Our nation is numb, President Obama said this month while announcing his My Brother's Keeper initiative. So numb that we are nonchalant about the overwhelming numbers of black and brown boys who end up in prison. "We just assume this is an inevitable part of American life, instead of the outrage that it is," Obama said. What should disturb us even more is that prisoners have become a commodity, thanks to the growing relationship between private prisons and state governments. The states that go into business with for-profit prisons sign contracts that essentially agree to maintain quotas on the number of prisoners. If they can't keep the prison populations at the agreed upon levels, the states must pay the difference. [continues 430 words]
In an event that can only be described as prescient, some kid at my parochial high school slipped into the boys restroom to get high. I know this not because I saw him, but because of the distinctively sweet yet pungent odor that lingered. Since our school's curriculum featured Bible classes, regular chapel services and other such religious activities, I may well have inhaled the aftermath of one of the original "Bong hits 4 Jesus." OK, that's probably stretching it. I'd never even seen a bong back then. Kids on the south side of Chicago who wanted to get high in the late 1970s smoked joints. [continues 565 words]
Alabama, as my boss loves to say, is a state of mind. I'll add: It is one heck of a confounding state of mind. We vote down a lottery, even though the data shows that we trek over to Georgia, Florida and now Tennessee to play their lotteries. In fact, during former Gov. Don Siegelman's big push to get a lottery, the data from Georgia and Florida suggested that we bought more tickets than anyone else - except for Georgians and Floridians. [continues 717 words]