Philanthropy, 2010 edition

Here are my two cents in philanthropy, 2010 edition (see 2007; 2008).

I started with Cincinnati, the Queen City, the 'Nati, my home for two years... Think globally, act locally, as they say.  I gave to the Ohio Justice & Policy Center, my former employer, a zealous legal outfit that takes prisoners' cases (health care, reeentry, solitary confinement of juveniles, inadequate public defense) often ignored by the mainstream.  If you have a few dollars to spare, I know OJPC will put them to good use.

I gave to the Cincinnati Interfaith Workers' Center, which advocates for low-wage and immigrant workers.  I know their staff and they don't drive expensive cars.  The Workers' Center forces employers to finally pay up after stealing from immigrant workers (documented and undocumented) who, without the Workers' Center, would be too scared to report the thefts.  On average, low-wage workers are cheated of $51 a week.

Other orgs on my radar: Partners in Health, Doctors without Borders, and Project Muso.

Where have you given in 2010?  Besides, of course, to fund tax cuts for the wealthy.  Tax cuts mean slimmer budgets, which means underfunded social services and porous safety nets (first to get cut), which means private donors must fund the work that the government (read: "the public") should have funded itself.

The world spins

It has not been a good week to have law school exams.  The world did not stop spinning.

In Georgia, thousands of prisoners across seven prisons sat down in their cells to nonviolently protest their slavery-like conditions.  In the words of the 13th Amendment, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude . . . shall exist within the United States."  Hidden in the ellipses, however, is an exception: "except as a punishment for crime."  It seems prisoners have had enough.  I bet prisons across the country are clamping down, lest others get ideas.  An Ohio prisoner I once interviewed spent months in solitary confinement for trying to organize a work stoppage.

In London, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange became perhaps the first person to spend a week in jail for "questioning" related to sexual assault.  Apparently no charges have been filed (yet).  WikiLeaks has sidelined the sexual assault issue, but nuanced writers have managed to criticize the politically motivated prosecution without trivializing the seriousness of sexual violence.

In Washington today, the Senate voted against the DREAM Act and in favor of repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," finally answering the question of whom the Republicans hate more: immigrants or queers.  So, congratulations, queers.  Now you too can forcibly occupy foreign lands - or at least do so openly.  Nothing says "empowerment" quite like the opportunity to oppress others.  Half-joking aside, of course I support the repeal.  The military changes hearts and minds - if not in Iraq, then here at home.  African Americans once turned to the military to assert their own social rights.

I finished exams in torts and Constitutional law.  Last up: property.

Magical kingdom in the sky

This photo, which I took in Lesotho two years ago, came to mind as I perused submissions to National Geographic's photography contest.  Lesotho, strangely embedded within South Africa, is the only country entirely above 1000 meters.  It has rightly been dubbed "the magical kingdom in the sky."  And for an exhausted traveler leaving tumultuous South Africa, it was magical.

(Click for larger size. Oh, all rights reserved.)

We encountered these Basotho shepherds on Hodgken's Peak, also taking in the 360-degree view.  At 3256 meters, I struggled for air, having just arrived from Durban and the Indian Ocean coast. 

It's been over two years, but I think frequently of that 56-day trek through South Africa, Lesotho, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia (whew!).  It was a fantasy, traveling as a modern nomad with a map, a pack, and my hitchhiker's thumb.  From my current perch in Michigan - with legal textbooks now spread across my desk - it might feel like another existence.  But it doesn't.  I am still basically the same person I was two years ago.  As we grow older, it seems, we grow slower.

Romanticizing romance

xkcd asks: Why do we romanticize young love?

Because we're not heartless enough to ridicule it.

Because we've all been that shallow, or at least sounded that silly.

Because it'd be too crude to romanticize the adolescent sex drive.

Because love itself seemed simpler then.

Because our memories are poor.

What will future generations condemn us for?

One of my professors jokes that if he wants to see a bunch of law students pick up their pens, he'll say, "The court lays out a three-part test..."  Three is perhaps the perfect number: complex enough to be more than obvious, simple enough that you might actually try to remember the parts.

Ethicist Kwame Anthony Appiah proposes one such three-part test to answer the question, "What will future generations condemn us for?" A practice we'll likely come to regret has these features:

First, people have already heard the arguments against the practice. The case against slavery didn't emerge in a blinding moment of moral clarity, for instance; it had been around for centuries.  Second, defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity. (As in, "We've always had slaves, and how could we grow cotton without them?")  And third, supporters engage in what one might call strategic ignorance, avoiding truths that might force them to face the evils in which they're complicit.

To recap, that's (a) present opposition, (b) amoral rejoinders, and (c) strategic ignorance.

That seems right to me, and I'd add a tautological fourth.  The victims of any abhorrent practice - whether prisoners, animals, or the elderly - are frequently disrespected.  We abuse those we consider beneath us, and in a justificatory circular twist, we diminish those whom we abuse.  But anyway, Appiah offers four "contenders" for future widespread condemnation: the prison system, industrial meat production, institutionalizing the elderly, and environmental neglect.  I'd add homophobia and torture (in the near-future) and xenophobia and war (in the distant).

Also, I'm addicted to New Yorker cartoons.  This one's from the January 4, 2010 issue.

A blog-tastic news round-up

The transition to law school has been tough - logistically (notebooks, binders, classes), mentally (losing job responsibilities and purpose), and socially (leaving a city I love). I have not (so far?) found soulmates in Ann Arbor, as I have been lucky to find elsewhere in this meandering life.

So that leaves time to blog the news:

Google announced that it will compensate gay and lesbian employees for the higher fees they pay on domestic partners' health benefits, proving again that queer people get all the perks. (h/t Hope)

The UN, reviewing Israel's assault on the Gaza-bound Mavi Marmara, found that one victim, Furkan Dogan, a 19-year-old US citizen of Turkish descent, "was filming with a small video camera on the top deck ... when he was shot twice in the head ... while lying on the ground." No mainstream news coverage or US response, but it's not like he was killed by terrorists. Oh, wait. (h/t Sushil)

Georgia killed prisoner Brandon Rhode on Monday by lethal injection, just one week after rushing the 31-year-old to the hospital for attempting suicide.  So much for "You can't fire me, I quit."

The supposedly liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, whose jurisdiction covers nine Western states, tossed out the Fourth Amendment ruled that police can secretly place a GPS device on a person's car without a warrant. I'm sure the police will only use their new power to track really serious offenders, like pot-heads. Because of a circuit split, the case could reach the Supremes.

In Vaughan v. Menlove, an 1837 English case that I read today, the court held that being stupid is no excuse. Should the defendant be responsible "for the misfortune of not possessing the highest order of intelligence"?  The defense argued that the court should judge only if the defendant acted "to the best of his judgment."  The court disagreed and invented the ideal "reasonable person."

So that's all the obnoxiousness that's fit to print tonight.  That was fun. I'm always trying to take myself less seriously in discussing politics, law, war, etc.  Moving to a new town is a great time to remember that no one wants to hang out with the fellow who's too obsessed with "justice" to smile.

My name is America, and I'm an alcoholic

Much of the commentary I consume each day just fades into the background.  But stray pieces sometimes beg to be remembered.  So, last week, Nicholas Kristof wrote a column apologizing to American-Muslims for the recent spike in hate speech.  He titled the column, “Is This America?”

Over at Killing the Buddha, Garrett Baer replied, "Yes, Mr. Kristof, This Is America."  An excerpt:

Rather than viewing the “shameful interning of Japanese-Americans during World War II, or the disgraceful refusal to accept Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe” as rare, exceptional tests in American history, we need to view those events as constitutive elements of the American experience. Was America not American prior to the abolishing of slavery? Was America not American prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, during the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, the Zoot Suit Riots, or the pursuit of Manifest Destiny? Anti-miscegenation laws were belatedly toppled in the ’60s, but today 37% of Americans would not approve of a family member marrying outside of his or her race. Are those people not American?

"We have to stop treating American bigotry as a series of exceptions," concludes Baer, "and finally deal with it as a chronic condition."  As I read appalling Supreme Court cases in my Constitutional law course, such as a 1918 decision invalidating child labor protections, I can see that our struggles over Park51 (the "Ground Zero Mosque") or Cincinnati's racist war on marijuana are not aberrant flares but manifestations of a familiar legacy.  So kudos to Baer for placing current events within the long arc of American history, which - as MLK would remind us - at least bends toward justice.

Nissan subverts species supremacy

People are fascinated by vegetarianism - and I think, somewhat afraid of it.  Every vegetarian has been asked the "why?" question countless times - enough times that if you're like me, you allow your answers to vary.  So, sometimes it's about stopping the cruelty to the 27 billion animals killed in the United States each year. Sometimes it's about protesting the unsafe working conditions of slaughterhouse laborers.  And sometimes it's about saving the planet, as animal agriculture generates more greenhouse gas emissions than all forms of transportation combined.

The latter two answers - about working conditions and climate change - provoke some guilt in the meat-eaters I talk to, or they make me feel uncomfortably holier-than-thou, which is why I try to avoid these conversations.  But the first answer, about animal rights, affects people in a different way.  It doesn't make them feel guilty about their eating choices; it makes them feel threatened, because (I think) asserting the natural rights of animals challenges our dominion over the little critters.  It subverts a sense of human supremacy that dates back to the Bible, when the god character creates "every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name."

So kudos to Nissan for introducing its new electric car, Leaf, with a commercial that strikes at that hallowed sense of supremacy.  Humans are just one animal upon the earth, one that must live in harmony with it, not over and above it.  The melting ice-caps highlight the earth's fragility; it reminds us that our technological advances have not arrived in a vacuum but upon our own delicate planet.  Human choices affect others, even non-human others, and the revolutionary, even radical, message of this commercial, the one that makes our hair rise as the polar bear approaches the man and embraces him in that beautiful "awwww" moment, is that we should care.



The ad concludes: "Innovation for the planet, innovation for all."

Reaching for the stars

"What are you going to do with it?"  They mean a law degree.

I usually say I want to protect the civil rights of incarcerated people, or defend the poor as a public defender.  Or if I am trying to startle someone, especially someone who's judged me by my short hair and tucked-in shirt, I might say that I want to defend the guilty from the abuse of the state.

Regardless, every time I answer, I build up expectations that I will actually undertake such a career, because if not, I'd have to admit that I had deluded myself and misled others.  Answering the question is thus a shield against any temptation to follow a more lucrative path of lesser resistance.  And yes, it also makes it harder to simply change my mind.  But that's a risk I'll take.  If we're not devoted to something, even an evolving something, we're devoted to nothing.

At the very least, if I do change my mind, I can always say:

Is law school a trade school?

I hope so, because I want to be useful to people, esp. people in prison, prison facing prison, and people dumped from prisons to homelessness. We can't be just a bunch of anti-somethings - anti-imperialist, anti-racist,  etc.  We must actually work toward the dream of shared prosperity.

A friend Chelsea gave me an essay, titled, "Leveraging the Academy: Suggestions for Radical Grad Students and Radicals Considering Grad School," by Chris Dixon and Alexis Shotwell. Graduate school, they write, "often creates exhausted, insecure, status-consciousness people who distrust their own judgments."  It's not surprising then, that "[t]hough radical ideas sometimes show up in academic discourse, they almost always originate elsewhere." Somewhat comically, the authors write in academic jargon - for example, describing the university as "a nexus through which systems of power manifest." (Ha, there's no simpler way of saying that? It doesn't bode well for me if even these self-identifying radicals get swept up in the temptation of trying to sound smart.)

Anyway, the point is to screw thinking for its own sake.

Albert Camus expresses the idea beautifully, as usual.  From The Plague (119):

"Do you believe in God, Doctor?"
Again the question was put in an ordinary tone. But this time Rieux took longer to find the answer.
"No - but what does that really mean? I'm fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out. But I've long ceased finding that original."
"Isn't that it - the gulf between Paneloux and you?"
"I doubt it. Paneloux is a man of learning, a scholar. He hasn't come in contact with death; that's why he can speak with such assurance of the truth - with a capital T. But every country priest who visits his parishioners and has heard a man gasping for breath on his deathbed thinks as I do. He'd try to relieve human suffering before trying to point out its excellence."

Torts, property, Constitutional law, oh my!

After four years in the workforce, I am going back to school.  Law school starts tomorrow.

I've been preparing for a struggle, for the discomfort of immersing myself a fairly narrow way of thinking.  In the ivory tower, we're tempted to believe that everyone shares our middle-class sensibilities, that it's all about the law, its procedures, its hierarchy.  It becomes easy to normalize injustice, to lose the outrage, to feel entitled to the lucrative careers that already have our names on them.  So part of me feels that the next three years will be Eli v. Law School.  But I also think that it'll be fun, that law school can be empowering in good ways.  Law school and I can be on the same team.  And with that optimism, I hope the gulp in my throat is just adrenaline hiding out.

 

Here we aren't, so quickly

Everyone seems to have an opinion about Jonathan Safran Foer. I found his first novel, Everything is Illuminated, as others did: a bit too clever and basically a pain in the ass. I enjoyed the hunt for the keyhole in his second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, but I didn't write home about it. His third book, Eating Animals, an artistic journalistic account of factory farms and a plea for vegetarianism, was wise and deeply appreciated. (More about that some other time.)

For now, I just want to officially join his fan club - thanks to a magazine piece.

"Here We Aren't, So Quickly," was just plain brilliant. The story (or maybe it's really a poem) follows the life of a couple ("I" and "you") in piecemeal brevity, gracing just two pages of the July 14th New Yorker. Its blog-worthiness, I think, draws from its use of negatives: how JSF highlights substance by noting absence and dissatisfaction. "I was just going through a tunnel whenever my mother called," he writes. "He was never happy unless held," he writes, suddenly and nonchalantly introducing a child. Then towards the end, in a paragraph that makes you go, "wow":

And here we aren’t, so quickly: I’m not twenty-six and you’re not sixty. I’m not forty-five or eighty-three, not being hoisted onto the shoulders of anybody wading into any sea. I’m not learning chess, and you’re not losing your virginity. You’re not stacking pebbles on gravestones; I’m not being stolen from my resting mother’s arms. Why didn’t you lose your virginity to me? Why didn’t we enter the intersection one thousandth of a second sooner, and die instead of die laughing? Everything else happened - why not the things that could have?

That connected the dots somehow, though I can't quite express why it made my hair rise. I've always been an amateur at literary criticism, but in vague terms, it speaks (to me) of the myth of fate, the sovereignty of whatever, the pursuit of pleasure, the mendacity of struggle, day-in amd day-out. He writes: "They encouraged us to buy insurance. We had sex to have orgasms. I went to the gym to go somewhere." Later: "We couldn’t wait for the beginnings and ends of vacations."

I've been skeptical of the literary prowess of this young author with three parts of a name. But this piece sucked me in like the great vacuum it evokes. You can read it, probably illegally, here.

William Kunstler film

"Some kids fear ghosts and monsters," says Emily Kunstler in an interview with The New Yorker. "I feared the police, the President, and the FBI."

Emily and her sister Sarah Kunstler just directed a film titled, "William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe," about their late father, often called the most loved and most hated lawyer in America. William Kunstler's many (in)famous clients included MLK, Angela Davis, the Chicago Seven, the Catonsville Nine, the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, and the Attica Prison rioters.

I have yet to see the 90-minute film, available for free on PBS. But I am excited about it.

Here's the trailer:



Here's the transcript from the February 1970 speech excerpted in the trailer:

And that is the terrible myth of organized society, that everything that's done through the established system is legal — and that word has a powerful psychological impact. It makes people believe that there is an order to life, and an order to a system, and that a person that goes through this order and is convicted, has gotten all that is due him. And therefore society can turn its conscience off, and look to other things and other times.

And that's the terrible thing about these past trials, is that they have this aura of legitimacy, this aura of legality. I suspect that better men than the world has known and more of them, have gone to their deaths through a legal system than through all the illegalities in the history of man.

Arguments for prison reform: What works?

I've been working for a non-profit law office on a project that if successful, will help prisoners with serious mental illness continue their mental health care after their release. While protecting the civil rights of incarcerated people can be controversial, this work on behalf of people with mental illness at least evokes some sympathy. Still, when pitching my work to strangers, I tend to appeal first to dollars saved and potential crimes averted, not to anything "radical" or moralistic, like fulfilling our responsibility to the vulnerable.

Is that a terrible thing? We certainly don’t lack for good data on why dumping prisoners with mental illness at homeless shelters is a public-policy-FAIL of grotesque proportions. Our criminal justice policy, to be "smart-on-crime," should rely on such evidence. The public should know that people who were enrolled in Medicaid when they left prison were 16% less likely (than those who were not) to be rearrested over the next year and twice as likely to use mental health services. Or that release planning actually reduces the financial burden on state and local governments.

I don't shy from asserting that prisoners should leave at least no worse off than when they arrived, that those who approach prisons with punitive goals exhibit the very cruelty that they purport to punish. But while I view prisons through a moral prism, I have learned to keep that deeper motivation separate from our public policy agenda, even as I lament that our arguments have become beholden to the trump card of "public safety" and the logic of dollars and cents. Behind the wonkery, we're talking about some of our most impoverished and vulnerable neighbors.

But even I grow tired of righteous, do-the-right-thing appeals to my conscience. It is abusing to see mailer after mailer depicting the wide eyes and starvation-induced protruded stomachs of orphaned African children, with their "Your donation can make a difference" zingers. At times I am probably more likely to toss them away and spare myself the agony of recognizing privilege, than to pull out my checkbook and send twenty bucks to such holier-than-thou organizations.

"Revolution must be preceded by reformation," Saul Alinsky would say. "To assume that a political revolution can survive without the supporting base of a popular reformation is to ask for the impossible in politics" (xxi). To change minds and earn people's attention, we have to show them how the plight of the incarcerated mentally ill affects their own lives - that is, their safety, their tax dollars. Arguing from morality risks alienating would-be supporters under a crushing ideal.

Dewy-eyed for justice

It's merely an aside in Jonathan Franzen's story, Agreeable, but it's a meaningful one. From a literary standpoint, the conversation between Patty and her father Ray serves to illustrate their emotional and intellectual distance. And from a legal/ethical standpoint, their conversation draws out and (I think) condemns the all-too-frequent collusion between lawyers of supposedly opposing sides in criminal cases. Ray is a defense attorney (if in name only) in Westchester County, NY.

Here's the excerpt from the May 31 issue of The New Yorker:

In tenth grade, for a school project, Patty sat in on two trials that her dad was part of. One was a case against an unemployed Yonkers man who had drunk too much on Puerto Rican Day and gone looking for his wife’s brother, intending to cut him with a knife, but hadn’t found him and had instead cut up a stranger in a bar. Not only Ray but the judge and even the prosecutor seemed amused by the defendant’s haplessness and stupidity. They kept exchanging little not-quite winks. As if misery and disfigurement and jail time were all just a lower-class sideshow designed to perk up their otherwise boring day.

On the train ride home, Patty asked her dad whose side he was on.

“Ha, good question,” he answered. “You have to understand, my client is a liar. The victim is a liar. And the bar owner is a liar. They’re all liars. Of course, my client is entitled to a vigorous defense. But you have to try to serve justice, too. Sometimes the P.A. [prosecutor] and the judge and I are working together as much as the P.A. is working with the victim or I’m working with the defendant. You’ve heard of our adversarial system of justice?”

“Yes.”

“Well. Sometimes the P.A. and the judge and I all have the same adversary. We try to sort out the facts and avoid a miscarriage. Although don’t, uh. Don’t put that in your paper.”

“I thought sorting out facts was what the grand jury and the jury are for.”

“That’s right. Put that in your paper. Trial by a jury of your peers. That’s important.”

“But most of your clients are innocent, right?”

“Not many of them deserve as bad a punishment as somebody’s trying to give them.”

“But a lot of them are completely innocent, right? Mommy says they have trouble with the language, or the police aren’t careful about who they arrest, and there’s prejudice against them, and lack of opportunity.”

“All of that is entirely true, Pattycakes. Nevertheless, uh. Your mother can be somewhat dewy-eyed.”

Client advocacy deserves more than lip service. Yet Ray tries to pass off his unenthusiastic approach not only as justifiable but as actually also commendable, as being somehow in the service of justice. "Of course, my client is entitled to a vigorous defense," he says. "But you have to try to serve justice, too." That is, you have to figure out who's guilty, who's telling the truth. But attorneys, particularly defense attorneys, are not supposed to serve as judges and juries. Their obligation is to the client - maybe guilty but always human, always more than the crime.

Ray does tell Patty that his clients tend not to deserve the harsh sentences reflexively sought by prosecutors. But he misses the larger discriminatory context of our criminal justice system - its targeting of the poor and historically marginalized. Ray doesn't appreciate that the zealous advocacy of a lawyer is all that protects a defendant from the awesome power of the police, the prosecutor, and the state to deprive people of liberty, that most basic American idea.

"Of all the rights that an accused person has, the right to be represented by counsel is by far the most pervasive, for it affects his ability to assert any other rights he may have," said Illinois Supreme Court Justice Walter Schaefer, quoted in Anthony Lewis's Gideon's Trumpet. Lewis explains: "The defendant cannot be expected to effectively assert his right to an impartial jury, his right to keep out illegal evidence, his right to challenge the voluntary nature of a confession" (108). Gideon's Trumpet tells the story of the landmark 1963 U.S. Supreme Court case, Gideon v. Wainwright, that finally required courts to provide counsel to indigent defendants.

To sum up, "Pattycakes" should listen to her "dewy-eyed" mother.

Whites smoke pot, blacks get arrested

African Americans are six times more likely than whites to be arrested for smoking pot in Cincinnati. In a city that's 46.5% black, those arrested for marijuana have been 85% black and 14% white. Maybe blacks use marijuana at a higher rate? No - perhaps even the opposite. Some 44% of whites, compared to 39% of blacks, have used marijuana, according to federal stats. Eleven to 12% of both groups used marijuana the previous year.

That's the most astounding finding I uncovered while researching an article for Cincinnati's Streetvibes, the newspaper published by the homeless coalition. And that racial disparity isn't the only failure of the anti-marijuana law that Cincinnati's city council passed four years ago.

In 2006, the city council wanted to give the police additional powers of search and seizure, so they elevated possession of a small amount of marijuana from a minor misdemeanor to a fourth-degree misdemeanor (M4). You're cited for a minor misdemeanor but arrested for an M4. An arrest entails a search. The city council reasoned that if police can arrest marijuana users, then they could conduct more searches, which would potentially turn up more guns and harder drugs.

Public policy FAIL. It didn't work.

Police searches have not, by and large, turned up guns or additional drugs. City police brought in just 2% of their annual drug haul through marijuana arrests. (Unsurprisingly, despite the assurances of council-members, a law targeting petty users turned up a small amount of drugs.) As for guns, police confiscated one gun in every 53 marijuana arrests on average , compared to one gun in every 33 arrests total. Potheads harbored guns less frequently than other arrestees.

Pot criminalization has not made us safer. In the year after the ordinance became law, violent crime in Cincinnati actually increased – murders by 16%, robberies by 44%. That may not be an accident. Economist-researchers in one study (Journal of Drug Issues) hypothesized that police crackdowns on marijuana disrupted flow, which increased demand for the limited supply, which in turn raised prices and led users to commit more burglaries and robberies in search of cash.

The racial gap draws, I think, from geography and police attention: In 2009, District 1 (a largely black area) posted 29% of the marijuana arrests with just 6% of the city’s population. District 2 (a largely white area) posted near-opposite numbers: 8% of the arrests with 26% of the population.

In the last four years, the law has needlessly criminalized thousands of Cincinnatians - some 13,000. It has also raised the burden on an already overcrowded court and jail system. Before the law, marijuana possession was a pay-out ticket, explicitly non-criminal, with a maximum $100 fine. A fourth-degree misdemeanor is a much bigger deal, carrying up to 30 days in jail.

So that's the gist. Read the whole piece here. I have a dream in which city council realizes its folly and repeals the law before the Cincinnati police department can celebrate a fifth year of easy arrests. Sometimes I'm optimistic. You don't have to support legalization to see the law's harm.

This article was my first foray into "investigative journalism." I pestered police, judges, and council-members for data and comment. There is something magical about uncovering new knowledge. It reminds me of Bennett, a young physics professor in Alan Lightman's Good Benito, rejoicing at a breakthrough: "for those first few moments at his kitchen table, he was alone with his discovery, he knew something true that no one else knew, and he had vast power in the world."

Prison lingo 101

Have you ever wondered what the term "Sanchez" means in prison? Or "silent beef"? Ask no further. A modestly-titled but brilliant "Glossary of Prison Terms" leads off the book, Dead Man Walking: Teaching in a Maximum-Security Prison, by W. Reason Campbell, published in 1978. (It predates Sister Helen Prejean's book by the same name about the death penalty.) Campbell's book chronicles his years teaching English in the California prison system. His glossary seems to capture the cruelty, deprivation, and black humor that pervade our nation's penal institutions.

I can't speak to their continued usage, but here's a selection of gems from the glossary.

Bricks. Life outside the joint. A person "hits the bricks" when he is released from jail.

Christmas tree. Bringing a woman to orgasm. The term conjures up the image of the long, pointed, green fir tree with the star on top, the the bright candles burning and swaying, the tinsel and the ornaments, the merriment and the spirit of giving. I remember once a student in describing a lost love said, "She didn't love me, but she loved the Christmas tree."

Cold dude. Someone who can perform an act without regard to human emotions or human decency. The term can be used to describe anyone from a sadistic guard to a calculating holdup man. Many inmates have respect for this kind of person.

Duck. To make a duck of someone is to make him look foolish. It derives, I suppose, from the ungainly walk of such a fowl. It gives inmates pleasure to see someone make a duck of a free person.

Duke. A prison leader. Prison authorities are always trying to identify dukes and work through them. However, once a man becomes identified with the power structure, he loses the respect of his peers and destroys his dukedom.

Fat-butt boy. A young prison homosexual. When you are intolerably horny, you go to a fatt-but boy.

Fox. A girl.

Front. To put on a big show, to pretend to be something you aren't. For instance, inmates who talk very tough are usually in jail for less serious crimes. The ones in for very serious crimes don't front about their deeds at all.

Gunsill. A loud-talking aggressive inmate. They come, usually, from one of the Youth Authority facilities, and after a while the older inmates sober them.

Hank literature. Literature written by inmates for masturbatory purposes. It circulates privately, is illegal, and is utterly without redeeming social value.

Joint-converted Muslim. A man who has joined the Black Muslims in prison. He is extremely zealous in his new religion, excessively polite and formal with white people, and usually boiling inside with anger.

Sanchez. The other guy. The man who marries or makes love to your wife or girlfriend while you are in the joint. When an inmate would express concern about a woman, someone who invariably say, "Don't worry about that woman. Sanchez will take care of her."

Shank. A knife. It can be a toothbrush handle filed to a deadly point. It can be a bed spring. It's amazing how many things can be converted into a deadly weapon.

Shine on. To complete ignore another person. It's a necessary process where men live in a climate of enforced proximity. Inmates work out their own petty differences by this process. It avoids physical confrontations and has a devastating effect on people who have been conditioned to noisy abusive responses.

Silent beef. Crimes you were suspected of committing for which you were neither tried nor sentenced. When the parole board has a hearing they go into these other alleged crimes with the defendant. The parole board judges the man on his complete past record and is, in effect, judge and jury for these alleged other crimes. Many inmates feel that a silent beef is more important than the crimes for which they were convicted.

Skin search. To strip completely naked and be searched for weapons or contraband. A guard has the right to skin search an inmate at any time for any reason.

Stone fox. A beautiful girl.

Wife. A male girlfriend in prison.

Zoo-Zoos and Wham-Whams. Goodies and candy bars bought at the canteen.

HIV disclosure in the bedroom

In Ohio, as in many other states, it's a crime for an HIV+ person to engage in any sexual activity with another person (apart from kissing) without first disclosing his or her HIV status. It doesn't matter whether the sexual activity could result in HIV transmission (it doesn't have to be intercourse; use your imaginations, people), or whether the partners used protection, or even whether someone actually contracted HIV as a result of the encounter. At the end of the night (or day, if you're into that), sexual activity without HIV disclosure constitutes felonious assault, a rather serious felony of the second degree, according to the Ohio Revised Code 2903.11. A conviction carries a minimum prison term of two years and a maximum of eight years.

Is this law a good idea? Is it likely to reduce the risk of contracting HIV? No public health organization has supported such laws - which is one indication that they're based on fear and hysteria and not on a 'smart-on-crime' approach (i.e., does the law make us safer?).

Consider the law's perverse incentives: In the most basic case, an HIV+ person has sex with an HIV-negative person. They use a condom. The HIV+ person (perhaps in the heat of the moment) fails to disclosure his/her status. From the perspective of the law, it doesn't matter that they used protection or that (say) the other person walked away without contracting HIV. If the relationship turns sour from some reason, the HIV-negative person could easily call the police. The HIV+ person, unquestionably guilty, would go to prison for at least two years. With those potential consequences, the HIV+ person probably wouldn't say in the morning, "Hey, I screwed up, and even though we used a condom, you may want to get yourself tested just to be sure."

Who really suffers in that situation? The unsuspecting partner, if infected, could live for years without accessing life-prolonging treatment and could possibly pass along the virus to others.

On the other hand, the very existence of the law might encourage more people to disclose. Then their would-be partners could make more informed decisions about whether to have sex in the first place. The deterrence effect does bring a certain virtue to the law, but obviously its success depends on whether the law actually leads to greater disclosure. After all, how many people even know such a law exists? And studies indicate that people respond not to the severity of punishment, but to the likelihood. So I doubt an HIV+ person would disclose simply because there's a law on the books. They'd probably think: "It won't ever be an issue since we're using a condom."

Meanwhile, the intended result of the disclosure law - being aware of a partner's HIV status - can be achieved another way, without resorting to the criminal justice system: by educating people to ask. Asking, though sometimes awkward, is essential simply because some thoughtless people - law or no law - probably wouldn't disclose except if asked directly, "Do you have HIV/AIDS?"

No matter the answer, it's obvious one should use condoms. A fifth of people with HIV don't know they have the virus. So some might argue that they'd be wearing a condom regardless, that disclosure wouldn't change their choice to have sex, that the law then serves no purpose. But personally, if I learned that a potential partner had HIV, my risk-adverse self wouldn't bring her home. So yes, I absolutely support disclosure. Even with a condom, I would want to know.

But that doesn't mean I support a disclosure law. Making non-disclosure a crime, with severe penalties, might seem like a good idea until you consider that deterrence works only when people think they might get caught. In this instance, I don't think it would work well. Instead, criminalizing non-disclosure sets up incentives that undermine people's health. How many HIV+ people have woken up thinking, "I should have disclosed last night, but now there's no way I would."

Bottom line (and attempted maxim): It can be a bad idea to enforce a good idea.

Execution in progress

In light of China's disastrous record on human rights - including, for example, its history of executing prisoners by organ removal - this photo below from the New York Times' slide-show of amusing Chinese malapropisms, or "Chinglish," is the only one that's not laugh-out-loud funny.

Check out the slide-show here.

The emergency room of the law

The lobby of this Ohio prison looks like every other - a little box of a room, packed with visiting families: older white parents wearing flannel, young black women toting children. The correctional officer glances up at me. "Lawyer?" I am as obviously identifiable as the rest of them.

This client, also, looks like every other, with a slew of drug-related offenses, thefts, receiving stolen property, etc. He's been revolving through prison doors since Iran stumped Jimmy Carter. For his schizophrenia, he's taken a slew of medications: Risperdal, Abilify, Wellbutrin, Elavil, Haldol, Prozac, Buspar. Anything else? Probably. He can't remember all the offenses, either. Now he says the prison had taken away the one medication that worked well. Too costly. In a couple months, he will be back on Cleveland's streets without medications, benefits, or a roof. Just like before.

Tragic, predictable, and preventable. Not just him, but the officers, the families, me.

Why do I want to play this role, "lawyer"? Say that word as the correctional officer would, with a degree of derision and a New York sleazy edge. Why would I want to represent, as the director of my law office dares to put it, "some of the most hated people in America"? Say that one with a sense of pride. We're on the cutting edge. What an odd business I'm in: driving hours to visit prisoners with psychiatric disabilities and to ask them how many times they've tried to kill themselves.

I have a curiosity for why people choose this work, so rather than reflect on my own motivations, I want to highlight those of Jesse Pasadoble, the fictional protagonist in Alfredo Vea's novel, Gods Go Begging. This Vietnam War grunt, turned San Francisco criminal defense attorney, wonders "how on earth an angry mute like himself had chosen a profession based on words" (70). The answer has everything to do with Vietnam. "Vietnam was supposed to be a place where the boys who made it got to go home and screw everything in skirts," says one friend as Jesse drinks himself stupid. "It was supposed to make us into men, but it turned us all into stone" (223).

For Jesse, criminal defense work keeps him in the war zone, but this time with a purpose: to mitigate the harm. Criminal defense work is the "the emergency room of the law," he thinks, and defense attorneys are the "field medics performing triage in the crowded jails," tending to people "wounded by life, by testosterone, by poverty" (37). In this imperfect situation, he can't stop the bullets, but he can try to treat the wounded.

He tells a friend: "I try to keep the state from compounding the crimes of this world" (312).

And that - after meeting yet another person imprisoned repeatedly for the symptoms of his mental illness and rendered personally "guilty" for systemic failures - is how I envision it, too.

Ha Jin's Waiting

Spoilers alert!

Ha Jin's novel, Waiting, winner of the 1999 National Book Award, follows an army doctor named Lin Kong who must wait 18 years, under the rules of Communist China, to divorce Shuyu, the wife he has never loved. His real partner is Manna Wu, a nurse at the army hospital.

So he waits. But then, 18 years later, when he and Manna finally wed, he remains unfulfilled. His problem is not simply that his first marriage was arranged; it's that he had never developed the capacity to love. On one occasion, Lin Kong laughs while reading love letters left to Manna by her former boyfriend, Mai Dong. “I feel my heart is about to explode,” Mai Dong wrote. “I cannot live for long if this situation drags on.”

Ha Jin narrates:

Yet having read all the letters, he felt a doubt rising in his mind. What troubled him was that the desperation Mai Dong had described was entirely alien to him. Never had he experienced that kind of intense emotion for a woman; never had he written a sentence charged with that kind of love. Whenever he wrote to Manna, he would address her as “Comrade Manna,” or jokingly as “My Old Lady.” Maybe I’ve read too much, he reasoned, or maybe I’m too rational, better educated. I’m a scientist by training—knowledge chills your blood. (252)

Later in the mind of Lin Kong:

His instinct and ability to love passionately had withered away before they had had an opportunity to blossom. If only he had fallen in love soulfully just once in his life, even though it might have broken his heart, paralyzed his mind, made him live in a daze, bathed his face in tears, and drowned him in despair! (296)

Better to have loved and lost, I guess, than to have never loved at all.

Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Spoilers alert!

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is the sort of miserable, wretched book you read all at once lest you have to pick it up again. It follows the journey of a nameless pair - father and son - through a landscape desolated by an apocalyptic event. I thought it might be an illustration of an“Life is a journey, not a destination” platitude, but the journey is horrible, full of terrorizing cannibals who harvest other humans for food, and the destination – a warm place by the sea – never materializes. The NYT review put it this way: “The Road would be pure misery if not for its stunning, savage beauty.”

What is that savage beauty?

In part, it's the urgent yet understated writing:

They began to come upon from time to time small ciarns of rock by the roadside. They were signs in gypsy language, lost patterans. The first he'd seen in some while, common in the north, leading out of the looted and exhausted cities, hopeless messages to loved ones lost and dead. By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold swept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond. (180-181)

[Seriously, read that again. Amazing.]

It's also the love between father and son, “each the other's world entire.” The man tells the boy:

When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that will never be and you are happy again, then you will have given up. Do you understand? And you cant give up. I wont let you. (189)

At the end, coughing blood and nearing death, the father instructs the son to eat their last can of peaches. And the son, though he could use the nourishment, saves half for his father. (277)

It's a touching book, sure, and the recipient of adoring praise, but it wasn't worth it. To me, it was less of a testament about the sustaining power of love and more of a reminder to never live through an apocalypse. For all the wisdom McCarthy supposedly imparts, I felt about the book as the father felt about his awful existence: “Some part of him always wished it to be over.” (154)

Rehabilitated ex-felons: Give us a chance

Cross-posted from WagingNonviolence.org (with a little time-delay).

Cincinnati’s Fair Hiring Campaign rallied last Thursday, February 25, to ask Mayor Mark Mallory and his appointed Civil Service Commission to end their policy of denying city jobs to qualified applicants with felony convictions.

Over fifty Cincinnati residents, myself included, arrived at Cincinnati’s City Hall for the Commission’s 9 am meeting only to find that the Commission had abruptly canceled its section for public comment. “Ain’t council chambers the people’s house?” asked one individual in the crowd. Leaders of the Fair Hiring Campaign negotiated for two minutes of speaking time before the Commission.

Former offenders face employment barriers both de facto and de jure even for seemingly ancient convictions that have no relevance to the job. These restrictions hinder the ability of millions of Americans (one in 99 is currently incarcerated) to reintegrate successfully after completing their sentences.

For at least three years, the City has opposed proposed changes to its no-felon hiring policy. Frustratingly, the Mayor denies that such a policy even exists.

Ironically, by condemning rehabilitated people to unemployment and under-employment, the no-felon hiring policy ends up increasing the burden on the City’s own overloaded criminal justice and public welfare systems.

Proposed changes would allow city government to consider an applicant’s evidence of rehabilitation. “We’re not asking for guaranteed jobs,” Stephen JohnsonGrove of the Ohio Justice & Policy Center told the Commission. “We just want fair consideration for people with old and irrelevant criminal records.”

After speaking to the Commission, the group walked to the Mayor’s office to present over 1000 letters from Cincinnatians supporting a fair hiring policy.

The no-felon hiring policy is based on fear, not evidence. Depending on a person’s age and offense, research finds that after a certain period of time s/he is no more likely to offend than same-aged members of the general population. For 18-year-olds arrested for burglary in 1980, that point was 3.8 years. Yet people convicted of crimes less serious than robbery still face barriers decades later.

Employment barriers don’t make us any safer. They serve, instead, to punish people years after they have paid their debt to society. “You can get over an addiction,” one person told me, “but a conviction stays with you for life.”

Disney workers fast for health care

Cross-posted from WagingNonviolence.org.

A Minnie Mouse lookalike outside Disney’s Grand Californian Hotel striking with union local 681.

Eight Disneyland Hotel workers of UNITE HERE Local Union 11 in Anaheim, California, engaged in a week-long hunger strike to highlight their two-year dispute on health care and other labor issues with the Walt Disney Company. The eight workers ended their hunger strike on Tuesday, as five more began fasting.

The workers want to keep the health plan that their union provides (paid for in lieu of pay raises), while Disney proposes deducting health care costs from workers’ wages. Disney maintains that their plan would cost $250 a month per family, while the union estimates $500. Workers typically earn $11-13 an hour.

The Disney dispute mirrors an exacerbating national trend: Employment no longer guarantees satisfactory health care coverage. Between 2001 and 2007, insurance premiums rose 78% while wages rose 19%. As health care costs rise, employers drop benefits, contributing to the number of uninsured Americans.

One in six full-time workers, or 21 million people, were uninsured for all 12 months of 2008. Astoundingly, 45% of the nation’s 46 million uninsured actually worked full-time. And the percentage of Americans who receive health insurance through their employer has decreased from 64% in 2000 to 59% in 2008.

The Disney workers seem determined not to become another statistic.

Zinn on civil obedience

In memory of Howard Zinn, who died yesterday, I reread an address he gave at Johns Hopkins University in November 1970, “The Problem is Civil Obedience,” reprinted in Voices of a People’s History of the United States. In the address, Zinn discussed his frustration with the so-called “problem of civil disobedience.” That’s “topsy-turvy,” he said, just plain backwards, like a protester getting clubbed by the police and then getting arrested for assaulting a police officer.

Here’s Zinn:

Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. And our problem is that scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where the schoolboys march off dutifully in a line to war. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.

Facing injustice, we are oblivious if not complacent. Why? Because we have undue deference for the law. “There is nothing sacred about the law,” Zinn went on to say in the same address.

“The law is not made by God, it is made by Strom Thurmond.”

Prison rape no joke

Cross-posted from WagingNonviolence.org.

“Prison officials don’t need a gun; they already have full control over you,” said a former Michigan prisoner who was raped by a correctional officer. She shared her experience with Just Detention International (JDI), an organization working to end the sexual abuse of detainees in prisons and jails around the globe.

The horror of prison rape has been well-documented by Human Rights Watch (hat tip, Te-Ping Chen at change.org). But in American popular culture, the issue of prison rape (when it’s not being ignored), is somehow considered funny, the subject of late-night, drop-the-soap humor. Humor can bring relief to conversations of uncomfortable facts, but it can also dehumanize and trivialize.

Just Detention International (note the name’s double entendre) seeks to change that dynamic with a moving new campaign. JDI prepared three sets of images.

The first set challenges the view that prison rape is somehow not really rape:

The second highlights the health of rape victims:

The third targets the alleged humor of people being raped:

Prison rape has reached epidemic proportions in US jails and prisons. Some 60,500 (4.5%) of the 1.3 million people in federal and state prisons were sexually abused in 2006, according to a 2007 Department of Justice study. By one account, one in five male prisoners is sexually abused at some point during his incarceration. Meanwhile, HIV is four times more prevalent, and Hepatitis C is eight to 20 times more prevalent, in US prisons than in society overall.

Among juveniles in U.S. youth prisons, according to a just-released Department of Justice study, one in eight reported being sexually victimized in the past 12 months (or if they were incarcerated for fewer than 12 months, since they were admitted). Eighty percent of these victims were abused by prison staff.

Kudos to Just Detention International for humanizing people in prison by depicting them in something other than prison garb. Rape is awful whether it happens to women or men, free or imprisoned. “No matter what crime someone has committed,” says JDI, “sexual violence must never be part of the penalty.”

Private prisons don’t solve CA budget crisis

Crossposted from WagingNonviolence.org.

Steep tuition raises at California universities have spurred widespread student protests and sit-ins. These actions were reportedly “the tipping point” that prompted Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to ask a very good question:

Thirty years ago 10 percent of the general fund went to higher education and 3 percent went to prisons. Today almost 11 percent goes to prisons and only 7 1/2 percent goes to higher education. Spending 45 percent more on prisons than universities is no way to proceed into the future. What does it say about a state that focuses more on prison uniforms than caps and gowns?

Unfortunately, in this State of the State address, Schwarzenegger found only half the answer. He proposed a constitutional amendment to prohibit California from spending more on prisons than on higher education. To achieve that goal, he recommended privatizing at least some of California’s prisons. “Competition and choice are always good,” Schwarzenegger optimistically declared.

Other states have tried privatization. And cost-savings promised by private prisons “have simply not materialized,” according to the Department of Justice (p.68). But while cost-savings have been scarce, security breaches have been abundant. One survey found 49% more inmate-on-staff assaults and 65% more inmate-on-inmate assaults in private facilities than in comparable public ones.

Private corporations seek profits by cutting corners. They attract less-qualified workers by providing inferior wages and benefits than state agencies. The California Correctional Peace Officers Association has already condemned Schwarzenegger’s proposal. Private prisons also generate profits by cutting prisoners’ food, medicine, drug treatment, GED classes, and reentry planning.

That’s a mistake. Inmate welfare is not just a Constitutional requirement; it’s smart policy. Education, drug treatment, and release planning reduce recidivism.

The California student protests against tuition hikes succeeded in capturing Schwarzenegger’s attention. California students shouldn’t stop there. The current proposal pits the interests of students against those of prisoners. Both groups in fact seek a shared outcome: greater access to public education.

There’s a better way to reduce prison costs: reduce the prison population (e.g., Michigan in recent years). End lengthy sentences for nonviolent offenders. Expand probation, parole, and “specialty courts” that emphasize treatment over incarceration for addicted and mentally ill offenders. Schwarzenegger is right to question prison costs, but his privatization proposal isn’t the answer.