MIDVALE -- Police said a Taylorsville man is in "extremely critical condition" after walking in front of an incoming TRAX train at the Fort Union stop at 7200 South Thursday.
It's so dark out, you can't find what you sit on with both hands. You're in the middle of nowhere, looking for a guy who drove his pickup through a fence and into a power pole. Just when you're about to give up looking, you see flashing lights in the distance. Soon enough, you arrive at a small farmhouse where a sheriff's deputy has a 70-year-old guy sitting on the tailgate of a banged-up '64 Ford. Its tracks say it abruptly veered off of a straight dirt road, jumped a ditch, penetrated a chain-link fence, missed a farmhouse and nailed a power pole. There's no good reason for a mishap here, but it's a holiday weekend and the bars would have closed about 45 minutes prior to your time out. There's one dim light other than what you brought along, and it's 30 feet above you on the other end of the truck.Q. Maybe so, but you know when we get a complaint from a patient, it doesn't look good for us. Better if we just run calls and don't cause trouble, otherwise we're pretty much guilty until proven innocent.He was transported to Intermountain Medical Center with severe head trauma from being pushed 10 feet into the fence, said Midvale Police Capt. Steve Shreeve.Q. What are we supposed to do? Some people are just dying to show us how stupid they are. Then, when we try to help them, it's all our fault. We were thinking, if we could get this guy on O2, he might not be so cranky and maybe we could communicate with him a little better. But he wasn't having it. We couldn't exactly leave him there. And the last thing we wanted to do was arm him.Fueled by the damage mass incarceration has done to state budgets, a new "smart on crime" movement has emerged to seek new ways of reducing the number of people in the system. Many states, including New Jersey, have attempted to do so by reforming probation and parole, in part by using something called "graduated sanctions"- levying small punishments on those who violate the terms of their supervision. Instead of being thrown back in jail, parolees are confined in shortterm residential assessment centers- privately run institutions where they are evaluated. The parole board, based on recommendations from the parole officer, then decides the best course of action: revoking parole, placing the offender in a work or treatment program, or putting him on positionmonitoring (using the ankle bracelet), which is one of the harsher sanctions in New Jersey.
-- Lana Groves
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