If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her prisoners, she doesn't deserve to have any.

Today I received a letter signed by 21 women who are inmates in the Cameron County Jail. I won't include their names because I don't know the status of their cases or whether there is a risk of retaliation.

Please remember these women have usually not been convicted of the crimes they are accused of committing. If they are convicted, they will be moved to a prison. Some may have never committed any crime at all. The following are excerpts with spelling and grammar as I received it:

"To start here in this Jail all the guards are nice persons. I think is not there fault about what's going on in this Jail is the fault of the County the one that is responsable for it. The food is so bad, sometimes it comes with hairs, with nats the water too. About the toilet paper we still having hard time with it one day thay had us with two brown paper napkins for each inmate. Now that Mrs. Gail Hanson has been banned out from this jail like we don't have nobody that we can tell about what we are passing through all weekend and other day we havent no toilet paper if we need they just give us a piece but in the cell we don't have none.

"...About the medical ...other girls they wait they cry of pain or about their physical problems. And the stuff take their time, while the inmate is hurting.

"I was like...bleeding of my surgery and they would give me hydrocarbonate water to clean the cut that was infected. They didn't took me to the doctor until the Consul of Mexico call them.

"Some of the inmates have the mattess torn and the blankets are torn.

"Commisary takes advantage of all the Inmates by selling the items on a very very high price. Somthings comes expire. They do it because they know we don't have other choice.

"The indigent package is toothpaste, a bar of soap and a toothbrush. When they should provide at least one stamp, envelope, one piece of paper and one pen so can the families be notify not everybondy takes collect calls and they should start selling phone cards.

"Recreation should be at least 3 times a week and not always they do that we could one week without getting rec. and that's unfair."

Is this true? In my experience, inmates tend to be more straight forward than people in the free world, just because there are few pretensions left. I think inmates tend to suffer silently. As our founding document says, it is a self-evident truth that 'mankind is more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.' Since these women don't have much chance to abolish the jail, they will be even more disposed to suffer according the self-evident truth of the Declaration of Independence.

Inmates often become stoics, perhaps not in philosophy, but certainly in practice. I have seen inmates suffering from swollen jaws, bad insect bites and dislocated shoulders not even mention the problem. Until I ask about it.

When inmates begin to risk complaints, the conditions have often pushed the boiling point--something else Cameron County has seen.

I have been listening to inmate complaints for over 30 years and I know that there are explanations for mistreatment. I had a client who ate light bulbs. Another who set her mattress on fire. And others who made a regular habit of stuffing up toilets and causing floods.

I don't know if Cameron County jailers were faced with these types of problems, but I know that jailers reach decisions to deprive the inmates based on violations of jail rules. Sometimes jails run out of supplies, which may be the case with toilet paper here.

Part of the problem is sometimes everyone gets punished if the jail administrators can't figure out who is causing the problem. This creates moral and ethical problems. There is a specific provision in the Geneva Conventions that prohibits group punishment.

If it is true that the inmates go a week without recreation, that is a violation of the Jail Standards Commission:

Each facility shall have and implement a written plan, approved by the Commission, for inmate physical exercise and physical recreation. Documentation of physical exercise and physical recreation shall be maintained for Commission review. Each inmate shall be allowed one hour of supervised physical exercise or physical recreation at least three days per week. (Click on the title for reference to the Texas Jail Standards).

Part of the problem is sometimes neither inmates nor jailers know what conditions should be expected under the jail standards. The inmates don't know to ask for them and the jailers don't know what they should be providing.

The commissary is a different type of problem. One of the Democratic candidates for sheriff attempted to make an issue of giving a private contract on the commissary. I was glad he raised the issue, but doubted it would help him much in the campaign.

A private, profit motive for a captive market is not free enterprise. I don't know what the prices are, but there is no reason prices won't be extortionate because there is no competition. Why not give this contract to the Big Brothers, Sierra Club or the Kiwanians or the Hanna High band? Any nonprofit is better than a private, profit making group. Contracting out the courthouse restaurant is different from the jail commissary, because in the courthouse, if prices are too high or the food is old, people can go somewhere else.

Security is also often a problem. The women's jail does not report complaints of being controlled by prison gangs, but I have heard these complaints from Carrizales-Rucker.

The most disturbing thing about the letter remains the complaint that a jail minister is being excluded for fielding complaints. This creates problems both for the Free Exercise of Religion and for shining a light on the nature of the problem. If no one can report on what goes on in a jail, it becomes a dungeon.

Kathy: "Keep it short. You just like to hear yourself talk. I seriously think you are your biggest fan."

I had an idea for a story once. I thought of it again yesterday when I pulled down Volume VII of the Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce to quote the Devil's Dictionary on the meaning of "politics." I ordered this set more than 30 years ago and it is one of the few things I have been able to hang onto as the book shelf space has shrunk with serial downsizing of houses.

I intended to read it beginning to the end, Volumes I through XII.

(Then the Regional Commander for the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity (the Moonies, followers of Sun Myung Moon) got beat up by the Chief of Police while begging for alms in the City of Aubrey, Texas. As is often the case when someone is beaten by a policeman, the Regional Commander was charged with assault on a police officer.

At the time I was considering whether to leave my nearly still-born career as a lawyer to spend the rest of my life shooting free-throws in the back yard. I had sued the sheriff over the jail conditions in Denton County. (This being during my second Babylonian Captivity). He started locking me in the jail for several hours when I tried to visit clients. Also, the sheriff controlled the bonds. This was a county that did not allow bondsmen, but only lawyer-bonds, and the sheriff wouldn't let me make any more bonds. My law practice, already at risk of being declared a hobby by the IRS, went from sparse to nothing.

The Regional Commander found me in the back yard and hired me. The District Attorney dismissed the case against him, we sued Aubrey for violating the Free Exercise Clause of the 1st Amendment, got a consent judgment declaring the Solicitation Ordinance in Aubrey unconstitutional, and the Regional Commander brought me two hundred files of other cities in Texas and Oklahoma he wanted to sue. I bought the first word processor in the county and was suddenly fully employed again.

So my free-throw shooting career came to an end and my plans for this book were put on hold. ) Yes, Uncle Toby, a digression.

Back to Bierce:

Ambrose Bierce disappeared into the Mexican Revolution. He is known to have been with Pancho Villa's army during his last discovered letter. There was some speculation he had committed suicide. He was in his 70's. He had written a letter to his niece Lori including this:

"Good-bye — if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico — ah, that is euthanasia!"

Then there was B. Traven, who wrote Treasure of the Sierra Madres. Traven would have been in Mexico about the time Bierce was there, if Bierce had survived long enough. Bierce was in Mexico in late 1913. Traven was there probably by 1924.

Traven is a puzzle. No one has figured out who he was. He would go by the nickname, El Gringo, and changed his name often. He had some American and some German connections. One anecdote I have heard is that when Treasure of the Sierra Madres was being made into a movie he surfaced for a while to give technical suggestions and then disappeared.

So we have two great personalities and writers. One disappeared in Mexico without a trace and one appeared in Mexico without a history.

My story was that they were the same person. Pretty cool, right?

I planned to read everything either writer published so I could steep myself in both their personalities. I then planned to write the great American novel and in the process explain in fiction both Bierce's disappearance and Traven's appearance.

There were a few problems with this theory. First, Bierce should have been born about 50 years before Traven. If the guy who died in 1969 was really Bierce (or Traven for that matter), Bierce would have died at age 155.

Second, Traven's work may have been originally written in German and translated.

Third, Traven most likely was in Germany or Chicago when Bierce was in San Francisco.

Fourth, writing styles are not very similar. It has been so long since I've read either, I hate to characterize them, but I think it is fair to say they are not similar.

Bierce was known as "Bitter Bierce" and besides his caustic humor he wrote eery short stories: One for instance about an officer directing artillary at his own family's house out of a sense of duty. Another, about a man being hanged from a bridge and the thoughts that went through his mind just before the rope snapped his neck.

Traven was spare in his style and wrote in defense of Mexican Indian rights and Wobbly politics.

All right, I admit, there were a few problems with the idea.

Then Carlos Fuentes wrote El Gringo Viejo and gave his version of Bierce's disappearance. Thus ended my project; I had little enough confidence that I could produce anything worthwhile even without having to be compared with the likes of Carlos Fuentes. The big upside, though, was that I had an excuse to spend a lot of time reading Bierce and Traven.

Freedom of Speech and Freedom From Quartered Troops, Illegal Searches, Hopes for Penumbras and Emanations and other Mournfully Expectant Desires

Granddaddy of all Bloggers

WWMD

"I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little the more, as I grow older; for, methinks, custom allows to age more liberty of prating, and more indiscretion of talking of a man's self." The granddaddy of all bloggers (hereinafter GOAB) tells us.

What greater security in freedom of speech GOAB offers from "custom;" far more constant, than that whippersnapper, the First Amendment.

This brings me to further discussion of the Bill of Rights, in particular the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 9th and 10th.

First, to my Primo (that is, both directly descended from the McGroarty family of County Donegal, by way of Wilkes-Barre, Penn.--everyone is Irish on St. Patrick's day) and his concern for the 1st Amendment. Also, to offer to him the sincerest form of flattery.

The First Amendment is gone. Justice Holmes burned it in the burning theater. Adams and Woodrow Wilson jailed it during time of war. And then most deadly of all, the corporations bought it: Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) -- now control most of the media industry in the U.S. General Electric's NBC is a close sixth.

You and I, Primo, can say most anything we want because we have no power. No one cares because no one listens. But imagine if either one of us owned one of the big five. Only then would we find out if First Amendment provides any protection. My hunch is that just as free speech disappears in time of war, a clear and present danger would exist if either of us were in a position of power.

Now back to the antinomianism. Neither your hero Voltaire, nor my hero GOAB had the benefit of the Bill of Rights. The salvation of society, in the unlikely event it occurs, will not be by law, but by grace. The Bill of Rights, however graceful, is still law.

Now the 3rd Amendment, alone, seems still to be around and strong. I search the house each day and find no troops quartered.

The 4th Amendment appears to have been repealed with the war on drugs. I did not read about the repeal in the advance sheets, but try to keep someone out of the slam on the flimsy grounds that he has not been secure in his person, house, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Fellow blogger, BobbyWC describes his hope for the 9th Amendment. The 9th and 10th Amendments describe the rights and powers being retained by the people. These amendments had a brief flowering with the Right of Privacy being found in the "penumbras and emanations" of the Amendments. Outside of this pleasing phrase, not much satisfaction has come from 9 and 10.

Charles L. Black in his slim book, A New Birth of Freedom, argues the Declaration of Independence, in particular the "right to the pursuit of happiness" be carried down into and through the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments. He argues the result "will be a thoroughgoing and never-ending working-over of the regime of law..." leaving folks alone to pursue happiness, which he thinks is not a bad thing.