American Forum

Several times I have been invited to the weekly meetings of the Rotary Club of Birmingham. Like any busy business club meeting, with a couple of hundred people in attendance, there is a chorus of knives, forks and spoons, clanging ever so slightly as members try to finish their meal when a speaker begins to speak. This past May, when Bill Finch, former director of Conservation at the Nature Conservancy and longtime nature writer spoke to Rotary it took only 30 seconds before the room fell completely silent.

He was speaking about the Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Only a few weeks after the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, Finch described the slow moving invasion that was taking place on Alabama’s and the Gulf Coast’s shores and its devastating impact on our people and the environment. When he finished his presentation, the audience was shell-shocked. I remember walking amongst the members of the club after the meeting – heads were shaking, and shoulders slightly lowered. The members were somber.

On December 3, 2009, the cable giant Comcast announced plans to buy NBC/Universal from General Electric in a $28 billion merger.

Ever since, lawmakers in Washington and legions of activists have been raising the alarm about the threat such a deal would pose to telecommunication workers, cable and Internet users, and communities of color.

As a result, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC), the Justice Department, and two Congressional committees have spent months carefully reviewing the proposed merger. The FCC even held a public hearing on the matter in Chicago last month.

Incarceration rates in Missouri are 12 percent higher than the nation. We also spend 6.8 percent of our state budget on the cost of incarceration.

Currently there are over 30,000 men and women in Missouri’s prisons. Reducing that number would substantially reduce costs so we can better spend that money to support the thousands in the state who find themselves out of work, hungry and homeless.

Governors all over the nation are looking hard for ways to stop unnecessary, costly incarceration. Absent some kind of expansive legislative action, this cost-saving strategy rests solely in the hands of the governor. The concern, appropriately, is that if we release these prisoners, will they commit new crimes?

So how can we reduce the prison population, while at the same time, protect Missourians?