First, Mesa County jailers issue an inmate a razor blade and then the county refuses to pay for medical help for the subsequent injuries. Now we are told that we may need to furnish Internet access to the prisoners. And just the other day, a man with numerous DUIs, arrests and summonses of one sort or another caused a fatal accident.

Evidently, there are numerous such people on the road. Recently a man was sentenced to over 200 years in jail. That must be insufficient as he is being shipped to Glenwood for yet another trial. I also recently read of the arrest of two Mexican nationals for transporting undocumented aliens. They have been arrested six times previously. It would seem to me that we are not getting through to them. Possibly it is more than a language problem.

All of the above suggests to me that perhaps our penal program could use some fine tuning, or more likely, a major rethink.

Never mind that the war on drugs makes the Iraq adventure, by comparison, seem rational and winnable. It may someday be viewed in the same light as Prohibition, the witch trials and the Inquisition.

JIM THAYER

Grand Junction

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 8:38 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.