VJC's June DN-R "Justice Matters" Column

Jury Service Is Extraordinary Power for Ordinary People

By Matthew P. Cavedon

Most Americans dread getting a jury summons in the mail. As a lawyer, I know my friends and family members’ first question: “How do I get out of this?” Little d  most of them realize that this little piece of paper is an invitation to participate in one of the most important responsibilities of citizenship, especially in tight knit communities like those of western Virginia.

The Constitution protects a lot of rights and asks pretty little of us in return. We can certainly serve in the military, honor the flag, and vote for those who make the laws. Bu the only civic responsibility that is a true legal duty is jury service. It’s also the one thing that immediately makes government belong to the people.

Participating in elections is important, but when you go to the polls, yours is just one of thousands of votes. At the national level, it may be just one among tens of millions. When an American is called to sit on a jury, their vote determines the verdic

Criminal cases require verdicts to be unanimous. That means every juror must come to an agreement as to whether the defendant is guilty or not guilty. Further, judges will assure each juror that they should never give up an honest conviction for the mere sake of getting along with the others.

This is a remarkable promise the Founders made for the people. When the laws actually threaten someone’s liberty or property, the ultimate judgment call is left in the hands of twelve ordinary members of the community. Lawmakers, judges, and lawyers are important. But it’s truck drivers and teachers, homemakers and store managers who have the final say over who goes to prison.

We’re celebrating America’s 250th birthday this year and that’s a great occasion for remembering the brave decisions of jurors throughout our history. They’ve used their power to protect liberty and change the country for the better. For example, before the Civil War, Congress made it a federal crime to help people escape from slavery. In 1851, the federal government charged Boston abolitionists with setting Shadrach Minkins—formerly enslaved in Virginia—free after his recapture up north. The abolitionists’ guilt could not have been clearer as a factual matter. But the jury stood up and refused to convict them. The brave stand of these ordinary jurors defended dignity against tyranny.

Serving on a jury remains meaningful today, even when criminal charges were properly brought against a wrongdoer. Federal judge Roy Altman recently told the story of presiding over an emotionally intense murder trial. Afterward, he met with the jurors.

One, a quiet elderly woman who had come to this country from Haiti, slowly stood up using her cane. She gave the judge a hug, then explained that while she had moved to America seeking a better life, she had learned something new through serving. Her  country gave her more than just opportunity, she said: it trusted her to be smart and wise enough to decide such an important matter. It was a memory she said she would carry with her for the rest of her days.

This woman understood something profound about democracy: it’s not just about deciding who gets to make the laws. It’s about deciding how they are applied. That work, too, belongs to all of us. The conscience of the community matters as much for freedom as does any other constitutional right.

But it can only have that role if we the people exercise it. Next time you get that piece of paper in the mail summoning you to jury service, don’t think of it as something to avoid. See it as the chance to seek justice for your neighbors and your country. It may cost you some days away from work, but it’ll enrich your sense of what it means to belong to the community.

Matthew Cavedon is a criminal justice lawyer who works at the Cato Institute, and wrote this for the Valley Justice Coalition's monthly column in the Daily News-Record/. You can learn more about the power of jury service at a website he curates, YourVerdictCounts.org.

Celebrating And Tending Our Small Food Forest

 

photo by my good friend and fellow gardener Daryl Byler

Caring for our 10'x 60' garden at VMRC's Park Village is one of the more therapeutic pleasures I enjoy in my semi-retirement.

The rabbit fence you see consists of discarded window screens salvaged from renovation projects around the Village. It works well to protect the peas, lettuce, and the various kinds of beans in that end of the garden, 

Down the middle of this area is a five-foot woven wire fence where the sugar snap peas grow that we are enjoying this time of year. These are planted in March to give them a head start over the pole lima and green beans I plant right next to them in early May. Since the peas are harvested early, the pole beans simply take their place for harvesting later in the season. 

The unfenced end of the garden is for tomatoes, squash, cantaloupe and Swiss chard. They can all be close together since the caged tomatoes are growing vertically while the squash and cantaloupe vines cover the horizontal space.

Every year some volunteer plants appear along with the planted ones, especially potatoes and sunflowers. We mostly leave such visitors undisturbed as long as they are not crowding out any of their neighboring plants. And we apply generous amounts of compost and shredded leaf mulch around all of the varied companion plants, a practice that largely eliminates weeds, provides needed fertilizer, improves soil quality and greatly reduces the need for irrigating the garden (But we were so grateful for the rain we've been blessed with in the past 24-hours!).

The overall result resembles a kind of food forest rather than a manicured set of cultivated rows of fresh produce. But the joy it brings to our table, and frequently to those of our neighbors, is beyond words. 

Glory be to God for dappled things...

...All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him. 

- from Gerard Manley Hopkins' Pied Beauty

The Surprising Ability Procrastinators May Lack

One of the more quoted lines in Covey's best selling book, The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, is, "The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing."

In workshops I've led on time management, I make the point that procrastinators (including myself) actually need to improve our "putting off" skills. In other words, we need to get better at putting off whatever hinders our focusing on a "main thing," the priority activity requiring our attention at a given time.

    

We are never simply doing nothing. Even when dozing, daydreaming, or mindlessly scrolling on Facebook we are doing something that occupies our time and attention. And of course even taking a nap, going for a walk or just vegetating can at times be necessary "main things" that are restorative and life giving, and can actually help us be more productive.

         

But whenever we have a deadline to meet, or any important task to complete, we may need to get better at "putting off" whatever distractions are getting in the way. 

     

Here's a suggested plan:

     

1) Create a daily time budget. In the Hebrew Bible, a day begins at sunset, which could be a good time to review the day just ending and to prepare for the day just beginning, one in which getting a good night's rest is one of the first "main things."

     

2) Upon rising, review the plan for the day, making sure there is ample time allotted for appropriate breaks and for unexpected events, but also for priority time for undivided attention to the "main things" that are on the list. 

3) Break up larger tasks into achievable smaller parts, and tackle the more demanding and challenging parts first, followed by some easier and more pleasurable ones. In other words, concentrate on measurable achievements for which you then reward yourself for what you have accomplished.

   

4) Choose an accountability partner or mentor if needed to help you stay focused on your goals and to encourage you when you fall short of reaching them.

All of this is simple and doable. But simple and easy are obviously not the same thing.

5/30/26 DN-R Justice Matters Column: Virginia's Aging Prison Population Crisis

Shawn Weneta is the Director of Government Affairs
at Cavalier Consulting in Richmond and
previously held policy positions with the
ACLU of Virginia and REFORM Alliance.

 Virginia is walking straight into a prison health care funding crisis, not because the problem is new, but because we have spent nearly a decade studying it, acknowledging it, and then doing almost nothing.

In 2017, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission warned the General Assembly that prison health care costs were on a collision course with Virginia’s budget, driven by an aging prison population, chronic disease, and the uniquely high cost of delivering care behind bars. JLARC offered clear recommendations to avoid this outcome.

Eight years later, the warnings have largely been ignored, and the bill is coming due.

VADOC medical spending has blown past appropriations in consecutive years, overrunning the budget by $25.8 million in FY2024 and $23.7 million in FY2025. Annual medical costs now total $294.4 million, consuming more than 18% of the entire corrections budget and growing faster than any other expense.

This is not a management problem at the margins; it is structural.

Virginia now pays $1.3 million every week, more than $67 million a year, for offsite medical care alone, delivered under guard with transportation, security staffing and legal risk layered on top.

And the cost concentration is staggering. Just two incarcerated individuals are each costing Virginia more than $1 million per year in medication alone, illustrating how quickly a handful of high-acuity cases can overwhelm an already strained system.

Even more alarming, spending growth is now outpacing health care inflation itself. Senate finance staff found that VADOC’s medical expenditures exceeded inflation-adjusted projections in both fiscal year 2024 and fiscal year 2025, meaning cost growth is accelerating, not stabilizing.

Meanwhile, the consequences are rippling through the system. To cover medical overruns, DOC has diverted funds from security operations and facility maintenance and imposed a partial hiring freeze. In plain terms, Virginia is funding prison health care by short-staffing prisons, a trade-off that raises safety risks for staff and incarcerated people alike.

And yet, the worst is still ahead.

Virginia’s prison population is aging rapidly. People over 50 now make up less than a quarter of the prison population but account for 61% of all medical costs. The average annual medical cost for someone over 55 is more than $70,000 per year, driven by cancer treatment, dialysis, cardiac care, dementia and end-of-life services.

This demographic shift is locked in. Over the next several years, more than 12,000 incarcerated people will age into the highest-cost brackets. No amount of contract renegotiation or staffing tweaks will change the basic math: prisons are becoming de facto nursing homes, and the most expensive ones taxpayers could possibly operate.

If current trends hold, and recent data suggests they are worsening, Virginia is on track to spend well over $4 billion on prison health care over the next decade. That figure assumes continued annual growth similar to the past five years and does not account for emerging cost drivers like new specialty pharmaceuticals, expanding opioid-use disorder treatment mandates, or rising contract labor costs.

To put it plainly: prison health care alone is on a trajectory to rival major statewide education or transportation programs, without any dedicated revenue stream to support it.

At that scale, the question is no longer whether prison health care will crowd out other priorities, but when. If left unaddressed, these costs could force lawmakers to consider tapping Virginia’s rainy day fund, not because of a recession or natural disaster, but because we failed to act on a known, documented and foreseeable budget risk.

What makes this moment especially troubling is how little progress has been made since JLARC sounded the alarm. Many of the commission’s 2017 recommendations remain unimplemented or only partially explored.

Other states have moved aggressively to reduce costs by treating people in less restrictive, less expensive environments when public safety allows. Virginia has largely continued doing what it has always done: treating aging, chronically ill people inside prisons long after incarceration is the costliest and least effective option.

According to a new study, if current trends continue, as much as one-third of the U.S. prison population will be over 50 by 2030.

Returning people home, under supervision, with medical coverage shifted to Medicaid or Medicare, is not a silver bullet. But it is one of the few tools that actually changes the cost structure rather than rearranging it. Every person safely treated in the community is one fewer six-figure line item in the DOC medical ledger.

Virginia’s prison health care crisis is no longer theoretical. The costs are real, rising faster than expected, and already undermining the core functions of the corrections system. We were warned in 2017. We confirmed the warnings in 2024 and 2025.

The silver tsunami is coming. The bill is already arriving. And the longer we wait, the fewer responsible options remain.

If Virginia is serious about fiscal stewardship, affordability, and making government work, we must confront this crisis now, before prison health care becomes the budget emergency we pretend no one could have seen coming.

Harrisonburg's Daily News-Record publishes a monthly Justice Matters column provided by the Valley Justice Coalition. Shawn Weneta was a great help in getting the HB1030 parole reform bill passed that Delegate Wilt sponsored on our behalf.

Three Texts For A National Day Of Repentance

Isaiah 1:13-20 New King James Version

Bring no more futile sacrifices;

Incense is an abomination to Me.

The New Moons, the Sabbaths, and the calling of assemblies—

I cannot endure iniquity and the sacred meeting.

Your New Moons and your appointed feasts

My soul hates;

They are a trouble to Me,

I am weary of bearing them.

When you spread out your hands,

I will hide My eyes from you;

Even though you make many prayers,

I will not hear.

Your hands are full of blood.

“Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean;

Put away the evil of your doings from before My eyes.

Cease to do evil,

Learn to do good;

Seek justice,

Rebuke the oppressor;

Defend the fatherless,

Plead for the widow.

“Come now, and let us reason together,”

Says the Lord,

“Though your sins are like scarlet,

They shall be as white as snow;

Though they are red like crimson,

They shall be as wool.

If you are willing and obedient,

You shall eat the good of the land;

But if you refuse and rebel,

You shall be devoured by the sword”;

For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

Luke 4:16-19 New King James Version

He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
    because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
    and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
    to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” *

Matthew 7:15-25 New King James Version

“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thorn bushes or figs from thistles? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Therefore by their fruits you will know them.

“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’

“Therefore whoever hears these sayings of Mine, and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it did not fall, for it was founded on the rock.

* This is believed to refer to the Year of Jubilee described in Leviticus 25:8-24 when slaves and prisoners were to be freed and acquired land was to be restored to their original owners.

Holy Cow! (Plus Sacred Calves, Bulls, Etc.)

India, a predominantly Hindu nation, prohibits cows being slaughtered for food and reverences them as a part of their religious tradition.

I used to think that one of the obvious solutions to India's food shortage would be to have them stop pampering their cattle and begin using them for food. Never mind the fact that their sacred cows are useful as work animals and are a source of much needed milk. Besides, they tend to feed along roadsides and help earn their keep as work animals, while also providing dung for fuel and fertilizer. 

So maybe rather than judging our Indian neighbors for their beliefs and practices, we should ask what golden calves or sacred cows we could be sacrificing in order to help feed the hungry. In contrast to India, which has the largest percentages of vegetarians in the world, we have become addicted to having a major portion of our diet involve the fattening, slaughtering and importing of beef and other flesh, a system that requires an exorbitant and  inefficient use of far more protein than is consumed by all of India, which has a much larger population. And reducing our consumption of beef even by half, some believe, would free up enough farm land and resources to practically eliminate malnutrition and hunger worldwide. 

And speaking of sacred animals, we have a pet industry in the US that costs us some $150 billion a year. I'm not against pets, per se, but the obvious fact that we would never, ever consider eating any of our beloved dogs, cats or horses should help us understand how our Hindu friends feel about their beloved cattle. 

Another near sacred industry involves our love affair with motor vehicles, resulting in our having more licensed sedans, SUV's, pickups, vans, trucks, motorcycles and other gas guzzling means of transportation in the US than there are licensed drivers. These all demand a major share of the world's limited supply of energy, and emit alarming levels of greenhouse gasses that threaten the life and health of the planet.

Professional sports represent another kind of near sacred enterprise in this country, having become an over $1 trillion a year industry. According to the Global Institute of Sport, that represents 40% of all the money spent on sports worldwide. According to the National Retail Federation, testimated spending on Super bowl Sunday in the U.S. this year for food, drinks, apparel, decorations and other purchases for the day was expected to reach a record $20.2 billion, or $94.77 per person.

Other sacred cows and golden calves may be associated with our assumptions about what kinds of real estate we feel we need to build and maintain as "houses of worship." What kinds of accommodations and how many paid staff persons would Jesus prescribe for church gatherings of a couple of hours a week? 

National allegiances and political parties and/or political leaders can also become sacrosanct and demand a cult-like idolatrous loyalty, whether on the part of those on the right or the left.

In short, how we spend our time and money is a literal measure of the worth we attach to the objects or activities in which we invest. The word worship actually derives from an old English word "weorth-ship." 

This calls for paying attention to the very first two of the Bible's Ten Words, or Ten Commandments, as follows:

“You must not have any other god but me. You must not make for yourself an idol of any kind or an image of anything in the heavens or on the earth or in the sea. You must not bow down to them or worship them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God who will not tolerate your affection for any other gods." 

Exodus 20:3-5 New Living Bible

The 15-foot statue on the right is on the 800-acre luxury golf course and hotel complex in Doral, Florida, purchased by the president in 2012.

An Ohio Weekly Newspaper That's Still Thriving

During spring break back in 1964 I spent a week at this site poring over issues of the first 30 years of this unusual weekly newspaper. It was for my senior history research thesis at EMC (now EMU), and my work was later published in the Mennonite Quarterly Review.

This Ohio newspaper avoids the internet. Its readers like it that way.

Every week, Milo Miller is in charge of publishing a paper. Instead of relying on a newsroom full of beat reporters and columnists, his paper The Budget looks to handwritten letters from across the country.
    “These would be letters that came today,” he said as he leafed through a basket of letters. “[There’s] Williamsburg, Kentucky; Millersburg, Ohio; Rexford Montana…”
     The contents of each piece of snail mail will be printed in the next edition of the weekly paper and distributed across the country to tens of thousands of readers.
    Ohio has lost more than half of its daily and weekly news publications between 2005 and 2025, according to data from Medill’s Local News Initiative.
    But the Budget is finding success by staying exactly the same.
    “We're kind of part of that culture. Part of the Amish story is The Budget,” he said.

The Budget’s start
The Budget was founded in 1890 by John C. Miller, an Amish Mennonite who wrote a column on what was happening in Sugarcreek’s community. He printed it and mailed it to family around the U.S. – who wrote back.
    He decided to publish those letters too.
    “Then all these letters started coming in. And by the end of that first year, there were over a hundred scribes from 12 different states.”
    It quickly became a national publication.
    More than 100 years later, it’s sticking to that 19th-century model. Every Wednesday, they publish around 70 pages of letters from Amish communities who still rely on print and old school word-of-mouth to share their news.
    Today, the Budget has around 1,200 writers who document their daily lives through letters sent to Ohio.
    “It’s funny to look back at some of the first letters you know in 1890. Outside of maybe a few words that would be trendy at the time, if you read that letter it doesn't look much different than today's letter,” he said.

The process
For the past four years, Budget staff member Brenda Keller has taken these reports on crops, births and deaths and transcribed them from sweeping cursive into bold typeface that’s distributed as far as Washington state.
    As she typed up one letter, Keller described it as pretty typical of what she’s seen over her tenure.
    “They're just going to visit people and having church,” she said. “That's the norm.”
    Unlike a traditional publication, there’s little editorial oversight at The Budget. Miller and his staff do some light copy editing and remove anything political or controversial: No debates over church rules. No endorsements of one sect over another.
    But mostly, Miller prints the news just as it comes in – funny hunting stories, weather gripes and all.
    “We're their form of entertainment. We're their nightly news. … They're not turning on the television or going to YouTube or going on TikTok or whatever to figure out what's trending, what's going on, what's happening in the world. In a lot of cases, they're reading it in The Budget,” Miller said.

Trust and tradition
The Amish and Anabaptist aversion to modern technology has kept The Budget’s circulation steady for years.
    It has 20,000 paid subscribers. Miller expects that to grow with the Amish population, which approximately doubles every two decades.
    “Our struggles are not on the financial end, it's the distribution model with the United States Postal Service. Presses are becoming fewer and fewer, where we're driving seven hours away to print,” he said.
    Even with the long drive, Miller will keep The Budget an internet-free publication.
    He may use a computer, but most of The Budget’s audience does not. Flipping through its pages has become a ritual for the community, steeped in tradition.
    “It’s their newspaper. We're just privileged enough to publish it for them.”

Kendall Crawford wrote this for the Ohio Newsroom, which gave me permission to post the piece.