https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/42057/20200805/nick-hillary-s-civil-rights-case-and-how-it-links-to-a-broader-moment-of-reckoning
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Since the coronavirus pandemic began, New York State has granted early release to 1400 inmates, all of them non-violent offenders. But thousands of elderly prisoners aren’t being considered for release, because they are in for violent crimes - even if they’ve served decades of their sentence and studies show that they are unlikely to re-offend. For now, it appears that advocating for the early release of these inmates is a stance even liberal politicians like Governor Andrew Cuomo are reluctant to take.
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18 year-old Treyanna Summerville was found dead in her home in Gouverneur a few weeks ago. The St. Lawrence district attorney says the investigation is ongoing. They’ve released very few details regarding the case, in part because a minor, a 13-year-old, is facing charges of second degree homicide.
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New York's Department of Corrections and Community Supervision outlined what it calls its "reopening" plans for the state prison system at the end of May. In four pages, it goes into the process for phasing staff in, and how visits are still suspended. But one little bullet point in those four pages has become a flashpoint: the announcement that it would transfer around one hundred elderly inmates out of other prisons and up to a prison in the Adirondacks.
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While the number of people testing positive or being hospitalized for COVID-19 continues to fall around the state, those numbers are going up inside New York prisons, where nearly two thousand staff and inmates have gotten sick. Inmate Stanley Jamel Bellamy describes his experience of the crisis thus far.
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Since New York’s North Country began to reopen, one big question is what if people don’t follow the rules? And what exactly even are the rules? On the front lines of these questions are local police, but how to enforce public health is something officers are figuring out as they go.
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People in St. Lawrence County know his face: the smiling, golden-haired 12-year-old boy, Garrett Phillips. It’s going on four years since his murder, and the posters demanding "Justice for Garrett" are still in the hardware store and the laundromat windows, on bumper stickers and front lawns.
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“This Must Be the Place” is a multi-media story series exploring off-the-beaten-path people and places across the North Country.
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Aaron Hinton says the 40-year drug war in Brownsville has almost made spending time behind bars normal. “It’s subliminally attacking out minds and making us believe that socially this is acceptable.” One out of every 50 men in New York’s prisons comes from Brownsville. The state of New York spends $40 million a year – and this has been going on for generations — locking up black and Hispanic men from this one neighborhood. What does that do to a community?
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It's travel time for a lot of people this week. But one family from the North Country recently made a bigger journey than most—all the way to sunny California, and they did the whole trip by train. The family had a one way ticket, taking them out to a new life on the west coast.
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Over the last four decades, New York’s prison population has soared, with many people serving long mandatory sentences for low-level crimes. As a result, the number of elderly inmates is surging—growing by almost eighty percent from 2000 through 2009.
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The number of women in American prisons has gone up by 800 percent over the past thirty years, according to the Federal Bureau of Justice. Most of these women are mothers, and about one in twenty of them are pregnant. In New York State, a woman who gives birth while serving time has the chance to stay with her baby in a prison nursery for up to one year, or eighteen months if the mother is eligible for parole by then.
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Two years ago, Moriah Shock Prison near Port Henry was next on the list of correctional facilities New York State wanted to close. Camp Gabriels near Saranac Lake and the Summit Shock Prison near Albany had already been shut down, and the prisons in Lyon Mountain and Ogdensburg were also on the chopping block. But the local community and Essex County officials rallied enough support to keep Moriah open. Today, 188 men live on the spartan campus, set in a former mining facility at the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains.
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On some Saturday nights, when no one's watching, one young man comes up to the top floor of the St. Lawrence University student center and plays the piano.
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Yesterday evening Venus made its last journey across the face of the sun, as seen from Earth, until the year 2117. People of all ages covered the southeast corner of the St. Lawrence University practice fields to get their look at earth’s closest neighboring planet, peering through one of the big telescopes or a pair of safe solar glasses.
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Weaver and gardener Isis Melhado lives outside Canton along the Little River, and times her planting by the phases of the Moon.
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