A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Sen. Niemeyer has introduced SB 116 which would protect kids from being exposed to civics. Specifically, this would prohibit schools from being used as voting sites during elections. That’s just smart. Everyone knows that voting is a gateway to other kinds of civic participation. First the kids see voting – next thing you know, they’ll be volunteering, exercising their First Amendment rights, paying their taxes and god knows what else. Better to nip this in the bud by keeping polling places away from schools.

The fiscal note indicates that in the 2016 general election, about 10% of polling places were at schools. I know that when West Lafayette had its education tax rate referendum, it was a special election where the referendum was the only issue on the ballot. By using the schools as polling places, the school system was able to keep the costs of the election down. I don’t know what problem the Senator thinks he’s solving here, but if school corporations think they can accommodate polling places and county officials want to put them there, then I don’t see that the General Assembly needs to inject itself into the decision making on this one.

Sen. Bohacek has introduced SB 11 which requires entities administering a needle exchange program to establish a needle exchange registry. The registry would be optional for users and, if the user was on the registry, the user might use that registration as a defense to crimes involving possession of the needles.

Currently, needle exchange administrators are prohibited from collecting personally identifiable information. That prohibition is deleted and the legislation would require them to maintain a registry. The registry is to include the person’s name, date of birth, and last four digits of their social security number. The information in the registry is only to be accessed by a court, a court clerk, or a law enforcement officer. (This would seem to prevent the needle exchange administrator itself from accessing the information — which I presume is not the intent, but maybe a drafting oversight.)

The legislation also says “an individual may opt out and is not required to be included on the registry.” The benefit to the user of registering is that, if they’ve registered within the past year, they can use the registration as a defense to prosecution for possession of a hypodermic needle for use with a controlled substance.

I get where this legislation is coming from. On the one hand, the government says it’s a crime to possess a hypodermic needle to use controlled substances. On the other hand, the government is giving you hypodermic needles that you’re almost certainly going to use for injecting controlled substances. This maybe harmonizes the message a little bit.

I’m ambivalent about the drug war. On the one hand, I think addiction and drug use does a lot of harm to our communities. On the other hand, I think policing, prosecuting, and jailing drug users comes with a lot of expense and does some harm in the process. I don’t have a good sense of where the balance is. Could we decriminalize possession of needles entirely without exacerbating addiction and drug use? I have no idea — I’m not on the front lines of this issue. I do have the sense that the benefits of needle exchanges themselves outweigh the harm. Preventing the spread of HIV and Hepatitis C in our communities outweighs the harm, which I think is probably marginal, from tacit endorsement of the use of needles. Even though the message is mixed somewhat, I don’t think it’s too complicated for the general public to figure out that the government doesn’t want people injecting illegal drugs, but if they are going to do it anyway, the government would prefer they use clean needles and not contract debilitating diseases that are expensive to treat.

I don’t have a good sense of how this legislation would shake out. Would it increase or decrease the use of needle exchanges? If it increases use, does the resulting harm reduction outweigh the increase, if any, in drug use that results from having a defense to the crime of possessing a needle for drug use? (I think they might revoke my blogging card for not pretending certainty and proclaiming every issue a clear and obvious matter of good versus evil.)

Niki Kelly, writing for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, has an interesting article on the Indiana Chamber of Commerce’s tackling of issues that might seem tangential to business interests. In particular, Micah Clark – a vocal social conservative – seems to take umbrage at the Chamber’s support for the General Assembly adopting a hate crime law.

“A lot of business owners – especially small-business owners – would prefer they stick to business and economic issues. It has given the impression to some they are for big government,” said Micah Clark, executive director of the American Family Association of Indiana. “Many people are scratching their heads as to why they are going off course so much.”

But Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Kevin Brinegar bristles at the idea his organization has strayed outside its lane.

“All of these things we get involved in is because it has an economic impact and jobs connection,” he said. “The Indiana Chamber of Commerce has indeed been a driving force in making Indiana one of the best places to grow jobs and raise families and one of the best business climates in the country.”

Mission creep is certainly a thing, and when you focus on everything, you tend to focus on nothing. That said, the Chamber is correct that the social environment is intertwined with the business environment. We do ourselves a disservice when we try to pretend our economic lives are somehow distinct from other parts of our lives. And – if it comes to a conflict between Brinegar’s Chamber and Clark’s “American Family Association,” I’m going to side with Brinegar. I probably watch too much “Survivor,” but the conflict between the two conservative groups puts me in mind of the Survivor end-game when one tribe has mostly voted out the other tribe and members of the dominant tribe have to square off against one another. If unions and social progressives were more powerful forces in Indiana, we’d probably see the Chamber and AFA more inclined to make common cause with one another. But, without unions and social progressives to unite against, you might see erstwhile allies engage in more open conflict.

As an aside, I really don’t like this description of students: “Brinegar said businesses pay more than half of the funds that go to K-12 education, and ultimately are the end users of the product – students – so their interest in a solid education system makes sense.” I suspect this was more of a quick metaphor than anything like a sincerely held belief that students are some kind of widget produced by schools, so I won’t hold it against Mr. Brinegar, but it gets at something unfortunately common enough that it seems worth addressing: employment isn’t the end-all be-all of education. Schools are more than vocational. We need them to produce more than workers – we need them to produce citizens, to help produce fully realized human beings who can make decisions for themselves on how to live happy, worthwhile lives. A productive work life is only a piece of that equation.