Tag Archives: Incarceration

The Grassroots Handbook Against School Consolidation

Received yesterday, The Grassroots Handbook Against School Consolidation: The Truth About Unification/Consolidation of the Valdosta/Lowndes School Systems By David E. Mullis, J.D., LL.M., October 12, 2011. It’s a 43 page exhaustive compendium of all the statements against consolidation by both school boards, the Valdosta City Council, etc., together with detailed debunking of every argument CUEE has made.

I think this passage on page 3 sums it up:

In other words, we can offer a great education, provide incentives for students to perform, make modifications to education to help students succeed, and provide technical help, but if the child is homeless, left home alone for long periods of time, living in a high crime area, living in a home with substance abuse, or just downright defiant, there is only so much the school can accomplish in helping these students succeed. Good parental, home and community environments are critical to the success of underprivileged children.
Therefore, CUEE and the Chamber of Commerce’s efforts are focused on the wrong methods of improving our school statistics. Unification will not accomplish any of their stated goals, but will create an enormous financial burden on the community and its families during this time of recession and high unemployment. The business community and volunteer organizations should instead focus on providing educational awareness and success clinics in low income areas. They should organize efforts to reduce poverty by bringing in industry with good wages and sponsoring basic community literacy and vocational training and tutoring. They should focus on programs to promote the value of education. They should organize drug awareness and rehabilitation programs in low income areas. They should focus their efforts in decreasing poverty. They should focus on encouraging community diversity. If they will do this, the educational problems will take care of themselves in good systems like Valdosta and Lowndes.
However, CUEE and the Chamber have insisted on pushing forward with their unification agenda despite the certain negative effect it will have on the community and the education of our children. They deny there will be any negative effect, but they have no personal accountability if they are wrong. They ignore all relevant studies and dismiss the results as being misleading. Then they state their own misleading and false assertions and claim them to be FACTS.

Indeed, what qualifies the Chamber of CUEE to talk about education? Judging by their track record, nothing does.

This Handbook is a great resource, and I applaud David Mullis for producing it.

-jsq

To the people of Valdosta and South Georgia —Occupy Valdosta

Posted today in Occupy Valdosta’s facebook page:

To the people of Valdosta and South Georgia
We, the local citizens occupying Valdosta, urge you to assert your power.
Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; to nonviolently occupy public space; to create an open process to address the problems we face, and to generate solutions accessible to everyone.
Our issues are varied, yet related.
We seek

Continue reading →

Neighborhoods matter more than schools?

Where you live makes more difference to your education than where you go to school, says a news study, backed up by an older study.

Maureen Downey blogged for AJC 5 October 2011, Forget school vouchers. The route to improving education may be housing vouchers.

School voucher proponents argue that kids need a way out of failing schools, but research increasingly suggests that it would be more effective to provide them a way out of failing neighborhoods.
Should we consider giving poor families in low-performing school zones housing vouchers that they could use to relocate in the zone of a school performing above the area median?

I’d say that’s a bad solution to the problem the study identifies, and we already know better solutions. But first, from the abstract of the the study Continue reading →

Do we want a Gladiator School prison in Lowndes County?

Remember FBI investigating CCA “Gladiator School”, the CCA-run private prison in Idaho the FBI was investigating last year? Well, it hasn’t improved much. Cutting corners for private profit endangers prisoner safety and public safety. Is that what we want in Lowndes County, Georgia?

The same reporter, Rebecca Boone, wrote again for AP Sunday, almost a year later, CCA-run prison remains Idaho’s most violent lockup

BOISE, Idaho (AP) — In the last four years, Idaho’s largest privately run prison has faced federal lawsuits, widespread public scrutiny, increased state oversight, changes in upper management and even an ongoing FBI investigation.
Yet the Corrections Corp. of America-run Idaho Correctional Center remains the most violent lockup in Idaho.
Records obtained by The Associated Press show that while the assault rate improved somewhat in the four-year period examined, ICC inmates are still more than twice as likely to be assaulted as those at other Idaho prisons.
Between September 2007 and September 2008, both ICC and the state-run Idaho State Correctional Institution were medium-security prisons with roughly 1,500 inmates each. But during that 12-month span, ICC had 132 inmate-on-inmate assaults, compared to just 42 at ISCI. In 2008, ICC had more assaults than all other Idaho prisons combined.
By 2010, both prisons had grown with 2,080 inmates at ICC and 1,688 inmates at ISCI. Records collected by the AP showed that there were 118 inmate-on-inmate assaults at ICC compared to 38 at ISCI. And again last year, ICC had more assaults than all the other prisons combined.

What improvement there has been is because multiple inmates filed lawsuits.

Even so, Idaho renewed and even increased its contract with CCA. With one small improvement: Continue reading →

Valdosta State Students defend their right of free speech

Campus authorities tried getting students to move away from the University Center where Governor Nathan Deal was having a luncheon. The students stood their ground.

Here’s the video.

Protesting Gov. Nathan Deal at Valdosta State University (VSU), 16 September 2011.
Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.

The students had been standing on the sidewalk in front of the Continue reading →

Some U.K. folks having doubts about catching up with U.S. in prisons

Will Self wrote 7 October 2011 for the BBC, A Point of View: Prisons don’t work

It was Dostoevsky who said: “The degree of civilisation in a society is revealed by entering its prisons.” But in contemporary Britain you don’t even need to do this, you can simply stand on a street corner and wait for the ghosts to come flitting past in order to appreciate its parlous condition.
We now have the highest prison population in Europe by a considerable measure, and following the recent riots there is no likelihood of it decreasing.
Of course, we aren’t quite at the levels enjoyed by our closest allies, those prime exponents of the civilising mission the United States, whose extensive gulag now houses, it is estimated, more African American men than were enslaved immediately prior to their Civil War – but we’re getting there.

Why the second thoughts? Continue reading →

And now an educational idea from Shakira

Belief based on evidence! About something that deals with the underlying local educational problem here: poverty. From her speech yesterday at the White House:

It is my belief and its also been demonstrated that if we provide early childhood education to Latino children it would take less than a decade to reap the benefits since investment in early education is proven to generate the fastest returns to the state.
With more ECD programs there will be less Latino students being held back, less dropouts and less crime involving school-age children; and they will be more productive individuals to society.

Continue reading →

Gary Black starts to see reason on HB 87

Jim Galloway quotes GA Ag. Commissioner Gary Black:

“One of the discussions we have to have is, do we want to have our food produced here or somewhere else? I don’t think Wal-Mart is going to cease to carry cucumbers. I think they’re going to get them somewhere,”

Also in Galloway’s AJC column yesterday, Gary Black and the shifting debate over illegal immigration, Black won’t back off HB 87, but admits it’s the source of the problem:

The state agriculture commissioner is walking a fine line. “Let me be clear. My position from a standpoint of amnesty and pathways to citizenship has not changed one iota,” he said.
Nor has Black renounced HB 87. Rather, state efforts to enforce federal immigration laws — blocked as a consequence of lawsuits — have contributed to “a sea change” in Washington’s attitude, he said.
“Without HB 87 and some of the other proposals, I don’t know that we’d be having this discussion about changing the guest-worker program,” Black said.

Black seems to have organized some interesting timing of a report release by his department: Continue reading →

Judge rules against Florida prison privatization

Judge Jackie Fulford ruled yesterday for the Second Circuit Court of Florida

that the prison privatization plan the Florida legislature added to the state budget is unconstitutional on a key point of all prison privatization schemes. Her ruling agreed with the Florida Police Benevolent Association, which is a union of correctional workers.

Judge rules prison privatization plan unconstitutional Dara Kam wrote for Post on Politics yesterday, Judge Rules Florida Prison Privatization Unconstitutional,

The privatization of 29 prisons in the southern portion of the state from Manatee County to Indian River County to the Florida Keys should have been mandated in a separate bill and not in proviso language in the budget, as lawmakers did in the must-pass budget approved in May and signed into law by Gov. Rick Scott, Fulford ruled.
“This Court concludes that if it is the will of the Legislature to itself initiate privatization of Florida prisons, as opposed to DOC, the Legislature must do so by general law, rather than ‘using the hidden recesses of the General Appropriations Act,’” Fulford wrote in her order issued Friday morning.

The order doesn’t say Florida can’t privatize prisons, rather that it can’t do it by hiding it in the budget process. But alleged budget savings are the only reason privatization backers are willing to admit to, so that’s no small matter.

And if prison privatization is such a money-saver, why did the prison companies’ cronies in the statehouse try to do it like this: Continue reading →

$1 of 17 GA tax dollars spent on prisons

Carrie Teegardin wrote for the AJC 4 April 2010, Georgia prison population, costs on rise

Georgia operates the fifth-largest prison system in the nation, at a cost of $1 billion a year. The job of overseeing 60,000 inmates and 150,000 felons on probation consumes 1 of every 17 state dollars.

Above owed to Farrah D. Reed, who also commented on Gov. Deal: the bad, prison slave labor competing with free labor:

Maybe if our tax dollars were spent on education and rehabilitation we wouldn’t have so many folks locked up in the first place!