Maureen Murdock's Blog, page 5
February 25, 2016
What is Memoir Writing?
Memoir often gets confused with autobiography and biography. Memoir is not a linear autobiography recounting a fully lived life, but rather a selected aspect of the writer’s life, written from his or her point of view. Rather than simply recounting an incident or memory from her life, the memoirist both tells the story and tries to make meaning out of it.
What happened to me back then and how did I react? What insight do I have now looking back upon that experience, that time in my life? Self...
February 20, 2016
Drug Overdoses for Young Whites an Epidemic: Police Chief’s Solution
The mortality rates for heart disease, HIV and cancer have decreased for young whites aged 25-34 while drug related deaths due to both oxycontin and heroin have skyrocketed. At the same time, the death rate for young blacks due to overdoses is falling.
Young whites death rates for overdoses for both illegal and prescription drugs are the highest since the Vietnam War of the mid-1960s. In 2014, the overdose death rate for whites ages 25-34 was 5 times its level in 1999 and the rate for 35-44 y...
January 13, 2016
Why ARE We Afraid of the Mentally Ill?
Last month 10-year-old Quintonio LeGrier was shot dead by a Chicago police officer after his father placed a 911 call because LeGrier was acting irrationally, wielding a baseball bat. This was not his first confrontation with the law but the death of LeGrier, who suffered from mental illness, gained national attention because a bystander was also killed.
10 days after Michael Brown was gunned down in Ferguson, MO. a young man suffering from mental illness, named Kajieme Powell was fatally sho...
October 31, 2015
Heroin: The Worst Drug Overdose Epidemic in United States History
Addiction to heroin, and deaths from heroin overdoses has gained much needed attention from the public, legislators and law enforcement. Why?
Nearly 90% of those who tried heroin for the first time in the last decade were white. Deaths from heroin use rose to 8,260 in 2013, quadruple that of 2000. New Hampshire is one of the hardest hit states; it has seen a 68% increase in opioid overdoses from 2013, prompting parents who never would have suspected their children of using heroin to demand a...
October 21, 2015
Police Chiefs, Sheriffs and Prosecutors Join Prison Reform Movement
In an abrupt change in philosophy, more than 130 top law enforcement officials including those from New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and others now support a roll back of tough laws and rigid judicial practices that have built a criminal justice system in the U.S. with the highest incarceration rate in the world. It also costs taxpayers $80 billion a year to maintain.
More than 1/3 of prison and jail inmates are incarcerated for low-level crimes like drug possession and shoplifting and need tre...
POLICE CHIEFS, SHERIFFS AND PROSECUTORS JOIN PRISON REFORM MOVEMENT
In an abrupt change in philosophy, more than 130 top law enforcement officials including those from New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and others now support a roll back of tough laws and rigid judicial practices that have built a criminal justice system in the U.S. with the highest incarceration rate in the world. It also costs taxpayers $80 billion a year to maintain.
More than 1/3 of prison and jail inmates are incarcerated for low-level crimes like drug possession and shoplifting and need tre...
September 8, 2015
Heroic Actions for Prisoners’ Human Rights
A Psychologist Warden in Chicago and a Federal Court Decision in California address Prisoners’ Human Rights
There are now 10 times as many mentally ill people in the nation’s 5000 jails and prisons as there are in state mental institutions. And these prisoners are more likely to be kept in solitary confinement and to be beaten by guards and other inmates. However, two new developments signal hope for the future.
The first is the selection of Dr. Nneka Jones Tapia, a clinical psychologist, as...
August 18, 2015
A New Lease on Life
In 1992, Rudolph Norris, 58, was convicted of possessing and selling crack-cocaine and was sentenced to 30 years in prison. 30 years. He would have received a greatly reduced sentence for the same non-violent crime today but his conviction came during the war-on-drugs debacle of decades past. According to federal data, roughly of the 1.5 million federal and state prisoners presently incarcerated are drug-related offenders. At Mr. Norris’s 1993 pre-sentencing hearing it was reported that “The...
August 13, 2015
De-Stigmatizing Methadone Treatment
We are being told that there’s a heroin epidemic in the United States that is killing scores of young people. The Midwest has become one of the hot spots of heroin use where it’s as easy to order it with your cell phone as it is to order pizza. Part of the reason there’s an increase of opiate use is that for years doctors prescribed painkillers such as Percocet, Vicodin and OxyContin thinking they were non-addictive. When they didn’t work to numb pain, people turned to heroin. And heroin is c...
