Coyote TV - Home of the High Desert Advocate

    What with arranging our daughter’s engagement and planning our father’s 10 year memorial we made a major error last week regarding the Cinco de Mayo Celebrations.
    We were wrong and we regret and accept the error.
    We were going to use some of this space to take exception to the rather extreme comments by City Manager/Public Development Director/Press Spokesman/ any other title Chris Melville.
    But we thought the better of it, we are big boys and can take our lumps when we deserve them.
    Besides a litany of Melville’s history would use space comments on two of our front page story rightly deserve.
    The new revelations coming out about the Ely Maximum Security Prison should sicken us all.
    If true even if just half of it is true should make every Nevadan ashamed about what was going on at the prison.
    We are a nation of laws and when you break the big ones you lose your freedom. The punishment is not being sent to a place where your health or life is left up to the arbitrary whim of the administration.
    But that exactly what seems to have taken place in Ely.
    We have no doubt that the people abused were disgusting people.
    But in addition to the inmates every time the law was broken or ignored regarding their treatment every Nevadan was abused.
    In a place where might apparently made right, there was no law except that of the jungle.
    We as Americans and as Nevadans are better than that and deserve better than that.
    In practical terms the wholesale abuse of the inmates is not only morally and ethically wrong it is damned stupid too.
    Managing a large population of dangerous violent men who have very little to lose is  not easy under the best circumstances.
    Taking away one of the few things they are entitled to only adds to the inherent danger for the average Correctional Officer must face every day as he or she walks the grounds.
    Because of the virtual news blackout that has existed at the prison for now going on ten years none of us on the outside have very much information on what exactly goes one behind it walls.
    We have no idea how many CO have been attacked, how many have been injured or traumatized. But we can guess the number is not a small one.
    Above and beyond any abuse an inmate may have received it is the health safety and well being of those CO’s the Ely Prison Administration has let down the most.
    While reprehensible on an intellectual level we feel no sympathy for the inmates. We know several of them and we know what they did. However we are morally outraged that if the allegations are true, the danger ESP administration put  on their front line staff is unforgivable.
    The city’s celebration of the $10,000 “donation” of strip club owner  Scott Bangerter is so wrong on so many levels we cannot quite cover them all.
    This was the same city council which not once but twice last year pontificated about the evils going at the Southern X-posure and threatened not once but twice to shut it down.
    The first time was for real and simulated sex acts going on, on stage and with customers that would have made Larry Flynt blush and the second time for being a haven of drug use.
    In both instances those objections disappeared when the appropriate “green grease” was applied to the wheels of what is taken for justice in this town.
    While we have nothing against strip clubs we do have something against hypocrisy.
    Mayor Josephine Thaut wrangled $10,000 out of Bangerter in return for the man dropping his suit against the city and the city removing some major teeth from its SOB ordinance.
    And from public enemy number one, Bangerter is now the kindly old uncle posing in a photo op with four girls who are only slightly younger than some of his strippers.
    It would have been less creepy and certainly much more in the spirit of the deal if he just left the money in a brown paper bag on the door step of city hall at 2 am.