Word: alabamas
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...platform" that will serve as her stump speech should she win the crown. This week's wannabes will plump for such causes as aging with dignity (Miss Hawaii), youth-violence intervention (Maine), alternatives to underage drinking (Nebraska), organ-tissue donation (Texas) and motivating at-risk children through music (Alabama). Miss California will speak in favor of sexual abstinence...
Certainly that describes James' penal philosophy, unveiled in April, when Alabama became the nation's first state to restore the prison chain gang, putatively as an "experiment." Last week, judging the experiment successful, the James administration began strapping leg irons every day on 160 prisoners at the Limestone Correctional Facility so they could be sent to break rocks with sledgehammers...
...fact, in true Alabama tradition, James is at war with the law. State and federal judges have, at one time or another, declared Alabama's public schools, mental institutions and foster-care system constitutionally inadequate. Rather than giving in to judicial rulings he dislikes, James inveighs against "pygmy-headed, pea-brained so-called jurists," harking back to the time when Governor George Wallace recommended "barbed-wire enemas" for federal judges. More substantively, James introduced a long-shot bill that would allow the legislature and the Governor to overturn rulings of the Alabama Supreme Court from which three or more judges...
James is also upsetting another, more recent achievement. Alabama's racial climate has improved steadily in recent years. But one of James' first official acts this year was to cut sharply the number of minority voting registrars, an emotional issue in a state where many blacks remember the poll tax. Hard feelings were made worse when James initially named an all-white cabinet, only later adding one black--as tourism officer...
...ALABAMA INMATES First chain gangs, now forced rock breaking. What...