Then and Now

Are youthful offenders today fundamentally different than they were 20, 30 years ago? Much ink has been spilled on this question, and many an editorialist has met a deadline with stories sensationalizing the leaner, meaner youth criminal. Neologisms have been constructed (think “supercriminal”); panels assembled; laws reinforced (think proposition 21 in 2000, or Jessica’s law in 2006). But what of it?

The question came up recently. I was engaged in a discussion with a couple of retired juvenile justice system administrators, two Latino men in their early 60’s. We were discussing the current challenges facing the reforms (a favorite subject lately), and they were rightly pointing out the two biggest obstacles facing the system: cultural resistance to change among the staff population, and ubiquitous violence among the ward population. I responded, “Yeah, but what’s new? The system has known this for years, through several reform cycles. What makes you think there are now real solutions? What in the current reforms (which are conventional enough) makes us think that the system will respond differently?”

One of these elder statesmen of system shuffled in his seat, obviously riffled, and replied thus to my admittedly dismissive objections, “What we need is respect between staff and wards. A respect initiated by the staff and reciprocated by the wards—we used to have that in the ‘70’s, but this generation of staff and wards are different. (At this point he went on a lengthy tangent about the identically immature behavior of staff and wards. “They just wear different uniforms,” he said.) There is less respect. The wards are more violent, more fearless. They don’t respect human life.”

This is a common enough perspective, despite the fact that juvenile crime has actually hit record lows in the last decade or so (though recent data indicates a rise, especially in middling cities like Oakland and Baltimore).

I responded, “ But what’s the difference between a youth in the ‘70’s and a youth in 2006? Fundamentally, nothing…” I was immediately cut off by the other retiree, who interjected, with a wisp of aged condescension, “I personally disagree. Like my partner said, these guys are really different from the guys I dealt with thirty years ago. Drive-by shootings didn’t exist back then. You would have innocent children being killed by stray bullets back then (referring to a recent shooting that killed a three year old girl in Pomona, CA).”

I never got a chance to develop my argument. But as I sat there, silenced by forced veneration, I began to question my own opinion. Have youthful offenders really evolved as criminals over the past 30 years? The system has certainly changed. It has become prisonized to a degree unimaginable in the ‘70’s, and the average ward has indeed become younger, meaner, angrier, more reckless. The streets seem to have become meaner too, more disorganized, more brutal. But has a fundamental change occurred, and if so, would we even be able to detect it?

I still think there is no fundamental change—social conditions have perhaps become more acute (think the crack baby phenom of the ‘80’s as one example, the swelling of the underclass as another); but this seems to be a quantitative change, one of degree that has not, as yet, effected a more basic change in quality. But that said, the old solutions may nonetheless be obsolete (or perhaps they always were).

Youth criminals are more intense today, expressions of a more desperate social condition, but not different. Drugs, especially hard drugs like Meth play a huge role, as do guns. These factors change the face of crime and the criminal, and raise the stakes exponentially—but they do not, or have not as yet, changed the kid.

The question we need to be asking ourselves is not the qualitative one. In fact, to go down that road, I am convinced, would be perilous. I am sure that it would lead to the dissolution of the Juvenile System altogether—something we might already be seeing (the juvenile system is now literally a mere department in the adult corrections system). In all of our discussions, we must be careful to constantly reaffirm the fundamental difference between youth and adults. That, in fact, should be above all our greatest interest.

Over the Wall

I am looking out my small wedge-shaped window—inmate proof window, a product of the increasing specialization of prison-building developed over the course of the past 20 years. (Some have called the 20^th century in America the century of incarceration. The Economist published an article recently referring to America as the Land of the Unfree.) The window is of the fashionable neo-medieval, an archers slot reborn as an escape-proof window.

I am looking out, beyond the razor wire, at the sparkling lights on the hills, suburbs about a half-mile away. They might as well be a thousand miles away, though. I look out at them every night, and they have become painful symbols of all that I am not, all that I cannot have, all that I have been forcibly removed from.

I have a German friend that remembers peering over the wall dividing East from West Germany as a child. She remembers seeing, from time to time, women just like herself, peering back at her, bags or children in their arms, with longing and resignation in their eyes. She remembers feeling sorry for them. She understood, even as a small child, the deprivations they endured on the Eastern side of the wall, only a few yards of concrete and razor wire between them. But she too felt that short distance represented a huge existential gulf.

I am staring again now, imaging myself to be one of those women, peering back with a torn spirit—longing, yet deeply resigned (the most painful docility). Is anyone peering back at this moment, thinking about the deprivations endured on this side of the wall?

My friend has frequently spoken of that experience as formative—teaching her the brutal absurdity of man-made divisions. Perhaps it was the immediacy of her encounter, her proximity to the wall, the fact that she could see the women’s faces and read their eyes; perhaps it was this immediacy, this contact, that taught her the lesson.

Or rather, forced it upon her mind. We must never forget that we build walls, in part, to forget. To shut out. To ignore. Ignorance is blissful because it has very high walls.

Walls, in this sense, are a failure of the human spirit. We build them so that we cannot see the woman’s face, or read her eyes. If we do not see, we do not care.

Walls are necessary I guess. Yes, they’re necessary, just as long as they are not absolute. Walls can indeed be beautiful. So long as they have doorways…

People and Productivity

The first time I heard the phrase, I was probably in the womb, my Mother probably watching the latest criminal justice sensation story on TV. That's how immanent the concept seems to me anyway.

It is one of those phrases that slips continuously into social consciousness, an unconscious mechanism in liberal-democratic societies (a-la-Borat, read repressed) that controls widespread social panic , euphemistically addressing a society's carefully hidden doppelganger--the antisocial.

Nevertheless, it took me years of incarceration, of crossing into the forbidden territory itself, to come to a full understanding of its meaning-in-use.

It usually comes as a great rhetorical flourish ending an inspiring speech made by someone in authority. To these people, it is the last word par excellence--the essential message to the enemy, the basic Gospel to the benighted heathen, the critical freedom message of Voice of America. It is to them like the musical flourish--a twitter really--to the Baroque Symphony; like celebratory gunfire to sub-national third-world militias; like the Aaronic Benediction to the Catholic Mass.

"...so that they might become productive members of society."

There it is in all of its anti-antisocial beauty. If I could I'd embark on a great etymological dig to uncover the first use of this blessed phrase, and its first benevolent application to the benighted criminal. Like Foucault, I would excavate the historical record and find where it all began, where the public mind initially contracted its peculiar viral strain.

There is no doubt some great mystery about the whole of human society hidden in that archaeological record---a deep and all-pervasive essence that has contributed a part to the very fabric of the contemporary social system.

Reducing the role of criminal rehabilitation to social productivity reveals, apart from an all-pervasive capitalist thought-world, the cynical nature of of the current correctional regime. A productive member of society, in this view, and which is borne out by reality, can be a subsistence wage earner who never finished high school, and lives the entirety of his life in a disorganized, disadvantaged community. This is a legitimately productive rehabilitated criminal in the system's view. Productivity, thus, is exposed as a euphemism for benign underclass.

Nevermind that subsistence wages, lack of education, and underclass status are all leading factors in criminality. That's clearly not important--what's important is reducing crime!

Incredibly, the authorities do not see the connection, nor the contradiction here...

More on this later.

Rule by Nobody

Hannah Arendt once defined bureaucracy thus. And she said of it, "If we identify tyrrany as government that is not held to give account of itself, rule by nobody is clearly the most tyrannical of all, since there is no one left who could even be asked to answer for what is being done." What she says next is as striking as it is relevant to the basic dynamic of prison society: "It is this state of affairs, making it impossible to localize responsibility and to identify the enemy, that is the most potent causes of the current (written in the 1960's but just as relevant today) world-wide rebellious unrest, its chaotic nature, and its dangerous tendency to get out of control and to run amuck" (Arendt in her essay "On Violence").

"I want a grievance right f--ing now!" Bang, bang, bang. "Get the grievance clerk down here now ^&5@$!" Bang, bang, bang. This is a daily routine here--the default response whenever a ward feels that he has been treated unjustly. The cards are always stacked against him of course; and I have seen an equal amount of frivolous and legitimate grievances, all following this precise pattern. Welcome to the first step in the bureaucratic process of the youth prison grievance system.

In theory, a polite and helpful staff is supposed to send a competent ward grievance clerk to deliver a numbered grievance form to the ward grievant. He is then supposed to fill out the form, and return it to the clerk who logs it and then submits it to the living unit Senior Youth Correctional Counselor. She is then supposed to exercise all of her competence and training to weigh the merits of the grievance, and deliver the preliminary finding. If the grievant is not satisfied, an appeal process is enacted that basically climbs the bureaucratic ladder of the institution.

In practice, literally anything can happen. The grievance clerk is never sent, or more frequently, he is instructed not issue the grievance. Or the grievant is offered some small pittance (I have seen anything from doughnuts to electronics) in exchange for withdrawing his request. Or the grievance gets “lost” (usually thrown away). Or perhaps its most frustrating fate, it actually makes its way along the prescribed bureaucratic track—and the grievant is patronized, the issue is evaded or ignored through the masterful use of technicalities, staff are defended, and the grievance is finally “resolved”, that is, a higher, ostensibly more competent bureaucratic official proclaims, ex officio, a last and final judgment, whether in accordance with policy or not, and the whole matter is dropped. Usually by that time the grievant is either pacified to his satisfaction, so disillusioned that he gives up with no further objection, or has further demonstrated his immaturity and “acted out”, usually violently, and the issue is therefore transformed into an issue dealing now with the wards own behavior. The buck gets passed endlessly in the process. The faces change, the only consistency being certain favored clichés, taught I think in a top secret ministry for bureaucrats deep underground---“I’m just doing my job.” Or, “I’m just following policy.” Or, “Well, you’ll have to take that issue up with my boss.” Or dozens more instantiations of the same oxymoronic expression of bureaucratic responsibility.

Prison Rule by Nobody is the leading cause, in my experience, of tension, anxiety, and violence in prisons. It underlies every other problem, taints the whole superstructure, and is therefore partially responsible for them all.

Forever Young

"Hey Nasty, your boy C-Loc says what's up, cuz."

"Heeey, what's my boy doin out there Capone?"

"Gang-Bangin!!"

So the conversation goes, night and day. Delusions of grandeur in the minds of socially disadvantaged, developmentally stunted young adults in the California Division of Juvenile Justice. These guys are rapidly budding into adults, at least legally and physically (state jurisdiction delays their legal development into full-fledged adults until their 25th birthday...unless of course they do something really bad).

Beyond physical and legal maturation, however, there is little or no progress. All the trappings of adolescent immaturity--the idolization of Rap stars; unrealistic delusions of impending fame and wealth; unrestrained hypersexuality; utterly self-centered notions of social expectations and responsibilities; oppositional-defiance syndrome-esque perspectives of normative modes of social participation and authority--mixed with histories of abuse, broken homes, drug abuse, delinquency, antisocial attitudes, and frequently, violent crime, reinforced by a youth prison culture that turns these characteristics into a full-blown identity.

Meet the typical ward of the California Division of Juvenile Justice.

Sometimes it amazes me that these are the same kids that California has become so frightened of. A kid that calls himself Capone (after the famous Mobster) is a gang member, but can barely read or write, sings rap songs at the top of his lungs thinking he's the next rapper-cum-entrepreneuer, and whose plan B is to somehow buy an apartment complex in Watts and "sell it for big money to Section 8."

Another who tattoos racist symbols on his arms with pen ink and a staple in his cell ("I just do it dot to dot, you know."), thinks himself a part of a neo-nazi race of ubermench, but who comes to me when nobody's looking to ask for help to pass his GED exam so that he can "get a high-power (that means really good) job when I get out."

These guys, these kids are frightening when they have a gun in their hands. Have we ever really stopped and asked why they don't even believe the hype themselves?

Living among them, being identified as one of them, I know that for most, they turn to criminality, paradoxically, because its the easiest option. Their fears are the fears of children--they don't want me because I'm too different; they think I'm stupid; I don't have what it takes. Many of these thoguhts I had when I was 6 or 7 years old.

I frequently wonder what kind of hell it is to simply lack the socio-psychological (or, as the system likes to call it, cognitive-behavioral) equipment to grow up, to think adult thoughts, to develop a truly mature sense of self. I have read about patients with severe brain trauma, who can no longer recognize the human face qua human face. Is something of the sort also the case with these eternal youth? Have they lost the ability to recognize, identify with, the face of society? What do they see when they look in the mirror? Is acquiring social norms like acquiring language--the older you get, the harder it becomes?

Throwing Carrot Wheels

Sometimes it is nice just to sleep the day away in here. Pull the covers over your head and seal yourself up from this god forsaken land of the caged. The vernacular phrase for this is 'sleeping your time away." It's the tacit, elliptical way in which prison culture acknowledges periodic bouts of depression.

I get depressed whenever I face the prospect of having to stay in my cell all day long. This is the bitter lot of the majority where I am incarcerated, and so I have had the opportunity to watch up close the various ways in which these young guys, most of them just kids, deal with the maddening idleness of day after plodding day of restless inactivity.

Today was just one of those days. For me, it's rare to be marooned on the living unit, so I am mostly glad for a day here and there to myself. I use it to sleep in, read, write, listen to NPR. But today isn't working out--mild depression has set in. So I went back to sleep. I dreamed lucid dreams, about trees and the ocean, non-incarcerated dreams that raised my spirits considerably. About 2:30 PM I woke up again, no longer depressed, though dazed from over sleep. Eyes still closed, I swung my legs off the bed, determined to be productive with the latter part of my day. Stepping down, I feel something strange beneath my feet. Wet. Circular. Cold. Did I spill something last night? I open my eyes and look. I laugh. Reaching down, I pick up a pen and paper, and now here I sit, writing about the dozens of carrot wheels strewn across my floor.

It would be funny if it weren't so sad, irritating if it weren't so indicative.

Now picture this. Some poor 19 year old kid, locked all day in a tiny, filthy cell, too poorly educated to occupy himself with writing or reading, too developmentally stunted to see the sheer juvenility of sitting on his floor, slinging carrot wheels out of his door and into my room across the hallway. Meet my neighbor across the way.


He is undergoing the rehabilitative program of the California Division of Juvenile Justice.

Now ask me why, when this kid finally gets out of his cell, he picks a fight on the way to school. The first guy he meets, just wham, its you today buddy.

He doesn't understand his anger, his frustration. He just knows its there. Just like the guy walking towards him that he's about to attack.

The Adjudicated Vote

I stayed up late on election night, listening to the voter returns. What an incredibly disconcerting experience listening to an election in prison. Why? Apart from obvious reasons, I would wager that a majority of the hundreds of guys here were simply unaware that an election was taking place. True, that’s not much different from society in general—a majority of Americans, though probably aware that an election was taking place (who can escape the TV ad’s?), did not even bother to vote.

The real difference is that there were also many guys in here who would have liked to vote, but neither had the means nor the will to violate institutional regulations to get registered, procure, and then send in an absentee ballot.

De jure, as adjudicated minors, wards of the state are eligible voters. But de facto, they are disenfranchised voters, denied the power of the vote by the failure of the DJJ to promote and facilitate voter registration and absentee ballot availability.

I don’t think it’s a grand conspiracy to suppress the adjudicated vote. Frankly, I don’t think the system is that smart. Nevertheless, elections have come and gone here, and nothing is said or done to advertise the fact that these guys could vote if they wanted to.

This is very sad indeed. There is nothing that exemplifies more the value of the citizen, the power of the individual, the right of the person, than the power, the right, the responsibility, the privilege of the vote. The right to the vote proclaims the right of the individual to claim a place in society, and to expect to be held to account, and hold society to account, for that place.

And so what better exercise can youthful offenders engage in to learn social responsibility, and to be invited into the rights and responsibilities of the social body?

This should be the thought of a truly rehabilitation-oriented system. It is foolish to hope for thoughts from a system such as this…and that is the truly disturbing thing: I am the only one thinking these thoughts.

What have I become?

We get the occasional surreptitious look at newspapers in here, and yesterday I was able to procure the A section of the Los Angeles Times (the November 6, 2006 edition). “A City Strains to Arrest a Deadly Trend” caught my eye immediately. The story featured the recent murder of a 12 year old boy in the city of San Bernardino. It addressed all the classic issues of a city grappling with violent crime and gang activity. But it really got me thinking…

Living in here, completely isolated from the normal rhythms of social life, it is easy, far too easy, to lose touch with what I guess one can call ones sense of social identity. In this enclosed, highly regimented, artificial environment, social identity—which is already pretty eroded in many offenders by their prior antisocial, criminal histories—is further eroded by the total disconnection that takes place—social and psychological--in the carceral process.

I could not believe that I had felt, albeit just for a second, a sense of absolute distance from this mainstream representation of social identity conveyed in the article—the expression of a city wounded by violent crime. I was taken aback by this brief feeling of dislocation, of displaced identification if you will, in large part because I have worked so hard (and have become very proud) to maintain and grow a sense of identification, of belongingness, with my community, and with society. Early in my incarceration, I resolved to consciously resist adopting the prison vernacular and the prison mentality it fosters and sustains (which is characteristically anti-social, and revels in the very de-indentification with the social that I have at great pains worked to maintain). For this decision, I have lived as a vagabond and an outcaste here (a prison social position usually assigned through anti-anti-social conduct, and which is usually hard and very vulnerable), fiercely maintaining my non-affiliation with prison associations (like prison gangs) at considerable personal risk. It is a dangerous thing to remain a non-affiliate in prison—but I considered it more detrimental still, a betrayal of my own social identity no less, to pursue any other course, despite the benefits (safety, mostly).

And so the momentary horror I felt at my reaction to the article--I felt sympathy, but only a thin, emaciated sense of empathy—put me into a brief panic, and caused me to immediately reevaluate the entire progress of the six years of my carceral life.

I calmed down eventually, and began to think clearly. I had not, after all, become an institutionalized prisoner (a ‘docile body’ in Foucault’s phraseology). But I had neglected something. I had neglected, partly due to purely structural reasons, but partly because of personal bitterness at having to live in prison—I had neglected considering the authentic, nonreplicable, perspective of the Other of the carceral process—the very social identity, ironically, I had worked so hard to maintain: the mother, having lost her 12 year old son in a senseless act of brutality; a community afraid to let their youth venture more than a few blocks from their homes; a young boy, missing his murdered friend, barely old enough to comprehend it. I had neglected this perspective, the perception of the community’s Other—which can only be described as me.

I had been so busy in the negative element of the task, fighting off institutionalization, that I forgot the vital constructive element—maintaining an actual identification with society. I had fallen into the old fallacy of thinking resistance a form of construction.

To be sure, much of this can be attributed to the structure of the carceral process itself. How is one to maintain an identification with the social, and with general social values, when one is kept isolated from society? The problem is compounded by the fact that many offenders, when incarcerated, haven’t yet developed fully formed social identities, or worse, have developed distinctly anti-social identities. Sadly, for many youthful offenders, these structural factors are simply too great to overcome. They are caught up unawares, and develop under the influence of the system identities radically antithetical to society, and suited only for prison society—caged selves, literally formed through interaction with the core feature of the prison milieu—the cell.

But youthful offenders must bear some responsibility. And I especially must bear it, having understood my predicament, and in full knowledge of what is needed to maintain an empathic link to society. Still, it is frightening to think that even I am prone—despite my efforts—to moments of capitulation to institutionalization. If anything, it reveals the awesome negative power of social isolation—which is something we must all bear in mind, because every one of these guys will go home eventually. As such, it is in the best interest of society, and it is the responsibility of people like me who have ears to hear and eyes to see, to devise ways of reintroducing to institutionalized youthful offenders the face of society, and urging them, inviting them, to re-identify.

Superman

Superman

Walking around this place, you are always wondering, “Is this guy going to attack me? Am I going to have to defend myself?”

One incident in particular stands out as a particularly instructive case in point.

I was walking from the living unit on my way to college one day, and as I looked across the large field in the center of the institution, I saw another inmate, charging as fast as he can across the field, heading right for me. They call this stunt a “superman”, probably because you’d need that kind of kryptonic speed to actually reach ones intended target. At the same instant, I look over and see the security patrol realize what’s happening, and also start charging through the field on foot and in vans, in an attempt to cut superman off before he can reach me and the crowd I was walking with. Knowing this place, and seeing that superman is Latino, I quickly calculate that, I, being white, am not the intended target. The target is walking directly behind me, a group of African-Americans, also making their way to college. They see superman too, but, simply wanting to get to college, they just keep walking, shifting their books in case superman succeeds, but clearly banking on the security patrol to intercept him before he reaches them. Between his target and superman is a row of bleachers and a low masonry wall, which slows him down, allowing the security patrol to easily intercept him. They knock superman to the ground, dousing him in the face with pepper spray, and tackling him and putting him in cuffs. And all the while, all we can do is keep walking…there’s no sense in doing anything else, nor much of an incentive.

If you defend yourself, you’re likely to find yourself, like superman—hemmed up, sprayed, and sent to a “holding room”, which is a kind of isolation cell-block in the bowels of the regular living units. Though a lot of the guys will tell you that the holding rooms “ain’t nothin”, meaning they aren’t afraid of spending time in them, I think everyone for the most part is afraid of them—they are a powerful tool used by the institution to punish offenders through isolation. The holding rooms are absolutely dreadful places; dark, filthy, and depressing. Before the reforms began, offenders would languish for weeks in these cells.

Such is life in a youth prison. It is a life where anxiety and fear become permanent parts of ones own personality. Despite the fear of being a target from an unknown predator—whether it be a superman or a staff—you just keep on walking, keep on living as best you can a normal life, hoping someone or some turn of events will continue to intercept the threats, real or imagined, before they bear down on you.

After awhile, after years, the anxiety and fear normalizes. But in brief moments of safety and familiarity—like visits with family—the normalcy of your former life comes rushing back. And then you remember where you are.

Little Frankensteins

Since the passage of proposition 21 in 2000, California’s youth offender population has been shrinking. Prop 21 was a tough on crime law passed which enabled juveniles as young as 14 years old to be tried and convicted as adults, and sent to adult prison. Since its passage, most violent juvenile crimes have been prosecuted under prop 21, and many youth now fill California’s adult prisons---many with absurdly long sentences, including life sentences.

The gutting of the California youth prison system has been spun as a success by the Division of Juvenile Justice. But the real story is that prop 21 has effectively reduced the role of the juvenile system to that of serving only those juveniles convicted of lesser crimes—like property crimes. The whole top-tier of juvenile criminals have now, for all intents and purposes, become adult offenders.

This has created a curious new juvenile prison environment---ironically, one characterized by increased violence, chaotic living environments, and the birth of a brand new youthful offender prison mentality.

My time in the system has coincided with this transition from the old youthful offender mentality to the new, leaner and meaner version. When I entered the system in 2003, the average age for youthful offenders in the older institutions (housing offenders between the ages of 18-24) was 21 or 22 years old. This majority set the tone for the older institutions, which was for the most part ordered and relatively mature. These older guys exerted a controlling influence over the younger guys, and kept them from running amok---which was the status quo in the younger institutions (housing offenders under the age of 18).

But as these older offenders went home, and as the new generation of younger offenders with less time moved into the majority, the environment became increasingly chaotic. Before, while the population still affiliated along race lines and gang membership was standard, there existed a chain of command that enabled conflict to follow ordered channels and manifest itself in predictable patterns (staff would work with the older offenders to address conflict, many times preventing prison riots). In this environment, non-affiliated people like myself could do their time with much less worry—could go to college and school without fearing random outbursts of violence, and count on a consistently stable living environment.

But as these older guys became a minority in the system, they could no longer exert the kind of control necessary to restrain the younger, more violence-prone generation. This younger generation began to exert its majority influence, and lacking the maturity and organization of the older more seasoned offenders, chaos began to become the defining characteristic of youth prisons. Racial tension, once checked by older, more rational offenders, began to spill out in chaotic spurts. Riots occurred at random, staff assaults increased, and the youth prisons became extremely violent---much worse because of their chaotic nature.

Now the transition from the old to the new is pretty much complete. And living in this brave new world is everyday becoming more and more impossible. Utterly random acts of racial violence are the norm, and one cannot exit their room without feeling in some degree of peril. It’s nothing like the streets of Baghdad, where such random acts of violence are usually fatal; but the stress that such constant fear produces has taken its toll on many of us---and the worst affected has been the non-affiliated offenders (like myself), who absolutely deplore the racial divisions, the violence, the gangs, etc. We’ve become easy prey in this new environment where it no longer matters whether you simply want to get your education, complete your Parole Board orders and get on with your life. Now, just the color of your skin can mark you as a target.

It has truly become the jungle.

The prison authorities have tried to reign in the chaos by segregating the units, school, and prison work positions by race, and staggering institutional movement so that offenders have only minimal contact with one another if they are of a different race. It has become commonplace to hear the staff on the other end of the phone ask when I move out from my living unit to work “What race is your ward?”

This segregation has only exacerbated things. Now tension builds up to a critical mass in multiple areas all at once---and when it erupts the prison descends into a kind of chaos I never thought was possible.

State of Emergency...

One issue that can be raised by the Governor's declaration of a state of emergency in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation this month (see the L.A. Times article on 10/5/06) is the problem facing the Department's parole services.

Why is the system fixating on out-of-state transfers as an answer to overcrowding, when the overwhelming number of parole violations that send criminal offenders back to prison are of a technical nature? If the majority of criminal offenders are not breaking the law to be returned to prison, then why not restructure parole to deal with technical parole violators with various community corrections sanctions regimes, including community service, electronic monitoring, drug treatment, restitution and fines, and intensive supervision?

The short answer is that the old solution—early release based upon a fixed formula, e.g. 85%, 50%, etc.---has failed. Incorporating parole into the structure of criminal sentencing across the board, without any consideration of parole readiness, spells massive parole failure. Parole, as a transitional supervision and support mechanism, only works on a discretionary basis. But as can be observed in the Juvenile System, it all depends on who is given these discretionary powers. The Youth Offender Parole Board (YOPB), comprised of political appointees, have no experience in correctional treatment, and cannot properly evaluate parole readiness because they are outsiders to the juvenile rehabilitative process. In this situation, YOPB parole discretion has become a tool to be held over the heads of offenders in order to coerce them into complying with institutional treatment. But since YOPB cannot evaluate treatment progress, and DJJ treatment is a mixture of incompetence and failure, it is clear that discretionary parole has its shortcomings as well, especially when tied to a flawed institutional structure.

Sad but true, only a restructuring of the parole system around a discretionary model that focuses on parole revocation prevention through services designed to support returning offenders will be able to permanently reduce the prison population in the only really viable way possible—through actually reintegrating offenders back into society.

In the meantime, of the approximately 170,000 inmates in the adult system at the present, many are parole violators that have not committed new crimes. In the juvenile system, nearly half of all commitments in 2005 were for parole violations. Re-releasing these people to the community would not be rewarding criminal offenders by early release. It would simply be releasing those offenders who have already served their sentence handed down for their commitment offense, but who are now taking up badly needed space because they failed to report to parole, turned in a positive drug test, failed to go to their treatment group, or could not find a place of residence. This hardly raises to the level of releasing early dangerous criminals who have yet to serve their time for crimes against society.

The devils advocate objects: hey, why can't these guys accomplish simple parole conditions? This exhibits a trend of irresponsibility that seems to be the underlying reason why criminal offenders can't be trusted and ought to be returned to prison.

I would reply: Parole conditions as they presently exist are ineffective and unnecessary. Parole conditions should be designed to prevent the recommission of crime, but also ought to be realistic about the limitations of criminal offenders, and establish conditions that seek to benefit and support parolees, rather than simply monitor and control them. If parole was responsive to the needs of returning offenders, its resources could be directed at ways to keep offenders out of jail, rather than on methods designed to send offenders back to jail for the slightest misstep. If parole services do not support offenders and make it their mission to keep them out of jail, then why have parole services at all? Why are we wasting our time and money?

Social Exclusion

The significance of contemporary spaces of social exclusion to the face of modern de-territorialized Muslims in their many contemporary cultural expressions and locales, as outlined in Olivier Roy's book Globalized Islam, got me thinking recently. My thoughts were further focused by Mike Davis' recent book Planet Slums, wherein he outlines with his signature starkness how spaces of social exclusion—from Baghdad to Los Angeles—have become one of the most formative elelments in the political, social and cultural landscape of the contemporary world.

Spaces of social exclusion are not new phenomena. The powerless, the have-nots, the marginalized, the Third World, the urban underclass, and the modern inmate all provide testimony to the multiple forms of social exclusion zones. Their histories, in fact, run deep and wide.

Michel Foucault's seminal work Discipline and Punish on the origins of the modern prison and its representation of the carceral nature of modern social structures, is an excellent example of an historical-philosophical excavation of modern forms of social exclusion, and in particular, of the way in which power/knowledge operates in the complex process of exclusion built into the institutions of the modern world.

I, of course, live in one of the most recognizable of these social exclusion sites—the modern prison.

As a lover of most things moderate, I have had a very hard time coming to terms with this very radical, though disturbingly accurate, representation of the social ecology of the modern world. I find it problematic to approach the subject along the lines of a Foucault or a Davis—Apocalypticism and nihilistic pessimism have never really appealed to my sunny humanistic tendencies. But I have come to learn to listen to jeremiads when their prophesies amount to real depictions of social phenomena.

The incomprehensible nature of the criminal is one of those perennial mysteries that seem to have plagued humanity from time immemorial. And yet, I have a hard time believing that any of the great sociologists and criminologists of the past and present have ever really taken a hard look at durance vile, the last of the great colonies, the subaltern within, the final resting place of the convicted.

Sure, they've identified its ecological profile and primary fauna—the poor urban-underclass minority. But they don't seem to really understand what they are looking at.

This profile should be a deeply disturbing fact. Crime has become a function of poverty and ethnicity (primarily Latino and African-American). The deep contradiction between the idea of criminality as antisocial conduct, and the reality of the criminal as a poor ethnic minority, ought to outrage us. Poor ethnic minorities are not congenitally predisposed to criminality—even the thought is abhorrent. But if crime is primarily a function of socioeconomic status, then is not the fact that the U.S. has the largest criminal class in the world an indictment of the most advanced, prosperous society on earth?

And how can a nation so concerned with the health of its economy, especially with respect to job-growth, continue to bear such an extremely wasteful, ineffective, economically unprofitable system for administering justice and controlling antisocial behavior?

With the nation focused domestically on the health of the economy vis-a-vis Mexican and Latin American immigration—the link between immigration, the socio-economic profile of the California inmate, and the health of the California economy is not being understood. The hidden costs of bad immigration policy is wrapped up in the cost of incarcerating poor ethnic minorities from overwhelmingly immigrant communities, especially in California. Disenfranchising immigrants from American society creates the conditions for urban-underclass criminality...not in first generation immigrants to be sure, but in their children.

Closing the border, building a wall and criminalizing and evicting illegal immigrants is definitely the wrong answer to this problem. Seeing the link between bad immigration policy and criminality focuses attention on the real issue, and points to a potentially viable solution—increased enfranchisement and economic assimilation can mean socio-economic opportunity for immigrant children—which is the surest way to prevent poverty related crime, and provide real incentives to buy into society and play by the rules.

The same solution can be applied to the oldest unassimilated immigrant group in America—the African American community. Indeed, the history of African American's in America since reconstruction is a case study in the wrong way to deal with immigrants (in this case, forcibly appropriated immigrants), and the consequences of a deeply flawed socio-economic assimilation strategy of exclusion and control.

The key to controlling criminality in America is a good immigration policy focused on socio-economic integration. A well adjusted immigrant family, whether first generation or fifth, addresses urban-underclass crime at its root, where socio-economic disenfranchisement breeds an antisocial response.

The Will to Reform

Reading the proposed reform plans recently published by the CDCR-Division of Juvenile Justice (look up the Safety and Welfare Plan, filed on December 1, 2005, which in the DJJ’s own view, is one of the most comprehensive of the Farrell Vs. Hickman inspired remedial plans, and outlines the department’s commitment to fundamental change), is a lot like reading a State Department plan on democracy promotion and the development of free trade in the developing world. The challenges and proposed solutions are nearly identical, since at question is the same basic problem: Institutional failure. Administrative inefficiency and incompetence, rampant corruption, fiscal irresponsibility, etc., are enumerated as the core problems to be tackled by a ‘fundamental’ re-structuring of the administrative and bureaucratic process, mainly through enhanced oversight and funding.


Prisons are indeed much like developing nations in many of their core characteristics, not least in the absence of respect for the rule of law. The irony of this statement, I hope, will be grasped immediately.


Recently I finished reading a book on the subject of rule of law promotion in the developing world, Promoting the Rule of Law Abroad: In Search of Knowledge, ed. Thomas Carothers. I was struck by the similarities between institutional development and reform in the developing world, and institutional development and reform in the California youth prison system (DJJ).


In Thomas Carothers’ view (founder and president of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment), historically, the biggest problems facing rule of law promotion have been “political and human. Rule of law reform [succeeds] only if it gets at the fundamental problem of leaders who refuse to be ruled by the law. Respect for the law will not easily take root in systems rife with corruption and cynicism. Since entrenched elites cede their traditional impunity and vested interests only under great pressure…Western nations and private donors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into rule of law reform, but outside aid is no substitute for the will to reform, which must come from within” (pg. 4).


This is an extremely astute summation of the core problem that confronts rule of law reform both in the developing world and in the prison system.


I am sure many of you saw the movie Shawshank Redemption. In my case, I was able to see it both before and during my incarceration. The second time around, sitting there in a prison classroom, I was amazed at how differently the film impressed me. Whereas I had focused on “Andy” before my incarceration, when I saw it a year ago, I became fixated on the prison warden. On a slightly different reading, the warden could be the main character of the story. Nearly every turning point in the main portion of the film hinges on the warden’s activities. His corruption and cynicism become the focal point of Andy’s covert subversion of the criminality of the prison-a criminality most apparent in the lawlessness of the prison authorities. Indeed, the irony the story weaves, of criminals guarding criminals, narrates the sad reality that, before I came to prison, I could hardly have believed was true.


Although the day seems to have passed when a prison warden can orchestrate and temporarily succeed in exploiting his power for personal enrichment, that same kind of flouting of the rule of law that is supposed to ground correctional institutions is very much alive today.


Perhaps it is the extreme disparity in the nature of the power-relationship between prison authorities and inmates that are at the root of this seemingly irrepressible urge to overstep both the letter and the spirit of the law.


Whatever the deeper reasons, for a very long time this rule-above-the-law has operated as the status quo in the California juvenile justice system.


But, since the Ferrell vs. Hickman settlement, a fundamental shift has occurred. The administrative levels of the DJJ have mustered the will to reform. Their change of heart has been truly shocking. They have been truly humbled (nothing like a pro-reform governor and a whole lot of bad press), and now they are listening.


So, what’s the problem?


In Promoting the Rule of Law Abroad, Carothers makes the point that frequently institutional reforms are stymied, not because of a lack of will from the leadership, but because of an entrenched culture of corruption and cynicism at the lowest levels (most clearly observed in many para-military police forces of the developing world). The California juvenile justice system now reflects this state of institutional dysfunction. For far too long, corruption and cynicism have marked every facet of the system; and even a change of heart from above has not produced the kind of trickle down effect relied upon in the reform implementations.


As far as I can tell, the face of this institutional corruption and cynicism is the CCPOA.


As I write, adequate structural and institutional reforms are being implemented by motivated administrations. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that the lower levels of the system (mostly prison guards and counselors), are not possessed of the same purpose and will.


There can be little doubt that the root of this resistance are the vested interests and lassitude that for many, many years has leached into the lower levels of the system through the inordinate influence and proxy-management of the DJJ (the former CYA) by the California Peace Officers Association.


CCPOA is not only independent of public accountability, but it represents the exclusive interests of prison guards and counselors in the DJJ (as well as the much larger adult system).


How would you feel if your political representatives were unabashedly more beholden to their campaign contributors than to their districts? If your doctor published on his office door the fact that he was more concerned with your insurance coverage of the medication you take, than its safety and effectiveness to heal? Or, if the judge appointed to your case proudly sported a municipal police badge on the bench?


What kind of political, medical, or legal system would allow for such a deliberate undermining of their most fundamental guiding principles, “service to the people”, “do no harm”, and “equality before the law”, respectively. These are, if you will, the respective “spirits” of the laws of politics, medicine, and the legal system.


It is ironic that each of these principles has been proclaimed in years past and in the present reforms, as guiding lights for the juvenile justice system. It is ironic because it brings to light the extreme fragility of the institutions of the modern world. They stand or fall based on the content of their respective cultures.


It’s the people, people.

The forgotten 5 percent

“What we have here is a failure to communicate...” I have never appreciated more the irony of that statement until now, in the midst of my own prison term.

Throughout my incarceration, I have frequently said, “If only the administration knew what kind of allies they could have if they stopped focusing on controlling the 5 percent of inmates that are beyond hope, and would reach out to the 5 percent that have most of their own interests in common.”

It is probably not widely understood that in most prisons, the administration allows a relatively small percentage of the inmate population (usually the most violence prone) to dictate the entire structuring of prison life and activities. Indeed, evidence suggests that, when it comes to violence, a relatively small proportion of inmates are responsible for the majority of violent incidents in any given institution. Furthermore, it is probably even less widely known that there is a relatively small proportion of inmates that have absolutely removed themselves from violence completely, and are in virtually full sympathy with prison authorities with respect to the safety and security of the prison, and the promotion of a therapeutic environment (however idealistic these might seem given current prison conditions).

Prison populations are not homogeneous. In between the majority of prison inmates, which are more or less an admixture of the extremes, there exists a small group of inmates that absolutely embody and fuel the resistance culture that currently blights the prison system; but there is also an equally small group that completely rejects the prison culture and struggles to maintain the kind of pro-social norms and values that everybody wishes that the prisons could facilitate.

These diametrically opposite extremes represent, to my mind, the two potential focus points for prison administrators, and represent two possible approaches, equally opposite, to administrating the prison environment.

No one, in the current discussion, is giving appropriate attention to the other 5 percent.

True, at least in the juvenile system, there is a renewed focus on rehabilitative/incentive programming. But, although rehabilitative and incentive based programming does target inmates that maintain a positive lifestyle, the rest of the institution frequently remains for the most part entrenched in a disciplinary mode divorced from the incentive programs and developed to focus on the other violent minority. When this happens, incentive programming once again becomes marginal and is never fully integrated into the general program structure of the prison. This happens most frequently in institutions with high levels of violence (like the institution where I live). Prison authorities cannot ignore or make of marginal concern institutional violence, while incentive programming can easily be sacrificed or made marginal if institutional violence is so frequent that it consumes a large amount of institutional time and energy.

The challenge is to adequately address the 'safety and security' of institutions without defining the social structure of institutional life around the exigency of violence control. This is not the easiest path to be sure. The disciplinary and control model is much easier and probably more efficient. But we must remember that criminal justice is not a business, and prisons are not warehouses that operate on the maximal efficiency model for controlling warehoused goods. Prisons house human beings, and their existence, especially in the juvenile system, is premised upon providing a social structuring conducive to the development of pro-social behavior.

It is way too easy to fall into the dead end of making marginalized, extra-structural incentive programming the entire focus of the rehabilitative aspect of the prison environment. It takes creative commitment to envision a prison environment that structurally embodies and promotes pro-social behavior, and provides incentives for the demonstration of such behavior.

It also takes intimate, first hand knowledge of the current dynamics of prison life and culture. This is where the forgotten 5 percent come in. This group has the potential to be an invaluable resource to prison authorities.

Contrary to popular knowledge, not all inmates are uneducated, and not all the educated inmates are devious and manipulative. Many of them, in fact, are quietly living positive, pro-social lives in prison, but are forced to fly below the radar because of the overall disciplinary structure of the institution, which does not acknowledge their lifestyle as structurally and culturally valuable, and actually serves to entrench and institutionalize prison resistance culture.

And they know what is going on. The administrative-bureaucratic nomenclature may escape some of them—but in reality they have a quite sophisticated, objective understanding of their environment. If given the opportunity, they could bring an invaluable perspective and insight into the discussion.

A failure to utilize these inmates would be a serious mistake—a communication failure that could very well hamstring any genuine reform efforts.

Walls

When people build walls, at some point other people are going to throw things at them.

If you think about it, walls are one of the most defining characteristics of human civilization. Not only are they universal, but they also universally define human social relationships. As such, they have also indirectly influenced human identity.

The basic function of a wall is to separate. The decision to separate one thing from another, or to divide up this or that space, has much more social significance than one might immediately suspect. Throughout history, these decisions have defined family relations, have divided public from private space, have symbolically defined sacred space, have represented racial and ethnic distinctions, have defined nation-states, have designated battle lines, have represented ideological divides, and have differentiated the criminal from the citizen.

Many times the separation created by wall building produces or represents mutual resistance, causing (or indicating) changes to the cultures on either side of the walls. Some of these changes are imperceptible. But most are recognized within the cultures themselves. Frequently, the changes are known and embraced.

Which makes it all the more frustrating to recall the history of wall building—which is a history of conflict. More frustrating still is the fact that most of these conflicts have been irrational and in a profound sense anti-human. In retrospect, we wonder how in the world the German people could have participated in the Holocaust (preceded by the removal and confinement of European Jews); how the United States could have interned Japanese Americans during the Second World War; or how the Berlin wall could have ever been deemed a necessity by the Soviet Union.

Prisons, obviously, are all about walls. It is certainly true that we have come a long way from the days when the criminal would be pilloried or executed in the public square. As grateful as we are for the improvement, there are many of us who feel, nevertheless, that the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater. In the humanizing process that rendered the pillory and the hangman's noose obscene and obsolete, replaced by the confinement of the prison, the public context of criminal justice has been abandoned by the justice process. Public influence upon the mind and heart of the criminal has been removed. The face-to-face phenomenon that places the criminal in the midst of society, confronting him or her with the legitimate social condemnation and the necessary restorative conditions laid out by the public body, has ceased to exist.

The absolute separation of the criminal from the public space seems to be at the root of the anti-social nature of prison culture. Prison culture is a classic resistance culture, created within the walls of facilities breeding social ecologies that have developed in response to being alienated from the wider society and its regulative norms.

One must remember, laws, especially criminal laws, require widespread acceptance and adherence by a general culture that contains such laws as norms of social behavior. Without people who share a common culture, laws are not followed, much less respected.

A common refrain in prison is, “It may be like that on the streets, but this is prison.” That “but” contains the key insight to which I want to draw attention. The absolute removal of criminal justice from the public space has enabled an anti-social resistance culture to develop in the nation's prisons—a culture, the norms of which have developed in the course of resisting and opposing the laws of wider society.

Inmates instinctively understand this as they move back and forth between cultures, experiencing life on both sides of the walls. But I think we all would do well to understand this in connection with the history of the failure of all prison rehabilitation models—the object of which has always been the reconciliation of the criminal with society through reform of attitude and behavior—originally introduced in the prisons as a way of reconciling the criminal with society.

These models have literally been in a constant state of “reform” since the origins of the prison system approximately 200 years ago. (Many of us have been hearing about prison reform for as long as we can remember!)

Reforms repeatedly fail not because they are intrinsically bad (some are, but some aren't). Rather, they fail because they have been hamstrung by the very nature of the walls of the supporting system. The state of constant reform clearly testifies to this fact.

The penal model of absolute separation—physical, social, and interpersonal—seems to be responsible for the failure of prison reform programs, and the development of the resultant, and far more serious, anti-social nature of prison culture.

Obviously the problem is more complex than this. Criminals come to prison because they have already exhibited anti-social behaviors. But although a different set of circumstances and issues are needed to explain this original anti-sociality, the force of the fact that the absolute removal of the criminal from society is a primary factor in the development of anti-social prison culture, should not be minimized.

Absolute separation and removal is appealing because it is easy and convenient. Citizens enlist paid professionals to shoulder the hard work of criminal justice. But no professional force can ever replace the force of the public space. Its force is the force of the whole. And the whole must maintain a regulative role over the part, especially the errant part, so as to ensure that that part does not become of itself a whole in and of itself, with a resistant relationship to the whole. So that it does not begin throwing things at the walls.

Because the fact remains—most criminals come back. They re-enter society every day by the hundreds; but now as foreigners rather than errant parts. Prison, in many cases, has taught them social norms and values in direct opposition to those established in the wider society. They have experienced a kind of alienation and separation from society that they could never have experienced previously, even while engaged in their criminal behaviors. And this experience has in many cases further removed from the criminal the social norms and values needed for successful social reintegration. And like the foreigner who reverts to his or her native language and custom when confronted with adversity or resistance, at the first sight of trouble the criminal reverts to what he or she has come to know best, which is the attitude and behaviors native to the prison.

Our Telos

I am writing this from a small prison cell somewhere in California.

I am writing by way of introduction. We are two young men incarcerated in the juvenile division of the California prison system. We are opening up this forum in order to accomplish something that flies in the face of the current status quo in the relationship between the criminal and the citizen, between us and society.

Bottom line, we are just a couple of young guys sick and tired of the usual way of doing time: Isolated, voiceless, and misunderstood.

Our incarceration has forced us together. However, of our own accord we have come together with a common desire burning in our hearts: to find a way to begin a meaningful dialogue with society on the issue of criminal justice (particularly, juvenile justice).

Amidst the constant speculation about who we are and what is happening to us, we also want to say something about ourselves.

Let us be clear. We don't want to bicker and complain about the criminal justice system; we don't want to lobby for support; we don't want to talk politics. Rather, we simply want to talk to society directly. We want to open up our experiences and our understanding to the public space and begin the long needed dialogue between society (the legally free) and its Other, the legally incarcerated.

For too long, public discussion on the matter of juvenile justice has lacked the voice of actual youth offenders themselves, those who are living through the interior aspect of the process.

Without this voice, the discussion has never been and will never be truly effective.

I say interior because in reality the criminal justice process (and in particular the juvenile process) in multi-dimensional. Although criminal justice has developed to conceal and exclude criminals from the sight of, and participation in, society (for the completely legitimate reason of protecting it), the fact is that society and criminals are constantly interacting.

The law mediates this interaction. It is at once a common bond and a wall of separation.

And for both it is the classic love/hate relationship. The criminal and the citizen loves and hates the law for opposite (and therefore related) reasons. The criminal loves the law because it is basically just (especially in the West) and guarantees a sentence and therefore (in most cases) a release. S/he hates it because it is basically just and demands a sentence to be served for its violation.

The free citizen loves the law because it guarantees his or her freedom and offers its protection. S/he hates it because at some point it inevitably conflicts with his or her idea of what it means to be free and protected under the law.

Often in this dynamic roles are reversed, and identities are exchanged.

In other words, both at the same time love and hate the law because its formal structure both agrees with, but is not completely consistent with, their personal ideas of justice. It is at this point where the citizen and the criminal share a common ground and concern.

As a consequence of the historical denial of this relationship and common concern, public discussion on criminal justice has also for too long assumed that criminals and citizens cannot, or should not, engage in meaningful dialogue. This assumption is simply without merit.

What if both society and the criminal were to open themselves up to one another in a cautious but honest dialogue? What if both took the step of acknowledging and addressing the actual relationship that already exists? What on earth would happen?

Would the discussion simply descend into acrimonious shouting? Would they even care to talk to one another? Would the fear and the anger, the resentment and all the rest, be simply too much to overcome? The criminal justice establishment and the State of California has long taken this position; therefore it has been the position of the majority of citizens.

And maybe it's true.

Or maybe a space can be established where there might begin a serious conversation about what justice is and ought to be from both sides of the Great Divide.

The fact is that there is but one real choice: either acknowledge and address the relationship that already exists, or deny and conceal that relationship and allow it to continue to fester at the margins of society, in the shadows of communities, and in the forgotten recesses within ourselves.

We can either acknowledge or conceal another fact: that there are people inside California prisons who care deeply about the Great Divide that so blights our society.

Some of us, though removed and concealed from public life, understand this state of affairs and realize the need for dialogue. So, we've asked ourselves, why leave the definition and protection of freedom to others, when a forum can exist where both citizens and criminals can meet upon common ground and listen to one another? What is stopping us from reaching out to citizens directly?

Criminals are guilty of violating the social contract and the public trust. In doing so, they have not only violated the law, but other persons. In serving his or her sentence, the criminal does not apprehend the authority and force of the law, then he or she does not truly reconcile himself or herself to free society upon release. So too it ought to be with the personal aspect of crime. For crime has always been, and always will remain, a profoundly personal affair. Should it not also be the case with the justice that purports to redress it?

Argument and disagreement will ensue. But we are convinced that to truly remain human, and to bring a direly needed humanizing element to the process, we must reach out to, listen to, and respect the social—both the laws and lives which we have violated by our criminal actions.

Because, in reality, there can be but one humane objective for criminal justice: Reconciliation.

How to reconcile the criminal with society, society with the criminal? Put in this way, the issue may seem remote from the lives and concerns of many ordinary people. In fact, it cuts to the heart of society (and of what it means to be a citizen) itself.

Some famous words by Dostoyevsky come to mind (who was no stranger to prison), to the effect that a society's condition can be discerned by entering it's prisons. Upon the same logic, it seems that a voice from within the prison experience itself can contribute a great deal not only to discerning the present condition of the criminal justice system, but also to discerning the present condition of society. And only an accurate understanding of the facts on the ground can lead to viable solutions.

Reconciliation is the best definition of justice, both according to the nature of the law, and in terms of the personal relationship between crime and citizens. It can encompass many things, from personal remorse and forgiveness, to social reintegration. But most importantly, it is also the only viable option for those desiring a humane and realizable solution to the problem before us.

To that end, we have chosen to open this forum with a series of articles premised upon this framing of the issues. We hope that they will spark your interest, inform you about the lives we are living, and move you to respond.

And so the dialogue begins.