Sunday, December 23, 2007
Reading the Papers
Lots of interesting articles this week, mostly in today's TNT. But first, for a worrisome chuckle, you should check out a story in Seattle Weekly about a new law familiar to people in Pierce County but probably news to anyone in King County.
Seattle Weekly has a story about the bill that is supposed to require counties to hold on to felons who are released from prison. You may recall that this was big news here in Pierce County, where King and Snohomish and other counties have been exporting their people released from prison for years.
Here's a line from the story: "An ex-convict, she was trapped in Tacoma by a new law that requires former prisoners to return to the county where they were first convicted, and stay there, while under Department of Corrections supervision, for one to two years."
Expect more stories and tales that will try to make the new legislation sound like a bad thing. Imagine what you would think if you live in Seattle, and this is the first you had heard of this subject: "The requirement to return prisoners to their "county of origin" is one little piece of the bill. Under that provision, newly released inmates must return to the county where they were first convicted—even if they've had multiple convictions since—regardless of where they were last living. It came about because of a pet peeve on the part of Pierce County, namely a feeling that Tacoma and its environs were a dumping ground for ex-cons."
You had to figure that at some point, people in King and Snohomish and these other counties would realize they would be seeing more felons because of the legislation. I think everyone has been a little nervous about what might happen when the other counties do realize they are being asked to keep their fair share; King County can outvote Pierce County in a heartbeat and could easily vote to send King County felons to Pierce.
The Seattle Weekly story puts a human face on the tale, and cutely uses a Pierce County victim to tell the story as if it was Pierce County that was being hurt. The short version is that felons want to leave the counties they came from because that was where they got into trouble. This same reasoning, of course, could be used to explain why every single felon in King County ought to be relocated to Pierce County, and nobody should fall for such reasoning. Since I worked in Thurston County for three years, I found the paper's story quite funny, because it is just entirely possible that the one felon will find out there are people in Thurston County who use drugs as well. I believe I saw one, maybe two such people, downtown one day. Anyway, check out the Weekly story, and be ready for other attempts to unroll the sensible legislation that requires communities to take care of their own.
But let's have a backup plan. If the reasoning does catch on, more and more people in King County will say that it makes sense to put a felon in another city far away from home so that he or she does not spend time with the 'friends' who got them into trouble. If that reasoning does catch on, our fallback position should be that every county - King, Pierce, Snohomish - and everyone else - simply authorize the Department of Corrections to put every single released felon on a bus to Portland. That way, the felons would be away from the 'friends' who got them into trouble, and crime will drop radically since the source of our problems is not our own individual choices we make, but the company we keep.
Right.
So anyway, on a more informative note, the TNT has tons of interesting news. There's an editorial with a completely different view of the legislation we just discussed.
The status of the Russell company is hugely important, because if Tacoma loses Russell corporate headquarters, it will cause a lot of devastation. Dan Voelpel got a lot of space to write a very detailed look at the situation; Russell is apparently going to decide by the end of next year if it will be moving its HQ.
Finally, I personally found the stories about real estate sales to be extremely interesting because I used to work in newspapers and know there is more to the story that you might see in print. It is a truism that newspapers will never write stories about how to sell real estate or automobiles on your own, because newspapers get a huge chunk of advertising sales from real estate companies and automobile dealers. Years ago, in another state, I wrote stories about an auto parts dealer who had got arrested for something, and his boycott of the paper cost us a small fortunate in advertising. But we had to write the story because he had been accused of a crime. Newspapers have a choice about whether to write stories about how consumers can use alternatives to new car dealers and Realtors. And most newspapers don't.
So for the TNT to take on this subject showed a lot of courage. As it is, the story seems to come down in the right direction, namely, you get what you pay for. So I doubt if there will be a lot of backlash. But it still look a lot of guts to take on the topic.
Forward this post
Seattle Weekly has a story about the bill that is supposed to require counties to hold on to felons who are released from prison. You may recall that this was big news here in Pierce County, where King and Snohomish and other counties have been exporting their people released from prison for years.
Here's a line from the story: "An ex-convict, she was trapped in Tacoma by a new law that requires former prisoners to return to the county where they were first convicted, and stay there, while under Department of Corrections supervision, for one to two years."
Expect more stories and tales that will try to make the new legislation sound like a bad thing. Imagine what you would think if you live in Seattle, and this is the first you had heard of this subject: "The requirement to return prisoners to their "county of origin" is one little piece of the bill. Under that provision, newly released inmates must return to the county where they were first convicted—even if they've had multiple convictions since—regardless of where they were last living. It came about because of a pet peeve on the part of Pierce County, namely a feeling that Tacoma and its environs were a dumping ground for ex-cons."
You had to figure that at some point, people in King and Snohomish and these other counties would realize they would be seeing more felons because of the legislation. I think everyone has been a little nervous about what might happen when the other counties do realize they are being asked to keep their fair share; King County can outvote Pierce County in a heartbeat and could easily vote to send King County felons to Pierce.
The Seattle Weekly story puts a human face on the tale, and cutely uses a Pierce County victim to tell the story as if it was Pierce County that was being hurt. The short version is that felons want to leave the counties they came from because that was where they got into trouble. This same reasoning, of course, could be used to explain why every single felon in King County ought to be relocated to Pierce County, and nobody should fall for such reasoning. Since I worked in Thurston County for three years, I found the paper's story quite funny, because it is just entirely possible that the one felon will find out there are people in Thurston County who use drugs as well. I believe I saw one, maybe two such people, downtown one day. Anyway, check out the Weekly story, and be ready for other attempts to unroll the sensible legislation that requires communities to take care of their own.
But let's have a backup plan. If the reasoning does catch on, more and more people in King County will say that it makes sense to put a felon in another city far away from home so that he or she does not spend time with the 'friends' who got them into trouble. If that reasoning does catch on, our fallback position should be that every county - King, Pierce, Snohomish - and everyone else - simply authorize the Department of Corrections to put every single released felon on a bus to Portland. That way, the felons would be away from the 'friends' who got them into trouble, and crime will drop radically since the source of our problems is not our own individual choices we make, but the company we keep.
Right.
So anyway, on a more informative note, the TNT has tons of interesting news. There's an editorial with a completely different view of the legislation we just discussed.
The status of the Russell company is hugely important, because if Tacoma loses Russell corporate headquarters, it will cause a lot of devastation. Dan Voelpel got a lot of space to write a very detailed look at the situation; Russell is apparently going to decide by the end of next year if it will be moving its HQ.
Finally, I personally found the stories about real estate sales to be extremely interesting because I used to work in newspapers and know there is more to the story that you might see in print. It is a truism that newspapers will never write stories about how to sell real estate or automobiles on your own, because newspapers get a huge chunk of advertising sales from real estate companies and automobile dealers. Years ago, in another state, I wrote stories about an auto parts dealer who had got arrested for something, and his boycott of the paper cost us a small fortunate in advertising. But we had to write the story because he had been accused of a crime. Newspapers have a choice about whether to write stories about how consumers can use alternatives to new car dealers and Realtors. And most newspapers don't.
So for the TNT to take on this subject showed a lot of courage. As it is, the story seems to come down in the right direction, namely, you get what you pay for. So I doubt if there will be a lot of backlash. But it still look a lot of guts to take on the topic.
