The Breach – Rewire News Group

Latest Episodes:

The Breach—’We Don’t Heal from It.’ – Episode Five: The Blackfeet Alternative Jan 30, 2019

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Season Four of the The Breach explores one central question: What happens when drug use during pregnancy becomes a felony?

Throughout Season Four of The Breach, we’ve explored the racial and political agendas behind the push to treat substance use by pregnant people as a crime rather than a health issue. We broke the news of law 240-D in Fort Peck, Montana, the harshest law of this kind found to date. We met Reneé, a woman jailed under 240-D. We’ve examined the ongoing challenges facing tribal governments as they grapple with high rates of substance use. And we’ve delved into the myths and contradictions of the drug court model in which Reneé and others can find themselves trapped.

In our final episode of the season, we take you to the Blackfeet reservation in northwest Montana for a glimpse at a compassionate alternative to criminalization.

This is Episode Four. Click here for the full series.

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The Breach—’We Don’t Heal from It.’ – Episode Four: The Catch-22 of Drug Courts Jan 23, 2019

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Season Four of the The Breach explores one central question: What happens when drug use during pregnancy becomes a felony?

In our last episode, we met Reneé, a woman jailed under 240-D, a unique law in Fort Peck, Montana, that criminalizes substance use during pregnancy. As part of her sentence, Reneé was required to participate in a special court in the Fort Peck justice system known as Healing to Wellness Court.

This is the tribal system’s version of a drug court, which is often billed as a more humane solution to drug-related crime. Today there are more than 3100 drug courts operating in the United States, including more than 70 Healing to Wellness Courts. But beneath the assurances of compassion and the glossy data suggesting success lurk very real concerns about the effectiveness of this system.

In this episode, host Lindsay Beyerstein speaks with drug court expert Denise Tomasini-Joshi. Together, they unpack the reality behind these band-aid courts and reveal how a seemingly humane solution falls short in practice.

This is Episode Four. Click here for the full series.

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The Breach—’We Don’t Heal from It.’ – Episode Three: Meeting Renée in Jail Sep 25, 2018

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When Montana county prosecutor Jay Harris announced he was going to seek protective orders for fetuses against pregnant people who use drugs or alcohol, it made international news. So why doesn’t anybody know that more than a dozen Native women have been criminally charged for the same behavior just a few hours away?

Join host Lindsay Beyerstein for for a completely new investigative season of The Breach that explores one central question: what happens when drug use during pregnancy becomes a felony? Hear from experts, locals, officials, and a woman from the jail in which she was held under a law that few people even knew existed—until now.

This is Episode Three. Click here for the full series.

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Credits:

Lindsay Beyerstein: Creator/Writer/Host
Nora Hurley: Producer
Mary Annette Pember: Editorial Advisor
Laura Huss: Research Director
Marc Faletti: Executive & Supervising Producer
Douglas Helsel: Original Music Composer & Performer/Sound Designer
Jo Constantz: Fact Checker
Additional Research and Production by Lauren Caton, Lauryn Gutierrez, and Saskia Hennecke

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The Breach—’We Don’t Heal from It.’ – Episode Two: Discovering 240-D in Fort Peck Sep 25, 2018

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This is Episode Two. Click here for the full series.

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The Breach—’We Don’t Heal from It.’ – Episode One: Investigating Big Horn County Sep 25, 2018

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Join host Lindsay Beyerstein for a completely new investigative season of The Breach exploring one central question: What happens when drug use during pregnancy becomes a felony? Hear from experts, locals, officials, and a woman from the jail in which she was held under a law that few people even knew existed—until now.

This is Episode One. Click here for the full series.

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Coming 9/25: A Nine-Month Investigation Leads to a Story You Have to Hear Sep 04, 2018

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It’s taken nine months, but The Breach is back with an entirely new format. We found one story that was so compelling we had to follow it wherever it led. This story is about pregnancy and drug use. It’s about Native people and tribal sovereignty. It’s about the search for justice. It’s a story nobody has told outside of a small community, but one that everybody needs to hear.

Listen to the trailer now, and subscribe at the links above to automatically download the three-episode miniseries when it is released on September 25.

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The Breach: How the United States Is Poisoning Native American Communities Dec 12, 2017

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Award-winning journalist Suzette Brewer joins host Lindsay Beyerstein for a wide-ranging discussion of issues facing Native American communities in the era of President Donald Trump. At reservations all over the country, water is being poisoned as toxins from mines seep into the local water supplies. And now the Trump administration wants to dramatically increase drilling on public lands, putting even more tribes at risk.

An edited excerpt:

Lindsay: What an apocalyptic scenario that would be if you’re a tribe, and you’re in somewhere remote, and all of a sudden there’s no potable water because mining has polluted it. What happens then?

Suzette: I can tell you exactly what happens because it happened to the Navajo Nation just two years ago. The Gold King Mine in Silverton, Colorado, exploded, and I think something like 1.6 million gallons of polluted contaminants went into the river and made its way down through Durango, Colorado and into the San Juan River, which goes through the Northern part of the Navajo reservation in New Mexico, and into Arizona.

These are people who have lived along the San Juan River for tens of thousands of years and have relied on that water. In the course of about 24 hours after the spill, their croplands were poisoned. The irrigation canals were poisoned. They still have not recovered from the spills. The Navajo people along the San Juan River are showing signs of lead, arsenic, and mercury contamination along with other pollutants that came out of those mines.

Recommended Reading:

Special election to replace Rep. John Conyers Jr. set for November 2018, by David Weigel for the Washington Post, December 2017

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The Breach: Calculating the Human Cost of the Terrible Tax Bill Dec 05, 2017

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Chye-Ching Huang of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities joins host Lindsay Beyerstein to break down exactly how the Senate tax bill will shift massive amounts of wealth from working people to corporations and the rich.

An edited excerpt:

Lindsay: People have talked about the impact of this bill, if it ultimately becomes law, as changing our whole way of life. What kind of programs and government activities and just the stature of the U.S. in the world, what kind of decline are we looking at if we’re losing these trillions of dollars?

Chye-Ching: I think that’s a really great question, to be looking forward to how does this affect fundamentally revenues, and the budget, and the way that programs are funded. I think we want to take really seriously what congressional Republican leaders have been saying, both in their budgets and recently, which is that these tax cuts for the wealthy are just the prelude to cutting vital programs. That could have really important impacts for families and the economy. In their budgets, in fact in the budget resolution that set off this entire process with this tax bill, they set out clear goals of deeply cutting Medicaid, Medicare, and other health programs, and they set up goals of cutting the part of the budget that funds education and training, transportation and infrastructure, medical research, child care, elder care—lots and lots of things that are really important to strengthening communities and the economy as a whole.

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Does the GOP Tax Plan Include a Tax Cut for Private Jet Owners? by Alex Kasprak for Snopes, November 2017

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The Breach: Sarah Kendzior on the ‘Oligarch Envy’ Haunting President Trump Nov 28, 2017

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Journalist Sarah Kendzior is back on The Breach to shine a light on the surprisingly coherent, and wholly anti-democratic, philosophy driving many of the choices of President Donald Trump. Kendzior, who speaks Russian and earned her PhD studying politics and propaganda in post-Soviet republics, also discusses the systemic challenges facing the mainstream media and U.S. intelligence agencies in the current political climate.

An edited excerpt:

Lindsay: Where do you think Trump’s attachment and admiration for Russia comes from?

Sarah: I think it’s multifaceted. I think there’s some kind of ideological or philosophical component in that Trump generally admires dictators, he admires strong-men governments, he admires oligarchs. I think he has oligarch envy. I think if he could, he would have lived like an oligarch in the United States, free of the kind of rules and regulations that we have–although obviously, we do not have enough regulations, because people like Trump and his cabinet members manage to come to power. And I think he’s worked directly with Russian financiers throughout his whole career, but especially after his bankruptcies in the ’90s. They propped up his business and gave him money when nobody else wanted to work with him, because he was very high risk, and I think that it’s possible he owes them quite a bit of money. And so I think there’s an aspect of debt. I think there’s an aspect of greed, where certain policies like removing the sanctions could prove beneficial to the Kremlin, to the oligarchs that back the Kremlin, to Trump, and to Trump’s cronies in the United States, to plutocrats here.

Recommended Reading:

Rebuilding Puerto Rico Will Cost $95 Billion, Says Island’s Governor, by A.J. Vicens for Mother Jones, November 2017

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The Breach: Rebecca Traister on the ‘Harvey Weinstein Effect’ Nov 21, 2017

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Rebecca Traister, award-winning journalist and writer at large for New York magazine, joins host Lindsay Beyerstein to discuss the righteous anger that has been unleashed by reports of Harvey Weinstein and countless other powerful men perpetrating sexual violence against women. The interview touches on Traister’s own run-in with Weinstein as a young reporter and examines the current potential for both profound cultural change and co-opted backlash.

An edited excerpt:

Rebecca: There are a lot of women running for office in 2018, but this is not going to be solved in one year, or one election cycle, or just by looking at electoral politics. This is only to be solved when it reaches every company, and also when it reaches beyond the elite professions. Because this is something I am also concerned about. Not to take away from the horrifying stories that we’re learning about so many of these men, but mostly, we’re learning about very powerful men in very high-earning and elite professions. What we’re not hearing about, for the most part, are women who are working in factories, in warehouses, in restaurants, in the service industry, the tip service industry, where harassment is perhaps at its worst.

I saw that 700,000 farm workers have made a statement in support of the women of Hollywood. We need to get the women of Hollywood to act in support of the women farm workers. There are all kinds of voices who are not yet present in this conversation and I think that’s another crucial thing that we need to address. And we need to address the gender power imbalances, the economic imbalances, that leave women susceptible to this kind of treatment and with limited resources to fight against it. Those have to be reversed in every profession, in every workplace, and that is generations worth of work ahead of us. And it’s what we need to do. But it’s not something that’s going to be fixed in the next six months, 18 months, 18 years.

Recommended Reading:

Two Dozen African Girls Dead at Sea, by Tariro Mzezewa for The New York Times, November 2017

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