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The Psychological Cost of RCJC Quarantine

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In the Richmond City Jail, COVID safety protocols look a lot like torture.

If anyone doubts how little the City of Richmond values the emotional well-being of incarcerated people, they should look no further than the Richmond City Jail’s harsh (and unacknowledged) quarantine measures. Over the course of five months, from June through October, Theresa Young spent a total of two and a half months locked for 23 hours per day inside a small cell. She was not put in isolation because she had done something wrong. (In fact, she says, staff recognized her as cooperative and dependable, asking her to clean as a volunteer.) Nor was her confinement an anomaly or a violation of jail policy. Young’s torturous months of medical isolation were simply incarceration-as-usual in RCJC during the era of COVID-19.

Even more than some other jails in the area, RCJC has been aggressive in using solitary isolation to combat the coronavirus. Though numerous lawyers, activists, and incarcerated people confirm that RCJC’s stated “two-week quarantine” policy means two weeks of emotionally trying and legally inconvenient isolation, the Richmond City Sheriff’s Office (RCSO), which runs the Richmond jail, has failed to publicly acknowledge the details of its quarantine procedures. This failure — perhaps a success in the minds of some — has effectively obscured from judges, prosecutors, medical officials and the public the profound callousness that underlies the jail’s response to COVID-19. 

“It’s hard for us as advocates,” Young’s lawyer, Lauren Whitley said. “Our clients are telling us things, and we have no reason not to believe our clients, and then nobody will verify it. It’s this weird form of gaslighting.”

The psychological risk of isolation

Over the course of her life, Theresa Young has been diagnosed with both paranoid schizophrenia and bipolar depression. She suffers from claustrophobia and has a history of childhood trauma. Not surprisingly, she described her time in medical isolation as a painful, retraumatizing experience. “I’m one of those that can’t be confined in one spot. I even kind of flip out when I’m in an elevator,” Young said. “This has been the roughest time being locked up.” 

Young first entered solitary confinement in June after a court appearance in Henrico. Unlike some other local and regional jails, RCJC requires that all incarcerated people returning from court spend roughly two weeks in a quarantine pod. According to Young, she has been in solitary medical isolation for 15 days on three occasions, twice after returning from court; and for a full month on another. All of these confinement periods meet the UN criteria for torture. 

“Just being in isolation is a horrible experience,” said Yohance Whitaker, an organizer with the Legal Aid Justice Center, who works with incarcerated individuals. “It’s taxing psychologically and emotionally and physically.”

During her periods of solitary confinement, Young struggled to keep in contact with her four-year-old daughter. “It’s not like being in isolation you can be on the phone whenever you want,” Young said. “When you’re on the fifteen days, you only come out for an hour, or half an hour. You have to choose if you want to be on the phone, shower, [or] do whatever on the time out.” 

Court appearances mean a lose-lose decision

RCJC requires all defendants who choose to appear in person to undergo a two-week lockdown after returning to the jail, despite the fact that they appear dressed from head-to-toe in Tyvek coveralls. As a result, Young and many like her must weigh the trying, potentially traumatizing experience of solitary against the probable legal cost of appearing before the judge on a video monitor, dressed in jail clothes. As one might expect, studies show that judges tend to be less sympathetic to defendants who attend trial remotely.  

“There’s something to be said for looking someone in the face when you’re going to lock them up or sentence them to imprisonment,” said Richmond’s Head Public Defender, Tracy Paner. “When they are not present in the courtroom, when they’re just a fuzzy image on a screen, the sentencing is harsher; the bond decisions are less favorable.” 

In October Paner told RVA Mag that, fearing isolation, none of her clients have chosen to appear in court since the policy began. “Folks who have mental health issues, pre-existing, suffer particular harm when they’re placed in isolation,” she said. “So I have folks who are like, ‘Ms. Paner, I can’t, I just can’t do it.’ I encourage them but I respect their wishes. I don’t want to hurt my clients.”

Photo via CGL Companies

Defense lawyers handicapped by lack of transparency 

Although RCJC’s use of isolation in quarantine is common knowledge among defense lawyers, activists, and people incarcerated in RCJC, the Sheriff’s Department has yet to acknowledge the jail’s widespread use of medical solitary confinement. An RCJC spokesperson ignored RVA Mag’s question and follow-up email regarding the use of solitary in medical quarantine, and both Richmond Commonwealth’s Attorney (CA) Colette McEachin and Danny Avula, Director of the Richmond City Health District — the top officials at two public entities that work closely with the jail to coordinate a pandemic response — told RVA Mag they were unaware that RCJC’s medical quarantine involved long periods solitary confinement. 

“I think one of the challenges of this work is that nobody has a sightline into what’s happening there,” Avula told RVA Mag. 

For her part, CA McEachin was skeptical of claims that individuals in quarantine were kept in solitary. “I don’t believe people are actually locked in a cell for 23 hours,” she said. “Obviously, I don’t want anybody punished or treated in an unhealthy, non-judicial way so, yes, it would be concerning if I thought that people were literally being locked in a cell with no opportunity to stretch or walk around for 23 hours a day. If there is no other way to do two things at the same time — which is to keep people in the jail until the court releases them, and keep those people who are in the jail in a socially distant, hygienic manner — and this is the best the sheriff can come up with, that may be the best that she can come up with. But I literally don’t know.”

Young’s lawyer, Lauren Whitley, said what most frustrates her is the misinformation or lack of information about what is happening inside the jail. Although RCJC is currently reporting zero COVID cases, after a large outbreak in September, Sheriff Irving has not been transparent about whether widespread testing has continued inside the jail. The result, according to Whitley, is that prosecutors and judges assume the jail is a safe environment, when that may not actually be true.

“You go in front of a judge, you want to advocate for your client credibly, and effectively, but we can’t do that,” Whitley said, “because there’s no information, or just blanket statements that seem inconsistent with our client’s experiences.”

Top Photo via CGL Companies

New Virginia Laws Seek to Close ‘School-to-Prison Pipeline’

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When Virginia’s schoolchildren return to in-person schooling after the pandemic, they’ll return to a school system in which criminal punishments for unruly in-school behavior have largely been taken off the table.

The near future of in-person schooling is uncertain due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but Virginia students will return to a system where several penalties for misbehavior have been taken off the table. 

Two new laws seek to stop criminal punishments in elementary, middle, and secondary schools. Sen. Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond, sponsored two measures that passed the Virginia General Assembly earlier this year. The bills went into effect in July but have not yet been widely implemented due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Senate Bill 3 prevents students from being charged with disorderly conduct during school, on buses, or at school-sponsored events. SB 729 removes a requirement that school principals report student acts that constitute a misdemeanor to law enforcement. These are acts that may be considered misdemeanors, such as assault on school property, including on a bus or at a school-sponsored event. 

McClellan’s bills are a victory, said Valerie Slater, executive director of RISE For Youth, a group that seeks to end youth incarceration in Virginia. 

“It gives the control back to principals in their own schools about what actions have to be taken further,” versus which actions can be handled within the school, Slater said.

Virginia state Senator Jennifer McClellan. Photo by Susan Shibut.

Suspension and expulsion are used disproportionately against Black students, other students of color, and those with disabilities, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Those punishments, along with arrests at school, often lead to students having a criminal record, according to the NAACP. The trend is known as the school-to-prison pipeline.

McClellan said she was compelled to introduce these bills after looking at data released by the Center for Public Integrity in 2015 and seeing that Virginia led the nation in nearly three times the rate of referral of students to law enforcement. She then worked with the Legal Aid Justice Center to find trends in what kind of behaviors were being punished and whether there were discrepancies involving which students were being charged. 

“When we started sort of digging into some of the cases that they had had, one of the biggest things kids were referred for was disorderly conduct,” McClellan said. “It was things like a kid on a bus in Henrico County was charged for singing a rap song and a kid in Lynchburg was sent to the principal’s office and kicked this trash can on the way out of class.”

McClellan was the co-patron of bills in 2016 which addressed these issues, including a failed bill which would prevent students from being found guilty of disorderly conduct if the action occurred on school property, school bus, or at a school-sponsored activity.

Lawmakers also passed McClellan’s measure that relieved school resource officers from the obligation to enforce school board rules and codes of student conduct as a condition of their employment. Now that the Virginia General Assembly has a Democratic majority, House Democrats felt that they could pass other legislation to curb the school-to-prison pipeline, according to McClellan.

“The thing that happened in between is we had started making progress on the discipline side, with things like suspensions and expulsions,” McClellan said. “And once you saw we could make progress on that, that gave us the confidence to try again with a new Democratic majority.”

Photo by Bima Rahmanda on Unsplash

A statewide analysis by Virginia Commonwealth University Capital News Service found that Norfolk City Public Schools in the Tidewater district had the most out-of-school suspensions in the state over the past five school years. This includes short-term and long-term suspensions. The data is from the Virginia Department of Education. A student is not allowed to attend school for up to 10 days during a short-term suspension, according to Virginia law. Long-term suspensions last 11 to 45 school days. Virginia students suspended from school are more likely to fail academically, drop out of school, and become involved in the justice system, said a 2018 Legal Aid Justice Center report. 

Norfolk’s school district issued 21,223 out-of-school suspensions in the past five years. Norfolk school officials did not respond to a request for a statement by the time of publication. Richmond City Public Schools was the second-highest district with the most out-of-school suspensions (19,768). Virginia Beach, Newport News, and Fairfax County public schools were also in the top five. The majority of students in Norfolk, Richmond, and Newport News public schools are Black, according to VDOE 2020 fall enrollment data. Almost half of students in Virginia Beach are white and about a quarter are Black. Nearly 40 percent of students in Fairfax County Public Schools are white and almost 30 percent are Hispanic.

Black students face out-of-school suspension at higher rates at a higher rate than white students in schools throughout the Central Virginia region. Even in districts such as Henrico and New Kent, counties that have a majority white student population, often Black students were issued suspensions at a higher rate. Black students in Henrico faced out-of-school suspension almost five times the rate of white students in the 2015-2016 school year. Such racial disparity was presented to the Henrico County School Board as far back as 2012, in a published report analyzing the disproportionate suspension rate. 

Aside from incidents involving weapons, Slater said that instances of misbehavior in school should not be handled by law enforcement.

 “We should not be so quick to involve children in the justice system,” Slater said. “We know that after that first contact, the likelihood that there will be continued engagement exponentially goes up. Once a child has been engaged with the juvenile justice system, they’re more likely to be involved with the adult justice system.”

Slater praised McClellan’s legislation for taking away schools’ ability to charge students with disorderly conduct, saying that the criteria for being charged with that crime is too vague. 

“It basically says that ‘you have caused a disruption.’” Slater said. “Is wiggling in my seat causing a disruption? Is asking to go to the restroom, repeatedly, causing a disruption? Is clicking my pen a disruption? It’s so vague that it’s become a catchall for whatever a particular officer wants to say a student has done.”

David Coogan, a Virginia Commonwealth University English professor and author of the book Writing Our Way Out, teaches a writing workshop at the Richmond City Justice Center He said he has worked closely with incarcerated people whose criminal records stemmed from childhood. 

“Most broadly, it starts in the structure of society, before you even get to school,” Coogan said. 

Coogan said that he sees a pattern in the people he works with at the jail. Children who grow up with few resources and who experience trauma and violence in the school setting later develop addictions or become incarcerated — often both. 

“We all do stupid things as kids, as teenagers,” Coogan said. “When you’re Black and traumatized and living in poverty, the stupid thing you do, to fight back at a school resource officer, is going to land you in a juvenile detention center, and it’s not fair.”

“Handcuffs with black background” by JobsForFelonsHub is licensed with CC BY 2.0.

Though Coogan says McClellan’s bills are steps in the right direction, he believes that more still needs to be done. 

“If you think about all the money and time spent on school resource officers — who are like cops — we need to stop thinking about having cops in school,” Coogan said. “What if we had five times as many guidance counselors — people with training to intervene? What if we had five times as many programs to keep kids engaged after school?”

McClellan agreed with Coogan, and said it starts with how adults in school treat kids. She pointed to cases in which kids with autism or other disabilities are treated unfairly or disciplined by adults who have no idea how to interact with them. 

“Everyone in the school building that interacts with kids, but especially school resource officers and school board members who ultimately make decisions about the code of conduct and discipline, need to have basic training on child brain development,” McClellan said. 

Written by Brandon Shillingford and Anya Sczerzenie, Capital News Service. Top Image: “Prison Bars Jail Cell” by JobsForFelonsHub is licensed with CC BY 2.0.

In Local and Regional Jails, a Patchwork Response to COVID-19

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State and local efforts to keep COVID out of jails have been hobbled by poor oversight and unambitious policy, advocates say.

At the time the Governor announced his early release plan, Letiesha Gordon’s son, Dayon Jones, was serving the final months of a non-violent felony sentence in Riverside Regional Jail, near Petersburg. As soon as the plan took effect, Gordon began a crusade to secure her son’s release. But when she requested an “Offender Appeal for COVID-19 Early Release” form for her son, she says the counselor she spoke with at Riverside did not even know such a form existed. 

In the months that followed, Gordon called the jail repeatedly; she emailed Mayor Levar Stoney, Governor Ralph Northam, and a senator; she sent several letters. “I know that they thought I was crazy but I was just a mother,” said Gordon, who is the founder of the non-profit A Better Day Than Yesterday, which works with incarcerated people after their release. “I didn’t even contact them on behalf of my organization because it was not about business at that point. It was about my son’s safety.”

After Initial Drop, Decarceration Stalls

This past spring the populations of local and regional jails decreased significantly. From March to April, the total population of Virginia’s jails decreased by 17 percent, and the number of people committed for misdemeanors dropped by 67 percent. However this decline was not enough to keep incarcerated people safe from COVID-19, advocates say, and in recent months the rate of releases has stalled. In October, RCJC’s incarcerated population exceeded 700 for the first time since March, rising from a low of 633 in July. Over half of those incarcerated in RCJC are pre-trial detainees, as of October, meaning they are being held prior to conviction.

“It is irresponsible to say that we’re trying to do the best for the people, but we’re placing them in positions where they could potentially die versus getting their day in court,” said Sheba Williams, who directs the non-profit Nolef Turns and serves on Mayor Stoney’s Task Force on Reimagining Public Safety.

On March 19th, as COVID spread through Virginia communities, Governor Northam declined to use his pardon power to release prisoners. Instead, his office issued guidance to local criminal justice officials suggesting they use sentence modifications, issue summonses when possible, and consider incarceration alternatives. Then a month later, in an April special session, the Virginia legislature gave the Department of Corrections (DOC) the power to release inmates with a record of good behavior and less than a year on their sentence: a category that included around 2,000 of the state’s roughly 30,000 prisoners. These statewide release policies impact local and regional jails because people with felony sentences of under three years, including Leteisha Gordon’s son, are usually held under contract in jails. 

Roughly half of those deemed eligible for release by DOC have been released to date.

Lack of Oversight 

Part of the problem, political consultant Jessica Pishko says, is that state and local officials have very little authority over sheriffs, who run local jails and serve on regional jail boards. Beyond the 8th Amendment’s prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment” and an antiquated state law designed to prevent extra-judicial hangings, Sheriffs have almost full discretion over how, or if, they address the risk of COVID in their jails, according to Pishko. (Danville’s sheriff, for example, only made masks mandatory for jail employees after reports of a 72-person outbreak at his jail last month.)

Sheriffs also appear to have the final say on what COVID-related information is revealed to the public. According to Dr. Danny Avula, Director of the Richmond City Health District (RCHD), RCHD is not allowed to release information about COVID rates in Henrico jails or RCJC without permission from those jails’ sheriffs. This has concerning implications. If the Department of Health must have a sheriffs’ goodwill to understand and address health risks inside of local jails, health officials can hardly serve as effective watchdogs in cases of disease outbreak. “There’s little accountability, little oversight, there is zero transparency when we’re talking about the public,” said Sheba Williams, describing the COVID situation in Virginia prisons and jails.

According to Yohance Whitaker of Legal Aid Justice Center, even with significantly reduced jail populations, it is difficult to maintain social distancing in facilities like RCJC. Many local and regional jails have enforced weeks-long periods of isolation as a result. “Prisons and jails and detention facilities are known amplifiers of infectious disease,” Whitaker said. “Measures to keep the illness from spreading like social distancing [and] washing your hands on a regular basis are nearly impossible in such confining spaces.”

A number of inmates interviewed by RVA Mag also questioned the efficacy of RCJC’s lockdown measuring, claiming poor sanitation in common spaces allowed for transmission of the virus even without extended person-to-person contact. According to RCJC inmate Emanuel Crawford, his pod is cleaned once a day by incarcerated people who are not given COVID-informed sanitation guidelines. 

“You might have a lazy inmate who just say look, I’m’a clean this and it’ll be alright – and then you just jeopardized everybody,” said Crawford. “In a situation like this, you should be making it mandatory that certain things be sanitized properly. Not only at night, but in the afternoon. Give us the equipment to do this two or three times a day.”

Jail deputies frequently interact with people experiencing medical or mental health crises but, beyond a high-school education, there are no training requirements for Sheriff’s deputies in the State of Virginia. How, or whether, employees are trained is left up to each sheriff’s discretion. This leads to a dynamic, Pishko says, where deputies with minimal training and no social-work experience are given power over vulnerable, often mentally unwell individuals. “I sometimes compare jails to a hospital,” said Pishko. “Picture a hospital where none of the staff want to be there. You have a bunch of sick people, but you have nurses who are like, ‘Whatever.’ ‘I don’t feel good.’ ‘Whatever.’ It gets scary, people die.”

Riverside Regional Jail. Photo via Facebook.

Administrative Harm 

Our legal system has long been stacked against the accused, especially Black and brown people and poor people. But, along with new dangers, the pandemic has also brought new legal and administrative barriers in Richmond-area jails and courts, limiting individuals’ access to counsel and gumming up an already slow legal process, according to Richmond’s head public defender, Tracy Paner. 

In response to the pandemic, the State Supreme Court has suspended defendant’s statutory right to a “speedy trial,” eliminating the five-month maximum waiting period between trials for people facing state charges. (“Everybody awaiting trial is in a holding pattern,” Paner said in October. “There’s no way for the defense to require it to go forward.”) Meanwhile, federal jury trials were suspended back in April. In Richmond they resumed, at a much-reduced rate, in October and November. This means that, if you were incarcerated in RCJC and received a federal charge in April, you could still be behind bars awaiting your day in court. 

During this period, your access to confidential legal counsel might also have been significantly limited. Since “contact visiting” ended in March, Paner says, lawyers generally have two options for speaking with their clients: through a glass wall or by video. But if a client is in two-week quarantine, either because they are COVID-positive or have recently arrived, the jail requires lawyers to use confidential video-conferencing. This presents two problems, according to Paner. First, the video is often poor quality, and sometimes the tablets inmates use do not work at all. Second, the confidential video-conferencing may not actually be confidential.

“I have seen it, other attorneys have seen it,” said Paner. “We are exiting from the visiting area and we can hear the speaker on the deputy’s computer. We can hear another attorney’s conversation with the client. We have had deputies who think they are helping us listening because there’s a time limit on the video meetings.”

Paner said that, though the public defender’s office has been “very proactive” in seeing bond motions for people with pre-existing conditions, it has not had much success. “The judges are saying things like, well, I know somebody who had it and it wasn’t that bad,” she said, referring to COVID. Richmond Circuit Court Judge Bradley B. Cavedo, who blocked the removal of Confederate statues, has referred to the coronavirus in court as “the wuhan flu.”

Cash Bail Is Alive and Well

In 2018, former Commonwealth’s Attorney (CA) Michael Herring announced that prosecutors in Richmond would no longer seek cash bail for defendants awaiting trial. Though the CA’s office also adheres to this policy under Colette McEachin’s leadership, Paner says prosecutors’ actions still perpetuate the cash bail system.

“The attorneys from the commonwealth do not say the word ‘I object’ to releasing someone in the courtroom for low-level felonies,” Paner said. “But what they do is stand there with records and say, ‘In 1992, he was charged with robbery but it was dismissed.’ That means — wasn’t him, didn’t happen, couldn’t prove it. So they would stand there and bring up things, from 20 years ago or more, that weren’t convictions, in an attempt to sway the judges. The letter of the policy might be followed, but certainly not the spirit.”

“Our policy hasn’t changed,” said Commonwealth’s Attorney Colette McEachin when asked about cash bail. “We still don’t seek cash bail in most situations. Generally, the only time we do is if the defendant is a threat to himself or others, or is a flight risk, which are the two bond determinations that are supposed to be made by statute. Ultimately, anything we recommend is up to the judge, and sometimes the judge agrees with us, and sometimes he doesn’t.”

Whether the fault lies with judges and magistrates, prosecutors, or some combination of both, Richmond’s cash bail continues apace. In early September, The Richmond Community Bail Fund identified 98 people in four local facilities incarcerated because they could not afford bail. (These numbers, acquired by raking through inmate databases and entering Freedom of Information Act Requests, are not comprehensive.) The combined cost of the bonds for these individuals was about $450,000, according to Luca Suede, co-director of the Richmond Community Bail Fund. 

“That’s about a hundred people that judges across different counties have already determined could be released,” Suede said. “Now, obviously everybody should be released. I don’t give a fuck how a judge feels. But in the State’s rhetoric — who has the kind of power to do these releases — there is already criteria that’s being deployed.”

Northam’s guidance to Virginia jails stops short of recommending bail be waived or discontinued, however. Instead, it asks jails to “consider ways to decrease the number of low-risk offenders being held without bail.” 

Protesters at Richmond City Justice Center, June 2020. Photo by Kegham Hovsepian, via Facebook.

“They can get over it together”

In May, Leteisha Gordon’s fears for her son’s safety were confirmed when Riverside Regional experienced COVID outbreak: 36 people at Riverside tested positive, including Gordon’s son. (Fortunately, Dayon Jones did not end up experiencing any serious symptoms of COVID-19.) When Gordon learned her son had tested positive and was on lockdown with another COVID-positive inmate, she called the jail to express her concerns. A sergeant, she says, told her: “They can get over it together.”

“This is somebody that’s helpless,” said Gordon. “He’s in jail. He can’t get to any kind of emergency assistance to help himself. And you don’t have his mother there, so for them to tell me that it was really heartbreaking. You have no idea.”

Finally in June, weeks after her son had tested positive for COVID-19, his counselor called him into his office with Gordon on the phone. He gave her son the form to sign and said it would take three weeks to be processed. After weeks emailing, phone calling and letter writing, Gordon had finally succeeded. A form her son should have had access to months ago — a form that, she insists, would have secured his release as a non-violent offender with asthma — had finally materialized. By that time though, it hardly mattered: Gordon’s son was scheduled to be released on July 13, three days later. 

All her effort didn’t save her son a single day in jail.

Top Photo via Riverside Regional Jail

The Richmond City Jail’s COVID-19 Response? “Torture.”

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People incarcerated at Richmond City Justice Center say a recent tear-gassing by law enforcement endangered their lives.

On August 29th, Tobias Hill was sitting in his cell at the Richmond City Justice Center (RCJC) when the gas began to creep beneath the door. He didn’t know what was happening outside, but as the tear gas burned his eyes and burrowed into his lungs, he did reach one conclusion. He was going to die.

“I’m screaming, ‘Help! I’m ready to pass out, I’m ready to die! Can you please help?'” said Hill, who has multiple pre-existing conditions and mild claustrophobia. “Three of the deputies look at me and just kept walking. I tell them I have asthma, I can’t breathe, I have bronchitis. They just kept going. Didn’t pay me no attention.”

Hill is one of about fifty people who sheriff’s deputies gassed with weapons intended for outdoor use, after cutting off his ventilation and water. Accounts from eyewitnesses suggest the gassing was an act of excessive and unprovoked aggression, one designed to inflict maximum physical and emotional harm on Pod 5G’s inmate population, many of whom were trapped inside their cells.

“I think the guards feel like, because we in cells that mimic a cage, we supposed to be animals or something,” said Theron Moseley, who authored a petition and letter on behalf his fellow inmates in 5G. “We not. We human just like them. We got nieces, we got nephews, we got kids, we got mothers. We human.”

According to Hill, the gassing was the worst thing that has ever happened to him in his life. “I was stuck in this little-ass cell not knowing what the fuck was going on,” he said. “I’m traumatized, to be honest with you. I thought I was going to die.”

After a moment, he reconsiders: “I knew I was going to die.”

The first page of 5G’s petition, titled “Incarcerated Lives Matter!”

“Legitimate questions”

The conflict that would leave Tobias Hill locked in his cell, screaming for his life, began with a level-headed conversation, says Moseley. At around seven that evening, he and about ten others were asking about the coronavirus protocols at RCJC, where over 100 people (13.5 percent of the jail’s population) have recently tested positive for COVD-19.

The group had two primary concerns. First, they were upset about the handling of recent fever on the pod — the individual with the fever had been moved to quarantine, but his cellmate continued living among the general population, according to Moseley. And, second, they did not understand why people from pods with COVID cases were being transferred to their pod, 5G, which had zero reported cases. Such transfers had occurred multiple times in recent weeks, and at least one of the individuals transferred tested positive for COVID-19 ten days beforehand. He did not test negative until after his arrival in 5G, an anonymous source confirmed.

According to Moseley’s letter, in the lead-up to the gassing, protesters informed Sergeant Brown and Lt. Branch that they would lockdown “as soon as the administration start following proper quarantine protocols” by removing individuals coming from pods already exposed to COVID-19. When Branch and Brown were unable to address these concerns, the group demanded to speak with their superior, Major Hunt. Hunt did come to the pod, but he refused to discuss the jail’s COVID-19 protocols; instead, he ordered the protesters to lockdown in their cells and left. A little while later, a deputy came on the intercom and ordered people to stand by their cells. Everyone complied, according to Moseley.

Then the ventilation cut off.

“Man, we’re going to have to take this now because they don’t want to answer our questions, legitimate questions,” Moseley described thinking as they waited.

A slot beside the door to the sally port opened. A tear-gas grenade flew into the pod, spraying smoke. It was quickly followed by two more, according to Moseley; then Sheriff’s deputies in riot gear entered, and soon it was almost impossible to see.

“The entire pod was smoked out,” Moseley said. “It went from a casual conversation, us asking questions, to all chaos.”

RCJC interior. Photo via CGL Companies

“There was no reason for all that they did”

While Hill banged against the door of his cell, screaming for help, Moseley and the other protesters attempted to comply with the deputies’ orders and enter their cells. (“I’m standing in front of my cell, waving my hands with a couple of other guys that weren’t even protesting,” said Moseley.) When the door did not open, he ran to the second floor of the pod, searching for an open cell where he could evade the gas. Soon after, he found himself crammed into cell #26 with at least five other people. (One of the men in the cell had severe asthma and later went to medical to use an oxygen mask, multiple sources confirm.)

Once in the cell, the men found the water had been shut off. According to Moseley, he and others had to dip their t-shirts in the toilet in order to soothe their stinging eyes, and one person drank water out of the toilet to clear his airways. As if this weren’t enough, a deputy outside also sprayed mace beneath the door, according to both Moseley and Travis Brown, the man assigned to the cell.

“There was definitely no reason for them to come and shoot more gas in there or none of that,” said Brown, who was outside cleaning the pod during the conversation that led up to the gassing. “It wasn’t even no threat inside the jail. Usually when you use tear gas and mace, it’s a problem with a riot. There was no reason for all that they did.”

In the midst of the chaos, Moseley and Travis Brown attempted to leave cell #26. On stepping outside, however, they were greeted with a face full of pepper spray by Lieutenant Brown and Sergeant Branch, despite Travis Brown’s attempts to de-escalate the situation.

“As soon as I came out the cell, I tried to go down on my knees like you usually do in any situation in prison to let them know you’ve basically given up or let them know y’all got the authority,” he said. “I tried to go down on one knee but they still maced me anyway.”

“We had to sleep in tear gas and pepper spray”

What angers Tobias Hill even more than the gassing itself, he said, was the way staff abandoned inmates in its aftermath, leaving people gasping and burning in their cells for at least fifteen minutes. (“They literally left us,” he said. “Couldn’t see no one in sight.”) Once staff did return, Hill said the two guards walked right past him, ignoring his cries for help.

After a while, the guards let people access an open-air rec area in order to air out the pod. Though people were given clean sheets to sleep on that night, according to Moseley, they were not allowed to clean the vomit from their cells or take showers for 24 hours afterward. Hill said his wait to shower was even longer — three days — and that his skinned burned the entire time.

“Basically,” he said, “we had to sleep in tear gas and pepper spray.”

Label of the tear-gas grenade model used in the gassing. It was found on the ground afterward and provided by an anonymous source.

After the gassing, someone in 5G found a sticker on the floor with the name of the grenade used. According to a description provided by a retailer, the weapon used — a 5231 Triple Phaser CS Smoke Grenade — is “specifically for outdoor use.”

As many experts have pointed out in the wake of Black Lives Matter uprisings, tear gas is far more dangerous than most law enforcement agencies let on. Even when used outside at protests, chemical agents can have long-term health consequences for anyone in the vicinity, including individuals in nearby houses. In addition, deploying corrosive, inhalable chemicals can raise the risk of coronavirus spread, compromise the body’s resistance to infection, and increase the severity of mild infections. Even outdoors, tear gas and COVID are “a recipe for disaster,” medical researcher Sven Eric Jordt told NPR.

A punitive approach to quarantine

The gassing and medical neglect that Hill, Moseley, Brown, and others experienced are not isolated problems. They are consistent with numerous reports of disorganization, repression, and medical irresponsibility that incarcerated people, activists, and local lawyers have described taking place inside the jail in recent months. Before the outbreak, according to Yohance Whitaker, an organizer with Legal Aid Justice Center, the jail’s COVID-19 protocols were “almost nonexistent.” Now, RCJC’s primary strategy for containing the virus is to put infected or exposed individuals into solitary confinement, often for twenty-three or even twenty-four hours a day. “Just being in isolation is a horrible experience,” Whitaker said. “It’s taxing psychologically and emotionally and physically.”

Those who resist such measures have been subdued by force on multiple occasions. Most recently, on Pod 6G, people were pepper-sprayed for refusing to enter lockdown. The details of the macing incident, according to Julea Seliaviski of RVA26 — an activist in close communication with an eyewitness — are disturbingly similar to the gassing of 5g.

At around 4pm on September 16th, according to Seliaviski, a group of people on 6G refused to enter their cells because they wanted a superior officer to come answer questions about new lockdown procedures, which allowed people to leave their cells for only half the day. Rather than address protesters’ concerns, a team of officers in riot gear entered and sprayed mace from the second story balcony, spreading chemical agents throughout the pod. As in 5G, the water was cut off, according to Seliaviski. People could not wash the pepper spray off their skin until the water was turned on again, at around 10am the following morning.

When asked about recent uses of chemical agents, a spokesperson for the Sheriff’s Office, Stacey Bagby, told RVA Mag, “It is the policy of the Richmond City Sheriff’s Office to use the methods warranted for gaining compliance of resistant or aggressive inmates, especially during incidents when other inmates and/or staff may be at risk.”

Someone incarcerated in another pod in RCJC, who wished to remain anonymous, informed RVA Mag that the sheriff has implemented the same lockdown procedures used in 6G — half the pod out in the morning, half out in the afternoon. Initially, according to the source, the deputies told people the reduced mobility was a health precaution implemented because of an infection on the pod. Even after the infected individual was quarantined and the entire pod tested negative, however, the half-day lockdown was put back in place — this time for “security reasons,” the source was told by a guard.

“When we go in there at four today, we won’t be back out till four tomorrow,” said the source. “So that’s twenty-four hours straight that we haven’t talked to our families. And there’s a pandemic in the world right now.”

RVA Mag has also received unconfirmed reports that a man recently contracted COVID in RCJC and died. An anonymous source close to the matter said the deceased was about sixty, had pre-existing health conditions, and was a “poster kid” for COVID susceptibility. Though the individual was having difficulty with breathing and speaking, jail officers refused his lawyer’s complaints, according to the source, and later died in a hospital. On August 31st, Sheriff Irving told WTVR CBS 6 news that no one had died from COVID in the jail or while in RCJC custody, leaving open the possibility that someone may have died shortly after being released. According to the anonymous source, the deceased was a pre-trial detainee. This means, if these unconfirmed reports are true, he died without ever getting his day in court.

A spokesperson for the Richmond City Health District said the RCHD is not able to comment about reports of a recent death for confidentiality reasons.

Cameron Fobbs, one of the petition signatories, participating in BLM protest.

Seeking justice for “the voiceless”

A common theme among the people interviewed from 5g was sense of outrage and surprise at the degree of force levelled against them. Moseley, Fobbs, Brown, and Hill all insist the protesters did nothing to instigate violence. “We talk about our situation,” Moseley said, describing his pod’s relationship with RCJC deputies. “We don’t fight each other. We not doing all that. So I’m trying to figure out: If we give all that respect, why can’t we get at least some respect back?”

Rather than suppress resistance, the jail’s unwarranted aggression may have galvanized it. Moseley, Hill, Brown, and 32 others have all signed a petition accusing RCJC of excessive force and requesting legal representation in a lawsuit against the jail. The petition is entitled “Incarcerated Lives Matter!” and the letter, which describes the gassing as “torture,” is signed: “Theron T. Moseley and the Voiceless.”

“To say that the pain we all felt was excruciating will be an understatement,” the letter says. “The feeling of being helpless and not being able to control your breathing is terrifying. That pain was so unbearable at times that I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”

Yasmin Sadrudin was on a call with her partner, Cameron Fobbs — one of the petition’s signatories — during part of the gassing. After the phone cut off, she didn’t hear back from him for 24 hours, and was left to imagine the worst. “It was infuriating because the jail kept acting like nothing happened, so then you’re not even given true information on the well being of someone you love,” Sadrudin said in a text. Fobbs was arrested and incarcerated in late July while protesting at Marcus David-Peters Circle; he was on probation for a prior offense at the time.

“His mistakes do not deserve the risk of catching a deadly disease by force,” she said. “All anyone is asking for is that human lives be valued.”

When asked to comment for this article, the Mayor’s Office referred RVA Mag to the Sheriff’s Office.

Top Photo via CGL Companies

The ICE Agents Who Look Like Local Police

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In Prince William County, ICE agents that are visually indistinguishable from local police have been arresting undocumented immigrants. For activists and local elected officials, this comes across as an unjust abuse of power.

Standing on a NoVA sidewalk in his Lady Gaga t-shirt on a hot afternoon, Josh Ayala told a small crowd about how ICE agents took his boyfriend. The agents, he said, presented themselves as local police officers.

“I just want to say fuck ICE with all my heart and all my strength,” Ayala told his fellow protesters on August 23rd. Around fifteen people gathered on a roadside in Woodbridge, VA, near the site of the incident, to protest the detention of Ayala’s boyfriend, Luis Valladares-Cruz, an undocumented immigrant who has been in Prince William County since he was 7. They carried signs and chanted slogans like, “Brick by brick, wall by wall, fire to the prisons and free them all.” One woman carried an American flag and wore an American flag headscarf; another wore a shirt that read, “Cops give pigs a bad name.“

“I would have never let Luis out of my vehicle knowing that they were going to take him,” Ayala told me later in an interview. “I feel like I was robbed.”

Josh Ayala speaks at an August 23 protest. Photo by Henry Clayton Wickham.

Ayala says that, when he saw blue lights flashing in his rearview and pulled over, he and Valladares-Cruz felt they had no reason to worry. Ayala trusted local law enforcement. They are here to protect us and “get the bad guys,” he told me. But the officer who approached the vehicle, wearing a vest with the word “POLICE” and a nondescript gold badge on his chest, was not a Prince William County police officer. In Ayala’s account, the agent said Ayala’s car matched the description of a vehicle associated with a crime in the area.

“We innocently gave them our IDs,” Ayala told me, “thinking, ‘Okay, they’re officers investigating a crime in the area. Let’s help them out.'”

A short time later, Valladares-Cruz was taken into ICE custody, and Ayala was left in shock on the side of the road — “I was literally, like, shaking,” he said. Three weeks later, he is still coming to terms with Valladares-Cruz’s absence. Since Valladares-Cruz was taken, Ayala told me, he has taken to sleeping on the couch. “Now, if I’m in the [bedroom] by myself, I feel like he should be in the living room,” Ayala said. “But in reality, when I come out he’s not there.”

Meanwhile, Valladares-Cruz is confined to an ICE detention center in Caroline County, where a man was recently brutalized after expressing frustration with the prison’s quarantine procedure. When Ayala and I spoke last Friday, Valladares-Cruz had been quarantined in an isolation cell for weeks. Ayala said he complains that he has no distractions or entertainment — “no books, no paper, no pen, nothing” — and compares the prison’s mushy meals to “cat food.” Ayala said Valladares-Cruz was still using communal spaces for dining and showering, which brings the efficacy of the facility’s quarantine measures into question.

At the protest on the 23rd, activists, people directly impacted by immigrant incarceration, and local officials echoed many of Ayala’s concerns. María Mayorquin, a small woman in a canary-yellow blouse, addressed the crowd in Spanish while holding up a crumpled sheet with her husband Edwin Garcia Rogel’s coronavirus test results. Beside her, activist Leonina Arismendi stood translating, a megaphone perched on their shoulder. Rogel has tested positive for the coronavirus along with over 90 percent of the other people detained in ICA-Farmville, and his wife has started a campaign to free him called Devuelvánme Edwin.

María Mayorquin (center) speaks about her husband’s detention in ICA Farmville. Photo via Free Them All VA.

Two local officials, including Occoquan District Supervisor Kenny Boddye, spoke also spoke to the crowd. Boddye described Valladares-Cruz’s detention as an “abduction,” and referenced the recent expiration of Prince William County’s 287G, an agreement that allowed local law enforcement to arrest people and turn them over to ICE. Since 2018, ICE has deported almost 600 local residents under the agreement. “We, all of us, ran last year on saying that this is no longer the Prince William County of the past, where we just rounded people up based on where they come from the color of their skin,” Boddye said. 

According to Valladares-Cruz’s lawyer, Astrid Lockwood with Legal Aid Justice Center, Prince William County’s immigrant community is still recovering from the devastating effects of 287G. Since Donald Trump’s election, she said, “there has absolutely been an increase in the authority that’s been given to [ICE officers] and their ability to act on it with impunity, knowing that there is essentially nothing we can use to say you can’t do this. Because then we’ll just get the pushback from their superiors, and their superiors’ superiors.”

One form this impunity has taken, according to Lockwood, is the restriction of phone private phone call access for clients. According to Lockwood, it can be “almost impossible” to get a private phone call with a client. It took her two weeks to get in touch with Valladares-Cruz.

Although Lockwood could not speaking directly about Valladares-Cruz’s case, she said she has seen a number of videos where ICE offers have “POLICE” printed in large letters across their chest, with only a small patch reading “ERO” for Enforcement and Removal Operations — hardly something you would notice in a moment of fear. “The average person doesn’t know what ERO stands for,” Lockwood said. “All they know is there’s a police officer dragging them out of their car.”

Protesters in Woodbridge on August 23. Photo by Henry Clayton Wickham.

In a statement, a press person for ICE told RVA Mag that “[ICE Officers] did not claim to represent any other law enforcement agency or purpose,” and that, though they travel in unmarked vehicles, “they can easily be identified by their agency-branded badges and protective gear.”

Lockwood, on the other hand, thinks that ICE agent’s lack of transparency is often deliberate. “The cruelty is the point,” she said. “The fear is the point.” As for Ayala, he says his views on law enforcement have shifted since the Valladares-Cruz was taken. “I can’t even look at [police] the same way because of knowing that they allow these individuals to come here and basically act as them,” he said, “I feel like my human rights as a citizen, they were violated.”

For now, Ayala is doing the best he can to support Valladares-Cruz while processing his own emotions. Last week, he said his grandfather was ill and two of his and Valladares-Cruz’s pet quails died. But he has decided it’s best not to tell Valladares-Cruz about such problems, given his already depressing reality.

“I don’t even cry anymore,” Ayala told me.

Top Photo via Free Them All Virginia

ART 180 Gives Public a Glimpse Inside the Lives of Incarcerated Youth with Virtual Reality Exhibit

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How would you feel being confined to a tiny, dark, and isolated jail cell?

Atlas, ART 180’s center for teens, intends to give you a glimpse into what that experience is like with their latest exhibit and installation, “My Reality”, which opened last Friday.

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Created by teens in the program, “My Reality” is an immersive virtual reality experience which places attendees in the shoes of incarcerated youth to hear their stories, see their artwork, and share in their experiences with the juvenile justice system.

The minute you put on the virtual reality headset, you are immediately sent to corridors of the lifelike looking digital cell. A prison cell slightly larger than a walk-in closet consisting of; a bed, a toilet, and a locked door. The stay mimicked the claustrophobia one would experience in a cell and I spent the entirety of the session hoping the door would open – which it didn’t.

Your entire three- minute stay – which felt much longer, to be honest – you are enclosed in the room and hear the narration of the teens who were incarcerated by the Richmond juvenile justice system. Each teen would tell their story and I couldn’t help but be moved by their stories. One kid, in particular, has been locked away for 7 months for a mistake without any trial.

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Photo by Craig Zirpolo

The goal of the exhibit is not necessarily to solve juvenile delinquency and youth incarceration overnight, but it is just to get the viewers to think about what they saw, and what they felt.

It does intend to lead viewers to consider lending a helping hand, or even just change their perspective the next time they run into a teenager that has been condemned by society because of the color of their skin or the area they live.

“Putting folks in large correctional facilities actually creates worse outcomes, actually leads to recidivism and particularly for youth it can be very traumatic,” said Rachael Deane of the Legal Aid Justice Center, the organization who worked along Art 180 for this exhibit to become a reality.

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Juvenile delinquency is a large problem in the state of Virginia, the total amount of juveniles in custody in is 1,563 (188 per 100k) (2013) making it 18th in the nation and higher than the national average of 173(per 100k). Unsurprising, this is more common in low-income areas and unfortunately young black males are usually the target as a result of these situations. The black to white ratio of juvenile imprisonment is 5:1, with Virginia’s numbers being 506 in custody compared to the 93 white youth(2013) according to The Sentencing Project. 

To emphasize these stats, the walls of the ART 180 gallery are covered in art either made by the incarcerated teens or was inspired by their circumstances, some with short stats and blurbs about youth incarceration. According to ART 180, it costs over $171,000 to incarcerate one child for one year in Virginia and $14,000 is the amount spent to educate one child for a year at Richmond Public Schools. 

 Art 180 artists directly worked with youth to help them channel their inner frustrations into something more creative for the “My Reality” exhibit.

The exhibit, which is #PerformingStatistics 3rd annual, was created in partnership with RISE for Youth (a bipartisan coalition a part of Legal Aid Justice Center), Scenic (a virtual reality content studio based in New York City), and artists Kate Deciccio, Roscoe Burnems, Catherine Komp and Mark Strandquist.

“What I did was take them through workshops, we would come in have a warm up, have a casual conversation just to know the guys, then we’d watch a video or poetry performance and from there we’ll just spark up some dialogue it was really just trying to get these guys to understand themselves a little better and the world around them a little better,” said Roscoe Burnems, a “My Reality” contributor and local poet.

This dialogue is what became the audio during the virtual reality experience. The choice to incorporate virtual reality into the exhibit was a no-brainer, as the technology it made for a powerful and novel narrative that one couldn’t experience from any other medium.

“We’re always trying to use art to work with people to understand not only what youth go through in the city, but what their potential is, and so that’s really about stepping into someone’s life and stepping into their shoes, and virtual reality is an amazing tool for that,” said Mark Strandquist, Creative Director of ART 180’s Youth Self Advocacy Through Art program.

“We literally can’t bring 1000s of people into a prison cell and make them know what it’s like to know what be there but we can for a few minutes virtually bring them there and have you understand from the teens perspective,” said Strandquist.

Not all of the teens were on board immediately with making art given their background according to Burnems.

“There was a kid who seemed not totally against the project but kind of like, ‘oh whatever, I’m gonna do what I want to’, he didn’t really care about poetry and none of that stuff, A few weeks in, he was helping lead the discussion and completely invested in it,” said Burnems.

We were all kids at one point and some of us still are and we know kids mainly just want to have fun, if their basic needs aren’t even met, something as simple as having fun is placed on the back burner. Gina Lyles, Program Coordinator for Self-Advocacy Through Art at Art 180 said it comes down to diverting funds to community-based efforts to engage youth. 

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“They(underprivileged youth) don’t have a lot of community-based support, things that steer towards youth development,” said Lyles. Lyles herself had been previously incarcerated as a kid and has since dedicated her life to prevent underprivileged youth to head down the same path she once walked.

“It’s all about funding, that money that the state is using to incarcerated youth could be put towards more community-based alternatives such as; mentoring, workshops,” said Lyles.

ART 180 specializes in one of these alternatives, inspiring youth year-round by using art to give them an opportunity to express themselves and keep them from problem behavior.

“That’s what community-based support looks like to me, keeping a kid close to home and giving them the resources they need it is an alternative to incarceration, we can stop the part of them actually committing crimes if we help support them and give them what they need before they commit a crime and go to jail,” said Lyles.

Beyond the virtual reality installation, the exhibit will include photographs, poetry, immersive audio installations, as well as take-action station will be present for those looking to get involved in local juvenile justice reform campaigns.

“My Reality” will run at ART 180 on West Marshall Street until Nov. 22.

*Cover Photo by Craig Zirpolo

 

Art Sponsored by Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art