All posts by djones

ministry, panel, prison

Prison Ministries Fundraiser

Leave a comment

Tonight was the night of my guest appearance on the panel for the Good New Jail & Prison Ministry fundraiser. This has become a crucial time for the organization since all charitable donations are down in this economy. This program is one that is entirely donation based, accepting no grants or government funds, so the ability to garner donations is critical to the services they provide.

The panel consisted of a real mixed bag: myself as mayor of the town, the chief of police, the county sheriff, the assistant warden at the prison, the pastor of a local church, and an ex-con who is now an ordained minister at a church about 50 miles from here. We were asked three questions and each person got a couple of minutes to give their answers to each question. It was amusing because the panel was seated up on the ballroom stage, towering over the audience seated on the ballroom floor. So after our meal of prime rib and stir fry, we panelists traipsed up on stage to entertain the audience before the real motivational speakers and the auctions got underway.

The questions and my summary of the responses ran as follows (please note that the chaplain that wrote the questions was a a bit over the top in his wording, but we all gleaned the real intent) :

Good News Jail & Prison Ministry was invited by the Department of Corrections to establish quality trained chaplains to serve as non-paid staff. Give your view, based on the economic climate of today, of the chaplaincy at the XXX Correctional Facility?

The assistant warden had the most telling things to say on this topic. She had the interesting statistics about the lowered rates of violence and the lessened discipline problems in the areas where chaplains serve. She (the AW) also brought up the fact that the chaplains work with the staff. Prison workers tend to have high stress and high domestic violence rates because of the spill over from the work environment. Chaplains help reduce that stress and make it easier to retain good staff. I have to admit that i had not thought of that aspect.

My main point was that having a full time professional chaplaincy supported by groups on the outside supplied hope and a connection to humanity for the prisoners. I have been inside the prison a number of times, usually to speak at graduation ceremonies and/or to meet with staff about programs that have a community interface. The prsion is also a customer of the city as they buy their water and sewer services from us. The environment on the inside is intentionlly designed to isolate and remove hope. Knowing that someone, anyone, cared enough to supply a chaplain is often the difference maker in the prisoners’ attitudes.

Given that XXX Correctional facility is the largest prison in Colorado; what value do you see from qualified chaplains serving behind the walls?

-and-

Offenders returning to society, what value do you place upon Faith Based Programs in the jail and prison? How do we stop the cycle of recidivism?

There was a spectrum of answers given to this topic, so I’m going to stick to what I had to say. I doubt I could do justice to all the others’ views. (Although we all did comment that the size of the prison had little to do with the issues at hand.)

I concentrated on the fact that the chaplains are one of the few groups working hard to prepare the prisoners to leave the prison environment and thrive in the real world. Those preparations include:

  • Introduction to a moral system – many prisoners have no moral system when they enter, especially how to treat others and expect others to treat you.
  • Introduction to the skills of planning and calendaring and preparing. In prison, life is not under your control and very regimented. Many prisoners do well in that environment and then fail in the real world. Many times it is because they have never learned to schedule their own time and efforts. The chaplains teach classes in how to do that even within the confines of the prison system.
  • Introduction to an accepting community of faith. Many prisoners feel that no one will ever care about them as people again. Just the fact that there is a community that cares for and about them and can act as a support group helps keep parolees out of trouble.

I also noted that although faith based systems have the lowest measured recidivism rates, the rate is still abysmally high. Prisoners in Colorado who are  part of a faith based system like Good News  have an 85% recidivism rate. Other programs run about 90%. Those that are part of no program run a recidivism rate of 95% or more. To me, that is one of the real glaing problems in the US. No other country in the world imprisons a higher percentage of its population and no other penal system suffers the same abysmal recidivism rate. I cannot fathom a system that has people serve their debt to society, relases them, and sees somewhere between 8 and 10 of every 10 released be re-imprisoned within 2 years.

So that was how i spent my Saturday night – how did you spend yours?

blog, meeting, writing

Interesting Experience

Leave a comment

This evening I was the guest speaker at the League of Voters meeting. I believe that this group used to be called the League of Women Voters, but like many organizations has begun to refer to itself as the League in a sex neutral way. That is undoubtedly a good thing for this group as the crowd was more than 50% male in composition.

The evening was in an informal Q&A format. I had asked the other city council members to attend, but none of them did. Pretty much typical – it is hard to get the council members out to an occasion where they might have to speak. I seem to be the only member that actual enjoys public speaking from time to time. Anyhow, the evening started at 6:30 and the next time I consulted my watch it was 8:30. Seemed like no time at all because I was enjoying having an interested and involved audience who asked intelligent questions. I only wish I ran into such crowds on a more regulatr basis.

The interesting event didn’t happen until the meeting was over and I was chatting with the chairperson before heading off into the roaring wind and stormy weather. (Yes, we may indeed be on track for yet another spring blizzard tomorrow.) The chairperson made the offhand remark that he was so happy I was blogging and that he really enjoyed reading the blog. It took me aback for a second or two because I don’t know the chairperson well. But he evidently enjoys the writings herein. I told him thanks and gently made sure he knew that this blog is a personal effort and not any official organ of the office. He said he understood. Coupled with running into one of my Very Important Teachers from this post at the post office today, it made for a strange day. Meeting two people in the flesh who like my writing, one of whom keeps trying to convince me to write a full length science fiction novel rather than my occasional forays into the sci-fi short story, in the same day, could cause me to get a big head! (Alright, an even bigger head. {*grin*})

The question that has been rolling around on the tip of my mind for the last couple of hours: Have you ever met an unknown blog reader in real life? Have they commented to you about your writing? How was the experience? I ask because after I got over the initial shock of a local, non-family member, non-political friend or foe, reading this blog, I rather enjoyed the experience.

(I am scheduled to plant a tree in one of the parks tomorrow for Arbor Day. It will be interesting to see if the ceremony gets blown and snowed out. One of the predictions from global warming is drier winters and more violent spring weather here on the plains. So far it fits in perfectly.)

(Do you think I abused the poor comma too much in this post? I’m to lazy to go back and re-write it, so abusive or not, they stay. {*grin/2*})

mama kat, writer's challenge

What would you buy?

6 Comments

It is time once more for Mama Kat’s Writer’s Challenge. This week the prompts are:

  1. If I sent you four hundred dollars today what is ONE thing you would spend it on and why. P.S. I want my change.
  2. What are your kids talking about?
  3. Tell us about a local news story that’s all the buzz right now in your neck of the woods.
  4. Share some blogging advice.
  5. Tell us about that time at the playground when that thing happened.

I felt a bit odd trying to answer some of these. No real obvious theme came to mind, so you get to watch me blither in a real time stream of consciousness way. Enjoy.

#1) I am torn. I could buy about a month’s worth of one of the drugs I take for my diabetes, but that is strangely unsatisfying to me.

I could also sign on to EBay and buy some computer and/or AV equipment, but that would be hard to estimate the change to give Mama Kat until the auction ended and one found out what (if anything) I had won. I could also bid on a new KVM box to replace this one that randomly sticks sending the last letter typed over and over. (I sometimes lose a whole post when it sticks on backspace and I don’t spot it in time.)

I guess I’ll go for a visit to the meat market. Four hundred dollars worth of steak and brats and sausage would make for a mighty fine start to a barbecue. Then I’d invite some friends over and settle back for some good food and even better conversation. And sorry Mama, no change left over. But you are welcome to come to the barbecue. {*grin*}

#2) Given that the Son just recently turned 19, it is hard to say for sure what he is talking about. One topic would likely be his job and the hours over the next few months until summer tourist season arrives. Another might be his plans for the coming year, including school, work, and the possibility of joining the National Guard. Beyond all that, it depends on his mood and what is going on in his life. Since I know he reads this blog, maybe he’ll leave a comment and tell us directly.

#3) The headline in todays paper was about a proposed real estate development that is before the city council. Since it is an active matter before council, I cannot say anything further.

Another headline notes that police responded to a vandalism call and found a mushroom growing operation. Samples were sent off to the state labs for identification and tox scan. The police chief noted that although no arrests had been made, leads were being pursued. It wasn’t clear to me from reading the story exactly what was happening other than some vandalism and presumed trespass. The materials found at the site were “organic”, so the question of the legitimacy of the mushrooms was left hanging. I’d suspect the unstated question is whether the mushrooms were of the illegal hallucinogenic species or just someone growing an edible species for fresh mushrooms. I suspect the answer will come out in the coming weeks.

#4) My only blogging advice from the production side is to just do it. I try to write most of my stuff like I was writing a letter to an acquaintence. I know it still comes out stilted at times, but it does seem to resonate with some of the readers. I never started this site with the goal of massive readership, so I am suprised at the number of people who actually read my drivel.

On the reading side, I might be considered an expert since I read about 200 blogs with my various reading software packages each day.

My number one gripe is the sporadic blog. I like a blog to be published regularly, at least once every other day. Given that is seems that at least a third of all the blogs are written by someone with a variant of the name Jennifer (Jen, Jenny, …), if it isn’t written regularly, I confuse the authors and backstories.

My second gripe would have to be the people who decorate their blog page to the point where the universe could go into heat death before it completes loading. Please recognize that most serious readers will be using reading software which strips all that fancy stuff out. The only time I actually visit your site is to comment – usually clicking in from one of my software readers because I found what you were asking or saying interesting enough to drive me to respond. So please don’t make it a test to see just how interested I am in commenting by forcing me to wait for the universe to reach heat death before your site loads completely. (And by the way, I also dislike the author approval for comments. If you are going to squirrel them away before publishing, why not just turn the comments off?)

#5) I’m not sure what you were hoping happened, but I do have one precious (to me) memory from the playgound. I was in the first grade at the rural Nebraska school I attended for K-3. The playground there was built up against a bluff that formed one wall of the valley the town was situated in. On top of the bluff was where we played games like Red Rover. After school, there was a group of us that played on the bluff before walking the one to four blocks home. (Small town living at its best – first graders able to walk unescorted to and from school and to each others homes.)

One day we were playing a variant of War, running like mad across the grass and bare dirt of the bluff. I remember running at full speed, loving the feel of the wind in my face, enjoying the endless energy that comes with being that age. And then I tripped. I went flying through the air. It was like time stopped. It felt like I was truly flying and the ground was never going to rise up and slap me in the face. Even after coming roughly to ground and getting up and dusting myself off, I was in awe of that feeling of flight, the feeling that one could just launch oneself into the air and fly. I spent many years from then on seeking to regain that experience again and again and again. The older and bigger and heavier I became, the harder it was to attain that feeling. It finally reached the point where the only time I experienced the feeling was while playing football. I suspect that was one of the reasons I loved football so much.

Well, that will do it for now. I have to get ready for tomorrow. I have my dental checkup and then a speaking engagement for the League of Women Voters meeting in the evening. Should be interesting.

google, weather, youtube

Bicentennial Post Tuesday

2 Comments

This is the 200th post here at The Art of Panic. Who would have believed one could write that much drivel in a half year? I certainly wouldn’t have.

The weather here is overcast and in the mid 70s today. What a change from the blizzards of the last couple of weeks. Maybe the snow and blow season is finally coming to a belated end. I can but hope! Since the weather is boring, I will take this opportunity write instead about something that has caught my fancy from the news – Google and its ownership of YouTube.

How many of you have followed all the bruhaha about the amount of money Google is losing running YouTube? If you want to see a really depressing view, read this. The basic factoids are that Google will make about $240 million in ad revenue on YouTube, but it will cost them about $711 million to operate the site. Some simple math then leads to the $470 million dollar loss for the year. No company can long afford to lose a half billion dollars on a single property and enjoy it. Heck, most of us couldn’t afford it even if we moved the decimal point 6 places over.

The most interesting thing to look at is what the effective CPM (Cost Per Thousand) would have to be for YouTube to break even. The estimates I have seen posit about 75 billion video streams being fed this year by YouTube. Even if we are optimistic and believe that Google can find an ad for every video (hard given the idiocy of some of the content) and assume that Google actually gets to keep the revenue on the popular copyrighted works, we come up with something on the order of $10 CPM on average. That is almost impossible to achieve. Add to the dilemma that current estimates claim that only 3% of the available ad slots are sold and you see a real problem.

To quote the Silicon Valley Insider’s analysis:

The economics are hard to overcome. Assuming YouTube delivers the 75 billion streams that Credit Suisse projects for 2009, and assuming YouTube manages to slot an ad for every stream (which is practically speaking, impossible, given the nature of much of their content), YouTube would have to achieve a $9.48 CPM for every video impression shown. Presumably, the videos YouTube is already monetizing represent the best content available, with diminishing returns as they reach deeper and deeper into a repository rife with copyright violation, the indecent, the uninteresting, and the unwatchable. Hulu claims to be charging a $30 CPM, of which roughly 70% goes to the copyright holder. Averages for other proprietary content hover around the $10 CPM mark. CPMs for user-generated content, assuming you can attract the advertisers, tend to be measured in fractions of a dollar.

So the real question for Google is how to find a new way to monetize the ever growing traffic on YouTube. This seems to be one of the better known counter examples to the old adage that “traffic is everything on the internet.” The adage only works when the traffic doesn’t lose too much per visitor. It will be interesting to see what the year will bring for Google and YouTube. Even Eric Schmidt (Google chief) is sounding cautionary about YouTube as a potential loss leader for the foreseeable future. (Listen to Eric here.)

So what do you think? Is there a way for Google to stop the bleeding without killing the site? Do you view things on YouTube? Do you ever click on he ads on YouTube? Do you think Google should do the obvious and kill the amateur video and go to only commercial content ala Hulu? Inquiring minds want to know. (Besides, I’m just plain nosey!)