As President Trump delivers on his campaign promise to crack down on unauthorized immigrants, the private prison business is booming.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement says border apprehensions are down by 30 percent – so why is the federal government expanding detention facilities?
One answer: Raids.
Data obtained by the Houston Chronicle shows interior immigration arrests are up by 10 percent from last year.
Fear in immigrant communities is at an all-time high. In January of this year, ICE agents picked up 675 immigrants in a highly publicized nationwide round-up. Data obtained by the Washington Post found more than half of the immigrants picked up had either traffic convictions or no previous criminal record.
To house the increase of detainees, the Trump administration is proposing raising Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s budget by 1.6 billion dollars so it can boost the number of detention beds by 17,000.
This expansion is already underway in Conroe, Texas
Craig Doyal is the Montgomery County judge. He says the expansion will generate 300 jobs. In April, the private prison company GEO group was awarded a 110 million dollar contract to expand its detention center in Montgomery County, the Joe Corley Immigration Detention Facility.
“They said the average salary at seventeen dollars an hour a little over $17,” Doyal says, “now for the jobs that are out there sort of you know around 40000 a year. So there are a pretty decent jobs.”
Carlos Sanchez is also thinking about jobs. He’s the CEO of the local Hispanic Business Chamber. He says a lot of the work in the detention center – like building it- will be contracted out. And he wouldn’t be surprised if some of those companies might hire illegal workers.
“Somebody is going to have tomanage it, somebody is going to have to landscape it somebody is going to have to throw the garbage or you know all these things all the services that come with having a facility that size will be managed and dealt with by not only Americans but also non-Americans,” Sanchez says.
The Geo Group said in a statement that the new complex will generate 44 million dollars in profits annually.
For the record, Geo declined my request for an interview many, many times.
But I wanted to understand just how detaining people could be a profitable business. I mean, the GEO group and its competitor, Core Civic, are publicly traded companies – you can buy stock in them right now. I’m looking at GEO’s stock right now and it’s more than tripled since election day.
I wanted to talk to someone who has been detained at one of the more than dozen immigration facilities operated by the GEO group.
Reyna is an asylum-seeker from El Salvador who was recently detained at Joe Corley – the immigration detention in Conroe that’s set to expand. Immigration detention is a business, she says. And the private prison company is running a lean operation. Immigrants, many detained for working for American companies illegally, work inside the detention center to cook and keep it clean. Reyna didn’t work, but she says at Joe Corley, some of her cell mates worked 12 hours shifts in the kitchen for 3 dollars a day.
The food was terrible, she says, and if you wanted to buy something at the commissary, the prices were jacked up.
For example, she says a packet of instant coffee costs almost 5 dollars. Reyna also told me that medical care was severely lacking, but I can’t independently confirm that. GEO turned down my interview requests and didn’t respond to my requests to tour the facility.
They did send me an email saying – quote “Our facilities are highly rated and provide high-quality services in safe, secure, and humane residential environments pursuant to the Federal Government’s national standards.”
So is GEO skimping on how much they spend on detainees to maximize their profits? I don’t know. The incentives are certainly there, but it’s hard for me to independently confirm or deny what Rayna said when I can’t see anything – either the facilities or their budgets – with my own eyes.
I went online to find out if any other detainees held in GEO facilities had made similar claims to Reyna, maybe on the record. A lot of the reports I found were attributed to anonymous sources – it makes sense, right? What immigrant in their right mind would go on the record right now? What reporter would let them?
But someone was willing to go on the record with me – a lawyer. Hans Meyer.
“GEO is making an incredible amount of profit from taxpayers to hold people in detention,” Meyer says.
Hans is bringing a class action lawsuit against the GEO group on behalf of detainees in its Aurora Colorado facility.
“They’re making money off of taxpayers to detain people then they’re using the labor of the people who are detained by threatening them with solitary confinement or coercing them into working and not paying them a wage an hour for their work,” Meyer says.
Hans couldn’t confirm the exact figures that Rayna told me about – 5 dollars for a pack of instant coffee for example – but he told me that they sounded right. His clients have told him similar things and the lawsuit he filed alleges serious labor abuses.
“They don’t have to pay cooks they don’t have to pay groundskeepers they don’t have to pay people to clean the facility. They use detainees to do that. And you know they threaten them if they don’t,” Meyer says.
Hans also brought up something I hadn’t thought about. The GEO Group donated $225,000 to Donald Trump’s campaign. Then wrote an even bigger check to Trump’s inaugural committee kicking in a quarter of a million dollars.
“They know what a good return on investment looks like and a good return on investment looks like someone like Donald Trump who absolutely. Is going to kick them those contracts and they’re going to make millions and millions if not billions of dollars,” Meyer says. “With Trump’s game plan to focus only on immigration enforcement build a wall build more detention centers. For them. You know it’s sky’s the limit. So obviously the stock has skyrocketed. The potential future profits for them is sort of off the charts.”
I went back to GEO to ask them specifically about the lawsuit and tried to get an interview with a company representative to explain their business model, but they refused. Instead, they sent the following statement:
“GEO has consistently, strongly refuted the allegations made in this lawsuit, and we intend to continue to vigorously defend our company against these claims. The volunteer work program at all immigration facilities as well as the minimum wage rates and standards associated with the program are set by the Federal government under mandated performance-based national detention standards.”
As an evangelical preacher, Rayna spend her days praying. She is waiting to make her case for asylum in front of an immigration court. Her husband is still being held at the Joe Corley facility, they couldn’t afford his bond. She’s worried about him because he has diabetes. But she says she doesn’t talk to him very often because phone calls cost 25 cents a minute.
After Tropical Storm Allison devastated the Houston Medical Center in 2001, the area’s 21 hospitals banded together to make sure it never happens again.
60dB’s Brenda Salinas talks to Jeff Masters, he’s the co-founder of Weather Underground, a web site that meteorologists go to get inside information about severe weather.
After Tropical Storm Allison devastated the Houston Medical Center in 2001, the area’s 21 hospitals banded together to make sure it never happens again.
How can blue cities fight back against red states? Molly Cohen, associate counsel with the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice. has four lines of defense.
Brenda Salinas met Joshua Browder, a Stanford computer science major who is automating legal aid and talked to Renee Knake, a legal ethicist, about what it means for the legal professor.
Politico’s Dan Diamond reports that after fending off challenges to their tax-exempt status, the biggest hospitals boosted revenue while cutting charity care.
The Atlantic’s Adrienne Lafrance tells us about the technology that makes it difficult to discern between videos of real people and avatars who can be programmed to say anything.
Journalist Nathan Kohrman argues that medical schools should do more to accommodate students with disabilities, and we talk to one such student, Molly Fausone.
The Washington Post’s Tom Hamburger explains this mismatch strikes right at the heart of a lot of concerns about the Trump family’s business interests.
The Washington Post’s Emma Brown reports that with the state budget in crisis, nearly a fifth of Oklahoma school districts are holding school just four days a week.
Russian-American journalist Alyona Minkovski explains the uncomfortable feeling of wanting to express pride in her heritage and culture colliding with the media’s recent demonization of all things Russian.
In the months following the Indianapolis’ Star investigation, 80 gymnasts have come forward to allege USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar sexually assaulted them.
The Development Set’s Kristance Harlow writes across the United States, emergency dispatch services are consolidating, and in many cases, run privately. In rural areas, it could mean the difference between life and death.
Trump might not fully appreciate how his antagonistic tone towards Mexico is harming one of the single most important relationships that the U.S. has. But Mexico doesn’t seem like it’s going to take that without a fight — maybe even installing its own Trump equivalent.
The Washington Post’s Amber Phillips explains Trump might not be able to get his border wall funded by Congress, but his isolationist immigration agenda is more likely to get funded.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement says border apprehensions are down by 30% year to year. So why is the Trump administration building a new detention center in Texas? 60db’s Brenda Salinas reports.
Michael Luca found that bad yelp reviews make it more likely that a restaurant will go out of business after a minimum wage hike, no matter if it’s $ or $$$$.
Quartz’ Special Project editor Lauren Brown gives us an introduction to Index, a site for short little stories about finance and economics you can swipe through on your phone.
Football player Zac Easter suffered from CTE — but he never played past high school. Reid Forgrave, as well as Zac himself, tells the story of Zac’s football-induced descent into darkness.
The hash tage #AirbnbWhileBlack highlights just how easily discrimination can reshape the sharing economy. But online marketplaces didn’t always work this way. And if they are well designed they don’t have to. The first generation of online marketplaces, including eBay, Amazon, and Priceline, made it hard for sellers to discriminate. Transactions were conducted with relative anonymity.
Young undocumented immigrants who obtained protected status through President Obama’s executive action face an uncertain future under a Trump administration.
Many men, in fact, see Trump as the candidate who can restore men’s status in society. According to several recent analyses, about half of men feel American culture has become too soft and feminine, and they feel men are suffering as a result.
Chris Christie was on the baseball team in high school. David Wildstein was the team statistician. He’s been a sidekick ever since — but soon he might take the Governor down.
60dB’s Brenda Salinas talks to Jeff Masters, he’s the co-founder of Weather Underground, a web site that meteorologists go to get inside information about severe weather.
After Tropical Storm Allison devastated the Houston Medical Center in 2001, the area’s 21 hospitals banded together to make sure it never happens again.
How can blue cities fight back against red states? Molly Cohen, associate counsel with the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice. has four lines of defense.
Brenda Salinas met Joshua Browder, a Stanford computer science major who is automating legal aid and talked to Renee Knake, a legal ethicist, about what it means for the legal professor.
Politico’s Dan Diamond reports that after fending off challenges to their tax-exempt status, the biggest hospitals boosted revenue while cutting charity care.
The Atlantic’s Adrienne Lafrance tells us about the technology that makes it difficult to discern between videos of real people and avatars who can be programmed to say anything.
Journalist Nathan Kohrman argues that medical schools should do more to accommodate students with disabilities, and we talk to one such student, Molly Fausone.
The Washington Post’s Tom Hamburger explains this mismatch strikes right at the heart of a lot of concerns about the Trump family’s business interests.
The Washington Post’s Emma Brown reports that with the state budget in crisis, nearly a fifth of Oklahoma school districts are holding school just four days a week.
The University of Chicago sent a welcome letter to all new students warning that the University won’t censor controversial speech or offer trigger warnings in class.
Chicago uses predictive algorithms to get ahead of likely crime — but instead of using these tools to deliver help victims they may have become a cyber drag net.
A new audio startup focuses on tailoring a playlist of short form stories that fit into a listener’s day
60dB, named for the volume at which a human speaks and founded by a former Planet Money reporter and two others with backgrounds at Netflix, is being teased as a “service for high-quality, short-form stories.”
Give the people what they want, when they want it, where they want it. It’s the mandate of streaming services like Spotify or Netflix, but the thinking around on-demand, personalized content has fully permeated the world of audio storytelling. (Seriously, search “Netflix of podcasting.” Every shiny new audio service has gotten the aspirational label, from Audible’s Channels to NPR One to Howl to Gimlet).
Now there’s one more new audio service on the horizon, co-founded by former NPR Planet Money reporter Steve Henn along withJohn Ciancutti and Steve McLendon, both with long histories at — wait for it — Netflix. 60dB, named for the volume at which a (calm) human speaks, is being teased as a “service for high-quality, short-form stories,” though the co-founders were more reticent about sharing too many details of its inner workings when I spoke to them prior to the announcement of the service Thursday morning (Ciancutti, Henn, and McLendon’s company is called Tiny Garage Labs).
60dB will start off as an iOS app, and then move into a broader universe of devices. A working version of the product exists and has been tested within a tiny group, but isn’t being released to the broader public just yet, though you can sign up to get notified when it is available. (I haven’t played with it either, and the team isn’t releasing screenshots or other materials at the moment).But in broad strokes: Users open the app, and it take signals from what subjects and types of stories and even people they’ve indicated they like, and 60dB will refine that feed of stories over time. The stories available on the platform will be easily searchable and contain familiar content aggregated from elsewhere, but also plenty of shortform content is new for the platform — emphasis on short.
There are “incredible stories people aren’t getting to hear,” Henn told me, whether because the length of many of the available podcasts “don’t fit into people’s lives,” or because it’s too difficult to discover shorter programming in single place.
I immediately thought of Acast’sattempts to emphasize diverse creators and niche interests, and of the constantly personalizing feed that NPR One offers. Henn and Ciancutti said that NPR One was a reasonable comparison: “But we wouldn’t be building this if we didn’t genuinely believe there wasn’t a good option already out there.” (I also immediately jumped to other conclusions, but 60dB isapparently not where NPR One lead Sara Sarasohn, who is leaving NPR, is headed)60dB also intends to offer data to the people creating for the platform, and not just barebones metrics. One of Henn’s last stories for Planet Money was about A/B testing, for which the team actually tested the effectiveness of the Planet Money episode lede on NPR One.
“One of the things we realized when we can see this type of data is that people can tune out of a story skip or tune out very early, first few seconds, first minute or two of a longer podcast. If you’re going to lose a chunk of your audience, that’s the point at which you lose them,” Henn said. “So just knowing that allows you to think really carefully about what’s the best way to reduce this. That’s tremendously powerful. This is something I really want to share this with everyone else who might be doing this for a living. I’ve been doing this for 20 years. This is late in my career, and now I’m going ‘ah ha!’”
The team declined to say more when I asked about who was paying for Tiny Garage Labs’ work and what the revenue model going forward would be, but Ciancutti dropped a small hint at the direction the team might prefer to go.
“We are not telling our funding story right now. We’ve got plenty of thoughts on monetization, but no one point of view on that at this point,” he said. “But you can see there’s three co-founders, and two of us spent twelve years at Netflix. Looking at our backgrounds you could imagine some of the biases that we have.”
“Netflix was a powerful example of how you can build a company to change consumer behavior in an industry like television, but also create a business model that really has lead to a golden age for high quality television,” Henn added. “The way the industry works now supports more great stuff than ever before. And that’s not a given when a media institution makes the transition into the digital world. That’s what I left Planet Money to work on.”
When you’re sixteen or seventeen do you really think about what you’re doing and who you’re doing it with? Sometimes, sure. But not all the time. There’s science to show that teens don’t think like adults. Their brains aren’t fully developed. That means two things. First that they don’t have the same ability as an adult to consider the consequences of their actions, and second, that in time, when their brains do become fully developed, they can be rehabilitated.
“I definitely thought that, without a doubt, I’m like, I know that I didn’t kill anybody – I wouldn’t hurt anybody. So I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, I know I’m gonna get out of here, I’m gonna go home.’ But it didn’t happen like that.”
-Ashley Ervin
For these and many reasons, the US Supreme Court issued a series of decisions that teens can’t be sentenced to death and they can’t be given an automatic life sentence without the possibility of parole. But what does that mean? How long can a state send a teen to prison before they have a chance at parole?
If you break the law and are sent to prison as a teen, how long do we wait to give you another chance? This week on Life of the Law, reporter Brenda Salinas tells us Ashley Ervin’s story.
STORY:
17 year old Ashley Ervin didn’t shoot anybody…but she did drive home the boys who did.
Back in 2006, Ashley was a shy, honor student from a black-middle class neighborhood in Houston. She was hand-picked to attend a special high school that focused on science. Her teachers loved her. She wanted to go into medicine.
ERVIN: And, right now I think that if everything would’ve happened as planned, I would’ve been a nurse right now.
Sophomore year, Ashley started dating a boy from her school named Keithron. She liked that he was soft-spoken, like her. She was a teenager in love.
ERVIN: That was my first boyfriend, and I knew it was possible that it could’ve been plenty others after that, but at seventeen that was like, that was all I seen. So, I kind of, just, put my all into that, and it was like, that was just it for me.
Keithron had a friend, Dexter. Ashley sort of knew that guy was bad news. They’d grown up in the same apartment complex, and he was always in and out of trouble as a kid. Ashley has always been really close to her mom. So maybe it says something that she didn’t tell her mom when she was hanging out with Dexter.
Most of the time, the three of them did typical high school stuff. They’d watch movies, listen to music, just hang out. But they also had some riskier habits.
One night, the three of them were out driving around Houston in Ashley’s car. It was late May, Memorial Day weekend, 2006. Dexter was driving. Ashley was dozing in the backseat. It was well after midnight.
ERVIN: And, I wake up to a car door slamming.
She could tell that her boyfriend Keithron had just gotten back in the car. He was wearing a hoodie with the hood up. He told Dexter that the woman didn’t have any money. They drove off.
ERVIN: I could tell that something was going on that wasn’t right.
A little later, Dexter noticed that Ashley was awake. He asked her to drive. They swapped places. Ashley started driving towards Keithron’s house. It was nearly dawn.
ERVIN: And, I’m at a stop light, and, I guess, he, I don’t know, he seen something or something, and he tells me, you know, “Turn here, and let us off here.” So, I do it, and in that instant, that’s when it all happened.
At a carwash near the intersection, an older man was busy washing a truck. Dexter and Keithron hopped out. They had guns in their hands.
ERVIN: He tried to rob some – this man, and, I guess, during the course of it, something went wrong, and, the man was shot, and he was killed.
The man was retired shop teacher Brady Davis. He had woken up at the crack of dawn to go to his local carwash. He was catering a barbecue later, and he wanted to clean his pit and trailer. Dexter and Keithron approached him wearing black bandanas over their faces. They demanded that Brady hand over his wallet. Brady had taught young men who looked just like them. Maybe he thought if he could only talk to them… He was found lying behind his truck with a single gunshot wound. He was 61.
Meanwhile, Ashley had driven around the corner to go to her house. So she says she didn’t actually see Dexter fire the gun.
ERVIN: I heard a gunshot, but I didn’t know, exactly, you know, where it came from, or what was going on, or anything. I didn’t know what was going on.
Ashley says she told herself, “I hear gunshots in this neighborhood all the time.”
ERVIN: And as I’m going back up the street, they’re running to my car, so I stop of course, and they get in, and they don’t say anything to me, and I just drive them back home.
Ashley says when she drove away she didn’t know what was happening. Police and prosecutors say she knew exactly what was going on.
About a month later, at the end of June, two plainclothes police officers showed up at a local McDonald’s where Ashley worked part time as a cashier. They had been looking for Ashley’s boyfriend, Keithron. He was a suspect in another crime — a rape and double murder committed in mid-June, a few weeks after the Brady Davis murder. The police had found out that Ashley and Keithron were dating. So when they couldn’t find Keithron, they stopped by Ashley’s work to see if she could help them.
The officers asked if she would come with them. She agreed.
ERVIN: In my family, I was always told, like, if you have to answer questions, just tell the truth and nothing will happen, I mean. That’s how my family was. But, looking back now, a lot of people in my neighborhood they probably would have never…freely went with the police like I did.
At first, the officers didn’t think she had anything to do with either crime. But then she mentioned her car – a black Nissan Sentra identical to one at the second crime scene. They asked if they could search it. She said yes, and the police had her car towed to the station. Then, the officers said they needed to take her to the station for questioning.
ERVIN: Actually that whole time I didn’t think that I was in trouble at all. And actually they kept telling me that I wasn’t in trouble, so they made me feel like… I wasn’t.
When she got to the station, the officers told her she wasn’t in custody. They said she was free to leave any time she wanted. They gave her food. They let her use the bathroom. Then they asked her about the rape and double murder case. The case in which her boyfriend Keithron was a suspect.
What she said must have been a surprise. Because Ashley, it turned out, was a witness to those crimes, too.
According to the police report, here’s what Ashley said happened:
It was late one night in mid-June 2006. 23 year old Maria Aparece was sitting in her parked car with her 17 year old boyfriend, Huy Ngo. They were talking when Dexter, Keithron, and another man approached them with a shotgun and a pistol and forced the couple into the backseat. Then, they drove around Houston demanding the couple give them money, credit cards and PIN numbers. Ashley’s cousin followed them in Ashley’s car, with Ashley as the passenger. Both cars drove to a wooded area. There, Dexter raped Maria while Keithron held her boyfriend back. Then Dexter made the couple march 60 feet into the woods, naked. He shot them in the head, execution-style. Ashley heard the gunshots. Afterwards, she and the three attackers went back to her boyfriend Keithron’s apartment.
At the police station, Ashley put this all in writing. Then, the police officer asked her about the Brady Davis murder. The one that happened in late May at the carwash, before the Aparece and Ngo murders. The officer suspected that Keithron and Dexter might also be involved in that crime…and that Ashley might know something about it, too.
So Ashley made a second written statement. She told the police everything that she saw and heard. And contrary to what she told me — that she was dozing in the car, that she didn’t really know what was going on — she told the police she knew Keithron and Dexter were robbing people. She knew they had guns and that Dexter had fired his. She also told police she knew all this when she drove Keithron and Dexter home after the murder at the carwash.
After the first day of voluntarily talking to the police, Ashley went home. The next day, police went to her house and said they had more questions for her. She agreed to go with them. They gave her a ride to the station.
When she got there, the officers read her her Miranda rights. You have the right to remain silent. You can ask for an attorney. Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law.
She agreed to answer their questions without an attorney. They asked her to give the same statement she’d given the day before. This time, they recorded her. She incriminated herself, again. She said she was the getaway driver after the murder at the carwash. And this time, her statements could be used against her in court.
It’s important to say here that Ashley’s aunt, Autumn Hawkins, says that the statement Ashley made to police wasn’t the truth.
HAWKINS: No it’s not correct, they you know sometimes you can tell them one thing and then they come up with something totally different from what you said and I think after her being there for so long, she was just ready to go home, you know.
That night, police questioned Ashley for five hours before they let her go home. Her aunt Autumn suspects the police fed Ashley information about the murders, information that she previously didn’t have. Autumn thinks Ashley added that new information into her statements because she was tired and wanted to go home.
HAWKINS: You know with her being 17 the first time talking to police officers, they kind of coerced her, you know into what to say if you say this we’ll let you go home.
The police didn’t charge Ashley in the Aparece/Ngo murders. Though she was at the scene of the crime, there was no evidence that she’d helped commit the crime.
But the Brady Davis case was different. There, Ashley herself said that she’d driven the getaway car. So the police charged her: with capital murder.
ERVIN: That’s when they told me, well, you’re, I don’t remember the exact words, but that’s when they told me that I was being arrested, too.
They took her to the county jail. That’s where she sat for almost 2 years, waiting for a trial.
In Texas there’s something called the law of parties. The law says if you knowingly played a significant role in a crime, if you added to the momentum of it in any way, you can be charged for that crime. So if you witness a murder, you’re not necessarily on the hook. But if you’re the getaway driver in a murder, like Ashley was, you can be charged as if you had pulled the trigger.
So things didn’t look good for Ashley. If she was found guilty of capital murder, she’d get a mandatory sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
But right before the trial, the prosecution came to Ashley with a deal: plead guilty to a lesser offense, testify against Dexter and you’ll get 35 years. Prosecutor Lisa Andrews says she still doesn’t understand why Ashley didn’t take the plea.
ANDREWS: I mean, the evidence against her was overwhelming and the law was clear about what her punishment could be, and then she was offered an opportunity that she didn’t take.
Even Ashley’s lawyer encouraged her to take to plea. And she was going to do it.
ERVIN: And right at the last minute, when I was taken into court to plead guilty to this lesser offense, um, I turn around and I looked, and my family was there. And I see my mom, and she just looked at me and she just shook her head, like, like, “No, what are you doing, you didn’t do this, so, you can’t.” So, I didn’t. I didn’t sign for it.
Ashley’s aunt, Autumn, says she’s glad her niece didn’t take the plea.
HAWKINS: Because we felt, her mom felt that her taking the 30 years is actually agreeing and saying that I’m guilty of doing this, and later on down the line she couldn’t appeal that 30 years because she said she was guilty and she really didn’t want to do it but she thought of it as 30 years at least I might have a chance of coming home but her mom was telling her you know, no, she didn’t want her to accept that and plead guilty to something that she didn’t do
In February 2008, after close to 2 years behind bars, Ashley finally went to trial. Despite the odds, she felt confident.
ERVIN: Yeah, I definitely thought that, without a doubt, I’m like, I know that I didn’t kill anybody – I wouldn’t hurt anybody. So I’m like, “Oh yeah, I know I’m gonna get out of here, I’m gonna go home.” But it didn’t happen like that.
The jury made their decision pretty quickly.
ERVIN: They deliberated, and I don’t – it wasn’t even that long that they deliberated, maybe a couple hours, and I was called back into the courtroom, my family was there, and, um, that’s when they read the verdict.
Guilty of capital murder. Even though she was 17 at the time of the murder, she was tried as an adult. The verdict came with an automatic sentence – life in jail without the possibility of parole. Ashley was in shock.
ERVIN: I just can’t believe any of it. Like, even though it’s been ten years, it still like, it still amazes me every day, like, every morning when I wake up I can’t believe that I’m in prison, and for life without parole? That’s what they gave me. It’s… I can’t grasp that.
Ashley was sent to state prison at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Hilltop Unit. It’s a minimum security prison for women in Gatesville, Texas, near Fort Hood. Every day since 2008, Ashley says she wakes up in her cement cubicle at 3:30 am. She works at the garment factory, where she sews Texas flags and prison uniforms. When she’s not working, she calls her family, writes letters and studies for the college courses she’s taking. In 2010, she appealed her sentence, but the appeal was rejected. It looked like Ashley would spend the rest of her life in prison.
But in the last decade, the US Supreme Court has made a series of major decisions that could change things for Ashley. Punishments that were once considered okay for juveniles were, one by one, ruled unconstitutional. Hadar Aviram teaches law at U.C. Hastings.
AVIRAM: I think, or in the, the first decision in this stream of decisions is Roper v. Simmons, it’s a decision in 2005, in which the Supreme Court says you can’t sentence a juvenile to death. It’s unconstitutional, they’re not as culpable as adults, so that’s the first rung in the ladder. Then we have Graham v. Florida, which is the decision in which the Supreme Court says you can’t sentence kids to life without parole for crimes that are not homicide. Then you have Miller v. Alabama, a decision from 2012, in which the Supreme Court says you can’t use a mandatory sentencing scheme that requires giving life without parole on juveniles, you have to have discretion.
In other words, the Supreme Court’s decision in the Miller case said that the sentence Ashley had received — automatic life without parole — was unconstitutional. But Miller only affected future sentences. The ruling didn’t apply to inmates who had already been sentenced to life without parole for crimes they committed as teenagers. Inmates like Ashley and more than 2,000 others nationwide. Would they have to spend the rest of their lives in prison? This past January, the Supreme Court began to answer that question.
AVIRAM: And then you have Montgomery v. Louisiana, decided in 2016, just recently, saying that Miller applies retroactively.
So let me explain. Remember, in the Miller case the Supreme Court banned mandatory life sentences without parole for juveniles — going forward. In the Montgomery case this year, the Court said that that ban also applied to people who had been sentenced to life without parole as juveniles in the past.
One of those people was Henry Montgomery. In 1963, at 17, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to mandatory life without parole. He’s now 69. Officials say he’s become a model inmate. He coaches the prison boxing team, is part of an art program and mentors younger inmates. As a result of the Supreme Court ruling, he’ll now be considered for parole.
Professor Aviram says that the new ruling could impact thousands of people in Henry Montgomery’s position.
AVIRAM: Which is to say, there are now people in their 50s and 60s, like Henry Montgomery, from Montgomery v. Louisiana, who were originally sentenced to life without parole when they were 16, 15, and the Supreme Court says you have to remedy that, that was an unconstitutional sentence, and you have to award these people special parole hearings that will take into account the age that they were when they committed the offense.
Different states responded to the Supreme Court ruling in different ways. Texas lawmakers decided that anyone automatically sentenced as a juvenile to life without parole would still have to serve 40 years. But after 40 years, they’d be eligible for parole. That means Ashley — and 26 other Texans in the same situation – will eventually get a chance for parole.
But just being considered for parole doesn’t guarantee freedom. In Texas, only about a third of the people sentenced for crimes in the same legal category as Ashley are eventually granted parole. Plus, Ashley will be in her fifties before she’s considered for parole. Whether she gets out depends on a number of factors: the severity of her crime, her record in prison, and to what extent she expresses remorse.
The board may also consider Ashley’s age at the time of the murder. In the past few years, lawyers and judges have begun to pay closer attention to the science of the teenage brain. Research shows that teenage brains work differently than adult brains.
JENSEN: Even into young adulthood, your brain is not done until your mid to late twenties.
Frances Jensen is a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. She says teenage brains get more of a rush from risky behaviors. And, teenagers are still developing their pre-frontal cortex. That’s the part of the brain responsible for decision-making.
JENSEN: So if you can imagine this brain that is, you know, it’s emotional area for risk-taking, impulse control, novelty seeking, emotional behavior, sexual desire, all of that, actually on at a higher rate in general than the adult brain; and it doesn’t have the frontal lobe to say, wait a minute, that’s a bad idea, let me rationalize this with you, you know, let’s think about cause and effect.
There’s a silver lining to the teenage brain’s immaturity: Jensen says that young brains are more flexible than adult brains. Which means under the right circumstances, people who commit crimes as teenagers can be effectively rehabilitated. But law professor Hadar Aviram says usually prison isn’t “the right circumstances.”
AVIRAM: We know that juveniles that end up doing long sentences in adult prisons end up disproportionately committing suicide, they’re disproportionately physically and sexually victimized. And that is something that is really disconcerting especially given the fact that as prisons are now they are not really a place that rehabilitates you, they’re a place that habituates you to a very problematic life from a very young age.
Ashley says, after eight years in prison, she doesn’t feel like she’s grown up at all.
ERVIN: Actually, um, I still feel like I’m seventeen. Like, um, I consult with my mom about basically everything before I do it, and that’s – I feel like I shouldn’t be like that because I am twenty-seven now, but I feel like I’m stuck at that age, because of all this happened to me, and I never got to experience a lot of stuff, and that’s really all I know. So, it’s kind of hard for me to sometimes say, “Ok, you’re a twenty-seven-year-old, you’re not seventeen anymore.” But I’m just kind of stuck there.
With no guarantee that Ashley will ever get parole, she and her family are working on another strategy to get her out of prison: a second appeal.
HAWKINS: With her already have done 10, wow 40 years, that’s a long time, you know so I would hope and pray that we can get something way before then
Her family has hired a new lawyer. His name is David Rushing. Ashley’s aunt Autumn says Ashley’s mom sends him all the money she can.
HAWKINS: It’s hard for her to send try to money, keep money on the books and pay the lawyer, and keep the payments but the help of her and me and the family, we’re putting it together, trying to do it.
Ashley’s aunt says the goal is to convince a higher court that the statements Ashley gave to police should not have been used to prosecute her.
The thing is, Ashley’s first lawyer already filed a similar appeal. That appeal was refused. I wanted to find out how this second appeal might be different from the first. So I reached out to her new lawyer to ask him. He has 4 different phone numbers listed on the internet. I managed to talk to him on the phone once. He even left me a voicemail.
CUT OF VOICEMAIL
But when I tried to schedule an interview with him, he stopped responding. So I went to Houston to look for him. He has two offices listed online. One downtown and one in an upscale business area. I went to both. He doesn’t work at either office anymore.
So I went to his house – one of his houses – and left him a note. He still hasn’t gotten back to me.
Meanwhile, Ashley is out of the loop. She goes to the prison law library to try find out what’s happening.
ERVIN: Yeah, sometimes I go and I try to look up as much as I can things that apply to me, or that I think applies to me, and I may not necessarily understand all of it, all the legal terms and everything, but I still try to like go over it as much as I can and try to, you know, figure out some things, or if I have questions I try to get in contact with my family or have some legal assistance from somebody and I just try to go from there.
A few days after I met with Ashley in prison, I got a letter from her in the mail. She included a poem. She wrote it a few years into her sentence, but says she still feels the same way. It’s called “Lost.”
Her Aunt Autumn reads the poem.
HAWKINS:
Two different worlds, I don’t quite fit in.
Pain and hurt is how my story begins.
See, I thought I was in love and I fell deep, I fell hard.
I thought that love would fill my void.
Instead it left me with bitterness towards that person.
Lost and confused, this I know for certain.
Why must I suffer? Why must I feel pain?
Lost in a world where it seems like everything is a game.
Who can I talk to? Who can I trust?
I hold all my feelings in until it feels like I’ll bust.
Do you know that feeling when a song moves you so much, you just feel like you have to add your own voice? Mexican culture has an answer to that: a cathartic, joyous yell called a grito.
Growing Up Hearing Gritos
Like lots of Mexican-American kids, Contreras and I grew up hearing the adults in our lives performing gritos when they listened to mariachi music at family barbecues, or cheering on friends and family at graduation.
“In my family, my mother and my grandfather, her step-dad, when we would be at family parties like Christmas or something like that, we’d be in the other room playing, we’d hear a really loud grito, we knew the party was on, it just took it to a different level,” Contreras says. “It was the ultimate expression that we were really having a good time.”
I am pretty sure I could identify my tíos and tías by their gritos, and many Mexican-American children begin finding their own grito voice early.
Like many schools in Texas, students at Perez Elementary school in Austin have the opportunity to learn and perform mariachi music. Their teacher, Angela Machado, is too busy teaching them chords and song lyrics to teach them gritos. “It is not part of the curriculum necessarily but I know a lot of them do already know how,” she says.
Third graders Leo Garcia, Jose Jaimes, Mario Flores and Angelita Alivter Cardenas show me their gritos. They sound like lion cubs learning how to roar.
If they want to keep working on their gritos, these kids may have a chance in college. Ezekiel Castro is a lecturer at the University of Texas Sarah and Ernest Butler School of Music. He is also director of the school’s mariachi ensemble and teaches about mariachi culture. The grito is an important part of that.
“The Mexicans are very emotional people,” says Castro. “When they hear mariachi music, whether it’s because of sorrow or because of joy, they do these gritos, these yells.” Castro says his students do a much better grito than he does. “Some people are just exquisite with it. Others, you know, we just do the best we can.”
Gritosaren’t just emotional; they’re political. One of Mexico’s founding fathers uttered the first documented grito in history when he declared the war for Mexican independence. The president of Mexico does a more formal grito every year on that anniversary, as Enrique Peña Nieto did in 2015.
Grito 101
Laura Gutierrez teaches Mexican performance studies at the University of Texas. She says gritos are complex expressions. “They’re like small narrative capsules, without the narrative that are full of layers of emotion,” Gutierrez says. And belting out a greatgrito feels really good. “When you finally release the last gasp of air, there’s relief,” Gutierrez says.
Video producer Kathryn Gonzalez rediscovered the grito at a 2014 Day of the Dead party in west Texas. “I was the only brown person at the whole party,” Gonzalez says. “There was a little conjunto band and I was so moved, I don’t even really honestly remember the song, but I was compelled to do a grito.”
But there were two things stopping her. “I thought well, A, I don’t know if anyone here would know what that was and why I was doing it,” Gonzalez says. “And B, I thought I don’t really know if I know how to do a good grito, like I’m not sure that I could pull it off.”
So Gonzalez teamed up with a developer friend and created the Grito App.
“You scroll through the different sounds, each sound has its own screen. You can learn a little more about the grito, you can share the grito, you can save it to your videos and just kind of text it or email it around,” Gonzalez says.
Since mariachi music is less popular among newer generations, not that many young people know how to do a good grito. Castro says that’s no reason not to try. “Everybody has their own individual way of doing gritos,” he says. “It’s a great expression.”
Growing Into Gritos
Felix Contreras tried to do a grito when he was a college student at Cal State University Fresno in the late ’70s. His friends would have grito contests after a long night. “It was pathetic. I thought, ‘Ugh, I definitely won’t be doing that again.'”
And even though his alt.latino co-host Jasmine Garsd has been trying to get him to do a grito on-air, Contreras says he won’t do it. “You have to not be afraid to be the subject of attention in a small world,” Contreras says. “You have to use the front of the diaphragm, full of gusto, and release anguish and joy from your soul to do a successfulgrito.”
Contreras has found himself listening to more mariachi music over the years. “It’s an acquired taste as you get older, you experience life’s heartbreaks and joys, the lyrics and the recitations and the performance resonates in a different way,” Contreras says. “It has all the secrets to life in the lyrics. You don’t know that when you’re in your twenties.”
“By the time you hit your forties, Chente knew what he was talking about,” Contreras says. And you might feel inspired to try out your own grito.
It’s a tough time to be in Houston right now. Ninety-degree weather, bumper-to-bumper traffic, and the oil and gas sector has been stagnating for the last 18 months. Eighty thousand people have gotten laid off, including Shawn Baker.
“I didn’t see it coming at all, not one bit, and I was very devastated, and I’m still very bitter about it, very bitter,” Baker said.
She took that frustration and decided after 25 years in the oil industry to finally become her own boss. She started a company called Tantrums LLC.
She bought a warehouse and converted it into five small rooms she fills with defunct electronics, glass bottles and anything that will break. For close to $3 a minute, she’ll help you pick out a tool, like a sledgehammer, a baseball bat or a lead pipe, and let you destroy everything in the room.
Television sets are available for trashing.
Brenda Salinas
“Everybody’s had enough at some point of their day or their life or whatever, and so when you come in here, you can be as aggressive as you want in the privacy of your own room. You can let it out or whatever it is you’re in here for, and you don’t have to clean up,” Baker said.
Baker got the idea for the business a few years ago when she saw a few guys beating up some furniture behind a bar.
“I just thought it was genius,” Baker said. “I could see me doing it.”
There’s not much Baker can do about the downturn in oil and gas, but she feels she can help people cope.
“There’s a lot of stress in this city because we’re the energy capital, and there are lot of layoffs happening,” Baker said.
One of her customers, Lance Nolan, is a mid-level manager at a drilling chemical company outside of Houston. Work’s been tough lately.
“We actually had a fracking division and we had to shut it down, had to lay off 35 people the other day,” Nolan said.
That’s why Nolan’s wife, Holly McClellan, decided to bring him to Tantrums LLC as a surprise. They both work in oil and gas, and they care for Porter, their 10-month-old daughter.
Before Nolan starts smashing his room, Baker leads him to the safety equipment.
“The face masks are optional, but you have to wear safety glasses and you have to protect your hands, and [wear] closed-toe shoes and long pants,” Baker said.
Lance Nolan smashes into a TV. When he’s not pulverizing electronics with a sledgehammer, Lance Nolan is a mid-level manager at a drilling chemical company.
Brenda Salinas
Pulverizing electronics and glass objects is relatively safe, Baker said. Every so often customers walk out with cuts and scrapes, which they wear as badges of honor.
Entire offices, as well as couples and friends, come in here for team-bonding activities. If you give her some advance notice, Baker will even set up a themed room for you. A few weeks ago she had a teacher who wanted a replica of his classroom. When he walked out, Baker was surprised to find the room intact.
It turns out the teacher just wanted to scream.
Sledgehammer in hand, Lance Nolan has 15 minutes to smash a room full of glass bottles, an orange schoolroom chair, a bunch of porcelain knick-knacks and a giant TV.
When his session is over, Nolan comes out drenched in sweat, with a big smile on his face. He’s out of breath, but he feels good.
His wife tells him next time, it’s his turn to watch the baby. She wants a turn with the sledgehammer.
brendapsalinas.com 