On August 18 in Springfield and Brattleboro there will be rallies calling on Biden and congress to stop funding Israel's war on Gaza. The organizers have a web page at: www.mobilize.us/nab

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Spencer Crispe is a lawyer in Brattleboro. On August 15 the Brattleboro Reformer daily newspaper published a letter by Crispe. It said, in part, “A considerable number of bad actors downtown deserve long prison sentences, and that cannot happen soon enough.... Criminals, drug activity and vagrancy are a blight on our town and harm hard-working, good people trying to earn a living and provide for their children.... We can start with a statute greatly limiting panhandling.... The police are already doing a great job, but are stretched, so adding officers to make as robust a police force as possible will help.”

Vagrancy means being homeless. It is probably illegal to ban panhandling, according to:

www.acluvt.org/en/news/panhandling-ordinances-across-vt-likely-illegal

According to:

https://endhomelessness.org/blog/the-supreme-court-rules-on-homelessness...

"Criminal penalties such as fines, tickets, and arrests (for being homeless) make homelessness worse, and cost communities a lot of money that should otherwise be spent on housing, supportive services, and street outreach. With record numbers of people entering into homelessness systems for the first time, we must remind leaders that what solves homelessness is housing, together with supportive services needed to help people stabilize in housing."

No nation keeps such a high percentage of its people in prison as the USA. Europe's rate is a third of ours. The USA's prison system is racist. That's according to the book “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander.

Vermont's prison system is one of the most racist among the 50 states. Just 1 percent of Vermonters are black but 9 percent of its prisoners are black. Vermont sends prisoners to a private prison in Mississippi.

Vermont uses a private prison – Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York
and Canada do not.

Groups that are working to end mass incarceration have web sites at
www.aclu.org and https://ellabakercenter.org

In 2014, in Oakland, California, anti-prison activists held a rally outside a meeting of the county legislature. They were asking the Alameda county board of supervisors to invest $17 million a year in programs to keep people out of prison by creating jobs for people just getting out of prison. The board rejected the activists’ request. The activists kept returning to the board’s meetings and speaking out during the public comment period. But the board kept rejecting their request. On March 4, 2015, the activists returned to a county board meeting. This time they were ready to get arrested for non-violent civil disobedience. They interrupted the meeting by singing songs from the civil rights movement. The board quickly ended the meeting. Soon, the activists won. They got the $17 million.

As of 2015, there were two main newspapers in Oakland, the Oakland Tribune and the East Bay Express. The Tribune was owned by a corporation in Colorado that owned dozens of other newspapers around the nation. The East Bay Express was owned by a group of local people in Oakland.

There are several radio and TV stations that cover Oakland news. One of them is KPFA, a non-profit radio station whose board of directors is elected by anyone who donates $35 a year or volunteers four hours a year. KPFA rejects the corporate money that NPR stations rely on.

Darris Young was the main organizer of the protests at the Alameda county board of supervisors meeting. He was a prisoner in California in 2008. While he was in prison, he organized a strike by the prisoners. They refused to do their jobs until they got more recreation time. They won. Now he is out of prison. As of 2015, he was working for the Ella Baker Center in Oakland as a community organizer. The Valley Post spoke with him in 2015.

Young told the Valley Post the East Bay Express provided coverage that helped turn out people for the protest in March. He said the Tribune did not. KPFA has covered his group’s work better than the commercial radio and TV stations.

Vermont's incarceration rate is double Europe's rate. In Brattleboro in 2017 there was a freedom march to call on Vermont politicians to reduce the number of people the state keeps in prison.