 Ring in the New Year with amazing savings from Appalachian Wireless. Get the Galaxy S7 for just $49.99 when you sign a renew a two-year service agreement. Better service, bigger savings. That's today's Appalachian Wireless. The Williamson Health and Wellness Center hosted its sixth Community Conversations Meeting Tuesday at the Cezon Mexican Restaurant in Williamson. The meetings typically focus on implementing solutions to various problems derived from the feedback of area residents. The problems could include anything from health issues, workforce improvement needs, drug addiction, and so on. Today's focus was criminal justice reform and what effect it has on Mingo County. We talked about how the United States imprisons more people than any other civilized country. We talked about how we got there and what we can do about it. We got there by extending prison sentences and by putting more people in jail. And a lot of that are drug offenses. So we talked about ways that we could address this problem. We talked about the need for resources in our community to help people when they're released from prison. And we talked about helping juvenile defendants go into the system so that we could keep them from becoming part of the school to prison pipeline. While most members of the community understand a solution cannot be found in a day, it's important for others to know what each person is doing and how different areas of the county feel about criminal justice reform. I think our big struggle is about the amount of drug use we have in our community and how it's destroying lives. And of course, Mingo County right now is struggling with financial problems as a county and so there's kind of a balance between getting people help, punishing people and how much that costs us all. For more information on community conversations and how you can get involved, follow the group on Facebook. Reporting in Williamson for EKB News, I'm Shelby Steele.