WM: This is totally lack logic. Out in the golden arc--Plymouth/Minnetonka/Eden Prairie, home owners got a $5,000 tax break on their home real estate. For me, personally, this little gem of no new taxes/give back to the charmed could, but so far has not, cost me the oxygenator that keeps me breathing in this kind of weather.Peter responds: Yes, Senator Berglin has done a lot of good work on behalf of seniors, poor people and the environment. But all her accomplishments will soon go down the tubes as more funding is taken away from social and health care programs, as well as the environment, in order to support a massive prison industry that will only get larger as long as she and other politicians --liberal, centrist or conservative-- call for more incarceration.
This has been a good week around my section of the neighborhood, I haven't called in a "shots fired" report to 911 in over 4 days. Not having a cell phone, I could not call in the three men beating the living crap out of a 4th guy that tied up the intersection of Lake and Park on Monday as I pulled up to the stop light. This summer we've had a firebombing of a store, a house arson, 4 shootings and another thoroughgoing beating. Tyeisha Edwards was the nearest murder at 34th and Chicago. In the early spring a woman was shot 4 times as she walked home from the bus stop because she wouldn't give up her purse to some thug-in-training. A young woman of my acquaintance said that when she was in the gangs, she was told that one's initiation included going out and beating up a person unknown to her. I'm personally on a first name basis with far too many cops.
Do the folks creating this mayhem need some attitude adjustment? You becha! The thing about prison is it captures the attention. Some of them, the true thugs, will not give up their behaviors till the day they die--and I could name names here. Others will begin to change when they hit middle age and can no longer run as fast (particularly while holding up their pants). A lot of them will die violently and many will go through life with an assortment of bullet hole scars. The Dortmunders among them (ref. Donald Westlake) will continue to steal cars, rob places, fence stolen goods, run hand books and numbers, etc. and go in and out of prison on a fairly regular basis.
Prison, if used properly, could have a positive value to the community. As a warehouse it reproduces itself and improves it's survival and growth chances. It does not mean adding new beds. It means making use of the time.
Chemical addiction requires treatment, sometimes several treatments before the person treated finally gets all his/her ducks in order to choose life. Treatment/AA/NA/etc. can be done in prison. Our enduring stupidity is that we waste the time we pay taxes for by warehousing felons. The younger the person, the greater the degree of recovery--I'm talking about adults here, not kids and juveniles.
There will always be prisons because there will always be those who, for various violent reasons, cannot be among us. If we renamed the prisons, called them retreat houses, and called a sentence a sabbatical, it would still have to be there and have locks on the outside of the doors and windows.
WizardMarks, Central
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