Tag Archives: drugs

Alcohol, drugs, and broken nuke equipment

A broken cooling water pump at Fermi 2 yesterday plus 60% lost safety data today. Airflow and quality problems at Kewaunee and Three Mile Island. Drugs at Saint Lucie in Florida and alcohol at Nine Mile Point 1 in New York and at Braidwood in Illinois. And four workers injured at Callaway in Missouri. Apparently nuke employees can get terminated for off-site recreational drug use, but not for fires or broken equipment.

We’ve already seen the event about fire at Plant Vogtle. Here are more events in the NRC Current Event Notification Report for April 4, 2013 and also today, April 5, 2013,

Continue reading →

Prison gang violence

This is what eventually happens in a country with 5% of the world’s population yet 25% of the world’s prisoners, in a state that has 1 in 13 adults in the prison system (jail, prison, probation, or parole): prison violence the prisons can’t deal with, possibly including the mysterious violence at Valdosta State Prison. When we stop locking up so many people by ending the war on drugs, we’ll have plenty of money to adequately secure the few remaining real violent offenders.

Rhonda Cook wrote for the AJC Saturday, Gang violence in prison is increasingly deadly,

In a little more than 10 months, 12 inmates and a guard have been stabbed to death in Georgia prisons, a dramatic uptick in violence that law enforcement officials and human rights advocates agree points to increased gang activity.

“We cannot remember a time like this when we were getting this volume and severity of violence,” said Sara Totonchi, executive director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, which monitors prison violence.

People who go into such prisons, if they aren’t already violent, are likely to be taught to be violent, and some just don’t come back out. Yet those that do get out can be bad for the rest of us:

Continue reading →

Animal shelter violations in Chatham County

Some of an animal shelter story coming out in Chatham County sounds familiar.

Mary Landers wrote for SavannahNow 20 October 2012, Savannah Chatham Animal Control Shelter cited for violating state rules: Local professionals call shelter’s care “inhumane”

The county-funded Savannah Chatham Animal Control Shelter was found to have repeatedly violated animal protection requirements in two state inspections last month, and its practices are being criticized as inhumane by four local animal professionals.

One professional criticized the shelter not only in writing, but also by revoking the shelter’s permission to use her veterinary license. The Chatham County Commission says it’s dealt with the problem. We’ll see.

-jsq

Even George Will is calling for drug legalization

We can’t afford this anymore:
A $200 transaction can cost society $100,000 for a three-year sentence.
It’s time to legalize, regulate, and tax drugs, taking tax money away from private prisons and police militarization, and freeing it up for education, health care, and rehabilitation.

George F. Will wrote 11 April 2012, Should the U.S. legalize hard drugs?

Amelioration of today’s drug problem requires Americans to understand the significance of the 80-20 ratio. Twenty percent of American drinkers consume 80 percent of the alcohol sold here. The same 80-20 split obtains among users of illicit drugs.

About 3 million people — less than 1 percent of America’s population — consume 80 percent of illegal hard drugs. Drug-trafficking organizations can be most efficiently injured by changing the behavior of the 20 percent of heavy users, and we are learning how to do so. Reducing consumption by the 80 percent of casual users will not substantially reduce the northward flow of drugs or the southward flow of money.

Will-like, he ignores the real reasons we’re locking up so many people (corporate greed), but he does get at the consequences: Continue reading →

Sentencing reform passed joint committee in Georgia

Remember the Georgia legislature was considering sentencing reform? Now it's passed the Special Joint Committee on Georgia Criminal Justice Reform.

Bill Rankin wrote for the AJC Tuesday, Sweeping changes to state sentencing laws passes committee,

A key legislative committee on Tuesday approved sweeping changes to Georgia's criminal justice system in a sentencing reform package intended to control prison spending and ensure costly prison beds are reserved for the state's most dangerous criminals.

Well, that sounds good!

But wait, this is cautious Georgia:

Continue reading →

I have become a Fan of Very Supervised Probation —Robert Nagle

Received yesterday on Save money by streamlining the state penal code. -jsq
My darling 22 year-old daughter wound up with a second DWI, because the first one was a wrist-slap. Don’t hate me as a parent because of it. But she went to DWI Court in Austin. The year of intense supervision and no-nonsense attitude and her willingness to not fight it (much) has turned her attitude and Life around. Did it suck for her? Why, yes. But, who knows but what it saved someone else’s life? And maybe it saved her own. I have become a Fan of Very Supervised Probation. If she’d gone to jail for six months, I suspect she’d have just come out hating society and gone right back to what put her there.

-Robert Nagle

Presumably this was for driving while intoxicated (DWI) with alcohol. We tried Prohibition for alcohol back in the 1920s, and repealed it in the 1930s, because it produced criminal gangs while failing to stop people from drinking alcohol. So instead we criminalized the misuse of alcohol such as while driving and legalized, regulated, and taxed purchase of alcohol. And now we mostly don’t actually lock people up for DWI: we put them on supervised probation.

It’s time to do the same for other drugs. We can’t afford to continue to spend more taxpayer dollars on locking people up than on education.

-jsq

the relatives of those people don’t care who is winning (the drug war) —Carlos Fuentes

A writer of fiction tells the truth about the failed war on drugs. We’re way past the beginning and middle of this story: time to end it. Which makes this a very bad time to build a private prison that depends on the war on drugs.

Anita Singh wrote for the Telegraph today, Carlos Fuentes: legalise drugs to save Mexico,

Fuentes, Mexico’s greatest writer and a former diplomat, addressed the contemporary problems of Latin American — in particular, Mexico’s drug problem.

He said: “The drug traffickers are in Mexico, they send the drugs to the US and once they get across the border what happens? We don’t know who consumes them. We can’t prosecute, we can’t defend. It’s a very difficult situation for us Mexicans. The governments of the US and Mexico have to fight drug trafficking together.”

Fuentes believes that decriminalising drugs is the only way to end the violence that in the past five years has claimed nearly 50,000 lives of gang members, security forces and innocent bystanders.

“It is a confrontation. Sometimes we win, sometimes they win. But there are 50,000 killed and the relatives of those people don’t care who is winning.

Nobody is winning except the profiteers in arms and pesticides, such as Monsanto. And even mighty MON is losing to Boliviana negra. Alcohol prohibition produced Al Capone and other gangsters; the failed War on Drugs produced drug gangs and ever more vicious militarization of police forces, right up to the Mexican failed “solution” of calling out the Army into the streets.

We’re all losing through lack of money for education and militarization of our own police. We can’t afford this costly failed experiment. The real solution is the same today as in 1933: legalize, regulate, and tax. That will also drop the U.S. prison population way down, saving a lot of money that can be used for education. It’s going to happen eventually, so building more prisons that will end up being closed is a bad idea.

-jsq

Pop the drug war balloon: legalize and regulate the drug trade —Terry Nelson, LEAP

LTE in the WSJ, 21 January 2012:
The article illustrates what I learned over my 30-year career as a federal agent: Cracking down in one place doesn’t make drugs disappear, it only moves the trade elsewhere. This so-called “balloon effect,” combined with the insatiable demand for drugs across the globe, means that no level of law-enforcement skill or dedication can make a significant dent.

The only way to pop the proverbial balloon is to legalize and regulate the drug trade, which would eliminate the opportunity to make enormous black-market profits. It wasn’t easy for me to come to this revelation after dedicating so many years to enforcing drug laws, but it is common sense. Law-enforcement officers don’t have to chase gangsters selling booze from town to town because we ended the failed experiment of alcohol prohibition decades ago. It is time we do the same for other drugs.

Terry Nelson
Executive Board Member
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition
Granbury, Texas

And that will pop the incarceration bubble, as well, according to CCA’s own 2010 report to the SEC. -jsq

What if shelters didn’t euthanize animals?

Some places are looking beyond the details of how to euthanize animals in shelters or how to control the drugs used to doing something about the idea of euthanizing animals in the first place.

Sue Manning wrote for AP today, Euthanasia to control shelter population unpopular

Nathan Winograd, director of the Oakland-based No Kill Advocacy Center, believes 95 percent of all animals entering shelters can be adopted or treated. And even though the other 5 percent might be hopelessly injured, ill or vicious, he said they should not all be doomed.

Some, if not most of them, can be cared for in hospice centers or sanctuaries, he said. As for pit bulls and other dogs with aggressive reputations, he said shelters need to do a better job of trying to find them homes.

That story has some interesting discussion of difficulties of getting to such a goal and methods of achieving it. Maybe we could have such a discussion around here.

-jsq

I really support … allowing non-violent offenders the opportunity to work and rehabilitate — Jessica B. Hughes

Received yesterday on Ankle monitoring for Lowndes County Jail. -jsq
I really support this idea. Initially, I was concerned about it, because I know that things like the SCRAM bracelet and the ignition interlock devices are very expensive to install and maintain, especially if you consider the costs involved with probation fees. $213.00/month may not sound like a lot of money to some people, but it is a king’s ransom to others (saying $7.00/day makes it seem more manageable). Still, allowing non-violent offenders the opportunity to work and rehabilitate themselves outside of a prison is a big step forward in the philosophy of crime and punishment in this county, in my opinion.

-Jessica B. Hughes