Friday, March 10, 2017

Director of Arkansas transitional home refusing to take registered citizens likens them to "nuclear warheads"

Scott Swanson is the seated man in plaid

I can't imagine a person who likens his clients to explosive weapons can be a very effective at counseling and running a transitional program. 


http://harrisondaily.com/news/transitional-housing-facility-near-omaha-barred-refusal-to-take-sex/article_74d1efa6-0053-11e7-8ad4-73375d0fb7b9.html

Transitional Housing facility near Omaha barred; Refusal to take sex offenders stops proposal

Posted: Friday, March 3, 2017 3:00 pm |
By JAMES L. WHITE jamesw@harrisondaily.com | 0 comments

Transitional Housing facility near Omaha barred; Refusal to take sex offenders stops proposal
A meeting about transitional housing for parolees will still be held Wednesday, but the license for a facility near Omaha has been put on a shelf because management didn’t want to take sex offenders.
Arkansas state Rep. Ron McNair told the Daily Times on Friday that he spoke with Arkansas Community Correction officials that day and was told the group opening the facility didn’t meet ACC regulations, so the license application had been pulled.
Lotus Recovery Services LLC had applied for an ACC Transitional Housing Facility License at 5035 Center Loop between Burlington and Omaha. It would accept non-violent prisoners released on parole and counsel them back to living on the outside, including securing employment for them.
When people living in that area heard about the proposal and saw the license application included accepting sex offenders, they rallied together, signing petitions to have the proposal stopped and taking to social media in droves.
McNair said he didn’t know if public outcry was a part of the ACC’s decision.
Jo McEntire, CEO of Giving Back Industries, said her agency is a partner with Lotus in developing the program.
McEntire said the regulation the partnership didn’t meet was that it didn’t want to take Level 3 and Level 4 sex offenders.
McEntire said the program the partners hoped to open would be for non-violent drug offenders released from prison.
“Our focus is recovery,” McEntire said earlier.
The group has spent years developing a program to teach addicts how to live without drugs, but helping rehabilitate sex offenders is a totally different undertaking.
“We do not know how to help the Level 3 and 4 sex offenders,” McEntire said Friday.
In an email to ACC officials, Scott Swanson, who had opened Oxford House addition recovery houses in the Harrison area and is a partner in the newest venture as well, used an analogy to explain Lotus’ position.
Swanson wrote that Lotus had agreed to take 20 or so “sticks of dynamite” that ACC would be releasing. The program Lotus developed would disarm those sticks of dynamite in hopes they would never be “re-fused.”
But as the project got closer, ACC informed Lotus that there would be a couple of “armed nuclear warheads” in the shipment that Lotus would have to figure out how to disarm.
“We have NO programs for sex offenders,” Swanson wrote.
Instead, Swanson wrote that he hoped to be able to help some of the 12,000 prisoners released, 80 percent of whom suffer with addiction, rather than the comparatively few sex offenders
In response, ACC officials said there would be no need for further discussion or negotiations with Lotus and the application would be considered inactive, and that the licensing process would be discontinued.
McEntire said the partnership will continue its efforts to develop transitional housing for addicts, but Friday’s development meant the Center Loop location won’t be possible.
But, she said the 3 p.m. Wednesday, March 8, meeting at the John Paul Hammerschmidt Center on the North Arkansas College South Campus will still be held for anyone interested.
The presentation will be the same even if the Center Loop location won’t work, McEntire said, adding that the partnership will continue exploring transitional housing for parolees suffering from addiction.

3 comments:

  1. http://www.tvnewscheck.com/article/102509/at-scripps-news-breaks-on-facebook-live

    http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/03/22/att-pulls-google-youtube-ads-over-offensive-content/99497194/

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/22/facebook-fact-checking-tool-fake-news?CMP=twt_a-media_b-gdnmedia&utm_source=Pew+Research+Center&utm_campaign=1493363f9b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_03_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_3e953b9b70-1493363f9b-39936113

    http://mashable.com/2017/03/22/facebook-live-violence-zuckerberg/?utm_cid=mash-prod-nav-sub-st#ACdaYEsNxOqo

    Facebook and Youtube are facing controversy on how to deal with fake news, hate speech and questionable content.

    ReplyDelete
  2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/so-sorry-alex-jones-your-pizzagate-apology-doesnt-change-a-thing/2017/03/28/7ab546da-1303-11e7-9e4f-09aa75d3ec57_story.html?utm_term=.2b860a2f7f90

    Washington Post reports a shitstorm involving Alex Jones and Edgar Welch over Pizzagate. Now the verdicts are out.

    It lingers in the fear that neighborhood residents continue to feel months after a gunman — who came from North Carolina to “self-investigate” the situation — opened fire there in December.

    And it lingers in the continuing, if evidence-free, belief of gullible people about what was claimed to be happening there — not only that the restaurant was the site of sex trafficking but that Hillary Clinton and her presidential-campaign chairman, John Podesta, were deeply involved.



    “I made comments about Mr. Alefantis that in hindsight I regret and for which I apologize to him,” said Jones in a six-minute video released last week, titled “A Note to Our Listening, Viewing and Reading Audiences Concerning Pizzagate Coverage.”

    “We relied on third-party accounts of alleged activities and conduct at the restaurant,” Jones said. “We also relied on accounts of reporters who are no longer with us.”

    This has about the same level of sincerity as the downcast “sorry” muttered by a 6-year-old after kicking his brother while Dad glowers over him with a yardstick in hand.

    Jones, of course, is a great favorite of President Trump, who was interviewed on his radio show last year. Trump has cited as fact some of Jones’s outlandish ideas — for example, that the news media has covered up terrorism by Islamist extremists — and has complimented his “amazing reputation.”

    No surprise, then, that Jones, who at best can be called a conspiracy theorist and at worst a cynical wacko, recently bragged about his ability to get White House press credentials, should he want them. Trump’s crony, the political trickster Roger Stone, said he thinks that’s a good idea.

    Alex Jones: The louder he yells, it seems the more people listen Embed Share Play Video3:21
    Alex Jones was a powerful underground voice for the alternative conservative media, but he became a more mainstream figure in December 2015, when Donald Trump, then a Republican presidential candidate, spent 30 minutes on Jones's radio program, "Info Wars." (Erin Patrick O'Connor, Manuel Roig-Franzia/The Washington Post)
    If Jones were really interested in cleaning up the bilge he spreads, he wouldn’t be starting now.

    He would have recanted the disgusting claim that schoolchildren were not gunned down in Newtown, Conn., in 2012 and that the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre was a government-run hoax to take away gun rights.

    He would have taken back claims that fluoridated water is a government plot to control your mind.

    He would have done penance for spreading the lies that 9/11 was an inside job and that Barack Obama is not a U.S. citizen.

    But none of those lies seem to have merited a second thought.

    As my colleague Paul Farhi reported over the weekend, the timing of Jones’s apology suggests he was concerned about a potential lawsuit, since his remorse came after he received a letter from Alefantis’s lawyer last month.

    Farhi wrote: “Under Texas law, the Austin-based Jones had to retract or apologize for the stories by Friday — one full month after receiving Alefantis’s letter — to avoid exposing Infowars to punitive damages in a libel suit.” And Friday, indeed, was the very day that Jones’s apology video was aired.

    Friday was also the day that the Comet Ping Pong gunman, Edgar Welch, pleaded guilty to assault and weapons charges.

    ReplyDelete
  3. http://politics.blog.mystatesman.com/2017/03/27/now-thats-real-news-on-alex-jones-pizzagate-apology-and-the-perils-of-subbing-one-conspiracy-for-another/

    http://www.mystatesman.com/news/crime--law/how-austin-east-side-pies-became-target-fake-pizzagate/jQJtrr2xVIMNmpWc0IOW5O/

    Now Alex Jones is to have been revealed for starting a conspiracy in Austin, TX over another false child rape allegation at a pizza joint there too? Wait is Alex Jones or his staff facing allegations that they abuse children at one point or right now but the rest of us don't know that yet??

    ReplyDelete

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