A Washington state homicide suspect with prior warrants in the East Bay was arrested in Missouri this week after he was mistakenly released in October from Contra Costa County’s Martinez Jail while waiting to be extradited to Washington state.

Isaiah Jamon Andrews, 20, of Kern, Washington, is suspected of fatally shooting a 20-year-old man at a hotel in Seattle on October 15. He was arrested on October 18 in Contra Costa County following a police chase and booked into Martinez Jail on suspicion of homicide, as KRON4 reported in October.

According to KPIX, Andrews was also being held at the jail on local charges, along with a juvenile warrant from Sacramento.

Andrews attended his extradition hearing on October 20 then disappeared two days later. Authorities launched a search of the area but did not notify the media or the public about his disappearance for five days — at which point SFist reported that Andrews was at large and had been released by mistake.

A multi-state search operation was also initiated.

On Wednesday, five months after his escape, the US Marshals Service arrested Andrews in St. Louis, Missouri, and he’ll now be extradited back to Seattle to face murder charges there.

Image: Google Street View

Carlos Harris has already served a 20-year sentence for a crime he says he did not commit, and a judge ordered his release from Santa Clara County Jail last week. But thanks to bureaucratic red tape, the jail can not release him.

A Santa Clara County man named Carlos Harris was convicted of robbery and attempted murder in 2005, though has maintained his innocence the whole nearly two decades he's been in prison.

Setting aside his guilt or innocence, it seemed like a nice story last Thursday when KTVU reported that a judge ordered that Harris be released from Santa Clara County Jail, reducing Harris’s sentence so that he had already served his full time. His cousin told KTVU that "This is an overjoyed moment of just relief and just glory," and Harris’s wife reportedly started planning a second honeymoon for the couple to renew their vows.

But despite that a judge ordered Harris’s release from jail, he has not actually been released from Santa Clara County Jail. Now five days after he was granted his release effective immediately, KTVU is now reporting that Harris still has not been released from jail, because of some bureaucratic slow-walking with the state department of Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

"I don't know what to do," Harris told KTVU. "I don't know when I'm getting out."

The Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office says they’d be happy to release Harris, but their hands are tied given the lack of response from state corrections officials.

"By 11:15 a.m. Friday [October 18], the Sheriff’s Office learned that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) must process Mr. Harris for release since he is technically in CDCR custody at the Santa Clara County Main Jail," a sheriff's spokesperson said in a statement to KTVU. "At 11:30 a.m. It was determined without CDCR dropping its hold, the Sheriff’s Office could not release him from jail."

NBC Bay Area reported Monday night that now the NAACP of Silicon Valley is getting involved. "We are calling for Carlos’s immediate release right now," that chapter’s board member Lynn Rose told NBC Bay Area. "Right now. Not tomorrow. Not the next day. Right now. There’s a lot of politics being played right now."

But right now, as of press time and five days after he was ordered released, Carlos Harris is still in Santa Clara County Jail.

Related: Mayor Breed’s Brother Gets His Prison Sentence Shortened, Could Be Out Within a Year [SFist]

Image: Google Street View

Sheriff Vicky Hennessy wants to explore the possibility of bringing a more farm-to-table culinary situation to San Francisco's jails. "It would be locally sourced food, the kind I like to eat," Hennessy tells the San Francisco Examiner.

That's right. When the city's $3 million contract with jail food provider Aramark ends next year, Hennessy wants to switch up the menu. Reports the Examiner, "Hennessy hopes at least a pilot program can be started by modeling the jail after San Francisco Unified School District efforts that use local food to feed students through the the Good Food Purchasing Program."

The Center for Good Food Purchasing's program involves analyzing how existing jail food is purchased and finding ways to incorporate locally produced and sustainable food into the inmates' meals. Plus, the program is a proponent of worker's rights and humane animal treatment. It's all very Alice Waters.

"When you get a group of men, and they don't like the food and they rebel against the food, that's a problem. We have to make sure that's one less thing the deputies ... have to worry about," explained Aramark's Vincent Mitchell to the Examiner. It's unclear if the new plan would include keeping Aramark on board or finding another institutional caterer to manage the inmates' "three hots."

There's no official plan in place to begin bringing the Good Food Purchasing Program into the city's jails. It's simply something Hennessy thinks is a good idea. "It's always been somewhat bland," said Hennessy of SF's jail food.

The Examiner's Jonah Owen Lamb reviewed a meal at the San Francisco County Jail as part of his research, and he gives Taco Night three out of five stars.

Related: Yelp Reviews Of The County Jail Are The Only Yelp Reviews We Trust

San Francisco County jails have a problem, and it's one that goes beyond the much talked about seismically unsafe Jail No. 4 that's in need of replacement. It appears that since 2014, the surveillance systems in both County Jails No. 1 and 2 have been on the fritz — leaving a compromised security system that has not been entirely repaired despite more than a million dollars worth of work.

So reports SF Weekly, which notes that a January letter from Sheriff Vicki Hennessy states that "many of the basic security functions of the facility are still not complete." And just what, exactly, are these incomplete basic security functions? The Weekly says that "the alarm system, the security cameras, and the electronics that control the doors" all need to be replaced.

The city has contracted two companies to do the work, notes the paper, at what is currently an unknown cost.

Although no one has escaped from either jail since the security systems have started failing, not having video of what goes down inside raises a host of other concerns. For example, this long gap in proper surveillance casts further shadow over incidents like 2015's "apparent suicide" in County Jail No. 2 (the infamous case of jail guards forcing prisoners to fight took place at County Jail No. 4).

Well, at least we now know that the cameras aren't fake.

Related: Public Defender: SF Jail Inmates Are Made To Fight While Sheriff's Deputies Bet On Them

Though expected, we now know that the Board of Supervisors' December vote to kill the proposed new jail means that San Francisco will definitely turn down $80 million in state grant money that had been allocated toward the project. At the time, the Supervisors voted to reject the jail but they explicitly did not vote to reject the state funding — perhaps hoping that even though the money was specifically tied to the proposed jail, it could maybe be used to construct mental health facilities. That hope has now officially been dashed.

In a letter addressed to the Board of Supervisors, the Chronicle reports that San Francisco Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru made it clear that we had forfeited the money.

"The bottom line is that the city most likely will be deemed ineligible for the grant funding if the project scope is significantly altered,” he wrote. “I plan to inform the state that San Francisco is turning down the $80 million grant. I want to make certain the Board of Supervisors supports this decision.”

The current San Francisco County Jail No. 4 has been deemed seismically unsafe, and both Mayor Lee and Sheriff Vicki Hennessy supported the project. Those opposed, including Supervisors London Breed, John Avalos, Eric Mar, Jane Kim, and David Campos, argued that with the jail population steadily declining the money would be better spent on mental health care and rehabilitation programs.

Supervisor Mark Farrell, who supported constructing the jail with its estimated $380 million price tag, told the Chronicle that it was a mistake to let that cash go.

"I continue to believe we should have leveraged the state funds for this project," noted Farrell, "because ultimately we are going to need to build a new jail.”

Previously: [UPDATE] Supervisors Set To Tank New Jail Project With Vote Today

SF County Jail No. 2 Pod E serves as the music venue for a new live album by jazz and soul artist Naima Shalhoub, and it's titled Live in San Francisco County Jail. Recorded for Mother’s Day in front of 50 incarcerated women locked up at County, Live in San Francisco County Jail is a compelling and heart-wrenching live album, and quite beautifully engineered considering it was recorded in jail — a jail where 85 percent of the incarcerated have not even been convicted of a crime, according to the public defender's recent figures.

The obvious comparison here is to Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, but this album is nothing like the Johnny Cash album. Naima Shalhoub’s songs are not jailhouse anthems about shooting that warden or shooting that woman down. These are melodic, uplifting soul tunes that you would take your mom to hear on Mother’s Day, peppered with jazz-backed poetry written and read by incarcerated women plus the improvisational stylings of Rhodessa Jones from the Medea Project (who’s featured in a free lecture tonight at Glide, if incarcerated women’s issues are your thing).

Live in San Francisco County Jail is previewed in the 12-minute video below, which I dare you to watch without getting completely choked up.

SFist spoke with Naima Shalhoub, whose music classes with women incarcerated at SF County served as the basis for this album. “A lot of the [songs], I had been singing with the women every week,” Ms. Shalhoub told us. “A lot of them were constantly on request from the different women in the class. ‘God Bless the Child’ I sang a ton. ‘Todo Cambia’, the song by Mercedes Sosa, I sang frequently.”

“The songs ended up choosing themselves,” she said.

The songs chose themselves during a year’s worth of weekly sessions where Ms. Shalhoub would shlep her ukulele down to SF County B Pod every Friday from Noon to 1 p.m. to play cover songs and originals. The locked-up ladies’ requests ironically skewed towards freedom songs and liberation songs. “To sing those type of songs in a jail or a prison, where it’s the exact opposite, it’s all about isolation and confinement, that experience was extremely powerful and visceral,” she told us.

The result is a jailhouse record whose songs don’t really feel like prison songs, they’re mostly uplifting and inspirational numbers. “I could go in and talk about doomsday all I want, but I get to go home to my comfortable apartment. So I had to really shift my lens of what freedom means in this context for these women,” Ms. Shalhoub said. “Yes, it was important to have the freedom to talk about the system and racism and sexism and classism and all these things, but what I found the women appreciated most was to feel uplifted.”

A plan was eventually hatched to record one of her sessions as a Mother’s Day concert, complete with a four-piece jazz band. “I wanted the women in my classes to want this,” she told us. “It’s a vulnerable situation to come in with cameras and recording equipment when you don’t necessarily have a choice. We made it be a choice.”

“We were approved to have an open mic and have their voices recorded in the room,” she said. “So it’s an honor to get other people’s voices out there that don’t have the privilege to be out there themselves.”

One of the open mic, spoken word jailhouse poets featured on the record is Tameika “Chocolate Chip” Smith, reading poetry she wrote right there in the joint. “It’s a bittersweet thing because I knew that any woman that was going to be a part of it, they were also doing time,” Ms. Shalhoub admitted. “Tameika in the past had mentioned that one of her dreams was to meet the president and to share her poetry with as many people as possible. So I’m hoping with this project that her voice gets out there.”

“There is so much talent behind bars, it’s maddening,” she said. “I just continue to meet so many talented women behind bars.”

Half of the profits from Live in San Francisco County Jail will go toward supporting incarcerated women through social and reentry programs, so it’s a noteworthy album for an outstanding cause. “Mass incarceration is an epidemic,” Naima Shalhoub said. “There are serious racial and gender and classist mediations of who is in in prison. One woman told me, ‘I want people to know that I’m smart. I want people to know that I have dreams. I want people to know that I miss my kids, I want people to know that I miss the sunrise’.”

Live in San Francisco County Jail is available on Bandcamp for $10 as a digital download or $15 for a physical CD with a 6-page digipak with photos, with half of the profits going towards support programs for incarcerated women.

So now Supervisor-elect Aaron Peskin has an official start date. The District 3 leader was voted back into his old job last month, and today we learn that he'll return to work on the 8th of December. Putting to rest speculation that he would delay signing the Board of Supervisors approved, Department of Elections certified election results from November's election, Mayor Lee announced he would sign the results — thus making them official — as soon as he is presented with them. Peskin is not officially a member of the Board until the Mayor does this, and the timing of Peskin's start date will likely have a profound impact on several major projects — including the proposed $380 million new jail.

And, as has been said a lot, Peskin's return to the board also seems to signal a return to some more progressive politics.

In conversation with the San Francisco Chronicle, the mayor made his intention explicit.

“I anticipate him being here on the 8th, and he should be sworn in, and that should be a fact,” said Lee. “I am taking his word he is going to be here.”

This should come as a welcome surprise to Supervisor Avalos, an ally of Peskin, who squawked to the Examiner on Monday that he expected Mayor Lee to delay the start date of Peskin's term by up to ten days — something that Lee has the authority to do.

Peskin's election to the District 3 Supervisor seat that he held for many years in the last decade brings with it a shift in power on the Board of Supervisors from what is considered to be the moderate bloc to the progressive bloc. The proposed new jail, which supporters say is needed to replace the current seismically unsafe jail, is opposed by the more progressive members of the Board who argue that the money should be spent elsewhere.

While Peskin has not officially announced a position on the jail, it is reasonable to assume he will vote to kill the project.

Opposition to the new jail picked up some steam this week, with San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon coming out against the project on Tuesday.

"What San Francisco needs today are mental health facilities, not a new jail,” CBS SF reports the DA as saying at a press conference.

In announcing that he would not delay Peskin's start date, maybe the mayor is signaling that he's already come to terms with the new balance of power, and will be carefully picking his battles.

Peskin, who is currently on vacation in Nepal, is unavailable for comment.

Previously: Mayor Lee Could Delay Start Of Peskin's Term In Order To Push Through New Jail Project

With Aaron Peskin's November election to the District 3 seat, the Board of Supervisors is set to make a shift to the left. However, what day he officially begins his job is ultimately up to Mayor Ed Lee, and with several important votes possibly coming before the Board the week of December 7th Lee may decide keep Peskin on the sidelines just a tad bit longer.

Replacing current D3 Supervisor Julie Christensen, Supervisor-elect Peskin is considered more progressive than and less cooperative with the mayor than Christensen — a difference that shifts the balance of Supervisors' power away from the Mayor's Office and the moderate bloc of the Board. As Mayor, Lee has the power to delay the start of Peskin's term by up to 10 days — an action that would maintain the moderate majority until after crucial votes are cast. Lee has this power as the Department of Elections certified election results don't take effect until approved by the Board in a vote, and then signed by Lee.

As The Examiner reports, this is a muscle that the mayor is not afraid to flex, having delayed signing certified election results by eight days on two separate occasions.

And what could be impacted by the mayor's timing? The Examiner points out that the future of both the potential Mission Bay Warriors arena and a new jail (with a possible price tag of $600 million according to Supervisor Jane Kim, but a pricetag of $380 million per the Ex) could be decided next week. The jail project is opposed by Kim and other progressives on the Board, and it is reasonable to assume that Peskin would vote with them to kill the project.

How likely is Mayor Lee to delay signing the certified election results? Supervisor John Avalos thinks we should expect it.

“No one expects the mayor to approve the will of the voters right away,” Avalos told the Examiner. “I expect more that he’s trying to rush the voting on legislation before Peskin gets sworn in."

Supervisor Scott Wiener seemed to suggest that the mayor will sign the election results when it suits him to do so, telling the Examiner that "[Lee] will sign it whenever he is ready to sign it," but refused to speculate on any possible motive for the potential timing.

“I know some people like to look for conspiracies," said Wiener. "There is no conspiracy here.”

What does Supervisor Peskin think about all of this? Well he's currently on vacation in Nepal and can't be reached for comment.

Related: Does San Francisco Need A New Jail?

The man pictured at right is loose on the streets of the Bay Area after outrunning a corrections officer who was escorting him to take out the trash. He is Timothy Deshone Midgett, 40, and it's not yet clear what he was convicted for here, though the Chron notes he has a warrant for his arrest in Houston on narcotics charges.

The escape happened when a deputy sheriff was escorting Midgett to a basement trash bin, and Midgett ran out of a side door from the Hall of Justice, running east. The deputy gave chase but wasn't able to keep up. Midgett was serving a one-year sentence and was scheduled to be released on July 24.

Police are searching for him and have alerted other law enforcement agencies around the Bay Area. He's described as 6 feet, 3 inches tall, 165 lbs, with black and gray hair, and a mustache and goatee.

[Chron]
[BCN/Appeal]

Poor Ed Jew! Not only is he doomed to spend the rest of his life with "disgraced" and "former" in front of his name, but he's in terrible danger of losing his crown as SF's most embarrassingly corrupt politician of this millennium. How quaint Jew's residency lies slash bubble tea corruption thing seems now that we have suspended Senator Leland Yee, his buddy Shrimp Boy and a 137 page criminal complaint to kick around. And to add insult to injury, this Friday Jew s expected to head back to jail.

Which, is anyone else a little surprised by this? Surely some of you wondered, at the news that the Ghee Kung Tong Supreme Lodge (just steps from Jew's family flower shop/shower) was raided, if there was some sort of connection between Jew's desire to get out of his final sentence and the busts. Or maybe I just watch too many TV shows in which the convict offers information to get out of jail time. Perhaps that, like film and television depictions of bloggers as angry slob rejects, is total fiction.

Because if a deal was struck, everyone involved is doing a great job of hiding it. Assistant District Attorney Alex Bastian has told the Ex that, despite the Jew team's best efforts, the disgraced former (see what we did there?) Supervisor is expected to turn himself in to the SF Sheriff's Department on Friday to serve his one-year sentence for lying and saying he lived in San Francisco, when he did not.

Assuming this all goes through as planned, I guess this is goodbye for now, Ed. See you next year!

[Ex]

How is disgraced former SF Supe "Tapioca" Ed Jew's fight to avoid his jail term for lying and saying he lived in SF coming along? Not so well, if San Francisco's District Attorney has anything to say about it.

We told you last month that Jew has returned home (to Burlingame, of course) after serving his five year federal sentence for fraud and extortion. But this is just an intermission, as he still has a one-year state sentence left to serve for lying about living in SF.

As we noted then, Jew's attorney, Stuart Hanlon, had been giving interviews saying that Jew shouldn't have to serve that sentence, in part because after a brief stop at a Sixth Street halfway house last August, "media attention" (in the form of an ABC 7 broadcast) meant Jew was forced to serve time at L.A.'s Metropolitan Detention Center for the final six months of his fraud sentence.

As that jail was, Hanlon says, "a maximum security lockup jail," Hanlon told reporters that since "Jew was not allowed to serve time in the halfway house, he should get credit for time served for his County Jail sentence."

However, Hanlon has apparently changed his story a bit since those interviews: In papers filed last week in SF Superior Court, Hanlon dropped the "media attention" excuse for why Jew had to leave the halcyon environs of Sixth Street. Instead, Hanlon says, the halfway house stop was just a mixup, as the Feds realized that with another sentence to serve, Jew was supposed to remain in jail. In other words, Jew shouldn't have gone to the halfway house in the first place, and when authorities realized their mistake, they rectified it.

In Hanlon and Jew's combined thought process, for some reason, this rule against halfway houses for convicts with another sentence to serve still means that "the extra punishment for his state conviction...has already occurred," reports the Chron.

Jew, who Hanlon said was not just teaching yoga but was also "building wheelchairs for poor children" while in jail, also contracted both valley fever and tuberculosis while in the pen, leaving Jew in poor health that could get poorer if subjected to this additional prison term.

Jew is expected to fight his second sentence in court March 21, but he shouldn't expect an easy ride from the District Attorney's office: as their spokesperson told Matier and Ross, "These are separate cases, separate crimes, separate jurisdictions and separate sentences."

[Chron]

In a storyline ripped from a rejected Desperate Housewives spec, Laurie Ann Martinez, a psychologist at Folsom Prison, was charged with faking her own rape in order to get her stubborn husband to move the couple to a better neighborhood. Reasonable, right? No, that is not reasonable. That is terrible. Also, she was in cahoots with a friend during this faux rape/robbery ordeal.

Sacramento Bee reports: "Investigators said Friday that she ripped open her blouse, split her own lip, scraped her knuckles with sandpaper and had her friend punch her with boxing gloves." Police responded to the the Martinez home on Norgard Court last April where they "found Laurie Ann Martinez lying on the floor, crying hysterically."

The fuzz says "it was all a ploy to get her husband to agree to move to a more desirable neighborhood." But now? The couple is divorcing.

Released Monday on $50,000 bail, Martinez faces two counts of conspiracy and, quite possibly, a lifetime of spinsterhood.

In an effort to become the most boring place on the world wide web -- or maybe it's just us? Since our friends post the most meh stuff now, we've resorted to following Arbor Mist's spectacular, frighteningly honest updates. Seriously. "Sparkling Raspberry put the sparkle in my smile ;)" beats the umpteenth pretentious Kanye West song lyric -- Facebook will "work with law enforcement agencies nationwide to remove accounts set up by inmates or posted on their behalf." Why? Well, according Associated Press, "prisoners are using the social networking site to stalk victims and direct criminal activity."

In Facebook's defense, they do have a point. One case in particular case, a convicted child molester sent Facebook pic sketches to one of his victims.

Last year a convicted child molester used a cellphone smuggled into prison to search his victim's Facebook and MySpace web pages, the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in announcing the agreement with Facebook. The inmate then sent sketches to the 17-year-old victim's home. Though he hadn't seen her in at least seven years, the inmate used photos from her social networking pages to accurately draw the clothes she wore and the way she styled her hair, the department said.

While inmates are allowed to retain their social networking profiles that were created before incarceration, Facebook will yank their pages if they're used while the convict is behind bars. California's botched prison system, according Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes, could do itself a favor by "keep[ing] smartphones and other Internet devices out of prisons."

Several years ago, California corrections officers uncovered 261 contraband cellphones inside prisons. "They found more than 7,200 in the first six months of this year," reports the LA Times.

[Oakland Tribune]