Dear Action Line: Why will personal mail to La Plata County Jail inmates need to be sent to San Antonio, Texas? Did the sheriff make a deal with Texas that its tourists can come here only if Texas takes our prisoners? Or is this like the deal with the Durango city utility bills having to be sent to Gretna, Nebraska? It’s bad enough that our local mail gets sent to Albuquerque to be postmarked and then sent back to Durango for delivery. Sign me, Penny Tentiary
Dear Penny: As San Antonians are conditioned to respond, appropriately or not: Remember the Alamo!
No, they’re not getting our inmates. Action Line could delve into the whole prison-industrial complex here, and how services are farmed out to contractors who make megabucks off the government-sponsored detention centers and the families who pay through the nose to contact their loved ones in jail or prison. But at least in this case, there seems to be a method to the madness.
Action Line contacted Ted Holteen, La Plata County’s public and governmental affairs manager, to use his full and proper title, and Holteen contacted folks at the county jail, and here’s what he had to report.
“Apparently there’s a nationwide problem with jails in that someone has figured out how to put fentanyl in ink; they mail the letter to an inmate who eats the paper or chews it enough to exhaust all the drugs,” Holteen said. “So apparently people are overdosing in jail because they consume their mail. You can’t make this stuff up.”
La Plata jail officials contracted with a new vendor, ICSolutions, a San Antonio-based company involved in prisoner communications – phone calls, video calls and secure mail, among other things.
“So what ICS does is take the mail and transfer it electronically and then the inmates read the mail on a tablet,” Holteen said. “Previously, jail personnel would have to get the mail, make photocopies of it for the inmates to read and keep the original until the inmate is discharged.”
The new system will go into effect on Sept. 1, which the calendar says is getting really close.
New Mexico, incidentally, now sends prison mail through a Florida company for similar reasons. As well as fentanyl, synthetic cannabis can also be soaked into letters.
Gretna is located just a few miles southwest of Omaha. It has some nice pumpkin patches, if you happen to be hand-delivering your utility bill. (Saves 60 cents!)
Dear Action Line: I’m hoping Action Line will unconfuse me about the distinction between rivers and creeks. Animas River, sure, because it’s big. Vallecito and Pine are about equal in size, but Vallecito is a creek and the Pine (Los Pinos) a river. The Piedra is a river too. La Plata, Mancos and West Mancos are rivers, but are much smaller than Vallecito or Mineral creeks. And of course there’s Hermosa Creek. What’s it all mean? – Going With The Flow
Dear Flow: So, if you visit the U.S. Geological Survey Dictionary of Water Terms, this is what you learn about a river: It is a natural stream of water of considerable volume, larger than a brook or creek. Action Line’s addendum: Except when it’s not.
Yep, if you came to Action Line to be deconfused on this issue, please stop and turn back now.
A river might be bigger, but there’s some relativity involved here. Drop the Los Pinos or La Plata into New York state, and it might be considered a rivulet of no concern.
For instance, West Canada Creek at Kast Bridge, New York, was at 429 cubic feet/second last week. Los Pinos River at La Boca was running at 119 cfs, the Mancos River near Towaoc at 4.26 cfs. You call that a river?
Southwest Colorado streams vary considerably depending on the season and where along the “river” you measure. (The Animas was at 78 cfs last week in Silverton, 305 near the New Mexico border.) And let’s muddy the waters even more by pointing out that irrigation concerns can greatly decrease a stream’s flow.
Action Line admittedly had trouble getting any local official to respond. One led Action Line to a page on the USGS site called “Water Science School.” One topic is “Rivers, Streams, and Creeks.” Aha! This will be helpful. Sure it will. This is what it says:
“Rivers? Streams? Creeks? They are all names for water flowing on the Earth’s surface. As far as our Water Science site is concerned, they are pretty much interchangeable. I (no author’s name is given) tend to think of creeks as the smallest of the three, with streams being in the middle, and rivers being the largest.”
So nobody has a solid answer to this question, and that’s Action Line’s answer.
Bottom line: Someone decided a century or more ago what to designate our local waterways, and we’re stuck.
There. Did that help?
Email questions and suggestions to actionline@durangoherald.com or mail them to Action Line, The Durango Herald, 1275 Main Ave., Durango, CO 81301. Send them in a torrent or trickle or river or rivulet. It’s all good.
