In solitary for staying true to their faith

Inmates punished for refusing to cut their hair

• Joseph Darius Jaafari
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  Joseph Darius Jaafari was a staff writer for the PA Post. His work covering crime, the military and LGBTQ issues has been featured in The Marshall Project, Rolling Stone Magazine, The Atlantic and The New York Times. He is a graduate of the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and an award-winning documentary filmmaker who has produced for VICE and The New York Post. He is a native Arizonan and infamous for his love of tacos.

Last week, we published a story on how the Lebanon County Correctional Facility is keeping a man in solitary because of his religious beliefs. The 37-year-old inmate, Eric McGill, is Rastafarian — a faith centered on the eventual return of Blacks to Africa and a strict reading of the Old Testament. Adherents believe that the Bible forbids people from shaving their heads. Rastafarians, in turn, grow beards and wear their hair in dreadlocks.

The Lebanon jail’s warden says McGill must stay in solitary if he refuses to cut his hair. Dreadlocks, the warden says, pose a danger because inmates could hide weapons or contraband in them.

McGill was placed in solitary more than a year ago and remains there today — despite the fact that the federal Religious Land Use and Incarcerated Person’s Act says prisons and jails must provide reasonable accommodations for inmates to observe their religious faiths.

Since we published our story, we have been contacted about similar cases. One inmate wrote that he has been in solitary confinement since September of last year because of his dreadlocks, and despite multiple grievances filed with the warden, he said he’s been denied every time.

“It’s unfair and unjust,” he wrote in the letter, adding that he felt the rule is “racially motivated.”

A former inmate, Ronald “Mufasa” Dieudonne, told me last week that he was incarcerated twice in the Lebanon County Correctional Facility — both times waiting for a trial. During each stint, he said he was kept in solitary confinement because he, too, would not cut his dreadlocks. Altogether, Dieudonne served nine months in solitary. He told the Lebanon Daily News, which first reported his story, that there were five others in solitary who also refused to cut their hair during the time he was incarcerated at the jail.

An argument McGill and others being held in solitary have is that beyond the discrimination, is Lebanon County jail’s lack of consistency compared to the state system. State prisons and other county jails don’t forbid inmates from having dreadlocks.

“There is no connection between this ban on dreadlocks and any sort of legitimate prison interest,” one of his lawyers, Alexandra Morgan-Kurtz, told me over the phone. “The interest that they have put forward in writing was security and cleanliness. We think those are not valid reasons to hold a man in solitary confinement, especially given that there are dozens and dozens of other prison and jail systems throughout the country, including the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections and the Federal Bureau of Prisons, that permit dreadlocks.”

We reached out again to the Lebanon County Correctional Facility and the county commissioners about the jail’s policy, but they would not comment.

If you or someone you know has had to deal with being placed in solitary, we’re interested in hearing your story.  –Joseph Darius Jaafari

Best of the rest

• President Trump spent a few hours in Scranton Thursday night at a town hall-style interview hosted by Fox News. You can watch the whole hour-long event online in two parts — part 1 and part 2.

• WHYY’s Miles Bryan covered the event, writing: “It was more intimate than Trump’s rallies — which often draw thousands of people — but the crowd was similarly friendly, breaking out into chants of ‘four more years’ during commercial breaks.” WBNG spoke with attendees, most of whom plan to vote for the president this fall.

• In the city where Joe Biden grew up, Trump took a few shots at the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination. PennLive’s David Wenner writes: “Some of [Trump’s] most disparaging words regarding Biden focused on Biden’s son, with Trump depicting Hunter Biden as a ne’er-do-well who reaped a windfall from a board position with the Ukraine gas company at the center of Trump’s impeachment by the U.S. House. Trump, who received applause when referring to the impeachment as ‘fake’ and ‘totally made up,’ said the impeachment ended up hurting Joe Biden.”

• One audience member, former Luzerne County GOP Chair Lynette Villano, was called on during the town hall, the Citizens Voice reports. She told the president “family members had disowned her because she supported Trump and asked how he could unite the country in a second term.” Trump’s response was that Democrats will rally around him after he wins reelection.

• The New York Times fact-checked the president on one of his claims: “The president also falsely claimed that Scranton now has ‘the lowest and best unemployment numbers’ ever. Its unemployment rate for April 2019, 4 percent, was the lowest since 1990, the earliest year for which data is available. But the rate has since increased to 5.6 percent in December, which was higher than the 5.4 percent recorded in December 2016.”

• Traveling with the president was Pa.’s GOP senator, Pat Toomey, who issued a statement earlier in the day saying how happy he was that Trump is returning to the state. Rep. Dan Meuser took to Twitter to say much the same.

• Former NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg may be out of the presidential race and $500 million poorer for it, but he’s promising to use part of his remaining $60 billion fortune to defeat Trump in six key states, including Pennsylvania. The Associated Press notes that there are few details on what exactly Bloomberg’s effort will entail.

• Rep. Madeleine Dean of the 4th District endorsed Joe Biden on Thursday. Read her announcement here.

• Three flags displayed in a Clearfield County municipal building showing off Trump as Captain America and an American strongman are the center of a debate that could turn into a legal battle. A local lawyer called the flags a form of state-sponsored electioneering, but the Bigler Township’s chairman justified it, using some old my-way-or-highway logic: “This is my domain and I run this show,”  R. Philbert Myers told The Clearfield Progress. “No one is going to tell me what I can and cannot display here.”

• The George W. Hill Correctional Facility is being sued for overpopulation, according to a lawsuit filed in Delaware County. The suit, which can be viewed here, alleges that the jail knew it was taking on too many inmates, which forced prisoners to sleep on concrete floors and be locked in processing cells with 15-18 people at a time (those cells are meant for only a handful of people at a time). I talked earlier this week on how overcrowding could very well be an issue if Coronavirus ever made its way into jails. The takeaway: more people in jails will only make the pandemic worse.

• Speaking of the coronavirus, a Pittsburgh couple is under quarantine after returning from a cruise of Hawaii and Mexico. A passenger on the ship died of the virus earlier this week in California. The Post-Gazette has more here.

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