Tag: COVID-19

San Francisco – Disproportionately Black homeless residents may face massive police enforcement due to a settlement reached between the City of San Francisco and UC Hastings College of Law, which compels the City to “employ enforcement measures” for those who do not accept shelter placements or safe sleeping sites – yet provides less than 10 percent of homeless residents with such offers.

Inmates at Louisiana State Penitentiary being exposed to COVID-19 say prison officials are not doing enough to protect their health and lives. Department of Corrections violates state and federal guidelines that protect the life and health of those incarcerated due to Angola’s unique double bunked and overcrowding. LSP pays fines to the fire marshal, but fines do not make up for lives lost.

San Luis Obispo – From February through April 2020, prisoners with valid subscriptions to the San Francisco Bay View newspaper were denied their monthly publications by the mailroom supervisor and her sergeant. However, a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation memorandum, dated May 8, 2020, sent to “Wardens/Mailrooms,” subject: “Response to Institutional Request for Approval of Temporarily Withheld Publications,” was denied by Acting Deputy Director Charles W. Callahan.

Mayor London Breed announced May 22 that San Francisco’s summer camps and summer programs can reopen on June 15 with limited capacity and modifications to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The Department of Public Health (DPH) issued a Health Order for summer camps and programs consistent with the statewide guidelines.

Sacred prayers to everyone sacrificing and organizing to serve those who have lost their jobs, sources of income and housing. And, to those who have tested positive for the covid-19 virus, suffered from other illnesses, had loved ones become ill or, worse, suffered the ultimate tragedy of death from the corporate-state violence of impoverishment, torturous military-police and white racist terrorism. Asé.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer: While you’ve been busy reopening the state for business, via your Michigan Safe Start plan, the COVID-19 pandemic is exploding like a biological time-bomb in Michigan’s aging and overcrowded prisons, with a 50 percent infection rate among state prisoners confirmed by recent news broadcasts. Your current plan to expedite the parole of state prisoners who are past their earliest release dates will, at best, only release a thousand prisoners, more or less.

The coronavirus crisis is testing most households and businesses in California, pushing some to the very brink of what they can bear before falling off a cliff.

The essentials of writing and publishing have not changed under COVID-19, just the promotions aspects such as in-person appearances. Book signings, conventions and readings are postponed, online or done via the mail. Yet the work of writing continues.

Jalil Muntaqim, world renowned for peace and justice initiatives over 49 years in prison, fights for his life, his parole-eligible sentence threatening to become a death sentence. On April 27, Judge Schick granted his release. But New York Attorney General Letitia James appealed the judge’s decision, preventing Jalil’s release.

“Ingenuity is the reigning order of the day” would be my choice of words if I had to sum up the COVID-19 pandemic’s quarantine into a sentence for small business owners.

“American prisons are death traps. They are the places with the highest rate of coronavirus infection in the world. Incarceration in the time of COVID skirts the genocidal cruelty of death by disease of the Nazis.” J. Fernandez

Journalists aren’t supposed to “bury the lead.” But when death is the topic and corporate power is the culprit, the connection routinely goes unmentioned.

According to Mark Twain (supposedly), history doesn’t repeat itself, but it frequently rhymes. He was right. Donald Trump, for example, rhymes with Mussolini. The decline of organized labor in recent decades rhymes with its decline in the 1920s. And the coming depression will rhyme, in many respects, with the Great Depression.

On April 30, 2020, at least half of the nearly 300 prisoners in my assigned cellblock (J-housing unit) here at Indiana’s Pendleton Correctional Facility refused to accept meals in protest of our treatment, or lack thereof, related to the coronavirus pandemic and it’s spreading within PCF.

“Y’know things get funnier every day you live. They don’t get no better. Dig? But they sure as hell get funnier.” This week I keep hearing those words in the back of my mind, as spoken by a Black journalist named “Roosevelt,” a character who works for a Black New Orleans newspaper in the 1960s film “WUSA.” Critics trashed WUSA when it came out in 1970 and it bombed at the box office, but Paul Newman thought it was the most important film he ever made.

In June, San Francisco Mayor London Breed is expected to lower San Francisco’s alert level to a COVID-19 semi-quarantine status, meaning that some of the shelter-in-place restrictions implemented in mid-March are expected to be lifted, if infection rates continue to decrease. But according to rumors heard in city government circles, big gatherings of dozens of people will not be allowed in the City until 2021 at the earliest. This may include movie theaters.

Distance learning has proven to be a failure in many cases over the last two months throughout the Bay Area and the nation for a myriad of reasons. For example, teachers were never trained adequately in how to pivot from classroom teaching to a cyber environment; school districts had to organize distance learning without having planned for its implementation; huge portions of the student body in the Bay’s Black and Brown neighborhoods don’t have access to the technology needed to be able to engage; and many students have no internet access at home.

Viet Nam and the Vietnamese people have confronted the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, and their quick and united national response has produced remarkable results and earned the recognition of top public health experts and organizations around the world.

“Thanks to you guys, I got to eat today. I didn’t know where I was going to sleep tonight. The park is comfortable and quiet, and we don’t have no drama. It’s peaceful. This community right here, we’re great. I feel real safe.”

If you have logged onto the Virginia Department of Corrections’ (VADOC) website or listened to Secretary of Public Safety Brian P. Moran during one of the many televised coronavirus briefings, then you probably were left with the impression that VADOC and Greensville Correctional Center (GCC) officials are taking all of the necessary precautions to prevent or mitigate the spread of the deadly COVID-19 behind the walls of GCC or any other prison in the state. If that is your impression, then YOU HAVE BEEN DECEIVED!