By Andrew Keiper
Kent State-Ohio News Connection

Across Ohio, opioid addiction and pretrial detention stemming from unaffordable bonds have led to a dangerous jail overcrowding problem, advocates and corrections officials say.

An analysis of 83 inspections of county-operated jails found that 34 percent were overpopulated in 2016. More than a dozen jails were within ten inmates of being over capacity. The overcrowding problem plagues both urban jails, such as the Hamilton Justice Center near Cincinnati, and rural ones, including Allen County Jail near the northwestern Indiana border. Male and female populations are similarly affected.

Opioids are often blamed for the large-share flood of low-level offenders in county jails, but they’re certainly not the only cause.

“Part of the problem is that individuals who are addicted often lose their jobs, therefore they have no money to pay the bail or bond and lay in jail until their court date,” said Robert Cornwell, executive director of the Buckeye State Sheriffs’ Association.

An overcrowded facility can lead to a number of dangers for inmates, both mentally and physically.

Stephen JohnsonGrove, deputy director for policy at the Ohio Justice & Policy Center, said inmates are at increased risk for mental or physical health crises.

At Hamilton County Justice Center, JohnsonGrove said inmates are sometimes relegated to sleeping in curved plastic “boats” in hallways when overcrowding reaches critical capacity.

“We have to look at and see the misuse of the criminal justice system,” JohnsonGrove said. “We have to see if we are misusing a hammer to drive a screw or a sledgehammer where we need a scalpel. So many social problems have been defined as criminal justice problems instead of being treated as a health problem or a community-social wellness problem.”

Solutions, too, are as myriad as the problems; Cornwell says there is no single answer.

“Well the solution to the problem, I’m not sure of, but part of it would be a long-term treatment program to allow the individuals to withdrawal from their addiction and then moving them towards some type of meaningful employment,” he said.

His organization has also been working with Ohio lawmakers to find a bipartisan answer to jail overcrowding.

“[We] are working with the Ohio legislature, in trying to look at the potential for bail/bond reform and what that may or may not look like,” Cornwell said. “And it has to be coordinated with the judicial branch to ensure that they are satisfied that the individuals will return and go to court.”

A policy reform, however, isn’t the only fix in Cornwell’s eyes. He sees jail overcrowding primarily as a product of the opioid epidemic – which he said warrants state and federal investment into long-term treatment centers.

Advocates like JohnsonGrove are also shouldering the task of finding a solution, although in a different manner. He similarly sees legislation prompting bail reform as a potential solution, but his organization is pushing a ballot initiative for 2018 – something Cornwell said is shortsighted.

“All problems can’t be solved by making constitutional amendments, and people who think that are misguided,” Cornwell said. “This has to be a legislative action. It can’t be an action done by a change in the constitution.”

Two counties are taking matters into their own hands to find solutions – one through the court system, the other through corrections.

Ken Mills, the director of regional jail services at Cuyahoga County Corrections Center, has helped pioneer a plethora of programs to help inmates attain GED’s, job skills and even health care.

“We’re trying to address all the issues to best set these individuals up when they leave here from coming back again, to prepare them to get into society and be successful,” Mills said. “Building bigger jails isn’t the solution.”

Mills, with the support of the county executive, sends inmates to the Euclid Jail Annex for six months of career and skills training. The program began in 2016, and he said there are plans to expand it to a third location to help incorporate the female population and additional programs like welding. He said there has been about an 80 percent success rate for individuals who have been through the entire program.

The CCCC facility was overpopulated by 368 prisoners when inspected in 2016, although Mills said the layout and million square feet of the jail help mitigate some of the issues.

Judge Becky Doherty is taking a different approach to helping defendants beat their addictions: through incarceration. She presides over the Portage County drug court and routinely uses high bail and temporary incarceration to help defendants detox.

“It’s not always the answer, but if I have someone who is routinely using while they’re out on bond, or while they’re on probation, taking them into custody sometimes is the only thing that’s going to stop them in their tracks and keep them out of a dangerous situation,” Doherty said.

Although the Portage County Justice Center was under capacity by three inmates in 2016, she said a few inmates a day can push the facility over the edge. Portage County, she said, is desperately in need of an outpatient drug treatment center, which would drastically reduce the jail population.

At the end of the day, the well-being and future success of inmates and addicts is at the heart of any debate about overpopulation.

This collaboration is produced in association with Media in the Public Interest and funded by the George Gund Foundation.


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By Whitney Curry Wimbish for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Mike Moen for Minnesota News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration

When Aster Abrahame injured her back at work a few years ago, the pain was so severe that she struggled to perform her job - processing pork loins at breakneck speeds at a JBS Foods meatpacking plant in Worthington, Minnesota. The company sent her to its doctor, who she says performed no examination or test, prescribed a painkiller and told her to report to work the next day. Abrahame's job is already among the most dangerous in the country. Now the Trump administration's U.S. Department of Agriculture is taking steps to remove regulatory protections and permit faster processing lines for pork and poultry companies.

The end goal is to allow meatpacking plants to set their own speeds, a spokesperson for the Department's Food Safety and Inspection Service told Sentient in an email.

"The rule for pork and poultry processing line speed will create [a] new maximum speed option but ultimately the decision for what line speed to utilize will be made by each individual plant," the spokesperson wrote. No new plants may obtain a waiver in the meantime, the spokesperson added, and extensions will only apply to those that have one.

Abrahame spent an excruciating, sleepless night after the company doctor sent her on her way, and in the morning went to her own physician before taking off work for a few weeks. She didn't qualify for workers' compensation and received no pay for the time off. The plant issued a strike against her attendance record, however, and Abrahame went back to work, even though she was still in pain.

"I didn't want to lose my job. After three weeks, I just decided, 'I have to go back to work,'" says Abrahame, 44, who has worked the processing line for 10 years despite the pain that shoots through her chest and shoulder. "I have kids, I have bills." Meatpacking and slaughterhouse workers, like Abrahame, are not only at risk of physical duress and injury, but also experience rates of depression that are four times higher than the national average.

The government's statement that "extensive research has confirmed no direct link between processing speeds and workplace injuries" is false, labor advocates say - and that the USDA's own data shows otherwise. A recent USDA study found a correlation between the speed at which workers process or butcher meat and their risk for musculoskeletal disorders.

Abrahame says she has seen plenty of injuries that should raise concerns about the Trump administration's deregulatory move here. "I see wrist injuries, shoulder injuries. Some people have back injuries. It's all the company workers - this is how we work here," says Abrahame, who is now a shop steward for her union with United Food and Commercial Workers Local 663, which represents 17,000 workers in meat packing and processing and other industries in Minnesota.

Removing Limits on Line Speeds

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced in March that the Food Safety and Inspection Service will extend waivers allowing pork and poultry producers to process meat at a faster pace than the previous time limits prescribed, and begin immediate rulemaking to codify these higher limits.

Worker advocates and union groups say it's important to understand that the government only regulates the speed at which animals are "eviscerated," a part of the processing where workers remove internal organs from carcasses.

Evisceration work is largely automated these days. Just two percent of employees at modern plants work the evisceration line, according to the National Chicken Council, with eviscerations capped at 140 birds per minute and 1,106 hogs per hour.

The government doesn't regulate the speed at which workers process meat by hand, which constitutes the rest of the processing to prepare meat for sale and runs more slowly.

The two are related, however, Debbie Berkowitz, practitioner fellow at the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University tells Sentient.

The evisceration rate "sets the speeds in the rest of the plants to a degree," says Berkowitz, who is also a former chief of staff and senior policy advisor at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Berkowitz has extensively studied processing speeds and written about the danger of raising them, as well as about processors' safety.

She and others point to the USDA's research published in January on pork and poultry plants that shows workers at a higher risk for injury when they work faster, as Sentient previously reported. Researchers looked at musculoskeletal injury rates for workers at plants that had waivers to eviscerate animals faster than the regulatory limit. Six pork processors, which eviscerated at speeds greater than 1,106 animals per hour, and 15 large poultry plants whose waivers allowed them to increase evisceration speed by a quarter to 175 birds per minute.

Eighty-one percent of poultry processors and nearly half of pork processors were at high risk for injury, the researchers found. The risk was associated with the rate at which workers handled individual parts per minute, or what the government referred to as "piece rate."

Forty percent of poultry processor workers reported moderate to severe upper extremity work-related pain in the year before; 42 percent of pork processors workers reported severe to "upper extremity pain."

The numbers are "higher than I've ever seen in any kind of industry," Berkowitz says. "They're astronomical."

Researchers found that the relationship between evisceration speed and how fast workers hand-processed meat varied depending on the plant, but worker advocates say the bottom line is that workers are more likely to get hurt when they're forced to work faster.

A permanent rate increase means "Injuries will increase and it's going to be a lot worse," Berkowitz says.

Berkowitz and others say that in addition to sustaining injuries, workers who get hurt on the line fear speaking up because it could cost not only their job, but their ability to stay in the U.S. Meatpacking and poultry producers are disproportionately refugees and noncitizen immigrants, and "this administration has declared a war on immigrant workers even if they've been here a decade," Berkowitz says. "Workers are going to get scared to bring up any complaints at all."

That fear is true in many immigrant communities, and especially heightened for meat processors, says Julia Coburn, director of projects and strategic initiatives at Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, who said people still talk about major Immigration and Custom Enforcement raids, such as the 2008 Postville raid or the raids under the first Trump administration.

"A lot of the trust has been broken-or was never there," Coburn says. "Today we're seeing a lot of fear being heightened by what they're hearing in the news." After Trump's March 1 executive order declaring English the official language of the U.S., for example, Coburn said fear began to spread that it was illegal to speak Spanish in public.

Workers Continue to Push for Protection

Though the government puts a cap on the evisceration rates, workers and advocates said it's unclear what the actual speed particular plants are running. That information is treated as a trade secret, says Ruth Schultz, meatpacking director at Abrahame's union, UFCW Local 663.

Workers in Worthington, Minnesota are negotiating a new contract with JBS, pushing for the plant to post line speed standards for every line in each department, train workers to monitor lines and empower them to alert management when speeds are too high. So far, the company has said no, but the union won't budge. JBS did not respond to Sentient's request for comment.

As it stands now, the contract allows for one "walking steward" per shift to time lines throughout the day by counting the number of pieces of meat processed by thousands of workers, Shultz says. But according to Shultz, workers have seen supervisors turn down the speed of the conveyor belt when the steward walks by, then turn it back up after they're gone. That's one reason the union is committed to the proposal, Schultz says.

"The expectation that's there above all is that workers behave like machines...the ultimate priority is keeping the process running at absolute top speed and everything is secondary, including bodily function," says Coburn. "It's horrifying."


Whitney Curry Wimbish wrote this article for Sentient.


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As today begins National Farmworker Awareness Week, North Carolina boasts the sixth-largest number of farmworkers of any state.

More than 150,000 people in the Tar Heel State are farmworkers or dependents of them.

Quirina Vallejos, executive director of the North Carolina Farmworkers Project, said the issues facing farmworkers include exposure to pesticides, inadequate housing and wage theft. But Vallejos pointed out the most pressing problem remains helping farmworkers know and defend their rights.

"Even if the workers know what their rights are, it's very challenging for them to speak up for themselves, defend their own rights," Vallejos explained. "Because if they're undocumented, they're afraid of being reported to ICE, and I've heard of employers threatening that very thing in order to get people to do what they want."

Farmworkers in North Carolina help harvest numerous crops, including tobacco, cucumbers, apples and bell peppers. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Labor's National Agricultural Worker Survey found more than 40% of agricultural workers were not authorized to work in the U.S.

Vallejos argued strong enforcement of existing regulations would best help farmworkers. One sort of policy lawmakers in many states could initiate, Vallejos suggested, would be the passage of laws to protect them from extreme heat.

"Workers are out there sunrise to sunset. That's a long time to be out in the fields and not get any breaks, not have time in the shade," Vallejos contended. "Employers should be required to be educated on emergency response to heat stress and heat-induced illnesses because that would save lives."

Carolina consumers who wish to support farmworkers, Vallejos added, could try to purchase produce from companies with strong labor standards.


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Nationwide, it is estimated about one-third of Americans either adhere to Christian Nationalist ideals or sympathize with them.

Groups working for social justice in Washington state are organizing to counter what they see as a movement harmful to democracy.

Aaron Scott, author of "Bring Back Your People: Ten Ways Regular Folks Can Put a Dent in White Christian Nationalism," is the keynote speaker at this weekend's Peace and Justice Action Conference in Spokane.

It is estimated 16% of people in Washington support Christian Nationalist ideas and although it is hardly a majority, Scott said the movement should not be disregarded.

"We can't afford to say, 'Well, we're not going to really deal with that stuff, that's a side conversation,'" Scott explained. "Because clearly we are now in a moment where it is not a side conversation. It is the central conversation."

Scott noted white Christian Nationalist groups embed in rural areas, building churches and securing funds to win local elections. Their beliefs often appear as anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ. He pointed out the ideology thrives where voter suppression and disengagement are high and encouraged people to stay engaged in their communities.

Christian Nationalists want the U.S. to be declared a Christian nation, with laws based on their far-right values. Though the ideas can seem threatening, Scott stressed arguing with strangers is usually not an effective way to change someone's mind. Instead, he suggested having direct, thoughtful conversations within trusting relationships, reinforcing their values of honesty and compassion.

"You can do things like point to the way this person lives their lives and the values that you know they hold, and highlight, like, 'This does not seem aligned with this,'" Scott advised.

Scott, who also works with the Episcopal Church, emphasized the core of Christianity runs counter to the ideas of Christian Nationalism. He added many Christian groups recognize the movement provides cover for white supremacy and are concerned about the threat it may pose to their religious communities as well as democracy. Scott acknowledged it takes time and commitment to counter extreme ideologies.


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