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Washington isn't the only place teeming with blundering
incompetents and infective officials.
The Pennsylvania Parole
Board is a hive of overpaid bureaucratic drones.
They obstruct
the public good and cost the taxpayers a fortune.
Worst of all,
they don't do their job of returning people to society.
A lawyer, a hilarious old babe named Alaine S. Williams, whined in court that we said that parole is an illusion in Pennsylvania. The Williams woman is only a Philadelphia lawyer, so her whining can't really be believed. The truth is that parole is an illusion. The Board is unfit for its job and the street-level parole agents are neurotic thugs. The task of a parole board is to return former offenders to society and help them succeed - not in Pennsylvania. Admittedly, the Commonwealth's parole policy and laws reflect draconian Republican extremism. They are biased against the poor, the common man. As with all Republican politics, parole policies are based on terror, exaggerated fear and lies. Admittedly, the Tom Ridge types with their vindictive mentalities of oppression and revenge stymie efforts which could benefit Pennsylvania. They think that persons should be discarded like clogged Bics. Truth-be-told, Pennsylvania is withering and dying because of Republican policies. Hate only goes so far. The core of the state's problems with parole and with everything else is the state legislature. The petty war-lords in the legislature are grossly overpaid, underworked and ineffective. They have no interest in the good of the people, only in their own power, position and prestige. They should all be replaced. Limit their replacements to a single term and cut their pay to $100 a day. Make all laws automatically expire in five years. The incompetent Parole Board is a symptom of the incompetence of the government. The Board employs persons like D.A. Anthony, a Parole Staff Technician, who would do better as a charwoman. Of Course, the trouble with the Pennsylvania Parole Board doesn't really rest with the flunkies in the cubicles. It's unfair to single out Anthony when it's the Board members themselves who are the real problem. Not one of them is truly qualified with compassion, common sense and restorative ethics. Consider Ben Martinez. He's made a career of locking people up. How's he qualified to release them? He's used his life-long job as a parole bully to play at being a cop. His mind rests on an education in politics! Martinez has always been a cop-type. That's not what's needed on a parole board. He's interested in control and oppression of people in order to hold them down. A parole board should do the opposite, lift people up and empower them. This guy should be translating toothpaste instructions into Spanish, not meddling in people's lives and screwing up society. Ben is matched in incompetence by Cathy McVey, the Chairman of the Board. Her qualification to be on the Board is that she was a yes-man (or yes-woman) in the Department of Imprisonment. She's a prison guard who turned to the job of trying to cover-up for Jeffrey Beard, the Pennsylvania prison boss and for his drunk driving. An apologist for the Department of Imprisonment who justifies prison abuses and failures is not suited to be on a parole board. The old woman should retire and make life miserable for her poor family. Jeffrey Imboden should have stuck to being a school teacher. He seems to be attracted to work with crackpots. He's another one of those guys who likes to look down on people in order to feel better about himself. Lebanon County needs a dog catcher. Let him do that. Sean R. Ryan is slightly better educated that some other members of the Board. He's one of those psychology types who tries to justify nonsense with psychological jargon and bull shit. I suggest that he get a prostate operation and struggle to be happy instead of taking it out on us. At the other end of the educational spectrum is Lloyd A. White. He's a campus cop at a third-rate collage, for God sake! What makes a campus cop suitable as a parole board member? Mr. White is better qualified to raid frat parties and harass students that to bully the whole population. Mike Webster is another cop and a pencil-pusher, an officer manager type. His claim to qualification as a parole board member is that he can schedule cases for court - pathetic. Who needs him? Michale Green was educated to be a bureaucrat. He's addicted to bureaucratic jargon and double talk. He struggles to use big words and not very successfully. At least, he's got a dram of human understanding, but he's not the stuff that should compose a parole board. Gerard Massaro claims to be a prison psychologist who collaborated with the cops. You can just imagine what his qualifications are. Why isn't he making a lot of money in private practice? You can't really bully patients in private practice. He should retire or go back to cop worshiping. Allen Castor is the last of the present crop of Parole Board misfits. His qualification to be a Board member is that he's a Vietnam vet. Still, in temperament and judicial detachment, he's one of the less bad of the bunch. These nine gems make up the current Pennsylvania Parole Board. They aren't quite as bad as Tom Ridge's board of sadists. They were nothing but political rubber-stamps. And that's what parole is in Pennsylvania, a matter of politics - bad politics, politics of fear, the politics of discarding people instead of improving people. The state would be better off without a Board at all. If we have a parole board it should help people succeed, not be super-jailers.
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