Dirty Dishes	Dirty Dishes Archive

Dawn was startled when the Texas Department of Criminal Justice responded to a request for the number of prisoners behind bars for possession of cocaine; Dawn had supposed that they had been flooded with queries about how many poor folk sat in prison for doing nothing more than their governor had, and thus would not be eager to cooperate with attempts to expose their boss's hypocrisy. The speedy response makes Dawn think maybe some staffers are Ann Richards hold-overs....

While the TDCJ's "Chief of Policies, Statistics, and Research" couldn't give an exact figure (a constant and maddening reality for those researching crime and prison policy), it's somewhere between 7,934 (the number of prisoners tagged for "cocaine possession" during the undetermined time the Lone Star computer form had such a specific code) and 28,636 (the number of prisoners in for "drug offense").

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Now, Dawn has heard all the jokes about how a newly-elected President Bush might be surprised at the response of hold-over White House interns discreetly asked to give a "little blow," but the Governor's hypocrisy is anything but funny to the (tens of?) thousands of people incarcerated in Texas's fraudulent war on drugs, a war George "Dubya" Bush loves to toot about.

(And, let's set some other wags straight: Dubya is in New Hampshire so much this fall because it's a politically important state, not because he doesn't want to miss the first good snow of the season....)