Wednesday, March 22,1978
University Daily Kansan
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Comment
Ununsigned editors represent the opinion of the Kanan editorial staff. Signed columns represent the views of only the writers.
The state of Kansas apparently is going to force a prison honor camp on Douglas County despite growing reservations about the camp expressed by those who would have to live near it. But opponents of the camp are clearly in the wrong.
The camp itself deserves more than kneejerk opposition from the Clinton Reservoir landowners who don't want it. Criminal rehabilitation dictates that somewhere, somehow, honor camps will be available. The problem, of course, is where to put such camps.
According to the state corrections office, Kansas needs at least three such camps. The best locations are at Clinton Lake, Tuttle Creek Reservoir near Manhattan and the El Dorado Reservoir. It's not as if Lawrence was singled out as the only site.
BUT WHY are the camps necessary anywhere? A few statistics are enlightening. Kansas currently has just one prison honor camp, near Toronto Reservoir, which houses 45 minimum-custody prisoners of the 2,249 prisoners in Kansas, 612 are eligible to live in a prison honor camp
because they are qualified for minimum custody status.
Only 45 of those 612 prisoners have the opportunity to be given a second chance—to live like and with "normal" citizens. Given the undeniable culture shock that results when an inmate is released from prison, the most trustworthy inmates simply must have a chance to readjust to society.
The preachers of fear play on the possibility for escapes from honor camps. Perhaps the track record of the Toronto camp will enlighten them. Last year, 41 of 45 prisoners there did not even attempt to walk away. That's not a perfect record, but it's hardly a devastating one.
ALL INMATES for the proposed honor camps would be carefully screened by state officials; the fact that the Toronto inmates are near parole should allay the suspicions of the Clinton landowners.
Gov. Robert F. Bennett has endorsed legislation to establish the honor camps. The Kansas House and Senate should follow suit. Unsubstantiated charges and fears do not merit rejection of humane reforms in the state's penal system.
Like manna, federal money for perceived domestic needs springs from an apparently unstable potential for abuse of federal funds designed to aid low-income Americans also appears
Housing funds mislaid in shuffle
The need for aid to poor Americans is manifest. But the funds aimed at improving the upward mobility and living conditions of the poor are diverted, poorly managed and, as a result, from tax payers and the designated recipients of aid.
THE COMMUNITY development program, initiated by the 1974 Community Development Bureau, led to retard urban blight by upgrading substandard housing. During its first year of operation, the Bureau coordinated the razing of about 50 houses. The owner-occupants
A $9-million community development program for Topeka, which in 1974 replaced urban renewal, demonstrates the need for a close watch on such federal programs. The head of the program, Everett Tomlin, was fired by Mayor Bill McCormick in January. The City Commission alleged improprieties in Topeka after the Topeka City Commission fired Tomlin and set up an independent audit of community development funds.
Council improves county's future
Citizens of Douglas County who are concerned about preserving the natural appearance and using the natural resources of this area can rest easier because of the efforts of a group of volunteers who are working toward these goals.
Also, this same group of volunteers is providing a means of getting involved for those who seek to make the county and the larger environment in which to live and work.
The volunteers do their work under the banner of the Douglas County Environmental Improvement Council. It is a group that is involved in a number of diverse activities, including advocacy and a healthy lifestyle on local policymaking and planning bodies.
AS LAWRENCE continues to grow, expand and develop, it is reassuring to know that a group, such as the council, is working with county officials and county planning officials and personnel.
That is not to say that local planners and policy-makers are not doing a good job generally, but rather, they do it well. The Council collects data and assists carefully thought-out opinions in the form of "position papers" that often would not otherwise be collected
Robert Krocker, council president, compares his group with Common Cause, a national citizens' lobbying organization. And the same obvious benefits that Common Cause provides on the national level can be worked up of the council on the local level.
THE COUNCIL is a mechanism for citizen participation in the political and
Steven Stingley
Editorial writer
professional machinery that governs lawrence and Douglas County, and all for one of the most noble causes into which the contemporary citizen can funnel his efforts—that of ensuring wise and controlled guarding and guarding against rampant greed.
Krocker says the group is a loosely structured and diverse organization. Most of the activities are carried out by four standing committees.
To exploit natural systems and resources is to exploit the very source of affluence and success.
The committees focus on scenic and natural resources, civic responsibilities, environmental quality, and environmental improvement awards.
The civic responsibilities committee is the most politically active of the groups. It keeps a close watch on city and county planning and zoning procedures, doing its own leg work and submitting position papers. The state is stand on city and countyissues.
ARLY ALLEN, chairman of the civics group, keeps busy researching and preparing the committee's stand. He follows through by attending meetings of the Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Commission.
Allen said that when the city or county is faced with a problem and has several options from which to choose in solving the problem, it often takes the "do nothing"
Although Allen says he must mistrust rigid, long-range planning, he thinks that attention should be focused on important goals and points.
MANY TIMES a long-range plan breaks down and individual judgment must be relied on, Allen says, and such a reliance can be dangerous because it is easy to lose sight of long-term goals under the pressure of immediate decisions.
Allen called it the dilemma of the law,
saying, "The more specific you get,
the more difficult it is to allow the justice of the situation to come to the fore."
A good example of the kind of work that Allen's committee does is a paper that it recently submitted to the planning committee for a better drainage system in Lawrence.
The paper consists of a historical rundown of the way the drainage system has worked and failed in the past, as well as possible solutions to the problem of intermittent flooding.
IT CERTAINLY will be a helpful aid for the planning commission in evaluating the problem and potential solutions. Moreover, once again an effort by the environmental council is spurring local officials to take action that they have chosen the "do nothing" option.
The people of Douglas County can either feel secure or get involved because of the existence of a group such as the environmental council.
But in any event, it is a big plus for the community.
were given $15,000, plus the value of their demolished residences, for moving to better housing. The program spends about $1 million a year in Teorea, almost all of it on housing.
The nature of the alleged improprieties at the Topela Community Development Center, guarded by the city commission, according to U.S. Attorney James Tuohy, is that the Topela Police Department.
The investigation evidently was triggered late last year when accounting discrepancies were discovered by city commission officials. During the last three years, the program has funded repairs to subway stations most of them apparently made without formal or informal bidding by contractors.
"We've spent a lot of money (on the investigation)," Topela City Attorney Dam Turner said. He touched the clip of the problems."
THE LATEST scuttlebutt around the Topeka City Hall is that a federal grand jury may
have been formed to enable investigators to subpoena documents.
ine investigation has led federal agents as far as Maine.
win the expectation of about $2 million in community development funds earmarked for Topeka by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is an important of the investigation cannot be discounted.
The program has been under investigation by the FBI across the country, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has been swamped by audits.
The program has made Topeka a better place to live during its tumultuous four-year history. Neighborhood improvement associations,
required by community development for funding, have
districts throughout the city. The associations have sparked concern for burglar areas,
through meetings in which representatives evaluate what their priorities are.
BUT THE associations stormed into McCormick's office last month to protest the investigation. The associations thought that the investigation has had no program. Their members were removed and puzzling. Many residents of the marginally bighed areas pay income taxes. Stopping the mismanagement of public funds is in their best interests. One of the funds have been frozen.
- charges that the investigation is poor, or that you must not discredit the program are absurd. Enough time has been spent on the investigation by highly qualified investigators, real interest in Topeka politics
to demonstrate how unfounded such assertions are.
The former head of the program in Topeka has offered no defense of his administrative record. He has written the city commission, demanding or forbidding damages. He says his constitutional rights were "wilfully and maliciously" violated. Meanwhile, Finance Commissioner Ken Elder said he supported a law to read the former head of community development.
If anyone's rights were violated, it surely was the low-income person's for whom the tenure tax payer, whose dollars finance the well-meaning program, also was cheated. The need for programs to upgrade substations in the country is apparent to the congressional callous American. But until federal funds, which ultimately emanate from Americans' tax returns each April, the government will for the manna will never read for whom it is meant.
"NATURALLY, THERE IS SOME DANGER IMPLICIT IN CLONING!"
To the editor:
Raise in traffic fines deplored
I note with mild amusement and some disbelief, Allen Holder's report in the March 8 Kansas that largely because of a 2014 court record recorded $36,000 in unpaid park fines, all campus fines
Auschwitz past shapes present
they must acquire for their state the strength it will need to ward off its enemies. Such a state of weakness that appears are prevented to accept.
But from Auschwitz Begin has also gleaned, like many of his damned and glorious crimes, that he was not but instincts--bitter and unslackening vigilance, distrust, self-reliance. The mentality of the survivor who has suffered to lay down his gun with ease.
By LEON WIESELTIER N.V. Timoen Fertuurs
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—Momenchah Begin is negotiating with the Egyptians not merely as an Israeli but as a Jew. He culls his politics from history—a firm stance of religion. The past that exercises him is not so much the biblical bliss of Jewish sovereignty but rather the inacrymose history of the ancient Israelites, feels accountable to Auschwitz.
BEGIN'S CAUTIONARY evocations of Auschwitz may have been clumsy, but when Israel's destiny hings in the balance, such memories cannot be evaded nor should they be.
Remorselessly, he summons up the Final Solution at conference tables and state dinners and press interviews. Begin with a lecture on how to campms that the Jews' vulnerability must end, that
The trauma of the Jews must be honored.
The nations—certainly the Arabs—must be alerted to the macabre emotional moorings of Jewish politics, to the scars and pain of their people without respite and inhibit them from entrusting their safety to the words of others. A people that has been to the other side of its own doom cannot be exposed to play with fast what remains.
Begin is right to insist upon the pertinence of the past to Israel thinking, as he was to insist that Sadat inspect the Israel Wall. Vad Vashem, the holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.
Six million murders are surely a mandate for life, for whatever Jews can do to see that Jews will not be extremely, that guns are no longer trained upon their children. A mandate for peace, in short, and for the flexibility of a more risky it will take to gain it.
IT IS, however, one thing to demand that the Jewish loss be respected, and another to hang respect on a specific policy.
The full lesson of Auschwitz is, rather, that Jews must no longer find themselves in a state of helplessness for them are varieties of dying.
Begain appears to believe that anything less than a hard line toward the Arabs would be a sin against Auschwitz. But a similar vision of Auschwitz is incomplete, and perhaps perilous.
The lesson of Auschwitz is not that Jews should conquer. They have never hungered for conquest. Nor is it only the Jews should fight, though fight they must when there is no other way.
TO LEET the present opportunity slip would be the real sin against Auschwitz. As would be the death of a single Jewish soldier fighting for the West Bank or Sinai, if the redisposaion those territories could have helped to end the 30 years war.
In exile, peace was un-tinkable for Jews, because past power, and they were weak. In exile, their political responses were responses of weakness: But Jews now possess the power
for peace, the power that could underwrite a judicious gamble for it. Of course, Israel's neighbors may prefer the conflict; Syria appears content not to quit it, and the unreliable Nicosia Palestinian Liberation Organization is discouraging.
But Israel mocks its deepest aspirations—what Zionists used to call the "normalization of the Jewish people"—if it does not whatever it can to strengthen Egyptians' willingness to deal.
It would be tragic if Jewish history in this century were divided against itself, if the cataclysm of 1948 robbed Jews of the capacity to win for it its fullest being. Auschwitz may have made a martyr's psyche in response to its loss of its long-awaited obsolescence.
A NEW heroism is now required of the Israelis, and it is decided not the heroism of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Nor is the past to which Begin points the entire story. If all that Jews could muster before they went out to defend their refusal to surrender, they would not have survived. Beneath the obstinacy of harassed Jews, however, lay an unarmed list inasmuch as awareness that accommodation is not surrender, that pragmatism has its own nobility. At this point with Begin, would do well to heed both. Begin would part of his patrimony.
Leon Wieseltier is pursuing a doctorate at Harvard University in Jewish history and literature.
KANSAN Letters
I am reminded of an instance some years ago when stationed at a small Air Force base in south Texas. Police radar was quite new then, and I stopped one day to ask the police officer operating a camera for me how it worked. The officer was happy to do so, and I asked him where in town they had similar units. He replied that there were no plans to operate them anywhere but at various locations alone, based on actual evidence, and were the only ones who would pay the fines for the citations issued.
One might expect a more enlightened solution from an institution with the stature of the University of Kansas.
will be raised (presumably to allow students and others who do pay to subsidize the cavaler attitude of this elite group). Of course, the actual amount of a given fine has little significance to someone who has no intention to pay anyway.
Walter M. Wondrack
Professor of aerospace studies Colonel, USAF
Sexist comment depersonalizing
To the editor:
Whether Governor Bennett said that he was "whistling at the things that walked by," or was "whistling at what walked by" makes him equally offensive, depersonalizing and inexcusable for a public official. Kim Jeffries questioned (March 10) whether the Kansan might be involved in a cover-up of the governor's actual remarks; she thought she heard him say "things." I did not read them, but I spalled when I read the Kansan's report of his reference to "what" walked by.
It is disturbing when an human being refers to another person, and the person this continues to happen between the sexes is likewise
disappointing. Persons have so much to offer each other, when we allow ourselves to be persons with each other.
Robert L. Shelton Associate professor of religious studies
It doesn't seem surprising that this "blatantly sexist comment could slip by" with me, because I don't care, it and besides, what else do we expect from . . . oh hh! It is the "governor" a thing, a ather, as well? Or, is he, too, a person
Support needed for genetics bill
Like many women who had seen or heard of the broadcast, I was quite concerned and wrote an advertisement for the Women's Coalition urging other women to express their concern.
A few weeks ago, NBC nightly news devoted the Segment 3 portion of its broadcast to the subject of anemocissence. A significant part of that segment was concerned with the termination of genetics. At Marks of Dimes, with the impression clearly given that this was national March of Dimes policy.
A phone call from the local March of Dimes chapter informed me that the broadcast was quite misleading. The
national March of Dimes policy supports genetics counseling. But this does not mean that it will continue to support all current counseling needs in the charitable organizations, the March of Dimes terminates most non-research programs after five years, on the grounds that the money generated from them to start new programs, which then must find new ways of funding. Since many genetics counseling programs started about five years ago and were started in March of Dimes many of them are also lose their funding.
There is a bill in Congress that would allow such projects to be funded by such agencies as the National Institute of Health, Genetics Diseases Act (P.L. 94-278), which covers a broad spectrum of programs. It should be noted that this is enabling legislation, not funding legislation—if such another bill must be passed if funds are actually to be provided.
If you are interested in this bill, write to your congressional representative in Washington. If you are interested in knowing about community resources here in the area of birth defects, contact the March of Dimes or the Women's Coalition.
Judith Roitman Assistant professor of mathematics
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