HungryBlues

Hungry Blues Has MOVED

This blog now lives at

http://hungryblues.net

Please update your bookmarks, blogrolls, rss feeds, etc. accordingly.

All comments and trackbacks on this site are now closed.

All existing content, including comments, has been migrated to the new site.

I will continue to maintain this site until I finish the long, tedious process of manually updating all of the internal links on the new site. Until that process is complete, internal links on older posts may take you back to this site.

If you want to comment on a post you have found here, copy and paste the title of that post into the search box in the sidebar of the new site. The search result should take you to the post in the new site.

For more on the site migration see this page on hungryblues.net.

Hunger Strike Calling for Blanco to Provide a Fair Election – Call to Join/Support evacuees

Tens of thousands of voters will be disenfranchised in the April 22nd
election in New Orleans, most of them Black. State officials know it, and
they know how to prevent it - by providing satellite voting for displaced
New Orleanians outside the state of Louisiana.  But despite large grassroots
efforts demanding satellite voting, the state has refused to take the
necessary measures for ensuring a valid election process and setting up
satellite voting. The only thing preventing this important election from
becoming a fair election is one signature by one person: Gov. Kathleen
Blanco.

Hillary Charlot and two other displaced survivors are set up below the steps
of the State Capitol.  They are taking part in a hunger strike to pressure
Governor K. Blanco to sign an executive order to postpone the election until
satellite voting can be put in place.  They will stay until Governor Blanco
takes appropriate action to ensure a fair election, or until the day of the
election.

Please Join Us

For the evacuees' voice to be effective, they need as much support as they
can get.  If you can, please join them in Baton Rouge today through the
scheduled 4/22 election date, either to participate in the hunger strike or
to stand in solidarity with them and the cause for a just election.

Contact James Rucker (415.505.9048 or [email protected]) if you have
questions or are able to provide help in any way.

Forward this to anyone you know who might be interested in participating in
or supporting the effort.

(Via Jordan Flaherty.)

VOICES FROM THE GULF COAST - Special Issue of Dollars & Sense Magazine

March 29, 2006
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Chris Sturr
or Amy Gluckman
617-447-2177

VOICES FROM THE GULF COAST

THE STORIES YOU HAVEN’T HEARD
ABOUT
HURRICANE KATRINA & GULF COAST RECONSTRUCTION

When Hurricane Katrina struck six months ago, the mainstream media was shocked to discover the scope of poverty in New Orleans. And that’s about as deep as the coverage has gone.

Dollars & Sense: The Magazine of Economic Justice has just released its 56-page special issue (March/April 2006) on Katrina. In it, you’ll discover how Katrina exposed—and has intensified—a whole range of unjust systems of racial and economic domination.

Did you know:

• When Katrina struck, the New Orleans jail housed about 6,800 prisoners, including violent felons but also plenty of people awaiting arraignment or trial, like a guy arrested for reading Tarot cards without a permit and homeless people arrested for begging or sleeping on the street. Prisoners were locked in first-floor cells as the water rose; some spent days standing in sewage-filled cells with little food or water. Meanwhile, the facility’s scant two-page evacuation plan was on “this guy’s computer” that got flooded.

But the story goes back much farther. The jail’s population has increased eightfold since the mid-1970s—while the city’s population has dropped. Why? Because the parish sheriff makes money for each prisoner he houses. As one sheriff commented, “fewer inmates translates into less revenue for the jail.” Locking up fewer New Orleanians would mean shrinking the sheriff’s fat patronage-based fiefdom.

• When Katrina struck, it devastated nearly the entire Mississippi coast, in some places for miles inland. Thousands lost their homes. But state and federal relief and reconstruction plans are doing little to help people rebuild their homes or find other housing. In Mississippi, Gov. Haley Barbour decided to spend the state’s entire $5.3 billion federal Katrina relief grant on retroactive flood insurance for otherwise insured homeowners—not a penny for renters, uninsured homeowners, or to repair public housing.

But the story goes back much farther. For years, redevelopment plans in coastal cities like Biloxi and Gulfport have been endangering low-income and black neighborhoods. “There are people here who’ll tell you that developers and local politicians have been trying to flood us out of existence, because with each piece of land, they haul in a bunch of red clay, which is semi-impervious, dump it in the wetlands to build up land on which to put a slab or a parking lot, then on the slab they put a building, a big ‘ole Wal-Mart or something,” says Mississippi historian and community organizer Derrick Evans.

• When Katrina struck, the flooding in New Orleans left behind a layer of toxic sediment—contaminants include arsenic and diesel-fuel substances—in neighborhoods throughout the city. The EPA has not begun any cleanup of the sediment. Government agencies are recommending that returnees wear protective gear like Tyvek suits when they work on their homes but, as environmental justice activist Monique Harden notes, “not one government agency provides this protective gear to people returning to the area.”

But the story goes back much farther. For years, low-income and black communities in Louisiana have faced the massive legal(!) dumping of toxic pollutants. In fact, the historic African-American community of Mossville, La., is the focus of the first-ever environmental human-rights lawsuit brought against the U.S. government, now pending before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States.

These are just some of the in-depth stories you’ll read in this special issue of Dollars & Sense. The issue includes:

• Repopulating New Orleans – How did San Francisco do what a top economist says New Orleans cannot?

• Gone to Mississippi – A journey along the state’s devastated coast

• Activist Perspectives on Katrina: Three Interviews

Mississippi historian and activist Derrick Evans – “Ground Zero of Someone Else’s Future”
East Biloxi community activist Jearlean Osborne – “The Storm of Life after Katrina”
Environmental justice activist Monique Harden – Katrina Hits Cancer Alley

• Down by Law – Orleans Parish Prison before and after Katrina

• Bringing Them All Back Home – Housing in New Orleans, six months later

• SPECIAL PULLOUT CENTERFOLD – Rogues’ Gallery of Katrina Profiteers / Map of the Katrina Diaspora / Roster of progressive Gulf Coast organizations

• And more!!!

Authors and editors available for interviews – contact Chris Sturr or Amy Gluckman at (617) 447-2177.


Founded in 1974, Dollars & Sense explains the workings of the U.S. and international economies and provides left perspectives on current economic affairs. It is edited and produced by a collective of economists, journalists, and activists who are committed to social justice and economic democracy. 

Ground Zero of Someone Else's Future

The March/April special Katrina issue of Dolars & Sense magazine will be in print any day now. In the meantime, a few of the articles are available online. One of the articles we've posted is my interview with historian and activist Derrick Evans. Derrick lives in Turkey Creek, MS, a post-emancipation African American settlement, incorporated as part of Gulfport, MS a little over ten years ago. He is the founder and director of an innovative community development corporation, Turkey Creek Community Initiatives.

Here's an excerpt from the interview:

DE: Even though I grew up here, I didn't know even a fragment of a fraction of what there is to know about the ecological identity of the place here, and it has turned out to be very important information that then translates into good urban planning.

There's a cultural landscape, there's a sociological landscape, there's the class and race distribution, and there's also the ecological profile. And what you'll find is that the unresolved problems pertaining to any one of those issues can be overlain on a map: that the lowest-lying land is typically where black folks, generations ago, would have acquired their land; where they would have settled and developed their communities, which would have been the least disturbed by 20th-century infrastructure; and that now, in the wake of a "Mississippi miracle," the economic revitalization of the coast, for example, the advent of dockside casinos, would be the most ripe or prime for redevelopment. Not at all unlike Roxbury in Massachusetts. Roxbury lies smack in the middle of the only direction for the city of Boston to revitalize, regardless of what the priorities are, whether it's to build more skyscrapers or provide more housing for middle- and higher-income folk. Likewise, we here are sitting in the same boat as Harlem, or neighborhoods in San Francisco and elsewhere, sitting in ground zero of somebody else's future.

So I've formed partnerships with some pretty nontraditional "civil rights activists"--like ladies from the Audubon Society, who now stand with us to protect the creek. Now that it's publicly utilized for birding and for kids to go canoeing and learn about native habitat, that helps ward off sprawl. The church here, Mount Pleasant, got involved and created an environmental ministry because of this trans-formation of looking at ourselves and the ecological context around us.

This is really important because this is a low-lying area, a very small watershed. We get 70 to 80 inches of rainfall per year that falls into a 17,000-acre bowl. A lot of water, small area--not a good place for a whole lot of what we call "impervious surfaces" like rooftops, parking lots and roadways without some provision being made to re-create the natural function of the watershed so that low-income communities like Turkey Creek, North Gulfport, Forest Heights, or even more affluent areas like Long Beach to our west, don't flood, which historically they didn't.

There are people here who'll tell you that developers and local politicians have just been trying to flood us out of existence, because with each piece of land, they haul in a bunch of red clay, which is basically impervious, dump it in the wetlands to build up land on which to put a slab or a parking lot, and then on the slab they put a building, a big 'ole Wal-Mart or something.

During Katrina, my mother was rescued from a house--the water reached her chest. She was with her 95-year-old husband, who never had and never would evacuate before any storm out here, because there was never a need. We have traditionally had woods behind us for thousands of feet as a windbreak, and hundreds of acres of wetlands to handle the runoff. But nobody had even done a comprehensive assessment of the total loss of wetlands to make it clear that houses three and a half miles north of the beach would be flooded to the degree that they were.

(Whole thing.)

If you don't already have a subscription, you'll be able to pick up the March/April issue at one of these newsstands. (If you made a donation for my travel to MS, you'll be receiving a copy with your thank-you.)

Before Katrina: Modern Day Debtors' Prison In Gulfport, MS

Gulfport, MS was in the news over the weekend with a jaw-dropping story. Saturday's US News & World Report told of a class action suit against the city, concerning what amounted to a debtors' prison before Hurricane Katrina:

Last July, a homeless man named Hubert Lindsey was stopped by police officers in Gulfport, Miss., for riding his bicycle without a light. The police soon discovered that Lindsey was a wanted man. Gulfport records showed he owed $4,780 in old fines. So, off to jail he went. Legal activists now suing the city in federal court say it was pretty obvious that Lindsey couldn't pay the fines. According to their complaint, he lived in a tent, was unemployed, and appeared permanently disabled by an unseeing eye and a mangled arm. But without a lawyer to plead his case, the question of whether Lindsey was a scofflaw or just plain poor never came up. Nor did the question of whether the fines were really owed, or if it was constitutional to jail him for debts he couldn't pay. Nobody, the activists say, even bothered to mention alternatives like community service. The judge ordered Lindsey to "sit out" the fine in jail. That took nearly two months.

[U]p until Hurricane Katrina hit, [Gulfport police were] beating the pavement looking for those who owed fines for things like public profanity--at $222 a pop. The result of Gulfport's fine-reclamation project was that while it collected modest sums of money, it also packed the county jail with hundreds of people who couldn't pay. The Southern Center for Human Rights filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Gulfport last July. Attorney Sarah Geraghty says that before bringing the case against the city, she witnessed hundreds of court adjudications involving Gulfport's poor in which no defense attorney was present or even offered. Many defendants, Geraghty said, were obviously indigent, mentally ill, or physically disabled, like Hubert Lindsey; some had been jailed for fines they had already paid. One mentally ill woman attempted suicide by jumping from an elevated cell in the county jail after she was picked up for having failed to pay several city fines; the lawsuit alleges that police then grabbed her again on the same charge a few months later, causing her to miss the surgery scheduled to fix the broken bones in her feet.

As we attempt to understand the observable disparities in who gets relief and what gets rebuilt, it is important to keep in mind the city's demonstrated attitude towards its poor. It is also important to keep in mind what strips of pavement the city was beating and whom it tended to be looking for. The Amended Complaint from the lawsuit, which attorney Sarah Geraghty has sent me, describes

a special force of police officers charged with patrolling the streets of Gulfport to arrest citizens who have failed to pay fines assessed by the Gulfport Municipal Court. These officers conduct periodic sweeps, during which they search the streets for people who look as though they might the City old fines. During these sweeps, the officers go into predominantly African-American neighborhoods and stop people in the streets without any independent reason or suspicion, but for the sole purpose of checking to see if they owe the City old fines. Those who owe fines are taken to jail.

The state of Mississippi has the highest percentage of Black Americans in the country [PDF]. Second is Louisiana. Mississippi and Louisiana are pretty much tied for the highest poverty rates in the US, both hovering just below 20% statewide. We cannot discuss the effects of Katrina and the issues around reconstruction without serious, ongoing considerations of race and poverty.

Further Reading
• Sun Herald, "A lawsuit alleges that practices in Gulfport's Municipal Court are creating a DEBTORS PRISON"
• Southern Center for Human Rights Indigent Defense Cases In The News

(Cross posted on the d&s blog.)

From Sea To Shining Sea

From Baltimore to San Francisco, with Chicago and most other places in between . . .

I received this letter from Mary Ratcliff via the SF Bay View email list. In her email to the list, Ms. Ratcliff added that "Phone calls to the mayor's office, (415) 554-6141, and/or the mayor's press office, (415) 554-6131, would be helpful."

Francisco Castillo
Deputy Director of Communications
Office of Mayor Gavin Newsom
City Hall
San Francisco, California

Dear Francisco,

Please bring this matter to the attention of the mayor right away.

Bayview precinct officers visited the home of Bay View managing editor and staff writer Ebony Colbert again this morning – at 7 a.m. We cannot imagine any other reason for the visit than a resumption of the intimidation campaign that began after we published an editorial by Ebony on Oct. 19 (http://www.sfbayview.com/101905/wakeup101905.shtml). Ebony’s latest story about the SFPD, this time prompted by the video scandal, was posted to our website yesterday (http://www.sfbayview.com/120705/truecolors.shtml).

The officers’ visits began a few days after the Oct. 19 editorial came out, the same day Mayor Newsom called Bay View publisher Willie Ratcliff asking him to retract Ebony’s editorial. They continued several times daily for several weeks (http://www.sfbayview.com/110205/sfpdstung110205.shtml) with gradually decreasing frequency until about a week ago. This morning they resumed.

The excuse for every visit is “a 911 hang-up call.” But Ebony’s home phone stopped working the day the visits started. It’s unplugged and stored in a closet. She uses her cell phone instead. No one in her household – consisting of mom and dad and two little ones, a 2-year-old daughter and 11-month-old son – is calling 911.

Last night, Ebony was up until 3:30 a.m. with a teething baby. Getting awakened by the police at 7 a.m. didn’t set well. She was born and raised in Bayview Hunters Point and lives here now. She is very familiar with the behavior of officers from the Bayview station; one of them is her relative. A brilliant and caring young woman, she wants and works hard to uplift her community.

She simply wants the SFPD to do their job, to protect and serve, not occupy and terrorize her neighborhood. If those words sound strong, consider the terrorism of Sept. 9, when several officers chasing 18-year-old Tyrelle Taylor on foot shot him repeatedly in the back, then, when he had fallen on a neighbor’s floor face down, threw themselves on him and viciously beat him in what could be nothing less than an attempted murder.

She also wants an end to the economic lockout of the people of Bayview Hunters Point, especially from City-funded construction jobs, like those on the Third Street Light Rail project. Please remind the mayor that the $125 million maintenance barn for that project is yet to be built, and ensuring that BVHP builds it – that most of the contracts and jobs, including on-the-job training, go to our people – would greatly uplift this community and win the mayor some good will.

Ebony and her peers know that once, when 10,000 of the jobs at the Hunters Point Shipyard were held by people living in Hunters Point, peace and prosperity characterized this community. They also remember that in September of 1966, when those jobs were being phased out and people’s frustration and fury at joblessness (nearly all other jobs then, as now, were off limits to Black people) and police brutality (shooting 16-year-old Matthew Johnson in the back and killing him, see page 15-16 in http://www.bvhp-pac.org/ConceptPlan.doc and many other sources) exploded into an uprising, the young people did not destroy their community.

They let SFPD know that they were not needed in Hunters Point by blocking police from entering any of the streets leading east from Third Street. Instead of commending the youngsters for a largely peaceful protest, tanks rumbled up and down Third Street and SFPD sharpshooters lined up three rows deep on Third Street and shot into the Bayview Opera House, where youngsters had fled for sanctuary, hitting several of them.

Francisco, please tell the mayor that, for the same reasons as in 1966, Bayview Hunters Point is once again close to the boiling point. The video scandal and the looming specter of an execution at San Quentin on Tuesday – which we pray the governor will reject – could lead to another uprising.

Frustration and fury over joblessness and police brutality and disrespect is now a challenge squarely facing Mayor Gavin Newsom. Current feeble attempts at job training and policing won’t cut it. Blatant attempts to intimidate a young writer with the courage to speak truth to power merely intensify community outrage.

I am available by phone 24/7 and look forward to discussing these issues with you.

Mary Ratcliff, executive editor
San Francisco Bay View
www.sfbayview.com

Hear Peter Wagner Speak About Prison Policy

I received the following announcement from Peter Wagner's Prisoners of the Census email list:

Tomorrow, Saturday Dec. 3 in Providence RI, I'll be giving the keynote lecture at the "U.S. Prison System: Community and Political Impacts" conference. My lecture will be at 1pm in Starr Auditorium, MacMillian 117
at Brown University. This conference is organized by Students for Sensible Drug Policy, Education Department, Africana Studies, Brown Green Party, Brown Democrats, Democracy Matters, American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for Informed Democracy, and Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance.

Next Saturday, Dec. 10, I'm going to be in New York City as the guest speaker at the Community Service Society of New York Roundtable Discussion on Prisoner Re-entry Issues. The discussion is from noon to 3pm in Conference Room 4A at 105 East 22nd Street.

More info about Peter Wagner:

Peter Wagner, JD, Executive Director. Peter Wagner teaches, lectures, and writes about the negative impact of mass incarceration in the United States. His current focus is on working to demonstrate - through graphics, legal research, and state-by-state analyses - the distortion of the democratic process that results from the U.S. Census Bureau's practice of counting the nation's mostly urban prisoners as residents of the often remote communities in which they are incarcerated. The New York Times editorial board has twice supported his efforts to change the way prisoners are counted, and the Boston Globe identified him as the "leading public critic" of the prisoner miscount. He has presented his research at national and international conferences and meetings, including a Census Bureau Symposium, a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, and a keynote address to a conference at Harvard University. Mr. Wagner's publications include Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in New York (2002); The Prison Index: Taking the Pulse of the Crime Control Industry (2003); and, with Eric Lotke, Prisoners of the Census: Electoral and Financial Consequences of Counting Prisoners Where They Go, Not Where They Come From, [PDF] 24 Pace L. Rev. 587 (2004).

Also see the Prisoners of the Census and Prison Policy Initiative websites.

Equality in Education - Day of Action

[If you are in the Boston area and are free tomorrow afternoon, come support this action. --BG]

Join us as we gather 400 supporters to represent the number of Massachusetts high school graduates every year who are denied access to higher education.
Let's show the legislature that the everyone deserves the right to an education.

The event will run from 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM and be held at the Grand Staircase.

Get more information

To RSVP, please contact Carlos Saavedra at csaavedra AT miracoalition DOT org

(From the information link, above:)

The Issue
Each year around 400 hundred high achieving students, who have lived in Massachusetts for most of their lives, are unable to pursue higher education because of their immigration status. Currently, students without permanent legal status must pay out of state tuition to attend state and city universities and colleges. Out of state tuition is three to five times the cost of in state tuition. As most of these students cannot afford to pay out of state tuition, they are forced to forego college and work in low-paying, low-skilled jobs.

The In-State Tuition Bill S. 764/ H. 1230
The bill allows students to pay the same in-state tuition rates as their peers at public colleges and universities provided they have attended a Massachusetts high school for three years and have graduated or received the equivalent of a diploma. If the student is not a legal permanent resident, they must sign an affidavit stating that they have filed an application to become a legal permanent resident, or will file an application as soon as they are eligible to do so.

Current Status
New Mexico, Texas, Utah, California, New York, Illinois, Washington, Kansas and Oklahoma have already passed similar bills. Governor Romney vetoed the bill in Massachusetts in June 2004. This session the bill was reported favorably out of the House Ways and Means Committee and is currently awaiting a full vote on the House floor. Governor Romney is expected to once again veto the bill, therefore we need a 2/3rds majority in the House to move forward. We are currently counting votes and urging House leadership to bring the bill up for a full floor vote.

Also see this, which explains that nationally "approximately 65,000 undocumented students . . . graduate from high school every year without the opportunity to go to college."

FEMA Does Vote Suppression

One of Spencer Overton's colleagues, Professor Nate Persily, has first hand info on how FEMA is refusing to give Louisiana the names and current addresses of the evacuees—info the state needs in order to make sure they receive absentee ballots (via Professor Kim).

Professor Persily writes:

"A lawyer working with the Louisiana Governor's office has asked me what remedy the state may have against FEMA for their refusal to release the names and new temporary addresses of evacuees from Hurricane Katrina. In particular, the Governor wants to make sure they receive absentee ballots for the February elections. FEMA has cited privacy concerns to justify their refusal to release the names and addresses. For some reason, it also appears that FEMA is unwilling to mail or forward the absentee ballot request forms or ballots itself (thereby not having to release the names) and the post office does not have forwarding addresses for most evacuees, so the state cannot simply mail the forms to the old addresses and have them forwarded. Assume that a FOIA request will prove unsuccessful and that individual evacuees on their own initiative could request and receive absentee ballots.

However, the question is: Are there other constitutional or federal statutory claims that the state could make to compel the release of such a list?"

(Whole thing.)

Rights? What Rights?

On Thursday night, I volunteered in a project to identify prisoners who had been in Orleans Parish Prison before Hurricane Katrina and were then evacuated to a federal penitentiary in Coleman, Florida. Angela Wessels, an attorney in Boston, who works for the Southern Center for Human Rights (based in Atlanta), is doing an amazing job overseeing the process of gathering volunteers—mostly local law students and her friends—to slog through the roughly 8,500 names on the "Hurricane Katrina Master Listing" and create a database of the inmates who were evacuated to Coleman.

OPP is the facility that includes Templeman III, the unit that was abandoned by prison guards with prisoners locked inside, while flood waters rose to chest level. For four days prisoners were trapped inside without food or drinking water. Orleans Parish Prison is both a jail where arrestees are kept pre-trial and a prison where sentenced convicts reside.*

Phyllis Mann explains:

There are lawyers all over the state, criminal defense lawyers, who are going to all of these facilities. There are 35 facilities that we are aware of all over the State of Louisiana, where over 8,500 people from Orleans jails were evacuated. And we're literally having to go in and meet with these people one by one to figure out when they got arrested, why they were in jail, whether they have been convicted or whether they were waiting for trial, whether it was a misdemeanor or a felony.

I understand that the computers from the Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff's Office were retrieved from Orleans on Friday, and their information technology people have been working to try to get as much information off of those computers as possible. And eventually what will happen is they're going to start matching the information they can recover from those computers to the information that we have been getting by going in and interviewing these people one by one, so that we can figure out where they're supposed to be. I would say a good half of them are not supposed to be in jail at all. They have served whatever sentence they had received and should be released. But until we can figure that out, they're sitting there. (Emphasis added.)

While there is small number of local New Orleans attorneys doing the herculean work of identifying and visiting individually every OPP prisoner evacuated to other facilities in Louisiana, there hasn't been adequate information for anyone to address the situations of the prisoners who were evacuated out of state.

Of the approximately 8,500 prisoners who were in OPP, about 900 were sent to Coleman Penitentiary. Working with the Master Listing and a very recently obtained list of the names of prisoners who had been evacuated to Coleman, volunteers have been identifying the inmates in Coleman who should have an arraignment, bond hearing, access to a lawyer, be in rehab or work-release programs, or have past or imminent release dates. Last Wednesday and Thursday nights, rooms full of volunteers entered the data on these inmates into spreadsheets to create a database of the prisoners in Coleman whom attorneys could help in an immediate way. This was the work that I was doing on Thursday. Once this new database is complete, attorneys who can go to Coleman Penitentiary will have the information they need about who is there and whom they can help.

At one point, while I was going through my hunk of pages from the Katrina Master Listing, there was something odd. I noticed that for one of the prisoners I was entering into the spreadsheet the booking date was later than his sentencing date, which didn't make sense to me. I asked Angela about it. She explained the funny dates mean the inmate had completed a sentence at another prison and was transported to Orleans Parish Prison just prior to his release. Now instead of being on queue to re-enter civilian life, this person has been shipped to a federal penitentiary in Florida, without access to an attorney or the ability to communicate with anyone to tell them where he is or even just to let family members know he is alive. And that's just one story out of roughly 900 that there are to be told about the Orleans Parish Prisoners who were evacuated to Coleman Penitentiary in Florida.

~
*Previously I confessed some confusion about whether OPP only functioned as a jail or if it functioned both as a jail and as a prison. Based on my work Thursday night, it is evident that the latter is indeed the case.

UPDATE, 10/24: Now that I have her permission to include it, I've added Angela Wessel's name. Adding her name to the sentence in the first paragraph forced me to remove the mention of my having met Angela through the Prison Policy Initiative.

Also see: More On The Coleman 900