CNN 2011-09-15

 Checking stories across country now.

     Cops said in Nevada of 4th person has died from yesterday’s shooting rampage in IHOP restaurant, 3 of them were national guard members, 11 people were shot. Police said, the suspects later turned the gun on himself.
All of sudden, we heard a bound of fire, we heard a bunch of shots going off. Loud shots, I mean it was crazy. You can see people running out of the building. I was just starting to hear something like machine guns or firecrackers or something it was loud. 
    Moving to New Heaven in Connecticut now, families of * Lee has filed one for death lawsuit against Yale University, alleging that the school did little to protect women on its campus. She was killed in a research lab in 2009, the university says the lawsuit has no merit. Senior Legal * of CNN will join us next hour to talk more about this case.
   And parts of New York, New Jersey, hit hard by the hurricane Irene, there are changes to the start of the school year. In New York, there are some delays, and North New Jersey, concerns of mode, one school made temporary means, temporary reassignment students to other schools.
   Arizona Department of Correction is cashing on crimes, if you want to visit someone behind bars, it’s gonna cost you 25 bucks. A fee that has angered not only family members but prison advisee groups. * David *calls the invitation fee, demon mugging. David, you actually believe that this ultimately would have a negative effect on public safety. 
    Well, research tells us that, one of the very best predictors of whether someone is going to go straight and living a law- bidding life after prison, is whether he is been able to maintain family contact while incarcerated. And visitation is a central part of that. So if we care about public safety, if we care about crime prevention, we should be doing everything we can to encourage and facilitate and promote prison visitation. 
    For these family members, families with a number of children, 25 dollar fee is a lot of money, most of them would be *, correct?
    Absolutely, this really is trying to get blood from a stone. Prisoner’s family are overwhelmingly poor, they are poor to start with and then they are almost always made poorer by the incarceration of spouse, parents or other bread earners, so these are really the last people on whose backs Arizona should try to balance its budgets.
    Right, David, there is been a lot of back and forth on what exactly is this fee. The Arizona Department of Correction gave us a statement saying that this is a background check fee and I’ve also read the same deal, see comes from director * refer to as visitation fee, and then you got * , the chief staff of Arizona Center saying no, this 25 dollar fee will not be used as background check but maintenance and repairs to prisons, ok, so with that said, what do you say the critics out there say, hey, these are prisoners, we got no sympathy, pay the 25 bucks. 
    Well let’s remember that, the fee is not paid by the prisoners but by their family members who haven’t done anything wrong. And I think we need to focus on what is best for the public safety. Other states are taking a very different approach from Arizona, other states actually subsidies prison visiting, because they know, that every dollar they spend will be repaid many time over in successive integration and decrease crime in the future. Unfortunately, Arizona is taking the exact opposite direction and it’s a direction that is bad for public safety.