After desperate, hopeless prisoners escaped from two state prisons in 1999, Governor Thomas "Please Let Me Play Vice President" Ridge and his chief prison henchman, Martin Horn, Secretary of Corrections, ordered an extremely expensive "report." The plan was to spend our tax money and call in outside "experts." The experts were supposed to whitewash the prison system. Ridge, manic with political ambition, could rely on the "Report" to make it clear that the excapes weren't his fault. They were just flukes. He should still be allowed to play Vice Presient (Oh, pretty please!). The scheme didn't work out exactly as intended. The four "experts" recruited for the whitewash were Robert Brown, Jr., an old-time "corrections" bureaucrat from Michigan, Larry DuBois, a "corrections" hack from Massachusetts, Steven Puckett, a Mississippi figurehead and Lane McCotter, a Utah dropout: a "Blue Ribbon Panel" of door-lockers, if there ever was one. These guys were bribed $900 a day (plus expenses, of course) to give Ridge's prison system a clean bill of health. After months of bureaucratic smirking and the expenditure of about 80 pounds of your money, the expert foxes of the Blue Ribbon Panel told the foxes in the Department of Corrections ("DOC") what was wrong in the henhouse. Sure enough, as planned,, the toadies dutifully reported that "Pennsylvania DOC ranks very favorably..." From that glowing expert evaluation, it followed that Ridge was a great, repressive Republican and should be Vice President. But the Report wasn't finished. It went on for 32 pages with that many more attachments. The traitor experts had the temerity to actually find some faults, in fact, quite a few faults! They complained about the gross overcrowding of the whole prison system: 144% of designed capacity! They want only 95% of capacity. That would require building at least 8 new prisons! Or, worse yet, releasing 17,600 prisoners! The panel went on to fault Ridge's puppet parole board for not paroling eligible prisoners and for being so quick to send parolees back to prison instead of helping them succeed. The experts recommended the closing of SCI-Huntingdon and SCI-Muncy. Many prisoners and others have clamored for the closing of SCI-Huntingdon on safety grounds. DOC spent a bundle of our tax money defending the suit and trying to keep the death-trap open. By the time the reader gets to page 13 of the would-be whitewash Report, Ridge's "throw away the key, throw away the man" prison strategy is looking pretty shabby and it gets worse! The experts strongly condemned the lack of jobs, training and education for the prisoners. It faulted Ridge's strategy for failing to give prisoners meaningful treatment and saddling them with endless hopeless hours of idle time: in "a prison environment, idleness is truly the devil's workship." Our cofounders have been suing SCI-Smithfield over these very issues. Again, the DOC is spending vast sums of our tax money to defend the suit and to oppose the expert Report that they spent vast sums of money to have prepared. This kind of wisdom is called a "Ridge-ism." The essence of the expert's Report is simple. Let people out of prison. Give them a meaningful existence while they are in prison. And stop putting so many folks in prion in the first place. In short, the Ridge schemes are a bust!