Emily Babay

Philly.com

By Emily Babay

Leroy “Beyah” Edney was 11 the first time he got locked up.

Edney was at a Philadelphia rec center when an argument with another kid turned violent. It didn’t turn out so well for the other kid. Edney spent six months at a juvenile detention center as a result. A few years later, he began stealing cash from supermarkets. He worked his way up to robbing banks and stores at gunpoint.

“My appetite got bigger and bigger,” Edney says.

Edney, now 56, has served half his life in prison – 28 years to be exact. He’s determined not to go back and works seasonally now as an artist at that same rec center in Overbrook. Edney has no employer benefits but recently obtained health insurance.

Edney was released for the last time in 2008, making him one of the more than 85,000 inmates released from Pennsylvania state prisons between that year and 2012, the most recent data available.

That number is growing: More than 19,000 Pennsylvania inmates were released in 2012 alone — nearly twice the number from a decade earlier. In Pennsylvania, New Jersey and across the country, the number of people incarcerated has been leveling off in recent years, after decades of steep increases. And the number of federal inmates could soon fall further, under new plans to ease sentences for nonviolent drug offenders.

Thousands of former prisoners are back on the streets in cities like Philadelphia. They are trying to readjust, find jobs, and just stay out of trouble. For many, it hasn’t proved easy.

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When a major fire broke out an historic suit store in Old City, I wrote a quick web story, then went to the scene and posted updates and photos on social media. Live updates from the scene are below:

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Philly.com

By Brian X. McCrone and Emily Babay

The City of Philadelphia has spent nearly $900 million in overtime during the past five years, partly as a strategy to keep costs down by hiring fewer full-time workers. But a Philly.com analysis shows the strategy is driving up pension payments to thousands of employees.

Overtime has allowed unionized municipal employees to boost their yearly pay and to inflate, or “spike,” their pensions at a time when the city pension fund is less than half funded, according to the examination of 167,000 payroll records from the calendar years 2009 through 2013. The records were obtained from the city through a request using Pennsylvania’s Right to Know law.

Through overtime pay, a single employee can bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional retirement income. Pensions are based on an employee’s three highest years of pay, excluding workers in the police and fire departments.

Many city employees are logging almost superhuman amounts of hours, year after year, the analysis found. City officials say they look at departments’ overall overtime spending, though there appears to be little or no study of its short- or long-term effects on municipal finances.

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