I’m talking about a law that is being misused.
What I’m seeing is a very poor response to addiction.

Prison isn’t harm reduction for addicts not ready to quit, unless you know something about Alabama prisons that make them unique from any other prison in either one of our countries.

I am haunted.

Tonight as Mike was straddling his two worlds and explaining to a frozen chosen, he kept saying “but I can build a prison.”
Kept popping into the middle or end of the sentences.
Must be the preacher in him.;^)

Mike speaks english just fine, when he said that phrase he lapsed more into his southern accent. He’s really good at colouring.
I saw what he was saying and our hearts broke for Alabama’s daughters.

There is no room for sentimentality, maudlism; being clear eyed isn’t about despair or bitterness or settling for less than.
I didn’t hang up convinced this prosecutor is about tough love as much as zealousness.

Thanks for taking time to explain in text, and explain with grace.

The Birmingham News had an editorial decrying the use of this law nearly a month before the NYT jumped on it. Good bet this is were they picked up this story and gave it flesh for the rest of us. The only other reference I could find this early was on womens health blogs.

http://www.al.com/opinion/birminghamnews/index.ssf?/
base/opinion/120332612014800.xml&coll=2

…but I can build a prison.
…I came to set the prisoner free…

In my experience, those who know abuse tend to not draw lines about who’s more of a victim and who’s not. And those who have not been embittered tend to be more merciful to all God’s creatures, not just those who are more fully developed.

This isn’t a subject for arguing; it’s about the heart.
Peace.

Since Bene and I just talked about this, let me go ahead and fill in the blanks about the stuff I should’ve said last night instead of just reacting.

How many of you have lived in or at least spent some appreciable time in the southern United States? Although I was reared for about eight years in the north, primarily in the midwestern US, I have lived the bulk of my life in the south. My formative years having been spent in the north, my outlook tends to be more midwestern, but I am intimately acquainted with southern culture in a way others might not be since I also have the perspective from which to critique it as well. My reaction relates to how I think a southerner would read this.

First and foremost, understand that small town US southerners are like small town people everywhere, and particularly small church people, churches I have served at various points over the past twenty years. They will give you the shirts off their backs if that will help you when you are down, but if they sense you are taking advantage of their generosity, they will cut you loose in a skinny minute. Tough love was probably born in the south.

The other thing is that such communities are notoriously insular, northern or southern, either one. You’re welcome to come be part of what we’re doing, but don’t come around here trying to change us. There’s a reason that the worst resistance to the civil rights movement occurred in places like this.

Now … put yourself in that mindset in a southern community like Covington County, AL, population 37,000 … SALUTE! (for those of you who remember Hee Haw) We don’t have problems like this around here. Meth labs? Crackheads? That’s what you get when OUTSIDERS come in. But in this day and age, you can’t get away from this stuff. In fact, as I told Bene on the phone, the people who set up these meth labs and such come to rural communities like this and set up shop because it’s far easier to overwhelm the meager law enforcement resources of these small communities.

In these small towns, we take care of our own problems as a private matter in our own families, so what do you do when a problem like this starts to overwhelm your community? You don’t have the resources for enforcement, so you can be darned sure you don’t have the resources for prevention either.

But … they sure do have a big ol’ dadgum prison up the highway, and you can send the problem up the road there. Let the State of Alabama deal with it. How do you justify this? Well, I don’t have the ability to take care of this in my small town, but if I send this girl to jail, at least she’s off the street and hopefully she gets cleaned up by the system because she has no access to the meth there. (Not likely these days since there’s about as much drug use in as out, but that’s another topic.)

Also, the prison will probably have the program needed to get her broken of her addiction. It’s a sad state of affairs, but you can’t get a lot of action behind building treatment centers, but you sure can get a southerner to vote for building a prison. The other consideration is that in prison, you take away the girl’s right to say no to treatment. Perhaps elsewhere, maybe in Canada, you have a system whereby you can “incarcerate” someone like this without actually making a felon out of them, but not in the United States. As Bene and I discussed, our citizens have somewhat different emphases on individual versus community rights.

Does this state of affairs stink? Yes, but it’s the system we’ve got, and when there is a cultural bias towards a particular way of addressing the problem, then it’s hard, perhaps even more so today, to bust up that inertia. But one thing’s for sure–no self-respecting southerner is going to take their cues on right versus wrong from The New York Times.

Part of what chapped my hide originally was the utter hypocrisy of that paper, with its history and general outlook towards southerners as being gap-toothed ignoramuses who have just now discovered foot coverings in high society, going after a southern prosecuter after a couple of DECADES of them giving a bye to Eliot Spitzer, the emperor (VIP, even) of prosecutorial abuse because he went after the Wall Street crowd. Now that he got busted being what he is, NOW they want to tut tut about his conduct, but not before. So, regardless of what the situation might be, the last people I want to hear telling me how terrible and abusive our prosecutors are is The NYT.

Bene, to a couple of your points, I apologize for any offense in relation to the term, “druggie girl.” It was a response to what I felt was a denigration of the worth of the fetus and was not meant as a broader value judgment regarding an addict’s worth in the sight of God. Mea culpa on that one. Completely. As regards prosecutorial hubris, we don’t learn here whether Gambril is just Eliot Spitzer’s evil southern twin or if he’s just a product of his culture who thinks he’s giving these girls the only chance he can realistically offer them. I wish I knew. As we discussed, “cracker” is a derogatory term applied to rural southerners and was meant to suggest that this is the stereotype The NYT was going for.

And you nailed me as far as the First Nations Reserve comment is concerned. I probably wouldn’t have commented about that, but then I don’t know anything at all about that cultural context, so why would I bless you with that particular vein of my ignorance?

Would I offer assistance as a minister to someone like one of these girls who came to me seeking it? I hope so, but institutionally I am in no better position to help in that regard than you are. I’ve had a meth addict approach me for assistance in a parking lot before, not in the form of addressing the larger problem, which I can assure you she had absolutely no interest in receiving from me. She needed money for “gas for her car,” not help. And I have seen her in that same parking lot on another occasion, and I confess that at one point I even pondered whether calling the police just to get her off the street, perhaps even accusing her falsely of soliciting for prostitution or perhaps finding some way to entrap her in such an action, might be a way to get her some help, even if for a brief time. How crazy is that? But that’s how one thinks in such hopeless situations sometimes. I seriously doubt that I as an individual had much hope of getting her free of her addiction.

Would I hire a felon? I work at a nuclear plant; that’s not an option. However, were she already an employee, oddly enough, my employer’s Employee Assistance Program would send her to treatment if she failed a drug screen, but that’s a one shot deal. If she went back to using, she’d be bounced.

I don’t make any excuses for who we are as southerners, but I hope this sheds some light on what Gambril may face where he is. None of this absolves him of the need to do better, nor does it absolve me either, but until a different, better, realistic, and pragmatic alternative is available, I challenge all of you to consider that he just might be doing the best he’s able. No need to write my own post since I appear to have saved you the trouble of linking it elsewhere.

Bene understands where I am coming from about this. I didn’t want to dominate the comments section over this (so, Mike, how’s that workin’ for ya?), but there was much more to be said. Being acquainted not only with Bene’s writing here but elsewhere, there is some degree to which when Bene writes, it IS about reporting, and if blogs are meant to stimulate dialogue, I’d say we probably got one going.

“Shouldn’t an adult not only have made up their minds, but passionately defend being anti-death penalty by now?” Perhaps so, but I’m not claiming to have all the answers. I’d certainly be open to you making up for the sub par job my parents (and clearly my wife) have done of rearing me, but be advised, I’m just shy of 47 years old, and I may be a tough case. And at this age, if I can’t pontificate, then really, what other vices are left to me?

My bottom line, Toedancer, whether in regard to this post or in regard to your starchy little takedown, is that some of us seem to have a much clearer and purer view of what justice and mercy and righteousness require, and others of us seem to muddle through the best we can and ask forgiveness for our own inability and lack of discernment or wisdom about difficult matters.

I’m in that latter category, but I don’t consider that some kind of red badge of courage. I KNOW I stink in the sight of God apart from the cross of Christ. How about you? As long as you appear to be prancing around my blog picking up little tidbits about which to drop pithy little comments here rather than there in my comments section (and by the way, tell all your friends, come one, come all and let us have a good chat about some of these issues), perhaps you might weigh in on the one where I wrote about the dialectic between justice and righteousness in the Old Testament. If perhaps you think you might afford me some of the righteousness about which that post speaks, then perhaps we might have some basis to talk about the justice about which you speak.

I am referring to born, breathing, APGAR ratable, cut from the umbilical cord.

I am not God, and I do not know when He breathes His spirit into a being. A fetus is a fetus.

“Don’t you agree with protecting children from abuse?”

And when did you stop beating your wife?
On the abuse scale of 0 to 6 the abuse my siblings and I went through was rated at 4.
0 being no abuse. 5 - institutionalized with severe physical damage, 6 - dead.

You go right ahead and work on ‘denying mercy to grownups’ all you want Jared, I’ve made my position clear.

There are about 4.4 million confirmed pregnancies in the U.S. every year.

- 900,000 to 1 million of those end in pregnancy losses each year.
- 500,000 pregnancies each year end in miscarriage
- 26,000 end in stillbirth (20 weeks gestation)

Read the data on incarcerating pregnant females/ or post-pregnant females yourself. Letters have been sent to Alabama by major medical organizations, pointing out far more effective interventions.

Just to be clear, this refers to physically developed persons and not persons in the womb, right?

I don’t know about incarcerating pregnant drug addicts, but it certainly does seem odd to say that to treat the unborn as created in the image of God and worthy of mercy necessarily means denying mercy to “grown ups.”
You mention “this is what happens when you apply legal status to fetuses . . .” You are right. If an unborn child is a child, then as with all born children, they must be protected from abuse. Don’t you agree with protecting children from abuse?

Or is that you don’t believe a fetus is a person?
Honest question in hopes of understanding your logic . . .

ABC news: http://www.abc3340.com/news/stories/0208/496076.html

http://www.al.com/opinion/birminghamnews/
index.ssf?/base/opinion/120332612014800.xml&coll=2

Women are being charged and imprisoned for still births.
South Carolina, New Mexico, Arizona, Alabama, Colorado, Georgia, Missouri, North Dakota and New Hampshire. They are criminalized as child abusers before they have given birth.

Ob-GYN’s and medical associations are trying to get law makers and enforcers to pay attention. 41% of women of childbearing age in the US fall below the poverty level and do not have private healthcare or Medicaid.