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6.Totally separate prison health and medical care from IDOC. If health care professionals do not have complete autonomy, administrators will forever create obstacles for them because their functions are initially in opposition. Administrators are forever under pressure to cut costs, which has led to prison murders now widely practiced for sake of profit and cost cutting. The moral issue is many times greater than cost issue.
7.Reduce prison populations by making punishments fit crimes. This creates immediate cost savings. More than half your prison population never deserved to be locked in a cage and should be released. The correct punishment for theft is restitution, double, or triple restitution. For example: Misdemeanor theft is single restitution. Felony theft is double restitution to victim. Armed robbery is triple restitution.
Those who refuse to restore their victims go to low security work houses that produce more food than required by prison and work house populations. The surplus is sold on retail market to offset corrections expenses. Regardless of global economic conditions, there will always be a market for good food. A thief who learns value of intensive organic agriculture need never steal again. Every crime that creates a victim must compensate victim(s) first and foremost, inside or outside state supervision or custody. This is justice. Compare it to what you are calling justice, where all costs of crime are laid on victims and taxpayers. Small wonder you are focused on costs.
Victimless crimes can be punished by fines and fines alone. This adds low cost state revenue and lots of it. Habitual offenders go to state work facilities where they earn their keep and produce a profit, six days per week. A percentage of all prisoner production is paid to victims, prisoner dependents, prisoner savings and monthly prisoner allowance. When prisoners release, they have a small bankroll and new skills to help them re integrate with society. When crime is seen as best option after release, crime is what you create.
8.For more than thirty years, health care and alternative medical breakthroughs have been suppressed by a professional medical monopoly. Every year, conscientious and compassionate doctors are leaving monopoly to learn and teach principles of health care and preventive medicine. More than a half dozen of them are becoming wealthy by simply passing along what they are learning to newsletter subscribers and book buyers. They are educating public about difference between health care and bad medicine.
The best of these doctors are selling monthly, eight page newsletters in language ordinary people can easily understand. The typical annual subscription price for these newsletters is $40 per year. They are worth many times their cost. Multi year subscriptions are discounted or accompanied by a dozen or more reports on specific medical and health care issues. Years of back issues are also available.
Most of these alternative doctors would probably allow unlimited newsletter reproduction rights for prisons. As prisoner health improves with health care and alternative medicine, more and more inmates will want to know all about personal health care, instead of lawsuits. If prison library also stocked a hundred recent books on subject, some percentage of prison population would know more about health care than typical MD., in less than a year. They would gladly assist state staff in identifying health problems in population and will learn much that can be applied to any citizen health care program upon release.
You could be training health care professionals in your prisons that will not require college degrees to be extremely useful to Illinois society. There is a lot to learn and newsletters, more than books, report all very latest breakthroughs.
Your prison population could create health care plans every state in America could use to improve citizen health and dramatically reduce personal medical expenses. Publish results of this experiment on Internet and create a positive model for global health care.
The health care industry is in its infancy and growing faster than most every other industry, save prison building and government. Your only alternative to reform is to impoverish your citizens until you are economically and psychologically worse off than Alabama. Not much of a goal, do you think?
9.When government becomes all about cost/ benefit ratios, it becomes critical to compare short term versus long term benefits. I know of few states with that much vision, perhaps because our educations do not teach vision but destroy reason and imagination, two major components of vision. I have focused my attention on Illinois because Illinois has been executing a prisoner I know and love, at Stateville and Menard, over more than three years. I have sought Governor's help to stop execution. I have enclosed Jimmy's story of his own execution so you can have a better idea of what goes on in Illinois behind closed doors. I am publishing all I know about Illinois Prison Murders on Internet in hopes of finding legal assistance to end this criminal behavior.
It seemed good to me to point out an opportunity for State of Illinois to become first and most progressive model in world for compassionate government, in a very few years. Thank you for your time, attention and consideration. I will happily correspond with any who might wish to further discuss this crisis.
Very Sincerely Yours,
Ed Howes
Freelance writer published on websites and in newspapers. justanotherview.com edhowes@hotmail.com