All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, introducing Tana Geneva from Reason Magazine.
She wrote this important piece.
In April, she was jailed on a probation violation.
By June, she was dead.
And this is the story of Holly Barlow Austin.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Tana?
I'm good.
How are you?
Is it Tana or Tana?
How do I say it?
I'm sorry.
It's Tana.
Tana.
Okay.
So anyway, so thank you very much for joining us on the show.
This story is absolutely outrageous and I hate it, and so that's why I wanted to talk with you about it so that other people would also be angry.
So please, who is this Holly Barlow Austin woman and why is she dead?
Well, she's dead because America's criminal justice system is essentially a horror movie, to put it in the most succinct way.
But just to, well, I guess just to back up, basically she was a 46-year-old woman who had gone through some addiction issues and she was on probation for a nonviolent crime, like many people.
She broke her probation protocol because she finally wanted to stop doing drugs unhealthily and she signed up for a rehab in Dallas.
So she dismantled her ankle bracelet, tried to go to rehab, but she got jailed for probation violation.
So she suffered from a number of physical and mental health issues.
She was HIV positive.
She had, I believe, bipolar disorder, and she was being medicated for all these things.
She got put in this jail, which is run by a company called LaSalle Corrections, which administers a variety of jails and immigration detention facilities.
And within months she was dead after documented and horrific medical neglect.
I mean, they didn't give her her medication the way they were supposed to.
They barely ever gave her water.
Based on video obtained by the family's lawyer, Eric Height, based out of Seattle, she was in obvious physical and mental distress and nobody did anything.
I mean, at some point in the video you see a corrections officer opening the door and then hopping back away and holding his nose because the cell smelled so bad and she had soiled herself multiple times.
It was just, I mean, yeah.
So ultimately by, let's look at my timeline, yeah, by June, she was incarcerated in April.
On June 15th, the jail staff finally sent her to a hospital, and two days later she died.
I mean, the thing that really just like makes it so messed up for me is that it's not even registered officially as an in-custody death because she was released a couple of days prior to her death.
Oh, sure.
They get to pad the stats in their favor that way, I see.
Yeah, like, oh, we sent her to the hospital and then she died.
So it's a hospital.
I mean, it's just, it's disgusting.
I mean, like you said, like your sort of very like raw and emotional reaction to the story is just kind of like been across the board.
I mean, I've had multiple people get in touch with me to tell me that I made them physically ill.
And I was like, oh, cool.
I'm glad I made everyone feel better today.
But yeah, I mean, it's definitely an important story.
And this, sorry to babble on, but this place also has the history of other completely egregious in-custody deaths.
There was one case from 2015 about a 20-year-old woman who died after she wasn't given her medication for diabetes.
And then a couple of years later, a 35-year-old man died after he said he couldn't breathe and jail staff were like, oh, he's fainting, not being able to breathe.
And then he died the next day.
So the company keeps getting contracts from the state because they cut so many corners.
They're cheaper.
But like some of the corners they cut is hiring completely unqualified medical professionals and jail staff that, you know, don't know to send someone to a hospital when they're clearly in serious like physical distress.
Yeah.
I mean, the idea that you would set up the incentive structure here where this private company has the contract to hold these human beings, but they also have everything to lose only monetarily by treating their illnesses and setting up.
I mean, you could have it just making up stuff.
But if you not that there should be, you know, contracted private prisons like this in the first place.
But you could set it up where every time you provide medical treatment to these people, you make an extra 15 dollars, we'll add to your budget every year.
What?
Something.
Right.
So the entire thing is this is where to save money is on treating these people like human beings.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So it's not like, oh, you get a bonus if you keep everyone alive for a year.
I mean, a socialist just government run prison.
They don't care if they waste money all day, which is bad in a lot of ways.
But they don't have such a negative incentive towards sending you to the nurse's office.
You know, they don't really have anything to lose in the way that it is when you have a private company on a government contract like this.
I completely agree.
And those institutions are incentivized to cut corners everywhere.
I will push back a little bit if that's OK.
Oh, sure.
OK.
OK.
So on the part where I was giving too much credit to the government run prisons, probably right.
Yes, absolutely.
Go ahead.
I didn't mean to say it like that, but go ahead.
I know.
I will say that, like, I mean, yes, like private prison should not exist.
They're insane.
But I will say that, you know, to tap into my inner libertarian, like I will say that a lot of public facilities are also monstrously egregious when it comes to medical neglect or just straight up killing people.
To give one example, there is a federal facility in Texas called Federal Medical Corrections Facility Carswell in the town of Carswell.
And that's actually where Reality Winner, the whistleblower behind some Trump-Russia thing is currently incarcerated.
And like the women there, I mean, that's where the first federal covid death happened.
It's a medical facility, so, you know, they're already dealing with like very sick people.
And yeah, like the first covid death, a 30 year old pregnant woman who just like died on a ventilator while they, you know, delivered her baby by cesarean, like there have been a ton of other covid deaths.
So, yeah, I mean, the public sector is also not very good at operating prisons in a way that doesn't kill people all the time.
Yeah.
All right.
Yeah.
We're certainly agreed on that.
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On this particular story here, a huge part of the outrage was, I mean, look, whatever way of thinking that these prison guards have that, oh, every prisoner's fake and that he doesn't feel well and this kind of thing, they know up front, this woman has AIDS.
She is dying.
Their responsibility is, their minimum responsibility, as long as they are controlling her movements, is to provide her with her prescriptions, and yet they did nothing but withhold them and separate her from her family when they could have intervened to make sure that she was being treated.
Yes, that's precisely correct.
It's completely crazy.
And then what all, and then this is what she died of, right, was she got, you say here, one of the prescriptions was for some fungicide, and then that was what she died of was fungemia and sepsis.
So in other words, that fungal infection got completely out of control and killed her.
Is that right?
You know, I'm not 100% sure.
I think, I mean, yes, that's definitely part of it.
I think she was also severely dehydrated.
I mean, at some point during her incarceration, she's visibly blind.
Like in the videos, you can see her groping with her hands like around the prison walls and like trying to drink the second cup of water she'd gotten in 16 hours and knocking it over because she was blind.
I mean, it's, yeah.
Also, I mean, not to be paranoid.
I'm sorry, I just, I wasn't entirely clear on that in the article or even just now.
She kind of went blind during all this or she was already blind in the first place here?
She went blind.
She went blind during the thing, as she's dying in there?
Yes.
Due to a combination of like physical deprivation and her pre-existing illness, she went blind.
Yeah.
I mean, that's what the lawsuit alleges.
And like, if you watch the videos, which are, I mean, it's literally like a horror movie, like the Saw franchise or something.
Like she's just like flailing around blindly, like desperately trying to grasp at the walls, like knocking over the water she's given not on purpose, but because she can't see and grasp it.
Yeah.
I mean, the lawsuit alleges that she went blind during her ordeal in the jail.
And there's audio of the guard or it's testimony that the nurse in charge said, oh yeah, she's good at faking like she's weak and they know she has AIDS.
Yeah.
Oh, AIDS is no big deal.
It was a big deal back in the eighties, but nowadays if you have AIDS, you're just Magic Johnson.
It's totally cool.
Everybody knows that, right?
Yeah, definitely.
Especially like starved, you know, dehydrated drug addicts in jail.
Yes.
Everyone's a Magic Johnson.
Um, it's interesting, you know, they say now that the Stanford prison experiment was faked.
They found some guy went back and reviewed all the notes from the thing and they really kind of exaggerated that whole thing and yet it doesn't seem like they probably needed to.
I mean, we're talking about some lady like she might as well have bounced a check for $15 here.
She's essentially guilty of offenses against the state, not having committed any crime against any person.
And they're treating her like she's, you know, Ted Pondy or Dick Cheney or the very worst people in America deserving of, you know, absolute total wanton neglect like this.
But they're just regular people from her same neighborhood, presumably, right?
Who the hell are these people to murder her in this way?
These lowly prison guards, they're not even so much as deputy sheriffs.
They have the right to murder this person like this and they think that, oh yeah, hey, let's do that.
And nobody stops them.
Nobody's in charge to, I don't, I'm not really that puzzled, but I am that angry.
Right.
Totally fair.
Yeah.
And I would say that like beyond like sort of individual sadism and neglect, like I think it's more of an institutional problem.
Like I think these people are incentivized to act in a particular way by the institution and like not to let them off the hook, but I certainly wouldn't want like the underpaid like prison staff to be scapegoated rather than this like big corporation that keeps getting government contracts to be in charge of life and death.
As a matter of fact, that prison is big enough for all of them.
The guards are already in there.
Just put them on the other sides of the bars and you're done.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
And God, like to tap back to what you just said, if only Dick Cheney had ever actually seen the inside of a jail cell, like not to be punitive towards anyone, but.
Well, and so is there any accountability on the local level?
I guess you say there's a lawsuit here.
Is the local district attorney even pretending to look at this or anything?
No.
Simple as that.
They're not.
And so, I mean, the usual gears for some kind of accountability would require an official investigation, which I think I mentioned earlier, like.
There was none because technically she didn't die in custody because they dispatched her to the hospital before she died.
Yeah.
So, I mean, I would be very, very, very, very surprised if there were some sort of like official accountability in this case.
Yeah, yeah.
And on the federal level, you basically, I guess there are a couple of other loopholes, but essentially you would have to show some kind of federal fraud about it or something like that, or they would have had to have called her a racial slur as she was dying to prove that they were just acting under the color of law rather than just doing their job.
But as long as they didn't call her any racial names, essentially the feds aren't coming to look at this.
Right.
You mean through like a hate crime legislation?
Yeah, or just civil rights legislation, you know, where like a local deputy sheriff will get prosecuted if he says the N-word as he's killing somebody.
You know, they'll make that into a federal civil rights case, whereas as long as he doesn't, it's fine.
But, you know.
Can I do, you know, I can push back again?
Yeah.
Like in a- Sure.
No, I agree with you a hundred percent, but I will just say that I'm working on a story right now focused on the NYPD, and there are actually like a huge amount of civilian complaints and lawsuits revolving around New York City police officers calling people the N-word while beating the crap out of them, or calling women whores while arresting them in front of their children, or being super transphobic, or like just, I mean, it would shock you.
But you know what?
Like the city spends thousands of dollars defending these officers, and they get more promotions.
So while I get your point a hundred percent that like the feds only step in if like, yeah, there's some sort of crime against like political correctness, even that doesn't actually.
So even in cases where it's been documented that a police officer uses some outrageous racial slur while being violent towards someone, the feds really don't step in if it's a powerful local department like the NYPD.
Sure.
I mean, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
No, I didn't mean to say they always do.
I just meant to say they only will in the case where it's that, that's the exception in the civil rights law where they'll intervene.
Otherwise, this is the local DA's or the local, you know, state attorney general's problem.
And if they don't do anything about it, nobody's doing anything about it.
And I'm not saying I would prefer for the feds to have more power.
I'm just saying those are the only different checks and balances at play here.
And that's the way they work.
That's all.
I mean, it's really crazy because I, too, have encountered the occasional story where like some low level rookie and like, you know, South Carolina or something will get fired for saying something wrong.
And then I look at all these cases where NYPD detectives who are much higher ranked than like the uniformed officers will literally just call somebody, am I allowed to cuss on this program or no?
Yeah.
We'll probably mute out the worst part of it, but it's okay.
Go ahead.
Further.
There's like several cases where an NYPD cop will like call a woman he's arresting for no reason.
A, you know, a big black, you know, bitch.
And again, the city spends thousands of dollars defending these cops and promoting them.
Yep.
No surprise there.
Exactly.
I mean, the NYPD, man, it really is just like, I mean, OK, to be fair, if you look at civilian complaints, 41 percent don't have any civilian complaints.
About 10 percent have more than six.
Some of them have more than 30.
So it's like, obviously, those cops probably shouldn't have guns.
Yeah.
And this is a story that you're working on now, you said.
I'm working on a series of stories based around some recently public data about NYPD misconduct.
And this particular story is about instances where officers have been accused of using racist, sexist, transphobic or whatever, just generally anti LGBT language.
So it's like, like, like, oh, you're dyke, you know, like stuff like that, where it's like, well, it's no repercussions except for, like, some retraining.
All right.
So, you know, you had this important quote here from the lawyer in this case saying that, you know, if this happened in war, this would be, you know, torture and murder.
This would be a war crime if somebody died in this, you know, when I get back to doing a live radio show every day kind of thing.
And I want to always have a thing where we cover stories like this, but we always introduce them as, did you see the outrage of what happened in Iran or what happened in Russia, what happened in China, the way these evil chai comms are?
And then, you know, a couple minutes in you go, oh, yeah, no, of course, we're talking about Texas.
We're talking about Washington.
We're talking about Virginia.
Every single day.
And all you have to do is, you know, Reason Magazine does a great job covering this, but you know, the Free Thought Project, every single day, cops killing people is just completely bananas.
Yeah.
It's insane.
Like killing people, facing no repercussions unless there's like, you know, some sort of video that can go viral.
I mean, again, like looking at the website or the databases of like NYPD misdeeds and sorry to be so regional, but it's just like what I'm focusing on now.
But I mean, there are cops who are still on the force that have killed people.
It just like didn't go viral because there happened to not be video and the city defends them.
It's like, you know, thousands of dollars of taxpayer money defending cops who just like killed somebody having a mental health crisis.
Yeah.
Under the slightest pretext, they do, too.
They're like, oh, he's got a screwdriver in his hand, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.
Oh, you see, he had a screwdriver when I come on.
This guy, you could have stopped him with one hand, tough guy.
What about that?
But no.
Yeah.
I mean, and you know, like so, you know, British cops don't really carry guns like some do, but not everyone.
So they're trained extensively in de-escalation without shooting somebody to death, even if they are waving around.
And if you're on Twitter or Facebook, you'll always see.
Watch this cop do some cool judo takedown maneuver to take down a guy with a knife.
But it's always in some other country far away in Brazil or Thailand or in Japan or somewhere else.
Watch this cop with his bare hands beat the crap out of this armed guy because he's a trained fighter, tough guy, and he wouldn't want to have to hide behind his gun.
All his mates might laugh at him.
Right.
Exactly.
But here they are all just dying to pull that trigger on somebody.
You know, I can't wait.
I can't wait to be a tough guy with, you know, hiding behind my big gun.
Yeah, it is.
It's nuts.
All right.
Listen, you're having Internet problems and I've talked enough over your great interview, but listen, I really appreciate you coming on the show and this great piece that you wrote.
It's at Reason.com.
It's called In April, She Was Jailed on a Probation Violation.
By June, she was dead.
Really important piece here.
It's by Tana Geneva, again at Reason.com.
Thanks again.
Oh, thanks, Scott.
Thank you for having me on.
Sorry for all the Internet problems, man.
No worries.
Thanks again.
The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
