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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (April 3, 1990)
Tuesday, BRYAN/COLLEGE STATION'S LARGEST f^ONLYV 3 WEEKS BOOK A^. .4 left 'i. SALE Publisher's Retail i°?cV2 Thousands at ZQ%_off_ WIN A $500°.i Sf 8 j:r“ BRING IN REGISTRATION FORM & WIN! NAME ADDRESS. Phone BE 1 of 5 Winners of A $500 00 Shopping Spree DRAWING: APRIL 14,1990-4:00 PM Children's Books Vz off Publisher's Retail 100's of Categories eluding: • COOKBOOKS • TEXTBOOKS • REFERENCE •TRAVEL • Novels • Paperbacks • Fiction • Business • Dictionaries • Computer • Medical • Crafts In- AND MANY MORE! OLD LOWE'S BUILDING 7500 East By-Pass Hwy 6 College Station, TX HOURS: MON-SAT 10:00 AM-9:00 PM SUN-NOON-6:00 PM This Sale Is An Authorized Liquidation of New Books from Bankruptcies, major publisher's overruns and bookstore returns. Personal checks accepted. <BURLEY’S> km® bay $1.00 IGLOO MADNESS ONE DAY ONLY Wednesday April 4 3-10 p.m. $1.00 4501 Wellborn between Texas A&M & Villa Maria 846-1816 IGLOO MADNESS SALE FROZEN COOLERS Flavors Strawberry Daiquiri Peach Daiquiri Banana Daiquiri Raspberry Daiquiri Spiced Apple Daiquiri Watermelon Daiquiri Grape Daiquiri Lemon Daiquiri Cherry Daiquiri Blue Hawaiian Mai Tai Hurricane Tropical Punch Margarita Pina Colada Strawberry Colada Banana Colada Rasberry Colada Peach Colada Grape Colada Peaches & Creme Strawberry & Creme Bananas & Creme Rasberry & Creme All drinks made with real fruit or fruit juices All creme flavors made with real Vanilla Ice Cream. Small $2.50 (12 oz.) $1.00 Medium $4.00 (20 oz.) $2.00 Large $5.75 (32 oz.) $4.00 Limit one 1.00 drink per person per visit. Limit six people per vehicle, Enjoy in Moderation. Plese don’t drive while intoxicated. The Advantage is yours with a Battalion Classified. Call 845-0569 Page 10 The Battalion Tuesday, April 3,1990 W3R.ED WALDO By KEVIN THOMAS SPADE PHILLIPS /?/. X NfETp a hiAME, SPADE, ■'DU^.K" Tost Won't Cor IT ANY LotJCy Criminals ordered to pay Some prisoners must reimburse state Coi exe by! WASHIN Supreme C fused to let its first exec ting stand a murderer's state gas cha By a 6-3 jected an en state autho execute Rol schedule. A federal Friday, had tion postpo: study of Ha may be neet Judge Jo Francisco-I: Court of should be l< judge appe whether hi: atrists they tent in faili for brain t rious ment; Harris v two San Di nation’s hi against h viously. u D< IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — Federal judges across the country increasingly are ordering criminals not only to pay the time for their crime but to pay the cost of their prison stay. From Jan. 19, 1989, through the end of October, federal judges ordered 254 defendants to pay a monthly fee during their prison sentence, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission in Washington, D.C. “We see this as merely an equitable and common sense thing to do,” said Judge William Wilkins Jr. of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., chairman of the seven-member commission. “If you have the wherewithal to reimburse taxpayers for the cost of your imprisonment, which you caused through the commission of a criminal act, then you ought to have to pay,” Wilkins said. Some civil libertarians, however, are objecting. They say the inmates aren’t getting their money’s worth be cause of overcrowded prison conditions. The commission, created in October 1985 after pub lic outcry over sentencing discrepancies, instituted mandatory sentencing guidelines to be applied uni formly in federal courts. But judges must use discretion in deciding which convicts will pay for their prison stay. Only those who can afford the monthly payment of $1,210.05, plus $91.66 a month during probation, can be ordered to pay. Those fees, calculated by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, cannot be imposed if they would leave the defendant’s family destitute or on welfare, said Paul Martin, a com mission spokesman. “It was kind of a very simple thought — select those folks who I ave the ability to pay for their cost of incar ceration or supervision,” Martin said. “It’s mainly ear marked, of course, for the ‘white collar’ defendant, someone who has some financial resource.” Of the 45,000 cases that reach federal court every year, few criminals appear to fit the bill. “Most people who are put away in the federal court system are indigent,” said Ron Wneeler, an attorney in Des Moines. “They don’t have a dime. I’ve had clients who didn’t have enough money to buy a six-pack of beer.” Last year, Wheeler represented a University of Iowa student charged with possessing LSD with the intent to sell. The student, Matthew Follett of Kenilworth, 111., pleaded guilty. In August, U.S. District Judge Charles Wolle sen tenced Follett to seven years in prison plus four years of probation. Noting that Follett had a substantial trust fund, Wolle also fined Follett $20,000 and ordered him to pay for his prison stay, plus the monthly fee during proba tion. “1 don’t have any problem with that at all,” Wheeler said. “If they’re convicted and can pay the cost of being kept in prison, I think they should. “It looks nice on paper, but in actuality, there aren't a lot of these kinds of defendants.” One critic of the program is Alvin J. Bronstein, direc tor of the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, who noted that the federal prison sys tem is running at 170 percent of capacity “and getting worse every month.” “It is clear to me that federal prisons today are ba sically unconstitutional because of the conditions of overcrowding, inadequate medical care and all the problems created by that mass of overcrowding,” he said. “It seems unseemly and highly inappropriate — if not illegal — to be requiring defendants to pay for room and board, or the cost of being incarcerated, in an un constitutional facility,” Bronstein said. Travel trend influences spa packages Associated Press A continuing trend toward the shorter vacation, including weekend breaks, continues to influence the travel and resort business, according to those in the industry. One inn owner is offering spa “breakations,” short one-to-five-day vacation packages including special fitness programs. “We’ve witnessed a tremendous change in recent years,” says Edward Safdie, owner of the Norwich, Conn., Inn and Spa. “Guests no longer book one- or two-week stays at the spa. Most of them just don’t have the time.” Safdie says the inn now offers shorter-stay programs and, for weekend travelers, inn accommoda tions and use of the spa on an “a la carte” basis. Many hotels, in cities from New York to Los Angeles, are offering special package deals for weekend guests. Stouffer Hotels and Resorts, for example, promotes one- or two- night weekends at its properties in Hawaii, the Virgin Islands, Califor nia, Georgia, Florida and Arizona, with longer weekend packages avail able at its Stanford Court in San Francisco and the Mayflower in Washington, D.C. Airlines give tourists needed sleeping bags SINGAPORE (AP) — The glut of hotel rooms of a few years ago that enabled picky tourists to choose from an array of bargains has ended. In fact, things are so bad that two airlines plan to issue sleeping bags to stranded passen gers. Room occupancy has been av eraging more than 90 percent in recent months. So Singapore In ternational Airlines and the Aus tralian carrier Qantas hope that sleeping bags will make unex pected layovers or flight delays at Changi Airport more bearable when no rooms are available. Sleeping bags will be used only as a last resort, according to an SIA spokesman. But stranded passengers zipped into sleeping bags in designated areas “is cer tainly far better than letting them lie around the transit halls,” he says. This city-state of 2.6 million people expects 5 million visitors this year. It has 68 hotels and 24,142 rooms now, with 72 hotels and 26,185 rooms expected to be available by the end of 1992. By then the Raffles Hotel, a 104-year-old landmark, is ex pected to reopen after a $52-mil- lion facelift. Room rates, heavily discounted as recently as two years ago, are expected to increase as much as 40 percent in the next two years. One stopgap under study is to offer apartments in government housing projects for visitors on a bed-and-breakfast basis. Singapore became a regional tourist stopover mainly because visitors could pick up some bar gains on their way to the beaches of Bali or the temples in Thai land. But there are few bargains these days. Only freespenders from Japan and Taiwan might find it relatively inexpensive, be cause the local dollar has depre ciated along with its U.S. coun terpart. With few natural and man made attractions, the Tourist Promotion Board plugged the is land successfully in the 1970s as “Instant Asia,” a clean and crime- free metropolis where most peo ple spoke English and the water was safe to drink. Spurred by the euphoria of surging tourism in the mid and late 1970s and optimistic fore casts that the boom would con tinue, developers built more ho tels than tourists could fill. Some 8,000 rooms were added in 1982- 86, a 57 percent increase. FEE foryoi Iexa$ A&M