Category Archives: Politics

5% population, 25% prison population: U.S.

Senator Jim Webb of Virginia met with people who work in prisons:

But once we were inside the presentation room, where about a dozen people who work in corrections and social services had assembled to talk about the criminal justice system, Webb’s evident passion and fluency with the issues created a palpable bond with the attendees. “We have 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the people in prison,” he said. “Either we’re the most evil people on earth, or we’re doing something wrong.” As for the imprisonment of nonviolent drug offenders: “I saw more drug use at Georgetown University Law Center when I was a student there than I’ve seen anywhere else in my life,” he said, to knowing laughs. “And some of those people are judges.”
Webb then listened as attendees enumerated the various dysfunctions, injustices and perverse incentives created by the metastasizing prison-industrial complex: “I can get $600,000 from the state for a new jail,” said Fredericksburg Mayor Tom Tomzak, “but I can’t get $40 for Healthy Families.”

We need to change that.

Georgia Leads the Nation!

any other state! More than California! More than any other state! Bank failures. Georgia leads the nation, with ten (10) failed banks since 2008.

So Far Behind Neighboring States?

Opportunity knocks, and what does Georgia do?

President Barack Obama’s plans for a national high-speed rail network is bittersweet for Georgia.
The state is now eligible to win millions of dollars in federal funds for high-speed rail projects.
But transportation advocates say Georgia is so far behind neighboring states that the best it can hope for is money to fund more studies.

Who are these un-named “transportation advocates”? Sounds like they’re “paving is progress” advocates.

Oh, my:

The department says it is changing. It has recently hired Erik Steavens to oversee rail projects, and he said he will push for a rail line linking Atlanta to Chattanooga.

Changing from thinking paving to thinking small. That’s change that will miss a great opportunity. Actually even worse than thinking small:

The only other rail project, with guaranteed cash available, is a line from Atlanta to Chattanooga that was part of a 2000 bill from the state legislature, HB 1348. In fact, the bill, which was passed when the Democrats last controlled the State House, contains plans for several lines around the state, but only the Atlanta-Chattanooga high-speed track is specifically guaranteed funding “should federal or private funds be made available for such high speed rail.”
Unfortunately for Georgia legislators, though, President Obama’s rail plans do not include a line between the two southern cities, meaning that if the state still wants to build that line, it needs to come up with the money itself.

Up until the 1950s Georgia had a rail system that connected almost every town in the state. The rails from Atlanta through Macon and Valdosta to JAX are still there, and in use constantly for freight. Sure, Valdosta would have to build a station, but those are not complicated. And somebody would have to convince CSX to share the rails. But JAX already did that for commuter rail, so it’s possible. 5 million people in Atlanta, 3/4 million in Jacksonville, and Valdosta halfway in between….

If the same entities that repeatedly banded together to keep Moody Air Force Base (VLD, Lowndes County, VSU, state and national reps and senators, etc.) lobbied DoT (state and federal), they could do this thing. They could even use the rail line to Barretts to run commuter rail to Moody while they’re at it. Here’s a chance for Valdosta and Lowndes County to lead the state in making real progress.

Prison Reform

We’ve locked a lot of people up since 1980, making the U.S. the world leader in prison population (both total and per capita), and the south the leader of the U.S. Locking up a lot of non-violent offenders, especially drug offenders, hasn’t bought us much safety and has caused a lot of problems.

Fortunately, somebody is trying to do something about it:

Washington, DC–Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) today introduced bipartisan legislation to create a blue-ribbon commission charged with conducting an 18-month, top-to-bottom review of the nation’s entire criminal justice system and offering concrete recommendations for reform. Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA), Ranking Member on the Judiciary Committee, is the principal Republican cosponsor.

You can follow the progress of S.714 online; it’s currently before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Meanwhile, Jim Webb explains the problem in Parade:

America’s criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace. Its irregularities and inequities cut against the notion that we are a society founded on fundamental fairness. Our failure to address this problem has caused the nation’s prisons to burst their seams with massive overcrowding, even as our neighborhoods have become more dangerous. We are wasting billions of dollars and diminishing millions of lives.
We need to fix the system. Doing so will require a major nationwide recalculation of who goes to prison and for how long and of how we address the long-term consequences of incarceration. Twenty-five years ago, I went to Japan on assignment for PARADE to write a story on that country’s prison system. In 1984, Japan had a population half the size of ours and was incarcerating 40,000 sentenced offenders, compared with 580,000 in the United States. As shocking as that disparity was, the difference between the countries now is even more astounding–and profoundly disturbing. Since then, Japan’s prison population has not quite doubled to 71,000, while ours has quadrupled to 2.3 million.
The United States has by far the world’s highest incarceration rate. With 5% of the world’s population, our country now houses nearly 25% of the world’s reported prisoners. We currently incarcerate 756 inmates per 100,000 residents, a rate nearly five times the average worldwide of 158 for every 100,000. In addition, more than 5 million people who recently left jail remain under “correctional supervision,” which includes parole, probation, and other community sanctions. All told, about one in every 31 adults in the United States is in prison, in jail, or on supervised release. This all comes at a very high price to taxpayers: Local, state, and federal spending on corrections adds up to about $68 billion a year.
Our overcrowded, ill-managed prison systems are places of violence, physical abuse, and hate, making them breeding grounds that perpetuate and magnify the same types of behavior we purport to fear.

And Arlen Specter gets into details in an op-ed in the Philadelphia newspaper:

The U.S. criminalizes conduct that would be better left to treatment and penalties other than imprisonment. Take drugs. The number of jailed drug offenders has soared 1,200 percent since 1980 despite the fact that many of these offenders have no history of violence or high-level drug distribution. Many are behind bars under sentencing guidelines that leave judges no choice.
In another example of dubious penology, too many mentally ill people are treated as miscreants or felons rather than as patients in need of treatment. There are four times as many mentally ill people in prison than in mental health hospitals. Many of these individuals end up back on the streets.
This is not about people convicted of violent crimes. We need to make sure that dangerous criminals and second-time offenders with a history of violence go to jail. As a former prosecutor who served two terms as D.A. in Philadelphia, I’m a strong proponent of incarcerating violent criminals for public safety and deterrence. And I support the death penalty in especially egregious cases.
But I also believe we need to restore judicial discretion in low-level drug cases and other nonviolent crimes. With our federal prisons at 140 percent capacity and with 7.3 million Americans incarcerated or on probation or parole – a number equivalent to 1 in every 31 adults – the issue cannot wait.

The question we started with, jail deaths in Lowndes County jail, is only a symptom. The problem is much larger. Fortunately, we can do something about it.

Georgia does not have a member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, but that means there’s no reason not to contact any or all of the members of that commmittee. Here they are.

Solomon’s Culvert

The VDT editorializes about the recent case in which a county resident put in his own culvert and got charged the county’s expenses:

The county should have responded to the resident’s call. It is not always easy dealing with the public, but the public is the county government’s boss. County employees should remember that and return residents’ calls, answer residents’ questions, and treat residents with a level of respect. Many county officials and employees practice such common courtesies. Others do not.
Perhaps this tale didn’t so much need an Aesop as it did a Solomon. Perhaps the judge should have split the difference by fining the resident for half of the fine and charged the other half to the county employee who did not return the resident’s call.

If that started happening, perhaps a few things would change.

Chip Your Chicken?

Shannon Hayes writes in an op-ed in the New York Times:

AT first glance, the plan by the federal Department of Agriculture to battle disease among farm animals is a technological marvel: we farmers tag every head of livestock in the country with ID chips and the department electronically tracks the animals’ whereabouts. If disease breaks out, the department can identify within 48 hours which animals are ill, where they are, and what other animals have been exposed.
At a time when diseases like mad cow and bird flu have made consumers worried about food safety, being able to quickly track down the cause of an outbreak seems like a good idea. Unfortunately, the plan, which is called the National Animal Identification System and is the subject of a House subcommittee hearing today, would end up rewarding the factory farms whose practices encourage disease while crippling small farms and the local food movement.

NAIS has been around awhile, but now Congress is proposing to make it mandatory. Hayes goes on to detail how much it would cost small farmers to chip every cow and chicken, calf and pullet.

Besides, NAIS is about controling disease by quarantine, which is locking the barn after the horses are out. Hayes gets to the root of the matter: Continue reading →

Expansion of Lowndes County Commission?

Since a proposal for nine commissioners was voted down in the 1980s and the Justice Department required a minority-majority district, leading to the current three commissioners plus non-voting chair, there have been various attempts to expand the number of Lowndes County Commissioners. Thomas County has eight commissioners, as do several other nearby counties with less population than Lowndes County. For that matter, the city of Valdosta has I think seven city council members, for less than half the population of Lowndes County.

The previous commission was divided among itself on this issue, and the local state representatives would not bring it up in the legislature without consensus among the commission. The new commission has been trying to move forward on this. The last version I heard involved keeping the same commission districts as now, plus adding two overlapping commissioners for new east and west districts.

Interestingly, there was nothing said about all this at Monday’s work session, yet we discover in the newspaper:

Paige Dukes, Lowndes County information officer, said the commission visited with reapportionment in Atlanta twice during the past few weeks. As a result of those meetings, the reapportionment office forwarded several maps to the commission for its review, Dukes said.
Lowndes County Commission Chairman Ashley Paulk said, “The commission continues to work feverishly on the expansion issue. We are at an 80 percent consensus regarding a plan that will meet local needs and satisfy requirements determined by the Department of Justice. I am working one on one with each commissioner in an effort to get a plan to citizens as soon as possible.”
Paulk was a guest of Scott James on his morning radio on program TALK 92.1 Monday, and in the course of that interview, Paulk said that if all the commissioners agreed on the plan, the expansion could actually be voted on by the board at tonight’s meeting.

It’s not clear from that just what they might vote on, but from context maybe it would be to forward a plan to citizens to vote on.

Valdosta Aeterna

A new year brings Mayor Fretti’s State of the City address for Valdosta. It was quite interesting as an exercise in transparency: he walked through what seemed like every city department, one by one, in addition to talking about overarching cost-saving measures and emphasizing that Valdosta has no debt, not even bond debt. This was all good.

I noticed that, unlike last year, there were no military personnel pointed out or even present. I guess the mayor noted that saber-rattling is not in fashion this year. He did mention some details of recent economic improvements at Moody AFB; everyone knows the importance of Moody to the local economy.

I did think it was a little over the top when the mayor included in his welcome of new and old county officials that “all roads lead to Valdosta, the county seat.” Valdosta Aeterna! Well, Valdosta, unlike Rome, may not be eternal, but bickering between the city and the county apparently is.

Also, as I mentioned to the mayor afterwards, I had hoped he would say a few words about the proposed bus system. He indicated that he had simply forgotten to do so. That’s understandable, considering all he did talk about. Next year.

If you live in Valdosta, I understand you can view the mayor’s speech on local cable for some time to come. I recommend it. The full text is on the Valdosta city web site (yay!), even though it’s in a hidden link (which I’ve dug out and linked in here) and in Microsoft Word (boo!) instead of as plain HTML.

In the regular agenda, the elephant not in the room became even more obvious by its absence. At the citizens wishing to be heard section, nobody came forward. For that matter, there were almost no citizens present other than elected officials, city employees, contractors, and press. This is a problem. The city of Valdosta is going to some lengths to be transparent and to accept citizen input. Where are the citizens?

Also, this being Valdosta, the one item on the agenda that got the most discussion time was the tennis court improvements at McKey Park. Sports rule in TitleTown!

Perhaps the new county commission chair will think about giving a State of the County talk.

Valdosta Urbanized Area

Another interesting thing from the Valdosta Transit Public Information Meeting was I was reminded of the Valdosta Urbanized Area. As you can see by the map, it extends all the way up Bemiss Road through Moody Air Force Base into Berrien County. This came up in the context of bus lines. Valdosta can run a bus to Moody, because Moody is in the Valdosta Urbanized Area.

In a larger context, local public officials often wonder aloud how they can keep landowners from selling out and developers from developing all over the county. Well, they can’t actually prevent that. (Except they already have in the Moody Exclusion Zone immediately around the AFB, but that’s not the point; in general they can’t.) But they can encourage developers not to go for cheap land way out on the edges of the county, and instead buy land near existing services (water, wastewater, busses, etc.). Cheap hookups, expedited permits, encouragement by local municipalities; these things can all help steer development.

Lowndes County and the city of Valdosta could even designate a Preferred Development Corridor and steer development there. It already exists: Valdosta up Bemiss Road towards Moody, plus the area in and around Valdosta, especially along I-75. What’s missing is official and unofficial encouragement for developers to develop there.

In addition, I keep hearing people saying there’s no farming left in Lowndes County. That’s just not true. It’s not like it was 50 years ago, sure, but there are people actively farming, and even seeking new land to rent. South Carolina promotes farming as its growth business. Lowndes County is big enough to promote both industry and farming.

What Happened to the Canopies

A while back I posted about Partial Win: Canopies May be Saved. Here’s what happened.

Before	After	Now

You may recognize that first picture from the Nov 6th post in this blog, Save Our Canopy Road. A copy of that blog post along with a neighorhood meeting notice with the same picture was in the materials staff gave to the Commission, so both staff and Commissioners should have been aware that that entrance was the symbol of the canopy. Despite a Commissioner telling us that the county would start with some noncontentious part of the clearing, the very first thing the county did was to tear all the limbs off those signature oaks at the entrance to the north canopy, and then tear them completely down and grub up the ground like a plowed field. That and tear down the neighboring fence. Here’s another view:

What looks like a plowed field is where those oaks used to be.

Now don’t get me wrong. The entire canopy is on the right of way the county owns, and, as I’ve said numerous times in public County Commission meetings, I do appreciate the county saving at least some part of the canopy, and I especially appreciate the Commissioners literally going out of their way on Nov 9th by piling into a van and driving out there to look at the situation, and then, as Chairman Casey said in the public meeting on Nov 10th, putting his thumb in the chest of the county engineer and telling him to find a way to save the canopies. And indeed, a significant part of the canopy is saved:

County staff showed pictures like that one at the Dec 9th Commission meeting, saying the canopy was saved. Indeed, part of it was saved. But the children crying in the house nearby don’t agree that “the canopy was saved,” nor do the adjoining landowners. Why should county staff, who never paid attention to the canopy until recent months except as an impediment to their highway plan, and who wanted to tear it all down, be the judge of what saving the canopy means?

Suppose the Commissioners had told staff to save your house and they tore down your front porch and flattened your carport and then showed pictures of your house to the Commission saying “we saved the house!” Would you be satisfied?

Speaking of the carport, here’s what the south end of the north canopy now looks like:

The pile of trees on the far side used to be canopy, and the bare dirt on the near side used to be canopy.

Why did they tear down the ends of the canopy? For curves. Designed for 45 MPH. After county staff had told me they were probably going to set the speed limit at the canopies lower than that. After the owner of both sides of the road immediately north of this canopy offered them the ability to move the road over enough not to need to tear down the trees or his fence. Instead of getting back to him on that, they just went ahead and tore down the trees the same day. As that landowner, Shawn Vandemark, said:

“We were told one thing and another happened.”

What we have here is a communication problem between the county government and its citizens. It’s not as if concerns about the canopy weren’t known to the county well beforehand. Back in June county government people attended a neighborhood meeting where those concerns were expressed, and options between paving like a highway or leaving it dirt were requested. Hearing no response, I sent a letter to the county on Aug 7th detailing those and other concerns. Still no response. The first notification anyone living on the road got (as far as I know) was when I noticed a truck driving slow around the road and asked them what they were doing. “Looking to see what it will take to tear down all the trees on the right of way!” When I pointed out that we were told back in June that we would be notified 6 to 9 months before anything was done, the two guys in the truck said, laughing:

“That’s the county way!”

The county did also leave a significant part of the south canopy, and we do appreciate the Commissioners making that happen:

Although once again the county tore down the south end (not shown). Why? For a wide curve. That one I doubt is even for 45 MPH, given that it doesn’t look like they managed to acquire that much land back in the early 1990s. However, why did it even have to be 35MPH? This local rural neighborhood road doesn’t go anywhere!

The point here is that county staff did not do what the county Commission told them to do. The Commissioners left the fox in charge of the hen house, and quite a few chickens got eaten.

This has all been said directly to the county Commissioners and staff in their public meeting of Dec 9th. Some of the Commissioners had some difficulty understanding what we were complaining about. I’m spelling out this part of it here so as to make it more plain. Yes, the commissioners did go out of their way to save the canopies, and we do appreciate that. But what they said to do is not what happened. And it’s not the first time. If county staff had been taking care of business since June by communicating with residents of the road about the canopies, Commissioners wouldn’t have had any need to scurry around at the last minute. And if staff had done what the Commission told them to on Nov 10th, Commissioners wouldn’t have been listening to complaints about the canopy on Dec 9th.

What we have here is a failure to communicate. A small amount of dialog could have prevented this situation. Dialog between June and November. Dialog between county staff and the local landowner after Dec 10th. Staff could have said to him: “here’s what I understand your concerns to be and here’s what we’re going to do; how does that sound?” A few iterations like that between the county and him and other concerned parties and a result could have been arrived at that, while it may not have pleased everybody, wouldn’t have been nearly as much of a problem.

Here’s the newspaper version of that Dec 10th meeting. More on other topics from that meeting in another post.

If saying one thing and doing another is “the county way”, does that seem right to you?

How do we institute effective dialog between the county government and its citizens?

Canopy Roads of South Georgia

Outside the city; off the main roads.