Sheriff threw a party for the county jailer
April 4, 2008 at 2:47 pm by Andisheh Nouraee in Scene & Herd
FULTON COUNTY CHIEF JAILER EDWARD MCNEIL: Jail to the chief
(photo and additional text by Joeff Davis)
On Thursday, Fulton County Sheriff Myron Freeman invited us to a party at the Fulton County Courthouse to welcome the county’s new Chief Jailer, Edward McNeil. It was the strangest and saddest party we’ve ever been to.
After 10 minutes of God-themed speeches, we pulled McNeil aside to ask him hard-hitting questions about being a jailer. But before we could ask him if he thinks it’s just a coincidence that jail rhymes with bail, a guest at the party had a heart attack and died. Kidding around was obviously out of the question after that, so we just wished McNeil luck and departed.
He’ll be a busy man.
A recent Pew Center study put the U.S. prison population at more than 2.3 million people. We have more people in prison than China – a rampant human rights abuser with four-times as many people as the U.S.
Georgia spent nearly $1 billion imprisoning people in 2007 and the state employs the second highest percentage of employees in corrections in the country, behind Texas.
According to Pew, one-in-nine black men in the U.S. between the ages of 20 and 34 are behind bars.
Send to a friend:
April 9th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Being an avid fresh loaf reader it was hard to get past this article. My father was the guest who passed away at this function. I am nt upset about the article, it just was a shock to read it. Thank you for not being rude about the situation. My family and I really do appreciate that.
April 9th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
China doesn’t jail as high a percentage of their prisoners as the US, they bury them.
That said, I think we are way out of whack in the jail terms for minor drug offenses.
My (partial) solution to US jail overcrowding;
1) reduce or eliminate incarceration for misdemeanor possession of drugs by legalizing them
2) illegal aliens imprisoned in US facilities should be deported immediately. If the countries exporting their criminals to us don’t want them back they lack the proper motivation and should be made tounderstand that we will not stand for this action any longer.
3) Effectively fund and staff capital cases to help ensure fair and accurate trials followed by a speedy and thorough appeal. Final convictions result in rapid execution. Returning the threat of actually dying from your sentence, rather than old age from a ridiculously long appeal, may add a factor of deterance to what is a punitive verdict, thus returning a little fear to the capital criminal.
There are more planks, but these are a good start o the platform.