Tag Archives: prison

Remember Vets – By Doing Something!

At the Vietnam wall of remembrance

At the Vietnam wall of remembrance

We have had another Memorial Day and remembered the sacrifice of the men and women who served this nation.

But we really should be doing a lot more than simply – “remembering them.”

We must do better and demand that our elected and appointed officials “do something.”

My late uncle, Charles Flannery, served in the armed forces led by General Patton when the Allies attacked by way of Sicily, landing on the beaches of Italy.

Charles was shot in the chest, lifted off his feet, spun around, knocked unconscious, and taken prisoner.  He returned home quite emaciated.

Years after the war, Charles died in a hospital in the Bronx that, according to my elders, refused to give him more blood, to save him from that earlier chest wound.

Ours was one family, as young as I was, that resented the nation’s unfulfilled promise to our Uncle Charles.

Our nation has been long on promises to vets when leaving our shores to serve our nation abroad, and quite uneven, often indifferent, falling way short to meet their needs, upon their return home broken and damaged by their service at war.

One clear indication of how we are currently failing our service men and women is the statistic that we lose so many soldiers upon their return to suicide. Continue reading

The “black flower” of civilized society

A row of cells at the model penitentiary in Philadelphia (photo by John P. Flannery)

A row of cells at the model penitentiary in Philadelphia (photo by John P. Flannery)

Prisons are factories of crime where the convicted, with little hope of returning to “civilized” society, decide to make their way outside the law when they’re released.

The prison conditions don’t help – the cliques, mob tanks and gang corridors prompt violence and abuse between inmates. There are “correction” officers ignoring and even facilitating illegal drugs, consensual sex, rape, torture, and escape; these “law” officers are “instructing” the inmates how the world “really” works. When a prisoner is ill, the institution often fails to provide critical medical attention. Cruel, yes, but not unusual. In the Commonwealth of Virginia, we have some 40 doctors and 14 psychiatrists to care for about 30,000 prisoners.

When I was a NY federal prosecutor, we investigated and prosecuted prison corruption, wiring inmates and guards we “turned,” but there’s hardly a prison or jail in America to this day that could come up “clean” if carefully scrutinized.

Perhaps what’s worse is that we openly allow and encourage prison wardens to confine prisoners to solitary for indefinite periods. Continue reading

Redefining Bakery

Have you ever heard of a Christian bakery?

I’ve been to many bakeries in my life. French bakeries, Italian bakeries, European bakeries, Mexican bakeries, but never a Christian bakery. The term just popped up because a so-called “Christian bakery,” Sweet Cakes by Melissa closed over a controversy. The owners refused to bake a cake for a client’s wedding because they thought the “act” of baking the cake violated their religious liberty. In Yiddish, we’d say the act was treif, but treif refers to products, not acts, and that’s where the people who orchestrated this controversy run into trouble.

The Oregon Family Policy Council, sister to our Virginia [some] Families Foundation placed a sign in the closed bakery reading:

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IS UNDER ATTACK IN GRESHAM

The late Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship Ministries Manhattan Declaration posted an article on its Facebook page that lead to this exchange: Continue reading