the reality tunnel

I’m excited that some of Decarcerate Monroe County’s ideas have become projected into the mainstream media, like this from a July 26 Herald Times op-ed:
Some of his numbers also should give pause to our criminal justice hierarchy. Why is it that while incarceration rates have gone up nationwideby 38 percent from 1994 to 2007, the [...]

INVITATION TO COMMUNITY MEETING AGAINST JAIL EXPANSION
SATURDAY, JANUARY 31, 3:00-6:00 p.m.
GREAT HALL, TRINITY CHURCH, 111 S. Grant St.
Childcare will be provided

Decarcerate Monroe County (DMC), with the encouragement of Citizens for Effective Justice, UU Friends of Prisoners Task Force, and New Leaf/New Life, is pleased to invite you to a community update and discussion on Monroe [...]

I want to try to draw some cohesive analysis from the election results, but it’s so difficult.  I’m just going to post some things that come across my radar that I responded to.
Folks talking about voting for McKinney/Clemente made me think long and hard about third party candidates.  I was so sick of hearing people [...]

I don’t have the time or energy right now to process yesterday’s community meeting on the building of the county juvenile facility.  I learned a lot, was pretty disheartened, and realized, more than anything, that perceptions and realities of limited resources force people with similar interests and goals to become adversaries.  This is how the [...]

This is a sketch of my thoughts on the at-this-time-ambiguous proposal for a juvenile detention center in Monroe County in preparation for the public meeting about this on Thursday.  I’ve organized my thoughts in terms of questions and demands.
QUESTION: Is building our own facility the best way to keep our youth close to their families [...]

The book group I’m facilitating at the county jail met again this past week, interrupting an Uno game going on in the common area of the cell block.  I had just played a game of Uno that afternoon, sprawled out across a post-picnic blanket on a grassy patch just above the lake.  Kids splashed below [...]

I’m trying to be better about posting what I’ve been doing lately.  Last night, the book group I’m facilitating through Pages and New Leaf New Life in the “therapeutic” block of the local jail met for the second time and we picked the book that we’re going to read, A Walk in the Woods by [...]

Saturday, May 3, 2008
Free
A New Jail?!: Exploring Alternatives to Incarceration in Monroe County
Events At:
Boxcar Books
310A S. Washington St.
Bloomington, IN 47401
(812) 339-8710
http://www.boxcarbooks.org
The Cinemat
123 S. Walnut St.
(812) 333-4700
Bloomington, IN 47401
http://www.thecinemat.com
A day of popular education that will explore alternatives to the current proposal of building new adult and youth jails in Bloomington. Through interactive workshops featuring community [...]

Some folks have started organizing to plan resistance to plans to organize against a proposed “justice campus” in Bloomington that would include a new, larger jail (as the jail is notoriously overcrowded and there is a federal lawsuit about conditions in the jail), a juvenile “treatment” facility (as youth from Monroe County who are sentenced [...]