- Ta'Neasha Chappell's needless death
exposes the harsh realities of pre-trial detention
and rural jail conditions.
And we need to dive into her family's pursuit of justice
and the systemic failures
that cost this young mother her life.
Right, you've probably never heard of this woman before,
but her name was Ta'Neasha Chappell.
She was from Louisville, Kentucky.
She was 23 years old with a daughter, Nevaeh.
According to her family, she loved to make people laugh.
She was vibrant, outspoken.
She saw the good in everybody.
She's the type of person that would take a bullet for you.
And I don't mean that metaphorically.
She reportedly once laid on top of her boyfriend
during a drive-by shooting, taking five bullets to the back,
another time taking one to the arm, protecting her daughter.
But on the last day of her life,
she spent hours begging for someone to just care about her.
Right, in May of 2021, Ta'Neasha was charged with theft
and fleeing the police in Indiana.
She was pulled over with her car
matching the description of a vehicle involved in the theft
to thousands of dollars in clothes.
The officer there approaching her car
with his gun pulled from its holster
trying to pull her from the vehicle.
She then drives off and the police chase her
before she's then pulled over again,
and the officer once again approaches the car
with his gun out, this time pointing it towards the car.
Ta'Neasha then takes off again
and eventually veers into a ditch.
She gets arrested, and on her way in
she tells the cop why she drove off, saying,
"You scared me with the aggression.
"As soon as I seen your gun,
"it scared me half to damn death.
"I was like, 'Oh my gosh, he pulled a gun.
"'My hands was out. He sees my hands.
"'Why'd he pull his gun out on me?'"
Ta'Neasha was then taken to Jackson County Jail,
which then failed to perform a medical screening on her
despite it being required by state regulations.
Eight days after her arrest
she was finally officially charged,
the judge then setting her bail at $4,000
and her trial set for nearly six months later.
Her family then tries to scrape together that bail money,
but they're unable to make it.
So Ta'Neasha's just stuck in pre-trial detention
where she's also the only Black woman in her unit.
She's ostracized, she faces racial slurs for weeks,
and on July 15th she starts getting sick.
And all night Ta'Neasha calls on the intercom
begging for help.
She was throwing up blood. She was dehydrated.
She was growing more and more incoherent,
and by the next day she was just stumbling around,
falling, hitting her head.
The jail staff and nurse reportedly visiting her cell
several times, but no one makes a call to the hospital.
And then after all of that, at 3:00 p.m. the next day
guards just find her lying naked on the floor
and then ordering her to get dressed,
with one sergeant telling her,
"This just makes us think you're faking it.
"If you're not gonna get up and get dressed,
"we're just gonna leave you alone.
"You can just sit there and suffer."
With an ambulance not being called until 3:15 p.m.
and Ta'Neasha pronounced dead at the hospital at 5:45.
And during those 19 hours that she was sick,
her family was also never contacted,
with her sister later saying,
"They had a duty to protect her.
"She wasn't attended to because she was a Black woman
"and they didn't feel
"like she was worth getting any attention."
Also, as far as how she died, that remains a mystery.
Her autopsy revealing a green liquid in her stomach
and labeling her cause of death as probable toxicity,
and some inmates saying that the prisoners
had been putting a cleaning product
in Ta'Neasha's food and drinks.
So Indiana State Police investigated
and said they found no evidence
that she was poisoned by her fellow inmates
or jail employees,
and the prosecuting attorney announcing
that there were no crimes committed
and no charges would be filed.
But Ta'Neasha's family isn't ready
to let her death be swept under the rug,
with her mother launching a civil lawsuit
against 13 jail employees and the sheriff
for failing to provide
adequate medical care for her daughter.
Her family also starting the Justice for Ta'Neasha movement
demanding not only federal prosecution,
but the removal of the sheriff and jail employees
involved in Ta'Neasha's death,
and that in addition to the removal
of the license of the jail nurse.
Also those who gave their depositions
offer some answers about their inaction
revealing what's been described
as a general lack of knowledge
about handling medical emergencies
as well as several grievous miscommunications.
And a really key thing to take away from this
is this problem isn't just limited to Indiana.
According to a 2021 study
from the Vera Institute of Justice,
rural counties incarcerate people
at double the rate of urban areas
despite having fewer resources.
And rural jails,
like the one in Indiana where Ta'Neasha was held,
suffer from the same problems that urban ones do,
overcrowding, understaffing, undertraining.
But those problems are made even worse
because they don't have the money to handle them.
With an associate professor of criminology
and justice studies at Drexel University
in Philadelphia saying, "Fiscal pressures are an issue
"throughout corrections, but this can be especially true
"in smaller counties and jurisdictions where the tax base
"and public funding infrastructure tend to be more limited.
"This can translate to poorer conditions inside of jails
"and a failure to meet standards of correctional care."
but also with Ta'Neasha's case,
an associate professor of criminal justice said
it was all of those things and more, saying,
"It's an intersection of all sorts of awful things,"
listing off, "Pre-trial detention for people
"who can't afford to get out on bail.
"Black people in southern Indiana
"being afraid of police officers.
"Lack of healthcare.
"Low education and pay for the correctional officers
"who are tasked with assessing people."
Saying, "Many don't have the training,
"the education, or the compassion."
And as far as how Ta'Neasha's story ends,
we won't know for a little while
with her mother's lawsuit not set to go to trial
until June 26th, but we'll obviously keep our eyes on it.
And in the meantime, let me know your thoughts
in those comments down below.
Also, if you or someone you know has any experience
with local jail systems,
whether it be on the employee side or the inmate side,
please share your story.
And then future of equal access to knowledge
is about to be decided
thanks to this major copyright lawsuit
that you probably have never heard about.
Right, so at the center of it you have Internet Archive.
It's a nonprofit that was founded back in 1996
to build an internet library
with the purpose of offering permanent access
for researchers, historians, and scholars
to historical collections that exist in digital format.
And its offerings include films, audio recordings, texts,
educational items, and the Wayback Machine,
which is a historical collection of billions of webpages.
But the service in question today is its open library
which offers digital access to print books.
The Internet Archive use what's known
as controlled digital lending,
which lets libraries lend one copy of a digitized item
out to one borrower at a time,
just like how a library works with physical books.
But in March of 2020, when the pandemic closed libraries,
people needed digital resources,
so they expanded that program
to a National Emergency Library.
And the Internet Archive lifted wait lists,
allowing multiple people to borrow
the same digitized book at once,
saying at the time that they received dozens of messages
of thanks from teachers and school librarians
for helping their students
during this tremendous and historic outage.
And while some questioned if this was illegal,
the Internet Archive argue, "No.
"The books in the National Emergency Library
"have been acquired through purchase or donation,
"just like a traditional library.
"The Internet Archive preserves
"and digitizes the books it owns
"and makes those scans available
"for users to borrow online."
And noting that, yes, it does traditionally follow
that one-at-a-time rule,
but desperate times call for desperate measures
and saying that rule is out the door
until at least June 30th, 2020.
But that wasn't a good enough answer for publishing groups
who then hit Internet Archive with a lawsuit,
that suit being led by Hachette, HarperCollins,
John Wiley and Sons, and Penguin Random House,
and arguing that this was willful
mass copyright infringement.
So the Internet Archive cut
its National Emergency Library program short.
The lawsuit still moved forward
with the publishers not just taking aim
at the Emergency Library,
but the Internet Archive's open library general practice
of controlled digital lending.
And since many libraries have adopted
controlled digital lending in some way,
that meant that this case could set the precedent
for how copyright infringement applies
to libraries lending digital books.
And that's essentially what happened back in March
when a judge sided with the publishers
and dismissed the Internet Archive's arguments
that this falls under fair use.
But the Internet Archive is vowing to keep fighting,
putting out a statement where it called the decision,
"A blow to all libraries and the communities we serve."
And adding, "This decision impacts libraries across the U.S.
"who rely on controlled digital lending
"to connect their patrons with books online,"
saying, "It hurts authors by saying
"that unfair licensing models are the only way
"their books can be read online.
"And it holds back access to information
"in the digital age, harming all readers everywhere."
And its founder, Brewster Kahle, adding,
"For democracy to thrive at global scale,
"libraries must be able to sustain
"their historic role in society,
"owning, preserving, and lending books."
So the Internet Archive will be appealing the decision.
And interestingly, authors have had kind of mixed responses.
The Authors Guild sided with the publishers
saying that the Internet Archive's
controlled digital lending is not fair use,
saying it's theft and a devalues authors' works.
But in September, a group of over 300 authors
signed an open letter in support of the Internet Archive
and libraries, actually asking publishers to drop the suit,
with author Scott Carney saying,
"Libraries are a vital institution
"to cultivate engaged readers.
"Allowing them to carry books in formats
"that readers actually use only helps authors.
"Not allowing libraries to function
"puts the control of reading
"into the hands of big tech companies."
Right, and that's a key thing because while this case
was specifically about the Internet Archive,
like I mentioned at the top of this,
this has much wider implications
with Bloomberg Law explaining, "The unwavering rebuke
"of the online repository likely bars similar practices
"by libraries, attorneys favoring both sides said."
And Juliya M. Ziskina, a policy fellow
at the Library Futures Institute, told the outlet
that while libraries don't have to be concerned yet,
they said it's a big blow, and adding it really enforces
that if libraries didn't already exist,
they wouldn't be allowed to exist today.
Now it is also worth noting that controlled digital lending
isn't the only way that libraries can get e-books
into the hands of readers,
but as outlets like Vice have noted, licenses are costly,
temporary, and ruin preservation efforts,
which is also why one librarian told the outlet,
"What ends up happening is that libraries spend more
"of their money on licensing things that they don't own,
"which can be taken away at any time
"that are more expensive to begin with
"than buying hard copies
"in order to serve a segment of their population
"that uses e-books, and that you ended up
"with a much smaller selection of materials
"because the budget gets eaten so much faster."
With Bloomberg Law saying that this is why supporters
of controlled digital lending say
it simply advances the premise of libraries
to the digital age.
Some even going as far to say that with this case
publishers get one step closer to killing libraries.
And that's not the only thing on the line here
because the Internet Archive could actually lose
billions in damages
if it doesn't successfully fight this case,
which is enough to threaten the existence
of its other services, including the Wayback Machine.
Which is why we've seen tons of people
speaking in support of it,
saying that it is a crucial tool for history,
journalism, information access, and more.
But for now, we're gonna have to wait to see
how things play out.
And of course, in the meantime,
let me know your thoughts in those comments down below.
And then spring is here, which means days are longer,
the weather's warming up.
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And then, moral panics aren't new,
but how they're now being weaponized to push agendas
and distract people from real societal issues
should concern you.
If you watch my daily show with any regularity
you know just how much LGBTQ issues
have taken center stage in American politics.
For the past few years,
how many times have you seen Republicans
just frothing at the mouth about trans people, drag queens,
whatever they wanna label as wokeness that week,
which seems to be a puzzling amount of anxiety
to be directed at a group
that makes up just 1.6% of the population
when it comes to trans and non-binary people.
Politicians, talking heads, and social media
have overinflated it to the point
that in a survey last year the average American guessed
the share of trans people to be 21%.
And it's this exaggeration of a smaller,
often non-existent issue than the whipping up
of the fear and hostility around that issue
that makes this what sociologists call a moral panic.
Right, it's a recurring phenomenon
that pops up in different forms,
with the satanic panic of the '80s being the most famous,
but also being the one that inspired me
to learn more about how they work.
So to that end, I spoke with four experts,
starting with Dr. Mary deYoung,
formerly a professor of sociology
at Grand Valley State University.
And she says at these moral panics,
which come in reaction to perceived social change
and confusion around morality and identity,
are almost universally right-wing.
Just think about the big ones.
You have witch hunts, Red Scare, the satanic panic.
- They had a certain regressive quality to them
in that they were trying to restore something
that people imagined were either lost
or were being threatened.
- And she told us that as the conversations
around different gender identities and sexual orientations
enter the mainstream,
some people feel like the traditional categories
they identify with are being destabilized.
So to alleviate this feeling, they deny the reality
of these different identities.
Right, and the targets and rationale,
they're kind of just tweaks on each other.
Think about conservatives saying trans people aren't real
or it's all just a mental illness,
often the same people who say gay people
are just making a choice or they're just confused,
and instead they blame an entity outside
what they consider the in-group
for introducing the confusion.
Currently, a great example of that
is the panic around teachers grooming students
or kids going to drag queen story time,
with the men in the end
feeling like their own identity is still intact
by expelling the other.
So that takes care of the identity confusion,
but the moral confusion requires a different solution,
which deYoung argues is why children
are so often made the object of anxiety
where they're seen as pure and innocent,
so their abuse is obviously morally unambiguous.
Plus, that kind of self-certainty gives you permission
to shut down any detractors.
- If you say, "Ah, I don't believe that,"
the response from somebody who does is,
"Do you not care about kids?
"Do you not care about sexual abuse?"
- With deYoung adding that this sense of moral clarity
also feeds into a basic human need deep within our psyche.
- Most of us operate, I think,
under a kind of fundamental assumption
that social psychologists call the just-world hypothesis,
that there is order, there is morality,
that people get what they deserve
whether for good acts or for bad acts.
- But you also have Dr. Michael Barbezat,
a historian at the Australian Catholic University,
offering a different explanation
for this obsession with kids,
saying children being the next generation
essentially represent the future.
So if you're afraid of where the future's headed,
you're gonna defend children.
And supposedly that fear is why moral panics
tend to flare up at times of crisis or instability,
with the same pattern repeating so often throughout history
that experts actually coined a term for it,
the nocturnal ritual fantasy.
Right, in essence, it's this idea that shadowy groups
secretly get together to worship forces of evil
and ritualistically abuse children.
- Historians will often say
that history doesn't necessarily repeat itself,
but it certainly rhymes.
And this is one of those rhymes.
It changes through time
with the groups of people we don't like.
So if you're an ancient Roman who's a pagan,
you think Christians are doing this.
If you are a medieval Christian,
you think bad Christians are doing this,
or Jews are doing this, or lepers are doing this,
people your culture doesn't like.
Later on in the Renaissance,
you think witches are doing this.
And in all of these cases,
none of these people accused of it were doing it.
If you read the sources
for all of these supposed conspiracies,
you'll be struck with how similar it seems
where you have these secret meetings,
sometimes they're underground,
sometimes they're in the woods.
There will generally be, of course, invocations to evil,
if it's Satan if your culture believes in Satan.
Cats somehow get involved.
People with dark skin somehow get involved.
There's always some kind of freaky orgy, for some reason.
And then they hurt kids.
- With him adding that this conspiracy appears again
and again over centuries
from sources that had no contact with one another,
suggesting that it may just be hardwired into our culture.
And in today's moral panic
you can see it most clearly in the QAnon movement.
They've got the global cabal, the perverse rituals,
the child abuse, even a little satanism thrown in there.
But also despite the universal similarities,
our moral panic has its own uniquely American origins
with Dr. Kyle Riismandel,
a historian at the New Jersey Institute of Technology,
explaining that the idea of childhood had to be constructed
for these conspiracies to work at all.
- Coming out of the progressive era
of the late 19th century,
the idea of childhood emerges, right?
That, like, children are somehow innocent
and therefore different than, you know, adults
and eventually what are called teenagers.
You know, 'cause in the 19th century, early 20th century,
children were working in mines and factories
and contributed to the family economy on the farm, right?
- And then he says the idea of innocent children
was placed in the suburbs.
We're not talking like the the literal geographic area
between urban and rural that you can outline on a map.
Rather we're talking about the suburbs as an idea,
a symbol or an image that's typically seen
as the family-friendly home of American moral values.
And after World War II, that space became racialized
through policies like redlining
which kept Black Americans from accessing mortgages.
Meanwhile, the federal government subsidized home ownership
for middle class whites,
making it cheaper to buy a house in the suburbs
than to rent an apartment in cities
like New York, Boston, or Philadelphia.
And at the same time, men are returning back home from war
to find women working traditionally masculine jobs,
so they reestablish themselves
as the head of the household.
- The idea of the breadwinner
is a relatively recent invention,
that's a post-war invention,
and it's invented because men could go to work and afford,
right, make enough money to have a household,
provide all the consumer goods,
and have their spouse not work, right?
And not work in the sort of paid sense.
They're obviously working at home.
- So this all, all adds up to the popular image
of a suburban family that's white, heteronormative,
patriarchal, and Christian
with a pure innocent child at its center.
But that image could only be maintained
by creating an external threat,
and this came first from radio, then from television,
which introduced cultural products into the home
that would supposedly corrupt children.
And so then you got parents freaking out
about their kids listening to rock music,
watching explicit movies,
playing "Dungeons and Dragons," you know, the evil stuff.
And then when you throw into the mix
a late '70s economic crisis, racial integration,
and the return of many women to work out of necessity,
you can see how America was ripe for a moral panic.
Which of course is exactly what happened
with Reagan defending so-called family values,
Jerry Falwell conjuring the moral majority,
and the media hyping up missing kids
and poisoned Halloween candy.
Meanwhile, rising single motherhood
and divorce rates produce broken families,
and all the fucked up shit going on behind closed doors
begins coming out into the open
where, key thing, it's labeled as trauma for the first time,
as deYoung explains.
- People often forget that it really wasn't until the 1980s
that the word trauma was used effectively and descriptively
to talk about things that we had never talked about
before that period of time,
child sexual abuse, incest, domestic violence.
The fear of what the impact
of all of this would have on children,
particularly of children perhaps weren't really
as well cared for as we imagined they were
in previous generations caused a lot of unsettled feelings.
- So to cope with all this,
the religious right makes the devil not only real,
but responsible for people's distress,
leading to the satanic panic
in which dozens of people are actually convicted
on cooked-up charges,
some of them even spending years in prison
before being exonerated.
But as a result, very big thing, all of the actual abuse
and crimes being committed in churches, in schools,
in the Boy Scouts, that goes unnoticed.
- One of the benefits is the the structural arrangements
of people in power and patriarchal privilege, and that,
were really protected
as we went running wild looking for these satanic abusers.
- Which is at the very least ironic
because it means at the very thing the panic is about,
right, the abuse of children,
is actually being swept under the rug by the panic itself.
But arguably that's also the entire point,
to distract people not just from those individual crimes,
but also the unpopular economic policies.
And so today that can look like Ron DeSantis waging his war
on so-called wokeness.
Meanwhile, you got the Florida's homeowner insurance market
imploding as companies stopped covering zip codes
damaged by Hurricane Ian and premiums skyrocket.
And that's without mentioning
the state consistently ranking near the bottom
for healthcare, school funding, long-term elder care.
And you can also see this replicated at the federal level
with Republicans harping on culture war issues
while they cut taxes for the rich
and cut funding for social programs.
None of which, by the way, is new, right?
Dr. Andrew Hartman,
a historian at Illinois State University,
says these culture wars have been going on
since the beginning.
- Throughout the 19th century, the culture wars were often
between the dominant Protestant groups
who controlled most institutions,
political and cultural institutions in the United States,
especially the schools,
and Catholics or Mormons or non-Protestant Christians.
There have been these struggles throughout American history,
but since the 1960s, these struggles have largely been
between those who are liberal, progressive, secular,
and then on the other side these have been
conservative Christian traditionalists
who have imagined an American identity
rooted in a more distant past.
- So Hartman says that since then,
while the left has made real progress on cultural issues
like racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia,
the right has also used the reactionary backlash
against the progress to push through their economic agenda,
which creates this really weird dilemma, right?
Because when Republicans attacks some marginalized group,
you have a choice.
Either push back against them,
in which case you're fighting on their terms,
and the economic issues and all the other issues
recede into the background,
or you ignore them and you focus on the economy
where they don't have a leg to stand on,
in which case you're just leaving
those marginalized people out to dry.
So how to navigate this situation is a question
activists have been debating for decades.
Obviously I'm not gonna be able to settle that,
but I did ask the deYoung,
how can we deflate this moral panic?
And she recommends interrupting the cycle of fear
and to do so with some Socratic questioning
to nudge people toward critical thinking.
So there even she's pessimistic,
saying it'll probably just collapse under its own weight,
like the satanic panic did, though not entirely disappear,
instead going dormant and then flaring up
10 or 20 years from now wearing different clothing.
♪ Sxephil ♪
♪ He's not sexy, sxephil ♪
♪ He's S-X-E ♪