Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh
Allegheny County Jail
With a criminal injustice system that emphasizes retribution even at the expense of justice, it is to be expected that prisons and jails are not nice places. Still, some seem to be worse than others. And the sense I’ve had of the Allegheny County Jail nearly since my return to Pittsburgh is that it is among the worse.
On Friday [March 3], [Jail Oversight Board member Bethany Hallam, an Allegheny County councilwoman] was critical of the county for failing to provide any previous drafts of [a redacted copy of the 50-page report from the nonprofit National Commission on Correctional Health Care] to the board and for waiting to release it during the March meeting.
“It’s hard to view this as anything other than yet another superficial press stunt by the county administration to distract from the abysmal human rights record of the jail,” Hallam said. “It’s ridiculous, and if there weren’t people suffering and dying every day as a result of their incompetence and cruelty, I would maybe even laugh about the absurdity of it all.”[1]
You know how you walk in, sometimes, in the middle of a story and you can’t really comment or say anything because you haven’t heard the beginning? So you’re just there, listening, knowing you’ve missed an important piece.
That’s how I feel with the Allegheny County Jail. I’ve been hearing bits and pieces. I know there’s a problem. But it long predates my return to Pittsburgh and I don’t feel I have even the beginning of a handle on it. And so I’ve kept silent.
And then I feel I’ve been silent too long. I transport people who don’t expect much out of life because their lives are in such blighted, impoverished places that they don’t even know better, who’ve been in there, daily. Those who talk about their experience tell me it’s a bad place. Which is to say that by any usual standards, it’s a particularly bad place.
Even people who work there or who have worked there don’t like it. And people are dying.
It’s another example of “it is what it is,” an acquiescence to what should not be. It is an acquiescence endemic to Pittsburgh, an acquiescence to what is surely corrupt because it can hardly be anything else.[2] But hey, somebody’s getting their retribution so I guess that makes it all okay.
Paula Reed Ward, “Report on Allegheny County Jail deaths finds no ‘trends or common factors’ that led to them,” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, March 3, 2023, https://triblive.com/local/report-on-allegheny-county-jail-deaths-finds-no-trends-or-common-factors-that-led-to-them/
Gilead
Abortion
Fig. 1. Sign at demonstration in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, May 3, 2022. Janni Rye, via Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
Eric Lutz, “Walgreens Caves To Antiabortion Republicans — Including In States Where Abortion Remains Legal,” Vanity Fair, March 3, 2023, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/03/walgreens-abortion-pill-access
Academic repression
Student loans
Fig. 1. Unattributed and undated image via James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal,[3] fair use.
Jennifer Taub, “Friday Fiascos: Supreme Court (In)Justices,” Follow the Money with Jen Taub, March 3, 2023, https://jentaub.substack.com/p/friday-fiascos-supreme-court-injustices
- [1]Paula Reed Ward, “Report on Allegheny County Jail deaths finds no ‘trends or common factors’ that led to them,” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, March 3, 2023, https://triblive.com/local/report-on-allegheny-county-jail-deaths-finds-no-trends-or-common-factors-that-led-to-them/↩
- [2]David Benfell, “It is what it is,” Not Housebroken, November 18, 2022, https://disunitedstates.org/2021/12/31/it-is-what-it-is/↩
- [3]Richard K. Vedder, “Eliminate or Radically Restructure Federal Student Loans,” James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, September 16, 2020, https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2020/09/eliminate-or-radically-restructure-federal-student-loans/↩