Director @PINJNews | @pulitzercenter Grantee | @LJJProject Fellow | ANIMAL YOU'LL SURELY BECOME @tolsunbooks Tips: Brittany@pinjnews.org
May 3, 2021 • 15 tweets • 6 min read
As an educator, I always think about how to explain the mechanism under which I work to up and coming young journalists. For #WorldPressFreedomDay I’d like to talk about how Allegheny County hasn’t responded to my questions in 70 days.
Covering the jail, questions have to go through the Spokesperson who works directly for the County Executive. In years prior, a question about the jail would be answered by the jail. Today, I cannot ask the ACJ administration anything without going through the County Executive.
May 3, 2021 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
U.S. Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime.
Yet, at the Allegheny Co. Jail, those who have not been convicted work to make the jail function, for free.
pittsburghcurrent.com/covid-19-roden…
.@bethanyhallam said that every dollar the jail saves goes in the county’s general fund instead of the worker’s pockets, “The county is profiting off of forced labor...It is essentially slave labor.”
Forty workers at a time prepare food for more than 1,600 hungry men and women. Standing shoulder to shoulder, they transfer meatballs and applesauce to trays, then load those trays to a cart and send them up in the elevator.
pittsburghcurrent.com/covid-19-roden…
The workplace has been at the center of numerous COVID outbreaks at the jail. Over the past year, when the unpaid workers get sick, the kitchen slows to a crawl and falls behind. For the incarcerated, food quality is somehow worse than it was pre-COVID.
Idk if you’ve ever been inside Allegheny County Jail, but I used to teach there. A “leisure library” is not what it sounds like. It’s a cart or pile of discarded and forgotten books. It’s not a room. It’s not something curated. It’s got literature in it if you’re lucky. (Thread)
The program I worked for was Words Without Walls with Chatham University. Founded and directed by the incomparable Sarah Shotland. The program also teaches children because they’re are incarcerated persons under 18 at the ACJ. This book restriction affects them, too.
Nov 21, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Netflix’s “We Are The Champions” just introduced me to competitive dog dancing. I resign. This is my calling.
We have a volunteer.
Nov 19, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Amy Downs called the Pittsburgh Current ‘not a real news outlet’ after we published a story on the Allegheny County Jail banning inmates from receiving books.
PublicSource ran the same story a couple hours after us. What does that tell you?
Sonya M. Alemán:
Reliance on official record keeping government documents, logs, files, court dockets, council agendas, and meeting minutes sustain the status quo and an epistemology embedded with whiteness’ because these records are tied to ideas of ‘reason’ and ‘objectivity’
Nov 18, 2020 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
According to Thomas J. Weber, CEO of PrimeCare Medical, which provides correctional health services in 80 facilities across five states, alcohol detoxification has doubled in jails and prisons since the beginning of the pandemic.
Quarantine is exacerbating mental health for folks on the inside, much like it is affecting us on the outside. Those incarcerated are deeply worried about family members contracting the virus, and during quarantine cannot call or communicate as regularly.
