more than 7,100 human remains, as “culturally unidentifiable.” It has made available for return the remains of 17 Native Americans, representing 0.2% of the human remains in its collections.
“It’s tough for folks who worked in the field their entire career and who are coming at it more from a colonial perspective — that what you would find in the ground is yours,” said Wesaw of previous generations’ practices. “That’s not the case anymore. That’s not how we operate.”
For decades, Indigenous people in Ohio have protested the museum’s decisions, claiming in public meetings of the federal committee that oversees how the law is implemented that their oral histories trace back to mound-building cultures. As one commenter, Jean McCoard of the Native American Alliance of Ohio, pointed out in 1997, there are no federally recognized tribes in Ohio because they were forcibly removed. As a result, McCoard argued, archaeologists in the state have been allowed to disassociate ancestral human remains from living people without much opposition. Since the early 1990s, the Native American Alliance of Ohio has advocated for the reburial of all human remains held by Ohio History Connection. It has yet to happen.
Wesaw said that the museum is starting to engage more with tribes to return their ancestors and belongings. Every other month, the museum’s NAGPRA specialist— a newly created position that is fully dedicated to its repatriation work — convenes virtual meetings with leaders from many of the roughly 45 tribes with ancestral ties to Ohio.
But, Wesaw said, the challenges run deep.
“It’s an old museum,” said Wesaw. “Since 1885, there have been a number of archaeologists that have made their careers on the backs of our ancestors pulled out of the ground or mounds. It’s really, truly heartbreaking when you think about that.”
Moreover, ProPublica’s investigation found that some collections were amassed with the help of federal funding. The vast majority of NAGPRA collections held by the University of Kentucky’s William S. Webb Museum of Anthropology are from excavations funded by the federal government under the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration from the late 1930s into the 1940s. Kentucky’s rural and impoverished counties held burial mounds, and Washington funded excavations of 48 sites in at least 12 counties to create jobs for the unemployed.
More than 80% of the Webb Museum’s holdings that are subject to return under federal law originated from WPA excavations. The museum, which in 1996 designated every one of its collections as “culturally unidentifiable,” has yet to repatriate any of the roughly 4,500 human remains it has reported to the federal government. However, the museum has recently hired its first NAGPRA coordinator and renewed consultations with tribal nations after decades of avoiding repatriation. A spokesperson told ProPublica that one ongoing repatriation project at the museum will lead to the return of about 15% of the human remains in its collections.
In a statement, a museum spokesperson said that “we recognize the pain caused by past practices” and that the institution plans to commit more resources toward repatriation.
The University of Kentucky recently told ProPublica that it plans to spend more than $800,000 between 2023 and 2025 on repatriation, including the hiring of three more museum staff positions.
In 2010, the Interior Department implemented a new rule that provided a way for institutions to return remains and items without establishing a cultural affiliation between present-day tribes and their ancestors. But, ProPublica found, some institutions have resisted doing so.
Experts say a lack of funding from Congress to the National NAGPRA Program has hampered enforcement of the law. The National Park Service was only recently able to fund one full-time staff position dedicated to investigating claims that institutions are not complying with the law; allegations can range from withholding information from tribes about collections, to not responding to consultation requests, to refusing to repatriate. Previously, the program relied on a part-time investigator.
Moreover, institutions that have violated the law have faced only minuscule fines, and some are not fined at all even after the Interior Department has found wrongdoing. Since 1990, the Interior Department has collected only $59,111.34 from 20 institutions for which it had substantiated allegations. That leaves tribal nations to shoulder the financial and emotional burden of the repatriation work.
The Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, a tribe in California, pressured UC Berkeley for years to repatriate more than a thousand ancestral remains, according to the tribe’s attorney. It finally happened in 2018 following a decade-long campaign that involved costly legal wrangling and travel back and forth to Berkeley by the tribes’ leaders.
“To me, there’s no money, there’s no dollar amount, on the work to be done. But the fact is, not every tribe has the same infrastructure and funding that others have,” said Nakia Zavalla, the cultural director for the tribe. “I really feel for those tribes that don’t have the funding, and they’re relying just on federal funds.”
A UC Berkeley spokesperson declined to comment on its interactions with the Santa Ynez Chumash, saying the school wants to prioritize communication with the tribe.
The University of Alabama Museums is among the institutions that have forced tribes into lengthy disputes over repatriation.
In June 2021, seven tribal nations indigenous to what is now the southeastern United States collectively asked the university to return the remains of nearly 6,000 of their ancestors. Their ancestors had been among more than 10,000 whose remains were unearthed by anthropologists and archaeologists between the 1930s and the 1980s from the second-largest mound site in the country. The site, colonially known as Moundville, was an important cultural and trade hub for Muskogean-speaking people between about 1050 and 1650.
Tribes had tried for more than a decade to repatriate Moundville ancestors, but the university had claimed they were all “culturally unidentifiable.” Emails between university and tribal leaders in 2018 show that when the university finally agreed to begin repatriation, it insisted that before it could return the human remains it needed to re-inventory its entire Moundville collection — a process it said would take five years. The “re-inventory” would entail photographing and CT scanning human remains to collect data for future studies, which the tribes opposed.
In October 2021, leaders from the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, Chickasaw Nation, Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, and Seminole Tribe of Florida brought the issue to the federal NAGPRA Review Committee, which can recommend a finding of cultural affiliation that is not legally binding. (Disputes over these findings are relatively rare.) The tribal leaders submitted a 117-page document detailing how Muskogean-speaking tribes are related and how their shared history can be traced back to the Moundville area long before the arrival of Europeans.
“Our elders tell us that the Muskogean-speaking tribes are related to each other. We have a shared history of colonization and a shared history of rebuilding from it,” Ian Thompson, a tribal historic preservation officer with the Choctaw Nation, told the NAGPRA review committee in 2021.
The tribes eventually forced the largest repatriation in NAGPRA’s history. Last year, the university agreed to return the remains of 10,245 ancestors.
In a statement, a University of Alabama Museums spokesperson said, “To honor and preserve historical and cultural heritage, the proper care of artifacts and ancestral remains of Muskogean-speaking peoples has been and will continue to be imperative to UA.” The university declined to comment further “out of respect for the tribes,” but added that “we look forward to continuing our productive work” with them.
The University of Alabama Museums still holds the remains of more than 2,900 Native Americans.
Many tribal and museum leaders say they are optimistic that a new generation of archaeologists, as well as museum and institutional leaders, want to better comply with the law.
At the University of Oklahoma, for instance, new archaeology department hires were shocked to learn about their predecessors’ failures. Marc Levine, associate curator of archaeology at the university’s Sam Noble Museum, said that when he arrived in 2013, there was more than enough evidence to begin repatriation, but his predecessors hadn’t prioritized the work. Through collaboration with tribal nations, Levine has compiled evidence that would allow thousands of human remains to be repatriated — and NAGPRA work isn’t technically part of his job description. The university has no full-time NAGPRA coordinator. Still, Levine estimates that at the current pace, repatriating the university’s holdings could take another decade.
Prominent institutions such as Harvard have issued public apologies in recent years for past collection practices, even as criticism continues over their failure to complete the work of repatriation. (Harvard did not respond to multiple requests for comment).
Other institutions under fire, such as UC Berkeley, have publicly pledged to prioritize repatriation. And the Society for American Archaeology, a professional organization that argued in a 1986 policy statement that “all human remains should receive appropriate scientific study,” now recommends archaeologists obtain consent from descendant communities before conducting studies.
In October, the Biden administration proposed regulations that would eliminate “culturally unidentifiable” as a designation for human remains, among other changes. Perhaps most significantly, the regulations would direct institutions to defer to tribal nations’ knowledge of their customs, traditions and histories when making repatriation decisions.
But for people who have been doing the work since its passage, NAGPRA was never complicated.
“You either want to do the right thing or you don’t,” said Brown University’s Gould.
She added: “It’s an issue of dignity at this point.”
The social media pressure campaign was just a part of the pharmaceutical industry’s successful lobbying blitz to retain patents — and make record profits.
Morschhaeuser, while alerting several site integrity and safety teams at Twitter, forwarded on an email from BioNTech spokesperson Jasmina Alatovic, who asked Twitter to “hide” activist tweets targeting her company’s account over a period of two days.
Morschhaeuser flagged the corporate accounts of Pfizer, BioNTech, Moderna, and AstraZeneca for her colleagues to monitor and shield from activists. Morschhaeuser also asked colleagues to monitor the hashtags #PeoplesVaccine and #JoinCTAP, a reference to the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 Technology Access Pool, a program promoted by developing countries to accelerate the development of vaccines through the equitable sharing of research and manufacturing capacity. She noted that the group Global Justice Now was spearheading the action with an online sign-up form.
It is not clear to what extent Twitter took any action on BioNTech’s request. In response to Morschhaeuser’s inquiry, several Twitter officials chimed in, debating what action could or could not be taken. Su Fern Teo, a member of the company’s safety team, noted that a quick scan of the activist campaign showed nothing that violated the company’s terms of service, and asked for more examples to “get a better sense of the content that may violate our policies.”
But it shows the extent to which pharmaceutical giants engaged in a global lobbying blitz to ensure corporate dominance over the medical products that became central to combatting the pandemic. Ultimately, the campaign to share Covid vaccine recipes around the world failed.
IN THE FALL OF 2020, GIG WORKERS IN VENEZUELA POSTED A SERIES OF images to online forums where they gathered to talk shop. The photos were mundane, if sometimes intimate, household scenes captured from low angles—including some you really wouldn’t want shared on the Internet.
In one particularly revealing shot, a young woman in a lavender T-shirt sits on the toilet, her shorts pulled down to mid-thigh.
The images were not taken by a person, but by development versions of iRobot’s Roomba J7 series robot vacuum. They were then sent to Scale AI, a startup that contracts workers around the world to label audio, photo, and video data used to train artificial intelligence.
They were the sorts of scenes that internet-connected devices regularly capture and send back to the cloud—though usually with stricter storage and access controls. Yet earlier this year, MIT Technology Review obtained 15 screenshots of these private photos, which had been posted to closed social media groups.
The photos vary in type and in sensitivity. The most intimate image we saw was the series of video stills featuring the young woman on the toilet, her face blocked in the lead image but unobscured in the grainy scroll of shots below. In another image, a boy who appears to be eight or nine years old, and whose face is clearly visible, is sprawled on his stomach across a hallway floor. A triangular flop of hair spills across his forehead as he stares, with apparent amusement, at the object recording him from just below eye level.
iRobot—the world’s largest vendor of robotic vacuums, which Amazon recently acquired for $1.7 billion in a pending deal—confirmed that these images were captured by its Roombas in 2020.
Ultimately, though, this set of images represents something bigger than any one individual company’s actions. They speak to the widespread, and growing, practice of sharing potentially sensitive data to train algorithms, as well as the surprising, globe-spanning journey that a single image can take—in this case, from homes in North America, Europe, and Asia to the servers of Massachusetts-based iRobot, from there to San Francisco–based Scale AI, and finally to Scale’s contracted data workers around the world (including, in this instance, Venezuelan gig workers who posted the images to private groups on Facebook, Discord, and elsewhere).
Together, the images reveal a whole data supply chain—and new points where personal information could leak out—that few consumers are even aware of.
Even in cases that hinged on the trustworthiness of demonstrably untrustworthy cops, people are still waiting to get their money back.
In response to the scandal that engulfed the Houston Police Department's Narcotics Division after a lethal 2019 drug raid based on a falsified search warrant, Harris County prosecutors dropped dozens of pending cases and recommended the reversal of at least five convictions. They said those cases were irredeemably tainted by the involvement of Gerald Goines, the officer who lied to obtain the 2019 warrant that led to the deaths of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, or similarly dishonest colleagues. But that judgment did not necessarily mean that the defendants recovered cash or cars seized by Houston's corrupt cops under the pretext of enforcing drug laws.
Even in cases that hinged on the trustworthiness of demonstrably untrustworthy cops, The Houston Chronicle reports, prosecutors so far have chosen to keep nearly all of the property seized from defendants. That striking contradiction illustrates the lax rules governing civil asset forfeiture, which allows police and prosecutors to pad their budgets by confiscating allegedly crime-tainted property.
The Chronicle identified "three dozen instances in recent years in which an indicted member of the Squad 15 narcotics unit swore to the facts used to justify a search leading to a cash or vehicle confiscation." The loot, collected over a five-year period, included about $75,000 in cash and several cars. "Records show some or all of the money confiscated during the busts was returned in five cases," the Chronicle reports, "typically after defendants hired lawyers to challenge the forfeitures." But the county has kept the rest of the money and the cars, even though prosecutors consider the evidence that led to the seizures unreliable because it was offered by cops with a record of making stuff up.
In 2018, for instance, Goines and his partner, Steven Bryant—both of whom face state and federal charges in connection with the operation that killed Tuttle and Nicholas the following year—participated in the raid of a "suspected drug house." They arrested Andrew Hebert, claiming they had seen him selling drugs outside the house, and seized $11,000 from him.
Prosecutors decided to drop the case against Hebert in light of Goines et al.'s unreliability. "Circumstances in this case impacted the credibility of material witnesses," they told his lawyer. But Hebert did not get his money back.
Also in 2018, Bryant and his colleagues arrested Christopher White and seized $2,465 from his car, claiming they had "observed him make a crack cocaine sale outside a barber shop." Prosecutors ultimately dropped the charges because of Bryant's involvement but again kept the money.
In 2016, Goines and his colleagues searched a house based on a fictional crack purchase. They seized $2,700 from Andre Thomas, who likewise never got it back.
"Prosecutors are currently reviewing several cases related to Squad 15 to determine if they involve assets that should be returned to members of the community," a spokesman for the Harris County District Attorney's Office told the Chronicle. But they are under no obligation to return anything, because the rules for civil asset forfeitures are much looser than the rules that apply to criminal cases.
To seize property under civil forfeiture laws, police typically need nothing more than probable cause to believe it is somehow connected to criminal activity. The government does not have to charge the owner with a crime, let alone convict him. If the owner does not challenge the forfeiture in court, which frequently costs more than the property is worth, a vague allegation of a criminal nexus is enough to keep the loot.
Prosecutors have voluntarily returned seized property to at least one of Goines' victims. The Chronicle says they "quietly" returned $1,668 to Otis Mallet, whom Goines arrested on crack cocaine charges in 2008. Mallet always maintained that Goines had invented the crack purchase that was the basis for the arrest, which would be consistent with what investigators later discovered about Goines' fabulism. Mallet's conviction was overturned in 2021, after he had served two years of an eight-year sentence.
While keeping Mallet's money would have been plainly unjust, it also would have been perfectly legal. Except in states that require a criminal conviction to complete a forfeiture, the fact that the government does not have enough evidence to prove someone committed a crime is no barrier to confiscating his property.
The Texas Supreme Court underlined that distinction in 2016, when it concluded that the exclusionary rule, which bars the admission of illegally obtained evidence, does not apply to civil actions under Chapter 59, a state law authorizing "forfeiture of contraband." The case involved the seizure of a 2004 Lincoln Navigator from Miguel Herrera, who was arrested after police found drugs in the car. Herrera argued that the search was unconstitutional because the cops did not have reasonable suspicion to pull him over and that the drugs they found therefore should not be considered as evidence to support forfeiture of the car.
The trial court and the appeals court agreed. But the Texas Supreme Court did not, saying "an illegal seizure" of evidence does not "require exclusion in a Chapter 59 civil-forfeiture proceeding." That means drugs discovered during an illegal search based on Goines' lies, although not admissible in any resulting criminal case, could still be used to justify the confiscation of cash found during that search, assuming the owner challenged the forfeiture.
The seizures highlighted by the Chronicle represent just a small piece of Harris County's take from this system of legalized larceny. Last year, the Institute for Justice filed a state lawsuit challenging the county's forfeiture practices. The lead defendant is the Harris County District Attorney's Office—the same agency that is trying to assess and ameliorate the damage done by Goines and his cronies.
The lead plaintiffs in the proposed class action are a Mississippi couple, Ameal Woods and Jordan Davis, who were robbed of $42,300 after they were pulled over by sheriff's deputies on Interstate 10 in May 2019. Woods and Davis were on their way to Houston, where Woods planned to spend the money on a tractor and a trailer for his trucking business. The deputies ostensibly stopped them because they were following another vehicle too closely, although Woods, who was driving, was not cited for that alleged offense. Instead, the cops made off with the couple's life savings.
The district attorney's office filed a forfeiture petition the following month. But Woods and Davis were not notified of the pending action until last August, 27 months after the seizure.
According to the Institute for Justice lawsuit, all of the money Woods and Davis were carrying was obtained legally. The largest share, $22,800, came from Woods' savings. He borrowed $6,500 from his wife and $13,000 from his niece, planning to pay them back after his investment in a tractor-trailer allowed him to expand his business.
The forfeiture petition claimed a drug-detecting dog alerted to the money. But no such dog was present during the stop, which means this alleged canine inspection must have occurred after the deputies already had seized the cash, supposedly based on probable cause to believe it was related to illegal activity. Research has found that as much as 90 percent of U.S. currency carries traces of cocaine, which therefore hardly counts as evidence that the current owner is involved in drug dealing.
"What happened to Ameal and Jordan routinely happens to other property owners in Harris County," the lawsuit says. After reviewing 113 civil forfeiture petitions filed by county prosecutors since 2016, the Institute for Justice found that all of them were "based on a form affidavit written by an officer who was not present at the time and place of seizure." Seventy-nine of the affidavits included identical or closely similar language saying "a K-9 Unit gave a positive response for the odor of narcotics" when presented with the property. Eighty affidavits were written by the same officer who supported the petition seeking forfeiture of the money seized from Woods and Davis, and 92 "involved a dog alert that allegedly was obtained after police seized property."
The lawsuit argues that Harris County's racket violates the state constitution in several ways: It involves seizures that are not based on probable cause; it does not give property owners a prompt post-seizure hearing; it relies on "hearsay testimony" and "cut-and-paste allegations"; it gives law enforcement agencies a financial incentive to seize first and ask questions later (if ever); and it requires owners to prove their innocence.
This process is so daunting and burdensome that 60 percent of property owners give up without a fight. That works to the advantage of local law enforcement agencies. From 2018 to 2020, the Institute for Justice notes, "Harris County prosecutors added $7.7 million to their budgets" through civil forfeiture. During the same period, "law enforcement agencies in Harris County added $15.9 million to their budgets," and "more than $7.5 million of that money was used to pay salaries and overtime to police officers—the same officers who make decisions about whether to seize property."
Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg wants credit for investigating the blatantly corrupt behavior of Goines and other Houston narcotics officers. Meanwhile, her office, which is hardly without blame for prosecuting falsely accused defendants, is eagerly engaged in money grabs that victimize innocent people and make a mockery of justice.
...One March day, [Jamestown, Michigan public library] staffers said, a woman showed up at the library, recording a video and yelling: “Where is she? Where is the pink-haired freak? Where is the pedophile librarian?”
Here's the article, from the Washington Post, which for some reason will not resolve to a link when I try to post it.
To recap:
A library added the book Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe to its adult collection.
The library, while doing so, had the audacity to have a director who had pink hair and who was openly queer.
Conservatives lost their shit that the book simply existed in a public library run by an openly queer woman.
The director resigned and the public library got defunded.
When I shared this on Twitter, I got called a groomer.
After North Carolina distributed free pay-to-play tablets to everyone behind bars, the only private conversation in prison is the one you do
Technology is touted as a privilege in prison, but it's a superficial fix—one that's both monetized and monitored at every turn—replete with the same dysfunction, violence, and other subterfuge that always hides what really happens in prison.
Before my incarceration at age 19 in 1997, my formal experience with technology ended with Windows 2.0 as a high school freshman. I played Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo video games, or paid quarters for tokens at an arcade. I saw dial-up internet exactly once, when my girlfriend logged into a chat room to find out when to purchase some concert tickets.
All of us who entered prison before the tech evolution of the early 2000s watched it play out on a television inside a prison dayroom, struggling to grasp new developments in our isolation outside of time. We were reminded of our isolation whenever someone new came to death row and spoke about "the internet." After a while though, they too became encapsulated in the concrete of yesterday, witnesses of the free world's technological glamor from a disconnected distance.
North Carolina prisons resisted technological advances until the mid-2000s, when canteens went cashless and a number of minimum and medium custody facilities provided limited access to pay phones. Weekly Rec Department movies were still 8mm films displayed on pulldown silver screens. Televisions were analog behemoths bolted to the dayroom wall. Nobody had hot plates, tape players, microwaves, or any tech other than a cheap digital watch and a hand-held AM/FM radio that used two AAA batteries.
On death row, we shared a single wall-mounted, steel-wired phone—identical to a pay phone, but without the coin slots—between 24 people. This system obviously came with its own limitations under normal circumstances. Those problems were exacerbated during the COVID-19 lockdowns when frustration and anxiety drove everyone to the phone, and tempers flared.
For a time, violence seemed inevitable—until a memo appeared on the block bulletin board in June 2020. In bold capital letters, it announced:
"NEW PRISONS TECHNOLOGY PROJECT"
"The Division of Prisons will introduce a new technology project that provides tablets to every offender, at no cost to you or the state of North Carolina, at all prison facilities."
Those reading the memo on death row at the time averaged 25 years in prison, each near the edge of 50. The concept of a "tablet," while simple to understand in a TV commercial, lacked any context in the carceral world.
Pay phones and profit margins
The advent of new technology in prison doesn't just allow for increased communication—it presents the state with new opportunities to make a buck.
Nationally, at the same time as the rise of social media and flip phones, an overburdened carceral system faced a growing crisis for mass incarceration. In 2005, as public officials searched for ways to cut budgets, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) warned its investors that the demand for private prisons' goods and services would be negatively impacted by relaxed conviction and sentencing measures.
It was a perverse admission of the industrialization of prisons. More people in prison meant more money for private companies building correctional facilities—or supplying telephone services, tasers, electronic ankle monitors, and GPS tracking.
The 2008 recession supercharged the private prison industry when state governments struggled to maintain overcrowded facilities and bloated penal budgets without releasing more people from prison. By 2010 in the South and Southwest, 7 to 9 percent of all prisoners were in private facilities—compared to just 2 to 3 percent in the Northeast and Midwest, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Privatized prison services impact nearly everyone in the system. One such company to rise out of the 2008 recession is the online prison profiteer JPAY, a Florida-based money transfer service. JPAY streamlined the collection of money from friends and family members of incarcerated people, charging a fee for every transaction and depositing money in the prisoners' trust fund account.
North Carolina's progressive image compared to other Southern states often actually means catching up to the rest of the country. This is especially true of its prison system.
It was not until 2012 that JPAY eventually came to serve North Carolina prisons, leading the way for other profiteers to follow. Soon after, prison telecom giant Global Tel Link (GTL) contracted with the Division of Prisons to provide phone services to every cell block of every facility. By 2016, they reached Central Prison's death row. Before the phones' arrival, if one didn't write letters or get visits, a single collect call around Christmas was the only other way to connect to the outside world.
GTL—which was, and is currently the defendant in numerous individual and class action lawsuits for its aggressively opportunistic and predatory business practices, including improperly retaining money that was deposited in accounts after they went inactive for a short period of time—was the first to meaningfully connect incarcerated people with their friends and family.
For a fee.
By 2019, GTL—which rebranded itself ViaPath Technologies in 2022—reported revenues of $318 million for services provided to nearly 2,000 prisons and jails in all 50 states.
As beneficial as access to a phone is to the incarcerated population in spite of the fees, it also meant something else for prison officials: A new, amplified way to gather information from prisoners—and anyone communicating with them.
No longer did penal servitude stop at the gates of a prison. Now, it invaded the home, car, workplace, town, state, and country of anyone daring to accept a call from the inside. Through GTL, the carceral state received limitless access to the private lives of law-abiding citizens.
For us, reacclimating to a telephone seemed a silly thing at first. Who forgets how to use a phone? But after going without one for years, the rules of conversation, delay between lines, and 15-minute time limit for each call made communication discouraging for some. A number of older guys refused to use the phone. I stumbled and tripped over words while speaking to my parents. Even though an automated warning announced every call would be monitored and recorded, the pre-recorded message soon became so much background noise when it came to talking with my family.
Considering the frustration and despair caused by the pandemic and understaffing, the June 2020 memo announcing "The New Prisons Technology Project" was a welcome distraction.
"From the tablets," it read, "you will be able to make phone calls and enjoy a variety of programs and activities, such as health-focused offerings, self-help programs, and re-entry related programming to name a few."
These programs were especially tantalizing given that in 1994, the national Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act stripped most prisons of educational programming and incentives for good behavior. What was referred to as the "No Frills" prison experience was really a human warehousing of many bored, frustrated, and dehumanized people with nothing but time.
The new memo about the tablets boasted video visits, a comprehensive education package that met "state standards," and a law library that had been absent from North Carolina prisons since the 1970s. Still, despite knowing the state has never been a benevolent caretaker, everyone immediately spun elaborate fantasies about movies, TV shows, music, and games. Conspiracy theories spawned rumors and misinformation, twisting talk of the tablets with dystopian cynicism.
The New Prisons Technology Project hung like a giant carrot dangling from the perpetual stick that is life in prison. Most understood the tablets as incentives for good behavior in a system devoid of them—and, of course, as a money-making scheme for prison profiteers. But many who read the memo overlooked the primary purpose of the new technology: An extension of the state's surveillance.
Screens that watch you back
As helpful as increased communication with the outside world seemed, it also allowed prison officials to monitor, record, and gather more data on incarcerated people, and their families and friends. While the impact of that access was not always apparent, there were obvious cautionary tales. Earlier this year after an incident at Central Prison, an administrator testified at the bond hearing of a man whose conviction and sentence were vacated and awaited retrial. Using the transcript of a phone conversation between the defendant and a co-defendant who turned state's witness, the Central Prison administrator helped to get the bond denied without her testimony being considered "hearsay evidence." When clips of the administrator's testimony aired on WNCN Channel 17 news at noon, it was a chilling reminder that the only private conversation in prison is the one you don't have.
Prison is fundamentally about incapacitation, punishment, control, and surveillance. Penal philosopher Michel Foucault held that in addition to surveillance, prisons should be considered as places for the formation of "clinical knowledge" about the incarcerated, both in behavior and the "deeper state of mind."
Advances in technology increase the body of knowledge prison officials build by seamlessly integrating surveillance with the ordinary course of life—and making prisoners dependent on technology in the process. This in turn allows law enforcement to collect information on ordinary people who unknowingly surrender their right to privacy by communicating with a prisoner—be it by mail, or by tablet.
North Carolina prisons had seen a rise in technology back in 2017, following an incident that April in which a prison guard was murdered by a mentally ill man incarcerated at Bertie Correctional Institution in Windsor, North Carolina. Later that same year, four other prison workers were murdered by prisoners attempting to escape from Pasquotank Correctional Institution in Elizabeth City.
After the death in April, The Charlotte Observer published a series of investigative articles by Ames Alexander telling lurid stories of compound corruption against prison guards—a result of chronic understaffing, poor wages, and little external oversight of a decaying penal system.
This increased violence—and coverage of its causes—revealed substantial dysfunction and embarrassed lawmakers. The governor's Crime Control Commission hired Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy to study the penal system's problems, and they in turn produced a staffing and security report containing recommendations for nine urgent improvements in personnel, organizational culture, and facility safety.
All of their suggestions advanced the use of technology in North Carolina prisons; from social media "good news stories" that drew attention away from the violence, to infomercials about career opportunities, to infrared scanners on perimeter fences and cell phone interdiction tech. The seventh recommendation in particular would more closely identify the penal system as a law enforcement entity by sharing information with the SBI, FBI, ICE, and local police through an "intelligence management system," citing similar models in Pennsylvania and Tennessee which they say have "allowed for more comprehensive investigations that expand beyond the prison walls to reduce crime both in prison and the surrounding area."
After the publication of the staffing and security report, the Legislative Oversight Committee on Prisons with the Department of Public Safety created the Prison Reform Advisory Board to advise the DPS on policies, programs, and services that would improve prison safety and security. Chaired by retired Major General of the U.S. Army Beth Austin, and comprised of current and former high-level prison officials, one discussion from a June 19, 2018, board meeting is especially telling.
One board member asked what the current "largest" drug problem is in North Carolina prisons. Another member replied that "synthetic cannabinoids" like K2 and spice—which are legally sold online and in tobacco shops—are especially problematic, because they are cheap and do not show up on traditional urine screens.
The meeting's minutes continue: "Mr. Mohr asked what intelligence gathering strategies are used inside the prison system. Ms. Sutton replied that phone calls, informants, and letters sent to offenders are used. Ms. Sutton stated that facilities use local law enforcement officials to assist with criminal investigations and they work with the department's Special Operations Intelligence Section."
After the Prison Reform Advisory Board submitted its findings and Todd Ishee, a former warden from Ohio's penal system, was hired as commissioner of North Carolina prisons, the next phase of the intelligence-gathering operation began. It would quickly exacerbate the dysfunction in North Carolina prisons.
Digitized and sanitized
Piloted in women's prisons in February 2020, TextBehind is another predatory profiteer like JPAY, which receives, scans, and sends digital files of personal mail to North Carolina, Wyoming, Colorado, Arkansas, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia penal systems.
Physical mail sent to TextBehind's Phoenix, Maryland P.O. Box is digitized and sanitized. No more scented letters or tear-stained notes from girlfriends or wives. No more 4 x 6 photos of siblings that remind us of a time when the whole family was together.
I had a small pop-up card collection that became my Christmas decorations. Each year, I received a new one and exchanged it with one of the old ones. When I told my mom about the switch to scanned mail, she said: "They've taken everything from us." What remained was a grainy copy of whatever was sent, several weeks after the fact, if it ever arrived at all. Physical mail became more uncertain and undependable, requiring certified or tracked letters just to be sure TextBehind could not claim they never received it.
Some states, like Florida, make prisoners pay for a paper copy of their own mail. While this does not include letters from attorneys and court documents, or books and periodicals mailed from a vendor like Amazon, few people ever receive their scanned mail, because it is either lost in this convoluted transit, or people on the outside have no desire to relinquish their privacy to the carceral state.
Commissioner of Prisons Todd Ishee claims TextBehind is needed in North Carolina prisons to screen out contraband, especially liquid cannabinoids sprayed on paper.
However, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, prison staff are the primary source of drugs, cell phones, and other contraband entering prison. The Federal Bureau of Prisons and the state of Pennsylvania, the latter of which uses TextBehind, found that once they began scanning mail through an intermediary, drug positivity rates in prisons actually increased.
Ironically enough, the North Carolina prison Advisory Board admitted at its meetings that prison staff are the primary source of contraband in North Carolina prisons too. If prison staff are the cause of the drug problem, then the switch to TextBehind was always about creating an easily accessible digital file for the Special Operations Intelligence Section and law enforcement.
Virtually identical to TextBehind, competitor MailGuard, of Florida-based Smart Communications, has "a smart tracker" surveillance system that gives officials a cache of intelligence into the public sender: home addresses, IP addresses, email, GPS tracking names, and location of devices in use, as well as any accounts connected to them.
These programs, as Stephanie Krent of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, told The Intercept, "force writers to leave a lasting digital footprint of their words, even if they opted to send physical mail because they preferred greater privacy."
The final phase
In 2020, when the tablets were first given to every incarcerated person at Central Prison (except to those in disciplinary segregation or designated mental health segregation), a Global Tel Link sales rep-technician gave each cell block a 20-minute lecture on how to use them. The Android device, with its touchscreen, facial recognition software, and security code entry system, felt alien. The digital image of my face above the glowing keyboard appeared much older than what was reflected in the steel mirror on the wall of my cell. Others gave similarly bemused or perplexed looks. Some listened to the fast-talking sales rep, struggling to absorb an entire technological world in that fast-moving moment.
No internet access. A select number of apps to be downloaded through the GTL GettingOut app. Some of the programs, like Khan Academy, were free. Most of the apps, including messaging, access to digital photos, and music, cost $0.01 a minute—a fortune for anyone without money or an income.
One older mentally ill man in a wheelchair grew frustrated and wheeled off, leaving his tablet on the table. Another watched Jerry Springer on the TV, the tablet forgotten in his lap. It would take most of us days to puzzle through a device that had evolved during the decades of our confinement. Eventually though, the day room stayed empty for the length of the tablet's battery life.
That was another part of the tablet's purpose: Control through fascination. Distracted people are less likely to think critically about the prison system's designs or reasons for their sudden willingness to provide access to technology. The advantage of greater communication aside, self-isolating people reduced the likelihood of violent confrontation—as well as questions about the information gathered by prison officials.
Within a few weeks of the tablets being passed out, a regular population prisoner was stabbed to death on unit three. The assault was bad enough that a crime scene photographer was brought in. The stabbing, though not fatal, forced the unit into a series of lockdowns made worse by familiar structural problems like power outages and understaffing—and now, increased levels of frustration when the Wi-Fi signal was weak and inconsistent.
Sometimes the new technology worked. Sometimes it didn't.
When the GTL sales rep tried to convince leery incarcerated people that we needed the tablets, it was the same pitch used by every prison profiteer to date: a modernized, streamlined incarceration experience. Technology is touted as a privilege in prison, but it's a superficial fix—one that's both monetized and monitored at every turn—replete with the same dysfunction, violence, and other subterfuge that always hides what really happens in prison.
Leaders and hospital administrators were there 24/7 supporting the travel nurses, but for their own employees? We have had no support.
A nurse writes to hospital executives: ‘All I’ve ever wanted to be was a nurse’
by Lauren Borell, Minnesota Reformer
November 4, 2022
I am a nurse at Methodist Hospital in St. Louis Park. I am tired and defeated. After our recent three-day strike, I went to work at 7 a.m., and I wanted to leave as soon as I walked into the hospital.
We were short staffed — again. I made an “aware,” which is a hospital term we use that means a report of unsafe staffing, hospital conditions, maintenance or security issues.
My aware went to my unit manager. We had a 30 minute conversation about my feelings and how disappointed I am in my leaders.
I decided to send an email to CEO Andrea Walsh and Vice President Melissa Fritz.
I want to make everyone aware that nurses are suffering, and health care is on the brink of collapse.
Below is the email that I sent to the CEO and VP.
My name is Lauren Borell and I am a 22-year-old registered nurse at Methodist Hospital. All I ever wanted to be was a nurse.
A recent Thursday was the worst day of my nursing career. Let me explain. I have been in the medical field since I was 16. The day I wanted to be a nurse was the first day I ever watched someone die.
Long story short: I was parasailing with my mom in the middle of the ocean when the captain had a heart attack. I performed CPR on him for over 15 minutes — just me — because no one else knew how to do it. I felt ribs cracked, I had blood and vomit all over me, and I watched this complete stranger take his last breath in my arms.
I became a certified nursing assistant at a local nursing home, where I cared for moms, dads, grandpas and grandmas. I’d watch their hearts break because their family didn’t come see them. I held their hands as their soul left them because I was the only person there. I cleaned their excrement, fed them, listened to their stories, washed their hair because there was no one else to care for them. All I ever wanted to be was a nurse.
I started taking pre requisites for nursing school in high school. When I got to college I applied for a scholarship, and the scholarship application asked one question: Why do you want to be a nurse?
I told them the story of watching that stranger die in my arms. The scholarship allowed me to focus on my passion because it helped pay for my tuition. I helped teachers educate students on the fundamentals of nursing. I joined as many committees as I could to share my passion with other students and peers. All I ever wanted to be was a nurse.
I became a nurse intern at Methodist. I learned what kind of nurse I wanted to be and where I wanted to work as an RN. I did my capstone on a unit for critical care patients in the fall.
All I had was COVID-19 patients. I listened to the BiPap alarms, ran into rooms only to realize the machine was pumping air into a lifeless body. I listened to families sob on the phones because COVID didn’t allow them to say goodbye to their loved one. All I ever wanted to be was a nurse.
I became a full-time RN at Methodist in February. Part time, I also became a home health nurse for a terminally ill 8 year old boy.
At Methodist, I have been verbally harassed, physically assaulted and mentally abused by patients. But it’s OK, because I am finally a nurse. I’ve taken five to seven patients at a time since being a nurse, which puts patient safety at risk, but it’s okay because I am finally a nurse. I started leaving work defeated after a long day, feeling unsupported from my leaders and sitting in my car in the parking lot, crying, but’s it’s OK because I am finally a nurse.
I had the privilege of loving an 8-year-old during his final months. Seeing him was my escape from the hospital because I never left crying. I wanted to go to work with him. I watched an 8-year-old boy die, and the next day I went back to work at the hospital for my shift. We were short staffed, unsupported, and I was mourning a child. I cried in the bathroom for my lunch break, but it’s okay because I am finally a nurse.
After all the death I have seen since I was 16, after all the hateful words I’ve heard from patients, after all the days short-staffed and struggling to keep my head up, nothing compares to that terrible Thursday.
Going through a strike is like going through a messy divorce. I didn’t think coming back from a three-day strike was going to be easy, but I didn’t know it was going to make me not want to be a nurse. Walking into the hospital and seeing management say good morning was the biggest slap in the face, and man did it sting. The travel nurses got free lunches. The hospital was paying them more than twice what I make. That hurt. But when I learned they were overstaffed with travel nurses? That crushed me.
In other words, the three days that we went on strike, patients had more safety than I have ever given them since February. Leaders and hospital administrators were there 24/7 supporting the travel nurses, but for their own employees? We have had no support. Everyone left as soon as we got there — no support, no help, and no confidence. We were understaffed a day after the strike ended. Five patients for the nurses’ assignments. No free lunches, no extra pay for doing the job of two nurses.
I realized on that day, that this isn’t okay just because I am finally a nurse.
Methodist ripped my passion for nursing away from me on that day. All I’ve ever wanted to be was a nurse. I have no faith in any hospital leaders or administrators. If you have the privilege of reading this email, my name is Lauren Borell RN, I am 22 years old and a nurse at Methodist. I have no idea who my leaders are, and I would love to talk with them because all I’ve ever wanted to be was a nurse and I’m not done fighting for my passion yet.
