Editorials from around Pennsylvania

Editorials from around Pennsylvania

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PA NEEDS DRUG TREATMENT, SANER SENTENCING LAWS, Jan. 29

The announcement of the closing of SCI Pittsburgh — Pennsylvania’s oldest and most expensive-to-run state prison — comes as a relief to four other towns that had been on the short list for shutdowns. Many counties depend on the presence of a state prison to support jobs and boost sagging economies.

Gov. Tom Wolf’s decision to close one prison instead of two, as planned, no doubt reflected the intense lobbying effort by senators and representatives to keep jobs in their districts.

Viewed as the elimination of an antiquated prison, the Pittsburgh closing makes sense. The Department of Corrections says the facility cost $100.5 million a year to run and was facing $15 million in repairs. It will require the relocation of 2,500 inmates overall, although no net reduction in corrections jobs is expected, except for retirements. After the mothballing costs are paid, the state expects to save $81 million a year.

Wolf said budget pressures necessitated the move, noting that the state’s $2 billion-a-year corrections tab “is threatening funding for programs that the people of Pennsylvania want: education, senior care and jobs and training programs.”

However, the closing falls short on two counts — it doesn’t save enough to really dent the state’s recurring structural budget deficits, and doesn’t contribute much to prison reform.

The Legislature needs to address the latter by rethinking sentencing standards and altering the way nonviolent drug-dependent violators are handled. Some progress is being made through drug courts, but more needs to be done.

Last year the Legislature settled its budget differences with Wolf by tapping new revenues — higher tobacco taxes, more legalized gambling, and other tax hikes. Still, the 2017-18 budget is expected to arrive with a $1.7 billion structural deficit. That figure is projected to rise to $3 billion in 2021 if the state keeps patching together stop-gap budgets.

Among the few increases in spending approved last year was something Wolf advocated — $15 million to begin to address the state’s opioid crisis. As part of that program, the state sent $1.5 million to 13 counties, including Northampton and Lehigh, to treat inmates with opioid addictions, to help them avoid relapse after they’re paroled.

That’s just a beginning. The state’s prisons will remain above capacity, even with the closing of Pittsburgh. While crime rates have declined in recent years, the percentage of offenders entering jail with opioid problems has doubled in the last 10 years, from 6 percent to 12 percent.

Finding room in a stressed-out budget to address prison reform and opioid addiction has to be a top priority. Reducing the prison population through sentencing sanity and treatment of drug users — and looking at other possibilities, such as decriminalizing and eventually legalizing marijuana — can ease the pressure on prisons, on courts, on police, on families.

Corrections Secretary John Wetzel, working under two administrations, has managed to reverse a 20-year growth rate in incarceration. That’s a strategy all states must embrace, with planning, common-sense drug/sentencing laws, and taxpayer investment.

- The (Easton) Express-Times

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HASTY POLICY CREATES CHAOS, Jan. 29

Many Americans agree that ensuring safety on U.S. soil should be a priority of the Trump administration. And many hold dear the values of this country as a beacon of democracy, welcoming tired and poor “huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.”

We are a nation of immigrants, a leader on the world stage, a melting pot.

And while today we are incredibly divided as a people, those two ideals - security and benevolence - need not be mutually exclusive.

To reconcile our need for security with our values of welcoming immigrants, it takes deft policy making. It takes diplomacy.

That’s why President Donald Trump’s hasty initiative to sign a record 14 executive orders in his first week has proven problematic.

If the chaos at airports across the country this past weekend is any indication, Trump has been unable to get his footing, and his ego is in the way of any true self-awareness. Additionally, he has clearly surrounded himself with people who are unable and/or unwilling to save him (and us) from his own disastrous inability to set policy that doesn’t send the country and the world into a tailspin.

The Associated Press reported this weekend on the growing fallout from Trump’s immigration crackdown as U.S. legal permanent residents and visa-holders from seven Muslim-majority countries who had left the United States found they could not return for 90 days.

It is a period of limbo for an unknown number of non-American citizens from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia or Yemen now barred from the country where they were studying or have lived, perhaps for years. (A judge stayed the executive order Saturday for those stuck at airports in its immediate aftermath, but the restrictions remain in place for most others.)

Trump evoked 9/11 as he signed the order. However, none of the 9/11 highjackers’ home countries were on the list of banned countries. They were, instead, from Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. It has been observed by many that Trump has business dealings in Saudi Arabia and UAE.

Extremist radicalization occurs largely online - and a number of those who carried out recent, high-profile attacks across the U.S. were American citizens, including Dylann Roof, who was sentenced this month to the death penalty for slaying nine African-Americans in a South Carolina church in 2015.

According to Politifact, “The New America Foundation, a Washington think tank that promotes data-driven research for social and economic policy, did an analysis of ’homegrown extremism’ since 2000. The foundation compiled data on 499 extremists, who either adhered to jihadist ideology inspired by al-Qaida or were motivated by right- or left-wing political beliefs. This database includes attacks as well as those accused of terrorism-related offenses, such as plotting attacks or fundraising.

“New America found that about 64 percent of the extremists were U.S.-born citizens and 80 percent were either American-born or naturalized citizens,” Politifact reports. “The database shows eight out of 499 extremists were illegal residents; all eight were jihadists.”

The presidency is a role of immense gravity with attendant consequences. And with the sweep of a pen, Trump has attempted to solve a complex set of problems with a simple solution, leaving American military personnel and civilians around the world in potential danger.

Extremists may now use this action against an America it already promotes to new recruits as hateful toward Muslims.

Even for those who agree with tougher immigration policies, Trump’s brand of impulsive governing should give pause. His first week has exposed his lack of policy-making experience. We still hope beyond hope he can settle in - and even rise to the challenge - before the country’s reputation around the globe is seriously damaged.

Because while the nationalist rhetoric can seem appealing to some, we don’t exist in a vacuum. Our standing on the world stage greatly affects the safety and security of our own citizens, both at home and abroad.

- The (York) Dispatch

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BRINGING HUMAN-TRAFFICKING PLIGHT TO LIGHT, Jan. 29

In the documentary film “Half the Sky,” reporter Nicholas Kristof, who followed a sex-trafficking rescue effort in Cambodia, offered a line that should be a rallying cry for our region.

“One reason why trafficking has been ignored is that the victims are voiceless.”

Even as the Community Connection Team was showing the movie depicting human-trafficking scenarios from across the globe - Thursday evening on the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown campus - local law enforcement and social-service professionals are declaring that the horrific issue is here in the Cambria-Somerset region.

And even as the Department of Homeland Security is describing human trafficking as a “modern-day form of slavery” - as our Mark Pesto reported - a Johnstown man is headed to trial for operating a prostitution ring out of a local hotel.

Police say Barshay Reqwan Dunbar forced women - kept in line with heroin and the threat of violence - to have sex with his clients, recruited online through the site Backpage.com.

Cambria County Detective Lia Demarco attended a Cambria County Human Trafficking Response Team meeting last week and said the district attorney’s office and local police are making human trafficking a priority.

“People think it’s not here in Cambria County,” Demarco said. “It absolutely is here. This is the sex trade.”

The testimony of a woman identified as “Victim 1” at Dunbar’s preliminary hearing echoed the themes that are painfully prominent in the 2012 documentary featuring Kristof, actress Meg Ryan and those working to help young girls escape prostitution rings in southeast Asia - where victims are kept in brothels against their will and beaten when they object to participating in the relentless sex trade.

Victim 1 testified that Dunbar recruited her into prostitution in October, and she had sex with his clients to support her heroin addiction. When she attempted to leave, Dunbar showed her a gun and told her “something would happen,” Pesto reported.

Victim 1 and another woman - “Victim 2” - testified that clients paid upward of $200 for a sexual encounter, of which they got $5 or $10 with the rest going to Dunbar.

The response team is developing strategies for identifying and stopping sex-trade operations while also preparing to provide assistance to victims after they are removed from those situations. The group’s work will also include a public awareness campaign.

Each time a movie is shown, the response team meets or someone shares ways to identify and stop this crime, we declare that the victims will be ignored and voiceless no longer.

- The (Johnstown) Tribune-Democrat

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AMID TODAY’S REALITIES, WE CAN’T FORGET WHO WE ARE, Jan. 29

There are two realities that are becoming clear as America heads into what is a new, increasingly gray and oftentimes scary future.

The first is that the rules have changed and that the assumptions that have governed the decisions in this nation for hundreds of years are not so concrete and simple anymore.

And the second is that now, more than ever, it is important that the conversation doesn’t stop as we try to figure out where we go from here.

President Donald Trump’s ban on immigration from seven Muslim countries is not just a random decision rooted in an irrational religious prejudice. It is a byproduct of a new reality.

It is the consequence of a world that has become an increasingly dangerous place since Sept. 11, 2001, and of a country that has realized, at last, just how vulnerable it really is.

It is the result of deaths of free people and millions of innocents at the hands of extremists at home and abroad - murderous attacks that are difficult to prevent and have become increasingly emboldened.

It is what happens when we cannot trust our hearts alone anymore, when a once-wide-eyed belief that those who see what we stand for will understand us and join with us is gone, lost in an instant when four planes killed nearly 3,000 people in a matter of minutes.

It is what happens when the principles that have governed a nation for generations are not so clear cut anymore.

But with all of that comes another very important duty - to tread carefully and to think thoroughly.

Many of us are the children of immigrants. In fact, this community is full of people who came to this nation with just a little money in their pockets and dreams of a better life.

They landed at Ellis Island and gazed at the Statue of Liberty. And many of them were moved to tears at the thought of starting their new lives in their new country.

Some of them were escaping political persecution, while others were running from oppression and poverty. They wanted to control their own futures and their own possibilities. They wanted to be free.

They settled in small and large communities across this nation, learned the language, worked hard and built lives and families.

And it is why for generations it has been easy to live by that inscription on the Statue of Liberty - “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

But that is not the world we live in anymore.

We are facing an enemy that does not just disagree with the freedom our nation represents, but one that is targeting us for what we believe. The mission is eradication.

So we cannot operate the same way we always have, not and be safe.

But there is a part two.

Our birthright, which so many have fought and died to protect, comes with a responsibility.

If we stand for freedom and liberty, we have to be the example our founders hoped we would be.

We have to make sure we are there for those who need us - those who are trying to escape the same despotism and persecution that brought so many here in generations past. We have to have an immigration system that opens its doors to those who want to be Americans and makes it possible for them to become citizens.

We have to be very careful that as we adjust to our new realities that we don’t forget who we are.

So, we have to call on our leaders to move cautiously, carefully and quickly, to put in a process that reopens our doors and that does not penalize the innocent.

We have to make American citizenship mean something, but not at the expense of the courage, compassion and fearless determination to do what is right that has been this nation’s hallmark for generations.

It is a much harder path, but we are up to it.

It is the difference between succumbing to the fear and standing tall for what we know is right, no matter how hard that challenge is.

It is what we have done for generations - set a course for freedom and justice and then ask the world to follow.

- The Sharon Herald

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PUT UNEMPLOYMENT CENTER WORKERS BACK ON THE JOB, Jan. 28

A number of Pennsylvanians who have dealt with unemployment compensation service centers complained about long wait times and busy signals before Dec. 19. The furlough of 521 call center employees and other staffers that day may have only increased their chagrin.

The layoffs include about 50 percent of the employees who handle incoming calls to the centers. With Pennsylvania’s most recent unemployment figure hovering at 5.6 percent, nearly a full percentage point above the national level, the job cuts may translate to further inconvenience for thousands already reeling from joblessness.

At the same time the layoffs happened, six days before Christmas, the administration of Gov. Tom Wolf shuttered three UC centers: in Allentown, Altoona and Lancaster. None of them is within 100 miles of Washington, but the cutbacks may be having a ripple effect here. Calls by the Observer-Reporter to CareerLink offices in Washington and Greene counties, inquiring about the volume of calls at those locations, were not returned. The employees on hand may have been under siege.

The unemployment center workers who are now, themselves, unemployed have gotten a lot of backing in recent weeks. Service Employees International Union Local 668 organized several rallies statewide Jan. 19, including one in downtown Pittsburgh. Then last Monday, the SEIU led another rally in Harrisburg that drew other unions, nonprofit groups, supporters and even a dozen or so legislators. They convened at the state Capitol, along with laid-off employees, urging the Legislature to pass funding bills for the centers, which would enable the workers to return to their jobs.

Last week’s rally took place on the first day of the legislative session for the Senate and House. That was appropriate timing, for there is a political element to these furloughs. A bill was before the state Senate late last year that would have provided millions in funding to the Unemployment Compensation system through the state Department of Labor & Industry. The Republican-controlled chamber did not vote on it. Wolf, a Democrat, said the money was needed to continue operating the statewide centers, and ended up closing three of them.

The reduction in the number of workers almost certainly weighs heavily on those still toiling in the service centers. There have been reports of long lines and long waits on phones at the centers and at the CareerLink offices that have been beneficial to so many. Benefits checks have been reported delayed or missing.

And the situation certainly weighs heavily on people relying on the service centers, as the number of jobless continues to hover high. An estimated 366,000 Pennsylvanians were considered to be unemployed in December.

It is a thorny set of circumstances that can be alleviated if the General Assembly passes the funding, allowing UC employees to return and paving the way for the governor to reopen the three centers he shut down.

Those would not be the only lives made easier. As Rick Bloomingdale, president of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, said at the rally in Harrisburg: “These folks are the lifeline for thousands of Pennsylvanians who struggle every day.”

- The (Washington) Observer-Reporter

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