Ben Max, left, of Gotham Gazette, and Jarrett Murphy, right, of City Limits
January 3, 2018 - Max & Murphy: Big Political News to Start 2018
2018 has started with a bang in New York politics: already this week we've seen the re-inaugrations of Mayor Bill de Blasio, Public Advocate Letitia James, and Comptroller Scott Stringer; the election of new City Council Speaker Corey Johnson; and Governor Cuomo delivering his 2018 State of the State address. For this episode of the podcast we recap and analyze those major political events and talk a bit about what's coming next.
Listen to the full conversation and let us know what you think -- we're on Twitter @TweetBenMax and @jarrettmurphy. You can listen to the episode through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts.
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by Ben Max, Gotham Gazette
@tweetBenMax @GothamGazette
Speaker Corey Johnson (photo: William Alatriste/City Council)
City Council Member Corey Johnson, a Manhattan Democrat, was elected speaker of the New York City Council with near unanimous support on Wednesday, becoming the first leader of the 51-member legislative body who is an openly gay man and openly HIV-positive.
Johnson took the helm at the first charter meeting of the new Council class, after a vote that saw little drama and 48 votes in his favor. Council members, including those who had attempted to run for speaker themselves, took their turns singing Johnson’s praises as prominent elected officials and political influencers from across the five boroughs looked on from the balcony of the Council chambers. Johnson’s mother was there, too, having driven from Massachusetts to see him rise to the Council’s top leadership position.
In an emotional acceptance speech, Johnson spoke about the importance of his mother in his life and some of the tough times they had faced. He spoke fondly of his predecessors and the city’s progress in the last four years under Mayor de Blasio and Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito. But he warned of challenges of “historic proportions” that lay ahead: an affordability crisis that is pushing out residents of the city, an “overflowing” shelter system with thousands of homeless families, struggling mom and pop businesses, a mass transit crisis owing from years of government neglect, continued racial disparities across the city, and potential funding cuts from the state and federal governments. “These problems are incredibly complex and entrenched,” he said. “But the future of our city depends on our ability to confront them. And confront them we will.”
In alluding to the many thorny issues that plagued the first term of the de Blasio administration, he promised to tackle them with increased independence from the mayor. “There has never been a more important time to ensure that our city has a strong, unified and independent Council to take on these challenges,” he said, with an emphasis on the word independent. He pledged unending support to his 50 constituents and promised to lead by consensus.
Johnson emerged at the top of a crowded field of candidates who had sought the speakership but all of whom dropped out of the race and conceded to Johnson in the days leading up to the vote, after it emerged that he had the support of the Queens and Bronx Democratic county organizations, led by Congressional Rep. Joe Crowley and Assembly Member Marcos Crespo, respectively. But, in a city where people of color make a majority and that is already led by a white male mayor, there was some criticism around Johnson’s selection to what is considered the second-most powerful position in city government.
Numerous Council members representing the Black, Asian and Latino Caucus had insisted that the next speaker should be a person of color. That included Council Member Inez Barron, who attempted a last-minute protest candidacy and voted for herself on Wednesday. “It’s time for a paradigm shift and that’s what I’m here to call for,” Barron had said at a news conference on the steps of City Hall shortly before the vote. “We’ve gotta put an end to the system that has deals that arrange for the speaker to be selected on behalf of what it is that county bosses and district leaders and other powerful players and other rich developers want to see happen here.” Her husband, Assembly Member (and former Council Member) Charles Barron, said, “The process is fraudulent, the process is racist, and the process is corrupt and its been that way for a long time.”
Another speaker candidate, Council Member Jumaane Williams, who only conceded the race Wednesday morning, opted for skipping the vote entirely and instead attended Governor Andrew Cuomo’s State of the State address in Albany, which was scheduled for around the same time (Williams is toying with a bid for governor or lieutenant governor, saying that Cuomo is not a true progressive). Williams had held out longer than most of the other speaker candidates, saying that the next speaker should be a person of color.
In a Wednesday statement, Williams criticized the lack of diversity in leadership positions in city government even as he looked forward to working with Johnson. “Equity must be an issue of highest priority to the next Speaker of the City Council,” he said. “Having spoken at length with Council Member Johnson, he is acutely aware of those concerns, and has agreed, in a tangible and accountable way, to work alongside me on issues of equity, both in government and citywide, for people of diverse backgrounds across race, gender, sexual orientation, and more.”
Williams and Council Member Debi Rose were the only two absences on Wednesday, meaning Johnson received 48 of the 49 votes cast. In his first remarks from the speaker’s podium on the Council chambers floor, Johnson also nominated members and a chair of the rules committee, which will help establish the new Council’s rules and the chairs and members of the other 40-plus issue committees. Johnson named Council Member Rory Lancman to chair the committee, and the speaker himself will be a member of it, as is customary. Johnson is one of 33 members who had signed on to a draft package of rules reforms that are expected to move ahead in some form.
The newly elected speaker has not expressed any particular legislative priorities yet, though he has had a focus on public health as a Council member who chaired the health committee. He’s focused more of his public comments on bolstering the Council and how he would lead the body. He again said on Wednesday that he wants to add to the Council’s land use staff, recreate an investigations division, and offer Council members the opportunity to pursue their interests and priorities.
Speaking with members of the media during a brief press conference after the formal proceedings, Johnson said he will seek a diverse staff, and said that Council Chief of Staff Ramon Martinez has been asked to stay on. He also said that he will look to female members and members of color to speak and lead on issues that he may not have direct experience with. Johnson said he will be talking with each member to see which committees they are interested in chairing or joining and would do his best to make as much of it work as possible. He is sure to also be guided by Crowley and Crespo, as well as other political heavyweights that helped him win the post, like the leaders of the hotel workers union and the firefighters union.
And though many expect him to adopt a more top-down style of leadership than Mark-Viverito, he has insisted that he will sit down with individual members to gauge the needs of their district while formulating a larger agenda for the Council. On the Council floor, he named each member individually, telling them, “I want you to know that in good times and in bad, through thick and thin, I will always have your back. Those of you who supported me, those who didn’t support me, those who ran for speaker and those who have been here in this body and those who are new, I will have your back.”
[Related: Corey Johnson’s Record and Promises]
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
(photo via The Mayor's Office)
When a head injury occurs in any of New York City’s 12 jails, no one bats an eye, according to Jonathan Stenger. “It’s accepted,” said Stenger, who was formerly incarcerated on Rikers Island and now works with inmates in the city’s jails through the Osborne Association. “People are just used to it.”
Quantifying these incidents for the first time, a new study finds that the rate of traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) sustained by inmates in New York City jails is more than 60 times higher than in surrounding communities. A head injury is considered a TBI if it causes the person to lose consciousness or to become confused and dazed. Published in the August issue of the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, the study also provides estimates for the 5,000-plus jails and prisons across the country; the five-person research team concluded that there are some 600,000 incidents of head trauma annually, close to 90,000 of which are TBIs.
The new findings could help researchers better understand recidivism and the long-term mental health issues facing many individuals who are spending or have spent time in jail, since these injuries can lead to degenerative brain diseases. They also raise questions about the societal costs of injuries incurred in jails, about officer training, and about the need for better injury and health recording systems in jails, which aren’t required to maintain such data.
“Brain injuries are a chronic health condition that shorten and diminish quality of life,” said Wayne Gordon, a rehabilitation medicine professor at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. “We need to be looking at how to make jails safer for these individuals, or it will continue to have significant public health implications.”
During a traumatic brain injury, the brain—which has a consistency similar to gelatin or firm tofu—shakes and jiggles within the skull. No matter where the head is hit during a severe injury, the gelatinous brain collides with and scratches against the front part of the skull that has bony ridges, damaging tissue. If there’s enough movement, tissues connecting the mid-brain and frontal lobe move at different speeds, harming connections from one area to the other.
“The frontal area is what makes us most distinctly human,” says John Corrigan, director of the Ohio Valley Center for Brain Injury Prevention and Rehabilitation. “Relative to the weight of the brain—we have way more frontal lobe than any species.”
This area primarily regulates impulse control, delayed gratification, and the ability to understand abstract and nuanced concepts. Following a TBI, people commonly report an inability to concentrate and high levels of fatigue, among a host of other symptoms that have implications for recidivism rates and employment.
Repeated brain trauma can deteriorate brain tissue to the point where it loses some function—a condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. Symptoms of the disease, which has drawn public attention because of its impact on players in the National Football League, include aggression, depression, confusion, suicidal tendencies, and progressive dementia. The National Institutes of Health has taken the lead on conducting CTE research, but has mainly studied the disease in football players and boxers.
Prisoners have not been studied and one of the main reasons, Corrigan said, is a lack of data. Jail and prison facilities across the country aren’t required to keep standardized injury logs, and many facilities haven’t implemented electronic medical records. New York City was among the first to do so, and is one of a handful nationwide that uses records as a surveillance tool to monitor head injuries.
The research team behind the new study jumped on the opportunity in 2012 when the city announced it would use electronic health records to monitor medical care in its jails. They tweaked the recording system so physicians working with inmates would be prompted to ask more specific questions if their patient had a head injury—including detailed descriptions of the immediate effects, and how the injury happened.
The researchers looked at 42 months of records of nearly 275,000 New York City inmates, and observed that, over this period of time, nearly 14 percent of inmates suffered a traumatic brain injury. After examining emergency room and clinical records across New York City, the researchers calculated that the rate of TBI sustained in jails over the three-and-a-half-year study period was about 63 times greater than in community settings. Experts said there’s no reason to believe much has changed since the study period ended.
A possible limitation of the study, said lead author and physician Anne Siegler, is that someone who experienced two traumatic brain injuries could have been counted as two individuals. The researchers were unable to identify unique incidents in the emergency room data due to privacy reasons, and therefore chose to tally each head injury as one.
The study was able to identify causes. The team found that inmate-on-inmate fighting and the use of force by an occupational officer were the greatest sources of head injuries: 42 percent (5,966) and 23 percent (1,776), respectively. Other causes included self-injury, slipping and falling, and attacks.
As they began to collect data, the researchers noticed how frequent head injuries were, which echoed their anecdotal experience. Homer Venters, an author of the study and former chief medical officer of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, described hundreds of visits he had made to city jails during his two-year tenure that involved treating patients who had suffered head injuries. Often, Venters recalled, a light would go on for an inmate he was treating when he began reciting the cognitive issues associated with TBI.
“It runs counter to the narrative they get everywhere else, which is that they’re lazy, they’re dumb, or there’s a problem in their will or moral character,” said Venters, who is now the director of programs at Physicians for Human Rights.
One patient Venters worked with said he used to read hundreds of pages a day before a correctional officer injured him; afterward, he had trouble reading more than a page or two in one sitting. He told Venters he felt tired and unable to follow the text.
Experts in the field say the new findings are alarming, particularly when extrapolated to the national level. The 600,000 or so head injuries that the researchers estimate occur in jails nationwide would amount to an additional 40 percent of head injuries if included in data collected by U.S. public health systems, said Venters. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 2.1 million individuals suffer TBIs annually.
More accurate numbers could be found with better record-keeping in jails, Venters said, but no one seems eager to quantify the scale. There is a dearth of data on the methods cities use to record injuries in jails or whether steps are being taken to implement electronic health records. “Jails and prisons don’t really want to know rates of injuries,” said Venters. The federal Bureau of Prisons’ (BOP) office of public affairs said the bureau does not monitor these injuries “due to the fact the cause of inmate head injuries in the BOP may vary.”
Experts say that the new findings suggest that only better record keeping will make fully clear the extent of the injuries on a national scale, and that training programs for re-entry should include discussions of TBI and its implications. Another study published in February 2017 found that former inmates in Indiana with TBI were more likely to return to jail than former prisoners without TBI.
Corrigan described the importance of arming re-entry workers with strategies to effectively communicate and create treatment plans with this subset of the formerly incarcerated population. If someone is displaying a short attention span and has a history of TBIs, slowing down when explaining something, recapping points and asking them to summarize major points can help them process information.
Members of the team said that training prison officers is critical as well. When Venters and his colleagues noticed the frequency of head injuries, they reached out to correctional officer training academies, delivering a handful of lectures about how to identify when incarcerated individuals may be showing signs of head injury. But the future of these or similar training efforts is not clear. Following multiple requests for interviews about guard training, a public relations officer at the Department of Corrections sent an email with a statement attributed to spokesperson Peter Thorne: “The Department cares deeply about the health and well-being of all inmates and is working closely with our city’s correctional health services provider to ensure people in our custody are provided with quality health care.”
Stenger said he hasn’t noticed any changes in the prevalence of head injury in the people he has worked with over the last few years. He described the jails as still feeling “unsafe.” Venters seems to agree:
“The way the jail system confers new health risks onto the people that pass through it is profound.”
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by Maya Miller for Gotham Gazette
@GothamGazette
The author is a freelance journalist currently earning an M.A. in health and science journalism at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism.