Opinion

Every February, the nation comes together to recognize American Heart Month, a time dedicated to raising awareness about heart disease.  It’s essential to be aware that even though heart disease is a significant health issue across America, many heart-related illnesses are preventable. Risk factors for...

The inmate trainers at CTF explained to me that dogs in the TAILS program are immediately crate trained when they arrive in the facility to give them a cozy place to decompress and be safe away from the world. (Except for Sunday, which is...

I often tell people how difficult it can be to put 1,000 words together every week with the expectation those words will somehow make sense and in so doing entertain readers for a few minutes. I tell people this because it is easy to...

You have to admit, I haven’t glorified the actions of those that would like to see us at the bottom of the ocean. However, after the reports from Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., that are plastered all over the television channels, I’m not sure anything...

Driving into the Correctional Training Facility at Soledad and you are reminded of how a secure institution can be. Acres of barren land, no trees, double high-wire fences, guard towers. And that’s how it should be, we know that. But head over to the...

No matter how I may wish to deny I am old, at two years and seven decades it is nonetheless a fact and, having never been old before, I am unrehearsed for the role. I am not alone in that realization, evidenced by how...

They say that the “Good Die Young.” I don’t know about all of the young, but I do know that there is one young man who left this mortal coil way too soon. He left us with memories that will last forever. This particular young...

We should go, shouldn’t we? Shouldn’t we go? Life happens when you are busy making other plans. And isn’t that always the way. My mother-in-law, who had been suffering with Parkinson’s and dementia at my sister-in-law’s house in Oregon, had taken a bad fall...

I have for many years been a reader of biographies, a habit I got into way back in the early 1960s after my parents purchased a set of encyclopedia, which included a series of biographies of famous Americans, one a month for a year....

In 1986 I worked for California’s Employment Development Department, where I processed amnesty seekers under President Ronald Reagan’s landmark immigration reform law called Immigration and Control Act (IRCA). The Watsonville office reviewed documents proving that applicants had worked in the local farming economy for...