Archiwum
- Index
- Colligan.Douglas.Strange.Energies.H
- Alan Dean Foster The End of the Matter
- Zwiadowcy 06 Obl晜źenie Macindaw Flanagan John
- Graczowa_
- Breeds 04 Kiss of Heat
- Baccalario Pierdomenico,Peruzzi Elena Dziennik zakochanej nastolatki
- Dominique Adair [Jane Porter] Hot for Teacher (pdf)
- Cisco.Press.OSPF.Commands
- By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept
- Janota Tomasz Dzieci Ziemi
- zanotowane.pl
- doc.pisz.pl
- pdf.pisz.pl
- stemplofil.keep.pl
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of drug offenses.
America's prison population has more than doubled since 1982. There are now 1,630,000 people in
prison in the United States. That is more than the populations of all but the three largest cities in the
country. Sixty
37 percent of federal prisoners are serving time for nonviolent offenses, mostly to do with drugs.
America's prisons are crammed with nonviolent petty criminals whose problem is a weakness for
illegal substances.
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Because most drug offenses carry mandatory sentences and exclude the possibility of parole, other
prisoners are having to be released early to make room for all the new drug offenders pouring into
the system. In consequence, the average convicted murderer in the United States now serves less
than six years, the average rapist just five. Moreover, once he is out, the murderer or rapist is
immediately eligible for welfare, food stamps, and other federal assistance. A convicted drug user,
no matter how desperate his circumstances may become, is denied these benefits for the rest of his
life.
The persecution doesn't end there. My friend in Iowa once spent four months in a state prison for a
drug offense. That was almost twenty years ago. He did his time and since then has been completely
clean.
Recently, he applied for a temporary job with the U. S. Postal Service as a holiday relief mail
sorter. Not only did he not get the job, but a week or so later he received by recorded delivery an
affidavit threatening him with prosecution for failing to declare on his application that he had a
felony conviction involving drugs.
The Postal Service had taken the trouble, you understand, to run a background check for drug
convictions on someone applying for a temporary job sorting mail. Apparently it does this as a
matter of routine-but only with respect to drugs. Had he killed his grandmother and raped his sister
twenty-five years ago, he would in all likelihood have gotten the job.
It gets more amazing. The government can seize your property if it was used in connection with a
drug offense, even if you did not know it. In Connecticut, according to a recent article in the Atlantic
Monthly magazine, a federal prosecutor named Leslie C. Ohta made a name for herself by seizing the
property of almost anyone even tangentially connected with a drug offense-including a couple in
their eighties whose grandson was found to be selling marijuana out of his bedroom. The couple had
no idea that their grandson had marijuana in the house (let me repeat: they were in their eighties) and
of course had nothing to do with it themselves. They lost the house anyway.
The saddest part of this zealous vindictiveness is that it simply does not work. America spends $50
billion a year fighting drugs, and yet drug use goes on and on. Confounded and frustrated, the
government enacts increasingly draconian laws until we find ourselves at the ludicrous point where
the Speaker of the House can seriously propose to execute people-strap them to a gurney and snuff
out their lives-for possessing the botanical equivalent of two bottles of vodka, and no one anywhere
seems to question it.
My solution to the problem would be twofold. First, I would make it a criminal offense to be Newt
Gingrich. This wouldn't do anything to reduce the drug problem, but it would make me feel much
better.
Then I would take most of that $50 billion and spend it on rehabilitation and prevention. Some of it
could be used to take busloads of youngsters to look at that school friend of mine on his Iowa porch.
I am sure it would persuade most of them not to try drugs in the first place. It would certainly be less
brutal and pointless than trying to lock them all up for the rest of their lives.
DYING ACCENTS
We have a man named Walt who does a little carpentry around the house from time to time. He looks
to be about 112 years old, but goodness me the man can saw and hammer. He has been doing
handiwork around town for at least fifty years.
Walt lives in Vermont, just across the Connecticut River from our little town, and is a proper New
Englander-honest, hardworking, congenitally disinclined to waste time, money, or words. (He
converses as if he has heard that someday he will be billed for it.) Above all, like all New
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Englanders, he is an early riser. Boy, do New Englanders like to get up early. We have some English
friends who moved here a few years ago. Soon after arriving the woman called the dentist for an
appointment and was told to come at 6: 30 the following day. She showed up the next evening to find
the dentist's office in darkness. They had meant
6: 30 A. M., of course. If Walt were told to come for a dental appointment at that hour I am positive
he would
38 ask if they had anything a little earlier.
Anyway, the other day he arrived at our house a few minutes before seven and apologized for being
late because the traffic through Norwich had been "fierce." What was interesting about this was not
the notion that traffic in Norwich could ever be fierce but that he pronounced it "Norritch," like the
English city. This surprised me because everyone in Norwich and for miles around pronounces it
"Nor-wich" (i. e., with the
"w" sounded, as in "sandwich"). I asked him about that.
"Ayuh," he said, which is an all-purpose New England term, spoken in a slow drawl and usually
accompanied by the removal of a cap and a thoughtful scratching of the head. It means, "I may be
about to say something... but then again I may not." He explained to me that the village was
pronounced "Norritch" until the 1950s, when outsiders from places like New York and Boston
began to move in and, for whatever reason, started to modify the pronunciation. Now virtually
everyone who is younger than Walt, which is virtually everyone, pronounces it "Nor-wich." That
seemed to me quite sad, the idea that a traditional local pronunciation could be lost simply because
outsiders were too inattentive to preserve it, but it's only symptomatic of a much wider trend.
Thirty years ago, three-quarters of the people in Vermont were born there. Today the proportion has
fallen to barely half, and in some places it is much lower. In consequence, these days you are far
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