Neal Peirce
For Release Sunday, January 22, 2012
© 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
“You’ll be woken in the morning by a convicted murderer.”
It was some years ago (1982), and the governor of Mississippi — William F. Winter — was talking. He’d graciously invited me to spend the night at the Governor’s Mansion. As he predicted, the next morning I was indeed politely awakened by a convict serving as a trustie at the mansion.
So earlier this month, when outgoing Gov. Haley Barbour stirred up a hornet’s nest with his pardon or clemency for over 200 offenders, I wondered if mansion trusties were among the bunch. And indeed, five — including four convicted murderers — were included. I checked with my friend former Gov. Winter (now 88), and he confirmed it was long-standing Mississippi custom — not just to assign several well-behaved and stabilized criminals from the state penitentiary to the mansion, but to suspend their sentences at the end of each governor’s term.
Barbour said he’d had so much confidence in the mansion trusties that he’d let his grandchildren play with them. Winter told me there’d even been one occasion, when other staff was off duty and he was obliged to be out of town, that he’d felt free to leave his wife, feeling ill, to the care of a single murderer trustie.
The Mississippi custom raises an intriguing question: What ever happened to the idea of rehabilitation in American justice as a whole? Historically, notes Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project, it was common for governors to issue a significant number of pardons and commutations — typically just before Christmas, in a spirit of mercy and forgiveness.
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Roberta Brandes Gratz
For Release Saturday, January 21, 2012
Citiwire.net
Is natural gas the clean energy source it has been successfully marketed to be? My judgment? No. It may burn more cleanly than other fossil fuels. But the process to create the wells and then to transport the gas — even before and after the actual hydrofracking process — is so destructive of the natural and built environment that it is a wonder anyone can call it clean.
Just visit Pennsylvania, relatively new to the gas exploration industry that really started ramping up operations two years ago. In this one state, 3,000 wells have been drilled. Thousands more are planned. And already, enormous change has occurred.
Pennsylvania is not the only state to experience intense gas exploration. But it is a popular target because of its location on top of the Marcellus Shale rock formation that also fans out under New York, West Virginia and Ohio. A map of existing and proposed drill sites makes Pennsylvania look like the victim of chicken pox. Add to that the requisite pipelines either in construction or yet to be and it is difficult to imagine any community large or small escaping the impact.
A recent visit to Bradford and Susquehanna Counties in northeastern Pennsylvania, currently a prime drilling target, revealed very troubling impacts that have received little attention so far. On scenic farm roads that never before bordered anything but farms — not even a gas station — industrial sites are sprouting left and right, representing the different segments of the gas production process — compressors, storage tanks, staging sites, maintenance operations and more.
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