I found Jesus!!!!
Pinko_Commie
I've been looking for that block for the last 2000 years or so, they keep
claiming he's gonna come back, but he never does.
I looked in all the obvious places, behind the sofa, under the stairs, but i
never founf him :-)
"Sgt Crackrock" <ligh...@catchme.com> wrote in message
news:3D87D1...@catchme.com...
> X-No-Archive: Yes
> Media Awareness Project
> US NC: Women Claiming Their Space In Jails
> URL: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v02/n1733/a07.html
> Newshawk: chip
> Pubdate: Sun, 15 Sep 2002
> Source: Winston-Salem Journal (NC)
> Copyright: 2002 Piedmont Publishing Co. Inc.
> Contact: let...@wsjournal.com
> Website: http://www.journalnow.com/
> Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/504
> Note: The Journal does not publish letters from writers outside its
> daily
> home delivery circulation area.
> Author: Amy Frazier
>
> WOMEN CLAIMING THEIR SPACE IN JAILS
>
> Some Counties Slow To Make Room For Female Inmates
>
> MOCKSVILLE - As a detention officer announced from behind a slit in
> the jail wall that lunch was being served, Melissa Gordon grabbed the
> hand of a fellow inmate and held an empty hand out for another woman
> to hold.
>
> Like a chain of paper dolls cut out of a single orange sheet, six
> women in prison-issue jumpsuits formed a circle and bowed their heads.
> Gordon recited thanks for the meal of beans and hot dogs.
>
> "I love to see that. They do that every day," said Terry Prevette,
> one of eight female detention officers assigned to women inmates in
> the Davie County Detention Center.
>
> Until Davie began housing females at its new jail earlier this year,
> Prevette worked with male inmates.
>
> Female inmates are far different from men, law-enforcement officials
> say, in terms of how much more privacy women are afforded, how they
> interact with each other, their health-care needs and the length of
> time that most spend in jail before being bailed out.
>
> And, until recent years, women were also different from men in that
> they rarely landed in jail. For that reason, some jails - such as the
> one in Yadkin County - aren't set up to hold women. Women arrested in
> Yadkin County are housed in neighboring counties.
>
> Last year, law-enforcement made about 1,400 arrests in Yadkin County
> and 18 percent of those arrested were women. In the mid-1980s,
> deputies might have arrested one woman a month, said Captain Danny
> Widener of the Yadkin County Sheriff's Office.
>
> Sheriff Michael Cain has a simple explanation for the increase.
> "There used to be a day when a girl was a girl. Now they'll fight,
> shoot and carry on like anybody else will. Maybe they're not teaching
> about being a lady no more," he said.
>
> Officials also attribute the increase to the simple fact that suburban
> counties are growing. As the number of male prisoners increased, so
> did the number of women in jail.
>
> According to the N.C. Sentencing Commission, jails in Davidson,
> Davie, Forsyth, Yadkin, Wilkes, Surry and Stokes held 1,639 men and
> 319 women in 1995 - a ratio of about five to one. By 2000, the ratio
> was essentially the same, 2,075 men and 420 women.
>
> Gordon, 21, is among the new class of women who have found themselves
> behind bars. She was locked up for violating the conditions of her
> pre-trial release by smoking marijuana. Her bond had been set at
> $10,000.
>
> "My grandmother is trying to get me out," said Gordon from jail in
> June. "If she does, she does. If she doesn't, she doesn't. I try to
> keep my head up."
>
> Rough Road
>
> When Gordon went to jail the first time in September 2001, her abuse
> of crack cocaine had caused her weight to drop to 92 pounds.
>
> Just days before, she had given birth to an underweight baby whose
> blood contained traces of cocaine, she said.
>
> Gordon went to jail to await trial for charges of forgery and
> uttering, felony possession of cocaine and drug paraphernalia.
>
> Her arrest was fairly typical of those involving women, Cain said.
> Women are mostly arrested for nonviolent crimes such as forgery and
> narcotics use.
>
> In the past 10 years, though, local jails have started housing a
> larger and "harder-core female population," said Bob Lewis, the chief
> of the state's jails and detention section.
>
> "One of the things that promoted that is the infiltration and the
> extensive use of drugs," he said.
>
> Gordon agrees. She blames crack for the trouble in her life and said
> she has her crack problem under control. "I despise that drug so
> much," she said.
>
> Gordon grew up in Yadkinville, at first under the eye of her mother
> and stepfather. During her first years at Forbush High School, she
> started down a path that would lead her to jail.
>
> "That's where I started smoking pot. Either after school or we would
> skip and go get high," she said. "It got to the point that I would
> come to school so stoned I didn't understand my lesson."
>
> Gordon moved in with her grandmother, Minnie Pearl Gordon, when she
> was 16. She dropped out of school soon after and started to use
> cocaine. On her 18th birthday, she said, she tried crack for the
> first time.
>
> "I seen the devil when I did that drug," Gordon said.
>
> To Jail
>
> In June 2001, Gordon borrowed the keys to her grandmother's purple
> Chrysler and told her grandmother that she would be back in a few
> minutes.
>
> "I didn't see 'em for a month," Minnie Pearl Gordon said.
>
> Gordon said that she traveled through several counties buying drugs
> with her grandmother's checkbook. She was six months pregnant.
>
> "I'd take the drug dealers shopping and I'd get them what they want,"
> she said.
>
> She said they would spend as much as $500 a day on drug binges. A $20
> rock of crack lasts only about five seconds, she said. "You could
> spend $1,000 in three hours."
>
> The binge stopped with an arrest in Rowan County. Though she had
> several charges pending, she wound up in Davie County facing forgery
> and uttering charges for writing bad checks from her grandmother's
> bank account.
>
> Gordon was jailed in September after her daughter, Destiny Pearl, was
> born.
>
> Destiny Pearl, now 1, weighed less than 4 pounds when she was born,
> Gordon said. Test results showed trace amounts of cocaine in the
> newborn's system. Authorities took custody of Destiny and Gordon said
> she is still trying to the child back.
>
> "How can I live in a world knowing I have a child that I don't have?,"
> she said.
>
> Gordon was released from jail through a pretrial program. She hadn't
> planned on returning, but she did.
>
> "I slipped," she said. In June, she told her pretrial officer that
> she had smoked marijuana, she said. She went back to jail almost
> immediately.
>
> Not Designed For Women
>
> There are 114 county and municipal jails in the state, and most hold
> females. "There's not five jails in the state that don't hold
> females," said Lewis, of the state jails and detention section.
>
> The Yadkin County Jail is one of them.
>
> Female inmates have increased in both numbers and in proportion to
> male inmates.
>
> In 1992, Yadkin County had 468 male inmates and 95 females - a ratio
> of about five men to every woman. In 2001, they had 1,005 men held in
> the county jail and 243 women - a ratio of about four to one.
>
> "When you don't have room, you take them far away. I have carried
> them as far as Caldwell County," Cain said.
>
> On any given day, an average of two Yadkin prisoners are locked in the
> female pod at the Davie County Detention Center, Widener said. The
> increasing numbers of females being arrested have led some more rural
> counties to reconsider whether they should have jail space for women.
>
> "It all boils down to the money. I wish I had a place to house
> females, so we didn't have to beg around for a place. But there's no
> way with the setup I have now that we could do it," Cain said.
>
> In the nine months that it has housed women, the Davie center has
> accumulated three file drawers full of information on female inmates.
>
> "When you see new facilities come on line, you'll see places for
> females," said Sheriff Allen Whitaker of Davie County.
>
> A Different Scene
>
> Sgt. Lindsey Bumgarner watched over the Davie center's pod of women -
> including Gordon - from a window in an upstairs watch station in
> mid-June.
>
> Some women talked and sipped coffee. Others read quietly.
>
> The behavior Bumgarner and other detention officers see from women
> differs greatly from that of the men in that there is more camaraderie
> in the female pod.
>
> "If we get older women in here, they tend to take on with the younger
> women and mother them," she said.
>
> Men fight and want to be king of the pod, jail officials said.
>
> One day earlier this summer, Bumgarner watched as one of the inmates,
> a hairdresser, worked with some of the others. She twisted locks of
> wet hair and locked them in place with makeshift rollers made from
> cardboard toilet paper rolls.
>
> Gordon said that jail wasn't pleasant, but that she had befriended
> several women. They would talk as she wrote long letters to her
> boyfriend in Winston-Salem.
>
> "When you're in jail, you can be by yourself, or you can make friends.
> Well, I'm here. You can talk to me if you want," Gordon said.
>
> But athough women may be less problematic than men, they do require
> more privacy and medical attention, said officials at the Davie
> center. Becky McMahan, a nurse practitioner at the jail, said that
> women also require more medical attention.
>
> "It's just a whole different set of problems when you see females
> versus guys - there are a lot of female problems," she said.
>
> She estimates that although the jail population is about 20 percent
> female, about a third of the health checks she does are for women.
>
> Women also tend to stay in jail for shorter lengths of time, jail
> officials said.
>
> "Women are bailed out," Cain said. He said that families would bail
> women out so that they don't lose their child-care provider. They
> also may feel women are less likely to run.
>
> "With men, they'll say, 'You got yourself into this. Get yourself
> out,'" Cain said.
>
> The Yadkin County Sheriff's Office also tries to reduce the costs of
> keeping women in jail, Cain and Widener said.
>
> "We do any effort we can so we don't have to pay $45 a day," Widener
> said. He said that includes making sure that women are considered for
> a pretrial release program.
>
> "There's such a backlog of cases, it might be three to six months
> before it goes to trial," Widener said. Criminal district court is
> held in Yadkin County one day a week. Superior Court is held every
> three months.
>
> Those who are charged with felonies may be in jail awaiting trial for
> up to 18 months, Cain said.
>
> Release
>
> Gordon expected to go to trial in Davie County in early July. When
> her family learned that she would have to wait until mid-September,
> Minnie Pearl Gordon decided to bail her granddaughter out.
>
> Melissa Gordon's bond had been set at $10,000, and that meant taking a
> lien on the family land.
>
> On the day after her release in mid-July, Melissa Gordon stood in her
> house watching a summer thunderstorm roll over Yadkin County.
>
> "I haven't seen any of this stuff since I've been in jail," she said.
>
> Upon being released, she enjoyed a long meal at a seafood restaurant.
> Gordon said her primary sustenance in jail was the chips and candy
> bars from the canteen.
>
> "The food is nasty. I wouldn't feed it to my dog, except the
> cornbread. It's just nasty," Gordon said.
>
> Free to set her own schedule, she watched soap operas, visited with
> her boyfriend and shopped with her grandmother for baby clothes for
> Destiny Pearl. She also said that she took a job as a hostess at a
> Winston-Salem restaurant.
>
> Gordon said she knows that temptation lurks with freedom.
>
> "I promise I'm not going to do anything," she said.
>
> Her grandmother said she's keeping a close eye, but keeping faith.
>
> "I don't expect her to do everything right, but I want a better life
> for her than what she's got."
>
> Gordon had a court date Monday to face forgery and uttering charges.
> According to court records, she never appeared and a bench warrant for
> her arrest was issued.
>
>