Open government?
Nineteen months after the Seattle City Council created an Open Government Committee, its role has been to reduce openness, says Chris Leman of the Seattle Community Council Federation.
Case in point: On Dec. 7, the committee will hold a public hearing to take comments on some changes to City Council rules that he says are downright scary. Among them: Standing council committees would no longer have to meet in Council Chambers at City Hall; committee chairs wouldn't be required to attend their own meetings and, best of all, legislation could be passed without a quorum of councilmembers. Technically, Leman says, that last one means a committee could function without a member of the City Council actually being present.
Don't get him started on the open government plan the committee was supposed to come up with. The current Public Engagement Plan that the committee is looking at, and will also take testimony on Dec. 7, falls far short, he says, of what the council's April 2008 legislation called for.
The hearing on changes to the council rules starts at 5:30 p.m. on Dec. 7, followed at 6 p.m. by a hearing on the Public Engagement Plan. A final vote is expected on the council rules Dec. 14.
--Cydney Gillis
"Women Behind Bars" not allowed behind bars
The American Library Association's Banned Book Week usually occurs in late September. But no such week exists in prison, where book are often kept from prisoners.
Take "Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System." Written by Silja J.A. Talvi -- a Real Change board member -- the non-fiction work has been banned by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, along with "Perpetual Prisoner Machine: How America Profits from Crime" by Joel Dyer. (Both books were ordered by prisoners.) Refusal to allow prisoners to have these books has led the books' publisher, the Washington-based non-profit Prison Legal News, to file a federal lawsuit saying the prisoners were denied their constitutional rights.
Why are the books banned? According to the Criminal Justice page of change.org, the TDCJ claims they are too graphic, not because the books are critical of the prison system.
The 11-page lawsuit states, in part, that the "TDCJs censorship regime ... is arbitrary, serves no legitimate penological purpose as applied to PLN publication[s], and violates the constitutional rights of publishers like PLN."
--Rosette Royale