Role of Government

That Easy Prison Transport Advertisement

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That Easy Prison Transport Advertisement

I am kind of a sucker when it comes to clicking on scammy internet businesses. I like reading up about them, taking a little of their ad dollars and educating myself on how they work. As a big consumer of the news and podcasts, I’m particularly interested in products and services marketed to the poor and how they compare to what is available to us in the Middle Class.

A few weeks ago I started seeing advertising for Easy Prison Transport, a local business that uses old city school buses to transport loved ones without cars to state prisons for visitation hours. For $100, you can buy a ticket for a Saturday day trip to Clinton Correctional in Dannemora, 15 miles west of Plattsburgh or Bare Hill Correctional outside of Malone, a few miles south of the Canadian border. On Sundays they offer $60 trips to Greene Correctional in Coxsackie and Hudson Correctional just outside Hudson.

I am sure these services are mostly used by wives and children of the colored and poor who want to visit their loved ones every once in a rare while. $100 bucks isn’t that much money these days, but if you’re poor and making minimum wage it might be a whole day’s labor. You have to figure only the poorest of poor people use these services – most other people would probably just drive their cars to visit the prison.

It has to be quite a trip. The buses leave at 4:30 am and are old school buses that rumble through the Adirondacks to their destination, on buses packed with people of common cause. Must be some very somber discussion.

It’s a very scenic trip, the mountains scenery of the Adirondack Northway and the somewhat pungent farm country of the Lake Champlain flatlands of Plattsburgh and the vast timberlands and less rich farm and grazing country up around Dannemora and Massena. The rundown trailers and mobile homes, the junk cars and broke down tractors and goats and cows in rocky pastures.

To be sure, many of the people behind bars are there for serious reasons. Most of these prisons are maximum or at least medium security. The people behind bars are often convicted of very serious crimes that have others seriously injured and disfigured, often for life, or dead. Other people are behind bars long periods of time for much more dubious reasons – things totally legal in one state but banned in another – often for purposes of stroking a political ego. Laws on the possession of firearms and so called illicit drugs often fall into that category.

Why do people make this costly trip to prisons for visitation purposes? For a few hours sitting across plexiglass to talk into a phone but see the face of loved ones behind bars? Love. It has to be quite the trip.

Is the government monitoring me?

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The other day half jokingly I noted on Facebook I didn’t want to leave my truck parked in the city with the stuff I needed for camp on a ninety degree day – with the propane tank, fireworks, ammunition and even the second battery sitting in the heat potentially posing a fire or explosion risk. I apparently watch too many cartoons or take the printed propane and battery warnings too seriously but I’d be unhappy if my truck burned. That said I was even more concerned about the heat decimating the ice I had to keep food prematurely.

Some random person that follows my personal Facebook feed commented that, that’s the kind of thing that gets you put on the government’s terrorists watch list. About the same time, reading the news for work, I saw this article about the Buffalo FBI surveillance of domestic terrorists and mass shooting threats. They mentioned that they had a unit that surveilled people of interest. That said, I was pretty bemused by the whole thing, noting that at least I’m creating good paying government jobs and the federal government has some of the best paid jobs in the Capital Region.

I’m really not that worried about government surveillance. If there is somebody in the government who sits around reading my blog posts and tries to psychoanalysis them, I’m glad I’m helping to keep them employed. I hope they enjoy watching my camping videos, stories about Big Red, my maps, photos and other content I provide. That said, more likely, they’re just read by an automatic spider run by the government like a Google, processed into some kind of intelligence like millions of other pages but ultimately not that useful. With 325 million Americans to keep an eye on plus six billion other foreign actors I’m sure I’m not that much of a priority or interest.

Sure as a staunchly independent individual, a single guy, who likes spending weekends in the wilderness, owns a few guns, are part of several pepper and off grid Facebook groups, plead to a misdemeanor a decade and a half ago, who has some conservative and some liberal views, I’m probably not the lowest of priorities by law enforcement monitoring. But I’m also not the highest either, and there are a lot more dangerous people out there like White Nationalists, religious extremists, racists and other hate groups. I’m certainly none of those things and there is a lot bigger fish to go after then me.

I also am aware that law enforcement has a lot of restrictions on monitoring citizens. Most monitoring when it occurs is probably broad-based and occurs on a lot swath of population and is fully automated. They have to have reasonable suspension that a crime is likely to occur in the near future and can only monitor people in public places or public utterances without a court order obtained by a judge after showing probable cause of a crime. Because of the cost and time involved, only when they have compelling evidence are law enforcement likely to investigate.

Probably because they are not colored or poor. 🇷🇺

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I keep seeing these articles about how Russian oligarchs can’t have their assets siezed without due process, in a process that rarely ends with actual forfeiture.

Probably because they are not colored or poor. 🇷🇺

The government has no problem with seizing the assets of people of color and the poor. Cops are more than happy to sieze the assets of blacks, because they are supposedly drug dealers under civil forfeiture and because they often don’t have lawyers or any other way to fight the evils of the state. Moreover many fees levied by both the government and the private sector go directly after the poor and people of color. Thats just the truth of the matter.

Redistrict America !

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People for a long time proposed re-drawing Upstate and Downstate New York into two different states. I think there should be a national dialogue about state borders, as many do not represent community interests anymore and are inherently anti-democratic or lack any logic or reason except history.

Ortho Olean

The Northern Tier of Pennsylvania and Southern Tier of New York are communities of common interest, but they are separated by the 42nd parallel, and vastly different set of laws and representatives. The same is true with the North Country of New York and Northern Vermont and New Hampshire.  Or Northern New Jersey, New York City, and South-Eastern Connecticut — it’s logical that the entire New York City Metropolitan area be in one state. Likewise, should Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota be consolidated into one state?

But that’s a federal, not a state question. Redistricting all of America into new states with be very disruptive of business and culture, which is why it’s never been attempted. But it makes sense to group communities of interest together. But it would require the creation of a whole new set of state laws, replacing ones that have been created over centuries, and would upend almost all political structures that currently exist.

Emergency

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“This seems like a good morning to hold emergency in person public hearings on projects that have been in the planning stages for 7 years now.”