Editorials from across South Carolina: prison escapes, nuclear waste, gun laws

The next escape

Last fall, (McCormick Correctional Institution) saw two fatal stabbings and an escape on a food delivery truck that led to a police officer in Columbia being stabbed. Half the positions at McCormick Correctional were unfilled at the time, and lawmakers said they were working on a solution: finding money in the budget, without raising taxes, to pay correction officers more and reduce the high number of vacancies across the system. Since change was promised, the state prison system captured national headlines after two inmates killed four of their prison mates at Kirkland Correctional, and again when a drone-aided escapee made his way from Lieber Correctional to Texas before being captured. This past week, a group of inmates made their way from their cells to the roof of their dorm at McCormick Correctional.…

Perhaps, if vacancies dropped from 50 percent to 40 in 10 months, another 40 months will see the prison fully staffed? Perhaps, but that’s a long time to go without enough officers to stop escape attempts and prevent murders in taxpayer-funded facilities that are ultimately responsible for keeping inmates safe and contained. Maybe, if lawmakers were made to live next to prisons — at least those who don’t belong inside — and it was their families in harm’s way when convicts break out, we’d see a quicker fix.

Nuclear waste

The federal government agreed to build the mixed-oxide facility as a condition of sending 34 tons of plutonium to SRS. The decision to abandon the project came after the plutonium already had been shipped to SRS.

Meanwhile, the planned permanent storage site for high level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, was shut down in 2011 by the then-chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, with the Obama administration’s approval. There are ongoing efforts to restart the project on which $15 billion has already been spent since the 1980s.

Meanwhile, South Carolina, Aiken County and Washington state have ongoing lawsuits against the DOE for failing to meet its promises on nuclear waste. The state also is attempting to get payment of $200 million in fines that the federal government agreed to remit if it failed to send a specified volume of nuclear waste out of the state by 2016. It reneged on that promise, too.…

South Carolina should emphasize its opposition to becoming the dump site for federal nuclear waste at every possible turn — in the courts, in Congress and by state government. The state has assumed more than its share of responsibility for nuclear defense production and waste management since the early years of the Cold War. The federal government should have to live up to its promises to the state.

Find common ground on guns

Already, battle lines are being drawn once again over guns, specifically semi-automatic rifles and an accessory known as a bump stock, which can be attached to them to make them fully automatic.

Such discussions took place 18 years ago, when two students murdered two schoolmates and one teacher while injuring more than 20 other people at Columbine High School in Colorado. They bubbled up five years ago, when a teenager shot his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. killing 20 children and six staff members.

In June of last year, the conversation about guns resurfaced when a gunman walked into the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, murdered 49 people and injured dozens more.

Closer to home, in Charleston, nine people were murdered two years ago, while worshipping in a church, prompting local discussions about how to keep guns out of the hands of those who would do harm.…

This story was originally published October 9, 2017 at 1:54 PM with the headline "Editorials from across South Carolina: prison escapes, nuclear waste, gun laws."