Category Archives: Crime-Courts

Wealthy LA convicts can upgrade to nicer jail

Posted on by

Wealthy LA convicts can spend extra to serve their time in fancy jails

If some California inmates are not happy with their jail conditions, those who have money to spare can pay for an upgrade. Two counties in Southern California have at least 26 such “pay-to-stay” jails, a joint collaboration between The Los Angeles Times and The Marshall Project found.

Starting at $25 and going up to $251 a night, the program allows certain inmates to move into a “less intimidating environment,” as one jail in Santa Ana advertises on its website. The conditions differ from an eight-person dorm to one cell with two beds, a television, a phone and a separate refrigerator. The average inmate stayed in one of the rooms for 18 days, the Los Angeles Times and The Marshall Project reported.

Southern California’s “pay-to-stay” jail system, which brought in up to $7 million between 2011 and 2015, started in the 1980s as a way to fight overcrowding in the region’s jails.

Prison Radio

Posted on by

This might be an over-simplification but Prison Radio appears to be short (2-3 minutes) recordings made by prison inmates. I’m assuming these are made from phone calls the prisoners are allowed to make. That’s make take on the what, your guess is as good as mine on the ‘why’ but I’m assuming the idea is to give a voice to the incarcerated.

One of the prisoners recording these commentaries is James Keown. Mr. Keown is from Jefferson City, MO, the town where I live. In 2008 he was convicted of murder for poisoning his wife with Gatorade spiked with antifreeze. He’s serving a life prison sentence in Massachusetts.

In one of his three commentaries (Who Are You?) he describes being on the air at one of our local radio stations when, during a commercial break, he was arrested. I briefly met Keown a couple of times but didn’t know him.

I find these commentaries bizarre in a way I can’t quite put into words. Perhaps it’s the distinctive “announcer voice” Keown uses when making the recordings.

UPDATE (1/9/18): Keown has stopped updating his Prison Radio page. Just those three posts back in 2016. His appeal to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court was rejected on October 23, 2017.

Missouri Death Row Audio

Posted on by

In the late ’90s I created a website called MissouriDeathRow.com. A Missourinet reporter had served as a witness (while covering) of every execution going back to 1989. There was no death row website because a) the web was still pretty new at the time and b) the Missouri Department of Corrections went to some lengths to avoid the term “death row,” even though prisoners sentenced to — and awaiting — execution were housed together.

At each execution, a packet of information was handed out to reporters and a stack of those were gathering dust in the Missourinet newsroom. News Director Bob Priddy and I began putting that information online and it quickly became the de facto site for information about capital punishment in Missouri. I maintained the site until I retired in 2012.

The site included a page with some of the history of capital punishment, including audio recorded by Missourinet reporters. As of this writing, much of that audio is no longer available on the site. The site was moved a few times, different servers, different platforms… files get misplaced or lost. My buddy Phil Atkinson did his best to find some of those and I’ve archived them here.

Death Row Audio

https://www.smays.com/death-row-audio/

Missouri hasn’t executed anyone in a couple of years but they had quite run at one point. The audio includes post-execution news conferences, interviews with victims’ families, opponents and proponents, and the condemned.

Live-streaming body cam video

Posted on by

bodycam“Taser plans to roll out live-streaming capabilities in 2017, and he expects facial recognition to become a reality someday so agencies can query police records or social networks in real time. An officer could patrol the Las Vegas Strip with a camera streaming to the cloud, “and there is real-time analysis, and then in my earpiece there is, ‘Hey, that guy you just passed 20 feet ago has an outstanding warrant.’”

Or that the guy you pulled over because he has “a wide nose” has NO outstanding warrants.

“The basic Axon camera must be activated manually, but departments can buy Axon Signal, which activates the device automatically in certain situations, such as when an officer flicks on the light bar on his car. For $10 per officer per month, another Taser service links Evidence.com files with existing dispatch and records software, so officers no longer need to individually tag files for retention or risk having an untagged file automatically deleted.”