20181201.0430

To return to an idea I broached in yesterday's post, I think I will set out to read and write summaries of pieces from the San Antonio Express-News, to which my wife and I subscribe. As I've noted, my wife and I take the paper for our continued edification, and I regard it as a way to stay connected to a community of which I am tangentially part; I did my undergrad in San Antonio, and I've worked in the city since 2016, if mostly on a part-time basis. My brother and his family live there, as well. As such, I've got something of a stake in what goes on the Alamo City; reading its newspaper makes sense for me to do, and engaging its materials overtly helps me do a better job of doing that.
On 17 November 2018, the editors of the San Antonio Express-News published "If Frank Wing Is a 'Dungeon,' Why Does Bexar Keep People There?" in the online version of the newspaper as part of its Unequal Justice series. In the article, the editors question why the Frank D. Wing Municipal Court Building seems continuously used to house inmates for longer than the 18-hour stay they are supposed to have while awaiting magistration. The piece opens with a description of the facility before explicating the dire situation of those who find themselves housed overlong in it, especially the many facing mental health problems. Potential legal problems--lack of adequate hygiene facilities and too-public meetings between the accused and counsel--are noted, as is the background of using the facility as a holding space for those awaiting court proceedings. The editors note that attention to the issue has caused an at-least temporary easing of the problem, but that even with such attention, difficulties remain; a few comments on what a better situation might look like follow before the article closes with an uncomfortable question: "Why is it so hard for the city and county to work together on this" issue of fixing the magistration system?
In truth, it's a good question. The two local governments largely overlap; much or most of Bexar County is San Antonio, anyway, and while there are certainly political and interpersonal concerns to negotiate, the two governments, city and county, appear to my eye to be inextricably intertwined. San Antonio does much well; it certainly has a sense of quiet pride in its identity and its institutions, so it would make sense that it would want all of those things to be better than they are. And it knows they need to be; if attention to the issue has improved it, it can only be because the way things were absent that attention were agreed to be other than they ought to be.
The matter does appear to be as the authors identify it; those who are likely to be held are among the more vulnerable populations, suffering from mental health issues or poverty or both. They would seem to be like those with whom I work in my day job, people who have erred, certainly, but who in most cases err from ignorance or desperation and who, given a way out, take it and cling to it tightly. They are not, in many cases or most, bad people, and while those who have done wrong should atone for that wrong, mistreating them when they are not yet proven to have done that wrong only reinforces their desperation. If they are to be treated badly regardless of what they do or do not do, regardless of what they are told is the way things are and ought to be, then they have little or no incentive to act otherwise than they wish. If they are to be treated in ways the abridge even those protections that those who treat them so claim to have in place, if they are, in effect, to be lied to, why would they trust that things could be otherwise? And, ultimately, why are we, collectively, content to have those whom we employ lie--and to be made liars thereby?