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About Cottage Grove sentinel. (Cottage Grove, Or.) 1909-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 16, 2019)
4A • COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL • JANUARY 16, 2019 O PINION The First Amendment Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridg- ing the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition their Government for a redress of greivences. Letters to the Editor Policy Th e Sentinel welcomes letters to the editor as part of a community discussion of issues on the local, state and national level. Emailed letters are preferred. Handwritten or typed letters must be signed. All letters need to include full name, address and phone number; only name and city will be printed. Letters should be limited to about 300 words. Letters are subject to editing for length, grammar and clarity. Publication of any letter is not guaranteed and depends on space available and the volume of letters received. 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As with all letters and advertising content, the newspaper, at the sole discretion of the publisher, general manager and editor, reserves the right to reject any letter that doesn’t follow the above criteria. Who benefi ts most from more prisons? In an interview on NPR last May, Homeland Security Sec- retary Kirstjen Nielsen com- pared the Trump administra- tion’s “Zero Tolerance” policy to the same policy experienced by incarcerated Americans ev- ery day in this country who are separated from their children. “If you break the law, you will be prosecuted. It’s no dif- ferent than what we do every day in every part of the United States when an adult commits a crime,” Nielsen said. “We’re following that same policy at our borders.” And she’s absolutely correct. In fact, we have a long his- tory of state-sanctioned family separation that continues as a widespread practice today — particularly in our justice sys- tem, where approximately 2.7 million children have a parent behind bars. And the fastest growing group of prisoners? Women. According to a report by the Prison Fellowship, there has been a 14-fold increase of women in prison since 1970, and 80 percent of them are single mothers. Whether guilty or innocent, men and women oft en spend weeks, months and sometimes years in prison awaiting trial for non-violent crimes, losing their jobs, homes and custody Refugee Service (LIRS) and Women’s Refugee Commis- sion (WRC), between October 2013 and September 2014, the U.S. government apprehanded 68,334 children accompanied by a parent at the southwest border — a 361 percent in- crease since the previous year. Keep in mind that more than half of all the children From the Managing Editor’s Desk Ned Hickson of their children before they’ve even had a chance to plead their case. Th e fact is, the current “law and order” approach isn’t new either. It was echoed by Presi- dent Nixon in the late 1960s, as well as Presidents Reagan and Clinton and their attempts to combat the drug war by creat- ing massive prison expansions to keep up with the demands of higher incarceration rates. In addition to prisons, in 2014 the U.S. government massively expanded its de- tention centers for immigrant families. According to reports from the Lutheran Immigration and who entered into family deten- tion facilities in that time were six years old or younger. And that was before the “Zero Tolerance” posture tak- en by past Attorney Gener- al Jeff Sessions, which com- pounded the problem by demanding enforcement with- out the necessary resources to do so humanely. But this is not a problem that is unique to the Trump administration, although its poor handling of it has made it uniquely terrible. When the Obama adminis- tration began detaining fam- ilies in large facilities back in 2014, for-profi t correctional corporation GEO Group an- swered the call with the Karnes Detention Center in Texas, which recently broke ground at that site in order to double its capacity. Another detention cen- ter was opened by Correc- tion Corporation of America (CCA) in 2015 that holds 819 mothers and 1,000 children in a lock-down style facility. Both GEO Group and CCA have had facilities closed in the past (Artesia Detention Center and Hutto Detention center, respectively) due to allega- tions of abuse and poor living conditions — only to re-open somewhere else with a govern- ment contract. While I think we all agree that our borders should nev- er be a revolving door, par- ticularly in an era with the constant threats of global ter- rorism and illegal drugs, one must ask who stands to benefi t most from an ever-expanding system of prisons and deten- tion centers. And whether tax dollars giv- en to corporate prisons and detention centers is money well spent, or money spent to pretend that all is well. Send letters to: nhickson@cgsentinel.com or cmay@cgsentinel.com HOW TO CONTACT YOUR REPS Oregon state representatives Oregon federal representatives • Sen. Floyd Prozanski District 4 State Senator PO Box 11511 Eugene, Ore. 97440 Phone: 541-342-2447 Email : sen.fl oydprozanski@ state.or.us • Rep. Cedric Hayden Republican District 7 State Representative 900 Court St. NE Salem, Ore. 97301 Phone: 503-986-1407 Website: www.leg.state.or. us/hayden Email: rep.cedrichayden@ state.or.us • Rep. Peter DeFazio (House of Representatives) 405 East 8th Ave. #2030 Eugene, Ore. 97401 Email: defazio.house.gov/ contact/email-peter Phone: 541-465-6732 • Sen. Ron Wyden 405 East 8th Ave., Suite 2020 Eugene, Ore. 97401 Email: wyden.senate.gov Phone: (541) 431-0229 • Sen. Jeff Merkley Email: merkley.senate.gov Phone: 541-465-6750 C ottage G rove S entinel (541) 942-3325 Administration Jenna Bartlett, Group Publisher Gary Manly, General Manager ..................................................... Ext. 1207 gmanly@cgsentinel.com Allison Miller, Multimedia Marketing Specialist ....................... Ext. 1213 amiller@cgsentinel.com Gerald Santana, Multimedia Marketing Specialist ..................... Ext. 1216 gsantana@cgsentinel.com Gina Nauman, Inside Multimedia Marketing Specialist ........... Ext. 1203 gnauman@cgsentinel.com Editorial Ned Hickson, Managing Editor...............................................541-902-3520 nhickson@cgsentinel.com Caitlyn May, Editor. ....................................................................... Ext. 1212 cmay@cgsentinel.com Zach Silva, Sport Editor ................................................................. 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