Weekly News Update

August 24, 2009 |
Valor

Week of August 17th
Maj. General Wade and Senator Alquist Receive Leadership Awards
This year’s CALCASA Leadership Conference included several awards, the most prestigious of which were given to the Adjutant General of the California National Guard and a State Senator. CALCASA’s Leadership Awards are given to individuals who have shown leadership in the area of preventing and responding to sexual assault in our community.
Fox40: “GPS Not Total Solution to Prison Overcrowding”
Suzanne Brown-McBride is the Executive Director of CALCASA as well as the chair of California’s Sex Offender Management Board. Brown-McBride was recently interviewed for a story about GPS monitoring devices as a strategy to reduce prison overcrowding. She said:

NYTs Magazine: Why Women’s Rights are the Cause of Our Time

The New York Times Magazine devoted it’s recent issue to women’s rights.

…women in poor countries suffer are of paramount importance, in an economic and geopolitical sense the opportunity they represent is even greater. “Women hold up half the sky,” in the words of a Chinese saying, yet that’s mostly an aspiration: in a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it’s not an accident that those same countries are disproportionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos.
There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. That’s why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution.


As Calif. prison spending rises, so do concerns
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California devotes 10 percent of its operating budget to locking up criminals in state prisons, one of the highest rates in the nation and an amount that is becoming a drag on the state’s ability to deliver other services.
Friday Legislative Update
Click here to review a summary of what happened this week with bills that CALCASA is tracking through the state legislature. The list includes bills that CALCASA is sponsoring, supporting and watching. We included links to each bill, so that you can read the text. All bills over $150,000 are sent to suspense and reconsidered later in the legislative session.