Josh Peterson

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Tennessee Department of Health announced Thursday the release of the WICShopper application for smartphones. As a part of the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program, the new WICShopper app is another tool to help participants establish and re-enforce healthy eating habits.

The WICShopper app helps WIC participants identify what they can purchase with their prescribed WIC benefits. The app allows WIC participants to scan the UPC barcode of store products determining whether that product is allowable as a WIC food item and on the participants WIC benefits. There are many key features such as location of Health Department clinics and WIC authorized store locations, healthy recipes, cooking and shopping tips.

‘’The WICShopper App makes it one step easier to access healthy food and nutrition education resources available through WIC,’’ said Tennessee Health Commissioner Lisa Piercey, MD, MBA, FAAP. ‘The WICShopper App puts resources at the fingertip and is another example of how the Tennessee Department of Health is implementing innovative solutions to improve services for Tennesseans.’’

Since the statewide rollout of the TNWIC Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) card in April 2019, the Tennessee WIC program continuously strives to enhance the process for WIC participants to receive benefits and purchase food products for their families. The WICShopper app represents the most recent example of this committment to Tennessee residents.

WIC participants can download the WICShopper app onto their smartphones by going to the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store and search for WICShopper. Additionally, participants can visit the Tennessee Department of Health’s website at www.tn.gov/wicshopper for instructions to download the app to their smartphone. The WICShopper app is available to all and free to download.

The mission of the Tennessee Department of Health is to protect, promote and improve the health and prosperity of people in Tennessee. TDH has facilities in all 95 counties and provides direct services for more than one in five Tennesseans annually as well as indirect services for everyone in the state, including emergency response to health threats, licensure of health professionals, regulation of health care facilities and inspection of food service establishments. Learn more about TDH services and programs at www.tn.gov/health.

By Nadia Ramligan, TN Public News Service

For rural Tennesseans, the cash-bail system has accelerated an endless cycle of arrests, excessively high bonds and incarceration, in communities already grappling with a substance-abuse epidemic and shrinking local economies.

According to a Vera Institute of Justice study, pre-trial incarcerations have jumped by 163% in the 53 rural Tennessee counties, compared with a 2% increase in urban areas in the past two decades.

Selina Williams, a mental-health liaison at Carey Counseling Center in Union City, a town with a population of about 10,000, said rural families without the means to pay bail suffer the most.

“People feel like that, ‘OK, people are in jail and it doesn’t affect the community.’ But actually it does; it’s affecting our children,” she said. “I think the whole community is impacted by the criminal-justice system.”

While larger counties have higher jail populations, rural regions are seeing the highest per-capita rates of incarceration, according to the ACLU of Tennessee. State lawmakers are considering a bill to boost regulation and oversight of bail-bond companies, and create a committee to review the state’s cash bail policies.

If Senate Bill 804 passes, the committee’s findings and recommendations would be due by next January. In the meantime, Williams said her community is fighting poverty and opioid use, on top of the coronavirus.

“The majority of the people that I have, they can’t afford bail to get out,” she said. “The majority of my people, they don’t have any money, they don’t have a job, they don’t have insurance.”

McMinn County resident Jessica, who asked that her last name be withheld, said she’s struggled with a substance-use disorder and is now in recovery. She said bail has affected her ability to stay employed.

“So, I was in and out of the jail system,” she said. “My dad, sometimes he’d post my bond, and then, sometimes he’d be fed up and he’d be like, ‘No, you’re going to sit there,’ you know. But then I’d lose my job – if I had one at the time – I’d lose my job for not being able to get bonded out. I felt terror, I guess, fear about losing my job.”

Both women in this report also are part of a campaign called “In Our Backyards,” highlighting the ways cash bail has affected rural Tennesseans.