Budget cuts drop in bucket compared to Big Dig debt

You can connect the dots yourselves.....the Republican published a sad list of budget cuts targeted for Western Mass. I've been focused on Open Pantry Community Services, but the OPCS is not alone in its pain. I'd assume that even the most avid supporters of law and justice recognize that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Thus cuts for Girls Inc, Dunbar Community Center, youth programs in Easthampton, Palmer and westfield and AWAKE's entire funding make little or no sense.

Now compare the entire amount of budget cuts-- $122.5 million-- to the STAGGERING debt Massachusetts has incurred from the Big Dig Project-- $7 billion in interest. Boston Globe.

What's wrong with this picture?

Ludlow prison hangs himself: drug users should not be in jail!

Kevin J. Small of Westfield, Massachusetts hanged himself Tuesday at the Hampden County Correctional Center. Mr. Small's suicide was the third at the Ludlow facility in the last five years.

Don't blame the jail, though, at least according to spokesman Richard McCarthy: Mr. Small's unit wasn't overcrowded, rounds of his unit had been done every thirty minutes as required, and the screening given him at admission did not indicate he was suicidal.

Mr. Small was on the 14th day of a 90 day sentence for possession of drugs.

So much wrong with this picture it's hard to know where to start, but let's start with what should be obvious: drug addiction is not a criminal justice problem, it's a public health problem.

Pro-incarceration supporters point to a drop in violent crime as reason enough to continue with our current "get tough" policy.

But consider this:

• 60% of federal prisoners are drug offenders.
• Only 3% are violent offenders.
• Drug offenders in country jails are not violent offenders.
• It costs 15 times as much as treatment to run a drug addict through the criminal justice system to achieve the same reduction in costs to society.
• Fewer than half of the more than five million drug users who desperately need treatment are able to get it. Drug Policy Alliance.

The United States now has the dubious distinction of incarcerating more of its citizens than any other country in the world-- one out of every 99.1 people for a grand total of 2,323,000 individuals. Are we really so much more rotten than the people in Chile, Russia, Pakistan, Switzerland, Turkey, Australia and the Philippines? Do we as a society really so lack imagination that this is the best we can come up with?
Photo by Still Burning.

Homeless man Ct. hit and run victim; remembering Westfield death

According to The Day, a homeless man who was killed in a hit and run by a white sports utility vehicle in Waterford, CT was originally from Massachusetts.

Frederick Finn, 43, was probably living behind an old drive-in when we has killed on Boston Post Road.

My sister Liz called me this morning to say she remembers Minh Khuu, the 45 year old man who was struck and killed by a train, as a former resident of the Warming Place Shelter, now closed. She says he was not alcoholic, not an addict, just homeless.

Minh Khuu was wearing earplugs when he was killed, probably why he didn't hear the train coming. Liz says he often wore earplugs at the Warming Place, because the noise of the shelter made it hard for him to sleep. He probably forgot to take them out of his ears on the day he was killed.

The homeless man who was found dead in the Connecticut River last week has been identified as Juan Bonille, 73 years old.

Meanwhile, Masslive posters yesterday were talking about how "dangerous" homeless people are.

Who Will Care? We'll Find Out

Today I started mentally composing a list of housed people, houses of worship and organizations that might actually care about what happens to homeless people.

Still can't get it out of my mind: Mayor Ryan KNOWS that people will be out on the street as of June 30, and he has CHOSEN to close the Warming Place because he thinks that the unsheltered will disappear from Springfield if they have no shelter. He fears that if there is even ONE vacancy at any Springfield shelter, we will draw in homeless people from outside the city. (I know writing in caps is gauche but I am THINKING in caps.)

In my spare time (ha!) I am going to find out:
Do cities the size of Westfield and Ludlow, if they are near a major metropolitan area, EVER provide their own shelter?
Is the ratio of Springfield homeless to non-Springfield homeless (about 60%/40% as I recall, with 75% from Hampden County) really that different than in any other city Springfield's size?

I am so tired of the crap and the assumptions.about people who become homeless.

Maybe one reason the idea of a tent city feels not foreign to me is that I've spent a little more than a tenth of my life living in a tent. When I homesteaded in Maine with my husband at the time, we built a shelter by pulling down saplings, tying them together, creating a weave with other small trees, and then covering the whole affair with canvas tarps and with flattened cardboard boxes stuffed inbetween. We built the shelter over a wonderful outcropping of rock that formed a natural fireplace. Smoke drifted up to a hole in the chimney. In the winters we used a tin stove.

Of course, getting wood for the stove was an ongoing affair. I fell into the habit of looking for standing deadwood-- didn't want to cut living trees and deadwood on the ground tended to be too wet. I got pretty good at knowing at a glance, even in the winter without leaves to guide me, which trees were standing up dead, and then mentally marking them for harvesting later. It took years for the habit to die away after I came back to Springfield. It was both a pleasurable activity-- in the sense of some treasure found-- and a habit necessary for survival in the Maine winters.

Now I find myself scanning the city as I drive, looking for vacant lots, hidden yet accessible places where people might camp if they had to. I remember doing this three years ago, after Sanctuary City agreed to find another place to move after six weeks on the lush lawn of St. Michael's. Same skill, different use.

A few of today's small pleasures (I didn't go looking for them, but boy, were they needed):
-- The grackles feeding their babies under the eaves of my work window eat my cracker crumbs.
-- The scent of lilacs drifts into my window.
-- I hear singing and look out my window and a Somalian woman is striding to the bus stop in full song.
Photo by William Cordero