Speakout 4/27

Wednesday, April 27, 2005

I read your column everyday and yes sometimes I am very amazed at the space that is used for such comments but I guess everyone has their own importance. I am a very concerned citizen of Canalou, with a population of just over 300 we have several very big problems and one of the biggest is: the people who live here and I say that because most of them we see do live here, our house sets on a corner lot and there are four stop signs in front, we can at any given time watch four out of five if not five of them run the stop signs, some even go at a speed of if not over close to 40 miles an hour through them. This is totally ridiculous, the cop lives within half block of this place and I have never saw one person stopped or warned about slowing down much less stopping. There are small kids playing and crossing the roads and also people out walking and they also have to deal with this problem. Is there something that can be done? We have contacted town meetings and the cop with not even a comeback answer. Someone Please Help. A concerned citizen of Canalou.

I thought I need to reply to the responses I received from my topic about prison isn't easy.

Let me first start off by saying I'm not a thug, nor am I stupid.

And I don't consider myself a liberal but I do step out of the box and look at other aspects of each problem unlike many of you who are closed minded. You know I never said I am for prisoner rights, nor did I ever say I worked in a prison. What I did say is it's not paradise! For the person who works in the prison who responded to my article I just finished reading a book called NEWJACK "Guarding Sing Sing" by Ted Conover. It is a non-

fiction

about Conover's one year stay as a CO at the New York Correctional facility Sing Sing and tells the facts of his stay you should read it.

And the facts part of my article were based on the capital punishment issue

the rest was my personal opinion just to make that clear.

And thanks for inviting me to come work in

an institution, but I don't think I could pursue that field but I have great respect for you for the conditions you work in everyday with the lack of retribution you get in

return.

I also want to say to the person who called me the thug and said I thought we were too tough on inmates; that your response didn't go along with what I wrote. Not once did I mention we were too tough because there are many loopholes that favor inmates.

What I said was the GET TOUGH INITIATIVE that our government has in place is overcrowding our correctional facilities because they are locking up non-

violent offenders for twenty years instead of rehabilitating them and making room for the violent offenders. And when you have this overcrowding it puts ten times the amount of stress on CO's and causes their work environment to be ten times more dangerous. I'm not misinformed, and I'm certainly not uneducated, I might not have the experience in

a correctional facility but what I do know is there is a serious problem in the field of corrections that our government needs to face head on.

To the caller who suggested that we do away with the ISLs. I work for an ISL and I take my job seriously. Our consumers have every right to live as normal of a life as anyone else. My job is to assist them in doing so. Just like all other jobs you have good dedicated workers as well as those who could care less but for those of us who care about our individuals this would be a tremendous letdown for those who depend on our facility and ones like ours. Caller, don't judge our workers or our facilities by the likes of one worker.