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by Aaron Bess
At 4:06 AM this morning I woke up to my phone ringing. Which has never in my life been a good thing. Surprisingly I woke up and answered it. It was Barre City Dispatch asking me to come outside and talk to officers. My heart is racing with thoughts of if my son’s are okay, is my family and friends okay.
They got a report of someone checking car doors and rummaging through the unlocked ones in the neighborhood. I come outside to see a stranger next to my little red car being detained.
“What is going on?!” Half awake, I ask the officer making his way towards me slowly, fresh snow had fallen and my driveway is slick. He slips and falls pretty hard (really hope he’s okay!). Fills me in, and says they tracked his footprints off Summer Street to my house on Mill.
“We saw fresh tracks around your pickup, leading to your car, but that’s where they stopped,” the police said. This dude was inside my car “sleeping,” as he said. Baloney. He was hiding. He had a reusable shopping bag half full of stuff, and a small blanket not big enough for a toddler.
Rewind to spring of this year here. A house on summer street turned into a full blown crack/trap house. Out of state plates, junky cars not even worthy of scrapping, flying through the neighborhood full of zombie-looking people.
This went on until the raid on Mother’s Day. They pulled four folks from out of state out in this raid, none of which were the homeowner, or the other locals that came and went from that house.
The raid slowed things down, but they picked right back up again. One afternoon coming home from work, I had to lay on the horn to back into my own driveway as some chick was tweaking, blocking access to my driveway. This went on til mid November when whoever bought the house was able to get the former owner out.
Long story short, I absolutely love my community, my neighbors, our wonderful police force and the firefighters. The crack house brought us together for monthly meetings to figure out a way to handle these issues. We invited the states attorney, our town representatives and extended the invite even further to our lawmakers.
I am a 5th-6th generation Vermonter, through and through. I love this state most days. But what I don’t love is becoming worse and worse.
First is how horribly bad we are taxed. Especially the working class folks that keep your house warm, repaired and safe.
Second is our horribly failed judicial system.
We all see it, try to ignore how sad it’s becoming just in our area. Panhandlers, homelessness and the crime it brings. Worst part is, these folks that are breaking the law, get maybe a slap on the wrist and are right back out there doing the same thing. While us hardworking folk are busting our tails to support ourselves and help one another make it through another hard year in this tax-happy state.
Vermont needs to do better for its Vermonters. Before you know it, us hardworking folk that keep this infrastructure running are gonna be sick of it. I know I am.
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Categories: Commentary
If you build the welcome…they will come. Remove the welcome they will get the message and go…plus a few 20 below winters should thin them out.
We spend more on “patching” pot holes in the roads than we do on mental health. 85% of these crimes are committed by addicts. The remainder are crimes of passion. The answer isn’t more enforcement, or longer prison stays. The problem with giving someone 5 years for a property crime instead of 3 is, he/she is still going to get out one day. If the underlying issue (mental health) are not addressed then the individual is going to get out, angrier, in better health, rested up, with a whole new network of criminal contacts. Not to mention, 5 years of nursing a huge resentment toward the public and the people who “turned thier back on them”. The answer mostly lies with programs. You’ve got them captive. You’ve got thier attention. If you want to increase thier prison sentence, do it but, use it as leverage to get them to take the mental health programs that need to be offered. 3 years if you take the programs; 5 years if you don’t. I know this will work. It worked for me. That’s what they are doing in Illinois, and New Jersey, two states where I spent 5 years each of my life trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. At one of these Programs I read a quote by Albert Ellis that said ” The significant problems I face today cannot be solved by the same manner of thinking that created them. ” it was like a light came on. If I want to fix what’s been happening to me, I needed to change my thinking 🤔. I was then, that I spent the next 8 years trying to change my thinking. And, its working. I’ve been out of prison two years next month and haven’t had a drink in a year. I go to AA meetings every day in order to continue to address my thinking. The answer isn’t harsher sentencing…We did that in the 80s and all it did was fill our prisons costing costing the U.S. taxpayer over 30k a year or inmate. No, the answer is programing. Flood these prisons with mental health, addiction recovery, and religious programs. Give them incentives to take these programs and then establish Post Release Programs to aid them in getting out and the transition of doing so.
Hey Lonnie, true and not true. El Salvador was the highest crime nation in the world, now it is the safest!
What did they do?
In restorative justice who is restored???????
It’s not the criminals, clearly.
How much mental health does one need to keep from putting their hand on a hot burner?
The programming you speak of, if one is truly going to change and forgive/be forgiven is in but one place and that has nothing to do with social work. It has to do with Jesus Christ!
3 years of study with Jesus
Christ and your life will be changed.
To date, what criminals has Vermont reformed?
We let criminals prosper and flourish, letting criminals run rough shod ALL OVER THE STATE IS not the solution, it’s NOT WORKING FOR ANYONE.
If you study human history, if you study wisdom, you will understand that some people will not change. Some people you can lead to water, but they won’t drink. It is not something you or I can change. It would be nice if everyone could experience the Change and the recovery you have, I wish recovery for every one. However reality also demonstrates this is not real life, some hearts and minds and minds are too hardened. Letting them steal more does nobody any good.
You may also find drugs lead to further mental health issues, physically altering the brain. Drugs are nobodies friend.
In Vermont it is very, very difficult to start your life over after making some serious mistakes, I will grant you that. And the most welcoming group after being in prison, are “friends” who deal drugs and lead a life of crime. There people can get shelter, earn money and get food (and drugs). So as much as liberal vermont says they care about recovery they do not, they have made the environment about impossible. How could we make it easier?
Rental laws and housing.
Nobody can take a chance currently the costs and time involved in getting a bad tenant out is way too steep. If we had laws that said, no harm, no foul, you need to leave, then everyone would be better off. Maximum 60-day eviction. If we allowed by right multifamily homes, it would be helpful. All the big housing projects across the state will not allow people this chance, they screen people very heavily. We have no cheap living, we’ve become the utmost in snobbery, in NIMBYism.
Jobs and Self Employment
Same goes for jobs, it’s a huge risk to hire some people, liability of them hurting themselves, hurting others if very costly on many, many aspects, aside from the physical. Insurance coverage and expense is a major issue. Our state makes it more difficult to be self-employed, which can be an amazing ladder out of poverty, if one develops the basic skills to hold a job.
Carrots and sticks are needed.
Some countries have little crime, because they cut the hands off of a criminal who steals from a vendor or restaurant. Crime stopped immediately when the Taliban took over places the United States moved out of. Rome got compliance from its citizens from crucifixion along the Appian way. Vermont gets compliance for liberal thought by publicly hanging and job removal if you don’t agree with the marxist dogma pumped out, ask our school principals! Mexican cartels get compliance, they will cut off both hands, wrap them up to stop the bleeding and send them home. Think about that, you can’t even wipe your behind after that. Should we go this route? Of course, the answer is no. Who promotes this type of unforgiveness?
The ideal would be to have change of heart, to have people willingly not steal, willingly LOVE THEIR NEIGHBOR. Who supports this type of forgiveness?
Some people love the lifestyle, or at least think they love the lifestyle, of being a gangsta, doing whatever comes to mind in the moment. Nobody said a sinful lifestyle wasn’t fun! If it weren’t fun nobody would do it! You don’t see people, multiple times, putting their hand on a red-hot stove burner, now do we?
The old terms still apply today. Repent! Repent! Repent! aka change your direction! Change who you are going to follow and take in internally.
This is why socialism has historically failed. Eventually you do run out of other people’s money. And Bernie’s “free”, “free”, “free” is nonsense. It’s not only a cliche, but it’s also the truth: Nothing in life is free.
And you guys’ resented tourists??? Lol. I tried to warn you decades ago of the gangsta’s, the thugs, the opportunists, the junkies AND your own homegrown Communists – More than half of the “democrat”-socialists in your legislature were BORN & RAISED in Vermont! Some families go back hundreds of years.
Know who your “enemy” is.
It never has been skiers or campers or families with 2nd homes who contribute to the tax base and live peaceably.
It’s the legislators, home-grown and carpetbaggers who are turning VT into California. At best.
The biblical prescription for real, ongoing, and lasting change is this:
“Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”
Romans 12:1-2
We are changed, transformed by what we think about. Another word for it is repentance, which literally means to “change one’s mind,” not in some shallow fickle way, but to think profoundly differently. Like as different as a butterfly is from a caterpillar.
But this renewing and transformation presupposes having first humbly received the mercies of God graciously given to us in Jesus’s death, resurrection, and forgiveness on our behalf. When this new birth happens, our lives are then framed by giving our lives to Him in gratitude as our expression of love, worship, and devotion to Him for all He has done for us.
Programs and policies all may help to modify behaviors—which isn’t a bad thing—but true and lasting change happens marvelously from the inside out by the grace of God. It’s all His work, but my part is to make a deliberate choice to receive His love and mercies. Renewing of the mind with the truth of the gospel produces transformation of the heart and hence, the person.
“Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.”
2 Corinthians 5:17