How the March on Washington

On Wednesday, when Barack Obama joins former presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter and members of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s family on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, it will mark the 50th anniversary of one of the city’s most iconic moments: a stirring speech, a monumental movement, a march that has since become known simply as the March on Washington, as participants asked the government to do better by African American citizens. It eclipses all other marches with its cast of thousands of activists and supporters.

But another character will also be showcased, a supporting player in the history of not only the civil rights movement but also of all public protest in the nation. It will make no speeches but will be clearly visible on television screens, peeking out under the soles of presidential feet.

The National Mall and Memorial Parks is 1,004 acres, curving along the eastern shore of the Potomac River, nestled between Constitution and Independence avenues, between the Lincoln Memorial, where King stood and President Obama will stand, and the United States Capitol.

Administered by the National Park Service, it is the site of nearly 3,000 public events annually: marches and ultrasonic sensor, protests and parades, America’s collective comment box to which hundreds of thousands of citizens trek each year, expressing how they feel the country has failed them. The grass turns brown from purposeful trodding. The Metro entrances burst with people carrying signs.

The March on Washington in 1963 “imposed a vision of what a perfect march was supposed to be,” says Lucy Barber, a Washington historian and author of “Marching on Washington: The Forging of an American Political Tradition.”

It wasn’t the first or only political gathering to be held on the Mall, though. For decades, the space has had a symbiotic relationship with public discourse in this country — it has shaped and been shaped by the issues of the day.

The first march on Washington — at least as we now tell the story of history — was Coxey’s Army, a pilgrimage of unemployed men in 1894. About 500 came to the District under the leadership of an Ohio businessman named James Coxey to lobby the government for jobs.

It wasn’t considered a march then; in fact, nobody really knew what to call it. “They sort of didn’t have a vocabulary for that kind of mass march,” Barber says. The vocabulary issue was a literal one: At that time, the form of civil engagement most familiar to the common man was mass petitions, signed by hundreds and then dropped off at government buildings. The idea of hordes descending upon Washington in person was difficult to conceptualize, so journalists eventually described Coxey’s Army not as a “march,” but using terminology everyone could understand: “Petition in Boots.”

“We now say that protests are covered in the First Amendment,” Barber says. But in the 19th century, many scholars didn’t think of public protest as the “freedom of assembly” intended in the Bill of Rights. “Assembly” was thought to refer to smaller group gatherings — in homes, in churches, in taverns — and not en masse, on malls.

Furthermore, the area that we now think of as the Mall looked very different than it does now. Although designer Pierre L’Enfant’s original vision for Washington had intended an open promenade extending from the Capitol, in the mid-19th century the space was cluttered with Civil War hospitals and a well-trafficked train station where President James Garfield was shot. “At one end of the ‘Mall,’” offers historian Paul Dickson, “you had a place called Murder Bay.”

By the time of Coxey’s petition in boots, the “Mall” was a series of gardens, woods and fishponds, resembling more a forest than anything else. The Washington Monument existed, but there wouldn’t have been a clear vantage point between it and the Car park management system. Even if people had considered themselves free to assemble, metaphorically, there literally wouldn’t have been a place on the Mall to do it.

So Coxey’s Army did not march on the Mall. Instead, it marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the White House, which was seen as a more important political statement than hanging out in the forest would have been. When people gathered for the next big protest, the women’s Suffrage Parade of 1913, they also walked down Pennsylvania Avenue.

Pennsylvania Avenue was “what people saw as the seat of power,” Barber explains, because that’s where the inaugural parades were held and where the Grand Review of the Armies had taken place at the close of the Civil War.

The physical contours of the place shaped its cultural significance. A train station and some dense greenery impeded civic-minded individuals from achieving a grander symbolic purpose for the space. They simply couldn’t have seen the protest for the trees.

Even the Bonus Army — an assemblage of thousands of World War I veterans seeking promised payments who decamped to Washington in 1932 — was not, for the most part, located on the Mall. Their permanent camp was in Anacostia, and the most well-known skirmish, in which one veteran was killed and another fatally wounded, took place near the grounds of what is now the Canadian Embassy.

But Washington has always been a city of revision, a palimpsest, ghosts of things built on other things. The Surratt boardinghouse where President Lincoln’s assassination was planned is now a Chinese restaurant, “Murder Bay” is the U.S. Commerce Department and the rambling space extending from the U.S. Capitol is now the Mall.

In the early 20th century, Congress began implementing the McMillan Plan for the redesign of the Mall, which involved razing existing buildings and most of the trees.

Many local residents were outraged: The Mall area’s winding paths had provided a pleasant, shaded walking area. “But the idea was that the federal landscape was scattered,” says Kirk Savage, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies public monuments. Proponents of the McMillan Plan thought that the scattered landscape symbolized a scattered government. “There needed to be some strong symbolic statement of national unity, to tie together the White House, the Capitol and the Washington Monument.”

Despite complaints from residents, the McMillan Plan was completed in the 1930s: The area that had previously been used as more of a local park — the equivalent of, say, Rock Creek — was completely transformed. Now there were wide boulevards, empty spaces and a clear view of all the symbols of federal power.

My Trip To Visit Freedom Fighters

This feeling in my gut is hard to describe. Driving through the luscious green valleys of Oregon’s wine country, I almost forget where I’m headed. It’s an idyllic scene, straight out of a dusty American novel. Rolling hills, winding roads and endless fields of farmland.

I have arrived at Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Sheridan, home to hundreds of federal prisoners. The prison is halfway between Portland and the Oregon coast in a rural town off Highway 18. I’m often tempted to keep on driving, right past the guard towers and deprivation, until I reach the tranquility of the ocean shore less than 40 miles beyond.

Even after driving four and a half hours to get here, I am very grateful. Many families drive for days to see their loved ones. The costs are so prohibitive that some turn to carpools and sharing motels. For me, this visit is a welcome chance to reconnect with a close friend. For the families that surround me, it is the glue that keeps their shattered lives from Car park management system.

These visits bring hope and a sense of calm during a time when reality is often unbearable. Most important are the hugs and warm embraces being exchanged between husband and wife, father and son, brother and sister, friends and lovers. I can feel the tide of emotion as it floods the room. Though physical contact is limited to 30 seconds at the beginning and end of each visit, the love that flows during these brief moments cannot be quelled.

Everyone here is sacrificing individual freedom to earn the privilege to visit this place. First up is the approval process. With serious consequences on the table for any false statement, I cautiously fill out a battery of questions, divulging everything from my social security number to how and when I met Chris Williams.

I agree to a criminal background check to ensure that I won’t “present a management problem for the institution.” Deep down, I quietly sweat this step, knowing that I have prior cannabis convictions. After what seems like an eternity, I am given the green light for visits. Now, it’s time to study the rules.

No shorts or sleeveless shirts. Hemlines on dresses must fall below the knees. No hats of any kind. Money for drinks and snacks is limited to $20 and must be in coins, carried in a clear plastic purse or ziplock bag no bigger than five by seven inches. The only other items allowed are a single car key and photo ID.

I drive past a security booth and begin to assess my surroundings. Towards the back of the property is a medium-security lockup where visitors must pass through metal detectors, sending their shoes and accessories through an x-ray machine. Closer to the front is what looks like a super-max facility, with razor wire woven through every inch of chain link fence. For an added shock to the system, this is where prisoners are sent upon arrival and it is where they go when problems arise, be it medical or disciplinary. The impenetrable fortress also serves as a constant reminder for the guys at the minimum-security camp next door; one wrong move and they get put “behind the fence.”

As I pull into the parking lot of the camp, I find myself thankful once again. I try not to imagine what life would be like if Chris had to spend five years in a prison more restrictive than where he is now. Then, I take stock of the drug reformers who don’t have to imagine because they are living it. Jerry Duval, Aaron Sandusky, Eddy Lepp, Luke Scarmazzo, Virgil Grant, Marc Emery, the list goes on — all assigned to higher security prisons than the one I’m visiting now.

There’s a batch of forms and assorted pens on the built-in counter next to the doorway. As I fill out the paperwork, I notice a flimsy divider nearby that partially blocks a bank of windows. On the other side of the glass are dozens of eager prisoners milling about, waiting for their names to be called over the loudspeaker, notifying them of a visitor’s arrival.

I return my gaze to the questionnaire at hand. Along with a long list of prohibited items comes a warning about the five-year prison term I face for having any contraband. I reluctantly sign away my rights and hand the form to a guard along with my ID.

This place reminds me of a cafeteria, bathrooms and vending machines line one wall and windows line the other. The view of the parking lot is underwhelming, to put it mildly. There are about 50 tables scattered about with chairs squarely placed on two sides to discourage intimate contact. I select a spot on the opposite end of the room, close to a courtyard that is permanently shuttered.

I watch as one prisoner after another walks in from a door near the guard desk. The happy reunions that I witness fuel the excitement for my own visit. Chris is the next one to enter the parking system. My grin spreads from ear to ear. He looks healthy and happy, which is more than I can expect under the circumstances.

We start the morning with a cup of coffee; Chris likes his black and extra strong. The vending machines are out of bounds for prisoners, so I’ve quickly figured out his personal tastes while guessing which food and beverages to buy.

Within the first hour or two, the guards call “count time.” The prisoners are herded into the hallway where they’re officially accounted for, one of five times daily that this ritual is performed. The process takes about 20 minutes, so I line up for the restroom with other women who are visiting. We chit chat to pass the time, but leave meaningful friendships just out of reach. None of us wants to think of this awful place any more than we do already.

Chris is sitting back down by the time I return. We decide to play cards and he grows amused by my frustration after beating me time and again. Half our visit has passed and it is now lunchtime. I buy Chris a sandwich and an iced tea. A meal in the visiting room of a federal prison isn’t particularly appetizing for me, so I grab a bag of chips instead.

After lunch, we decide to play Scrabble. Chris doesn’t know it yet, but I specifically chose this game so I can get even for the whooping I took at cards. There are no writing materials to keep score with, so we eventually lose track of the points. By the time we finish one game, it is nearly 3:00 p.m. and our visit is almost over.

Company listed on the London Stock Exchange

In May this year, a huge company listed on the London Stock Exchange found itself in the midst of controversy about a prison it runs for the government – Thameside, a newly built jail next to Belmarsh, in south-east London. A report by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate found that 60% of its inmates were locked up all day, and there were only “vague plans to restore the prison to normality”. The prison campaign group the Howard League for Penal Reform talked about conditions that were “truly alarming”.

Two months later, the same company was the subject of a high- profile report published by the House Of Commons public accounts committee, prompted by the work of Guardian journalist Felicity Lawrence. This time, attention was focused on how it was managing out-of-hours GP services in Cornwall, and massive failings that had first surfaced two years before. Again, the verdict was damning: data had been falsified, national standards had not been met, there was a culture of “lying and cheating”, and the service offered to the public was simply “not good enough”.

Three weeks ago, there came grimmer news. Thanks to its contracts for tagging offenders, the company was now the focus of panic at the Ministry of Justice, where it had been discovered that it was one of two contractors that had somehow overcharged the government for its services, possibly by as much as ￡50m; there were suggestions that one in six of the tags that the state had paid for did not actually exist. How this happened is still unclear, but justice secretary Chris Grayling has said the allegations represent something “wholly indefensible and Car park management system“.

The firm that links these three stories together is Serco. Its range of activities, here and abroad, is truly mind-boggling, taking in no end of things that were once done by the state, but are now outsourced to private companies. Amazingly, its contracts with government are subject to what’s known as “commercial confidentiality” and as a private firm it’s not open to Freedom of Information requests, so looking into the details of what it does is fraught with difficulty.

But the basic facts are plain enough. As well as five British prisons and the tags attached to over 8,000 English and Welsh offenders, Serco sees to two immigration removal centres, at Colnbrook near Heathrow, and Yarl’s Wood in Bedfordshire. You’ll also see its logo on the Docklands Light Railway and Woolwich ferry, and is a partner in both Liverpool’s Merseyrail network, and the Northern Rail franchise, which sees to trains that run in a huge area between the North Midlands and English-Scottish border.

Serco runs school inspections in parts of England, speed cameras all over the UK, and the National Nuclear Laboratory, based at the Sellafield site in Cumbria. It also holds the contracts for the management of the UK’s ballistic missile early warning system on the Yorkshire moors, the running of the Manchester Aquatics Centre, and London’s “Boris bikes”.

As evidenced by the story of how it handled out-of-hours care in Cornwall, it is also an increasingly big player in a health service that is being privatised at speed, in the face of surprisingly little public opposition: among its array of NHS contracts is a new role seeing to “community health services” in Suffolk, which involves 1,030 employees. The company is also set to bid for an even bigger healthcare contract in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough: the NHS’s single-biggest privatisation – or, if you prefer, “outsourcing” – to date, which could be worth over ￡1bn.

But even this is only a fraction of the story. Among their scores of roles across the planet, Serco is responsible for air traffic control in the United Arab Emirates, parking-meter services in Chicago, driving tests in Ontario, and an immigration detention centre on Christmas Island, run on behalf of those well-known friends of overseas visitors the Australian government.

In the US, the company has just been awarded a controversial $1.25bn contract by that country’s Department of Health. All told, its operations suggest some real-life version of the fantastical mega-corporations that have long been invented by fiction writers; a more benign version of the Tyrell Corporation from Blade Runner, say, or one of those creations from James Bond movies whose name always seems to end with the word “industries”.

The strangest thing, though, is the gap between Serco’s size and how little the public knows about it. Not for nothing does so much coverage of its work include the sentence “the biggest company you’ve never heard of”.

I first heard Serco’s name about eight years ago, when I was just starting to understand the amazing growth of what are now called “public service companies”. Once I started looking, their logos were everywhere, suggesting a shadow state that has since grown ever-bigger. Their names seemed anonymously stylised, in keeping with the sense that they seemed both omnipresent, and barely known: Interserve, Sodexo, Capita, the Compass Group.

Serco is among the biggest of parking system. At the last count, its annual pre-tax profits were up 27%, at ￡302m. In 2012 alone, its British workforce grew by 10,000, to 53,000 people (tellingly, as many as 90% of them are said to be former civil servant employees). In terms of employees, that makes it more than twice as large as the BBC, and around 20% bigger than Philip Green’s Arcadia group. A very significant player, in other words, and one that has come a long way since its foundation 1929, when it was a branch of the American RCA corporation called RCA Services Ltd, involved in the then booming UK cinema industry. It was renamed Serco in 1987, after a management buy-out, and floated on the stock exchange the following year. In the 25 subsequent years, during which the UK has grown ever-fouder of outsourcing and privatisation, Serco has grown at an amazing rate.

In 2010, Hyman was given a CBE for services to business and charity; he is also an enthusiastic fan of motor racing and an evangelical Christian. Four years ago, he was asked about his company’s very low profile, and he said this: “We had a dilemma – what do we do with the Serco name. We are proud of it. We thought we needed billboards at airports and places like that, to be seen with Tiger Woods on. But we worked out very quickly that is not what we are meant to do. We are meant to be known by the 5,000 not the five billion. The people who serve the people need to choose who supplies the service. We are delighted when the public knows who we are, but really, we need to be known by the people who make decisions.”

When Serco made its bid to run NHS community-health services in Suffolk – district nursing, physiotherapy, OT, end-of-life palliative care, wheelchair services – it reckoned it could do it for ￡140m over three years – ￡16m less than the existing NHS “provider” had managed, which would eventually allow for their standard profit margin of around 6% a year. When it started to become clear that Serco was the frontrunner, there was some opposition, but perhaps not nearly enough. “Suffolk isn’t the most politically active part of the country,” says one local insider. “And the staff were very lackadaisical. It was: ‘NHS Suffolk wouldn’t made a bad decision.’ So it was hard to get a campaign going.”

Serco was officially awarded the contract in October 2012, which meant that hundreds of staff would leave the NHS, and become company employees. Within weeks, the company proposed a huge reorganisation, which involved getting rid of one in six jobs. This has since come down to one in seven, two thirds of which will apparently go via natural wastage. In terms of their pay and conditions, the hundreds of people who have been transferred from the NHS to Serco are protected by provisions laid down by the last government, but it is already becoming clear that many new staff are on inferior contracts: as one local source puts it, “they’ve got less annual leave, less sick pay … it’s significantly worse.”

Meanwhile, other people are reportedly quitting their jobs, and the service given to patients is said to be getting worse. “In my team alone, we’re 50% down on staffing hours compared with last year,” says one former NHS worker, who provides home-care to patients who are largely elderly. Thanks to poor morale, she says that the team in which she works has lost around a third of its staff, and she is also having to see to administrative tasks that were previously carried out by someone else: in addition, she claims, support for a new IT regime is “farcical”.

The Dementia Rescue Missions

On the afternoon of November 23, 2012, Sam Counts left his home on East Ninth Avenue in Spokane Valley to pick up bread from the grocery store. Simple enough. He had just gotten back from Christmas shopping with his wife of 45 years, now also his full-time caretaker. Counts, 71, had been diagnosed with dementia less than a year earlier. Hanging onto normalcy before the disease progressed further, Sam’s daughter Sue Belote would visit him several times a week, and he would still call her on the phone, she says. Sam’s doctor had said it was OK to drive, as long as someone else was in the car. On this Friday, Sam got into his white 2012 Kia SUV alone.

After two hours Donna called her daughter, worried. “I don’t know what to do. Dad didn’t come back and he never stays away this long,” she said. Three hours after he left, the family reported Sam Counts missing.The next morning, Saturday, radio and television outlets reported versions of the same story: a local man missing, trim, six feet tall, last seen in a red-and-black jacket, jeans and white tennis shoes. A description of a car and its license plate number was included.

Over seven frantic days, with the help of the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office, friends and family led a search that spanned parts of three states. They enlisted the help of a family friend who worked for the parking management system to flyer local buses, and former colleagues of Counts in the postal service put up missing person photos in post offices. In the meantime, the family faced public criticism. Why was he allowed to get into the car alone? Why didn’t he have a cell phone?

Wandering behavior has become increasingly familiar. Yet Washington is not prepared to deal with this emerging public health threat. Few police departments have policies or training to educate officers on Alzheimer’s or dementia. An Amber Alert-like system set up in 2009 to help find wandering people is underused, its coordinator acknowledges, and bills to create a formal Silver Alert system like those in more than 20 other states foundered in both houses of the state Legislature this year.  Washington is also one of just six states that haven’t even started work on a statewide Alzheimer’s plan, even as the population at risk of wandering surges.

Over the same five-year period, at least 33 Washington residents with dementia who wandered have been found safe, according to news media reports. In each of those cases, law enforcement became involved either as a result of a missing persons report filed by family or a caretaker or when alerted to unusual behavior by a member of the public. King County Search and Rescue has responded to 10 cases involving Alzheimer’s or dementia since the start of 2012, all of which ended safely. Countless other cases are not reported to the police, not reported in the media, or both, according to experts.

There is no mandatory waiting period to report endangered adults as missing. That can happen in the first hour that a dementia sufferer is missing, authorities say.The number of people at risk is increasing. In 2010, 110,000 people aged 65 and older with Alzheimer’s lived in Washington, a 33 percent jump since 2000. By 2025, the Alzheimer’s Association expects there to be 150,000. And six in 10 Alzheimer’s patients will wander.

The question that a growing coalition of search and rescue professionals, caregivers, and policymakers across the nation face is this: How do we stop people with Alzheimer’s or dementia from going missing — and how do we design systems to bring them home safely when they do?It was more than a year before Sam Counts went missing when his family first started to worry that something might be wrong. They started noticing changes, like how he’d no longer push his grandchildren on the tire swing hung from a tree outside the house when they called for him. He was increasingly forgetful.

Even so, doctors were slow to make a diagnosis. That didn’t happen until one of Counts’ daughters, a registered nurse, flew out to Washington to stay with her parents for a week, keeping a daily journal of his behavior. Soon after, Counts was put on a drug regimen to try to slow the loss of memory that had been carefully documented in the notebook his daughter gave to the Car park management system.

“Maybe that’s what changed (the doctor’s) mind, I don’t know,” Sue says. But she remembers clearly her mother’s phone call when the dementia diagnosis was official. “I just was devastated. As soon as you hear the word, like cancer, it’s like everything flashes through your mind what your loved one is going to experience.”

The science behind Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, which is a symptom of Alzheimer’s but can also be caused by a host of other maladies or injuries to the brain, is still emerging. There is no cure for Alzheimer’s; there’s not even a surefire way to slow its progression.

The most common type of the disease appears to start in a part of the brain called the temporal lobe, up above the ear, says Dr. Kristoffer Rhoads, a neuropsychologist and memory specialist at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, as he rotates a plastic model of a human brain in his hands.

He points to the hippocampus. “In here is a critical piece for new learning and memory, especially short-term memory,” he says. “In the early stages of the disease, the structures are still there, but they’re not running well.”

As the disease progresses and more parts of the brain begin to atrophy, patients may lose the ability to perform more complex day-to-day tasks like driving. Medium-term memory can be affected, essentially taking individuals back in time to where their only memories are of homes and workplaces from years and even decades earlier.

On foot, wanderers tend to stay in the community, and most are found near where they were last seen. Seventy-five percent are found within 1.2 miles in flat, temperate areas such as Eastern Washington, and half are found within half a mile, according to Robert Koester, author of Lost Person Behavior and a speaker at the most recent state search and rescue conference. If someone with dementia gets stuck while wandering, or encounters an obstacle, he is likely to sit down and end up hidden away. When a vehicle is involved, the search radius immediately grows, but there is still an intended destination in most cases.

“Their characteristics are very predictable, in a bad way,” says Dr. Meredeth Rowe, a professor at the University of South Florida College of Nursing. Wanderers aren’t able to seek out help when they are lost. They won’t answer when their name is called. They can’t tell if they are too cold, too hot, or need a drink of water.