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WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) today met with members of the Illinois Restaurant Association (IRA) to discuss the ongoing support needed for restaurants as they work to recover from the economic impacts of COVID-19. Duckworth is a strong supporter of replenishing the Restaurant Revitalization Fund (RRF) and is a co-sponsor of the Continuing Emergency Support for Restaurants Act . “No one should be surprised that among the restaurants that managed to survive the deadly pandemic, far too many are struggling to achieve the same scale and capacity they had pre-pandemic, which is why passing legislation to replenish the RRF is critical,” Duckworth said. “Supporting neighborhood restaurants should be a bipartisan effort – and it’s deeply disappointing that despite broad support throughout the Democratic Caucus – we still lack 60 votes to get it done. I’ll keep working with organizations like the Illinois Restaurant Associatio

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The 17th Ward Alderwoman joined Politically Speaking to talk about equitable development, efforts to reduce opioid overdoses, and a varied athletic and professional career.

St. Louis will honor one of the town’s most accomplished comedians this Thursday. She will receive a proclamation from the Mayor and throw out the

The post Nikki Glaser Day in St. Louis! appeared first on Explore St. Louis.

ALTON - A Sacred Space has been a lifesaver for seniors with its special home care services. Cheri White is the administrator for the company, Robin Wright is the marketing director, and Amanda Hawkins HR Director. The business is located at 1726 Main Street in Alton or by calling (618) 661-8222. “Are you a senior and find it a little more difficult to run your weekly errands?” A Sacred Space’s White said. “We have the solution for you: we can do your grocery shopping, pick up mediations from the pharmacy, pick up your dry-cleaning, go to the post office, deliver packages and pick up packages within 15 miles within Illinois. Our service is completely customizable to meet your needs!” The packages are as follows: Senior Servings Package - $60 a month and .$60 a mile. Community Savings Package - $75 month and $.60 a mile. Some of the services A Sacred Space offers are: Personal care Companion care Respite care Preparation of light meals Light

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ALTON – Three Alton Memorial Hospital departments were recognized this week with top awards from national health care research leader Professional Research Consultants Inc. (PRC) . The Digestive Health Center earned a Top Performer award for the third consecutive year. PRC’s highest honor recognizes health care facilities, service lines and hospital units who score at the 100 th percentile for the Overall Quality of Care percent “Excellent” score in PRC’s national client database for the prior year. “The Digestive Health team works very well together, in a very efficient way,” said Amy Toenyes, nurse manager of the DHC. “During the pandemic, we had to make some scheduling adjustments and add some steps to getting signed into the department. But they were able to give the same exceptional care.” During that time, the staff kept up its practice of checking in with patients by phone before and after their visits, although COVID

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Some of the best events of the year are about to happen in St. Louis. Each year, St. Louis residents celebrate coming out of winter hibernation by getting absolutely sloshed at the Cinco De Mayo festival on historic Cherokee Street on Saturday, May 7. (Note: The festival is not on May 5 but on May 7.)

"In the 17 years that (HOME WORKS) has been in existence, we've partnered with 120 schools, we've trained over 2,500 teachers and completed 30,000 home visits."

A St. Louis County jury is in deliberation Thursday afternoon, tasked with deciding the fate of accused murderer Beau Rothwell.

EDWARDSVILLE - The Southern Illinois University Edwardsville 2022 Bi-State Honor Band Festival will take place April 30-May 1 in Dunham Hall on the Edwardsville campus. The event is one of the most important outreach activities in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Music and the most important for the band area. Having been a part of the department for more than 25 years, the festival aims to offer a two-day honor band experience for high school students in the greater St. Louis area. Participating students are drawn from nearly 30 local and regional institutions across Illinois and Missouri. The festival is also an important recruiting and fundraising event for the department. “My favorite part is seeing the students’ growth throughout the event,” said Rubén D. Gómez, director of bands and assistant professor in the Department of Music. “At the beginning of day one, they barely know each other, they are seeing the music fo

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JERSEYVILLE - Today is move-in day for a local sandwich shop; Pig on a Wing is moving from Medford’s Food Mart to the place it first opened at 807 IL-16 in Jerseyville, next to Farm & Home Supply and attached to Hansen Meat Packing. Pig on a Wing Owner Steve Walker said it’s officially time for the business to move back to its “roots,” but he’s been grateful for the name recognition Pig on a Wing has gotten out of being on State Street for five years. “We moved five years ago to get our name out, because we were on the edge of town and not a lot of people knew about us,” Walker said. “But then right here in the middle of town the past five years, everybody knows Pig on a Wing now.” Walker also owns The Pizza Crew restaurant which occupied the IL-16 location while Pig on a Wing was located at Medford’s. However, he said The Pizza Crew’s food isn’t leaving Jerseyville - it’s just joining the Pig o

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Former state Rep. Cora Faith Walker died from a heart condition, the St. Louis Medical Examiner has found. Walker, 37, was an aide to St. Louis County Executive Sam Page. …

The T-7 could help keep workers here busy into the next decade as Boeing works on successors to its larger, aging fighter jet programs.

Residents of four St. Louis encampments are now packing up their belongings in anticipation of a May 2 eviction. Residents say they would rather stay in the camps than go to temporary shelters — and question the timing of the city’s notice to vacate. Unhoused STL Founder Ramona Curtis shares her concerns, along with two camp residents.

Acclaimed author Arundhati Roy discusses why she’s always felt a kinship to the Mississippi River, why she was eager to visit Ferguson, what drives her activism and what keeps her from despair. Roy is in St. Louis to receive the 2022 St. Louis Literary Award from St. Louis University.

by Annie Waldman, ProPublica, Beth Schwartzapfel, The Marshall Project, and Erin Einhorn, NBC News

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system and NBC News. Sign up for The Marshall Project’s newsletters, and follow them on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

A bill that would place strict limits on the use of solitary confinement for youth in Louisiana unexpectedly advanced out of a legislative committee on Wednesday after legislators heard testimony from people who had been held in isolation as children.

Testimony during the hearing also included descriptions of conditions in a facility that was the subject of a recent investigation by ProPublica, NBC News and The Marshall Project. Teens at the Acadiana Center for Youth at St. Martinville were locked behind solid steel doors around the clock for weeks at a time, alone and frequently in the dark, and were handcuffed and shackled when they were allowed out to shower or make phone calls. Conditions were so punitive that one expert described them as child abuse.

“The bottom line is that this is a terrible way to rehabilitate children,” testified Rachel Gassert, policy director at the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights. She cited the findings of the investigation as “a great illustration of why this bill is necessary.”

The state’s Office of Juvenile Justice said that the facility was meant to provide additional support and security to its most troubled teens, but internal documents showed the harsh measures instead led to violence, property destruction and escapes.

After months of defending the treatment of teenagers at St. Martinville, the head of the juvenile justice office, Bill Sommers, publicly acknowledged to lawmakers for the first time that he was not satisfied with how the facility was being run. He also expressed support for the proposed legislation to limit the use of isolation in his facilities.

“The longer an individual is in solitary, the more they’re likely to act out,” he said. “I do believe in that correlation.”

In Louisiana, current state policy allows a maximum of 12 hours of isolation in most cases, and seven days for “highly disruptive” behavior. Those policies are nonbinding and don’t have the force of law, and even those limits stop short of what experts recommend. Most experts suggest that isolation should be used only until a young person calms down and is not a physical threat to themselves or others.

The new bill, which was introduced last month by State Rep. Royce Duplessis, a New Orleans Democrat, would make it illegal for the agency to use solitary confinement for young people for more than eight hours at a time. The bill would also require the state’s juvenile justice agency to better track the use of isolation in its facilities and to notify parents when their children are placed in solitary.

“We’re trying to keep the guards safe, we’re trying to keep the juveniles safe,” Duplessis told lawmakers on Wednesday, adding that the bill “puts some guardrails in place, which currently there are none.”

Both the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association have decried solitary confinement as a harmful, punitive practice, leading to depression and even psychosis. Research has found that more than half the kids in juvenile facilities who die by suicide are, or recently were, in isolation. Citing the harm the practice can cause, the federal government has banned the use of solitary confinement at its juvenile facilities, and at least 24 states have placed strict limits on its use.

“It turned me into an antisocial person,” said Therrin Dew, 21, who said he did numerous stints in solitary confinement — one as long as six months — during the five and a half years he spent in facilities including Louisiana’s Swanson Center for Youth. “I was energetic and a free spirit once, but being in a cell that long, it kind of turned you against people.”

The conditions were unsanitary, he said, noting that he was once isolated in a cell that had someone else’s feces smeared on the wall.

“If you’re in solitary confinement, you can’t learn nothing but the way the bricks look around you.”

Some lawmakers came into the hearing skeptical about the bill, Duplessis said. “There’s a big push in the Legislature right now to make it safer,” he said in an interview Thursday, referring to violence in the facilities. “By making it safer, in some people’s eyes, that means increasing punishment.”

State Rep. Debbie Villio, a Republican and former prosecutor from the New Orleans suburbs, raised concerns early in the hearing about a binding eight-hour limit, saying that juvenile behavior should be handled on a case-by-case basis. But later in the hearing, after testimony from Dew and others, she announced her support for advancing the bill.

“I can’t ignore what we’ve heard,” she said. “It sounds to me like there’s some serious issues that need to be addressed immediately.”

Among those issues is a debilitating staff shortage. Sommers testified that about a third of his agency’s positions are currently unfilled.

The bill ultimately won unanimous support from the House’s criminal justice committee and will now go to the full House.

Last year, legislators ordered an audit of the use of solitary confinement at youth lockups, after two teens died by suicide in isolation in the same week in 2019. That audit, released this week, found that the Office of Juvenile Justice routinely ignored its own policies on isolation, with 40% of confinements in 2019 and 2020 exceeding the maximum duration allowed at the time. The average duration of confinement was about six days, more than 14 times the national average as of October 2020. In one instance, a child was held in solitary confinement for three months straight.

“It’s unforgivable,” said Gina Womack, executive director of Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, which advocates for youth in detention. “A lot of our young people already have some mental health issues, and solitary just really exacerbates that.”

The audit also showed that Black youth were disproportionately held in isolation in state facilities, accounting for 94% of placements in solitary confinement, greater than the 82% of the children in state-run lockups who were Black.

St. Martinville was not included in the legislative auditor’s report because it opened in 2021. But the investigation from ProPublica, NBC News and The Marshall Project found that the conditions there were even more extreme than what the auditor found at other secure care facilities across the state. Youth in the facility were in solitary for weeks on end and weren’t provided education or other legally required services, such as substance abuse counseling.

Witnesses at the hearing told the committee that any time in solitary can be life-altering.

“I lost part of who I was as a human being,” Ronald Marshall, who was held in isolation for seven months as a young person in Louisiana decades ago, told the committee. “My need to feel safe. My need to feel loved. My need to feel in control of my life. It destroyed all of that.”

If all goes as planned and construction can start in the next 30 days, developers hope that the apartments can open in March or April of 2023.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) set aside $42.5 billion to be spent by the states on expanding access to affordable broadband. But state by state, telecom lobbyists are working hard to ensure that this money only goes toward “unserved” locations, and can’t be used to potentially create competition in markets they already serve. […]

Republicans split on the legislation, but it still advanced to the House on an 18-15 vote.