It's Friday September 11, 2026 and in this morning's issue we're covering: Three North Carolina schools made big gains on chronic absenteeism, Fayetteville State seeing record enrollment, retention, Designed to help people with serious mental illness, Joliet Treatment Center repeatedly failed to prevent or respond to fires, despite two deaths, Receiver in charge of turning around Jackson’s water system now says city should sell it, It’s dangerously hot inside some New Orleans homes, even with air conditioning, study says, Despite eye-catching strikes and employer concessions, the percentage of unionized workers in the city remained flat in an annual report on the state of organized labor, One Woman’s Tormented Path to Prison, Regulators Knew This Marijuana Product Was Harming People. It Stayed on Shelves for More Than a Year.

Media outlets and others featured: NC Newsline, Carolina Public Press, The Marshall Project, Mississippi Today, Verite News, The City Reporter, Prison Journalism Project, ProPublica.

Three North Carolina schools made big gains on chronic absenteeism. Here’s what they’re doing.

By Ahmed Jallow (North Carolina Newsline) Published: September 8, 2026

At Washington County High School, Principal Torrey Hines learned that some students were spending part of the school day at a barbershop instead of attending an intervention period, a designated time for additional academic support.

So Hines went to the barbershop one morning to find out why. A student told him they skipped because intervention was scheduled first thing in the morning. Hines said the school responded by moving that intervention block to “smack dab in the middle of the day.”

The story was one of several examples shared by three principals at a recent State Board of Education meeting about how their schools have improved attendance.

North Carolina’s chronic absenteeism rate remains well above pre-pandemic levels.

About 400,000 students were chronically absent during the 2024-25 school year, meaning they missed at least 10% of school days. That was about one in four students.

The statewide chronic absenteesim rate has fallen from a peak of 31.2% in 2021-22 to 24.3% in 2024-25. Still, students who are chronically absent miss about 30 days of school on average, according to the state Department of Public Instruction.

DPI has identified more than 300 schools statewide as “Bright Spots” based on improvements in chronic absenteeism. The schools range from elementary to high school, and their approaches vary.

At Northwest Elementary in Pitt County, Principal Taimak Willis said staff focus on understanding what is keeping students out of school.

“We believe that people matter. So yes, we’re talking about students, but what about the parents? Once we find out that there are attendance issues, we deal with the students, but we go and make sure that the parents have all of the resources and things that they need,” Willis said.

Teachers are asked to alert school staff when a student misses two or three consecutive days. A social worker then contacts the family, and the school’s attendance team discusses next steps.

In one case, the school connected a mother who was struggling with her mental health to resources and helped connect the family with transportation and other resources so the students could get to school.

Northwest also has a family resource center that has basic supplies such as toiletries and is equipped with a washer and dryer. Willis said the center can help students whose circumstances outside school are affecting their attendance.

The school also has an interpreter that works closely with families, including by making home visits. Willis said some students who had struggled with attendance now come to the front office to eat with the interpreter because of the relationship she has built with them.

Hertford County Middle School divides students into three groups based on attendance, said Principal Elenia Riddick. Those attending regularly, those trending toward chronic absenteeism, and those who are already chronically absent.

The school assigns an adult to check in with students in the two higher-risk groups each morning. If a student is absent, that adult calls the family to find out what happened and whether the school can help.

Building relationships with students and their families has been key to the school’s strategy, she told the board.

“What we really focused on at Hertford County Middle School was those personal check-ins, making those connections with students,” said Principal Elenia Riddick, “and they’re excited about coming to school when they know somebody is there looking for them.”

Riddick said the school also tries to recognize students whose attendance improves by at least 5% after the first nine weeks. For some students who do not typically receive awards at school, it’s a big deal.

Principal Hines also talked about efforts to make school more engaging. The school uses a house system modeled after the Ron Clark Academy, with students divided into teams that compete for points and recognition. The school plans to use attendance in the competition, with incentives for the house with the best attendance.

Hines says his students have quickly embraced the house system.

“We’re noticing just within the first three weeks of school that kids are all in,” Hines said. “They want to come to school. They want to do well for their house.”

The school has also tried to make activities more relevant to students. During a week focused on hip-hop, students learned about the music, attended pep rallies and dressed as their favorite artists.

Parents are being held responsible for their kids’ crimes under new laws

Parents get daily calls showing whether their children attended school or arrived late. Social workers also make home visits. The school has partnered with outside providers to offer health and mental health services on campus.

Hines said some students miss school because they have responsibilities outside of it. Some care for younger siblings while their parents work. Others work to help support their families. Many parents work second- or third-shift jobs, making it harder for them to be involved with the school.

Shaun Kellogg, who leads DPI’s Office of Research and Promising Practices and the state’s AttendNC Counts initiative, said there was no single attendance program shared by the schools identified as “bright spots.”

The state has been studying those schools to understand what is behind their improvements. This summer, Kellogg and a colleague interviewed principals, counselors, social workers, data managers and other staff at seven bright spot schools.

“The numbers indicated that something special was happening,” Kellogg told the board, “but the numbers don’t tell us why.”

Fayetteville State seeing record enrollment, retention

by Kate Denning, Carolina Public Press
September 9, 2026

Fayetteville State University may be among the smaller public institutions in North Carolina, but it’s punching above its weight.

With the onset of the academic year, the university is celebrating historic benchmarks like 80.7% student retention and the enrollment of more than 7,700 students. Both are all-time records for the school, which bounced back from a retention rate of 63% and has grown by more than 1,000 students since 2021. Last year’s graduating class was its largest ever.

Assistant Vice Chancellor for Student Success Tavoria Freeman, who has worked at Fayetteville State since 2006, told Carolina Public Press that, while there has been steady growth over time as the university aimed for new heights, it’s seemed to have soared in recent years.

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“I've been here a long time, and these last five years, it feels like we’ve just pushed ahead really, really fast,” she said. “I can of course see how we have slowly grown over the years, but I feel like we’ve had a lot of accelerated growth in the last five years. It’s really exciting.”

But none of these achievements come by surprise, and they certainly didn’t happen overnight, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Enrollment Management Cierra Griffin said. The growth has been a result of strategic and intentional partnerships and marketing efforts, including a heightened focus on transfer and military student populations.

Griffin also credits the leadership of Pam Baldwin, the university’s inaugural vice chancellor for strategic enrollment and student success, who was appointed to the position in 2024 after serving as the associate dean of academic partnerships. Baldwin often tells fellow administrators to look at the data, consider what story it tells and what the strategy should be.

The university’s partnership with a number of North Carolina community colleges, Bronco Benefit, was born out of Baldwin’s assessment that there needed to be a better strategy for attracting transfer students, for example. The university also uses the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association to its benefit, the athletic association Fayetteville State is a part of, which is made up entirely of historically Black colleges and universities. 

Fayetteville State recently became a Common Application partner, a standardized college application platform used by more than 1,000 universities. It’s also the university’s third cycle in the NC College Connect program, which offers direct admission to North Carolina high school students that meet admissions requirements. Executive Director of Admissions LaToya Floyd said they’ve also employed a digital marketing campaign, and frequently host virtual events for those who they can’t connect with in person. And sometimes, it’s as simple as a billboard.

“We’re starting to tell our story,” Baldwin said. 

“All of those things together create an opportunity for us to meet our goals, whether that’s enrollment or retention, telling those stories and allowing this team to do the great work when they understand clearly what the mission is. 

“I don’t believe anything is a surprise or happens by accident. I think you put a plan in place. You work with your partners. You talk with strategic comms about how you want to push harder through the military space, or you want to work differently with the community colleges, and then those things happen, and then of course, the results come.”

While recruiting, the university leads with the benefits of being an NC Promise institution. Through a partnership with the state, Fayetteville State and three other universities are able to offer in-state tuition for just $500 per semester. Affordability and access are at the forefront of the university’s mission, as it is for the NC Promise program as a whole, Floyd said.

“We want to make sure that students who come here understand that the plan is to ensure they complete the degree that they began with as little debt as possible,” Floyd said.

Not only is the university attracting more applicants — those applicants are more high-achieving than ever. The average GPA of this year’s freshman class is a 3.45 on the 4.0 scale, another historic high for the university. It’s through the efforts to increase the visibility of the university that they’ve been able to attract scholars with even bigger and better achievements, Floyd said.

For keeping those high achievers on an upward trajectory, culture and climate matter, Baldwin said. Winners like to be around other winners, so when a standard is set, especially in a close-knit environment like Fayetteville State — which students and faculty have affectionately dubbed “Family State University” — people usually want to strive to meet it, she said.

As for keeping those students coming back and achieving this year’s momentous retention rate, Griffin said it starts at the leadership level. When everyone agrees on the mission, supporting the student population from the top down gets a lot easier.

“We don’t do any magic tricks — we do what makes sense,” Griffin said.

“It’s the little things, low-hanging fruit that keep our students coming back. Putting advisors as instructors for the freshman seminar classes, collaborating with our campus partners like financial aid to address issues such as balances. Sometimes it’s just a matter of money. Little things like that and meeting our students where they are. One thing that I know truly works with our students is we understand that life happens.”

The culture of support at Fayetteville State has transformed over the last 10 years from reactive to proactive, Freeman said. Utilizing data has helped the university understand how it can support students in the present moment, rather than after they’ve fallen behind. 

The student success team analyzes quantitative data on students’ grades, percentage of students who receive a D, F or withdraw from a course, who has yet to declare a major and percentage of completion toward a degree, as well as surveys that provide qualitative information. 

“We’re looking at this data every day, and we’re trying to see, ‘What students do we need to support today? Who do we need to connect with today,’” Freeman said.

“Especially as it relates to things that might hinder them from persisting in the future. We can see what’s going on with their account profile, whether that be the grades, the early alerts, the balances, and we can start that outreach early so that we can prevent them from having those holes or having other barriers that come up that’ll stop them from getting to that graduation point in four years or less.”

This summer, an anonymous trust gifted the university $6.5 million, the largest private contribution in Fayetteville State history. It’s from the same trust that donated $5.8 million in 2022. And with the passage of the North Carolina budget bill, the university will receive an annually recurring $2 million from the state. 

Rather than using the funds for new programs, it’ll be allocated toward the university’s free summer school program — an initiative that has already produced positive results.

“We have been really fortunate, in not only our private donations, but also the work that we’re doing in partnership with the state to ensure that all of our funding is supporting our initiatives that are already in place that are very strategic,” Baldwin said.

“Our 30-60-90 free summer school, for example, is one of our strategies, and so we’re not trying to create new stuff with new money. … Of course, there will be tweaks along the way. We’re increasing our nursing opportunities, as an example. We want to make sure that we utilize funding to take care of the initiatives that our data says is either working or we need to do to continue the progress.”

Enrollment at HBCUs like Fayetteville State has been up around the country, a stark contrast to the trends across higher education overall, which some have gone as far to call an “enrollment crisis.” The times are undoubtedly changing, and it’s important for higher education leaders to pay attention, Baldwin said.

“If we’re going to stand still and let the grass grow around us, we’re going to be in trouble,” she said.

“Paying attention to what’s happening — that return on investment is important, that students want to graduate not only with a piece of paper but a job, and that includes internships and experiences while they’re here at Fayetteville State University — and knowing we are responsible for providing those opportunities. … 

“It’s extremely important that we are not just having students walk across a stage, but they are walking across a stage into life, and they are going to be successful because of their experiences at Fayetteville State University.”

This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

A Prison on Fire

Designed to help people with serious mental illness, Joliet Treatment Center repeatedly failed to prevent or respond to fires, despite two deaths.

By Shannon Heffernan Illustrations by Joseph Rogers

This article was first published by The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Facebook.

Around 10 p.m., a haze of gray smoke wafted down a hallway lined with prison cells at the Joliet Treatment Center. The window of cell A9 began to glow red as the fire within grew. Jason Stephens was locked inside. Minutes ticked by, and the smoke became so thick you could not see more than a few feet. No one came to let Stephens out.

There have been more than 70 fires at the facility in the last three years, according to an investigation by The Marshall Project, WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times. That includes a dozen cases in which men incarcerated there set themselves on fire.

This article was published in partnership with WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times.

The Joliet Treatment Center opened in 2017 with the promise of being a new kind of prison in Illinois, designed to provide intensive mental health treatment. But in the years leading up to that night in the summer of 2024, incarcerated men and civil rights lawyers who visited the facility said the conditions declined. Men were kept locked in their cells for long stretches, with nothing to do. They complained about a lack of medical care and mental health treatment, which the prison system is legally obligated to provide. Men reported that guards used excessive force.

As the men grew more despondent, some became willing to do anything to draw attention to their troubles and resorted to setting their cells — or themselves — on fire.

One man needed surgery to graft new skin onto his charred calf.

Another lost a leg.

Two have died.

Last year, the prison — with a population of about 200 people — recorded roughly three fires a month.

Despite that, officials at the Joliet Treatment Center have repeatedly failed to meet their responsibilities to prevent or respond to the fires, government records show.

Cellblocks lacked sprinklers, and fire alarms were turned off or inoperable. At an annual inspection, the prison would not provide a fire evacuation plan. Guards delayed ambulances responding to emergencies at the prison or trying to take men with serious injuries to the hospital.

The Illinois Department of Corrections did not answer questions about the epidemic of fires at Joliet Treatment Center, but in an email a spokesperson wrote that it is “committed to ensuring the safety and security of staff, individuals in custody, and all persons who enter our facilities” and takes its responsibility to uphold requirements related to facility safety seriously.

Craig Haney, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz and an expert on mental health in prisons, said the frequency of fires at the Joliet Treatment Center is a sign of abject hopelessness.

“These are the kinds of desperate acts that somebody takes when they feel they have no alternative,” Haney said.

As the blaze in Stephens’ cell intensified, three correctional officers gathered around a desk in a nearby room. Security camera footage from that night on July 27, 2024, shows that they seemed to notice something was wrong on the wing and grabbed a fire extinguisher. A call for help went out over the prison radio, and more officers slowly trickled in and put on medical gloves and masks.

About 10 minutes after smoke began to seep out of Stephens’ cell, officers entered the hallway.

Guards sprayed a fire extinguisher and pepper spray into his cell through a slot in the door usually used to deliver food.

Then, with Stephens still locked inside, they walked away.

A prison worker called 911. The fire department arrived within minutes, but precious time had already been lost. And more was about to be wasted.

Corrections officers told firefighters that the fire was out and that they needed help to clear out the smoke. According to a fire department incident report, it wasn’t until later, as the firefighters set up fans and officers meandered nearby, that prison employees mentioned that someone was still locked inside the burnt cell.

A group of guards and firefighters opened Stephens’ door, stained black with soot. Firefighters found Stephens lying on the floor, unconscious but still breathing, after having spent a half hour in a smoke-filled cell.

They looked into his airway and found it charred. Guards handcuffed his unconscious body, and he was loaded into an ambulance waiting outside.

But at the prison’s exit, guards refused to open the gate for the ambulance to leave until prison employees filled out paperwork and guards were ready to follow in a van.

An argument erupted, and a guard walked up to the ambulance, yanking open the driver’s door. A group of firefighters and guards rushed over to intervene.

According to one guard, a firefighter said, “This man can die while y’all pussyfooting around.”

As the guards and firefighters argued with each other, one guard pulled another away, attempting to defuse the tension.

But the prison still would not allow the ambulance to depart.

A firefighter called his dispatcher again and again to report that the ambulance was stuck, with Stephens in the back hooked up to a machine forcing air into his lungs. Guards made the ambulance wait for nearly 28 minutes before finally opening the gate, allowing it to drive to a nearby hospital.

The next day, Stephens was moved to a Chicago-area hospital. Doctors performed a tracheotomy, cutting a hole in his throat so they could insert a breathing tube. But they could not save him.

Two weeks later, at age 38, Jason Stephens died. The medical examiner listed his official cause of death as “complications of inhalational injuries due to mattress fire.”

Patrice Daniels sifted through a gray box of Stephens’ belongings. While incarcerated at the prison, Daniels’ job was to pack up the property of men who transferred out or died.

For Daniels, the fires — and the hopelessness that led men to set them — felt especially tragic because the Joliet Treatment Center was supposed to be a model of a prison that prioritized mental health treatment and healing, instead of punishment.

As a child, Daniels survived sexual abuse and would injure himself by banging his head on the wall. In his teens, he was in and out of mental hospitals and juvenile detention, where he put glass in his ears and eyes. At 18, he killed a woman in a park. He turned himself into police and confessed and was sentenced to life in prison for murder. He continued to mutilate himself. Instead of receiving therapy, he said, he was put in solitary confinement for stealing razor blades that he had cut himself with.

Sometimes, he said officers tied down his limbs and injected him with psychotropic drugs.

More than a decade after Daniels landed in prison, a lawyer asked him to join a lawsuit accusing the Illinois Department of Corrections of failing to treat the mental illnesses of people in the state’s prisons.

After a yearslong battle, the Department of Corrections settled the case and committed to opening a facility dedicated to providing mental healthcare: the Joliet Treatment Center. Daniels called it the most gratifying day of his life.

In 2017, Daniels was among the first people transferred to the new prison in what had been a juvenile detention center. The building smelled clean, nothing like the overwhelming scent of mold and feces he was used to in other prisons. The officers played cards and basketball with the men. Therapy and psychiatry were readily available.

In the first two years of the Joliet Treatment Center, a court-appointed monitor reported that men there routinely had plenty of time outside their cells and received 15 hours of structured therapeutic activity a week, unlike in some other prisons. But then, the once-hopeful mood dimmed.

A new warden took over in early 2020. According to Daniels, she had a more punitive approach. Daniels said the start of COVID-19 that year gave the prison an excuse to keep men isolated in their cells for long stretches with little treatment, and the facility never rebounded.

Over the next few years, the prison began to cancel mental health groups and recreational time. Men complained about frequent use of pepper spray.

Daniels said that in the early years of the Joliet Treatment Center he’d allowed himself to become emotionally vulnerable. He felt betrayed by the prison’s new harshness.

A mental health worker at the prison said she noticed men hurting themselves more frequently when the coronavirus lockdowns began. Prison employees got numb to the routine self-harm.

They “experienced something that the human brain was not meant to process,” said the worker, who asked not to be named because she still works in corrections and fears retaliation for talking about the conditions she saw at the Joliet Treatment Center.

“In order to do our job every day, we had to expect it,” she said, “and we had to get used to it.”

Around the same time, men began to set fires.

The Marshall Project interviewed or corresponded with seven men and asked why they set their cells, or themselves, on fire at the Joliet Treatment Center. They described poor medical treatment, and loneliness while being locked in their cells.

Many said that prison employees had grown inured to other forms of self-harm. But fires were impossible to ignore.

“We try to talk and write to them, but they don’t respect that. But when we act like animals and set things on fire and ourselves on fire, they listen,” one man said.

In the spring of 2020, Alexander Yracheta set himself on fire, after he said the prison repeatedly canceled his mental health groups, and he spent much of his time alone in his cell. He used the spark from an electrical outlet to light a cloth tied to his leg.

According to prison investigations, guards pulled him from the cell and put cuffs on his legs while his shorts were still on fire. He later had to have skin graft surgeries to repair the damage to his leg. The pain had been excruciating, but he said it was worth it to go to the hospital and get a break from his cell.

“I couldn’t really take it,” he said, adding, “I knew I had to do something extreme to get out.”

No one knows for sure what made Stephens start the fire in his cell. But examining his path to that day in 2024 offers some clues.

Stephens had a difficult life, according to his family and court records. As a toddler, he was diagnosed with sickle cell disease, a genetic disorder that can cause blood cells to become misshapen, leading to episodes of extreme pain and organ damage. Sometimes, his muscles hurt so badly he couldn’t move and would just scream.

Around age 7, he and his mother were living on the street and in shelters. By 14, he had dropped out of school and would pick up odd jobs in construction. Stephens’ medical records say he began struggling with mental illness as a child and was eventually diagnosed with major depressive disorder, with psychotic features and PTSD.

When Stephens was 27 years old, he was arrested and charged with shooting a friend in a drug dispute a few years before. Stephens maintained his innocence. Court records note he had been hearing voices, but a judge found him mentally fit to stand trial. In 2015, a jury found him guilty of murder, and he was sentenced to 50 years in prison.

Behind bars, Stephens routinely complained to guards, nurses and doctors about extreme pain from his sickle cell disease.

Dr. William Weber, a physician and medical director at the Medical Justice Alliance, an organization dedicated to ensuring that people in prison get proper healthcare, reviewed Stephens’ medical records for The Marshall Project. Weber said the records show that when the prison took him to outside hospitals, doctors prescribed Stephens with medications for sickle cell pain, but the prison often failed to provide them to him.

By early 2024, housed at a maximum-security prison, Stephens made more desperate pleas for attention. He staged a hunger strike that lasted for 34 days. When that failed to get him the medical help he wanted, he asked employees, “What do I need to do to get medical treatment or sent to the hospital? Cut myself or swallow a bunch of pills?”

Later that day, he swallowed two razor blades and a nail clipper. The prison system refused to send him to the hospital because the facility was on lockdown due to a staffing shortage.

His medical records note several hospital visits in the ensuing weeks, but it’s unclear when, or if, those objects were ever removed.

Prison officials transferred Stephens to the Joliet Treatment Center in May 2024, presumably to give him additional mental health help. Stephen’s mental health records show some psychiatric visits, but rarely mention indivdual therapy and largely reflect brief mental health evaluations conducted to assess his risk of suicide.

At the Joliet Treatment Center, Stephens continued to complain about the lack of medical treatment. He insisted he needed a specific kind of blood transfusion that had helped him in the past. A prison doctor acknowledged that he would have “been better off” with the transfusion but failed to make sure he got the treatment.

In early July 2024, an officer at the Joliet Treatment Center wrote in a report that Stephens said he was going to do whatever he needed to do to get medical help, including hurting himself. “This has been an ongoing issue,” the officer wrote.

One day, a few weeks later, several men on Stephens’ wing began to harm themselves. Two of the men were sent to a separate part of the prison, and guards tied down their arms and legs in what are called four-point restraints. A doctor sent a third man to the emergency room.

The mental health worker, who was also on duty that day, said even with all the chaos, it was a normal day at the Joliet Treatment Center.

“It’s just what we would call a really busy shift,” she said.

By the end of the day, Stephens was one of only two men remaining on the wing. The other man said later that they both told officers they were also in crisis and wanted help. But no one from the mental health team responded.

That night, Stephens set a fire in his cell.

The Illinois Department of Corrections did not answer questions about the fire in Stephens’ cell or about his complaints about medical care, citing pending litigation. The department has refused to provide a full investigative report about the incident, and The Marshall Project has sued to obtain the record, along with those of other fires. The lawsuits remain ongoing.

Still, there is evidence the Joliet Treatment Center was unprepared for the fire that killed Stephens, even after more than a dozen earlier blazes at the prison.

In an interview with prison investigators, an electrician at the facility said that the wing where Stephens was housed didn’t have working alarms or sprinklers. The only safety plan, he said, was for “correctional staff to be vigilant to watch for fires.” He said the issue was raised in staff meetings prior to Stephens’ death, but the fire protection systems never got fixed.

The Illinois State Fire Marshal’s Office, which inspects buildings to ensure that they meet fire codes, repeatedly documented problems at the prison. In 2023, a year before Stephens’ death, a fire marshal noted alarms in other parts of the prison were disconnected or inoperable and that prison employees said they said they didn’t know if the alarms worked on the wing where Stephens would later set the fire. The prison also couldn’t produce a written plan for how to evacuate the building. Days before Stephens set his fire, a marshal again noted similar violations.

As far back as 2020, local fire officials had complained that guards delayed ambulances trying to enter and exit the prison grounds to respond to fires. Jeff Carey, chief of the Joliet Fire Department, said that his department reached out several times to the prison’s administrators before Stephens’ death to get the problem fixed, to no avail.

In the years since Stephens’ death, the fires have persisted unabated at the Joliet Treatment Center. There have been more than 60 since then, including at least eight cases of self-immolation, according to department records.

In November 2024, officers saw flames coming from under the cell door of a man named Latrell Edwards. They evacuated other men housed on his wing before letting him out of his cell, according to prison reports. Edwards was taken to the hospital with labored breathing and soot coating his throat and died two months later.

Since Stephens’ death, fire officials have continued to note delays at the gate and problems with alarms and evacuation plans.

The mental health worker at the Joliet Treatment Center said that prison employees had grown used to the fires, even after two men had died. That made it easier to ignore problems. “It's almost like there’s nothing they can do that will shock us anymore,” she said, adding, “No matter what they do, it’s not enough.”

As the prison environment became more focused on security and punishment, and opportunities to provide meaningful therapy declined, she decided to leave.

Daniels said that for a long time he had hoped he could help the prison return it to its mission of healing. But the culture became so toxic that last year he asked the Illinois Department of Corrections to transfer him to another prison.

As he rode away in a prison van, his legs and hands shackled, he saw the sign for the Joliet Treatment Center, and he thought, “That’s a sham. Treatment doesn’t happen there.”

If you or someone you know is in crisis or considering suicide, help is available at the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988. For more information, visit https://988lifeline.org/.

Receiver in charge of turning around Jackson’s water system now says city should sell it

by Alex Rozier, Mississippi Today
September 9, 2026

A recent financial plan from JXN Water, the court-appointed receiver in charge of rebuilding the capital city’s water and sewer infrastructure, is now proposing Jackson sell the systems altogether. The idea comes amid the utility’s call for yet another set of rate increases. 

In February, U.S. District Court Judge Henry Wingate, who is overseeing the receivership, greenlit a 12% rate increase after a drawn-out debate. Through court hearings that spanned nearly a year, JXN Water faced pushback from local advocates and city officials who blamed the utility for driving up costs to a point where rates would become unaffordable for residents. 

JXN Water is now saying it needs to increase rates again in 2027 by 10%, followed by 9% and 8% hikes in 2028 and 2029, respectively. Those numbers are a stark jump from figures the utility mentioned in court hearings last year, where it said it would need 3% annual rate increases from 2027 to 2029. 

But Ted Henifin, the head of JXN Water, said the city could reduce the need for rate increases if it sold its water and sewer infrastructure. With the revenue it would get from selling those assets, the city could pay off significant debt that’s driving the need for rate increases, Henifin explained in the August financial plan. 

“What it does is create greater financial stability for the system, which lessens the need for larger rate increases in the future,” JXN Water told Mississippi Today. 

The idea comes as city and state officials, as well as Wingate, are deliberating what to do with Jackson’s water and sewer systems once JXN Water’s interim control is over, which the utility projects to be in 2027. The Mississippi Legislature approved a plan this past session to put the systems under a regional authority, but Wingate halted the state law in June. 

Under the judge’s orders, Henifin has to propose his own transition plan, which is due near the end of September.  

Jackson City Council members, who repeatedly have publicly criticized JXN Water over the last year, pushed back at the utility’s latest proposal. Ward 7 Councilman Kevin Parkinson said while he doesn’t think the city is ready to regain control of the water system, Henifin’s idea to sell it is a bridge too far.

“ I think the city is not well positioned to take over that water system anytime soon,  but I don't think that should mean the city has absolutely no say and should be forced to sell off its assets,” Parkinson said.  ”I'm all for creative solutions, but I'm hoping that those can involve the city having a seat at the table.”

Ward 2 Councilwoman Tina Clay went further, arguing the infrastructure should return to city control once JXN Water’s term has ended. 

“ I am totally against the concept saying that the city of Jackson can't run its own water department,” Clay said. “ When it left the city, it was run down, it was torn up, it was broken, the city had no money. But now that it's fixed, the city can run the water department. Anything that's broken and with no money, nobody can run effectively.”

The councilwoman disagreed with recent comments from Mayor John Horhn, who said it was unlikely the systems would come back under city governance. 

“That should not be a thing of the past,” she said. “ Jackson State (University) has an engineering department. We have a lot of resources that we can reach out to. We don't have to give up and give away things.”

Under the proposal, whatever authority assumes control after JXN Water would take out a tax-exempt bond to give the city the $121 million needed to pay off its outstanding debt. Henifin said the tax benefit “hinges on the new authority not being connected to the city or under city control.”

"(T)he Internal Revenue Code allows the bonds issued to finance the acquisition price to be issued on a tax-exempt basis, as long as JXN Water (or its successor) is not related to the City for federal tax purposes," according to the financial plan.

Horhn’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment. 

Mississippi Today asked to clarify whether JXN Water outright supported the idea of Jackson selling its infrastructure, to which the utility responded in an email, “Yes.”

Other council members said they needed a chance to review JXN Water’s proposal, but most were skeptical about increasing water rates again. Ward 1 Councilman Ashby Foote said the collection rate — which the utility said has now climbed above 80% — needs to improve before charging more to those who already pay their bill. 

Ward 4 Councilman Brian Grizzell said the city should have increased rates earlier to avoid the huge jumps customers are seeing now. The increases Henifin proposed are too much for Jacksonians, he said.

“At some point, we have to recognize that affordability matters just as much as financial sustainability,” Grizzell said. 

“Ratepayer input and city ownership of the assets are not mutually exclusive,” JXN Water said in response to concerns over the city losing its voice in governing its water and sewer systems. “This proposal does not mean ratepayers go unrepresented, and it does not mean the city loses its voice in how the system is run.”

The utility told Mississippi Today it is still drafting its transition plan, and will “have more to share as it progresses.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

It’s dangerously hot inside some New Orleans homes, even with air conditioning, study says

by Halle Parker, Verite News New Orleans
September 8, 2026

Yana Sutton grew up between Hollygrove and Gert Town, and now, she spends nearly every day there to take care of her grandmother. But it was only in the past few years that Sutton realized how much the extreme heat in the neighborhood was taking a toll on her grandmother’s health. 

“The heat is heaviest in the bedroom,” which is in the back of the Gert Town house, Sutton said. The neighborhood has far more concrete and buildings than trees than other parts of the city. The imbalanced landscape amplifies the amount of heat and humidity that passes into her grandmother’s house from a back room. The house’s central air conditioning couldn’t keep up.

Her grandmother thought she was resting, but her doctors said the high temperatures actually raised her blood pressure and exacerbated her pre-diabetes. Her grandmother also slept far longer than she intended.

“She says she'd wake up soaking wet,” Sutton said. “(The doctor) said when you get up in age, if your blood pressure is fluctuating and you’re in this tremendous amount of heat, your brain and everything is not signaling you to wake up.”

Sutton has since blocked the room to the limit the outside air seeping into the rest of the house, helping to keep her grandmother’s bedroom cool. 

“ We see the difference because her blood pressure now is stable,” Sutton said. 

As summer days and nights grow warmer, it’s harder for New Orleans residents like Sutton to keep their home cool with the cost of energy. That’s especially true when they live in the city’s concrete-laden hotspots like Gert Town, Hollygrove and areas in the Upper Ninth Ward. 

“ Hollygrove is like a dome in a sense, where it's trapping the heat,” she said.  

A study published in the Journal of Urban Health in June found that even when New Orleans residents had air conditioning units, they struggled to keep the temperature in their homes under 80 degrees overnight. 

Researchers from RAND and Johns Hopkins University collaborated with the team at iSeeChange, a crowd-sourced platform for reporting climate and weather observations, to track the temperature inside the bedrooms of 114 New Orleans residents during the summers of 2023 and 2024. The residents were recruited from five neighborhoods: Hollygrove, Dixon, Desire, Florida and Bunny Friend. 

Past research had indicated that the neighborhoods suffered from worse heat than other parts of the city, amplified by the urban heat island effect. Sutton said it affects everything from seniors’ health to the integrity of their houses.

The Hollygrove-Dixon Neighborhood Association partnered with CAPA Strategies and the Center for Collaborative Heat Monitoring to map the how temperatures changed throughout the day on July 25, 2025 across New Orleans. This map shows the temperatures recorded in the afternoon between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. Other map layers show the temperatures recorded in the morning and evening. (Credit: CAPA Strategies and the Center for Collaborative Heat Monitoring)

Hollygrove resident Deanna Simon helped map heat across the city on a single July day in 2025 during a study by the Hollygrove-Dixon Neighborhood Association. The temperature snapshot showed heat disparities across the city based on tree canopy, the concentration of impervious surfaces and proximity to the lake. It also recorded the hottest temperatures between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m.

“The heat kind of lingers for a long time. It has to be middle morning before you start feeling really cool,” Simon said, until the area reabsorbs the heat.

Several peer-reviewed studies have linked higher temperatures to worse sleep, which can place more stress on the body. Warm nights can be especially dangerous for people with chronic conditions, people over 65, low-income communities, communities of color and women. The heat can increase the risk of various heart problems, such as strokes or heart disease, and even lead to death. 

By the end of the century, some researchers estimate that the risk of death from excessively hot nights will be six times more likely as a result of global warming, predominantly caused by humans burning fossil fuels. 

New Orleans’ “unique heat risk”

RAND’s Lena Easton-Calabria, a co-author of the new study, said they chose to focus on New Orleans because it’s seeing some of the “most severe heat trends,” and high poverty rate. 

“These are things that … come together and create a very unique heat risk and make the population very vulnerable,” Easton-Calabria said.

An analysis by the policy-neutral nonprofit Climate Central found that the average temperature in New Orleans, during the day and at night, has warmed by more than 4 degrees from June through August since 1970. The nonprofit also estimated that New Orleans residents lost an average of 61 hours of sleep per year from 2020 to 2025, in part due to climate change. 

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/hFYNf/1/

Not surprisingly, the June indoor heat study found that the hotter it is outside, the hotter temperatures can be indoors. But in a state like Louisiana, which has some of the highest energy costs in the country, the use of air conditioning varied in response to the temperatures and affected how cool the study’s participants could keep their homes. 

Public health recommendations for sleeping temperatures can vary. One study in Boston found their participants slept best between 68 degrees and 77 degrees. Most cities that have passed cooling standards so far have required landlords to ensure their properties can remain under about 80 degrees, including New Orleans’ Healthy Homes Ordinance. 

But even cooling the bedroom to 80 degrees can be challenging, according to the recent study. Unless participants had central air conditioning and reported that they ran the system most or all of the time, temperatures in the bedroom were expected to exceed 80 degrees if it was hotter than 90 degrees during the day. During the study, at least one bedroom heated up to 101 degrees overnight, while others maxed out at 65 degrees. 

Most of the study’s participants were Black and made less than $50,000 a year, including the homeowners. Study co-author Jaime Madrigano, a public health professor at Johns Hopkins, said while most cooling standards attempt to protect renters, their findings suggest low-income homeowners also need help with staying cool. 

Homeowners made up most of the study and more than half made less than the city’s median household income. At least in the recent study, the homeowners were more likely to report using their air conditioner only half of the time or rarely. 

Air conditioning or medication?

In Hollygrove, Dorethea Parker saw herself in the study’s findings. She’s owned her house for about 35 years. Parker said she blasts her window air conditioning unit in the bedroom, turning it to 72 degrees. Even still, cooling her bedroom at night is often a losing battle against the city’s steamy summer heat. 

“It’s extremely hot in my house,” she said. “I definitely wake up some nights because of the heat.”

She typically keeps the rest of her window units off to save on her energy bill. Part of Parker’s problem is that her walls aren’t well-insulated. Plus, she believes the cool air escapes beneath the floorboards of her elevated home.

Caroline Reed, another study co-author who worked with iSeeChange at the time, said while several studies, including this one, have shown that air conditioning is a life-saving tool during extreme heat, their study suggests that air conditioning alone won’t solve the problem. 

Reed focused on outreach to residents and placing the temperature sensors in their homes. She said she often heard residents, especially those with ongoing health problems, talk about how difficult and expensive it was to cool their homes. People who ran their air conditioning all the time, to keep up with the heat, typically reported spending at least $200 more on their energy bills than those who saved on energy but had hotter houses.

Reed said some residents who limited their energy use or had window units that may have been less efficient at cooling couldn’t find relief from the heat outside when they came inside. Dealing with the persistent heat would add stress to their bodies and their finances. 

“I think that,  unfortunately, air conditioning, while it’s incredibly essential, still will always not be able to compete with other essentials in terms of your water bill, your food, or your medications,” Reed said. 

The choice between running the air conditioning and affording medications can be deadly, Reed said.

“We know that exposure to extreme heat over short or long amounts of time is just really dangerous for folks,” she said.  “When people are hospitalized, or in the worst case scenario, … even die from extreme heat, a lot of times they're found in their homes.”

Investing in cooling

The researchers and iSeeChange team said they hope studies like this can help inform heat policies at all levels of government. 

In New Orleans, Easton-Calabria and Madrigano said setting a cooling standard for renters establishes the concept of cooling — or maintaining a healthy temperature — as a right.

“It’s a good first step,” Madrigano said. But questions remain about how to implement and enforce the standard, and more would need to be done to ensure affordability doesn’t present a barrier. 

“I think it is evident, from our research and others, that the cost of running AC needs to be accounted for when policymakers are trying to protect their constituents during extreme weather,” Madrigano said. “Access, alone, should not be the only consideration, and energy assistance programs are going to be crucial to saving lives.”

Currently, programs to help reduce the cost of energy bills, either as financial assistance or through energy efficiency, are limited. 

The federal Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program is the primary source for public assistance with energy bills, but can only serve a limited number of residents. From April to September 2024, about 80,000 Louisianians received $200 to $800 to offset cooling costs. The Trump administration and U.S. House of Representatives have proposed cutting the program entirely next year, though a similar proposal in 2025 wasn’t enacted by Congress as the program has bipartisan support. 

Housing advocacy groups in New Orleans have pushed for more funding toward programs to upgrade houses to seal them against the weather, also known as weatherizing. 

This can include sealing the cracks in a building with foam to prevent from air leaking inside. Material known as weather-stripping can similarly be used for gaps around windows and doors to block drafts. Contractors can also install more insulation or repair holes in a house’s heating and cooling system. 

But homeowners only have access to two programs: the federal Weatherization Assistance Program and Entergy New Orleans’ EnergySmart program. 

Parker, who lives in Hollygrove, said the EnergySmart program had its limits. While her free home assessment was helpful, the company only installs insulation in the attic, not the walls or the floors. 

Beau Tidwell, a spokesperson for Entergy New Orleans, said the company recommends for residents with needs beyond the scope of EntergySmart to apply for Weatherization Assistance Program. The federal program will install wall insulation, he said, and Quad Area Weatherization can help with applications. Though, the federal program often has a long waitlist and limited funding. 

The latest proposal for addressing housing needs in New Orleans — created through a process called HousingNOLA — called for the city to invest about $3 million to weatherize and equip homes with solar panels and batteries to reduce residents’ energy burden, on top of improving the housing stock. 

Reed said she believes dedicating more government resources to limiting extreme heat will be the main area for growth, as well as preventative care from healthcare providers.

“ Extreme heat is still a relatively emerging area,” Reed said. “People are trying to better understand the ways that it presents risks to our communities and what solutions are actually offerable, and then within those solutions, what's actually affordable.”

Volunteers with the Hollygrove-Dixon Neighborhood Association plan to advocate for more tree plantings and other ways to reduce the heat island effect, possibly making it easier for cooling systems to keep up. 

This study was the first in a series of publications looking at the effects of extreme heat in New Orleans. iSeeChange has also launched a new campaign inviting residents to share their experiences with heat.  

Sutton said the neighborhood association also plans to present a proposal to the New Orleans City Council early next year using the research and community input to request more resources to address heat.

This article first appeared on Verite News New Orleans and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Does New York’s Labor Momentum Measure Up?

Despite eye-catching strikes and employer concessions, the percentage of unionized workers in the city remained flat in an annual report on the state of organized labor.

By Claudia Irizarry Aponte, The City Reporter

Sep 4 9:00am EDT

Organized labor in New York City has been mightily active so far this decade, and the first half of 2026 was no exception. Nurses, public defenders, hotel workers and college faculty all walked off the job this summer to historic effect, winning substantial contract improvements.

But, while union advocates may have reason to pat themselves on the back, the momentum has not been enough to reverse New York’s decades-long decline in overall unionization rates, according to the latest annual report by the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies.

The share of the unionized workforce in the city has remained flat despite an uptick in what researchers describe as “highly visible union activity,” such as the historic nurses strike this past winter.

MORE: On Labor Day, Mamdani Debuts ‘Worker Power’ Office to Support Union Organizing

But there are some bright spots: New York ranks first in union density among the nation’s largest states; it is second overall only to Hawaii, which has a much smaller population. Between 2025 and 2026, public-sector union density in both New York City and State was roughly double the national average.

In all, New York has more union members — 1.81 million — than any state other than California, the nation’s most populous. 

Ruth Milkman, a co-author of the report and chair of CUNY’s graduate labor studies department, said in an interview that New York is still a stronghold of organized labor, and reiterated that recent organizing, successful strikes and strong public support for unions bode well for the city’s labor movement. 

But that activity has not reached the scale needed to reverse a longer-term decline in the share of workers who are union members, the report found, echoing its findings from recent years.

The threats to workers across the nation and in New York are overwhelming, from artificial intelligence and the consolidation of large corporations, to the Trump administration’s gutting of the federal workforce and its culling of the National Labor Relations Board.

“So the fact that New York’s numbers are staying flat, it’s actually an achievement,” said Milkman. 

Milkman’s research team completes its annual report using Census data from the U.S. Current Population Survey of New York City residents. The New York City Central Labor Council, the city federation of unions, has disagreed with the report’s methodology and conclusions in the past, claiming that it does not account for workers employed in the city who live in its suburbs and in neighboring states.

Healthcare and education are two of the most unionized sectors in New York City, at 28% and 18.6% respectively, according to the report. And this year, workers in those sectors showed their might: A 39-day walkout this past winter resulted in raises and improved nurse-to-patient ratios for 15,000 nurses across three private hospital systems. 

That strike by the New York State Nurses Association was the largest and longest of its kind in New York City history. Meanwhile, non-tenure track faculty at New York University won their first-ever contract following a two-day strike in April, and more than two years after they unionized with the United Auto Workers.

This year’s report also zeroes in on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s unprecedented focus on boosting worker organizing in the private sector and his administration’s efforts to crack down on labor law violations. Last month, the city Department of Consumer and Worker Protection announced a new partnership with the Manhattan District Attorney’s office that will make it easier for both offices to investigate wage theft and other crimes.

However, the researchers cautioned, Mamdani’s “biggest challenge will come later in 2026, when the municipal labor contracts expire and new ones will be negotiated, affecting hundreds of thousands of workers.”

The city’s limited control over its budget resources “will make this an especially daunting task,” the report notes, adding that Mamdani’s success will depend on the strength of his relationships with Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state legislature.

One Woman’s Tormented Path to Prison

by Jamie Silvonek, Prison Journalism Project
September 3, 2026

In the late 1980s, Caroline Guy held a cassette recorder to her head, trying to record the voices she was hearing. She had torn through her apartment, throwing away electronics and furniture, hoping to remove the source of the noise.

Guy, a military veteran, had moved to Philadelphia in 1989. In a new city, at a new job, the voices she had heard for most of her life escalated. They encouraged her to harm herself and others. Soon, simple tasks grew impossible; she once abandoned a full cart in the middle of a grocery store because the voices overwhelmed her. Eventually, she retreated into her apartment, sitting in isolation and listening to the voices.

Desperate for an explanation, she paid a surveillance store more than $700 for two “body scans,” as she called them, to ensure there was nothing implanted inside her. She saw multiple doctors and psychiatrists, simultaneously begging for help and imploring them not to report that anything was wrong. A diagnosis, she feared, would cost her her job at a container factory. When a psychiatrist gave her a prescription, Guy ripped it up.

“At the time, I didn’t know I needed help to the extent that I did,” Guy said. “I was in denial.”

Two weeks later, Guy shot and killed her coworker with a gun she had purchased a few weeks prior. She believed it was the only way to stop the voices.

The path to prison

Guy’s journey to prison is sadly commonplace, and psychiatric suffering is only one part of the story. When Guy was young, a family friend raped her while she was babysitting. More abuse occurred later in life, during her military service. 

It is rare to encounter women in prison who have not struggled with mental illness or been abused. While 15% of incarcerated men report symptoms of serious mental illness, that number jumps to over 32% for incarcerated women. And according to the Vera Institute of Justice, nearly 86% of women in jail report histories of sexual or physical violence. These twin traumas often go unaddressed until they reach a breaking point.

The voices Guy tried to record in her apartment had dogged her since her childhood in Louisiana. As a child, she tried to tell her family about her distress. But her family was traditional and religious. They believed that children were to be seen, not heard. 

“Any time I mentioned hearing voices to my family, they just brushed me off,” she said. 

Because her family did not take her concerns seriously, Guy assumed that hearing voices was normal and tried to accept them. 

"When you're little and start to hear things like that, you start to think it's a normal part of life that everyone experiences," she said. "It's when you get older that you start to wonder if it's just you."

When Guy was 17, she was sexually assaulted by a friend’s uncle. Three months later, she learned she was pregnant. As a result, she said she was forced to stand before her entire church congregation and say that the rape and pregnancy were her fault. She was humiliated and outraged.

She remembers people in her church conflating her assault and her mental illness, saying things like, "Guy’s lost her mind ever since that guy raped her." Knowing she was in no position to care for a child, she signed away her parental rights as soon as her daughter was born.

About a year after giving birth, Guy decided to get her high school diploma and enlist in the military. 

“I had an uncle who was a veteran, and when he would come to visit he would play war documentaries for us,” Guy said. “I saw people jumping out of planes and I knew it was something I wanted to do.”

Throughout Guy service, she and other women were subjected to harassment and abuse from other soldiers. Once, a fellow soldier entered Guy’s room and attempted to grab her. When she fled, he chased and threatened her. 

“I was so angry,” she said, “It took me back to being raped — being completely powerless against someone who thinks they can do whatever they want to you.”

In spite of the abuse, Guy completed jump school and entered the 82nd Airborne Division. She was one of only three Black women in that initial group of 110. But as her service drew to a close, her behavior became erratic. Her sergeant sent her to the mental health unit, where Guy remembers asking the specialist not to record anything that could result in her being kicked out. 

In July 1982, she was honorably discharged. Eventually, she settled in Philadelphia, where her undiagnosed mental illness continued to spiral.

When the voices finally silenced

Guy was diagnosed with severe paranoid schizophrenia while awaiting trial for murder in 1995. In the wake of her diagnosis, the jail psychiatrist experimented with different medications over a period of months. Finally, at 37 years old, Guy started taking perphenazine, an antipsychotic medication that silenced the voices.

"I woke up one morning and I was just sitting on my bed when I realized that, for the first time, I couldn't hear the voices,” Guy said. “That was the beginning of my recovery."

Guy is now 67 and has been incarcerated for 31 years. She takes her medication daily, attends group therapy, leans on her peers, keeps a healthy daily routine and meets consistently with a psychologist and psychiatrist. 

Guy believes that having access to more robust mental health treatment could have prevented her from killing someone. 

"Thirty-one years ago there wasn't a lot of support," she said. "When I would call the police and ask for help, they told me there was nothing they could do. They never even referred me to a psychologist.”

Guy was recently reunited with her daughter. On May 20, 2024, after writing to adoption registries for over 20 years, Guy learned her daughter had contacted the prison. They began exchanging letters, and three months later, her daughter flew from Texas to Pennsylvania for their first visit. 

"My daughter says now that God brought us together," Guy said.

Guy’s life sentence means she has almost no shot at freedom. But she said she has not given up. These days, Guy is fighting for clemency, an extraordinarily rare event in Pennsylvania. She was granted a merit review in 2023 but fell one vote short from the board of pardons, which serves as a gatekeeper for applicants seeking a public hearing. 

In her three decades inside, Guy has never demonstrated any kind of violence. I've lived on the same unit with her for years. When I look at her, I don't see a person who deserves perpetual punishment; I see a woman who works in the mental health unit because she knows what it's like to feel isolated. I see a woman whose gap-toothed smile crinkles her eyes when she talks about her daughter and their dreams for the future.

This article first appeared on Prison Journalism Project and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Regulators Knew This Marijuana Product Was Harming People. It Stayed on Shelves for More Than a Year.

by Christopher Osher and Evan Wyloge, The Denver Gazette

Co-published with The Denver Gazette

September 4, 2026, 5:00 am

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Denver Gazette. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

Reporting Highlights

• Not an Anomaly: In the cases we reviewed, Colorado marijuana regulators took over seven months, on average, to warn the public after receiving a complaint or starting an investigation.
• Open Loopholes: Colorado lacks measures adopted in many other marijuana markets to improve testing procedures that prevent contaminated marijuana from going to stores.
• Multiple Chances: Even when the state discovers problems with a product that’s in dispensaries, manufacturers say they often continue selling the product while challenging the findings.

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.

In March 2022, Colorado public health officials started getting startling reports of liver damage tied to a new marijuana-based sleep aid that had quickly become a top seller in the state.

But it wasn’t until June 2023, nearly 15 months later, that the state’s Marijuana Enforcement Division would warn consumers that the danger had become so serious that the manufacturer had halted production of the sleep pills, called 1906 Midnight Drops, after more reports of “acute liver injury.”

The delay highlights a slew of weaknesses in the system for protecting consumers from hazardous products in the nation’s first regulated recreational marijuana market.

The health complaints had prompted the division to investigate, but the agency decided it didn’t have the power to pull the drops from the stores in this situation. If the agency had dug deeper, it might have found what the state attorney general’s office later discovered: The manufacturer, Sima Sciences, began receiving complaints of harm shortly after it launched 1906 Midnight Drops and two years before health officials ever did.

Instead, the enforcement division took four months after the first report of liver damage to the state to post a notice on its website. But the agency didn’t call it a health and safety warning, which would have advised people not to consume the product. It released a more neutrally named “informational notification.” While there had been reports of “adverse health events,” the notice said, regulators didn’t find any violations. The manufacturer had reformulated the product, the notice added, and no additional issues had surfaced.

Jenifer Chatting didn’t even see it.

A surgical assistant at an oral surgeon’s office, Chatting wanted a safe, natural alternative to pharmaceuticals to treat her insomnia. So she was relieved when a local marijuana dispensary suggested a sugar-free option made of cannabis and herbal extracts that the manufacturer touted as the “the best sleep aid on the market.” She began taking the Midnight Drops nightly the same month that the state health department received its first complaint.

Unaware of the enforcement division’s notification, she didn’t worry when she started having full-body cramps and became lactose intolerant in September 2022, about six months after she started taking the drops. She thought she just needed to drink more water.

She continued taking the drops for nine more months until her dispensary stopped stocking them. Now, despite never having liver problems before, according to her medical records, she has liver damage at age 53; her doctor says she will ultimately need a transplant.

Colorado’s failure to get Midnight Drops off the market or to warn consumers to stop taking it despite repeated reports of harm was not an anomaly, The Denver Gazette and ProPublica found.

The division has limited authority to force companies to recall products. The agency instead relies on posting health and safety advisories on its website to warn the public, and on sending news releases to local media outlets.

Yet, in the cases for which the news organizations were able to identify the date of a complaint or the start of an investigation, it took regulators an average of more than seven months to issue a warning. That’s an incomplete snapshot because the division refused to release data on when investigations began. Complaint dates were private, it said, because the probes were ongoing — even years after the warnings were issued and some companies had surrendered their licenses.

Still, The Denver Gazette and ProPublica were able to identify initial complaint or investigative start dates for 23 of the 83 advisories the agency issued over the past five years by reviewing other licensing violation records. 

Seven months is a long time for products that are typically smoked or ingested within days of purchase, industry insiders and consumer safety experts said. In comparison, federal investigators have criticized the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for taking an average of two months after learning of a potential hazard to not just warn consumers but to get companies to recall contaminated food.

Kimberly Anzarut, a former Denver marijuana regulator and now an industry consultant, said the delays mean Colorado consumers aren’t getting vital warnings while products are still on shelves.

“When you take a really long time to get a bulletin out to tell people about these issues, a lot of time, people have already consumed the product,” she said.

Lab directors said it generally takes only three days to return test results identifying contaminants, and if there’s an emergency, they can do so in a day.

But MED spokesperson Heather Draper said in a statement that it’s more complicated than just getting test results and that it takes time to build a case that leads to a health and safety advisory.

“This most often requires investigative resources to evaluate the scope of concerns, gather evidence of potential product safety concerns, and receive test results that indicate a contaminated product has been sold to consumers,” she said. 

Thuy Vu, Denver’s former head of marijuana inspections and enforcement, said regulators should act more quickly and that “time is of the essence,” because the safety problems reported to regulators are almost always a fraction of the harm a product is causing.

“Seven months, eight months, that’s ridiculous,” she said.

The delays mean contaminated marijuana products often remain on sale for a long time, with no public warning. In addition to complaint dates, The Denver Gazette and ProPublica were able to get sales start dates for nearly all the health and safety advisories and found that Colorado regulators also take, on average, more than seven months from the first sale of a contaminated marijuana product to warn the public.

The news organizations found that warnings take a long time in part because Colorado lacks measures adopted in many other legalized marijuana markets to improve testing procedures and prevent contaminated marijuana from going to stores. 

And when the state does discover a problem in a product already on shelves, it gives manufacturers multiple chances to disprove the agency’s finding. Though the MED can require companies to stop distributing flagged products, industry lawyers and manufacturers said manufacturers often continue selling them while challenging the findings.

Chatting’s husband, Luke, is now fearful of losing his wife and critical of what he calls insufficient warnings about Midnight Drops. The couple is suing the company, which has denied their claims. The lawsuit is pending.

“Why weren’t there big banners in front of the dispensaries about these things?” he asked. “The state makes millions and millions and millions of dollars off of the taxes for the marijuana, but they don’t do any regulation at all.”

“My Patients Were Swearing by These”

The person behind Midnight Drops is Peter Barsoom, a wunderkind of Wall Street finance who left New York in 2014 to co-found a recreational marijuana company called Sima Sciences.

Soon he was turning up in splashy magazine profiles. The 1906 product line was a nod to the year the U.S. government enacted the Pure Food and Drug Act, which he said led to the first federal regulation and eventual prohibition of cannabis. 

His initial focus was high-end marijuana-infused truffle chocolates. 

“Our competitors are chardonnay, Xanax and coffee, not other edibles,” he said during an interview in 2017. 

In 2019, he branched out into the sleep tablet line and also manufactured other “drops” meant to help with sex, anxiety, energy, focus and bliss.

By 2023, his company, based in Henderson, Colorado, was manufacturing 81% of the pills sold in dispensaries in the state, according to the cannabis analytics firm BDSA.

Vu, the former Denver regulator, worked for about a year as Barsoom’s head of regulatory compliance and said Barsoom wanted her to bend the rules on inventory reporting and product safety, though she stressed that she was unaware of the problems with the Midnight Drops, which were made after she left. They clashed, and he fired her in 2016, she said.

Barsoom declined interview requests and did not respond to detailed questions. His company’s lawyers also did not respond to requests for comment. But in court filings in response to personal injury lawsuits, they stated that “injuries, damages and losses, if any, may have been caused by plaintiff’s own comparative negligence.”

To promote the Midnight Drops, the 1906 website said the pills were infused with corydalis, an herbal extract, which, it said, “has been used for millennia.” It claimed the extract had sedative qualities and would help people stay asleep because it targeted body pain and tension.

A relative of the poppy, corydalis also contains a compound that researchers have linked to severe and potentially fatal liver injury.

Following reports about liver problems, the company reformulated Midnight Drops and added a warning label stating the product should be taken in consultation with a physician. But the new herbal supplement was also primarily composed of a compound with the same chemical makeup as the one in corydalis that had been tied to liver risks, regulators eventually concluded. 

One doctor reported to the enforcement division in December 2022 that he continued to “see an uptick in patients with elevated liver enzymes,” which he believed was caused by Midnight Drops. He warned the agency that he had seen four such patients in the past two months and knew of other doctors treating more, state records show.

Dr. David Cristin, a gastroenterologist, said he was exasperated because patients kept using Midnight Drops despite his concerns. He said he registered a complaint through the company’s website, detailing the issues he had found, but was never contacted.

“The thing that was frustrating was my patients were swearing by these,” he said.

By May 2024, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment would receive 52 reports of harm involving Midnight Drops, at least 20 severe enough to require medical care. Of those reports, 25 occurred before the MED’s second notification. While the health department often does the initial review, records show it typically finished gathering information within days, which would trigger an automatic referral to the MED.

Nearly a year after issuing its first “informational notification,” the MED and the health department issued the second one in June 2023, warning that Midnight Drops had continued generating reports of “acute liver injury.” 

At that time, Sima announced it was stopping production. But Barsoom and his companies continued marketing Midnight Drops for several more months and did not adequately warn dispensaries to stop selling them, according to a Colorado attorney general’s office investigation.

Chatting didn’t see the second MED notification either. A couple of weeks after it was posted, she went into a dispensary but learned the drops were no longer in stock. She said a dispensary staffer told her they had been pulled because consumers had been abusing the product. She hadn’t been, so she didn’t worry.

But that summer, bloodwork during a routine checkup revealed Chatting’s liver enzymes had soared to abnormal levels, indicating potential damage.

The MED’s lawyers have refused to release any of the agency’s investigative files about Midnight Drops, making it difficult to assess why the agency didn’t act sooner. Draper, the spokesperson, said that when regulators were fielding complaints about Midnight Drops, their powers were limited: They could put a hold on products and require companies to issue recalls only for specific violations. She said because of a 2023 statute change, regulators can now place holds on products over safety concerns to prevent their sales, even without a violation.

Still, even with that change, the time it takes to warn consumers after the first complaint as well as after the date when a product goes on sale have both gotten longer, according to the news organizations’ analysis. Draper said the agency “has improved its Health & Safety Advisory processes and this work continues.” She added that agency officials do not believe that the newsrooms’ analysis is “an accurate representation of our process and progress in these areas,” but she did not say why or provide any evidence disputing it.

Loopholes in Safety Rules

The continued time lag in public warnings from regulators is another blow to consumer safety for Colorado’s marijuana industry, which has loopholes in safety rules other states have closed to make it less likely that contaminated products end up in dispensaries.

In one of the longest cases, it took regulators three years to warn consumers from the date of the first sales of marijuana products made by Pueblo County-based Boone Farms that were contaminated with yeast, mold and aspergillus, which can damage lungs and cause asthma, fungal infections and, in rare instances, death. Draper said she could neither confirm nor deny if there was any other investigation. The owner of the company declined to comment but previously said it was a small amount of product and that some of it sold before the state set standards for aspergillus.

An MED investigator had similar suspicions about contamination in products made by Boulder-based Range Street, but “due to other priorities and bandwidth,” had to put the investigation on the “backburner,” according to the investigator’s synopsis obtained through a public records request. The MED eventually found yeast, mold and aspergillus. But it didn’t warn the public until 410 days after the first sales. Range Street, whose former owner declined to comment, has since surrendered its medical marijuana cultivation license.

Unlike other states, Colorado operates largely on an honor code, with manufacturers free to choose the samples and the labs that conduct contaminant tests required before products can be sold. Colorado regulators in January said they were considering requiring lab personnel to collect samples, which would bring Colorado in line with 26 of the 42 state marijuana markets. But the agency backed away from the proposal after top manufacturers argued it would increase costs.

Colorado also allows marijuana manufacturers to test their products far less frequently if they can show consistent compliance, something only one other state does. And the time frame for demonstrating that compliance can be as little as a few weeks.

Colorado’s regulators acknowledged at a 2023 industry forum that the reduced testing program “potentially poses risks to public health and safety,” as problems with the program were “a common occurrence” in investigations.

This January, the enforcement division noted in an industry bulletin that problems with that program persist, leading to recalls and advisories for unsafe levels of pesticides. The division told manufacturers in July that it is reviewing the reduced testing program as it considers a broader overhaul of testing rules. 

Colorado also has historically relied on complaints to identify tainted marijuana once it is actually in the marketplace, rather than randomly sampling products on shelves. The Cannabis Regulators Association recommends random sampling, and other states like Oklahoma have such programs. Colorado only this year launched a pilot program to randomly sample dispensary products, but the program has run into delays, and the state hasn’t identified a long-term funding source.

Once a contaminated product gets to dispensaries, Colorado regulators face challenges in getting the product off the shelves. Colorado expects manufacturers to voluntarily recall products. Regulators in Colorado can only force products to be recalled in a public health emergency, but regulators can encounter hurdles to quickly establishing that one exists.

Even when testing finds contaminants, manufacturers say marijuana that’s already in dispensaries often remains for sale. That’s because Colorado allows the manufacturer to retest the marijuana, and the rules don’t specify a time frame for when those tests have to be done. The rules state that the MED “may” require manufacturers to refrain from selling items during retesting.

In contrast, Missouri immediately puts a hold on all marijuana products that fail mandatory contaminant testing. Manufacturers there can have the products reanalyzed, but dispensaries can’t sell those products until retesting shows the original analysis was incorrect.

In an industry bulletin in January, Colorado regulators said the agency had seen “increased instances” of marijuana manufacturers taking advantage of the retesting rule to cover up the use of banned pesticides.

“Health Isn’t Really Their Primary Concern”

Tess Eidem, a research professor at the University of Colorado who has a federal grant to analyze the division’s health and safety bulletin process, said she worries the state prioritizes protecting the financial viability of the marijuana market over consumer safety.

She pointed out that the MED isn’t part of the state’s health department but instead is in the state’s revenue department. 

“So health isn’t really their primary concern,” she said.

Draper said that “consumer safety has been and remains a top priority for the Division.”

In September 2024, a little over a year after Chatting stopped taking Midnight Drops, she and her husband went on a dream vacation to England, where they lived on a houseboat. The trip was such a success that they began planning to retire there, projecting that in about a decade they could downsize and spend their golden years traveling the canals through the English countryside where Luke was born.

A month later, Jenifer got a call from a doctor. Because she’s a former smoker, she had gone in for a routine lung screening. Her lungs were fine, but the X-ray detected something suspicious with her liver. A follow-up ultrasound detected cirrhosis.

Chatting’s gastroenterologist ruled out alcohol consumption, noting in her medical records that Chatting had always been a light drinker, and instead cited an herbal sleeping aid as a likely factor. After she stopped taking the drops, her liver enzymes came back into normal ranges, but the damage was already done, her medical records show.

Two days before Thanksgiving, Luke couldn’t sleep and rose about 2 a.m. to Google information about cirrhosis. He said it was then that he finally discovered the MED’s notifications about Midnight Drops.

He started slamming his fists on the armrests of his desk chair. One armrest broke, and his fist hit jagged plastic, fracturing his left hand.

“Jen, they killed you,” he recalled shouting.

She has few symptoms now, other than body cramps, but her gastroenterologist has warned that her condition will inevitably deteriorate and she will require a liver transplant in as little as five years.

Struggling to come to terms with the diagnosis, Jenifer now stays mostly indoors, building elaborate Lego artwork and spending time with their rescue pug mixes. 

“It’s hard because you think you’re doing something good for yourself and healthy and all natural,” she said. “And then it ends up being, you know … .” She stopped and gathered herself. “Just because something’s all natural doesn’t mean that it’s good for you.” 

Last September, Barsoom and his companies settled with the attorney general’s office to resolve the office’s investigation. Barsoom and his companies denied that they had violated consumer protection laws. But they agreed to pay $400,000 in fines, and the settlement bars them from selling cannabis products in Colorado until at least 2027. 

Barsoom also agreed to issue an apology. 

“We’ve always believed that great products should improve people’s lives,” his statement read. “When we learned that Midnight Drops wasn’t meeting that standard for everyone, we realized we had let our customers down. We are sorry that we didn’t act faster and communicate better with both our customers and regulators.”

The Chattings said Barsoom’s apology doesn’t amount to much for them, and they wish Colorado regulators had acted faster and communicated better with consumers.

“How are people supposed to know this?” Luke asked. “The only way I found this stuff was by digging and digging and digging on the internet.”