Letters

On last week’s editor’s column:

As an editor at the Associated Press here in Philadelphia, I can confirm that we “wire service boneheads” can indeed do math. I’m surprised Tim Whitaker only now realizes this. He’s the experienced editor of a fine newspaper with many excellent reporters writing their own version of “gray goo,” so I assumed he already knew that competent, professional journalists possess a wide range of skills.

One skill unique to AP writers and editors is the ability to take cheap shots from columnists, bloggers and others who comment—often intelligently—on AP-reported news and then abuse the journalists who produce it. It’s akin to being patted on the back and punched in the stomach at the same time.

This feeling, incidentally, is something known to every Phillies fan, including boneheads like me.

Lofty Ideas

On an item in last week’s Cultural Report Card:

The Inquirer quietly retracted the assertion that 1352 Lofts is in violation of code requiring the removal of the elevated terrace created to make the new building fully handicapped accessible.

The characterization in last week’s Cultural Report Card that Rimas Properties illegally annexed the sidewalk is factually incorrect.

Rimas properties secured all appropriate approvals for the architectural plans as they were built, and the developer is working closely with the city to remedy the sidewalk issue that has arisen. Until the matter is resolved, the company apologizes for any public inconvenience.

Jail Sell

On last week’s Trouble With Spikol column:

What’s so interesting about the incarceration issue, whether it’s Paris Hilton or the average person, is how it dovetails with planning, and federal and state funding disinterest and incompetence, going back to the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1960s.

“Antisocial” behaviors need treatment in social services and incarceration via containment under the penal code. The area of agreement could be containment via hospitalization, but underfunding many programs means poor and insufficient staff and treatment.

The prison system is poor behavior modification because the system lacks funding and training. It isn’t really meant to serve that purpose either. But just like slapping and hitting children, we’ve learned over far too long a period that slapping a jail sentence on someone and containing them in an unhappy jail environment won’t produce a better person.

Why do we still think it’s better or cheaper to fund weeks, months or years in prison instead of treatment—either contained (via hospital) or outpatient?

Then there’s the issue of rehiring the incarcerated. Paris Hilton doesn’t have to go out and get a job. The incarcerated’s job opportunities are limited after prison because of prison, thereby defeating a primary deterrent to crime—employment.

Patriot Games

To Jeffrey Barg on last week’s Angry Grammarian column about the difficulties associated with writing “Fourth of July”:

Actually, the name of the holiday is “Independence Day.”

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