Search Results for: Prison

The Bicycle Thief

Longreads Pick

He was an Olympic hopeful in track cycling. Then he was a bank robber, more prolific than Dillinger, with a bright orange getaway bike. And then he was a prisoner, caught by his distinctive wheels.

Published: Jan 29, 2019
Length: 38 minutes (9,675 words)

Power to the People

The words Pray and Obey on a chimney at the former home of Warren Jeffs in Hildale, Wednesday April 5, 2017. (Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune via AP)

For years, Hildale, Utah, was controlled by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and more specifically, by Warren Jeffs; under his watch, every element of civic and social life was dictated by the church, and powerful church families controlled the lion’s share of wealth, creating a steep economic divide. Jeffs is now in prison and Hildale is trying to redefine itself — last year it elected a secular mayor, a woman — but as Tarpley Hitt explains in her story for The Daily Beast, “redefining” is about a lot more than transferring government power back to the actual government.

For the new government, bridging that divide is a top priority. In a sense, they have a head start (most of their 1 percent is now incarcerated). But inequality in Hildale is not like inequality anywhere else in the United States, where disparity usually stems from an unbalanced capitalist system. For decades, Short Creek operated as a quasi-communist state. The original settlers wanted to establish a radical kind of cooperative society that adhered to the New Testament value of holding “all things in common.” They pooled all their resources in a collective trust, and for decades—the vast majority of Short Creek’s existence—everything in the town was shared: from homes, to food, to health care.

After Jeffs and his father, the communal trust crumpled. When the federal government seized all the town’s assets in 2005, it was valued at a staggering $110 million, much of which had been leached from apostates and less powerful families. Not long later, the feds ordered the town to subdivide, and in the years since, Hildale has been gradually—and painfully, for many townspeople—divvying up the land, establishing private property for the first time in history.

The new council has been tasked with overseeing the town’s transition to an entirely new economic system. But they’re trying to do that while nursing the wounds Warren left behind—in a deeply divided constituency, where the act of drawing lines in the sand (sometimes literally: the council had to draft zoning laws) runs the risk of driving people even further apart.

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How Diderot’s Encyclopedia Challenged the King

The encyclopedists meet at Diderot's home. Hulton Archive / Getty

Andrew Curran | an excerpt adapted from Diderot: The Art of Thinking Freely | Other Press | January 2019 | 19 minutes (5,105 words)

Denis Diderot’s incarceration at Vincennes took place exactly halfway through his seventy years on earth. Prison became the dramatic pause that gave shape and meaning to both sides of his life. Before prison, Diderot had been a journeyman translator, the editor of an unpublished encyclopedia, and a relatively unknown author of clandestine works of heterodoxy; on the day that he walked out of Vincennes, he was forever branded as one of the most dangerous evangelists of freethinking and atheism in the country.

During Diderot’s three-month imprisonment, his jailer the Count d’Argenson and the count’s brother the marquis had looked on with amusement while this “insolent” philosophe had bowed and scraped before the authority of the state. In a diary entry from October 1749, the marquis related with glee how his brother the count had supposedly broken Diderot’s will. Solitary confinement and the prospect of a cold winter had succeeded where the police’s warnings had failed; in the end, the once-cheeky writer had not only begged for forgiveness, but his “weak mind,” “damaged imagination,” and “senseless brilliance” had been subdued. Diderot’s days as a writer of “entertaining but amoral books,” it seemed, were over. Read more…

A New Low: Stealing From the Dead

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Did William Ernest Johnson III steal the homes of the dead by forging notary signatures to transfer ownership and flip them for a profit in Philadelphia neighborhoods ripe for gentrification, or is he — as he maintains — a victim too? Craig R. McCoy investigates at the Philadelphia Enquirer.

They are all dead. Yet if city records are to be believed, they all walked into the office of a notary public and signed away their homes, which just happened to be in gentrifying neighborhoods with soaring property values.

Gail Harrison lived alone in the house where she grew up on Seybert Street in North Philadelphia. She had her quirks, but neighbors looked out for her. “She was a nice, friendly, Christian-hearted woman,” one said.

Harriet Dunn and Dorcas Moone lived quietly in a North 27th Street rowhouse in Brewerytown that they bought in 1950 after leaving the Army.

Alex Krasheninnikow survived a Nazi concentration camp. He later handed out the Communist Party paper on the streets of Philadelphia. His home on Agate Street in Port Richmond was overflowing with books.

Their properties all ended up in the hands of a stranger, a 43-year-old man named William Ernest Johnson III, who wrapped up some of the deals while still on parole from a long prison term for a string of violent crimes.

In all, an Inquirer investigation has linked Johnson to at least six suspicious home transfers over the last 2½ years. In case after case, he acquired vacant houses with longtime owners who were dead or so aged that their grown children would later say they never participated in the transactions.

The taking of Gail Harrison’s house was the first of a string of suspicious acquisitions involving Johnson. To look into them is to find more dead sellers, doctored deeds, and a city bureaucracy blind to it all. The thefts took place so quietly that in two cases the relatives did not know about the illegitimate sales until they were contacted by the Inquirer.

One theft required the forging of two signatures — those of longtime companions Harriett Dunn and Dorcas Moone. Dunn had been dead a quarter century and Moone a decade when someone signed their names to the deed selling their three-story house at 1323 N. 27th St., another Brewerytown address. Moone’s signature on the deed misspelled her name.

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Wayne Byerly’s Redemption Through Ratting

USP Florence, whose banal exterior belies the house of horrors inside.

After a lifetime of bank robberies, Wayne Byerly ended up in U.S. Penitentiary Florence, an overcrowded high-security prison housing violent criminals with a reputation as the most dangerous prison in the United States — “In one seventeen-month period, USP Florence logged 94 inmate stabbings or beatings, roughly one for every ten inmates.” But USP Florence’s real calling card is the fate of its snitches, recounted in Alan Prendergast’s Westworld story about Byerly, his time in the pen, and his extensive work as an informant.

A few days later, drug smuggler Mirssa Araiza-Reyes got into an argument with his cellmate, Frank Melendez, whom he suspected of being a snitch. Araiza-Reyes had strong feelings about snitches, having attacked another suspected informant with a padlock and razor. He required all his roommates to sign affidavits swearing they that they weren’t snitches. Unable to come to terms with Melendez, Araiza-Reyes beat and strangled him. He kept the body in his cell for four days, a period during which staff paperwork indicates Melendez went through several counts, received meals, and was taken to showers and the exercise yard. When he could no longer stand the smell, Araiza-Reyes notified a guard that Melendez was dead.

“I took care of that snitch for you,” he said.

The incident became known as the Weekend at Bernie’s killing. But that grotesquerie was soon overshadowed by a more extravagant foray into corpse abuse. In October 1999, bank robber Joey Estrella was killed and eviscerated in the Special Housing Unit (SHU) by his two cellmates, cousins William and Rudy Sablan, after a night of drinking and playing cards. It’s not clear if the Sablans regarded Estrella as a snitch or just a nuisance, but the cousins removed portions of his liver and spleen. By the time officers arrived to videotape the aftermath, the Sablans were covered in gore, mockingly gnawing at Estrella’s excised organs and drinking his blood. While the camera rolled, they stuck a cigarette in the dead man’s mouth and used his hand to flash the finger at the guards.

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The Classroom Origins of Toxic Masculinity

KC Noland / Youtube, Saul Loeb / Getty

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2019 | 8 minutes (1,974 words)

Covington Catholic High School, St. Michael’s College School, Georgetown Preparatory School. All three are Catholic, mostly white, mostly rich, all-boys, and all three have recently made the news. At Covington, student Nick Sandmann went viral after a video emerged showing him, surrounded by a bunch of white classmates in the same glaring MAGA hats fresh off the same anti-abortion rally, mocking Native American Indigenous Peoples March attendee Nathan Phillips. At St. Mike’s school — Canadian, suggesting we may be less nice than we are similar — several students were charged after a video appeared on social media in which their fellow classmates were assaulted, one with a broomstick. Eight boys were eventually expelled after several incidents were investigated, all, according to reports, involving football and basketball players. Georgetown Prep, meanwhile, made the news when Christine Blasey Ford accused U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of assaulting her when they were teenagers while fellow Georgetown student Mark Judge watched. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” she said. The quote reverberated across social media once again after the Covington video went viral.

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A Reading List to Celebrate World Breast Pumping Day

The Willow wearable breast pump on display at CES International 2018. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

As my daughter Emilia turns 7 months old on January 27, which happens to be World Breast Pumping Day, I can say I’ve finally gotten the hang of pumping breast milk. On my maternity leave, I was lucky to be able to exclusively breastfeed her for the first six months. As I prepared for the transition back to work full time, I pumped periodically to get familiar with the bulky, noisy machine I’d soon spend a lot of time with, as well as to build a modest freezer stash of milk for all the future occasions I’d be away from the baby. (Spoiler: there haven’t been many.)

I wouldn’t say I enjoy pumping in the same way I enjoy nursing (well, when Emilia wants to nurse, which — in her recently distractible state — has been less frequent). But it can be very satisfying to collect ounces of milk, the only substance my baby really needs in her first year to live and thrive, from my own body. Serena Williams, after all, called breastfeeding a superpower; I too feel invincible, even if just for those moments, being able to provide nourishment for this tiny human I’ve made.

But, like so many women before me have said, pumping is also awkward and onerous. I look at this image of ultra-runner Sophie Power from last fall, who stopped halfway through the 105-mile Ultra-Trail du Mont Blanc race to pump and breastfeed her son, and think, wow, here is someone partaking in an incredibly demanding activity, pushing the limits of the human body, but — just like any other mother — she can’t get around the physical need to pump.

Because no matter who you are, the logistics of pumping can be challenging, if not impossible. Even if you can afford the newest wearable models that promise more freedom, like the $500 Willow and Elvie pumps, pumping is still a commitment and huge part of your day-to-day life.

It was interesting, then, to follow the larger conversation around Rachel McAdams’ high-fashion breast pump photo. Last month, while doing a Girls Girls Girls magazine cover shoot, the actress was photographed wearing a Versace jacket and Bulgari diamond necklace — while pumping from both breasts. While the photo was praised by some for its attempt to #NormalizeBreastfeeding and show that even celebrities need to take pumping breaks, some say it missed the mark and wasn’t truly subversive, while many mothers expressed that the image did not represent them — and what a pumping session really looks like.

As I settle into new motherhood, and as each day brings new challenges — why won’t she nurse? where can I pump? why has my milk supply dipped? — I continue to read as much as I can: to learn how mothers juggle the task with everything else in their lives, and to remind myself that I’m not alone. Here’s a reading list of stories, new and old, that explore the complicated act of breast pumping.

1. Baby Food (Jill Lepore, January 2009, The New Yorker)

In this piece from 10 years ago, Lepore discusses the history of breastfeeding versus bottle feeding, and the rise of the breast pump.

In 1904, one Chicago pediatrician argued that “the nursing function is destined gradually to disappear.” Gilded Age American women were so refined, so civilized, so delicate. How could they suckle like a barnyard animal? (By the turn of the century, the cow’s udder, or, more often, its head, had replaced the female human breast as the icon of milk.) Behind this question lay another: how could a white woman nurse a baby the way a black woman did? (Generations of black women, slave and free alike, not only nursed their own infants but also served as wet nurses to white babies.) Racial theorists ran microscopic tests of human milk: the whiter the mother, chemists claimed, the less nutritious her milk. On downy white breasts, rosy-red nipples had become all but vestigial. It was hardly surprising, then, that well-heeled women told their doctors that they had insufficient milk. By the nineteen-tens, a study of a thousand Boston women reported that ninety per cent of the poor mothers breast-fed, while only seventeen per cent of the wealthy mothers did. (Just about the opposite of the situation today.) Doctors, pointing out that evolution doesn’t happen so fast, tried to persuade these Brahmins to breast-feed, but by then it was too late.

2. Why Women Really Quit Breastfeeding (Jenna Sauers, July 2018, Harper’s Bazaar)

For many women, the circumstances in which they pump are unacceptable or worse, nonexistent.

Under the Affordable Care Act, U.S. companies are required to provide break time and a clean, private place to pump milk. Sauers offers an overview of pumping legislation in the U.S. and the challenges of pumping in a variety of work places, from co-working spaces with open floor plans to hospitals and college campuses.

But even as doctors and nurses promote breastfeeding to patients, their own working conditions sometimes make pumping difficult.

Sarah, a registered nurse at Northside Hospital in Atlanta who spoke on condition of anonymity, said she is currently struggling to pump at work. She and her colleagues, several of whom are also pumping, work 12-hour shifts. Sarah gets to work early so that the last thing she does before clocking in is pump; that way she can go as long as possible before taking a break. When her shift begins at 7 a.m., that means rising at 3:45 a.m.

“Typically, the way our patient flow goes, I probably won’t get another opportunity to pump until about 9 or 10 a.m.,” she says. “From there, it varies. A lot of days, we don’t even have the staffing to relieve people for lunch. I have to tread lightly asking for a pump break when most people aren’t even getting lunch breaks.”

3. ‘A Pumping Conspiracy’: Why Workers Smuggled Breast Pumps Into Prison (Natalie Kitroeff, December 2018, The New York Times)

Kitroeff reports on the staff nurses at Deerfield state prison in Capron, Virginia, who weren’t allowed to bring breast pumps into the facility. Some tried to pump in an unpleasant men’s restroom; others resorted to expressing milk in the backseat of their car in the parking lot. But one nurse, Susan Van Son, had had enough — and she smuggled her breast pump in, piece by piece.

In July 2016, another Deerfield nurse, LaQuita Dundlow, 32, returned to work after giving birth to her second daughter. Like Ms. Olds, Ms. Dundlow said managers told her to pump in the men’s restroom. She couldn’t produce milk in the fetid space. “The smell, it messed with me,” she said.

So Ms. Dundlow hung baby blankets from the windows of her Ford Expedition. Three times a day, she came out to express. Occasionally, she said, she had to explain the situation to a security guard who tapped on her window, wanting to know what was going on inside.

Sometimes, she didn’t have time to take the quarter-mile walk from one end of the prison to her S.U.V. On those occasions, painfully engorged, she would take a sterile cup normally used to collect urine samples, go to the bathroom and express milk by squeezing her breasts. Then she would hand the cup to her husband, who was also employed at the prison, as a correctional officer. He would take it to a cooler in their car.

4. Stop Shaming Working Moms Into Pumping (Jessica Machado, December 2015, Elle)

As Jen Gann writes in The Cut, figuring out how and when to pump is a privileged problem to have.

After returning to work after a 12-week maternity leave, Machado quickly realized that pumping was an activity around which she would structure her entire life. “I had become not a breastfeeder, but a pair of breasts owned by a machine,” she writes, describing her shame over not being able to keep up with her son’s demand. She explores why working mothers in America are pressured to pump.

I live in Brooklyn, just south of Park Slope, where the mommy wars have been won by upper-middle-class leftists in comfortable fair-trade sandals. Though I am neither in the right income bracket nor organic threads to think of myself as a Park Slope mom, there is a bar of motherhood that is set by those around me that can’t help but seep into my subconscious. Women wear their babies in slings as a badge of attachment parenting; they buy vegetables from the co-op to puree in top-of-the-line food processors; many have nannies to assist them in the juggling of domestic priorities. When working mothers have problems breastfeeding in my area, they reach out to lactation consultants, who charge $125 to $400 a visit to show them tips like adjusting the pump’s speeds and making sure the pump’s parts fit properly. These moms can also combat dwindling supply by renting a hospital-grade pump, which is not covered by insurance but costs upwards of $70 a month––a pretty high price tag for people like me who are already struggling with the added expenses of daycare and baby necessities.

And my breastfeeding peer pressures and pumping obstacles are minimal compared to most. I’m not a cashier or a server or a police officer or a professional driver or basically anyone whose job is to serve people when they need to be tended to, who can’t just drop everything to keep up with a pumping schedule. I am not an employee who has to share my pumping space with a conference room or a break room or a broom closet. I’ve never had to pump in the car or a public restroom. I’ve never had a coworker or stranger walk in on me, half-naked, while cones were on my breasts sucking like vacuums. I am not a mom on WIC assistance who is punished for formula-feeding by getting benefits for half as long as those who breastfeed.

5. The Unseen Consequences of Pumping Breast Milk (Olivia Campbell, November 2014, Pacific Standard

“There’s an assumption that bottle-feeding breast milk to a child is equivalent to breastfeeding, but that may not be the case.” Campbell looks at studies that suggest exclusive pumping may not be as beneficial for mothers and babies, citing issues like milk contamination, an increase in coughing and wheezing in infants, and potential health impacts for mothers (including the risk of postpartum depression, reproductive cancers, and more).

Thorley has written extensively on the potential perils of “normalizing” the separation of breast milk from breasts. She says that bottle-feeding of breast milk has a place in specific circumstances, such as when a baby is unable to adequately stimulate the mother’s milk supply, or in cases like Boss’, where a baby is unable to nurse directly. And while she agrees bottled breast milk is better than infant formula, “breastfeeding is about more than the milk.” Babies don’t just breastfeed for nutrition; they nurse for comfort, closeness, soothing, and security.

6. The More I Learn About Breast Milk, the More Amazed I Am (Angela Garbes, August 2015, The Stranger)

Breast milk contains all the vitamins and nutrients that a baby needs in its first six months of life. It’s also dynamic: adapting to the baby’s needs. And like a fine red wine, writes Garbes, the flavors in a mother’s breast milk are subtle, reflecting its terroir: her body. Garbes takes a closer look at the complex makeup — and value — of this precious liquid.

I love the idea that even before her first encounter with solid food, her taste buds had already begun telling her that she is part of a city filled with the cuisines of many nations, a household that supports local farmers, and a Filipino family with an abiding love of pork and fermented shrimp paste.

We can’t expect the value of breast-feeding to just trickle down to mothers in the trenches, pumping away in cramped offices and broom closets, working multiple jobs, forking over significant portions of income to day care, and, yes, tired and close to the breaking point, cursing their own desire to continue feeding their children their milk. We have to make an effort to reach all mothers, not just those actively seeking support and information.

7. A Certain Kind of Mammal (Meaghan O’Connell, April 2018, Longreads)

In this excerpt from her book And Now We Have Everything, Meaghan O’Connell describes the all-consuming activity of nursing her son.

I had tried the breast pump a few times, recreationally, but not yet so as to explicitly buy time away with my own milk. The pump looked just like I’d imagined, like something you’d use to masturbate a farm animal. The bulk of the machine was a little yellow box the size of a toaster oven that gasped and sighed with a rhythmic, mechanical sucking noise that was initially disturbing, like it was trying to tell me something but couldn’t quite find the language. There were two snaking rubber tubes that ran from the box to the air-horn-looking boob funnels and from there into baby bottles that collected the milk. The horns were where the magic happened, where your tits went. Sucked into the machine, my nipples looked like long, pink taffy, stretched and then milked.

The first time I saw milk stream out of my body and into this contraption, I felt woozy and then oddly turned on. It’s not often in life we gain a brand-new secretion.

What Falls to Earth

Illustration by Cristina Daura

Susanna Space | Longreads | January 2019 | 13 minutes (3,200 words)

On June 30, 1908, a star-like body with a fiery tail tore through the clear morning sky above the vast Siberian forest. As it neared the ground, a column of light shot twelve miles into the air. Booms like artillery followed, and stones rained from the sky; houses shook and windows shattered. A wave of intense heat threw people from their chairs. Hundreds of reindeer scattered and burned.

I came upon the story of the Tunguska meteor by accident. It was 2014 and I had watched a documentary about Russian girls, children of 12 and 13, sent abroad by American modeling agents to work. The film made me curious about the girls’ home in the Siberian countryside, a backdrop they were eager to shed.

My interest in the girls receded as I read about the meteor. I was online, trying to learn more about Siberia when links to articles popped up about a similar event, this one a century later and 3,500 miles away in Chelyabinsk. A meteor had exploded over the city one February morning, the flash recorded by hundreds of smartphones and dashboard cameras.
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The Weather and the Wall

iStock / Getty Images Plus, Unsplash, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Will Meyer | Longreads | January 2019 | 15 minutes (4,073 words)

“At the museum steps
Didn’t we establish
That all this blood is not a dream
This is progress
And we are not that high
We could almost be redeemed”

 — unreleased song by The Lentils

*

For years, changes in butterfly populations and migrations have been considered an “early warning indicator” of global warming. In 2006, a British butterfly specialist told The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert that of 10 species living in Southern England at the time, “Every single one has moved northward since 1982.”

Now, several years and many missed early warning indicators later, the National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas, has received a letter from Customs and Border Protection announcing the government’s intent to build a border wall through critical habitat for 240 species of butterflies and 300 types of birds. The letter explains that the wall will be 36-feet tall and 20-feet wide, and that an additional 150 feet south of the border will be cleared of all vegetation to create an “enforcement zone.” Comparing the wall’s construction with a calamitous weather event, the National American Butterfly Association president told the San-Antonio Express News that: “For us to financially survive and weather this storm, we’re trying to create a fund that will be kind of like an endowment.” As of this writing, a GoFundMe created to protect the Center has raised just over $24,000.

Meanwhile, given that Mexico hasn’t “paid for it” and won’t, a GoFundMe to finance the wall’s construction raised $20.5 million dollars before GoFundMe decided to offer refunds. That’s nowhere near enough money to actually build the thing, but enough to make you pretty sure the butterflies don’t stand a chance. Indeed, the president and the Republican-controlled Senate have shut down large swaths of the government for over a month, demanding that the Democrats in the House vote to pay for the wall before the government can be reopened. Still, it’s hard to believe the wall is really going up.
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The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

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David Treuer | an excerpt from The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present | Riverhead Books| January 2019 | 24 minutes (6,491 words)

 

What follows is the prologue to David Treuer’s new book The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, in which he explains what drove him to write it. That book is the one referenced throughout.


This book tells the story of what Indians in the United States have been up to in the 128 years that have elapsed since the 1890 massacre of at least 150 Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota: what we’ve done, what’s happened to us, what our lives have been like.* It is adamantly, unashamedly, about Indian life rather than Indian death. That we even have lives — that Indians have been living in, have been shaped by, and in turn have shaped the modern world — is news to most people. The usual story told about us — or rather, about “the Indian” — is one of diminution and death, beginning in untrammeled freedom and communion with the earth and ending on reservations, which are seen as nothing more than basins of perpetual suffering. Wounded Knee has come to stand in for much of that history. In the American imagination and, as a result, in the written record, the massacre at Wounded Knee almost overnight assumed a significance far beyond the sheer number of lives lost. It became a touchstone of Indian suffering, a benchmark of American brutality, and a symbol of the end of Indian life, the end of the frontier, and the beginning of modern America. Wounded Knee, in other words, stands for an end, and a beginning.

What were the actual circumstances of this event that has taken on so much symbolic weight? Read more…