Poor treatment, grandfather’s advice: PD letters

Lack of treatment

EDITOR: Mental health costs matter a lot to the seriously mentally ill in our prisons and their families (“Prison Mental Health Wing Locked” October 24). It is estimated that nearly a third of the prison’s population today (about 250 inmates) live with serious mental illness. The 2024 Sonoma County grand jury report described their experience as extremely unpleasant because mental health services at the jail are “basic” and substance use treatment is “much needed.”

Psychiatric evaluations, especially for people whose mental illness may render them incompetent to stand trial, involve long waits. Meanwhile, these individuals are “lucky to get out of their cells for 30 minutes” a day. Spending more than 22 hours a day in a cell, isolated and inactive, can exacerbate mental illness, leading to increased anxiety, anger, depression and paranoia. This can make prison work very stressful for staff and increase the risk of self-harm and suicide.

Mentally ill people often spend more time in jail than those who are not mentally ill, waiting for appropriate evaluation or placement. I urge consideration of the distress caused by nine years of inaction on the 2015 state grant to provide more humane housing in our prison for at least 72 inmates.

MARY-FRANCES WALSH

Executive Director, NAMI Sonoma County

Not at the gas station

EDITOR: In 2019, Santa Rosa passed a climate emergency resolution. In 2022, Santa Rosa passed a permanent ban on new gas stations. In 2024, Santa Rosa is poised to allow a new gas station at the intersection of Highway 12 and Wright Road. This proposal was exempted from the 2022 ban because it was decided that any gas station with a permit application already in progress would be exempted. But it would still have to go through the approval process. The fact that this proposal has been exempted does not mean that it should be approved.

Besides being a punch to the guts of climate concerns, all gas stations are toxic threats to human health, emitting dangerous compounds every day. This station will be located in a seasonal wetland adjacent to the Joe Rodota Trail, at an address where more than 10 gas stations already operate within a 5-mile radius. It is not necessary.

The permit vote will take place Nov. 14 at the Santa Rosa Planning Commission. Be there to tell them we don’t need another gas station destroying the planet and our health.

WOODY HASTINGS

Sevastopol

A better way to reduce rates

EDITOR: Regarding Marisa Endicott’s October 29 column (“Mailed flyers raising concerns”), perhaps PG&E could “lower rates, keeping the prices paid by customers lower than they would otherwise be,” without selling customers’ names and addresses, as well as the utility’s name and reputation, to a private insurance company if it stopped spending millions for useless things (it is a monopoly without competition) and uninformative advertising.

ROGER HAMLYN

Boyes Hot Springs

“Industrial resistance” code.

EDITOR: I was thrilled and excited to read your front page article about high school students teaching elementary school kids to code (“Cracking the Code”, October 3). I wondered what language they were using and hoped it would be Python. But my pleasure at finding that this was the case was dampened by your reporter calling it “rudimentary.”

There is nothing rudimentary about Python. It is a powerful industrial language that underlies countless applications and websites. I retired in 2018 from the 45-person research department of the world’s largest nonprofit library, where I was processing heavy 400 million library records on a 50-node parallel computing cluster and terabytes of memory. The language I used? Python.

Thus, my joy that the high schoolers were savvy enough not to teach using “training wheels” language that students are supposed to leave behind to enter the real world – just the opposite. Their students will be able to build on everything they learn today and look forward to writing modern, business-quality Python code for which they will be paid handsomely.

ROY TENNANT

Sonoma

The wisdom of a grandfather

EDITOR: My grandfather used to say that “people who use bad words have a poor vocabulary, a poorer imagination, and no respect for their audience.” Maybe something to consider when voting for the person who will be our country’s world representative?

PATRICIA F. CLOTHIER

Santa Rosa

Spending your time

EDITOR: A question for those who say they’re going to vote for Donald Trump because he’s presided over a period of low inflation and we the people won’t let him do the nasty things he promises: Wouldn’t you rather spend the next four would you rather be improving your home than fighting the arsonist you allowed to live with you?

BRUCE HAGEN

Petaluma

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