Nolef Turns Archives

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

Henry Clayton Wickham | November 24, 2020

Topics: A Better Day Than Yesterday, Cash Bail, Colette McEachin, coronavirus, COVID-19, General Assembly, Legal Aid Justice Center, Levar Stoney, Nolef Turns, Ralph Northam, Richmond City Justice Center, Richmond Community Bail Fund, Riverside Regional Jail, Virginia Department of Corrections

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

“Creative Protests” At Marcus-David Peters Circle Combine Music, Art, and Resistance

Anya Sczerzenie | September 3, 2020

Topics: black lives matter, Creative Protests, George Floyd, Julia Seliavski, Marcus-David Peters Circle, Marwa Eltaib, Nolef Turns, protests, RVA26, Sheba Williams

Organized by RVA26, monthly “Creative Protests” at Marcus-David Peters Circle have given creative voice to a community hungry for positive change, even as the space remains the focus for civil disobedience in Richmond.

It’s a place where you can play a pick up game of basketball outside. It’s a place where a community garden grows, nurtured by volunteers.

It’s a place covered in graffiti: “Black Lives Matter.” “ACAB.” “Fuck 12.”

It’s a place where you can take your kids, your dogs, even your babies. It’s a place where people listen to live music, socially-distanced, and laid out on blankets.

*Morning yoga at Marcus-David Peters Circle. Photo via RVA26/Twitter*

It’s a place with a giant statue of civil war general Robert E Lee, which, unlike Richmond’s other confederate statues, remains standing on its pedestal (for now).

It’s a place of fun, and it’s a place of protest. It’s a place where groups gather to begin marches.

It’s a place that was once simply called the Lee Circle, or the Lee Monument, but has been reclaimed and re-named by community members and protestors. Marcus-David Peters circle, or MDP for short. It has become a community space for many Richmonders.

“Like any birth story, it was birth and then chaos,” said Marwa Eltaib, organizer of the Creative Protests and founder of the anti-incarceration group RVA 26.

RVA 26 is a group of people who were arrested on May 31 during protests, including those at what would become Marcus-David Peters Circle. The group now describes themselves, according to their instagram page, as “organizing against Black incarceration and for Black liberation.”

*Lady E And Friends perform at Marcus-David Peters Circle. Photo via RVA26/Twitter*

In addition to other events, RVA 26 has hosted one Creative Protest event every month of this summer. Along with speeches by activists and organizers, these events feature live performances by local black artists.

“Some are up-and-coming, while some are more established,” Eltaib said. “We try to get new artists out there. We have such a beautiful, eclectic, and diverse array of black artists in Richmond.”

These Creative Protests took place on June 13, July 18, and August 22. They hosted musical artists such as rappers Jason Jamal and Skinnyy Hendrixx, and blues musician Lady E. Some visual artists — such as live painters — have been involved in these events, but the difficulty of doing live art, coupled with fears that the police may come and confiscate the finished product, means that few visual artists have performed.

“If we have a project like that, we need to take more precautions,” Eltaib said.

Performance art, including fire-spinner Venus Riley’s dance with a flaming hoop — the grand finale at the August 22 protest — is better suited for the circle. Eltaib says that she hopes to involve more performance artists, such as dancers, in future Creative Protests.

Police have been removing items from the circle since its inception. Some of the art pieces from previous Creative Protests, as well as a small lending library, were removed earlier in the summer, according to Eltaib. A sign marking the circle as “Marcus-David Peters Circle” was removed in mid-August, though the Richmond police department denied involvement in removing the sign. Recently, a new sign arrived at the circle, declaring its name once again.

*The new Marcus-David Peters Circle sign. Photo via JusticeforMDP/Twitter*

The atmosphere during musical performances was that of an outdoor concert, with people sitting on blankets, talking to friends, and eating. Almost everyone wore a face mask.

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, in-person community events can be few and far between. The spontaneous, decentralized and community-driven nature of the MDP circle makes it so that community is happening all the time.

“That wasn’t our main goal, but it’s a natural effect,” said Eltaib.

The main goal of the space, and of the Creative Protests, is to send a message.

“We founded the first Creative Protest to utilize art to continue the conversation of Black liberation,” Eltaib said. “It’s a wonderful way to get the message across.”

At the Creative Protest, organizers wanted to make this purpose clear. Between musical performances, speeches by organizers reminded people that they weren’t at any ordinary concert. At one event, Sheba Williams, director of the group NoLef Turns, spoke at the event about the difficulties of being labeled a felon, especially as a Black person.

When night fell on the circle, projections were shone onto the Lee monument behind the performers. One was the face of Marcus-David Peters, superimposed with the words “reopen the case”. Another was the label “second place — you tried” on the Lee statue’s base, making it look like a gigantic participation trophy.

The circle, which has been occupied by protestors since the killing of George Floyd, may have seen a lot of artistic creativity on display in the months since, but it is still a protest space.

On August 24, two days after the third Creative Protest, people dressed in black gathered in the circle. They all planned to march in solidarity with protestors in Kenosha, Wisconsin after the shooting of Jacob Blake.

The circle was both the starting and ending point of the march, which wound through neighborhoods before spilling out onto Broad Street, where bike marshals blocked traffic and a few people in cars passed out ice-cold bottles of water to marchers.

Some marchers came on foot, some brought bikes. A few brought dogs on leashes. One protester held a rainbow flag, superimposed with a black power fist. Another protester held a sign painted to look like a spiky coronavirus molecule, which read, “Racism is deadlier than the pandemic.”

Julea Seliavski, who co-organized the Creative Protests with Eltaib and is another founding member of RVA 26, said that she hopes the creative protests can bring more of an audience to the Black Lives Matter cause.

“It comes down to care, it comes down to supporting the Black community,” Seliavski said. “People can come in and be radicalized through art. By radicalized, I mean radical softness, radical love.”

Regarding the future of the MDP circle, Marwa Eltaib said that she wants it to become a healing space for the Richmond community to gather.

“You can find food, you can find friends, you can find someone to have a conversation with,” Eltaib said. “If you’re homeless, home-insecure, anyone. I want everyone who comes to feel pride in what Richmond did together. And, I would like the police to stay out of it.”

Top Photo by R. Anthony Harris

Sending A Highly Visible Message

Carley Welch | August 17, 2020

Topics: billboards, black lives matter, Colette McEachin, DTC RVA, Marcus-David Peters, Marwa Eltaib, Nolef Turns, protests, Rebecca Keel, Richmond Community Bail Fund, RVA26, Sheba Williams, Southerners on new ground

A variety of advocacy groups around Richmond are calling for Commonwealth Attorney Colette McEachin to drop all charges filed against participants in recent Black Lives Matter protests. One group has even posted a billboard.

Driving to the Richmond City Jail, you can hardly miss Commonwealth Attorney Colette McEachin’s face. It’s plastered on a billboard overlooking Oliver Hill Way, and it is not in favor of McEachin’s work as an attorney. Instead, it serves as a demand that she drop all charges against the hundreds of individuals who’ve been arrested and charged with crimes during the recent protests in Richmond. It also asks that she reopen the Marcus-Davis Peters case.

The billboard was paid for by Drop The Charges RVA, a small group of individuals with experience in advertising and communications; it was funded through anonymous donations. DTCRVA leadership said the billboard was made possible by the groundwork done by Nolef Turns, SONG (Southerners On New Ground), the Richmond Community Bail Fund, and other activist groups in the area.

“We are just using our skills to amplify the voices of those doing the groundwork,” a DTCRVA leadership member said in a text message.

Charges facing individuals arrested during the wave of Black Lives Matter protests over the past few months range from misdemeanors that include violating the 8 PM curfew set in the first few days of the protests, to more serious charges such as disturbing the peace and assault of an officer.

Nolef Turns, a local organization dedicated to helping individuals who’ve been charged with a crime get back on their feet, has been working to get charges expunged for those arrested for protest-related offenses since the protests started in late May.

Though Nolef Turns is committed to helping those who have been convicted, the goal where protest-related crimes are concerned is to hopefully avoid a conviction altogether. In Virginia, the state background check includes one’s arrest record, not just their conviction record. This is why getting the charges dropped altogether is vital, according to Nolef Turns Executive Director Sheba Williams, because the process of getting arrest records expunged is a long, drawn-out procedure that someone standing up for social justice shouldn’t have to go through.

“The only people who are eligible for an expungement today are non-convictions. So you go through the process of the court, you pay your bond, you pay for an attorney, you take time off of work to go to court. Then you’re not convicted, but you still have this thing on your background check,” Williams said. “You have to go before the court where you got this charge to request that they expunge it from your record, and that’s the part that we do.”

SONG, a local organization calling for LGBTQ liberation among all races, ethnicities, religions, and backgrounds, has also been fighting to get the charges against protestors dropped, organizing protests of their own and calling on McEachin to drop the charges.

A frustrating part about this particular mission, according to Rebecca Keel, a statewide organizer for SONG, is that McEachin has said numerous times that she will not listen to demands of her constituents. In Keel’s opinion, it’s the responsibility of elected officials to listen to the people they represent.

“I personally voted for Colette McEachin, so I’d like to be listened to by her, but she is refusing to do so,” they said. “I think that that’s a big indicator that a politician is not ready to serve a community, but rather ready to continue to serve laws that do not work. Colette McEachin is serving systems of oppression, rather than her constituents.”

Among those who were arrested and are also calling on McEachin to drop the charges is the group RVA26. RVA26 is a group of individuals of varying races and backgrounds who were part of the 233 people arrested on one of the first nights of protesting, according to group member Marwa Eltaib.

The group name actually originated from the first 26 individuals who were arrested and held on a jail bus that night for “eight or nine hours.” Those 26 people, joined by many others as the night went on, all experienced different outcomes, as some were able to go home after they were released from the bus. while others were kept overnight and into the next day. Eltaib was one of the latter: arrested, crammed into a bus with others in defiance of social distancing guidelines, strip-searched, and left in a jail cell. While there, she says she witnessed what she called “traumatizing” events, including people screaming for medical help or having mental breakdowns.

Eltaib said despite being handcuffed, watching people’s hands turn black and blue from the restraints of handcuffs and zip ties, and not getting a phone call during her booking, she still has gratitude for part of the experience — that the white people who were present were using their privilege for good, and standing by the protesters of color.

“The people that were arrested were more disproportionately Black and brown people, but we still had a good amount of white allies with us that were vocal,” Eltaib said. “It was very traumatizing and horrible, but even still, we were in so much privilege knowing that our community was surrounding us and that we had legal representatives on the outside. And I knew that we had people looking for us and waiting.”

Using their experience to help those who are now getting arrested and facing the same treatment and battles as they once did, members of RVA26 are attempting to build relationships with those currently incarcerated.

“It gets very lonely, and overall mentally,and spiritually draining, being stuck in those jails,” Eltaib said. “So being able to be a level of support for people that are still incarcerated, and then raise funds for that, is what we’re trying to do.”

Richmond Community Bail Fund (RCBF), an organization which supports those who are incarcerated by helping to raise funds for those who can’t afford bail, has focused on protest-related charges in recent months. They too are calling on McEachin to drop the charges against protesters.

RCBF has been around since the spring of 2017, said Luca Connolly, co-director of the organization. Since the protest began, members of the group have passed out flyers at the protests with the organization’s emergency number on them, so individuals who get arrested can call RCBF for help when they get their one phone call.

“There’s usually a hotline volunteer who’s [asking protesters], ‘Do you have the support hotline?’’’ Connolly said. “It’s great now because everybody’s like, ‘Yeah, I have it.’ That feels good. I have met people who have it tattooed on their body, and somebody projected it onto the monument in Marcus-David Peters Circle. You need to be prepared for the worst.”

The organization also builds relationships with those incarcerated, providing support with legal fees, legal advice, child support assistance, clean clothes, and rides home. Connolly said there’s also a hotline number that people can call if they’re calling from outside a jail, which helps provide support for those whose loved ones have been arrested.

RCBF is financed through 100% grassroots fundraising said Connolly, meaning they take no money from foundations or big corporations. She also said they primarily ask for money from white people and people of wealth.

“We kind of understand our work as a reparations-based framework, moving white wealth to liberate black people who are experiencing mass incarceration or police violence,” Connolly said.

Discussing protest-related charges in an interview with RVA Magazine last month, McEachin said she would look at the cases on a case-by-case basis instead of dropping the charges of all protesters as a group, which is what these various organizations are pleading her to do.

“There’s not going to be a general review. It’s a very individualized review, which is what I would think people would want if they were charged,” McEachin said. “Given what I know now, I think there will be some charges left at the end of my review.”

Protesters are facing an array of charges, some of which may sound worse than others. However, Connolly feels that it’s important not to separate the fate of individuals based on what they’re being charged with.

“We are asking Colette McEachin to drop all charges against all protesters,” she said. “No one should experience prosecution for exercising their first amendment right to protest.”

Top Photo via Drop The Charges RVA