Writing from Prison

Excellent article from the Wall Street Journal.

An excerpt.

When a revolutionary mob stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789, the famous Paris prison held only seven inmates. The eighth, the Marquis de Sade, had already been transferred to another jail. But the liberators did find the manuscript of his pornographic novel “The 120 Days of Sodom,” which he had managed to write on a narrow scroll of parchment 50 feet long.

Sade was uncommonly prolific during his 11 years in the Bastille, producing 20 plays and eight novels. Two centuries later, the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, who was sentenced to five years of hard labor by the Soviet government, wrote in his essay “The Prison Where I Live,” “Prison writings are about suffering and endurance.” In its perverse way, Sade’s work exemplifies both.

The real significance of prison literature, though, whatever its subject matter, is that it speaks to a higher truth about the human condition: The spirit remains free, even when the body is in bondage.

St. Paul’s Epistles to the Philippians and the Colossians, written from prison around the year 62, combine practical admonitions to these early Christian congregations with musings on the cosmic nature of Jesus. Likewise, the prison diary of Vibia Perpetua of Carthage, who was martyred in 203 at the age of 21 after becoming a Christian convert, recorded both her inner thoughts and daily life, making her the founding mother of prison literature.

In the sixth century, the Roman senator Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius was brought down while at the height of his power, having been chancellor to the Ostrogothic king Theoderic. In prison, Boethius composed “The Consolations of Philosophy” while awaiting his execution. The treatise is one of the great meditations on the meaning of life in all its vicissitudes.

Modern prison writing came into its own during the Reformation, when large numbers of educated people were incarcerated as being enemies of the state because of their religious views. Writing became an act of political resistance. In 1642, the poet Richard Lovelace, imprisoned for his support of King Charles I in the English Civil War, wrote from the Gatehouse prison in London, “Stone walls do not a prison make/Nor iron bars a cage.”

Not surprisingly, prison authorities have often reacted by trying to silence the writers in their midst. Sentenced in 1849 to four years in a Siberian prison, for the crime of belonging to a progressive literary group, the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky could only write in secret. Miraculously, his prison notes survived, courtesy of a sympathetic hospital doctor, and formed the basis of “The House of the Dead.”

Dostoyevsky’s message in that novel—that oppression destroys the oppressor as well as the victim—continued to resonate in the 20th century. Writing from Birmingham jail in 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded his fellow pastors that society cannot avoid the consequences of injustice: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”

Retrieved July 16, 2018 from https://www.wsj.com/articles/literature-behind-bars-1531414940

Stanford Prison Experiment was a Lie

And the harm caused by the fake narrative generated by the experiment is incalculable

The whole sad story is reported in Medium, a must read.

An excerpt.

The Lifespan of a Lie

The most famous psychology study of all time was a sham. Why can’t we escape the Stanford Prison Experiment?

It was late in the evening of August 16th, 1971, and twenty-two-year-old Douglas Korpi, a slim, short-statured Berkeley graduate with a mop of pale, shaggy hair, was locked in a dark closet in the basement of the Stanford psychology department, naked beneath a thin white smock bearing the number 8612, screaming his head off.

“I mean, Jesus Christ, I’m burning up inside!” he yelled, kicking furiously at the door. “Don’t you know? I want to get out! This is all fucked up inside! I can’t stand another night! I just can’t take it anymore!”

It was a defining moment in what has become perhaps the best-known psychology study of all time. Whether you learned about Philip Zimbardo’s famous “Stanford Prison Experiment” in an introductory psych class or just absorbed it from the cultural ether, you’ve probably heard the basic story.

Zimbardo, a young Stanford psychology professor, built a mock jail in the basement of Jordan Hall and stocked it with nine “prisoners,” and nine “guards,” all male, college-age respondents to a newspaper ad who were assigned their roles at random and paid a generous daily wage to participate. The senior prison “staff” consisted of Zimbardo himself and a handful of his students.

The study was supposed to last for two weeks, but after Zimbardo’s girlfriend stopped by six days in and witnessed the conditions in the “Stanford County Jail,” she convinced him to shut it down. Since then, the tale of guards run amok and terrified prisoners breaking down one by one has become world-famous, a cultural touchstone that’s been the subject of books, documentaries, and feature films — even an episode of Veronica Mars.

The SPE is often used to teach the lesson that our behavior is profoundly affected by the social roles and situations in which we find ourselves. But its deeper, more disturbing implication is that we all have a wellspring of potential sadism lurking within us, waiting to be tapped by circumstance. It has been invoked to explain the massacre at My Lai during the Vietnam War, the Armenian genocide, and the horrors of the Holocaust. And the ultimate symbol of the agony that man helplessly inflicts on his brother is Korpi’s famous breakdown, set off after only 36 hours by the cruelty of his peers.

There’s just one problem: Korpi’s breakdown was a sham.

“Anybody who is a clinician would know that I was faking,” he told me last summer, in the first extensive interview he has granted in years. “If you listen to the tape, it’s not subtle. I’m not that good at acting. I mean, I think I do a fairly good job, but I’m more hysterical than psychotic.”

Now a forensic psychologist himself, Korpi told me his dramatic performance in the SPE was indeed inspired by fear, but not of abusive guards. Instead, he was worried about failing to get into grad school.

Retrieved June 18, 2018 from https://medium.com/s/trustissues/the-lifespan-of-a-lie-d869212b1f62

Ministry to Prison Guards

There is an excellent article by Eve Tushnet in America Magazine bringing attention to the humanity of guards which too many in prison ministry either forget, do not accept or do not know.

I spent 12 years (1960s /1970s) in maximum security state and federal prisons and long held the typical criminal’s position regarding guards, but in those 12 years I saw more decent behavior from guards than not, even though I pretty much remained alienated from them due to the situation.

More ministries dedicated to them is something that should be done; and it would be best done by a guard.

An excerpt from America Magazine.

The patron saint of corrections officers, St. Adrian of Nicomedia, is said to have been a Roman officer astonished by the faith and courage of the Christians whose torture he was supervising. Legend has it that he declared himself a Christian and ordered his own name to be added to the list of those facing the death penalty, although he had not even been baptized.

In Acts 16, Sts. Paul and Silas converted their warden after being miraculously freed from their chains; they prevented him from killing himself in shame over their escape.

At the crucifixion, the two people who confessed Jesus as Lord were a fellow prisoner and the centurion assigned to guard them. From the very beginning, Christ came to deliver not only captives but their guards.

And yet today, startlingly few Christian ministries exist to serve those who work in jails and prisons. Chaplains and other Christian volunteers come to visit inmates—following Jesus’ call in Matthew 25:36—but corrections officers are mostly left to handle their spiritual lives on their own. Trained to mistrust others, doing work that is poorly understood and only noticed when it is done wrong, working overtime in an environment of fear, stress and split-second moral decisions, officers show all the signs of people in crisis: high divorce rates, high rates of post-traumatic stress and depression, high rates of substance abuse; several studies have found that their suicide rate is among the highest of any job in the United States.

I spoke with several people who looked back on their corrections work as a time when they were able to make a positive difference. But most people I heard from echoed the assessment of Jeffrey Rude, a chaplain and trainer of corrections officers: “Our staff are hurting, and our staff are desperate.”

Hidden within our contemporary debates about the nature, expanse and injustices of incarceration in the United States are hundreds of thousands of people who took a job. They took the job because they needed work or because they wanted to protect their communities. They came out of the military or out of neighborhoods much like those of the inmates. Some had loved ones behind bars. Others came out of sheltered environments utterly foreign to what they were about to experience.

Officers noted that their job was to watch over people who might be trying to kill them or threatening them or their family members with assault. They work in unpredictable environments, where even elderly or ill people may become violent. They have seen religion used to manipulate, shanks hidden in Bibles. They are often explicitly trained to view inmates with suspicion and even contempt, and yet some put themselves at risk to save inmates’ lives. Officers work grueling hours, sometimes in facilities without adequate heating in the winter or cooling in the summer—an issue of prisoners’ rights but also workers’ rights.

People used words like “thankless,” “unappreciated” or “guilty until proven innocent” to describe their role. Almost all of the officers and former officers I spoke with told stories, unprompted, of fellow officers who had committed suicide.

Many people knew corrections officers who had been raised Christian but no longer went to church. Long, inconvenient hours made churchgoing hard; some former officers said they were anxious in crowds or they’d had painful experiences worshiping alongside inmates’ families. This can be considered fraternization, a security risk and therefore a risk to their jobs. Every single person I talked to mentioned that C.O.s learn to close themselves off from others.

Retrieved June 12, 2018 from https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2018/05/31/you-have-heard-it-said-visit-imprisoned-what-about-their-guards#

 

Recidivism

An excellent article about it from the Crime & Consequences Blog, validating what is, and has long been known, criminals generally remain criminals after prison and/or involvement in virtually all rehabilitation programs.

Rehabilitation: Evaluation of Failure Page https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/evaluation-of-reentry-programs-3/

An excerpt from the Crime & Consequences post.

Rehabilitation is a beautiful thing.  The story of a person who previously followed a life of crime seeing the light, turning himself around, and becoming a productive and law-abiding member of society warms our hearts.

Regrettably, it is very much the exception, not the rule.  Most criminals released from prison go right back to their old ways.

Criminologists measure recidivism by a new arrest after release.  This measure is imperfect, to put it mildly, because arrest does not equal guilt.  Not all arrested are guilty, and not all guilty are arrested.  Given the low clearance rate for crimes (46% for violent and 18% for property in the 2016 CIUS), the latter problem is the bigger one by far.  That is, the real recidivism rate is much higher than the reported rate because the perpetrator does not get caught for most crimes.

The recidivism rate for a cohort of released criminals also depends on how many years you follow up.  If a researcher-advocate wants a low number, all he has to do is define recidivism for the purpose of the study with a short follow-up period.

Today the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics released a report titled 2018 Update on Prisoner Recidivism:  A 9-Year Follow-up Period (2005-2014).  The nine-year period is new, and the report confirms what we have known from shorter but varying periods: the longer you follow up, the greater percentage is eventually arrested for a new crime.  At nine years, the percentage not arrested at any time in the follow-up period down to a discouraging 16.6%, only 1 in 6.

Are the people arrested in year 9 but not in years 1–8 people who went straight for 8 years and then fell off the wagon?  Doubtful.  More likely they were just good at evading capture for 8 years but eventually slipped up.

Here are the “highlights” according to BJS, with a comment on each:

• The 401,288 state prisoners released in 2005 had 1,994,000 arrests during the 9-year period, an average of 5 arrests per released prisoner. Sixty percent of these arrests occurred during years 4 through 9.
• Five arrests per released prisoner, multiplied by a factor to adjust for the fact that they are only arrested for a fraction of the crimes they commit, is an enormous number of crimes.  The currently popular notion that we can shorten sentences without increasing crimes is just crazy.  Shortening sentences may be the right thing to do in some instances, but we need to approach the question with our eyes wide open as to the cost to the innocent people who will be victimized as a result.

• An estimated 68% of released prisoners were arrested within 3 years, 79% within 6 years, and 83% within 9 years.
• If you see a study that defines “recidivism” with a 3-year follow up, throw it in the garbage.  That’s what it is.

• Eighty-two percent of prisoners arrested during the 9-year period were arrested within the first 3 years.
• Retrieved May 24, 2018 from http://www.crimeandconsequences.com/crimblog/2018/05/the-hard-truth-about-recidivis.html

Courts Got Wacky, Crime Exploded

That is the gist of this excellent article from the American Greatness blog.

An excerpt.

When the great Thomas Sowell retired from writing commentary in 2016, he wrapped up his farewell column this way:

With all the advances of blacks over the years, nothing so brought home to me the social degeneration in black ghettoes like a visit to a Harlem high school some years ago.

When I looked out the window at the park across the street, I mentioned that, as a child, I used to walk my dog in that park. Looks of horror came over the students’ faces, at the thought of a kid going into the hell hole which that park had become in their time.

When I have mentioned sleeping out on a fire escape in Harlem during hot summer nights, before most people could afford air-conditioning, young people have looked at me like I was a man from Mars. But blacks and whites alike had been sleeping out on fire escapes in New York since the 19th century. They did not have to contend with gunshots flying around during the night.

Sowell grew up in Harlem in the late 1930s and 1940s. I grew up in Houston in the late 1950s and 1960s. Like Sowell, I can tell of some carefree practices that would seem strange now.

Houston was a segregated city back then, but already a very large one. Yet my parents gave me the run of the town. They let me take the bus to the central library and the downtown movie palaces, and after I showed I could handle a bicycle safely in traffic, they let me ride it through all kinds of neighborhoods to distant record stores and hobby shops. It never occurred to them to be afraid of what some nogoodnik might do to me.

The only thing approaching violence I encountered was when a black kid pegged me with a BB gun from a half-block away. When the pellet bounced off my head, I just thought, “That’s pretty good shooting,” and kept on riding. Getting shot with a BB gun was no big deal; my brother had been shot in the belly, at close range, which really hurt, but the only repercussion was that we scratched the dumb redneck who shot him from our list of playmates.

What suburban family would let their boy run loose in a city the size of Houston today? This long-vanished nonchalance prevailed not only among Harlem’s poor and Houston’s middle class, but among the rich as well. Look at the older silk-stocking districts of any American city. What won’t you see surrounding them? Security gates. Rich, poor, or in-between, Americans once upon a time lived without fear of their neighbors.

Only a decade after I rambled around on a bicycle, Houston became a playground for one of the worst serial killers ever, a man who with two accomplices abducted, raped, tortured, and murdered at least 28 boys from 1970 until 1973.

Why are we not intent on undoing the social and legal changes that let such evil flourish?

Sowell’s column closed with these words:

We cannot return to the past, even if we wanted to, but let us hope that we can learn something from the past to make for a better present and future. Goodbye and good luck to all.

For many months now, I’ve been challenging Donald Trump to make good his promise that “the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon—and I mean very soon—come to an end.” So far, no chorus of readers, pundits, politicians and citizens has risen to press forward that cause, and the reason may be that most Americans today are too young to remember how things were before crime assumed its present dimensions. Let us therefore “learn something from the past to make for a better present and future.” Let us recall not only what we once had in the way of law and order, but how what we had was lost.

Consider just one aspect of the problem: the revolution in criminal justice imposed on us by the U.S. Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren.

When historian Stephen Ambrose asked former President Eisenhower to name his biggest mistake, Ike “replied heatedly, ‘The appointment of that S.O.B. Earl Warren.’ Shocked, I replied, ‘General, I always thought that was your best appointment.’ ‘Let’s not talk about it,’ he responded, and we did not.” Later, Ambrose read the “flattering and thoughtful references” to Warren in Eisenhower’s diary, and concluded that his anger at Warren resulted from the “criminal rights” cases of the 1960s, not the civil rights cases of the 1950s.

Eisenhower was hardly alone in his anger. The most controversial ruling of Warren’s tenure wasn’t Brown v. Board of Education, which the court decided on a unanimous vote in 1954. It wasn’t even the edicts against prayer and Bible readings in public school, although those raised quite a stink and in their own way may have contributed to the subsequent crime explosion. The Warren Court’s most controversial ruling, in fact, was Miranda v. Arizona (1966), the 5-4 decision that imposed on police a duty to inform a suspect of his rights before questioning him, and let the most red-handed culprit get away with the most heinous crimes if police didn’t follow procedure.

Bear in mind that Miranda didn’t create the right to remain silent. Decades before, the court had barred third-degree interrogation, the principal means of trampling that right, with no harmful effect on law enforcement. Miranda broke new ground, and its results were new, too. New, but not improved.

Writing for the court, Warren acknowledged, “the modern practice of in-custody interrogation is psychologically rather than physically oriented.” He took note of the methods prescribed by advanced police manuals and textbooks for getting around a suspect’s defenses. For example, interrogators would pretend to see things the suspect’s way. “The officers are instructed to minimize the moral seriousness of the offense, to cast blame on the victim or on society.”

Warren complained that if the suspect didn’t warm to such treatment and instead insisted on his constitutional right to say nothing at all, then the manuals advised the examiner to “concede him the right to remain silent” but to “point out the incriminating significance of the suspect’s refusal to talk.” Thus by “patience and persistence,” officers managed to draw many suspects out, eliciting alibis that wouldn’t hold up, to be followed by incriminating admissions hedged by excuses and understatement, with a complete confession frequently the end result.

Retrieved April 15, 2018 from https://amgreatness.com/2018/04/14/miranda-versus-america/

 

Life After Prison

A good photojournalist story about it with a focus on Stockton, California, from the New York Times.

An excerpt.

STOCKTON, Calif. — In California, known for decades as one of the nation’s most avid jailers, the trajectory of law and order is shifting. Through litigation, legislation and a series of ballot initiatives, the state’s prison population has dropped 25 percent over the past decade.

The photographer Joseph Rodriguez has been documenting crime and punishment in California for years and recently focused his gaze on the migration home, in Stockton — a barren outpost in California’s Central Valley.

Gretchen Newby, executive director of the Stockton-based nonprofit Friends Outside, which provides support to prisoners and their families, said the city was experiencing a “cluster effect”: Large-scale arrests two or three decades ago have combined with newly relaxed parole requirements, leading to the release of long-term prisoners back to the city. Those who have family tend to find their way. But long stretches behind bars leave many without support. “It’s common to come out with untreated illness, chronic conditions due to age and neglect,” Ms. Newby said. “How are they going to live?” Friends Outside case managers work to answer this question, lining up job interviews and transitional housing.

The roughly 600,000 men and women who leave incarceration nationwide each year are the long tail of the nation’s prison boom. Finding housing tops the list of challenges they face, followed by getting and keeping a job. These practical barriers are compounded by internal obstacles. Researchers report high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as histories of abuse and neglect among prisoners. These early wounds are compounded by the violence, humiliation and bone-deep isolation of the prison experience.

“It’s a lot of work to unravel the garbage I created,” said Jesse De La Cruz, who spent three decades in and out of California prisons. Former prisoners, he said, are expected to “change everything they’ve done all their lives in three months. It doesn’t work that way.”

David Eng was fortunate in this regard. He was sentenced to 17 years to life for second-degree murder for stabbing to death a man who he said had beaten and sexually assaulted his sister. After 28 years, he left prison with the support of a handful of family members and friends. A brother in Stockton offered him a place to stay. A year and half later, he has a car, a new wife and a job helping other returning prisoners get on their feet at Fathers and Families, a Stockton nonprofit.

Retrieved April 10, 2018 from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/07/opinion/sunday/life-after-17-to-life.html?emc=edit_ca_20180410&nl=california-today&nlid=2174538120180410&te=1

 

Pope Will Visit Prison

Always good news, as reported in the Catholic Herald.

An excerpt.

Pope Francis once again will celebrate the Holy Thursday Mass of the Lord’s Supper in a prison and will wash the feet of 12 inmates.

The Pope will celebrate the evening Mass on March 29 at Rome’s Regina Coeli prison.

Before Mass, the Pope will visit sick inmates in the prison infirmary, the Vatican said. He will celebrate the Mass and wash the feet of 12 inmates in the prison’s central rotunda and, afterward, will meet some inmates in the prison’s Section VIII, a protected section of the prison for inmates convicted of sexual crimes and other inmates who could be in danger in the general population.

A former convent built in the 1600s, Regina Coeli has operated as a prison since the 1890s. Although the government says the capacity is just over 600 inmates, the monthly census since March 2017 has been more than 900. More than half of the inmates are non-Italians.

The prison is just over a mile from St Peter’s Square.

From the beginning of his pontificate, Pope Francis has celebrated the annual Holy Thursday evening liturgy at a place of particular suffering. His immediate predecessors celebrated the Mass either in St Peter’s Basilica or the Basilica of St John Lateran.

Retrieved March 20, 2018 from http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2018/03/20/pope-to-celebrate-holy-thursday-mass-in-rome-prison/

Mass Incarceration

The deceptive narrative is unveiled in this superb article by Heather Mac Donald (one of the best criminal justice policy leaders in the country) from City Journal.

An excerpt.

In July 2015, President Obama paid a press-saturated visit to a federal penitentiary in Oklahoma. The cell blocks that Obama toured had been evacuated in anticipation of his arrival, but after talking to six carefully prescreened inmates, he drew some conclusions about the path to prison. “These are young people who made mistakes that aren’t that different than the mistakes I made and the mistakes that a lot of you guys made,” the president told the waiting reporters.

The New York Times seconded this observation in its front-page coverage of Obama’s prison excursion. There is but a “fine line between president and prisoner,” the paper noted. Anyone who “smoked marijuana and tried cocaine,” as the president had as a young man, could end up in the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution, according to the Times.

This conceit was preposterous. It takes a lot more than marijuana or cocaine use to end up in federal prison. But the truth didn’t matter. Obama’s prison tour came in the midst of the biggest delegitimation of law enforcement in recent memory. Activists, politicians, and the media have spent the last year broadcasting a daily message that the criminal-justice system is biased against blacks and insanely draconian. The immediate trigger for that movement, known as Black Lives Matter, has been a series of highly publicized deaths of black males at the hands of the police. But the movement also builds on a long-standing discourse from the academic Left about “mass incarceration,” policing, and race.

Now that discourse is going mainstream. As the press never tires of pointing out, some high-profile figures on the right are joining the chorus on the left for deincarceration and decriminalization. Newt Gingrich is pairing with left-wing activist Van Jones, and the Koch brothers have teamed up with the ACLU, for example, to call for lowered prison counts and less law enforcement. Republican leaders on Capitol Hill support reducing or eliminating mandatory sentences for federal drug-trafficking crimes, in the name of racial equity.

At the state and city levels, hardly a single criminal-justice practice exists that is not under fire for oppressing blacks. Traffic monitoring, antitheft statutes, drug patrols, public-order policing, trespass arrests, pedestrian stops, bail, warrant enforcement, fines for absconding from court, parole revocations, probation oversight, sentences for repeat felony offenders—all have been criticized as part of a de facto system for locking away black men and destroying black communities.

There may be good reasons for radically reducing the prison census and the enforcement of criminal laws. But so far, the arguments advanced in favor of that agenda have been as deceptive as the claim that prisons are filled with casual drug users. It is worth examining the gap between the reality of law enforcement and the current campaign against it, since policy based on fiction is unlikely to yield positive results.

Retrieved March 20, 2018 from https://www.city-journal.org/html/decriminalization-delusion-14037.html

Self-Taught

This is a charming essay from Aeon with resonating tidbits for those engaged in prison ministry.

In the second paragraph of this excerpt the author notes how she mispronounces words often because she learned primarily from books; exactly the case for me and many other criminals who read deeply in prison, and who are outsiders; the title of the essay being The Outsider.

An excerpt.

When I was in graduate school, a professor came upon me listening to music on my headphones. The piece had stunned me and it must have shown in my face, for he asked if something was wrong. I told him no, but explained that I’d just heard the ‘Ode to Joy’. I can’t recall exactly what I said next, but I enthused about what a wonderful ‘song’ it was, and asked if he had ever heard it. He had. And his response alerted me to the fact that it was unusual to call it a ‘song’. The professor’s manner was kind but it was impossible not to notice his shock: here was a creature seeking a PhD, who had never before heard the ‘Ode to Joy’. This was one of my earliest signals that I lacked the standard cultural and class equipage of academe.

Early in my career, I regularly mispronounced words. The vocabulary of academia was one I had encountered only in books – its language was emphatically not the stuff people I knew said out loud. I was once congratulated on my ‘bravery’ for not training out my ‘rustic accent’ – never mind that I didn’t know, until then, that I had one. More recently, I was asked to develop a seminar on class bias. I am a philosopher, and since I do not study class bias, the request surprised me. I later discovered that I was chosen for my ‘unique’ life experience, my perceived lower-class origins. Even now, people casually ask me at conferences where I am from, in a way that suggests they are struggling to place the unusual. A student once marvelled that I ‘talk like Faulkner’. Another, prompted by a course evaluation to ‘describe this instructor in one word’, recorded: ‘y’all’.

Before entering academia, I wasn’t terribly aware of my class. My family had made out pretty well, relative to many of our neighbours and even kin. But judgments of ‘doing pretty well’ depend, of course, on your point of comparison. At any rate, the cultural capital of my upbringing involved a very different currency to the one that’s spent in academe. In academia, people carry Beethoven in their pockets like so much loose change. My pockets weren’t empty, sure, but they were mostly stuffed with commercial jingles. So I often felt broke in a land of the wealthy, a cultural pauper among the aristocracy. To use the coin of the realm, you could say I had ‘impostor syndrome’ – that perception that one is not adapted for one’s role, that one does not really belong or pass muster.

I still lack the cultural stuff to pass in academic environments. Yet even as I often feel ill-fitted, using the archetype of an ‘impostor’ to explain myself to myself has never offered me much value. ‘Impostor syndrome’ is a conceptual construct rendered in the language and sensibility of the very thing I feel ill-fitted for. It is an academic term, after all, and seems like an affliction for the higher orders, a malady you have to come up a bit in the world to develop. Most importantly, I can imagine the withering look my grandmother would offer if someone dared to suggest that she suffered from ‘impostor syndrome’.

Retrieved March 9, 2018 from https://aeon.co/essays/how-useful-is-impostor-syndrome-in-academia

 

Deincarceration Advocacy

It is a dangerous narrative, as this article from City Journal points out.

An excerpt.

Last November, a deranged 26-year-old man, Devin Patrick Kelley, opened fire on worshipers inside a church in Sutherland, Texas, killing 26. High-casualty mass shootings are tragic in human terms but anomalous statistically, at least in terms of the portion of total U.S. homicides that they represent. The vast majority of murders, which take place disproportionately in America’s low-income and minority neighborhoods, don’t get nearly the same attention. The Texas church shooting does have an important point of commonality with the majority of American murders, however: its perpetrator had a troubling criminal record. The deincarceration movement, which would return thousands of convicts to American streets, presents a threat to public safety. Repeat offenders already commit a substantial portion of the nation’s violent crime—according to one study, 53 percent of killers have at least one prior felony conviction. They will be walking the streets in greater numbers if deincarceration advocates have their way.

Consider a few examples. In October 2017, Radee Prince shot and killed three people in Maryland. Prince, it turns out, had 42 prior arrests and 15 prior felony convictions. About a month earlier, a police officer in Yonkers was shot in the face by an 18-year-old assailant not unknown to police. He had recently been sentenced to probation and classified as a “youthful offender,” despite being caught with an illegal firearm, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, a machete, and brass knuckles. Earlier in 2017, Baltimore police named Cortez Wall, an 18-year-old murder suspect, “Public Enemy No. 1.” Wall had already been convicted of a gun charge, for which he was on probation. That didn’t stop a Maryland judge from releasing him on bail on a drug charge; he had allegedly murdered someone before his release, though police did not yet suspect him. Had bail been denied, Wall would have been in custody when he became the prime suspect in the deadly shooting.

Most recently, on February 13, a Chicago Police Department Commander, Paul Bauer, was shot and killed while off-duty. Bauer was responding to a radio call that he overheard regarding a suspicious-person report in a downtown Chicago office building. The alleged shooter is 44-year-old Shomari Legghette. “It should come as no surprise” that this was not Legghette’s first run-in with the law, Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said at a press conference held the day after Bauer’s murder. Legghette has an “extensive criminal history” that includes charges for drugs, armed robbery, and gun possession. Johnson called the tragedy “a devastating reminder of repeat gun offenders who are out on the streets of Chicago and need to be held accountable.”

Yet proponents of deincarceration want to make it easier for hardened criminals to sidestep prison and roam the streets. The ACLU, an outspoken supporter of bail reform, cheered the fact that, in New Jersey, judges required defendants to post bail in just three of 3,382 cases processed in January 2017. In an article for Time, two scholars at NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice criticized harsh sentences, not just for “nonviolent” drug offenders but also for those committing more serious offenses, calling mass incarceration “the greatest moral and racial injustice of our time.” Citing a report showing that “longer sentences do not reduce recidivism more than shorter sentences,” the authors called for the immediate release of nearly 40 percent of America’s prison population.

Do crime statistics support the claim that such a high percentage of America’s prison population wouldn’t pose a danger to the public—particularly in high-crime neighborhoods of cities like Chicago, which have driven a national increase in violent crime rates? To answer this question, I consulted Chicago Police Department records of the last 200 people arrested for actual or attempted first-degree murder, as of November 21, 2017. That someone has been arrested does not mean that he is guilty, of course, though arrests suggest probable cause. I found that an outsize number of the most serious violent crimes were allegedly committed by individuals who used to be, and perhaps should have remained, behind bars. Of the 200 individuals arrested for murder in the period examined, the vast majority were people of color, particularly black males, with previous arrests. The CPD had arrested two-thirds (133) at least once before; the average number of prior CPD arrests was more than two, and some individuals had as many as 20 “priors.” Seventy-four (37 percent) of the 200 had at least one prior CPD arrest for a violent or weapon-related offense.

These numbers don’t include arrests made by agencies other than the CPD—such as police departments in other states and in neighboring counties—or federal or juvenile arrests. Indeed, for ten of the 200 individuals arrested in the examined time frame, the first listed arrest is for violation of parole conditions, or for possession of a weapon as a felon—meaning that those individuals had been convicted of felonies not listed by the CPD, likely because the offenses occurred in another jurisdiction or before the individuals were legal adults.

According to a recent University of Chicago study, of those arrested for a homicide or shooting in Chicago in 2015 and 2016, “around 90 percent had at least one prior arrest, approximately 50 percent had a prior arrest for a violent crime specifically, and almost 40 percent had a prior gun arrest.” On average, someone arrested for a homicide or shooting had “nearly 12 prior arrests, with almost 45 percent having had more than 10 prior arrests, and almost 20 percent having had more than 20 prior arrests.”

The CPD’s 2011 report on murders in Chicago found that over 87 percent of suspects arrested for murder that year had prior arrest histories. That proportion remains consistent, going back at least 20 years. And the trend isn’t limited to Chicago. In a study of the 75 most populous American counties, conducted from 1990 to 2002, the DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics found that “more than half of murderers (53%) had a [felony] conviction record.”

These numbers belie the notion that the criminal-justice system in cities like Chicago is systematically denying people of color second chances—a potent talking point for deincarceration advocates. Fifteen percent of the 200 suspects whose records I examined had at least five prior arrests before they were arrested for murder. Further, these numbers seriously—if not wholly—undermine the claim that the public does not benefit from the incapacitation of violent or chronic criminals.

Retrieved February 21, 2018 from https://www.city-journal.org/html/second-third-and-fourth-chances-at-what-price-15657.html