Sprawling visa scandal continues to embarrass small towns in Louisiana. Three law officers are among the defendants.

Authorities uncovered the alleged scheme while investigating 
a 'pattern of inconsistencies in U-visa applications.' (HS photo)

Three lawmen, an elected marshal, a Subway shop owner and foreign nationals with cash and a bent for staying in the U.S. allegedly spent nearly a decade manufacturing false police reports of burglaries to help foreign nationals stay in the U.S. 

Most recently, a federal judge "delayed a March trial date and hasn’t set a new one," reports Joe Barrett of The Wall Street Journal. "Locals wish the whole thing would blow over."

Residents from a smattering of small towns in southwestern Louisiana had "endured an 'unusual concentration of armed robberies of people who were not from Louisiana,' then-acting U.S. Attorney Alexander Van Hook said at a news conference last summer."  

"He then delivered the punchline: 'In fact, the armed robberies never took place.'"

How does that happen? It went something like this: The Subway shop owner, Chandrakant 'Lala' Patel, would "allegedly connect with crime 'victims' looking to stay in the U.S.," Barrett writes. "He would then turn to one of the law-enforcement officials to draw up paperwork for crimes that never happened." The foreign nationals, who posed as crime victims, would then apply for U visas, which "allow certain crime victims to remain in the U.S."

Authorities allege the scheme worked for almost a decade and netted the five men $5,000 per foreign national "helped" by the crime reports, which in turn allowed hundreds of foreign nationals to stay in the U.S. based on false claims. Barrett reports, "Investigators with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spurred the multi-agency probe in July 2024 after uncovering a pattern of inconsistencies in U-visa applications."

Meanwhile, residents in the rural towns of Oakdale, Glenmora and Forest Hill, where the indicted men live or worked, have been shocked by the allegations. Barrett adds, "Months later, locals still talk about the scandal in hushed voices, wary of drawing more attention to their towns."  

Opinion: Indictments aren't enough to account for law enforcement's 'epic' failures at Uvalde school shooting

Teachers and students followed active shooter survival steps.
Law officers did not. (Adobe Stock photo)

On May 24, 2022, Salvador Ramos, 18, entered Robb Elementary School with his AR-15-style rifle and started looking for victims. When shots rang out from his gun, teachers and students implemented their live shooter training. The Uvalde, Texas, police arrived at the scene within five minutes of the first 911 call, but they did not enter the building. In the 77 minutes it took for police to breach classroom 112, 19 children and two teachers were shot dead.

Last week a grand jury indicted former Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo and former school police officer Adrian Gonzales on criminal charges for failing to protect the victims, but many Uvalde residents feel the indictments fail to hold the larger law enforcement community accountable, writes Neil Sturdevant in his commentary for the Uvalde Leader-News. "Perhaps to some, the 29 felony indictments for child endangerment/abandonment feel like justice served, but we think otherwise. Other officers, especially those in leadership positions who failed to intervene. . . should not walk away without consequences."

Arredondo served as the "de facto on-scene commander," as concluded in the 575-page Department of Justice report released last January. "The veteran officer bore direct responsibility to protect life on the Robb campus," Sturdevant explains. But his mistakes multiplied the victims. He treated the shooter as though he was a "barricaded suspect" instead of an active shooter in a school filled with young pupils. 

Gonzales was the "first on the scene and was able to quickly identify the classroom where the carnage was unfolding. . . and yet he did not approach the classroom," Sturdevant writes. "Gonzales had undergone active shooter training and taught the course earlier that year." But Arredondo and Gonzales weren't the only officers who abandoned students and teachers. Four other officers actively delayed intervention, which allowed more children to be shot or bleed to death while they waited for help.

"We wonder how evidence presented to grand jurors failed to illicit similar indictments for [those other] men," Sturdevant asks. "The same can be said for members of the Uvalde Police Department, elite Texas Rangers and state police who milled in the Robb hallway during the rampage killing. . . . Now two men stand alone as the sole source of blame for one of the most incompetent police responses in U.S. history."

"How does Uvalde district attorney Christina Michell look families in the eye and say this is a good deal? Mountains of evidence outlined a failure of epic proportions," Sturdevant writes. "The children and teachers who were carried, limped or dragged from their classrooms. . .were clearly abandoned by police. Now our criminal justice system has failed to right those grievous wrongs."

Researchers find urban communities have about 150% greater access to legal services than rural residents

Farm Progress map, from Data Axle, 2022

In urban and metro American cities, lawyers and legal help are relatively easy to find, but for rural communities, legal representation is becoming so sparse some counties don't have access to legal advice. "Rural communities often lack the necessary infrastructure to provide essential legal support. This gap can leave individuals without the means to address crucial legal issues, ranging from family matters to property disputes," report K. Aleks Schaefer and Andrew J. Van Leuven for Farm Progress. "A 'rural legal desert' refers to areas where residents face significant challenges in accessing legal services and representation."

Researchers Schaefer and Van Leuven "collected firm-level data from 2014-2021 from more than 350,000 law offices together with socio-demographic data for 3,108 counties in the continental U.S. to statistically quantify the scope of the rural legal desert problem and shed light on potential solutions," they write. "We found that— when evaluated on the basis of legal employees per capita — urban communities have approximately 150% greater access to legal services than those in rural areas."

Legal resources vary among rural communities, and those with greater per capita incomes provide better legal access, Schaefer and Van Leuven explain.

With knowledge of the stark differences in legal access and protections for rural residents, Schaefer and Van Leuven advise advocating for policy changes and creative solutions. They write, "Our findings highlight the need for targeted policy interventions and innovative solutions to address the rural lawyer shortage. One policy intervention that appears to have been successful is Project Rural Practice established by the South Dakota Legislature in 2013. The PRP program provides incentive payments to attorneys who commit to serving five continuous years of practice in an eligible rural county."

Rural sheriff and prosecutor offices in Texas are awarded $125 million to bolster staffing and equipment needs

Map of criminal legal deserts in Texas.
(SMU Dedman School of Law map)

To address law enforcement and prosecutorial staffing and pay shortages, Texas has awarded $125 million to rural offices that need more trained professionals, increased wages and new equipment to serve their communities, reports Carlos Nogueras Ramos of the Texas Tribune. Commenting on the funds, Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar said, "These rural grant programs will help law enforcement offices across this state get the additional financial tools they need."

The grant was made available to communities with populations less than 300,000, and once offered, "94% of eligible sheriff's offices applied for money. Nearly 86% of eligible prosecutor's officers applied, the comptroller said. The comptroller awarded grants to 224 sheriff's offices and 138 prosecutors' offices," Ramos writes. "Rural law enforcement can apply for the grant again in 2025."

In rural Texas, prosecutors' offices have struggled to compete with metro areas to recruit and retain attorneys. "The money is a start to reverse a long-term decline of prosecutors in rural Texas counties, said Pamela Metzger, executive director at the Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law," Ramos reports. "Less than one percent of lawyers practiced criminal defense law in rural parts of Texas."

The lack of attorneys means rural defendants wait longer to see a public defender, which can lead to more time sitting in jail. "Metzger said that an individual accused of a crime in a major city typically has a guaranteed public defender representing them in court within a day." She told Ramos, "If you live anywhere else, you'll have to wait 72 hours or maybe a weekend, just because of where you live."

Reeves County, pop. 14, 800, will
continue to face staffing shortfalls.
(Wikipedia map)

For law enforcement offices, the added funds will help but not solve their staffing woes. Michael Lazcano, a chief deputy at Reeves County, said, "Money is one part of the equation. He said that law enforcement agencies, especially rural ones, will continue to grapple with recruitment," Ramos reports.

A 2022 study by the Department of Justice "found that recruiting has been a persisting challenge for sheriff’s offices. The number of full-time, sworn officers — 174,000 — has not increased since 1997."

Cheap prison labor is used to supply businesses with all sorts of products; but prisoners can be vulnerable to abuse

Prisoners are forced laborers without 13th Amendment
protections. (Photo by Rebecca Blackwell, AP)

Less than a decade ago, a New York Times story ran with this headline, "A Small Indiana County Sends More People to Prison Than San Francisco and Durham, N.C., Combined. Why?" The story goes on to explore America's prison belt, which was brimming with rural residents, often sentenced for drug crimes by more conservative courts. But, if sending people away for extensive sentences is a rural answer to crime, residents may want to know what the incarcerated do while serving those sentences.

Angola, Louisiana, is home to the country's largest maximum-security prison, which used to be a Southern slave plantation but is now a vast farming facility with prisoner labor. "Unmarked trucks packed with prison-raised cattle roll out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where men are sentenced to hard labor and forced to work, for pennies an hour or sometimes nothing at all," reports Robin McDowell and Margie Mason of The Associated Press. "The cows are bought by a local rancher and then followed by The Associated Press another 600 miles to a Texas slaughterhouse that feeds into the supply chains of giants like McDonald's, Walmart and Cargill."

Prison workers are vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. "If they refuse to work, some can jeopardize their chances of parole or face punishment like being sent to solitary confinement," McDowell and Mason write. "They also are often excluded from protections guaranteed to almost all other full-time workers, even when they are seriously injured or killed on the job."

The 13th Amendment to the Constitution outlaws slavery and involuntary servitude "except as punishment for a crime," AP reports. "That clause is currently being challenged on the federal level, and efforts to remove similar language from state constitutions are expected to reach the ballot in about a dozen states this year."

Meanwhile, many U.S. prisons "lease" incarcerated people for labor. "An analysis of data amassed by the AP from correctional facilities nationwide traced nearly $200 million worth of sales of farmed goods and livestock to businesses over the past six years," McDowell and Mason write. That amount does not include sales to state and government entities. 

Corporations who "hire" prisoners not only harness cheap, reliable labor, but they may reap additional benefits such as tax credits and other financial incentives. "Incarcerated workers also typically aren't covered by the most basic protections, including workers' compensation and federal safety standards," AP reports. "In many cases, they cannot file official complaints about poor working conditions."

Linking prison labor to shelved products requires following a complex web, but AP found "Mammoth commodity traders that are essential to feeding the globe like Cargill, Bunge, Louis Dreyfus, Archer Daniels Midland and Consolidated Grain and Barge have in recent years scooped up millions of dollars' worth of soy, corn and wheat straight from prisons, which compete with local farmers."

To read how AP reporters crisscrossed the country to uncover agriculture trading practices tied to prison labor, read the full story here.

Why are so many Americans behind bars? It's complicated.

The Conversation Chart by Jeffrey Bellin, from CC-BY-ND data

In a country known as "the land of the free," it's hard to reconcile how so many people end up behind bars. "The U.S. continues to imprison a higher percentage of its population than almost every other country. The U.S. incarcerates 530 people for every 100,000 in its population, making it one of the world's biggest jailers," reports Jeffrey Bellin for The Conversation, a platform for journalism by academics.

"As a former prosecutor and a researcher who studies the criminal justice system, I have found that understanding how the U.S. incarceration rate grew over the last few decades is the key to understanding its root causes," Bellin explains. "I think the public debate can improve if people develop a better understanding of how mass incarceration arose and its tenuous connection to crime."

Incarceration rates intertwine with spikes in serious crimes such as homicides and longer sentences, Bellin notes. "Over time, this led to today's aging prison population and many people being held long past the time they would have been released at other times in this country's history. . . . The number of people incarcerated in state prisons for homicide increased by over 300% between 1980 and 2010. . . . But the scale of the increases for other offenses, like drug crimes, is even larger – rising 1,147% over this time frame.

"Substantially reducing prison and jail populations will require a better understanding of the link between incarceration and crime. It is not simply the case that incarceration goes up because people commit crime; instead, the story is much more complicated," Bellin explains. "That is because we use incarceration for two purposes: to obtain justice on behalf of victims and to try to change people's behavior."

Bellin points out two types of cases in the nation's criminal courts. The first type involves violent crimes such as murder or sexual assault. The second type "are cases like drug offenses and weapons possession, which are not typically about obtaining justice for victims but are supposed to further policy goals like preventing drug use." Over the last several decades, courts have increased sentence years and the number of actions that can lead to prison time. The result is massive incarceration.

Is there a solution? Bellin writes, "Substantial progress at reducing the incarcerated population will require reversing both trends. First, returning sentence lengths for all offenses, including serious violent crimes, to their historical norms. And second, resisting this country's growing habit of relying on incarceration as a tool for achieving policy goals."

Use of force in Pa. jails common with mentally compromised inmates; 2/3 of people in U.S. jails are just awaiting trial

(Mixed media by Tom Downing, WITF)

In its investigation into Pennsylvania's county jails, WITF, the state's public television station, found that "One in three uses of force from 25 jails during the last three months of 2021 involved a person who was having a mental health crisis or who had a diagnosed mental illness," Brett Sholtis reports. "The situation brings risks ranging from lasting psychological trauma to death."

In the U.S., "two-thirds of people in jails are there pre-trial — meaning they haven’t been convicted of a crime. Most are there on nonviolent charges such as parole violation, theft, drunkenness and drug possession," Sholtis reports. "Though their time in jail may be relatively short, those who fail to adapt can pay a heavy price."

One story Sholtis provided: "When police found Ishmail Thompson, he was standing naked outside a Dauphin County hotel, where he had just punched a man. A mental-health specialist working with the county prison said Thompson should be sent to a hospital for psychiatric care. But at the hospital, a doctor ran some tests and cleared him to return to jail. At the jail, when corrections officers tried to strip-search Thompson, he ran into a shower where he was 'wetting himself down,' prison records show. An officer pepper-sprayed him in the face and tried to take him to the ground. Thompson fought back. Staff flooded the area, handcuffing and shackling him. . . . About 20 minutes later, an officer saw that Thompson was taking 'short, abnormal breaths.' Five days later, Thompson died. The district attorney said no criminal charges would be filed."

Sholtis writes, "Most uses of force don’t lead to death — and the coroner did not determine whether Thompson’s death was due to being pepper-sprayed and restrained. But the practices corrections officers employ every day in Pennsylvania county jails can put prisoners and staff at risk of injury and can hurt vulnerable people who may be scheduled to return to society within months."

Craig Haney, a psychology professor at the University of California Santa Cruz, who specializes in prison conditions told Sholtis, "Some mentally ill prisoners are so traumatized by the abuse that they never recover, some are driven to suicide, and others are deterred from bringing attention to their mental health problems because reporting these issues often results in harsher treatment." While use of force is needed "for officers to prevent violence against others. However, records obtained by WITF show that a significant number of uses of force are against people who are not hurting anyone else," Sholtis reports. "WITF found that one in five uses of force — 88 incidents — involve a prisoner who was either attempting suicide, hurting themselves or threatening self-harm. Common responses by prison staff included what was used on Thompson — a restraint chair and pepper-spray. In some cases, officers used electroshock devices such as stun guns."

Who probes suspicious deaths? It may not be who you think

(Photo by Mathew Schwartz, Unsplash)

A chronically underfunded system riddled with egregious conflicts of interest. That's one way to describe the state-by-state system that governs U.S. coroners, reports Samantha Young of Kaiser Health News. The meshwork is so sticky, one physician shared this observation with Young: "If you ever want to know when, how — and where — to kill someone, I can tell you, and you’ll get away with it. No problem."

Nancy Belcher, chief executive officer of the King County Medical Society in Seattle, told Young that in Washington, "A coroner doesn’t have to ever have taken a science class in their life. These are the people that go in, look at a homicide scene or death, and say whether there needs to be an autopsy. They’re the ultimate decision-maker."

How suspicious death is investigated varies from state to state, and even within states. "The job can be held by an elected coroner as young as 18 or a highly trained physician appointed as medical examiner," Young reports. "Some death investigators work for elected sheriffs who try to avoid controversy or owe political favors. Others own funeral homes and direct bodies to their private businesses. . . . It’s a disjointed and chronically underfunded system — with more than 2,000 offices across the country that determine the cause of death in about 600,000 cases a year."

The cost to hire medical examiners or properly train coroners is disproportionately difficult for rural areas, Young reports: "Many Illinois counties also said they would shoulder a financial burden under legislation introduced last year by state Rep. Maurice West, a Democrat. His more sweeping bill would have replaced coroners with medical examiners. Rural counties, in particular, complained about their tight budgets and killed his bill before it got a committee hearing. West told Young, “When something like this affects rural areas, if they push back a little bit, we just stop."

Dr. Jeffrey Jentzen, a former medical examiner for Milwaukee, told Young, “When you try to remove them, you run into a political wall. You can't kill them, so you have to help train them." Young notes that a 2011 study by the National Association for Medical Examiners "found that 82% of the forensic pathologists who responded had faced pressure from politicians or the deceased person’s relatives to change the reported cause or manner of death in a case."

Lawmakers have made some progress by allowing counties to "pool their resources and hire shared contract coroners in exchange for ending the dual role for prosecutors by 2025," Young writes. Belcher told Young, “We were just trying to figure out a system that I think anybody would agree needed to be overhauled."

Many Mississippi courts have no records of search warrants, concealing an important key to monitoring police work

The site of a no-knock warrant in Greenville, Miss.
(Photo by Rory Doyle/ProPublica, via Daily Journal)

Over a third of Mississippi's courts are breaking record-keeping rules that require them to to keep all search warrant records, reports Caleb Bedillion for Tupelo's Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal in partnership with ProPublica. The news organizations surveyed the state's 82 county justice courts in the state and the municipal courts in the 10 largest cities, and found that 15 courts had no search warrants among their records and 16 only had partial records, essentially blocking public access to them.

The problem of missing records becomes more acute when trying to track down no-knock search warrants — which hand officers the ability to search a residence without announcing themselves. The practice has attracted widespread national scrutiny, most recently after Breonna Taylor was killed by Louisville police in 2020 during a no-knock raid that has resulted in the indictment of three officers.

Merrill Nordstrom, a Mississippi public defender, found that many of the warrants being issued in Greenville were no-knocks. Yet the warrants, which had been signed by a local judge and should have been returned to the court after the search, were not in the court's possession. Instead the local police department kept them, and they were "hidden from view because law enforcement agencies, unlike the courts, can claim a broad public-records exemption over records in their possession," Bedillon reports.

Quick hits: World bird population falls; gentrification can be rural; Black people more likely to be wrongfully convicted ...

Nearly half of the world's bird species are in decline, reports the Guardian, citing the latest State of the World's Birds report from BirdLife International.

Gentrification isn't just an urban issue; rural communities face it too, the Lewiston Tribune reports from Idaho.

A study from the National Registry of Exonerations found that Black people are seven times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of a serious offense. The Crime Report summarizes the study.

“When you read the novel, what I really want you to be focused on is the human story,” Kentucky and Appalachian author Silas House tells the Lexington Herald-Leader about his new Lark Ascending.

Rising food prices hit less-healthy older adults hardest, a national poll conducted by the University of Michigan finds.

N.H. newspaper makes its crime coverage 'more deliberate' after a reporter saw the obituary of a former story subject

Crime reporting at The Keene Sentinel in western New Hampshire involved quick-hits, police press releases and "not a lot of reporting, not a lot of context," Paul Cuno-Booth, a former police and courts reporter for the paper, said at last week's Radically Rural conference in Keene. That approach changed after Cuno-Booth spotted the obituary of a former story subject — a woman who had been arrested after leading police on a slow-motion car chase across an icy lake.

Keene in Cheshire County (Wikipedia map)

"Now, reading her obit, he learned more about the woman who’d been arrested on the ice that day," writes Dan Kennedy on his Media Nation site. "She’d had surgery for a brain tumor in 2016. She’d worked with mentally disabled people. She was a triathlete. Hers was a deep, well-rounded life, and the Sentinel’s story had reduced her to a caricature for the entertainment of its readers."

At Radically Rural, co-sponsored by the Sentinel, Cuno-Booth detailed how the paper sought to change its crime coverage. He left the paper, but it got help from Kelly McBride, an ethics specialist at the Poynter Institute, to be "more deliberate" in its coverage.

Individual crimes aren't being reported now unless the paper is "prepared to follow them all the way through the court system, which immediately ruled out minor offenses," Kennedy writes. Mug shots have become rare, people can have earlier reports of crimes scrubbed from online searches, and the paper is focusing on crime trends, not one-off small crimes.

'Exodus' of prison employees puts more stress and strain on those who stay on the job; group calls inmate strike in Ala.

A guard tower in Beeville, Tex. (Photo by Eric Gay, Associated Press)

Across the country, prison systems are strained by an "exodus of corrections officers," making life inside the walls harder for both inmates and employees, reports Stateline, a publication of The Pew Charitable Trusts. States are raising salaries and increasing recruiting efforts to attract more potential employees to prisons — which are disproportionately located in rural areas.

"In February, 8,043 of the 24,020 jobs inside the Texas correctional system were vacant, an all-time high. A recent pay raise has helped lower that number to just under 7,000," Stateline reports. Kansas and Florida both had nearly a quarter of their prison jobs vacant. Multiple states were raising wages for a dangerous job with a typical salary range from $42,909 to $53,482, depending on experience and location.

The staff shortages are worsening conditions for prisoners, as wait times for medical appointments, meals, showers and the delivery of ice and water to non-air-conditioned cells are delayed by a lack of staff, Stateline reports.

A tough job is also made even tougher by a lack of staff, but some longtime corrections officers told Stateline that the salary enables them to raise and house a family. On the other hand, Andy Potter, the founder of One Voice United — which advocates for corrections officers — told Stateline that the pay and benefits of the position don't match the high stress and danger of the job.

"The Alabama Department of Corrections said it has received reports of inmate work stoppages at all the major prisons in the state after a prison-reform organization called for a strike," AL.com reports. "The organization Both Sides of the Wall called for the strike beginning this morning as a protest of conditions in the state’s overcrowded, understaffed prisons, which the Department of Justice says hold men in conditions that violate the Constitution."

Nine justice-reform programs for rural areas will get extra support and provide inspiration to other programs

Justice reform programs in nine rural communities have been identified as innovation sites under the "Reaching Rural Initiative" and will receive extra support to further their goals and provide inspiration to other emerging programs, says The Crime Report, published by the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay College of the City University of New York.

The Rural Justice Collaborative and the National Center for State Courts launched the initiative last year because rural areas have complex justice issues that urban models often can't address, TCR says: "Although the problems of the justice system in urban areas have received the lion’s share of attention in the media, rural America is reeling from underfunded court systems, overcrowded jails―and has been especially hard hit by the opioid epidemic. Rural Americans are more likely than urban residents to be jailed, and to lack professional help for substance use and mental health issues. But efforts to export strategies that have worked in urban settings often fail in small communities or rural areas, where public health resources are strained."

Tara Kunkel, executive director of Rulo Strategies, which organized the collaborative, told TCR: "Before this, there has been no nationally concerted effort for justice leaders and their collaborators in other sectors to share what they know. The innovation sites provide a framework that others can build from." Selected sites will host leaders from other rural communities, discuss their strategies in webinars, and will get travel expenses for up to two regional trainings. The winners are:

• The Rural Incubator Project for Lawyers, in Montana, which has a 24-month fellowship program that trains and supports small legal practices that provide services to the poor.
• The Center for Empowering Victims of Gender-based Violence in Kansas, a research and collaboration center that puts domestic violence and human trafficking survivors on the road to economic freedom through social entrepreneurship.
• Texas Dispute Resolution System: Rural Mediation, which provides in-person and virtual mediation services for rural Texans as a dispute resolution alternative to the court system.
• South Carolina Victim Assistance Network Reaching Rural Initiative, which provides resources to crime victims remotely and in their own communities.
• Lazarus Recovery Services in North Carolina, which provides prevention and recovery support to people with substance-use disorders.
• Rural Attorney Recruitment Program in South Dakota, which recruits lawyers to practice for five years in rural counties where older attorneys are retiring with no replacements available.
• Public Defender Corporation Recovery Coach Project in West Virginia, which connects indigent criminal defendants with substance-use disorders to certified peer recovery coaches who arrange for substance use treatment opportunities immediately after a client is released from incarceration.
• Scott County Coordinated Community Response Team in northeast Tennessee, a multi-agency effort that provides various services and support to victims of domestic violence, elder abuse, human trafficking and sexual assault.
• Family Accountability and Recovery Court in North Carolina, which serves families involved in the child welfare system due to allegations of child abuse, neglect, or other parenting issues related to substance dependence.

The Rural Justice Collaborative is accepting applications for Innovation Sites through Jan. 17. Click here for more details or to apply.

Killer of 5 at Capital Gazette sentenced to life without parole

"An Anne Arundel County judge on Tuesday sentenced the man who blasted his way into the Capital Gazette newsroom and killed five people to six life sentences, five without the possibility of parole, plus 345 years — all to be served consecutively," Alex Mann and Lilly Price report for the Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland. "Judge Michael Wachs handed down the sentence after hearing from survivors of the mass shooting and the family members of Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith and Wendi Winters, who died in the attack."

At the hearing this morning, survivors of the 2018 attack and the loved ones of the victims delivered emotional impact statements as shooter Jarrod Ramos watched, Emily Davies and Katie Mettler report for The Washington Post. Reporter Selene San Felice, who hid under a desk during the shooting, spoke first. "There were days I wondered why I lived or if I should live at all ... I live to spread the truth," she said. "We will press on."

"This summer, a jury found Ramos had the mental and emotional capacity to be held criminally responsible for the mass shooting. Although Ramos had pleaded guilty to the murders, he had argued he was not legally sane at the time and should be sent to a psychiatric hospital with the potential for release instead of prison," the Post reports. "The jury had arrived at its verdict in less than two hours." The judge made a brief but heartfelt statement before announcing the sentence, the Gazette reports: "To say the defendant showed a callous and cruel disregard for the sanctity of human life is simply an understatement," Wachs said. "What I impose is what the defendant deserves."

Study: Court fines and fees, which some states use to fund their judicial systems, disproportionately hurt the rural poor

A recently published study exposed what authors say is an "unhealthy conflict" in judicial systems, "between using fines and fees as both a source of revenue and punishment, and said they imposed an inequitable burden on the rural poor and communities of color," Andrea Cipriano reports for The Crime Report, a publication of the Center on Media, Crime and Justice in the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York.

The study, published in the Idaho Law Review, noted that Idaho funds its judicial system largely through penalties and fines. Commissioned in 2019 by the Idaho Legislature Office of Performance Evaluations, the study is the latest in a decade of research showing that "has documented how skyrocketing court fines and fees cause harm to those least able to pay them, and make future justice involvement more likely," Cipriani reports. "The study recommended that Idaho abolish juvenile court administrative fees as a first step towards reform."

"For people caught up in the criminal system, fees simply operate as another layer of punishment on top of fines," the study said. "Enforcing monetary sanctions with the threat of additional fines, fees, and jail time merely recriminalizes financially precarious people, without any legitimate policy goal or discernible benefit to the state. . . . Mostly white and rural states like Idaho regularly impose substantial monetary sanctions on people without the means to pay them." Idaho has more than $195 million in uncollected court debt.

The authors found that, in effect, "Idaho is trying to squeeze 'blood from a turnip' — essentially forcing people to give money that they don’t have, Cipriani reports. "Worsening the problem, the escalating fees have contributed to overzealous policing, prosecution and punishment, the study said."

Overcrowding, lack of resources spur rural-jail death spike

An inmate in the Boyd County Detention Center in Catlettsburg, Ky., died of withdrawal symptoms. (Google Maps image)

America's smallest jails have some of the highest death rates in the nation, spurred by overcrowding and lack of resources, Katie Rose Quandt reports for The Atlantic.

"Across the country, an average of roughly three people died each day in local jails of all sizes in 2016, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics — a rate that is almost certainly an underestimate. A disproportionate number of those deaths happen in America’s smallest jails," Quandt reports. "Mortality rates were highest in jails holding a daily average of fewer than 50 people between 2000 and 2012, the last period for which BJS reported mortality by jail size; suicide rates were inversely correlated with jail size from 2000 to 2007. Small-to-midsize jails tend to have fewer resources to provide adequate mental-health and medical care, suicide prevention, and drug treatment—services that many people entering jails need. They also often have less oversight and are more overcrowded than their larger counterparts. In many ways, small institutions are the most troubling example of America’s epidemic of preventable deaths in jails—and they are also the least likely to draw public attention."

Jail deaths are almost certainly underreported, not least because many jails routinely release prisoners who are near death, said Jasmine Heiss, director of the Vera Institute of Justice’s "In Our Backyards" initiative, which studies rural incarceration trends.

Recent criminal-justice reforms have led to slow declines in the overall incarcerated population since its 2008 peak, but that's mostly been in state and federal prisons along with large urban jails. "The opposite is true, however, in the rest of the nation’s 3,134 local jails, which are operated by counties or cities and typically hold people who are awaiting trial or serving short sentences," Quandt reports. "Over the same time frame, jail populations shot up 27 percent in rural areas, and 7 percent in small-to-midsize cities."

One reason for rural jail population spikes: even overcrowded jails are increasingly taking in populations from elsewhere to make money. "Roughly 80 percent of jails around the country rented out bed space in 2013 to other counties, federal agencies like the U.S. Marshals Service and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or state prison systems. This especially bloats jail populations in rural areas: In 2013, 46 percent of people in rural southern jails were being held for other jurisdictions," Quandt reports. "This trend has completely changed the landscape of local jailing in states like Kentucky. . . . Instead of de-carcerating, the state farms out half its prison population to county jails for $31.34 a day, leaving people serving multiyear sentences in small jails with worse access to programs, services, and health care. . . . Around the country, state departments of corrections limiting their intake during the pandemic have become yet another contributor to growth in jail populations."

Many Kentucky counties seem to be trying to replace coal-related jobs with incarceration jobs, according to Judah Schept, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University who studies rural incarceration. "You have counties becoming reliant on jail infrastructure," he told Quandt. "You have folks who live there anticipating work opportunities at jails and prisons, because coal employment is gone. And you have increasing numbers of people actually going into jail."

"Sometimes, when small counties build massive jails with the intention of housing state and federal detainees, this increased bed space can actually enable more local incarceration," Quandt reports, citing a rural sheriff's quote in a Vera Institute report: "They said, 'If you build it, they will come,' And that’s what happened. The judges knew there was room, so they threw them in jail."

Overcrowding "can mean less programming, fewer services, unsafe conditions, and more time locked down in cells. These problems coincide with other structural difficulties confronting small jails," Quandt reports. That can affect officer retention, the availability of rehabilitative programs, and health-care services.

But jails increasingly serve as first-line resources for mental health, addiction and homelessness in infrastructure-poor rural communities, according to Heiss. "In the absence of broader societal support systems, incarceration has become the catch-all solution in areas hit hard by poverty, unemployment, and the meth and opioid epidemics," she told Quandt.

A Vera Institute data analysis "found that smaller counties are less likely to have resources for programs like pretrial services and diversion programs that keep people out of jail," Quandt reports. "They also use pretrial detention at a higher rate than many jails in bigger cities." About two-thirds of the U.S. jail population is awaiting trial (many because they can't afford bail), compared to 50% before 1993. About 75% of people reported to have died in jail between 2006 and 2016 were awaiting trial.

But pretrial detention doesn't seem to keep the public safer. "A Prison Policy Initiative analysis of bail reforms around the country found that releasing more people before trial does not lead to more crime," Quandt reports. "Pretrial detention does, however, keep people in dangerous and overcrowded jails, instead of allowing them to await trial safely from home."

The story illustrates rural jail disparities with the story of Christopher Hall, a Kentuckian who died in early 2019 from withdrawal symptoms while awaiting trial in the Boyd County Detention Center. Because of previous jail deaths, the county jailer had resigned and the newly elected successor began his tenure just weeks before Hall's death. A corrections expert who analyzed the jail's logbooks said the new jailer had inherited a broken system and hadn't had time to fix the jail's problems. But, Quandt writes, "some structural problems—overcrowding by the courts, an unequal society that often uses incarceration as a solution to mental illness and addiction—cannot be fixed by any one jail or jailer."

Study: many legal-aid programs don't work in rural areas because they're designed for cities

"Many legal-aid programs don’t work in rural areas because they are designed to serve large cities, a new research study says. The result is that low-income rural residents aren’t getting equal access to justice, according to a new paper published in the paper in the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law Policy," Olivia Weeks reports for The Daily Yonder.

The report, based on case studies in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin, found that such programs fail the rural poor in three ways: they don't account for the lack of broadband access, they incorrectly presume that anyone in crisis can competently serve as their own attorney, and their standards for justice don't line up with rural Americans' expectations, Weeks reports.

Northern Minnesota and Wisconsin have high poverty rates, low employment, an economy mostly reliant on mining, and "an absence of large legal firms, limited social services, and rural lawyer shortages that are accelerated by a graying pool of local attorneys. 'Legal deserts' like this one significantly reduce the efficacy of state and federal legal aid funding. Even if the cash support is there, the practitioners aren’t around to take advantage of it," Weeks reports. "In rural areas, only 14 percent of civil litigants receive legal assistance. The other 86% are left to defend themselves in court. This rate of civil representation is less than half the national average." The authors say defendants in rural Wisconsin can wait as long as four months for a public defender. 

The authors write that lawmakers' access-to-justice solutions are often inaccessible to rural defendants: "Most simply, the initiatives touted as advancing 'equal administration of justice for all' often prove to be the very same self-help forms, helplines, and online resources that low-income rural residents identify as barriers to justice." 

Lack of broadband access, lower tech literacy, and too little legal guidance also make a just legal result less likely for the rural poor, they write: "Without addressing the rural digital divide, the ability of technology to close rural civil justice gaps remains limited."

Quick hits: Billionaires buy up farmland; USDA wants feedback on rural renewable-energy pilot program...

Here's a roundup of stories with rural resonance; if you do or see similar work that should be shared on The Rural Blog, email us at heather.chapman@uky.edu.

The new jobs-and-stimulus package dedicates $20 million for efforts to preserve tribal languages. Read more here.

A pilot project in rural Maine aims to use paramedics to improve health-care access. Read more here.

The Agriculture Department wants feedback on the creation of a rural renewable-energy pilot program. Read more here.

An Illinois billionaire has quietly bought about 24,000 acres of farmland in the state since 2015, saying it's a good investment. Farmland purchases by hedge funds and the wealthy have surged in recent years, and economists say it's a good investment because of its stability. But wealthy investors paying top dollar for farmland contributes to the shortage of land available for farmers to purchase. Read more here.

The Hospital (St, Martin's, $28.99), a new book by journalist Brian Alexander, examines the state of rural health care by focusing on a small hospital in northwest Ohio. Read more here.

University of Tennessee agricultural economists Harwood D. Schaffer and Daryll E. Ray have dedicated their "Policy Pennings" columns over the past month to a look back at crop export trends over the past 60 years, and what they can teach us now. Read more here.

A legal scholar who was raised in rural America discusses academia's blind spot towards rural areas. Read more here.

if you're looking for a story that delves deeply into coal ash and how it impacts people nearby, this is one of the best we've ever seen. Read it here.

An op-ed says the USDA shouldn't be funding rural jails. Read more here.

A study examines the impact of solar farms on rural property values, and notes that such projects increasingly compete with rural residential developers and concentrated animal feeding operation farmers for rural land. Read more here. 

Health-care providers and housing experts explore the intersection of rural housing quality and health. Read more here.

Illinois the first state to eliminate cash bail; issue disproportionately affects poor, helps overcrowd rural jails

"Illinois this week became the first state in the country to eliminate cash bail, a system that critics say leaves poor people—most often minorities—in jail for months awaiting trial," Kate Queram reports for Route Fifty. "Under the new law, judges will not be able to set any kind of bail for most defendants. Instead, they’ll use a risk assessment system to determine whether a defendant is a good candidate for release. Detention is a last option to be used only when “it is determined that the defendant poses a specific, real and present threat” to another person, or 'has a high likelihood of willful flight.' Judges will still be able to detain defendants charged with felonies, including murder and domestic battery."

The issue disproportionately affects the poor, who often can't make bail and must pay bond companies (typically 10 percent of the bail) to get out of jail, CNN reports. Those who can't bond out are stuck in jail, contributing to the overcrowding that's especially pronounced in rural and county jails. The numbers of people awaiting trial far outnumber people serving sentences.

Growing support for elimination of cash bail could make prison expansion—a popular rural economic tactic—less profitable, according to bail reform proponents.

A first of its kind pilot program aims to better coordinate investigations of missing or murdered indigenous people

A new first-of-its-kind federal pilot program aims to help federal, state and tribal agencies better coordinate investigations of missing or murdered Native Americans or Alaska Natives, Emma Coleman reports for Route Fifty. 

The exact numbers of missing and murdered indigenous people—especially women—is unknown because of faulty data collection, but it's a widely acknowledged problem (and one explored in depth by an impressive news package from the University of Montana's School of Journalism). Some states, such as Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Washington, have already taken steps in recent years to address the issue.

"Led by the Justice Department, the Tribal Community Response Plan will require federal, state, and tribal law enforcement agencies to work in coordination to create 'culturally appropriate guidelines when investigating emergent cases,'" Coleman reports. "The guidelines will include instructions for law enforcement, victim services, community outreach, and public communications."

Oklahoma will be the first state to join the program, which is part of a broader Justice Department effort to tackle disproportionate violent crime rates among Native American women and children, according to U.S. Attorney Trent Shores with the northern district of Oklahoma. Shores, another U.S. Attorney in Oklahoma, and representatives from the Muscogee (Creek) and Cherokee nations announced Oklahoma's participation this week.

After the project rolls out in Oklahoma, it will expand to five other states: Alaska, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana and Oregon. "Last year, the Justice Department stepped up its efforts to coordinate with U.S. Attorney’s offices on the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Initiative, allocating $1.5 million to hire coordinators in 11 states," Coleman reports. "Six of those states will be in the pilot. The other five are Arizona, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, and Washington."