How not to feed the GEO Group's for-profit prison business!

As an active participant in Friends Committee on WA Public Policy, fcwpp.org  I do not believe that contracting with the GEO Group to send WA prisoners out of state far from family and the support network they will need upon release is an appropriate way to deal with overcrowding in WA prisons.

The GEO group currently operates the NW Detention Center in Tacoma for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement).  The Tacoma facility has accumulated a long list of civil, human, and labor rights complaints right under the noses of WA taxpayers. How much worse will problems be 2000 miles away from local observers’ capacity to monitor?

 Instead of pouring WA taxpayers’ dollars into the pocket of a for-profit firm with incentive to continue incarcerating people, I urge policymakers to ease current overcrowding in WA prisons, cut recidivism and reduce future growth in the number of Washingtonians behind bars. I urge the legislature and WA policymakers to:

 --Expand juvenile restorative justice programs.

 --Fund increased mental health services to help people address substance abuse and other issues while cutting back on entanglement with the criminal justice system. I believe these services are vital. The legislature should add revenue and should be funded from the operating budget and also support giving local jurisdictions the option of a .1 % sales tax to help fund these services.

 --Enact this year’s property crimes bill to intervene early, cut the losses, and get people back on the road to life as productive citizens instead of serving longer prison sentences for property crimes than the average for many other states.

--Restore inmate access to and funding for study at WA state universities and community college to help them return to society

 --Restore parole so offenders have goals to work for and so WA taxpayers are not asked to fund incarceration long past when most offenders pose any further risk to society.

 The WA state legislature can act on several of these recommendations yet in this session. It’s time to invest WA taxpayer dollars in WA residents, not just in prisons for profit.

 Please share. We need a conversation about this!

 

What draws ...to Friends Meeting, from Reno Friends Meeting.

RantWoman enjoys collecting "First Time at Meeting" items and is quite charmed by this one.

http://www.renofriends.org/what-draws-you-to-quakerism/

Popcorn and pure joy, or at least envelope-stuffing!

RantWoman's efforts endlessly to cavil, quarrel, irritate, and generally be all around a joy-inducing presence have been generously fed by a couple popcorn moments from a recent Meeting retreat. The following may or may not embroider on actual conversations.

1.  In very best sort of shrill gym teacher voice, RantWoman are you going to participate?

[Look, Lady, RantWoman has already gotten herself up, dressed, onto a bus, a good walk to Meeting. RantWoman has done this in total faith that God WILL show up. but first ...]

...coffee...coffee...

...We're playing A Great Wind Blows, God's little aerobics at an hour before God herself is awake let alone verbal....

...large legally blind person trying to tell which images are real bodies and which are the RantWoman visual amusement park, stumbling around big circle BC, Before caffeine SHOULD scare people....

But look you can just wave your fingers.

Bless the Lord oh my Soul and may all glory be to Dial-a-Tirade except it was too early in the morning for Dial-A-Tirade to pull words together.

WAY too early to find words for "Oh, yeah, really? Really? Which part of Total Fog and blur do you have NO CONCEPT of trying to pull waving fingers out of?

Too early to interact with some Friends' "Waving fingers is cultural Appropriation from Deaf Culture" issues (You want Deaf Culture? Appropriate THAT! Followed by, say, fierce waving arm millimeters in front of nose gesture.)

Too bad--or maybe Praise God? RantWoman could not think of a way to "lose" on behalf of "A Great Wind Blows for everyone who should not be expected to be verbal before....

2. Worship Sharing, There are worship group leaders who tend the group like a flock of lambs.  And there are Drill sergeant worship group leaders.
Again with the gym class metaphors, different coach:

Either speak once or pass!
Either speak once or pass!
Either speak once or pass!

Look Lady, careful what you ask for! How about either SOMEONE notices how vigorously I am nodding along with another Friend OR we will be WAY past Dial-a-Tirade and well into Russian Novel?????

Yea, verily.

God did show up, multiple times.

And there was an EXCELLENT envelope-stuffing exercise. RantWoman has stuffed LOTS of envelopes.  Envelop-stuffing is like riding a bicycle: one NEVER forgets.

TIME SENSITIVE Request to complete SURVEY: Young Adult Quaker Volunteer Activities

RantWoman's Meeting is doing a discernment process about its 25-yearold program QuEST and Quaker Voluntary Service. RantWoman received the request to complete a survey by email today and is clear to post the request to her blog. RantWoman will forward the link to this blog entry to the Ad-hoc Committee and will do only very minimal moderation of any comments posted here.

The survey mentioned below contains contact information for the ad-hoc committee compiling the data and RantWoman has edited the email to omit that.

RantWoman has also added the website for the QuEST program operated by her Meeting so people completing the survey have some basis for comparing the QuEST experience with  opportunities offered through Quaker Voluntary Service.

Other than that, the request:

Please take this short survey, telling us what you think is important in
*any* Quaker program for young adults volunteering with peace and justice
organizations. 

[Any year-long program because that is the model under discussion here--RantWoman, trying to keep the editorializing to a minimum. RantWoman seeks to save clear statements of her own opinions for another post in order HOPEFULLY not to bias the survey, that is unless RantWoman mentioning different models... speaks to anyone else. If so, the survey contains multiple open-ended comment fields]

It does not matter if you are familiar or not with UFM's
QuEST Program. The QuEST Committee of University Meeting has set up an ad
hoc subcommittee to explore a possible relationship between QuEST  http://quest-seattle.org/  and Quaker Voluntary Service (QVS).  (More information on QVS at
www.quakervoluntaryservice.org.) 

As part of our discernment process, we want to hear what *you* think.  

Please click on the link below and fill out this survey on-line, DEADLINE JUNE 8.   It should take only a few minutes.   If you have questions or further comments, see contact info in the survey.

Thank you for assisting in our process.

Ad Hoc Subcommittee

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/T9DYFC7

Fresh Popcorn from various Fora.

RantWoman is TRYING for Zen-like calm and unflappability. Really she is.

Since there is a lot of steam, MAYBE it's a good thing there are popcorn kernels about too.

(Please hold in the Light the point that right now the popcorn kernels seem especially prone to pop around one specific weighty and greatly esteemed Friend, a Friend RantWoman too holds very dear even though the popcorn popper is sort of overflowing.)

Popcorn Kernel Zone #1: the most recent Meeting for Business. "We're all volunteers!" The supply of popcorn kernels in Meeting for Business remains bountiful. Perhaps it is a blessing that there are way too many to pop all at once or that there are so many that RantWoman's Excessively plain English to Quakerese filter just shuts down completely.

In this case, the pterodactyl that might have come flying out of RantWoman's mouth would sound something like "What you think there is a different standard for God than if you are getting paid / relying on professional experience / walking in that zone where God and professional experience intertwine???"

MAYBE there also would have been a popcorn kernel about the difference between "We are all volunteers" and doing as much as humanly possible, doing as much as one can do cheerfully, and various other ways to color the gap between what one might WISH and what actually happens. Or maybe something about a gracious and versatile God able to work with....  Hold that point in the Light and hope that the RantWoman Message Manglement service also manages not yet to route a couple matters to Dial-a-Tirade.

Popcorn Kernel Zone #2, Adult Religious Education with the fact that RantWoman is frequently the youngest or in the case reported here RantWoman thinks the second -youngest person in the room:

In a flow of conversation about whether those present have any concept of Quaker missionaries, and especially missionaries from liberal, unprogrammed all over the theological map Quakers, one Friend reported a conversation with another Weighty Friend about whether everyone should be a Quaker. Weighty Friend is reported to have said well, everyone should know about Quakers but should not necessarily all BE Quakers and should certainly have some choice about it.

RantWoman's first popcorn kernel moment: Wait. Excuse me? Where does God / the Holy Spirit / the Goddess / SOME sense of something larger than ourselves fit into this conversation?

RantWoman's second popcorn kernel moment: if it is truly something larger than oneself moving, then how much say do individual Friends, even Weighty friends necessarily get about the whole matter?

The flow of conversational steam went a different direction and what did emerge from rantWoman's mouth was a repeated call to talk about Capital gains tax and how many people in WA are tragically undertaxed.

Go figure!

God, REALLY ?????

Senior High murals provide insight into students' lives and studies

RantWoman went out seeking answers to an important question about school colors and was served up wonderment instead. RantWoman remembers wonderful murals on the halls of Billings Senior High but RantWoman does not remember all the murals mentioned in the video below.
If RantWoman were not already feeling sentimental, the Save our Murals project would do it for sure.

The Save our murals webpage http://www.billingsschools.org/Page/1131

A really sweet video.



RantWoman is unclear why she was more strongly led to post here than on her other blog which does in fact go near many educational topics. Cope!

Quibbles and querulousness

RantWoman, Why oh WHY can you not just CHILL OUT???

 

·       Reflecting on last month’s Meeting for Business, under our bylaws the annual meeting and also the first introduction of the budget.

 

o   Quorum of Annual Meeting defined in bylaws as ¼ of the members who live in King County, 21 or 22.

 

o   Budget for year includes dues to Quarterly and Yearly meeting. In our Meeting we customarily pay dues for everyone who is a member regardless of whether they have been inactive for a number of years. We figure this balances out for people who are very involved but have not sought membership.

 

·       Nearly first Item on the Agenda; termination of 7 inactive members, none of whom lives in King County. Our care and Counsel committee makes many efforts to contact and also pays attention to whether people continue to contribute even if they live at a distance.

 

o   Two adults and their spouses long ago associated with a worship group under our care. The mother of the two adults is still active; her daughters are not. No question, Goodbye and God bless.

 

o   Two adult children who grew up in Meeting, live a great distance away and have never taken any steps one way or another about membership. Goodbye and God Bless!

 

o   A Friend who did MANY kinds of service to Meeting and who is remembered with deep gratitude by many present but who lives at a distance and says he no longer wants connection. Many are sorry; not sense of the room to postpone. RantWoman could have stood aside AGAIN if only out of appreciation that Friend at one point asked to use our space as a neutral place where the community of local taxi drivers could work out some issues.

 

o   Net impact on quorum 0 because everyone terminated lives outside of King County.

o   Net impact on budget: money saved on dues is less than .5% of proposed annual budget.

 

·       Tidiness?

 

·       Sloppy reading of bylaws?

 

o   In WA Recording Clerks are customarily listed as Secretary on forms needed by the State of WA.

 

o   As if RantWoman needed any more reasons to be considered an all-around pain in the rear, at some point during a Recording Clerk gig, RantWoman looked up the roles assigned by statute to organizational secretaries. They include things like seeing that proper notice of meetings occur and also helping to see that process follows the bylaws. No problem about notice or quorum. And…?

 

o   Should RantWoman mention that the Recording Clerk falls under RantWoman’s continuing concern about people wearing too many hats.

 

·       Timeliness?

 

o   RantWoman herself did not even fully massage her issues until after Meeting for Business.

 

o   And just how much of a calamity is it????

 

·       Note: Count of members present: 50% greater than number required for quorum

 

Tidiness not terrible, but a BIT of a downer way to open Annual meeting.

 

PLUS RantWoman wanted to bring up a different line item to suggest to the budget. Whine! Moan. Howl. Yowl!

 

Please hold in the Light.