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COVID-19 Spreading Through Richmond Jail Once Again

Henry Clayton Wickham | March 11, 2021

Topics: coronavirus, COVID-19, quarantine, Richmond City Justice Center, Richmond Public Defender's Office, Richmond Sheriff's Department, tracy paner

Inmates and advocates continue to report unsafe conditions in the Richmond Jail.

Reports from incarcerated people, activists, family members, and the Richmond Public Defender’s Office suggest that the Richmond City Justice Center (RCJC) may be experiencing its worst COVID-19 outbreak since 91 incarcerated people tested positive in September. 

“We’re kind of operating in the dark,” Richmond’s Head Public Defender, Tracy Paner, told RVA Mag. Though the Public Defender’s Office has received no official information on COVID cases from the Sheriff’s Officer, Paner said it is clear that multiple sections of the jail are currently under quarantine. Lauren Whitley, another lawyer with the Defender’s, told RVA Mag that — according to an RCJC deputy — 11 of 18 pods (or sections) of the jail are under quarantine, either because of exposure or active COVID cases.

RCJC inmate Chontel Coleman, who was recently exposed to COVID-19, says he fears becoming infected in the jail. On Tuesday, February 16th, Coleman says, RCJC employees tested everyone in his pod of the jail, 6E, for COVID-19. Three days later, the results were in. According to Coleman, around half the pod tested positive for COVID-19; fortunately, Coleman tested negative. A few hours later, he said, deputies moved COVID-positive individuals off the pod and told those remaining that their pod would be isolated for two weeks as a precaution. But just two days later, Coleman says, fifteen new people were moved on to the pod, to his dismay.

“We were all still exposed to those previous people who had tested positive,” he said. “We didn’t have a second test to verify that everybody’s still negative before they brought new people inside.”

Current research suggests that, during the four days of infection prior to symptom onset, the chance of false-negative on a PCR COVID test is high—ranging from 100 percent on day 1 to 67 percent on day 4. In other words, if Coleman or others in 6E had just recently been exposed to and contracted COVID, they were still likely to test negative. And, according to Coleman, there are ample opportunities in RCJC for COVID to spread through 6E.

“We don’t have anything to sterilize anything,” Coleman said. “We have four phones for all the people that are inside of this pod. We have nothing to wipe down the phones between phone calls. We have a kiosk that we use with a touch screen — nothing to wipe down or sterilize the kiosk.”

According to Coleman, this recent outbreak is not the first time since September that people on pod 6E have had COVID-like symptoms. Since January, he said, at least three sick individuals have been removed from the pod. Each time, no one remaining on the pod was tested. For this article, RVA Mag also spoke with other incarcerated individuals, some of whom believed they had COVID-19. Multiple incarcerated sources confirmed that many sections of the jail have been placed under COVID quarantine for various periods since late January.

“The main reason why I’m speaking out is because it seems almost like they’re just using us as guinea pigs and trying to test how easily, you know, how rapidly it can spread,” said Coleman. “And then they’re just keeping it all under wraps.”

When RVA Mag contacted the Richmond City Sheriff’s Office to ask about the number of COVID-positive cases, a press person replied with a statement listing recent mass testing and vaccination dates in the jail. The statement did not specify the current number of positive cases in the jail.

When RVA Mag asked Coleman’s mother, Caroline Coleman, about her son’s emotional well-being, she said incarceration has taken its toll on him. “He’s just fearful,” she said. “And I’m fearful for too, that one morning or one night I’ll get a call that he’s sick, he has COVID, or that he’s died as a result of COVID,” she said. “And there’s nothing that I could do about it. I just feel helpless.”

RVA MAG contacted RCJC for this article. Their press person had not replied to our press inquiry at the time this article was published.

Instabowl Wants to Be the Go-To for To-Go

David Tran | January 4, 2021

Topics: COVID-19, Instabowl, Mike Ledesma, Pandemic, Perch, quarantine, richmond restaurants

The latest restaurant to enter Richmond’s ever growing food scene is Instabowl, a fast-casual eatery offering a variety of take-out only bowls from the chef that brought you Perch.

Across the country, restaurants are adjusting their businesses model to adapt to a COVID-19 pandemic world. Many dining establishments are pivoting to strictly takeout and delivery operations as they forge ahead amid the pandemic. 

Instabowl, the newest concept from Perch chef-owner Mike Ledesma, recently opened with the pandemic and its restrictions in mind. Located in the Fan, the fast-casual eatery is purpose-built to serve to-go bowls aiming to serve a variety of cuisine that rotates approximately every 30 days. 

“A lot of restaurants with this kind of format keep the same menu for a long time, but I feel like we can go seasonality,” Ledesma told WTVR. “We can go with what people are wanting to eat, and we can see the trends and make changes faster.”

Restaurant-goers can find dishes similar to Perch staples on Instabowl’s menu, such as its vegan crab cakes and tuna poke bowl, adjusted to fit the virtual to-go concept. In addition to its signature bowls, Instanbowls offers breakfast bowls, soups, and salads.

Its current winter 2020 menu offers dishes with influences from all over Asia — South Asia with its Sri Lankan-inspired kesel muwa curry bowl, Southeast Asia with its seafood pho, and East Asia with an Korean-fused bowl. The restaurant plans to serve dishes inspired by Mexican and Caribbean cuisine, according to Richmond Magazine.

Ledesma told Richmond BizSense he has done research to perfect the take-out experience, making it more immersive and elevated.

“We’re taking what we learned at Perch and expanding it to our new location,” Ledesma said, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “The one key difference is that everything we make at InstaBowl is purposely designed to taste best when you get home, to work, wherever. Between thoughtful preparation and eco-friendly packaging, our InstaBowls are built to travel.”

Instabowl is located at 2601 W. Cary St. and is open daily for breakfast, lunch, and dinner from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Photos via Instabowl RVA/Facebook

The Amazon Trail: But…

Lee Lynch | December 17, 2020

Topics: coronavirus, COVID-19, Election 2020, hummingbirds, Pandemic, quarantine, The Amazon Trail

At the end of a long, extremely difficult year, Lee Lynch tries to find the silver linings to the many clouds that hung over us all in 2020.

The year 2020 wasn’t a total bust, except for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who should not have died or have been permanently harmed by COVID-19. In the U.S., many lay those deaths and disablements at the hands of the greedy, power hungry 2020 administration and its followers. 

Personally, I’ve been taking inventory of the bad and the good with my sweetheart, and finding some surprises. 

Yes, over seventy-four million Americans voted to keep the traitorous officials in office, but eighty-one million plus voted to restore our democracy. 

There are arms-bearing fanatics at the gates, but they have served to expose long-entrenched enemies of this country: racism, misogyny, religious zealotry, fear of any kind of difference, from xenophobia to homophobia. I trust many Americans are finally acknowledging these defects in ourselves. 

I couldn’t see my family this year, but I can call them without the long distance charges that accrued when I was a kid and my mother dialed her family once a week at low Friday night rates, if no one was on the party line.

To compound that loss, our much-loved niece is sick and in pain from cancer treatments, but the treatments will cure her and then she’s going to treat herself to Disneyland. 

We lost our good and gorgeous gray cat Bolo, but we’ve adopted a shelter cat and a foster dog.

A long-term couple, old friends of ours, are no longer together, but are finding their ways. 

Our perfect lesbian neighbors are moving away, but now are our fast friends and are trying to find a buyer compatible with us.

We endured colonoscopies, but have clean bills of health.

COVID isolation made me put on the pounds, but I’ve already lost more than I gained. 

My sweetheart has a demanding job with long hours, but with her sacrifice, we can afford our goofy, loving cat and dog.

We had to give up feeding seed and suet to the birds when rodents discovered the food source — and our house — but our sugar water feeders were so swarmed by hummingbirds that everyone, from friends to delivery people, delighted in coming to our door. The hummers outnumbered humans enough to relax their shimmery bodies and let us watch them from inches away. Other neighbors provided for the birds we lost.

The roof needs replacing like, last summer, but by staying home we’ve saved enough money to get it done next spring.

Our neighborhood cancelled the monthly potlucks, but I’m no longer exposed to that ridiculous number of homemade desserts.

Speaking of food, the women’s lunch, the Mexican lunch, the men’s breakfast, and worst of all, Butches’ Night Out — all were cancelled in 2020, but have I mentioned my clothes suddenly stopped shrinking?

My county just entered the extreme risk category for COVID, but I know no one who has gotten sick and we tested negative, thanks to our ability to isolate. 

A beloved old friend died, but we had one last joyous visit in the mountains around Crater Lake in Oregon before her last decline and her spouse is going to, slowly, be alright.

Top conferences like the Golden Crown Literary Society and Saints and Sinners went virtual. I missed getting together with friends, other readers, and writers, but the popularization of Zoom and Duo and Skype have strangely given us perhaps more in-depth encounters than hurried lunches and large group dinners.

Shopping became an infrequent, rushed chore, but impulse buying, useless accumulation, and shopping as fun may help save the planet.

Between the plague and the threat of a Totalitarian state, I feared my time on earth had been shortened, and it still might be, but day to day I’ve had more time than ever to finish a book, start another, be with my sweetheart, and just be.

For me, the word “but” has become synonymous with the word “gratitude,” as in: the 2020 occupier of the White House severely damaged our country and my gratitude to everyone who helped oust him is strong — no buts about it. 

Copyright Lee Lynch 2020. Top Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash.

The Psychological Cost of RCJC Quarantine

Henry Clayton Wickham | December 14, 2020

Topics: Colette McEachin, coronavirus, COVID-19, Isolation units, Legal Aid Justice Center, Pandemic, quarantine, Richmond City Health District, Richmond City Justice Center, Richmond Sheriff's Department

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 of 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

Post Sixty Five Returns With New Single, ‘Middle Child’

Will Gonzalez | December 4, 2020

Topics: Middle Child, Post Sixty Five, quarantine, RAWLS, richmond bands, richmond music, Taylor Bess

Spurred on by pandemic-provided alone time and inspired by the loss of a loved one, the Richmond/Charlottesville indie-rock quintet brings us their first new music in three years.

Over three years removed from their last release, Richmond-via-Charlottesville indie-rock band Post Sixty Five has released a new single, entitled “Middle Child.”

The track has been part of the band’s live rotation for some time already, and was actually started way back in early 2018, before the band had decided to relocate to Richmond. Each of the five-piece’s members made the move one by one over the course of that year.

“It wasn’t collective, which is maybe the wildest thing about it,” said Kim McMasters, one of the band’s guitar players. “I think we were all sort of feeling saturated with Charlottesville, we’d been there since college and had seen a lot of things change, and we needed a better place for the music to grow and also for us to grow. So it was kind of this weird domino effect.”

“There are cool people doing stuff in Charlottesville, people that we love, but there’s just not that many people there,” said Matt Wood, the band’s bass player. “The scene’s just not that big.”

Between rehearsal spaces and their own homes, “Middle Child” was the first song recorded by the band entirely on their own. It was mixed by Taylor Bess, who plays in RAWLS, and some notable gear was used during recording, including a Red Panda Tensor delay pedal for the oscillating ambient sounds heard in the background, and a Line 6 Helix, which was used to record the fuzzy bass guitar. One of the synthesizer tracks on the song was recorded back in 2018, but most of the rest of the song’s tracks were done more recently. The band wasn’t afraid to add more layers to the song than would be possible to play in a live setting.

“I think because we knew there were not gonna be shows for a while, we felt a little bit more comfortable pushing the limits of recording,” said McMasters. “You have so many more hands when you’re recording because you can add layers and layers of yourself.”

The band’s members have stayed mostly isolated from each other over the past several months, but besides practicing in person, the way they’ve always been crafting songs isn’t much different from how they have to do it now. Hicham Benhallam, the band’s singer and primary songwriter, records an idea for a song on his own and then sends it to the others over the internet. Over the years, the band has amassed a large Google Drive folder of song ideas from this method.

“When quarantine started, I had realized that, for maybe the first time in my eight or nine years of writing songs more or less seriously, the fact that I do things alone was gonna come in handy,” said Benhallam. The band’s productivity writing and recording hasn’t wavered even though they haven’t been able to meet in person as a whole.

“Outside of working on these songs, I’ve actually struggled quite a bit to stay creative and motivate myself to work on stuff. I think personally I’m motivated a lot by the desire to play live and make music in the moment with my friends, and not being able to do that has been challenging,” said Wood. “But this has been a nice little light, because it’s still collaborative and there’s a lot of great communication that we’ve been able to do in spite of the circumstances, and it’s been great for me.”

Photo by Joey Wharton, via Post Sixty Five/Facebook

The song’s lyrics are about Benhallam’s father, who passed away a few months before the song began being written. Benhallam, who was 24 at the time, says it was a loss he was not prepared for and not equipped to deal with at the time.

“I didn’t have the emotional language, didn’t have the bandwidth, didn’t have good emotional examples to be like ‘Hey, I’m a guy who’s grieving for his dad, and I’m far away from home,’” said Benhallam. “That first verse is that initial moment of sorting it out over the first few months. The second verse is, I think, with a little more recall, trying to just remember this as much as possible about this person who is no longer around.”

Post Sixty Five is planning to release another single soon, entitled “Crowdsurfing,” although no date has been determined yet. For now, “Middle Child” is available as of today for streaming on Bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotify, and Google Play.

Top Photo by Joey Wharton, via Post Sixty Five/Facebook

“Let’s Get Better Together in Quarantine”: Side By Side’s LGBTQ Challenge

Jamie McEachin | October 23, 2020

Topics: Capital One, coronavirus, COVID-19, LGBTQ Challenge, quarantine, Side By Side, Ted Lewis

Why not make use of this time in quarantine? That’s the question Side by Side, a LGBTQ youth non-profit, is posing to their community. The organization is challenging Richmond to engage in self-improvement, and to raise $30,000 in the process. 

The challenge began Oct. 11, on National Coming Out Day, and will continue until Friday, Nov. 13. “Let’s Get Better Together in Quarantine” is sponsored by Capital One and is a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign for Side by Side and LGBTQ youth in Virginia. 

“We’re excited to create an engaging, socially-distant event that builds community,” Side by Side executive director Ted Lewis told RVAHub. “All the money raised will go to support LGBTQ+ youth living in Virginia.” 

The challenge is calling for participants to raise money while committing to self-betterment goals, beginning with an entry fee of $25. Side by Side is encouraging challengers to set goals for physical fitness, intellectual growth, home improvement, civic engagement, and artistic endeavors. 

Some examples of goals, provided by Side by Side on their website, include running or walking every day of the challenge, learning more about racial inequity and social justice, organizing closets, signing up to be a poll worker or to canvass voters, and learning 30 TikTok dances. 

Side by Side wants participants to share their goals and get their friends and families involved in the challenge, either by participating themselves or donating to their campaigns. 

During the 30 days of the challenge, Side by Side will be hosting virtual events on social media with local businesses or entertainment figures that have worked with the non-profit in the past. For the event’s participants, a local business will donate a prize to be won with a raffle. At the end of the challenge, Side by Side will give a “grand prize” to the individual or team that raised the most money for the cause. 

The funds raised by the challenge will go to LGBTQ youth in Virginia.

This project is a continuation of the mission of Side by Side, which “is dedicated to creating supportive communities where Virginia’s LGBTQ+ youth can define themselves, belong, and flourish.”

To donate or register for Side By Side’s LGBTQ Challenge, go to secure.frontstream.com/lgbtqchallenge.

Image via Side By Side/Facebook

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