Frontier Justice is GMCR / KURU‘s latest offering to address and examine significant issues and to engage our community in dialog on some of our most challenging social conditions.
Your host is our newly appointed 6th circuit judge, Tim Aldrich. He is joined by Silver City mayor, Ken Ladner and a range of guests with backgrounds and expertise in social services, civic involvement, and activism.
Frontier Justice is an outgrowth of a series of programs presented by Local Flavor host Paula Geisler earlier in the year. Paula invited a diverse cross section of community members to participate in a multiweek discussion called A Sense of Place. The participants brought diverse backgrounds and experiences literally to the table in the GMCR / KURU studio including Hispanic, Anglo, Apache, and Afro-American community members and sought out Chinese and Jewish residents with histories in the community.
The concluding instance of that series was titled Healing the Civic Wound. It was an examination of where we stand today and what work lies ahead of us as we learn from each other to understand and overcome our differences and disagreements.
The scourge of poverty, the debilitating aspects of homelessness, alcohol and substance abuse, mental and social maladjustment, and incidents of domestic and societal violence render many to chronic states of dysfunction. These issues can be noted as part of that civic wound that we still suffer under and became the starting point for Frontier Justice.
Judge Aldrich and Mayor Ladner‘s guests have included experts and longtime civic activists in drug and alcohol treatment, law enforcement, and social science related services and as the program progresses we look forward to an expanding sphere of issues and interests as we seek – with creativity and determination – to leverage our perennially minimal resources to arrive at just solutions to seemingly intractable problems .