Laura Talkington’s son after he was attacked on Nov. 1, 2003, by another ward in a California Youth Authority facility in Stockton, California. Photos were taken by CYA infirmary staff.

Every parent’s worst nightmare revolves around what harm their child might come to when away from the care and control of the family unit. There is no greater heartbreak for a parent than when a child unleashes familial bonds and harm befalls a loving — if misguided, and even at times obstreperous — child. Imagine, then, how Laura Talkington feels.
In a piece written for the Pacific News Service, Ms. Talkington describes her fear at visiting her son and the horror of watching him lose himself and become another person, at how he has become hard and afraid due to the abuse heaped upon him, by both guards and other prisoners.

I have not been able to be a mother ever since my son went to the California Youth Authority, the state’s system of youth prisons. I have spent the last four years watching him appear in the CYA visiting room with cuts, choke marks and bruises. He has been attacked by other youth or staff more than 40 times. I have seen him lose confidence in himself, become cold and depressed and fearful for his life. And the whole time, I have not been able to do one thing about it. Except lose sleep … What the CYA calls rehabilitation, the rest of us call tortuous abuse.

Mark Martin, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, provides more chiiling details on the abuse these children suffer. And because, as we’ve found most recently with the published pictures and video of the torture of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of U.S. troops that “a picture is worth a thousand words”, VanRamblings offers this disturbing video as graphic testament to the abuse suffered by children at California’s quasi-jails for kids.

Far be it from VanRamblings to kick a man when he’s down, but migawd, for the first time in the last four years, a beleaguered George W. is looking not only all of his 57 years, but positively weary and downright … old. Looks like the bike spill that he took while on vacation in Texas — when you pile up every other untoward event that has affected the U.S. President these past weeks and months — has really begun to take its toll.
As Talking Points Memo suggested yesterday …

I can’t help but wonder whether the spill the president took from his bicycle today won’t become iconic in the same way that the state dinner the first President Bush attended in Tokyo on January 8th 1992 in which he collapsed into the arms of, and then vomited on, Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa became a symbol of his then-faltering presidency.

Matt Drudge reported an alleged uncharitable off-the-record remark made by John Kerry, quoting the Democratic Presidential hopeful as saying, “Did the training wheels fall off?” Although Kerry’s alleged intemperate remark — even if it is funny — may in the short term afford Bush an added degree of sympathy, the long-term implications of the Bush spill may be dire indeed.

Thank goodness most readers of VanRamblings live in Canada, where soft drug laws verge on the reasonable. In the United States, many of those convicted of simple possession of marijuana are languishing in prison, for periods of up to 60 years.
Of course, comedian and satirist Tommy Chong, 65, got off relatively easily when U.S. District Judge Arthur J. Schwab sentenced him to only nine months in a federal lockup, and fined him $20,000, for distributing drug paraphernalia through his Internet-based California company, Nice Dreams Enterprises.
How much did it cost to prosecute Tommy Chong? Would you believe $12 million? Obviously, the linked article suggests, the money spent on prosecuting Chong could have been much better spent.
Adding to the furore over Chong’s conviction, the following item from a NORML Free Tommy Chong Action Alert …

Ironically, Tommy Chong was sentenced on September 11, 2003, exactly two years after the worst terrorist attacks in American history. With Osama Bin Laden still on the loose and President Bush admitting that the war on terrorism is far from over, it is preposterous that we would waste valuable law enforcement resources locking up a comedian for selling glass pipes. Can anyone here honestly say they feel safer today because Tommy Chong, a comedian and actor, has been sentenced to 9 months in federal prison for selling pipes on the Internet? Of course not. These laws do nothing except make criminals out of otherwise law abiding businessmen.

Thanks to Talk Left for reminding us of the hypocrisy and unjustness of Tommy Chong’s continued incarceration.