Tim Tai / Spotlight PA
Yvonne Newkirk would talk to her 60-year-old brother Edward Ball on the phone almost every day. He was serving time at a state prison in Luzerne County, where he would also write to her every week. Then, in mid-November, all contact ended.
After three weeks of silence, Newkirk was desperate, and asked prison officials where he was housed, SCI-Dallas, for help. But staff there refused to give her answers, citing a federal act meant to protect a person’s private medical information.
For two days, she called the prison nonstop, and, eventually, a sympathetic nurse explained her brother had been hospitalized and intubated after a positive COVID-19 diagnosis weeks before, she said. Despite being his emergency contact and power of attorney, Newkirk said, she was never called, and prison officials wouldn’t tell her what hospital was treating him.
Press release content from Newswire. The AP news staff was not involved in its creation.
DOC Gets a Win With Creative Incentive-Based Program
December 17, 2020 GMT
Video Game Tournaments as Incentives for Prisons
MILL CREEK, Wash. - December 17, 2020 - ( Newswire.com )
The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections purchased eight PlayStation 4 Custom Sport Bundles from Fully Loaded Electronics to use in its activities department. The goal? Create an incentive-based program using the gaming devices to promote positive behavior among the inmates.
The positive impacts that gaming provides to inmates.
With the PlayStation purchase, the PA DOC was looking to create a program that promoted good behavior, reduced inmate stress, and allowed positive and controlled competition among the inmates. Behavior incentive programs use positive reinforcement (the ability to earn or purchase a gaming device) to teach and reward good behavior. Incentive programs only work when the incentive i
Muncy, Pa. â A female employee at the State Correctional Institute at Muncy claims a pervasive culture of sexual harassment exists at the facility, and she was a victim of such harassment, coercion, and workplace violence.
Devon Grafius, an employee in the psychology department at SCI-Muncy, alleges a corrections officer (CO) there repeatedly harassed her between October 2019 and January 2020. Grafius said she reported the incidents to her supervisors, and later to state police, but no charges have been filed against the CO.Â
According to emails obtained by NorthcentralPa.com, Grafius reported the incidents to her supervisor on Dec. 30, 2019 and made a report to Pennsylvania State Police on Jan. 1, 2020.
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The coronavirus pandemic has hit certain populations hard. Seniors are at risk. So are diabetics. Cancer patients. People with pre-existing respiratory or circulatory conditions.
That makes some locations particularly important to protect. Personal care homes. Senior centers. Nursing homes were among the first major hotspots for covid-19 outbreaks.
But those are not the only places where a disease can flourish. We can’t forget about jails and prisons.
Detention facilities long have been known to be incubators for illnesses. Tuberculosis is a bacterial infection that has a lot in common with covid. It causes a deep, chronic cough, fever and fatigue. It is transmitted through tiny droplets aerosolized in water droplets when people cough, speak or sing. It can kill in 2018, it claimed
On Nov. 20, Jesse Richard Morgan sat down with an investigator looking into allegations of voter fraud and gave a lengthy sworn statement in which Morgan, a contract truck driver for the U.S. Postal Service, said he believed he had hauled thousands of mail-in ballots from New York to Pennsylvania in October.
The 28-page sworn affidavit is confusing at times, but the story Morgan tells is that someone at the postal distribution center in Bethpage, on Long Island, told him that he was hauling mail-in ballots to Harrisburg and Lancaster postal distribution centers.
His statement is attached to a lawsuit filed by several Pennsylvania state representatives, led by Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, a Butler County Republican, asking the Commonwealth Court to throw out the results of the 2020 presidential election and alleging that the stateâs administration of the election was âso severely flawed it is impossible to certify the accuracy of the purported results.â