Another August Winding Down

I have had a new idea (which in itself is refreshing, so many old ones emerging for another go at me most of the time): instead of a traditional book review format, I will try addressing the author of a book directly. My first trial balloon will begin today's post.

Dear Author #1: Jack Myette

 

Dear Mr. Myette,

 

Let me begin by thanking you for your 25 years of service in the Michigan prison system and for holding onto your values during that quarter of a century. There are easier ways to have a regular paycheck, but you did it the hard way.

 

For a while I found the going rough in your book, Prison: The Inside Story. The stories were so bleak! You don’t sugarcoat your experiences or those of the prison inmates, that’s for sure. I was eager to get to the Transforming Lives [as an Officer and Educator] part but didn’t want to skip ahead, so I set the book aside for a few days and then returned to finish it.

 

What I have been thinking about most since reading your book—the question that plague many of us—is why there isn’t more education in prisons, given the clear results shown in lowered rates of recidivism. Let me put the question another way: Why don’t statistics on education and recividism persuade more people that changing lives in prison is a good thing?

 

(Here are some overall statistics on prisons for my other readers, numbers that should give all Americans pause. The graphs are easy to read. Take a look, friends.)

 

Jack, you gave one part of the answer to my question in your book: “the old ‘They ain’t got nothin comin’” attitude that you found among some (many?) prison employees, but I know it is widespread among the general nonincarcerated population, as well. I had community college students who thought that whatever horrible thing happened to prisoners behind bars was in some way “deserved” and part of their punishment; that prisoners should have no rights; that they certainly should have no “privileges,” including education. Of the three aims of incarceration—deterrence, reformation, and retribution—far too many Americans focus solely on retribution. (Not as in a simple “eye for an eye” fashion, either. Is the idea of proportion too subtle to be grasped?)

 

So retribution (however disproportional) is one part of the answer, and saving taxpayer dollars seems a minor concern, as the people intent on causing maximum suffering to criminals don’t care if retribution costs more than reform. They probably don’t care about recidivism, either, since the former inmate who returns to a life of crime only proves to these folks that he was worthless all along. Those who change prisoners’ lives, on the other hand, are a challenge to stubbornly closed minds.

 

But I think there is another, less obvious reason for not addressing recividism in any meaningful way, and that has to do with money. It has to do with capitalism. 

 

I grew up in a town that boasted a maximum security prison. Back in the postwar 1950s, that prison had its own farm and raised its own food. You note that the Traverse City State Hospital also had its own farm, and your solution to overcrowded prisons and also homelessness and mental illness is to “turn back the hands of time,” to make prisons and mental hospitals once again “self-sufficient,” with “strong educational and vocational programs….”

 

The problem I see with the solution you propose is that prisons are a huge market just begging to be captured—a  captive market audience, if you will, that business loves tapping. It’s a little like your prison school principal who didn’t want student inmates graduating, because he “received kudos for the number of students in school,” and every student who graduated was one fewer student in school, so a successful student prisoner took away from his numbers! 

 

How, how sad that music was taken away from your students! Not only did your graduation rate subsequently fall, but the whole calming and basically human aspect of music was lost to the classroom and the students. 

 

Back to my point about numbers, however—. As more and more prison services are privatized, as whole prisons are privatized, why would the businesses making money from incarceration want to see fewer people in the system? A successful prison, a prison that was not a revolving door but that returned reformed criminals to society—that prison, while certainly cutting costs, would also be cutting away its own future profits. 

 

As long as prison populations are seen by for-profit business as fertile ground for investment, and as long as government is willing to relinquish responsibility for those it imprisons and to pay private business to take on the job, I see limited motivation for prisons to reduce recidivism. So step #1 has to be reversing and eliminating privatization of prisons and prison services. 

 

Step #2, then, would be tackling that extremely knotty problem of retribution-only points of view, both among prison employees and among the American public at large. 

 

When my Contemporary Ethical Dilemmas class discussed capital punishment, a number of students voiced the opinion that they would want death for anyone who murdered someone they loved. They imagined themselves as parents of a murder victim. None of them, until prompted by a written assignment, ever imagined themselves as the parent of a murderer. And yet, every murdered had parents and was once a child.

 

There are a lot of shoes we are reluctant to walk a mile in, but you have come closer to doing that than most of us, so thank you for sharing your memories and insights.

 

 

News From the Near Neighborhood

Tiny asters are left of cattail.

 

On Sunday I noticed the season’s first blooming asters (keystone pollinator flowers), tiny pale lavender flowers upstaged by yellow goldenrod (also a keystone pollinator flower), pink Joe Pye-weed, and the startling blue of chicory flowers in the morning sun. Clouds have been spectacular in recent mornings, too.

It's fresh corn and tomato season, back-to-school time, dark coming earlier and daylight coming later. Still, I am not eager to “fall back.” Too much remains to do, indoors and outdoors—more jam to make and get into jars, hummingbirds and bees and goldfinches to watch as they buzz and weave and swoop among the thistles, still grass to mow, dinners with friends on the porch to arrange, always books to read, fun to have with dogs, and on and on and on. 

 

Looking Across the Miles

 

Retributive and preemptive punitive actions continue to be taken by the current administration in Washington, D.C., against Americans who have dared to voice disagreement with the president. Friday it was an FBI raid on John Bolton’s home that the Wall Street Journal (hardly a “pinko” news source) called part of a “vendetta campaign” and “revenge” on the part of the president. It is completely mystifying and outright heartbreaking to see the people who worried so vocally for years and years about “creeping socialism” seemingly unconcerned about galloping fascism, a term I do not throw around lightly. Are these complacent folks just looking the other way? Will they claim later that they were in Iceland and didn’t see it happening?

 

The latest executive order from the White House (as I type these lines on Monday), going against the Supreme Court majority that included conservative Anthony Scalia, calls for a one-year jail sentence for anyone burning an American flag. The president holds the flag sacred as a symbol at the same time that he desecrates and denies American history and values. What, one wonders, does the flag symbolize to him, if not our history and values, freedom and the rule of law? Poor flag! Poor stars and stripes, to be so used! But it is hardly the first time and will not be the last that a scoundrel has wrapped himself in his country's flag.

 

No, I cannot imagine burning the flag myself. I don’t even like to see those little ones on sticks in rows in the ground, because all too frequently they fall over or the wind blows them down, and the flag is never supposed to touch the ground. (If you’re going to display it, do it right.) Do not mistake me! I am not in favor of flag-burning! But I am even less in favor of a lawless executive persecuting those whose views differ from his own. ¿Claro?

 

 

Perspective 

 

Early in the morning, before what can be called “first light” but when dark isn’t quite as deep as it was 30 minutes earlier, I think about the long sweep of history, about nights and days hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and how the coming morning, now almost here, is not so much as the blink of an eye in that vast time canvas. There have been upheavals—movements of land and sea, advancing and retreating glaciers, extinctions and evolutions—that have left their mark in the rocky bones of the earth, but my life will not be such, and neither will the lives of any single person alive today. 

 

At this point, Pompeii comes to mind, and that feels like a lit candle, because it wasn’t the views of those doomed people on law or religion or ethics that survived them but only random mundane moments of their lives, frozen by a tsunami of ash. And so, here I am, in a moment of my life: coffee mug on a table surface next to me, dog in her typical resting croissant shape on my other side, book in my hands. We see the Pompeiians caught in one frozen moment but not in their preceding moments. We don’t hear their conversations or see the daylight or darkening sky they may have seen. Their thoughts, whatever they were thinking before time came to an end for them, were completely erased. 

 

We don’t feel like Pompeiians, though, do we? We write our journals, publish our books, make our movies and podcasts, and hope we can somehow, in some small way, influence the direction of the future, though the unintentional and unthinking ways we daily contribute to that future are much more likely to be effective. But whatever course the future takes, we will all one day be gone.

 

Do you find that long view depressing? Does it seem to illustrate meaninglessness? 

I don’t see it that way. I find the long perspective calming. For me, it makes the present brighter and clearer and more precious—lamplight a pool of miraculous presence against the dark masses of trees outside the window, my dog’s warm, aromatic presence the gift of now, this moment in which we are both alive. The memory of another moment, from only the evening before, comes to mind: a viceroy butterfly motionless on a blackberry vine. And for that moment and this, for the miracle of life, my heart swells in gratitude.

Book Review: THE UP SIDE OF DOWN

THE UP SIDE OF DOWN: WHY FAILING WELL IS THE KEY TO SUCCESS, by Megan McArdle

NY: Viking, 2014

(On sale February 11, 2014)

Hardcover $27.95

When teaching philosophy, I used to tell my students that getting a concept wrong, being confused, misunderstanding or misstating an idea or position were all positive signs. “It means you’re thinking, not just memorizing and regurgitating.” This is a lot of the message of Megan McArdle’s new book: failure can lead to learning, which can lead to growth and success.

One thing you should know, however, is that this is not a self-help book. You and your problems and issues (or me and mine) are not McArdle’s focus. Her canvas is much broader. And that broader vision is both the book’s strength and its weakness.

The big picture approach helps to situate personal experience and individual concerns in a broadly psychological and social context that allows the author to commend or criticize government and corporate policies and programs, as well as the aims and strategies of individuals. On the other hand, it is a weakness when examples drawn from disparate realms are tossed in with insufficient discussion (“punish” puppies to house-train them? How? “spank ... immediately” to discipline children? For what range of offenses, one instantly wonders with some alarm) or when huge global issues such as poverty are brought in for a brief paragraph, acknowledged with a nod, and then left by the side of the road.

Those are my caveats. Having issued them, I want to assure my readers that this book is well worth their attention, for as many reasons as the topics it addresses.

McArdle presents fascinating information from diverse disciplines and draws from it her own conclusions. She writes engagingly not only when recounting very personal experiences (the kind that don't usually make it into books on economics) but also because she brings an open mind to national debates, debates often rigidly polarized in American society at large and treated superficially in familiar sound bytes. The publisher identifies her as “an outspoken Libertarian,” yet time and time again McArdle acknowledges an active role for government, and never does she seem to be hewing to a party line –conservative, liberal, or libertarian. More than once her even-handed discussion reminded me of Aristotle: no one person or group is wrong (or right!) about everything, and she gives every position its due issuing her critique. Then, too, her criticism is based on empirical evidence, not personal opinion or blind ideology. Very refreshing!

What we need, this book implies, is more information, more experiments, and even more gadflies and whistle-blowers. Will that eliminate or even reduce failure?

In your dreams! 

Despite the most thorough market research, scientific research, psychological research -- at the end of the day the market is still made up of human beings, and human beings are and always will be unpredictable.

So why bother? 

Because we can do better. Because we can prevent failure from turning into disaster.

To manage failure and learn fast enough to stay clear of disaster, we must be aware of common errors in the way we process information. Because of the normalcy bias, it’s hard for us to see a crisis if everyone around us is acting as if things are all hunky-dory. (I think of this as the “Emperor’s New Clothes” bias, but really, someone does need to blow the whistle there, wouldn’t you agree?) Then, once we’re all convinced we’re going down the right road, the confirmation bias kicks in to reassure us and will even “bend the map” in order to discount information that would otherwise clue us in to the fact that we are lost. The lesson here, as we used to say to each other in grad school philosophy classes, reading one philosopher after another who started out with what he considered self-evident propositions, “It isn’t always obvious what’s obvious.” Too often we just see what we look for. And then there’s risk aversion, or what I always think of as the why-we-are-in-Vietnam syndrome: We’ve put too much into this! We can’t get out now! Throwing good money after bad makes for disastrous gambling, with ever-mounting losses. Excuse all my Memory Lane quotations today, but it’s true that “You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, know when to run.”

To anyone familiar with the work of Tversky and Kahnemann or Dan Ariely, news of the ways in which our reason is contaminated by irrationality is no news at all. The thing is, “knowing” as in “being able to choose the correct answer on a test asking about risk aversion facts or statistics" is not at all the same thing as knowing how to avoid the pitfalls, so any book that reminds us to double-check our thinking is probably a book we need to read. In one book I recently read but did not review, Alex Stone’s Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind, the author, who never believed in fortune-telling in the first place visits a fortune-teller, focuses on how she’s doing what she’s doing, sees clearly what’s going on – and yet

Later that day, I caught myself brooding over what Stephanie said – that is, until I remembered the source and pushed these thoughts aside. And yet, no matter how hard I tried to dislodge them, they had a stubborn way of creeping back into my consciousness....  

One of the scariest things about mentalism is that even after you understand how it works, it still feels believable.  

- Alex Stone, Fooling Houdini (2012)

How scary is that?

Okay, I said that The Up Side of Down isn’t a self-help book, but McArdle does have a few words of advice for unemployed job-seekers, most of them good. Her take on why the long-term unemployed slack off on the searching is that the longer they have to look, the more anxiety and unhappiness they experience and that discussions on unemployment benefits should take this into account, to reduce job-seekers’ anxiety and keep them moving – presumably to wherever there are jobs. This was basically a good discussion, as far as it went, but the number of jobs that have gone overseas is left unaddressed, and the advice to spend time with others in the same boat, other unemployed people, for “support” didn’t convince me. After all, you won’t get job leads hanging out with other people who are out of work, and you might just get more depressed and feel more hopeless. I wonder if McArdle has read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bait and Switch. I’d love to see Ehrenreich and McArdle onstage together, not debating, per se, but conversing these important issues at a deep and meaningful level.

There’s much more in this book than what I’ve covered here. For instance, Chapter 8, “Blame,” begins with the way human brains work, brains looking for patterns, causes, and agency – brains jumping, therefore, from accident to intent, positing intention and design to what may be random events, assigning blame where there may not even be responsibility. Just as having control reduces stress, so believing we have control reduces stress. -- But if we’re all in control, designing events to conform to our intentions, isn’t someone always guilty? -- Not so fast!!! We may have only imagined the intention....

The following chapter, “Punishment,” may surprise many readers (and I know from teaching undergraduates that there will be strong resistance here), because in it the author lays out the well-supported claim that visiting vengeance on criminals (‘vengeance’ usually called in this context by the milder term ‘retribution’) is usually counterproductive. She does not argue against punishment in general but says that the consequences, to be both effective and cost-effective, must be immediate and inevitable. No letting small violations slide and then, unpredictably, crashing down with harsh verdicts. Actually, the harsher the verdicts, the more 3-strikes-you’re-out, “the higher the incarceration rate, the less it discourages....” The probation program she introduces to us mainlanders is from Hawaii, called HOPE, and the judge’s message to his probationers, people who have failed usually several times in many different ways, is that everyone wants them to succeed, that the focus from here on in will on the future, not the past.

Closely monitoring probationers costs less than keeping criminals in prison. Likewise, providing free housing to homeless people, even if they are alcoholics and/or drug addicts, is cheaper than the myriad costs to society of homelessness.

With bankruptcy, as with criminals and homelessness, this libertarian author takes a surprising position, namely that choosing bankruptcy can make much more sense than remaining under the crippling burden of debt year after year. Bankruptcy lets people start over. And since so many entrepreneurial endeavors fail, it’s important that people willing to take the risks of starting new businesses should have the opportunity to try again after failing.

In so many ways, in so many realms, forgiveness costs much less than punishment. This should be a wake-up call to individuals, voters, and government officials.

Realizing that McArdle's book originated as essentially ten separate magazine features (the author is a long-time blogger and a writer for Bloomberg View, The Atlantic, The Economist, and Newsweek) helped me make sense of the variety of topics brought together in a single book under one umbrella title. It isn’t the book I expected, but it brought together many intriguing issues, and I look forward to future books from Megan McArdle.

Undercover Thoughts

Thursday afternoon, last day in February: more snow sifting down. Sometimes the wind blows it at an angle, and sometimes it drifts lazily. Half an hour after David left this morning, his tire tracks no longer looked bright and new but like all the other tracks from earlier in the week. Unlike last year at this time, we have a pretty good, deep snow cover.

I’ve spent much of yesterday and today under warmer covers, woven and polar fleece throws, trying not to move too much to set up another round of coughing. It isn’t any horrible flu, just a bad cold, and I think I’m on the recovery side of the upside-down bell-shaped curve. Another upside has been plenty of reading time. Finally, after lo these many years, I’m getting around to reading Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. Before that, I devoured a fascinating memoir, the subject of the remainder of this post:

Avi grew up in an Orthodox family. The basketball team at his yeshiva high school was called the MCATS, as in Medical College Admission Test. Avi quit the MCATs at the age of fourteen to devote himself to the study of Torah and traveled to the West Bank during summer vacation to study more Torah.

Talmud Camp in the ancient Judean heartland, a.k.a. the Occupied Territories -- this was my paradise. Even my parents, who were religious, were concerned about my fervor.

No who knew Avi when he was growing up would have predicted he’d end up in prison.

He didn’t go directly from the schoolhouse to the Big House. For a long time he seemed to be going nowhere. As his classmates from Harvard were establishing themselves in careers as doctors and lawyers, getting married and having children, Avi drifted into part-time work as a free-lance obituary writer.  Even a similarly rudderless friend found this development astonishing, pointing out, “You’re not exactly living the dream.” Something had to change. He saw an ad for a job and decided to apply. He had no background in library science (or in social work) and until he saw the ad hadn’t known that such a job existed, but now he set his sights on the position: prison librarian. For him the choice was clear: “It was either law school or prison.”

Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian, by Avi Steinberg

NY: Doubleday, 2010

I was offered a loaner copy of this book with only a minimal description of what it might contain, but I accepted the loan eagerly. Our country has the largest percentage of its population behind bars of any country in the world (Russia and Rwanda come in second and third), you don’t have to live in a huge urban area to know people who have been sent to prison, and yet the average white Joe or Jane Doe whose life has not yet been touched by this reality buys into the myth that American prisoners are a privileged class. If facts about prison violence are cited, Joe and Jane shrug and shake their heads. No, no, sorry! Anyone in prison is there for having broken the law, for having violated someone else’s rights? Why should they have any rights at all? That’s the argument I’ve heard in classrooms and around coffee tables. Loss of liberty is seen as insufficient punishment: the horrors of prison life are just what prisoners deserve!

Running the Books starts off as far as possible from being a retributive diatribe. Actually, the book begins with such broad strokes of humor that I kept wondering if the author would ever say anything important, not only for society but for himself, anything that he felt and believed deeply. Was it worth taking the time to read? Would I learn anything? Oh, well, the funny parts were funny. For example, would the author pass the drug test required for employment, or would his hair sample reveal that he had smoked marijuana a few weeks before? Then, no one ever gets his name right. ‘Avi’ is too unfamiliar for inmates and fellow staff. “’What is that, French?’” And so I read on, entertained and curious. I was an unsuspecting fish, and the author was just playing with me. In time he would set the hook, so gently and gradually that I barely noticed.

Naturally, this smart, naive and inexperienced young man who looked years younger than his actual age encountered situations for which he was unprepared. Of course, he made mistakes, as he is the first to admit. On the other hand, he and the more hardened staff members didn’t always agree on what constituted a mistake. Should he, for example, file reports on prisoners he sees leaving notes in books for other prisoners, i.e., using books as illegal mailboxes? He wants to believe both what people tell him and that he can be an agent of change in their lives. Is he in for a rude awakening. Well, yes and no. Mostly yes, but not always in the ways you might expect.

One of Avi’s duties in addition to running the library was teaching writing classes, one to men, another to women prisoners, and one of the women in his class wanted to do nothing but stare out the window. What would the appropriate authoritarian response be to make clear to this prisoner that he was in charge? Jessica was the woman who stared out the window, but I’m not going to tell you why or what Avi did about it or how Jessica’s story ends.

The prison librarian finds himself helping to edit one prisoner’s life story and guiding another inmate through applications to culinary school, and in fact there are as many stories in this book as there are characters. The book is divided into only two parts, Part I and Part II, with only two “chapters” in each part, and these divisions are pretty much irrelevant. Important section divisions begin anywhere on a page, in boldface type, and are signaled by headings such as Job Training, Blueberry Muffin Day, Stopping the Waves, or some other, sometimes surprising title. And so this book contains, besides stories of individual men and women, what I called the other day “essay islands.” The first that stopped me in my tracks was a section headed Prison Doors: A Brief History. It begins like this: “The prison occupies a former dump and incinerator site.” On the following page we read --

It turned out that the common metaphor of prison as a warehouse was actually not a metaphor. South Bay was a warehouse district. There were auto-body shops, mason depots, a methadone clinic, sundry bombed-out buildings, the headquarters of the Boston Fire Department, the Transit Police. But mostly just streets of warehouses and a chorus of beeping, produced by the backing up of delivery trucks. Sometimes it felt as though the entire place was inching backwards.  

And in a way, it was. South Bay is rumored to be sinking into the sea. Although a landmass for generations – having been filled in a century ago – seagulls still swarmed the skies. Perhaps they sensed the rising tide.  

Signs of the End were everywhere.

Steinberg stands in front of the prison one day to study its architecture and compare it to what he has read of the faces of prisons at various times in American history. He sees nothing either uplifting or judgmental. “The structure,” he reports, “repelled all imagination. It was two cereal boxes.” Still less was there any of the symbolism that Nathaniel Hawthorne described in the first chapter of The Scarlet Letter. Has the modern prison abolished dread? Hardly. The true prison door today is found “safely out of public sight,” inside of the building,” and is far gloomier than Hawthorne’s old oak door surrounded by roses could ever have been. Prison Windows is another essay island, standing out nearly self-contained from the text that precedes and follows, and there are others -- yet they draw power, too, from the personal stories of the surrounding text. Without the stories, a reader might be able to shrug at the essays and dismiss them. The essay island titled Delivered, the opening section of Chapter 4, begins with the brief sentence, “There are various reasons to cry in prison” and ends with the prison librarian “initiated into an ancient club: those who cry alone in the darkness of prison.”

“What’s it about?” That is a question often asked when anyone recommends a book. In this case, the subtitle gives big clue clue, but what else can be said to someone wanting a capsule summary? I can say the following, without giving away any of the book’s specifics: Avi learns (and shows) that people inside prisons and people outside are not that different, after all, if you take away the uniforms and rules; he also learns, long after she had died, that his horrible, negative grandmother had been, like many of his inmate library patrons, a prisoner of loneliness; and he concludes, contrary to his predecessors' posted sign reading BOOKS ARE NOT MAILBOXES, that books indeed are mailboxes and that this is one of the functions of a library--to carry messages through space and across time.

This is a book review and a recommendation. Running the Books is now available in paperback for $16 and is in stock at Dog Ears Books.

Book Review: THE CRYING TREE

Part I, Chapter 1 of The Crying Tree, by Naseem Rakha, begins on October 1, 2004, as prison superintendent Tab Mason learns that an execution date has been set for one of his death row inmates. Daniel Robbin has been on death row for 19 years-- half his life--convicted of the May 1985 murder of 15-year-old Shep Stanley, son of Nate and Irene Stanley, but now Robbin has stopped appealing his sentence, and Mason will have to arrange for and preside over his first execution.

Chapter 2 takes us back in time to September 20, 1983, the day Irene Stanley’s husband, Nate, came home to announce that he wanted to pull up their family’s southern Illinois stakes for a move to Oregon. Irene protests. The farmhouse the family lives in was built by her great-grandfather, and Irene grew up in it. She and Nate graduated went to school in this community and were married in her family church. Everyone they know is here. But Nate’s mind is made up. He wants a change.

From these two different starting points, the two tracks of the story move forward, each in turn, though we know, from Chapter 1, even before meeting the Stanley family in Chapter 2, that Shep died a violent death two years later. Daniel Robbin, the prisoner on death row, seems a cool, unemotional man. He shows no fear of his own death and expresses no regrets for Shep’s. The omniscient narrator, however, is only putting a couple of cards at a time on the table.

Irene Stanley and Tab Mason are the two main characters, and we see most of the story through their eyes, share their feelings through most of the novel’s chapters. Slowly, gradually, their secrets are laid open. Irene and Tab are not the only ones who have secrets, however, and the story’s tempo accelerates as more and more secrets are revealed. There is no one, it seems, who has nothing to hide.

If The Crying Tree were a thriller, secrets and revelations would carry the weight of the story and serve as its focus. Instead they are—not merely incidental, because they reveal some of the deepest aspects of the characters concerned--but certainly secondary to the more important questions of this novel: Can terrible psychic trauma be forgotten if starved of attention? What of forgiveness? Is it a human possibility, or are some acts unforgivable? Can one “move on” without forgiving? Is it possible to find “closure” for the murder of one’s child, and what would make that possible?

This story covers the years 1983-2004. I cannot imagine any shorter period of time would have sufficed for the journey made by Nate, Irene and Bliss (Shep’s sister) Stanley, Daniel Robbin and Tab Mason. Even if you read this book in two days, as I did, you will feel time’s cruelty and the family’s sense of the horror of continuing injustice, year after year. Mason’s failed marriage and the daughter he has all but lost, along with the enigma of Daniel Robbin, present different kinds of scar tissue. Everyone is wounded and struggling to carry on.

As the date draws near for the execution, the first in Oregon in many years, the press is hungry for answers. They want precise details of the procedure. They ask if the prisoner will feel any pain.

Mason wanted to say, Of course there’s pain, you assholes. There’s always pain. The pain of knowing, the pain of waiting, the pain of anticipation. And then there’s that other pain. The pain of planning out an execution. ... A job governors, kings, and heads of state have given to lesser men throughout time. Men never meant to sit with society—the pariahs, the recluses, the ones with the hoods, who either found a way to separate themselves from the results of their work or died from it, one execution at a time. That guy who’d done fifty executions in Florida had quit. Just up and quit one day. Told Mason that he couldn’t get the eyes out of his head. Fifty sets of them, staring.

There were tolls, Mason wanted to say. Tolls both sides of the road. But the press hadn’t asked about that. And if they had, what would he have said?

What Mason has to say to the press is carefully scripted: Stick to the cold, dry facts. Use official terminology. Refer to the execution as “the procedure.”

I believe that how it deals with violent criminals is one of the severest tests of any society. I also feel strongly (I know it is true for me) that forgiveness, whether for great betrayals or minor offenses, is one of the greatest spiritual challenges that human beings face. Another is asking for forgiveness.

The questions at the end of my paperback copy of The Crying Tree were formulated by the author. She introduces them by giving her own background to this story:

In 1996 I was assigned to cover Oregon’s first execution in over thirty years. At the time I had never given much thought to the death penalty and what it would take for the state to plan out, prepare, and then kill a man. After the assignment, I wanted to learn more so I began to interview death-row inmates, the people they had harmed, and the men and women we entrust to carry out our nation’s most severe sentence. During the time I heard many stories, some of them abhorrent and some heartbreaking, but by far the most compelling were those told by the people who had come to terms with the murder of a loved one and no longer felt it necessary to seek retribution. This arc, from the most desperate kind of anguish to reconciliation and even love, stunned me....

The questions that follow are thought-provoking and would add greatly to a discussion of the book, but I want to pose different questions, though they too can only be considered by readers who have first read the entire novel. Realizing that this book is fiction, then, and the details of its story not those of any particular capital case:

How did you feel during the last scene? Had Shep been a different person, had Daniel been different, and this scene therefore not possible, what feelings might you have had at the end of the story? Suppose Shep’s father had not come home while Daniel was in the house? Would Irene’s forgiveness of Daniel make as much sense if the facts of Shep’s death had been different? (Remember when Irene comes to the point of forgiveness and how much she knows then.) How far are the lessons learned by this fictional family over the 19-year period of the novel generalizable to other human beings suffering similar losses? If you think that the novel is "not realistic," which parts of the story do not ring true to you? In your own life, have there been lesser traumatic events which you still struggle to put behind you?

I ask these questions because I have taught classes in applied ethics and, knowing that no one comes to the issue of capital punishment without a strong opinion, I’m sure there will be those who would dismiss The Crying Tree as “only a novel,” “not real life,” “nothing like most murders,” etc. The first hurdle to a fair assessment, therefore, will be to enter as fully as possible into the world of the novel. The second will be to accept its possibilities while wrestling with the questions posed by our everyday reality.

This is a very challenging novel, well worth taking the time to read and reflect upon. I would suggest that reading groups follow up with a true-life memoir, Dreams From the Monster Factory, because these issues are not going to fade away in our lifetime.

On My Mind Today: Again and Again, “Follow the Money”

Every American has an opinion about prisons. Everyone’s information is partial, and perspectives are often skewed by personal experience or special interest. That’s my topic for today, and I won’t try to pretty it up with pictures.

As we all know, statistics can be confusing, if not downright misleading, so let’s get this straight right away: The United States prison population is the largest in the world, by actual head count. We also have the largest percentage of our population in prison of any country world-wide. The U.S. prison population numbers are ahead of second-ranking China, a country with four times our population, and we don’t come out looking any better when the stats are given in percentages: Twenty-five percent of the world’s prison population is incarcerated in the United States, a country with four percent of the world’s population.

Why? Don’t you wonder? Are Americans more inclined to crime than people of other nationalities? Is our culture the most depraved? Our government the most politically repressive? What could account for the United States coming in first in such a sad race?

Beginning from a different starting point, one comes up with different questions and different answers, all of which came rushing back in on me recently in the course of a conversation that began with someone I know casually voicing the common complaint, “Prison is like a resort! They’ve got it better in there than people outside! I don’t call that punishment!” Seeing my shocked expression (has this person not read statistics about violence in prison, including forcible rape?), the speaker went on to say, “I know—losing your freedom is supposed to be the punishment. But how is it punishment if they have everything else?”

I asked, “Would you trade places?”

“That’s not the point. If you do the crime, you do the time.”

No one was arguing that. The question up for debate was whether or not prison is a punishment or an undeserved reward, a cushy life provided for free to criminals.

Others were drawn into the discussion. One recalled days when prisons had working farms and prisoners grew their own food. (They probably cooked their own meals then, too.) Someone else asked why that system stopped, and another person—perhaps my original conversation partner--ventured a guess that “prisoners didn’t want to work any more.” Wait a minute! How about this: large-scale food producers, processors, transporters, distributors and vendors didn’t like the fact that that captive market was closed to them. With prisoners growing their own food, the state wasn’t handing out contracts to private companies to provide it.

If you look at the link above, you’ll find a hefty paragraph centered on the idea that “prisons are big business.” As we all know, business means jobs. (Somewhere. But where? We’ll get to that.) Michigan is hardly alone with its floundering business economy and high unemployment figures, so it’s no wonder communities compete for the chance to have new jails and prisons built in their areas. They’ll even be happy to rent out cells to other counties, housing law-breakers from other parts of the state for profit. It means new local jobs inside and outside the prison.

My adversary in discussion the other day was upset about a state-of-the-art basketball court prisoners enjoyed. I imagine a lot of people would see that basketball court and sneer in contempt and resentment, thinking how spoiled prisoners are and how much they have that they don’t deserve, but would anyone sneer in contempt and resentment at the company that won the contract to build the basketball court or at the company workers who built it and took home a paycheck to pay the rent and put food on the table for their families?

The numbers, though, the numbers. Why are the numbers so high? One way to examine this question is, again, by looking at statistics. How many prisoners are doing time for nonviolent crimes? How many for illegal drug use (while kingpin distributors go free and rake in profits)? How many for nonpayment of child support (and does incarceration help support their children)? Now many for something as nonviolent as not appearing in court to pay fines and costs they can’t afford?

An unscientific way is to look at anecdotal evidence. You know someone in jail or prison. (If you think you don’t, then someone’s keeping something from you.) What are some of these anecdotes? Here’s just one:

A young man receives a speeding ticket and is assigned a court date. Lacking money to pay fine and costs--and not knowing any better--he just doesn’t show up. A warrant is issued for his arrest. He is apprehended, arrested, tried and sent to jail in another county.

I choose this anecdote because it is so simple and much more common than many people imagine. This young man was white, which makes his case less usual. “There are more black 17 year olds in prison than in college.” I’m not saying all these young men, black and white, are incarcerated for failure to appear in court on speeding tickets or for falling behind in their child support payments. I am saying that there is enormous pressure to provide an incarcerated population that provides jobs for the free, “outside” population, and putting people behind bars for an increasing range of violations increases the incarcerated population, providing an increase in community jobs. Communities vie for jails and prisons in the same way they vie for waste disposal sites, dollar signs so blindingly bright on the benefit side of the analysis that costs to the community recede into the dark background, invisible.

Or so it appears on the surface, but the reality is much more complicated. Although the story aired on “Sixty Minutes” years ago (when we still had television) and has been the subject of many other features since, in print and in other media, I am constantly surprised by how many people have no idea that private companies have workshops set up in prisons and hire prison labor rather than employing from the free community. You were worried about losing jobs overseas? The minimum wage in Haiti is 27 cents an hour, while prisoners can be paid much less or even nothing at all, depending on which state of the union is holding them behind bars.

When economic times are tough, when the financial present is anxiety-ridden and the future uncertain, people need to point the finger of blame, and no one wants to blame winners, because success is what everyone wants, and winners are to be admired. They are the proof, after all, that our system rewards work and entrepreneurial ingenuity. We don’t want to blame those on top--we want to be up there with them! But someone must be responsible for rising crime and unemployment, so how satisfying for us to locate failure and wrong-doing at the bottom of the heap, among society’s losers. And no one is lower on the loser heap than a prisoner.

Forget how many jobs the losers are generating, just by being in prison. Don’t think about work they do, for slave wages or for free, for profitable companies that would sooner employ slaves than free men and women. Finally, don’t suspect for a moment that generation of jobs and profits may be the reason so many Americans are in prison.

Is it true that life “inside” is better than life “outside”? If that is true, as it certainly is for a segment of our population, isn’t that itself a sad commentary on American life?

It will be argued that I am trivializing crime, ignoring criminal violence. I don’t forget those prisoners, but I think it should trouble (too mild a word) every American that our prisons themselves have become trade schools for violence, “monster factories,” to use one writer’s term. How many “career criminals” are created inside? Is this an appropriate way to punish offenders or an effective way to protect society?

Thank you to anyone who has read this post in its entirety.