A few weeks ago, we reported that some Mexican pharmacies are selling oxycodone that is actually fentanyl

Now, @ConnorASheets & I found out that **the DEA has known** about this for years – and did not tell the public, even after a man died. THREAD:

latimes.com/world-nation/s… Before I get to the DEA bit, let me tell you a little bit about Brennan Harrell.

He died in 2019, after buying a pill at a pharmacy in Cabo. Here’s one of my favorite pictures of him:

#breaking The @ACLU just asked a federal judge to hold Sheriff Luna, the Board of Supervisors and LA County in contempt of court over their failure to fix the "appalling" conditions inside LA jails.
latimes.com/california/sto… Last year, the court ordered the county to stop chaining mentally ill people to benches for hours. But in this filing, the ACLU alleged that the jail has been skirting that by tethering people to gurneys instead. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…

NEW: I got a SCATHING leaked letter written by 4 U.S. Senators, saying @TheJusticeDept has done such a bad job of overseeing "appalling" LA jail conditions that they are undermining "public’s faith and confidence in our legal system."

latimes.com/california/sto… It's in reference to a yearslong lawsuit -- filed by the DOJ, against Los Angeles -- that has resulted in years of federal monitoring.

But, as @CoryBooker et. al. write, that monitoring doesn't seem to have resulted in adequate improvement. If anything, conditions may be worse.

For my first story @latimes, I went to Mexico and got drugs.

Specifically, @ConnorASheets and I went to pharmacies, got pills & tested them.

Turns out, some are selling oxy & Adderall over the counter – but the pills are actually fentanyl & meth. latimes.com/world-nation/s… In total, we tested 17 pills – things sold as hydrocodone, oxycodone, Adderall - and found 71% tested pos. for fentanyl or meth.

TO BE CLEAR, these are laced pills being sold *in pharmacies* in Mexico, including tourist cities like Cabo.

THIS is one of the most shocking jail lawsuits I've seen: An mentally ill man with an IQ of 55 who was being held on $1000 bail literally *starved to death* in an Arkansas jail.

They put him in solitary, he decompensated - and he died. THREAD: documentcloud.org/documents/2357… First, here’s Larry, pre-arrest - he's the one on the left.

Tall guy, weighed around 185 pounds.

(Warning: Some of the photos downthread are shocking.)

There is an ongoing hunger strike in Texas prisons over the use of solitary.

Officials confirmed the strike, but seem dismissive of it & allege the participants are only in solitary because they will not renounce gang membership. Some thoughts on this response... THREAD: First, I notice that this statement doesn't actually indicate that the participants are all gang members, just that it was allegedly/supposedly organized by one.

The actual participants may or may not be in solitary over gang membership.

I just found out one of my sources got killed.

I'm sad, but I'm not gonna wax poetic about how he was a good guy. I’m not sure he was.

But he was a great example of how broken the system is. And he did a lot to help expose that even without knowing it. THREAD: He went by Kane, and he first went to prison when he was like 16 or so. He got caught stealing a LARGE amount of scrap metal. I don’t remember the exact story after that but I think he screwed up on probation - and ended up in Parchman.

HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED what books are banned in your state's prison system? After a YEAR of records request, today we @MarshallProj published a searchable database of all the banned books list we could get our hands on - more than 54,000 titles. themarshallproject.org/2022/12/21/pri… Most of those titles are from Texas and Florida, which together ban roughly 30,000 titles -- many for absurd reasons, like nudity

(Banning books for nudity is inane in a setting where people are forced to get naked in front of others on a daily basis for strip searches.)

ALERT: Florida prisons are meeting on 12/22 to decide whether to ban my book permanently!

If you would like to (politely) tell them fuck no don’t do that, please write this address and tell them why my book -Corrections in Ink is important for prisoners.

Also, #FuckBookBans For background, this started several weeks ago when the mail room at one Florida prison temporarily “impounded” my book because they said it was “dangerously inflammatory” and a “threat to security.”

https://twitter.com/keribla/status/1585334155780366336?s=20&t=dsvcLoK6JqRimhCANH-Mgw

As soon as Michael Wages got on the prison bus, a tattooed man in front of him asked: “Have you ever thought about escape?”

Michael hadn’t - but the tattooed man had. And THIS is inside story of how he did. My latest, w/@John_Tedesco: houstonchronicle.com/news/investiga… You might remember this when it happened in May: Former Mexican Mafia member Gonzalo Lopez hijacked a Texas prison bus and killed 5 people in what became one of the deadliest escapes in American history. themarshallproject.org/2022/12/06/tex…

This year, John Ramirez was executed bc the judge said he didn't have authority to grant the DA's request to call off the execution

Today @moodyforelpaso filed a bill that ensuring this doesn't happen again, by making a law that judges HAVE to cancel an execution if the DA asks Here's some background on the case, and why the DA ended up asking to have the execution cancelled

https://twitter.com/keribla/status/1514634453380960262

In LA guards chained detainees to chairs for days at a time. In West Va there was semen in the food. In St. Louis there've been riots & in Houston some guards carried knives to work

In short: America's jails are going from bad to worse. My lastest: themarshallproject.org/2022/11/04/why… You might remember that a few weeks ago, I wrote about deterioriating conditions in the Harris County jail. houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outloo…

Stephen Barbee is scheduled for execution in Texas in under 2 weeks - but yesterday a federal judge said the state can't kill him untill they formalize a new policy specifying prisoners' religious rights DURING an execution. This is not a stay and does not necessarily mean the execution will be cancelled -- but it will be interesting to see how the Texas prison system handles this, since they usually take months and months and months to revise policies of any kind. houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-t…

When I was getting high, I used to get Narcan illegally - and I used it > half a dozen times on friends who OD'd

It's wild to think that if I hadn't broken the law to get it, there are multiple ppl now living productive lives who'd be dead & I'd probably be in prison Many of these were Cornell students, people I got high with when we were in college. They cleaned up, one got a law degree. Another is doing some rich people shit, not sure what exactly.

It's wild what prisoners ACTUALLY do w/contraband phones vs. what prisons fear they'll do. I just talked to a guy who's using his to teach other guys computer science

"We’re using Harvard’s CS50 materials," he said. "That professor @davidjmalan, I think he’s one of the best." Aside from having contraband phones, he said, they've also hacked the tablets so they can download movies and apps -- by using the phones as hotspots. Guys rent out hotspot time to the people who don't have phones.

(In case you're wondering, no this is not in Texas.)

Since it was jail, everyone was just passing through and we didn’t know each other well. So there were no real attempts at parties or gifts from commissary. No toilet paper decorations or jailhouse trees, at least not that holiday. I don’t remember if there was visiting that day, but visiting was a double edged sword in jail anyway: No one got to go out for rec on visitation days, so it was just pacing in the day room – 40-some feet in either direction.

HERE is my *favorite* story this year. It came from a guy on death row, who told me how prisoners there started a radio station - and how it gave him a last chance to find community.

Here’s a THREAD about the power of words & the magic of 106.5 The Tank themarshallproject.org/2021/12/20/the… If you’ve heard of San Quentin’s Ear Hustle podcast, you might think a radio station in prison is no big deal.

But that’s California, and this is Texas – at a no-frills maximum-security prison where a few hundred men live in solitary, nearly 200 of which are sentenced to death.

When the top TX prison psychiatrist testified in court last month, he likened prison to a “design magazine,” called it an inmate's "natural environment" & claimed ppl would kill each other for psych meds

If you ever wondered why ppl don't trust prison healthcare, here's a THREAD First, background: This started when Arizona prisoners sued to say they were getting unconstitutionally bad care.

During the trial, officials called in Dr. Joseph Penn - who oversees Texas prison mental health - as an expert to say it’s all fine. themarshallproject.org/2021/10/31/ari…

These are images from inside in an Alabama prison cell. In case you can’t tell, the first is 2 bottles of mice caught in one of the units.

This has been circulating online over the past few days so I asked the state for comment. Thread: Some of the pics are from a different facility, but the one of the bottles full of rodents is a screenshot from this video taken recently at Kilby.

#breaking There was a small riot at Briscoe Unit, the prison holding ppl arrested thru Abbott’s border initiative, Operation Lone Star. Several men - US citizens arrested w/the migrants - started fires in protest, got gassed, broke out windows & went outside to escape the gas The incident took place on November 7. TDCJ offered the statement above, but they haven’t clarified what prompted the unrest.

Sources at the unit have cited conditions and lack of access to courts as some of the reasons.

My first day in jail I woke up to my mugshot all over the news, a cringy shot of me at my worst.

It didn’t occur to me then to question why cops post pics like that, or whether the should be allowed to. But reporting this column got me thinking. THREAD:

https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1458773772882825218?s=20

A lot of the time when it comes to mugshots the debate is about whether news outlets should publish them - especially since the motive is usually just to get clicks & thus ad $$$.

That’s what I wrote about last year, for my first @marshallproj story.

https://twitter.com/keribla/status/1227215183698944000?lang=ca