The mods are rightly concerned about self-doxing, so to avoid power-leveling too much I'll just say I do live in the same county, and I have driven past the jail. (To my knowledge, I have never been to the town of Washington Boro, at least not on purpose. I do know where Penn Manor High School is -- that's the one Nick failed to fail out of.) There was an aerial photo (I think?) of its goldfish-castle façade earlier in the thread that actually makes the front of it look bigger than it is. But up close, it's tiny, which makes the "castle" part on the front look even more ridiculous -- it looks like forgotten infrastructure for a medieval-themed kiddy park on the edge of town (not the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire, which is right over the border into an adjacent county). I can easily understand how an itsy-bitsy jail like that, housing both people who are serving sentences for low-tier crimes and people who are merely awaiting trial, could rapidly become overcrowded.
The hot weather in the county has broken, however, and it's been thunderstorming for about two days. I have no idea if this will make any impact on the planned protest or not, but it was only supposed to get up to 55 degrees (I wore a hoodie to the doctor) so that may have reduced the overheating somewhat -- and although I do care about the safety of whoever has to live or work inside that teeny jail building, even if I were super-passionate about the issue, I can see myself finding better things to do than standing in the rain on a Friday night. (Also, it's going to be First Friday, and people will therefore be hella drunk. I can see a hypothetical protester finding better things to do than standing in the rain on a Friday night getting empty bottles of Rolling Rock flung at them from passing cars.)
While I was on Lancaster Online (again, I hate giving them clicks because the editorial staff and commentariat would be absurd if they weren't real live human beings, but that's where all these articles are if you must), I did see something that made my heart kind of sink for Amber. A man was convicted of sexual assault of a child -- I think she was less than 10 -- and got 23 months. You can literally get more time in that for pot possession in this state, thanks to mandatory minimum sentencing (which judges hate too, because it doesn't allow them to consider mitigating or aggravating factors). But 23 months for the sexual assault of a kid. I mean, goddamn. If I were her parents, I'd be making plans to move out of state. Maybe across country.
