Of Your Dollars
A few years ago, the bloated Department of Corrections had so much money that it didn't need that Secretary Martin "Isn't Power Wonderful" Horn decided to raid one of his own prisons. Yeah, it sounds stupid, but Horn is a jerk and he did have all those extra millions of our tax dollars that he wanted to squander.
With a highly-paid army of guards and cops, Horn raided SCI-Graterford. He may have picked that particular prison because it is close to Democratic Philadelphia and it is almost entirely black prisoners. Horn has certain obvious bigotries.
The raid took days to complete. It cost you personally about 22 cents a head; or about $2,600,000.00 total of our tax dollars! Of course the search didn't find anything. But it wasn't supposed to. The real idea behind the raid was to bully the (mostly black) prisoners and to make the psychotic guards feel powerful.
The raid cost so much of your tax money and was such a great fun outing for the wealthy "Horn Horde," that it has become a standard sewer down which to flush millions of our dollars. Since the expensive fiasco at SCI-Graterford, Horn has staged similar raid/searches to further intimidate the (mostly black) prisoners at SCI-Greene, sight of well publicized recent barbarism. To squander a few more millions, Horn also raided SCI-Albion near Erie, Pennsylvania and SCI-Rockview near State College, Pennsylvania. At none of the searches was anything found!
By my calculations, these raids cost about $12,000,000.00. That's about a dollar apiece for each man, woman and child in the Commonwealth. For that squandered fortune absolutely ZERO was found; nothing! Just the waste of $12,000,000.00!
Is it just me, or is there something wrong with that kind of government? I want something back for my buck. I want a government which respects me and my money. I want a Department of Corrections which respects even prisoners and blacks.
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