PlanetAlbany

Prison rape nonstory

Most of the front page of yesterday's Times Union was taken up by a story headlined: "Cruel, but not unusual," with the drophed: "Great Meadow in Washington County ranks 5th worst nationwide for inmate sex abuse." Says the lede: "Behind the walls of Great Meadow Correctional Facility, less than 75 miles from the state Capitol, an old stereotype remains hauntingly true: Go to prison, risk rape."

This succeeded in getting my attention because prison rape is a genuinely awful thing, and I had not thought the rate of it was worse than average in New York state. I still don't think so. The story is based on the percentages of inmates who report sexual assaults by a fellow inmate or staff member. The nationwide rate, according to the story, is 4.5 percent, and at Great Meadow the rate is 11.3 percent.

But it turns out that when you break the Great Meadow figure down, only 3 percent involves alleged inmate-on-inmate abuse, and 9.3 percent is the alleged staff-on-inmate rate. This seems odd on its face, because all the inmates at this maximum security facility and the overwhelming majority of guards are male. It is well known that heterosexual prisoners deprived of female company may turn to homosexual sex and sometimes rape, but the guards suffer no similar deprivation. The story provides no actual evidence for any incident of a Great Meadow prison guard raping or sexually abusing an inmate.

To its credit, the TU story quotes the Department of Corrections spokesman, Erik Kriss, who "attributed the Great Meadow numbers to pat-and-frisk searches to find contraband." It also quotes the correction officers' union president, Donn Rowe, who notes that "Some of the people making these allegations are not in the situation they're in for being honest people." No one in the story disputes these remarks, and they seem to me to account for the numbers. That is to say, inmates are complaining about the way guards pat them down in searches for contraband. Their complaints may or may not have merit. But they don't amount to an epidemic of guards raping inmates, or justify the TU sensationalizing this story to the point of distortion.

Global Foundries, Grant Cottage

The Times Union reported this morning that the $300 million new subsidy being requested by Global Foundries has been drastically scaled back, and local Sen. Roy McDonald confirmed that when I ran into him this afternoon at Saratoga Spa State Park. He said the chip fab company is seeking five annual grants of $30 million starting next year for a total of $150 million. While the company wants the state OK now, there would be no new cost in the budget year starting April 1 -- i.e. the budget currently being negotiated. In return for the new subsidy, the already heavily subsidized company would expand the large plant currently under construction in the Saratoga County town of Malta by 90,000 square feet, and add an undetermined number of new jobs. McDonald said he strongly supports the request.

The senator was attending the annual meeting of Friends of Grant Cottage, as was Robert Kuhn, a senior official with the state Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation. Despite the unprecedented budget pressure on the Parks Office, Kuhn said money would be found for a much needed repainting of the cottage on Mount McGregor where Ulysses S. Grant died in 1885 after completing his memoirs. The Parks Office also aims to solve the drainage/flooding problem in the cottage's visitor center, Kuhn said. Grant Cottage is operated by the Friends, not the Parks Office, and although the state tried to shut it down in the 1980s, it was not one of the sites targeted in this year's executive budget, which called for closure of many parks and historic buildings run by the Parks Office. The Legislature has not gone along with these cuts.

Recent donations to the Friends, it was announced at the meeting, include $10,000 from Fox News President Roger Ailes.

A bridge too late

This being Adirondack snow-melt season, today seemed like a good time to check out the newish park at the Cohoes Falls in northern Albany County. (All Over Albany had the same thought.) But the footbridge over the canal to the park is padlocked and it won't open until May 1, a sign informed me. Fortunately, there's a sidewalk along Mohawk Street leading to School Street and Overlook Park, where you can still see the action from further away. But a viewer there confirmed my suspicion that by the time May rolls around, the flow and the view will be much reduced.

Senate Democrats do it the Bruno way (updated)

So the state Senate majority's Democratic leaders are resisting subpoenas from the inspector general regarding the aborted AEG deal to install video lottery terminals at the Aqueduct horse racing track in Queens. This raises obvious questions about what they have to hide.

Might whatever it is bear some resemblance to what turned Republican Joe Bruno, the former Senate majority leader, into a felon? He was convicted of taking money from a businessman, Jared Abbruzzese, to whose company he had steered state grants, and who was trying to get a piece of the franchise to run horse racing in New York. Meanwhile, almost nine years after they were authorized, the state is no further along in actually getting the VLTs installed, and has lost many hundred million dollars of revenue as a result. Dysfunctional is far too kind a word to apply to New York state government.

Update: Their pay-to-play is pretty unvarnished, and expanding. "Stench of Senate slime," editorializes The Daily News.   

Diocese responds to critical post

I rescue this comment from my post the other day which was bemoaning the continued closure of churches by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany. Ken Goldfarb, chief spokesman for the diocese, responds:

 

"With all due respect, if one reads the New York Times, the Boston Globe, as well as the Troy Record and the Times Union one would know that churches have been closing in urban areas throughout the northeast. As national and local news organizations have reported, this has been due primarily to a decline in the number of parishioners. They, and overall urban populations, have left the cities and gone south, west and to the suburbs. In addition there has been a national decline in the number of men entering the priesthood. The experience of the Albany Diocese is certainly not unique. The number of church closings in recent years here is at or below the average closed parishes among all dioceses that serve urban populations in the northeast including, Boston, Springfield, New York, Rochester, Newark, Camden, etc. The alleged 'incoherent plan of continued desecration' flies in the face of the more than 2.5 year Called to Be Church pastoral planning process that allowed for grass roots input in the process so that this restructuring could be done in an orderly and coordinated way with parishioners playing a major and unprecedented role in the future of the Catholic Church of this diocese. Of course any time a church closes it is a difficult and painful decision. But, in order for the Church to remain viable and to continue to fulfill its mission it must have the appropriate resources. It would not be wise to use limited resources to maintain churches that now serve a small fraction of what they were built for a century ago, or even served 50-60 years ago."

 

Goldfarb has a point, and as reported in this week's issue of The Evangelist, the diocesan newspaper, they are trying to drum up new parishioners. But even if Bishop Howard Hubbard's diocese is doing no worse than many others -- and even if his handling of the sexual abuse scandal was no worse than many other bishops' -- that's not much of a defense. Bishops by and large have not been held accountable by popes or anyone else on earth, and have been exceedingly reluctant to accept responsibility for the decline of the church on their watch. Back when the last round of church closings was announced in January 2009, I posted criticisms of specific decisions from Amsterdam to Mechanicville, and the current closing process in Watervliet and Green Island does not inspire any more confidence. When one approaches Albany on I-787 and sees the prominent spire of the empty St. Joseph's Church between downtown and Arbor Hill, it is a symbol of aspiration, decline and abandonment. Hubbard has served the diocese for a long time, and has done plenty of good things. Nevertheless, the continuing closure of churches and schools -- and secularization of hospitals such as St. Clare's in Schenectady -- is best described not as some reasonable response to changing demographics, but as a disastrous collapse.

Budget ball in Assembly's court

Assemblyman Bob Reilly, D-Colonie, the Legislature's principal foe of legalizing mixed martial arts bouts, said he hopes revenue from legalization will not be included in the Assembly's budget plan, which is due this week. I talked to Reilly a few minutes ago on the Assembly floor, where the chamber was taking care of nonessential business ahead of a Democratic conference meeting. Reilly noted that the governor's budget included $15 million in revenue from MMA legalization, and that the Senate plan includes the same amount. The Senate plan supposedly includes rules changes, but "I don't trust them," Reilly said.

The Assembly budget plan is expected to include substantial cuts in education funding but by a substantially lower amount than proposed by the governor and accepted by the Senate. Reilly said the chamber will likely fill gaps by accepting Lt. Gov. Ravitch's plan which includes borrowing, and which was not included in the governor's and Senate plans. The Assembly, like the Senate, is expected to nix Gov. Paterson's proposal of a tax on sugared soda. Reilly said he is one of the opponents of this tax, noting that it is not progressive and that the industry incurred substantial costs  last year as a result of the bottle bill enacted by the Legislature and governor.

On the Senate side, meanwhile, I understand some Democratic senators are not happy with their colleague Antoine Thompson, who got 15 of his colleagues last week to sign off on a letter opposing education cuts -- a position contradicted by all of them, and Thompson too, in yesterday's budget resolution vote.

Albany County Catholic cratering

I'd missed this story about more impending Roman Catholic church closings in Albany County, because it's been covered in The Record but apparently not the Times Union. The monumental St. Patrick's in Watervliet is now slated for closure, along with St. Brigid's there and St. Joseph's, the heart of neighboring Green Island. Immaculate Conception, one of three other Watervliet churches that were closed recently, will apparently reopen in what appears to be an incoherent plan of continued desecration. It looks like a new dark age, which I do not see longtime Albany Bishop Howard Hubbard leading us out of.

Senate budget plan surprisingly responsible (updated)

I can't tell you yet what it means or how it will turn out, but this budget plan released today by New York State Senate Democrats actually seems, at first glance, to a considerable extent fiscally responsible.

On the other hand, there's no excuse for the same people further restricting public access at the Capitol. 

Updates: Finance Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Kruger is discussing the budget plan now on the Senate floor, which proceedings can be viewed here.

Republican Minority Leader Dean Skelos has issued a statement opposing the plan (no link, but a sample follows):

"Their budget does not include a cap on state spending or local school
taxes. They add $1.5 billion in new spending that was not in the Governor’s
original budget. They increase spending on welfare and expand eligibility
to include more people, rather than restoring the STAR property tax rebate
check for all homeowners or providing other tax relief.  They propose to
increase Medicaid fraud recoveries by tying the hands of the Medicaid
Inspector General to make it more difficult to fight fraud."

The floor "debate" continues, but so far only with supporters of the resolution, i.e. Democratic senators Liz Krueger, Jeff Klein and Craig Johnson. Now President Pro Tempore Malcolm Smith has started speaking, also in support.

Now the first critic, Republican Sen. John DeFrancisco, is speaking, starting off by denouncing the process by which the plan was produced, saying Republicans saw a draft for the first time yesterday afternoon. He goes on to say, "It's not balanced" by $1.5 billion, and doesn't deal with the state's "structural deficit."

I'd stopped watching, but the TU says the resolution just passed on a party line vote. I'm not clear how the 16 Democrats who last week said they opposed education cuts square that position with this week's more fiscally responsible vote.

Murphy, Owens bestride Congress like a colossus

At least that's what the Times Union says: "House Democrats today abandoned their plan to use a controversial procedural gambit to pass the final piece of the administration-backed health care overhaul without an up-or-down vote on that measure. Two upstate New York lawmakers — Democrats Scott Murphy and Bill Owens — took the lead in pushing against the widely criticized strategy. ... At issue was Democrats’ potential plan to pass a rule for floor debate that would 'deem' the bill passed — without a specific vote on that measure itself."

The only trouble with that heroic scenario is that a couple of days ago, both Murphy and Owens were in the majority on a 222-203 vote which defeated a resolution that, according to The Washington Post, "would have prevented Democrats from using a 'deem and pass' strategy to approve the Senate measure."

So on Thursday the two upstate freshmen go along with party leaders in moving forward 'deem and pass,' and on Saturday, when said leaders decide to abandon the tactic, the two pipsqueak freshmen take credit for the reversal. Sure, that's the way it went down.  

Looks like Murphy's a yes vote (updated)

Rep. Scott Murphy, a Glens Falls Democrat who voted against the health-care reform bill last year, and is now supposedly undecided, this afternoon voted yes on a vital procedural vote to allow the current version of the bill to proceed. It passed 222-203.

I got a mailing today from Murphy which doesn't mention health care but is all about jobs. One of his boasts is that he "worked to bring $151 million to Upstate New York for High Speed Rail, which will connect our local industries to the global market." It's true enough that the feds are providing the money, most of which will be spent on constructing a badly needed second track between Albany and Schenectady, eliminating the worst bottleneck in the state. The trouble is, that $151 million is a pathetically small share for New York of the $8 billion federal rail program, which was part of the stimulus bill. The Republicans called the bill "porkulus" and voted en masse against it, but a more telling criticism of Murphy and the rest of New York's congressional delegation is that they didn't deliver the state's fair share of pork. And it's pretty dumb of the freshman congressman to be boasting about delivering so little.