Category: Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement
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Role Reversal: Poverty Increasingly a Suburban Phenomenon
by James A. Bacon Mirroring national trends, poverty in Richmond region suburbs has grown far more rapidly since 2000 in suburban counties than in the City of Richmond, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, reporting numbers published in a new book, “Confronting Suburban Poverty in America.” Writes the T-D’s Graham Moomaw: “From 2000 to 2011, the…
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We’re So Sorry, Toots! We Grovel in Apology!
In the pantheon of Reggae gods, there surely will be an elevated place for Frederick “Toots” Hibbert. In my mind, he would be revered as Apollo to Bob Marley’s Zeus. I’ll never forget watching, “The Harder They Come,” the 1972 Jamaican film starring Jimmy Cliff as a gangster turned reggae star. The stand-out tunes, in…
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We Have Trouble in River City
by James A. Bacon As much as it pains me to serve Virginia-bashing fodder to Don the Ripper and PeterG on a platter, I follow the facts and evidence wherever it leads. And the findings from a new paper published by Filipe R. Campante and Quoc-Anh Do, “Isolated Capital Cities, Accountability and Corruption: Evidence from…
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Data Shows Hospital Billing Outrages
By Peter Galuszka It’s long been fascinating how Big Hospitals, linked with Medicare, Big Pharma and Big Managed Care, have come up with an extraordinarily convoluted system of setting prices for various hospital procedures. There is plenty of nonsense about including on this blog about bringing “free market efficiencies” to health care, as if human…
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The Tea Party and IRS Abuse
By Peter Galuszka News that the U.S. Internal Revenue Service has targeted Tea party groups, including one in Virginia, along with other right wing organizations is deeply disturbing and conjures up ghosts of other government witchhunts. President Barack Obama has chastized the IRS for singling out the Tea Party and other groups that say they…
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GiftGate: “If I Were a Rich Man . . .!”
By Peter Galuszka Richmond’s “Giftgate” scandal just gets worse. On Friday, Atty. Gen. and presumed GOP gubernatorial candidate Kenneth Cuccinelli announced that he was amending his required disclosures of gifts to show that he took more goodies from Star Scientific plus previously undisclosed gifts of a $7,750 trip in 2010 to Southwest Virginia from coal…
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Corruption? This is Virginia!
By Peter Galuszka An old adage in journalism has it that good stories just keep getting better. And so it is with the saga of Jonnie Williams Sr. and the family of Robert F. McDonnell, the governor. First we learn, courtesy of The Washington Post, that the head of Star Scientific gave McDonnell’s daughter $15,000…
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Re-engineering Criminal Justice in Richmond
by James A. Bacon The average cost for housing an inmate in Virginia’s jails and prisons runs roughly $25,000 a year. Add to that the fact that some jails are antiquated, overcrowded and need replacing. The Richmond City Jail, for instance, designed in the 1960s to hold 856 inmates, is routinely crammed with a number…
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“One Piece At a Time”
By Peter Galuszka Straying from the Virginia plantation, I’ve been noticing how Cyprus, a small historic island nation in the Mediterranean Sea, is once again acting the tail wagging the Euro-system dog and is affecting the finances of many farflung people. The Euro-crisis has taken hold in tiny Cyprus, forcing such draconian suggestions as a…
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Food Insecurity… or Child Neglect?
by James A. Bacon We read today in the Times-Dispatch about the trials and tribulations of one Ashley C. Williams, who recently tested positive for cocaine last month while awaiting trial in Richmond for the death of her two-year-old son. The boy died of starvation and dehydration on May 30, 2009, weighing only 14 pounds.…
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Cuccinelli’s Strange Lesson in Federalism
By Peter Galuszka (Note: You’ve heard from Jim and Les on Ken Cuccinelli’s book. Here’s my review that runs in this week’s Style Weekly). Kenneth Cuccinelli, Virginia’s firebrand attorney general and Republican gubernatorial hopeful, is typically full of fire and vinegar that make him such a lively politician. But you’d never know it from his…
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In Praise of Inmate Savings Accounts
And now, a short break from transportation taxes… I’ve been blogging recently about what Virginia can do to ease the reentry of jail and prison inmates into society, both salvaging lives and saving taxpayer dollars by reducing recidivism. Lisa Kinny, director of communications for the Virginia Department of Corrections, has informed me of a recent…
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The Lessons of the 2013 General Assembly
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in Business and Economy, Consumer Protection, Courts and law, Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement, Demographics, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), Electoral process, Energy, Environment, Federal issues, Government Finance, Government workers and pensions, Health Care, Housing, Infrastructure, Insurance, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Public safety & health, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Social Services and Entitlements, Taxes, TransportationBy Peter Galuszka If there’s any good news from the 2013 General Assembly session, it is that the hard right’s strange hold on taxation has been broken. Republicans can start acting like responsible adults once again instead of dogmatic shills or spoiled children. Gov. Robert F. Donnell and legislators found a way to raise badly…
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Peanuts, Tobacco and Corporate Greed
By Peter Galuszka Stewart Parnell had a dilemma. The owner of Lynchburg-based Peanut Corporation of America faced deadlines in shipping peanut butter from his troubled manufacturing plant in Georgia but test results from salmonella, a problem because of unsanitary conditions at the factory, were not back from the lab yet. His customers included schools, snack…
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Visa Reform and Farmville’s Private Gulag
By Peter Galuszka Surrounded by coils of security wire, the cream-colored metal complex sits in a small valley just outside Farmville, 60 miles southwest of Richmond. On the ridges above the private Immigration Centers of America-Farmville detention facility, a row of signs warns: “No photos or filming.” Inside the facility’s entry, just before the airport-style…