MandatoryTX

While studying Human Services at Western Washington University, I did an internship through Americorps with the Education program at the King County Jail on 5th Ave. in downtown Seattle. I got a taste at how effective our criminal justice system is at rehabilitating our criminals, and how good of a financial investment it is for our society.

Let's say you are a prosecuting attorney and need to get your conviction rates up. Stall a few cases who's defendants are too poor to post bail for a few months, while their careers and family life fall apart on the outside. Now offer them a plea bargain: plead guilty and all you have to do is "time served" (the few months they already served.) Because responsible people have people they need to take care of outside of jail, a lot of innocent and good people get criminal convictions on their records because of these kind of nasty tricks.

A full one percent of the USA's population is incarcerated. We have the highest incarceration rate in the world - worse than any dictatorship or socialist dystopia on the planet. Besides the large number of innocent people in jail, jail must also be considered a social service - what other way is better to keep someone from committing domestic violence, for example? I have actually met people who like it in jail, and like to live there at the tax payer's expense. I have heard of homeless people intentionally getting into jail so they could get out of the cold and see a doctor. As good of a resource jail is for these people, we simply cannot afford to provide this kind of high-end social service for some 1% of the population.

I have an alternative I started writing about while studying Human Services, called "Mandatory Treatment." If you catch someone with cocaine on them, don't offer them 3 hots and a cot for a few years, instead make them go into a 3 month in-patient drug rehabilitation program. First, it is going to be LESS pleasant than a longer term in jail, it is a harsher punishment. Second, unlike jail, it might really get them thinking about their life and their mistakes - they might actually change their behavior. Third, it will be much less expensive.

But Mandatory Treatment can work with non-narcotics programs. Driving while under the influence for example - long jail sentences hardly suffice for treating alchohol-related behavior problems, while Mandatory Treatment would have much better odds. Another example is domestic violence: jail is not going to give an abuser sufficient counseling and introspection to change behavior. From vandalism to shoplifting, Mandatory Treatment would work far better than what we have now, for a lot less money.

Brown Rice Recipe

One way you can instantly add a lot of nutrition to your diet is to convert from any white rice to any whole grain rice, collectively called "brown rice". There are many types of brown rice, and a the commonly found ones I have ran into in Seattle include: black cargo rice, red cargo rice, brown short grain rice (sometimes found in sushi), brown long grain rice. Your normal approach to cooking rice is likely to end up making nearly inedible garbage, but many people have found innovative ways of cooking it that make it just as good if not considerably tastier than white rice.

I have a universal way of cooking all types of brown rice that is easy and works every time:

1. Put your dry rice out of the package into a pot.
2. Put water in the pot until the rice is covered by at least 5 times as much volume as the rice itself takes up. So if the rice fills the pot to 10%, make sure the water level is up to at least 60% of the pot.
3. Bring the rice to a boil stirring occasionally. Cover the pot, and reduce to a simmer.
4. After 30 minutes, check rice for consistency. If it's ready, move on to step 5, if it is not, repeat this step every 5 minutes until the rice has the texture you want.
5. Use a pasta strainer to drain the water off of the rice.
6. Very briefly douse the rice in the strainer with water, and let the rice sit a few minutes in the strainer to let the water drain off the rice.
7. The rice is now ready to eat or use in some other recipe (fried rice, Spanish rice, etc.)

In a nutshell, to cook perfect brown rice, cook it like you would pasta: boil it until it has the consistency you want, then briefly rinse it off and drain off all the excess water. It's even easier than it sounds.