Thumbs up, thumbs down
Thumbs up to an encouraging turnout from Connecticut’s youngest candidates for COVID-19 vaccines getting their first dose. Since residents aged 16 through 24 became eligible April 1, nearly a quarter of that population got a shot. For some students in that group, there’s some extra motivation to being able to tentatively plan graduations, proms or other school-related festivities. Gov. Ned Lamont predicted, “I have a feeling we’re going to have to work harder with the younger demographic,” but this is a good start.
Thumbs down to Gov. Ned Lamont and Connecticut Department of Transportation Commissioner Joseph Giulietti using the sorry state of the Stamford train station to promote a proposed fee on big rigs using highways and a regional emissions reduction initiative. It’s refreshing to hear state officials acknowledge that the busiest stop on the line (short of Grand Central Terminal) is in need of an overhaul, but many of the station’s issues should have been addressed years ago. Democrats should not be preemptively blaming Republicans if the funds don’t come through this time.
Thumbs up to plans to reopen Connecticut courthouses as COVID restrictions are lifted around the state. Precautions enacted at the pandemic’s outset a year ago were unavoidable, but they resulted in an unacceptable backlog of cases that has left people in limbo for far too long. The courts plan to return to “near normal” operations over the next few months, officials said, which will be a relief to everyone involved. While much can be done virtually, the regular functioning of our justice system is something that has been on hold for too long.
Thumbs up to a difference of 27 percent between estimates of Connecticut’s incarcerated population at the end of 2020 and its actual size. In terms of actual lives, that means 3,500 fewer people in prisons and jails than there were in March 2020, as the pandemic hit the state. It’s always worth celebrating a lower prison population, but it’s also discouraging to see an uptick in the Black and Hispanic population from 70 percent to 72 percent. Experts attribute the decline to the success of prison reforms launched under the administration of former Gov. Dannel P. Malloy.
Thumbs down to the number of reported hate crimes in Connecticut nearly doubling from 65 to 128 between 2019 and 2020. These are just the crimes that were reported, and experts fear the true figure may be considerably higher. Of those 128 cases, 106 involved white supremacist propaganda, while there were 21 anti-Semitic incidents along with one extremist murder and a white supremacist event. Nationally, the ADL documented a record number of white supremacist events, averaging them out to 14 a day. While the COVID-19 pandemic can be blamed for sparking the kind of anxiety that can fuel such actions, the larger question is whether it merely triggered troubling latent issues.
Thumbs up to the inclusion of social equity provisions in any bill to legalize recreational marijuana. While expectations have been high following neighboring states’ decisions on legalization, some legislators have insisted the state simultaneously address people who have been most affected by the decades-long drug war that has devastated communities. This is the right stance. People who have spent years behind bars over a substance that is about to be legalized need to be made whole, to whatever extent is possible. It’s worth opposing legalization until this can be achieved.