Month: October 2015

by William Skink

The County Detention facility on Mullan road is overcrowded. It’s a bad situation getting worse with no easy fix. There are a lot of good people looking at this issue right now, but I’m afraid well-intentioned efforts are going to have unexpected consequences.

It’s with that in mind that I read an op-ed by Martin Judnich. The first flag for me is his recommendation we repeat California prison reform. Montana is not California, no matter how many Californian’s flee here to escape. The situation in California is not analogous with Montana, not to mention there hasn’t been much time to even evaluate what impact passing Proposition 47 last November has had on California prisons and jails.

Here is Judnich describing why Montana should follow California’s lead:

Montana should follow California’s lead in reducing criminal penalties to free up jail and prison space. California faced constant overcrowding of its jails for decades, resulting in the early release of prisoners and jail inmates in almost all cases. In 2014, the state of California passed Proposition 47 reducing penalties for some non-violent crimes, and most importantly, personal use drug crimes. This didn’t affect serious and violent crimes; instead it focused on property crimes such as theft, forgery, issuing bad checks and personal use drug crimes. Drug crimes such as distribution or manufacturing, where large amounts are involved, remained serious felonies, but in cases where personal use of any drug was involved, the crime is a misdemeanor where jail is not recommended and treatment alternatives are the norm. In Montana, the vast majority of personal use drug crimes are felonies, not misdemeanors.

Similarly now in California, for property and theft crimes, jail is not recommended and alternatives such as community service and restitution is ordered. This reduction results in freeing up jail and prison room and requires non-custodial sentences for crimes that can be dealt with in drug treatment and jail alternatives instead of a jail cell.

Sounds nice and all, but there are problems when you start digging into this. The first problem is treatment alternatives. What are they here in Missoula? Share House has 18 beds for co-occurring and homeless individuals. Recovery Center Missoula, if you can afford it, has, I believe, 16 beds for inpatient treatment, but its services really aren’t for the types of addicts clogging up the jail. If you can afford upwards of $30,000 dollars for treatment, you can afford to bond out of jail. You can also probably afford a lawyer to keep you out of jail.

There are some other outpatient options, but it’s limited. If jail diversion is going to be successful, increasing treatment options has to be a part of it, otherwise keeping addicts out of jail will simply result in giving them more opportunities to harm themselves and others with the behavior that results from their addictions.

The other alternatives mentioned—community services and restitution—also sound good, but I’m skeptical. A good portion of the jail population are poor. If they don’t have a few hundred bucks to bond out, what are the chances they have the resources to provide restitution? With community service, my question is how do you effectively compel someone to follow through? If there isn’t the threat of jail for non-compliance, then it won’t work. If jail is the consequences for not completing community service, then, guess what, there will be plenty of people who won’t or can’t follow through for any number of reasons. So back into jail they will go.

Judnich concludes his op-ed with this:

Recidivism is the concept that criminal offenders return to the system and to jail. If we want to stop recidivism in relation to drug crimes involving user amounts of drugs, let’s use our existing systems of drug courts and treatment-based resolution instead of jail beds. We can help with the overcrowding situation, and actually help some people with their real problems, not just hold them in a cell until we release them back to the same patterns of behavior.

The existing systems of drug courts and treatment-based resolution are ALREADY not sufficient to meet the current volume of people. Diverting more people to inadequate systems simply won’t work.

Part of Missoula’s jail overcrowding problem is a result of the population growth that has happened since the jail was built in 1999. Automatically dismissing the need to build another pod, imo, is short-sighted.

Instead what I’m afraid is going to happen is well-intentioned changes in sentencing will be made, more treatment options and easier access to those treatment won’t happen, and the jobs of first responders on the streets and in hospital ERs will get more dangerous.

by William Skink

When I see the need in our community here in Missoula; when I read that Big, Rich America can’t even afford a cost-of-living adjustment for the old and disabled; when I see multiple crisis’ already happening and getting worse, I think about foreign policy.

Not only do I think about foreign policy, but I think about what my younger self would think about today’s foreign policy.

Let’s say it’s October 7th, 2001. America has just launched it’s Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. Remember, since it was oh so long ago, why we waged war in Afghanistan:

Its public aims were to dismantle al-Qaeda and to deny it a safe base of operations in Afghanistan by removing the Taliban from power.

Now, my October 7th, 2001 self is still reeling from the shock of the 9/11 attack and things are moving fast. Emergency powers in Congress are pushed through, a broad Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists is pushed through, weaponized Anthrax is killing low-level aides to politicians. It’s madness.

And here I come, October 15th 2015 William Skink, and I say:

Billy, dude, I’m you from the future and I’ve got to tell you about how nuts we’ve become in America. People aren’t even paying attention to this Afghanistan thing anymore, which is probably a good thing because if they did they might wonder why the Taliban is as strong in 2015 as they were in your time here, as this absurd war is just getting started. And it gets crazier.

So Bush is all-in against Al-Qaeda, right? He even invades Iraq a few years later, justified by some bullshit like you’re getting about Afghanistan. Lots of Democrats vilify him, of course. Then a half-black Democrat by the name of Barack Obama ascends to the White House promising to end all kinds of insanity, like the wars and the torture prison in Cuba, but instead of doing any of that, this Democrat, who somehow gets a Nobel Peace Prize early in his presidency, does such a bang-up job of fucking up the Middle East that by October, 2015, America and its “allies” are actually arming Al-Qaeda in Syria in order to bring down Assad because the neoconservative strain of insanity merged with the neoliberal, neocolonial bloodlust to control everything and destroy whatever resists, and not even the latest brand of hopium offers any sanity for how to relate to the rest of the world.

Yeah, foreign policy.

Who seriously believes the original justification for the war in Afghanistan? And how can Obama quietly extend this war without anyone really giving a shit? From the link:

US President Barack Obama has announced plans to extend the United States military’s role in Afghanistan and keep the current force of 9,800 troops through most of 2016, amid a surge in Taliban attacks.

And here is something from the link before that:

The United Nations Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) keeps as diligently careful records about violence in the country as is possible.

Little attention is paid these days to Afghanistan, as the focus of attention seems to be further westwards – with the Russian intervention and Western failure in Syria centre-stage. UNAMA data shows that the Taliban’s strength is now as it was before October 7, 2001 – when the United States began its Global War on Terror in the country.

American foreign policy is desperate, dangerous and insane. It accomplishes the opposite of what its stated goals are, time and time again.

While Obama extends a military presence in Afghanistan—which, remember, the original goal was to keep it from being a “safe haven” for Al Qaeda—US officials are complaining about Russia killing CIA Al Qaeda pals in Syria.

2001 me would have a hard time believing the state of affairs today. I have a hard time believing America remains collectively oblivious to the chaos this country is directly responsible for.

We are closer than ever to WWIII going hot. Will the spark happen in Syria? In the South China Sea? Can any entity talk America down from the most destructive tantrum a powerful toddler nation has ever thrown over not getting everything it wants?

Aliens. I always hold out hope that aliens will come down and save us from ourselves.

by William Skink

In a post titled Not Guns Again, Pete an anecdotal story from a shooting Pete Talbot covered as a journalist 16 years ago seems to indicate a background check at the Spokane gun show the Glock was purchased at could have stopped the mentally ill felon from buying the gun. I’m sure the crazy ex-con would have been so deterred at that point to not try and buy a gun elsewhere, right?

In that post I mentioned in the comments the sensationalizing media attention being a factor in perpetuating mass-shootings, and (not seriously) asked if we should pass an ordinance limiting media coverage of these horrific tragedies. To dismiss this sentiment, another comment said this: yeah these shooter gunnuts enjoy basking in their posthumous infamy.

That dismissive comment misses the point. Luckily we have Malcolm Gladwell at the New Yorker taking a closer look at How School Shootings Spread. I recommend reading the whole article. Here is one excerpt to start us off:

School shootings are a modern phenomenon. There were scattered instances of gunmen or bombers attacking schools in the years before Barry Loukaitis, but they were lower profile. School shootings mostly involve young white men. And, not surprisingly, given the ready availability of firearms in the United States, the phenomenon is overwhelmingly American. But, beyond those facts, the great puzzle is how little school shooters fit any kind of pattern.

To try and put the pieces of this puzzle together, Gladwell examines the group dynamics of riots. More from the link:

In a famous essay published four decades ago, the Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter set out to explain a paradox: “situations where outcomes do not seem intuitively consistent with the underlying individual preferences.” What explains a person or a group of people doing things that seem at odds with who they are or what they think is right? Granovetter took riots as one of his main examples, because a riot is a case of destructive violence that involves a great number of otherwise quite normal people who would not usually be disposed to violence.

Most previous explanations had focussed on explaining how someone’s beliefs might be altered in the moment. An early theory was that a crowd cast a kind of intoxicating spell over its participants. Then the argument shifted to the idea that rioters might be rational actors: maybe at the moment a riot was beginning people changed their beliefs. They saw what was at stake and recalculated their estimations of the costs and benefits of taking part.

But Granovetter thought it was a mistake to focus on the decision-making processes of each rioter in isolation. In his view, a riot was not a collection of individuals, each of whom arrived independently at the decision to break windows. A riot was a social process, in which people did things in reaction to and in combination with those around them. Social processes are driven by our thresholds—which he defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them. In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.

Gladwell has an interesting argument here about how contagious behavior spreads. For those who want to actually understand this phenomena instead of making symbolic gestures that will have little impact on stopping the next mass-casualty, it’s a must read.

The Columbine tragedy gets especially close attention paid to it by Gladwell because it has been the template over which others have added their own twisted death tolls:

The first seven major shooting cases—Loukaitis, Ramsey, Woodham, Carneal, Johnson and Golden, Wurst, and Kinkel—were disconnected and idiosyncratic. Loukaitis was obsessed with Stephen King’s novel “Rage” (written under King’s pseudonym Richard Bachman), about a high-school student who kills his algebra teacher with a handgun. Kip Kinkel, on the morning of his attack, played Wagner’s “Liebestod” aria over and over. Evan Ramsey’s father thought his son was under the influence of the video game Doom. The parents of several of Michael Carneal’s victims sued the makers and distributors of the movie “The Basketball Diaries.”

Then came Columbine. The sociologist Ralph Larkin argues that Harris and Klebold laid down the “cultural script” for the next generation of shooters. They had a Web site. They made home movies starring themselves as hit men. They wrote lengthy manifestos. They recorded their “basement tapes.” Their motivations were spelled out with grandiose specificity: Harris said he wanted to “kick-start a revolution.” Larkin looked at the twelve major school shootings in the United States in the eight years after Columbine, and he found that in eight of those subsequent cases the shooters made explicit reference to Harris and Klebold. Of the eleven school shootings outside the United States between 1999 and 2007, Larkin says six were plainly versions of Columbine; of the eleven cases of thwarted shootings in the same period, Larkin says all were Columbine-inspired.

While the article is fascinating and in many ways deeply disturbing, there is nothing in terms of a solution offered by the author. The script established by Eric Harris is being revised by a new generation of young men. The riot is spreading.

By JC

Couple of things the media and Missoula County School trustees are not telling us about the special bond levy that Liz referred to yesterday. There are certain participation requirements:

If a school district bond election is held at a regular school election, or special election called by the trustees, the bond issue is subject to the following:
a) 40% or more of the qualified electors cast a ballot in the election – the proposition must be approved by a majority of the votes; or
b) More than 30%, but less than 40%, of the qualified electors cast a ballot in the election – the proposition must be approved by 60% or more of the votes; or
c) 30% or less of the qualified electors cast a ballot in the election – the proposition fails.

As a mail-in school bond issue would be lucky to get 40% turnout43% (the 2013 Missoula County mail-in election got 43% turnout with a mayoral election on the ballot), it becomes unlikely that it is going to pass. And if it is a close election at, or just above 40%, it would be better for the “no” votes to abstain from voting to push the total participation into the 30-40% range where 60% “for” is needed to win, or into the sub-30% range where the election becomes moot.

So, isn’t democracy wonderful, where a bond can be defeated more easily by a “no” contingency just staying home?

Of course, parts of the bonding are good, but as with the ill-fated 911 county bond a few years back, a lot of hidden stuff is packaged in with the essential, and we don’t really get to discuss that, or pick and choose what the voter thinks is really essential through a series of smaller bonds stretched out over time.

What this bond really shows is the “leadership” ability of past Superintendent Alex Apostle, whose main accomplishments seem to be pushing the Superintendent’s salary from a mere $132,000 when he was hired to $200,000 seven years later, and increasing his bennies to an $1,000/month auto allowance and $832/month retirement annuity.

Apostle’s “leadership” style pissed off the lowly workers in the school system — teachers and support staff, as the operations budgets and wages were horribly constrained while the school board lavished raises and perks on him. Apostle failed to incrementally increase ops budgets, and deal with critical infrastructure needs in a phased and as-needed basis, instead resorting to being nothing more than a bonding hit-man doing the dirty work for the local contractors that will be the ultimate profiteers if this bond passes. One wonders what sort of kick-backs might follow Alex to his new job in Washington???

There’s another more insidious side to this whole bonding dilemma. And that it who is going to pay for it. The obvious part of this is that property tax payers will. But another story in the local paper rag pointed out that the rise of nonprofit housing for less-than-median income individuals and families is tearing a hole in the property tax base.

While affordable housing for students and the worker classes is commendable (though Liz and I are more about housing and jobs for the un-housed and unemployed) in the current economic malaise, the amount of public assistance needed to create affordable housing, and the creation of those properties by tax-exempt nonprofits like HomeWord will prove to hobble the bonding capability of our communities:

by William Skink

The Missoulian had a cute story recently about a very important Montana banker, Tom Swenson, and his upcoming chat with Federal Reserve’s Sith Lord, Darth Yellen. The purpose of this meeting? Tom is going to tell Janet what the little people in Montana think about the economy:

In a few days, Bank of Montana CEO Tom Swenson will fly from Missoula to Minneapolis to sit down with one of the world’s most powerful economists – Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen.

There, he’ll give her and the rest of the Fed’s Board of Governors his feedback on what regular folks think about Montana’s economy.

Isn’t that adorable? Here’s some more specifics:

“I’m giving feedback on the perception of economic conditions in the area,” Swenson explained. “What the Fed is trying to do is get real-time data. They want to hear what regular people feel about the economy, which a lot of times is contradictory to what economists report in the paper. They’ve got hundreds of statisticians and historical data, but they are trying to get directors to provide real-time and experiential data on our communities, and they will use that information to make the best real-time decisions.”

Fuck that noise. When the hell has the Fed shown they are interested in listening to regular people? Who really thinks the Federal Reserve even acknowledges reality beyond the no-interest liquidity scam Wall Street and corporations are continuing to exploit at the expense of the financially raped taxpayer?

While Tom is wining and dining Darth Yellen, Missoula is gearing up to vote yeah/nay on a 158 million dollar public school bond. Last June, Helena saw their school bond get voted down. Is a repeat in Missoula possible? It’s possible, but doubtful. Missoula loves it some good bond, passing a parks bond that should have been called the softball field and parking lot bond. And we’re talking a bond to benefit school kids, so if you vote against this bond you obviously hate kids and want to kill their future.

Or, maybe taxpayers are beginning to experience bond fatigue.

In Seattle (h/t @Lgpguin) the League of Women Voters is urging a no vote for a 930 million dollar transportation levy. From the link:

“The league’s good government positions state that levies should be used for capital projects, not maintenance. Frequent, sequential levies demanding more tax revenues from those with and without financial means to pay for them is not a reliable way of funding,” said League President Amanda Clark.

“As we look into the very near future and see even more levies on the horizon pushing homeowners’ property taxes to unmanageable levels, we are concerned about the ability of even well-off Seattleites to remain in their homes.”

When the next crash happens (not if), the problems of financing new schools and transportation infrastructure could be replaced with food shortages and empty ATMs. Greece, after all, is our future if something doesn’t happen to disrupt the current trends of wealth consolidation for the 1% and austerity class warfare for the rest of us.