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his poem on prison food was meant to be amusing; this one is much more serious and clearly shows the remorse of a teen offender more than a decade into a long mandatory sentence. thanks to j. for sharing this piece of himself with all of his classmates and for allowing me to share it on this blog.

The Path I Laid

So often as the days go by
You regret the choices made
Life then grabs you by the horns
And pulls you down the path you layed.
What on earth can ease the pain
When you see your decisions were wrong
Who on earth can shoulder the burden
When you realize your dreams are gone.
All your life there’s been one thing
Just one thing in which you sought
And now it forever escapes you
It’s possible, it is, but it’s not.
Your dream is now your history
A family of your own you may never know
And the only pain you feel is loneliness
Knowing your dream will never grow.
And even though you may know
That trouble again you’d never find
So quickly life just speeds away
And leaves you so far behind.
I’ll always watch as days go by
And regret the choices made
Life has grabbed me by the horns
And pushed me down the path I layed.

(written on halloween, 2004)

reuters reports that five of sixty-nine runway models are being kept off the catwalk at this week’s international designer show in madrid. evidently, their “ratio of body weight to height was so low it was deemed an unhealthy example to the public.”

i’m no expert in the sociology of bodies, but i’m sure that patriarchy and control are part of the story. nevertheless, even male models are today pressured to drop to size zero. in recent years, the boy-waif look has apparently overtaken the buffed and angular male ideal.

i’ve written before about the body mass index and its flaws. this is partly personal (yes, at my current weight and height, i’m officially overweight) and partly scientific. there are far better ways to identify a healthy body weight than the b.m.i. for example, wrestlers have strong incentives to cut weight, so every minnesota grappler now sees a “certified skinfold technician” or undergoes a water displacement test to establish a minimum wrestling weight of at least seven percent body fat.

should the state or particular industries regulate the weight of a class of workers? i’m personally torn on this issue between libertarian (ain’t nobody’s business what i weigh) and communitarian (bad for society as well as bad for the models) impulses. that said, i’m all for placing sensible weight restrictions on children. the state and schools have an expansive license to intervene in the lives of juvenile models and wrestlers who have yet to reach the age of majority. and parental consent is no solution — many parents would sign anything if they thought it gave their kids an edge or a better shot at glory.

but this raises a bigger question, about which much has been written: why aren’t we associating physical beauty with adult bodies? super-skinny models lack the breasts, muscles, and curves associated with adulthood, so i can’t help but see the fashion industry as complicit in sexualizing kids and adolescents. or maybe it is just too darn difficult for high-end designers to deal with the curves and lumps of adult bodies. like placing a coat over the back of a chair, i suppose they can easily drape anything over a stick-like 5’11” 90-pounder.

as a runner and parent, i tend to emphasize exercise more than diet in discussions with my kids. one sees a marvelous diversity of body types at the average marathon, for example, but every finisher is defensibly “in shape.” i’m still trying to exercise my way out of the post-holiday interim pants, but i doubt that i’m in any immediate danger of hitting size zero.

i didn’t blog specifically about week 4 of the inside-out class, but perhaps the most memorable moment came when an inside student shared a poem he had written about prison food. he had written the poem some time ago, but our discussion about prison food and the current allegations against the food buyer for oregon prisons gave it renewed relevance. he read it with good humor and our class was amused and impressed. the outside students wanted to share it with their friends and families, so the poet brought in copies for us this week and also gave permission for me to share his poem on this blog. i’ll reproduce it without further commentary; feel free to add your comments below.

Absolutely Horribly Disgustingly Gross

I’ve been eating prison food for 11 years now
Since I was 16. I’ve ate what they serve,
So digustingly gross and nasty.
They say we’re inmates, “It’s what we deserve.”
But how can they feed us this crap
And from which sewer did it dwell
All mushy bruised and wrinkly
Don’t even try to place the smell.
We walk down there every day
Never knowing what we’ll find,
Maybe some of that yard pigeon chicken
That 2 hours later shoots from our behind.
Could you imagine if we took a sample
And sent it to the scientists,
There’d be news channels within a week
Screaming how could we be blind to this?
They’d tell us things that it contained
That would surely blow our mind,
From gizzard guts to lizard nuts
Even DNA mixed throughout their find.
If they really wanted to keep kids from prison
They’d give ’em a tray of what we eat inside,
That alone would curb their appetites
Of wanting to lead a life of crime.
Be careful when you eat this shit you guys
Its effects you’ll never know,
Over half of what we eat is rotten
And they feed it to us knowing so.

have you followed the recent stories regarding barack obama’s li’l habit? when i think smoking presidents, i call to mind images of fdr’s jaunty cigarette holder and general eisenhower inhaling four packs a day as he led the allies to victory in wwii.

these days, things are different. why, mr. obama’s smoking may cause greater controversy than his teenage cocaine use. as maureen dowd suggests, smoking makes mr. obama “intriguingly imperfect.” as a non-smoker, i enjoy the image of the commander-in-chief sneaking out by the loading dock to suck down a heater between meetings.

just as former presidents clinton, ford, and reagan, mr. obama won’t be caught smoking around the cameras. joe biden would disapprove, i suppose, but i think most of us like to see a little fallibility in our presidential candidates.

while i would not approve of a glue-sniffing president or a chronic inebriate president, smoking has different connotations. i’d advise mr. obama to avoid the nicotine patches until after the election. a patch-wearing president seems weak and compromised relative to a smoking president. think about it: can you imagine winston churchill chewing nicorette? not during wartime, i’ll bet. nah, winnie went so far as to say, “My rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them.” here’s hoping our presidential candidates proceed with equal bravado.

during my term as a piece of furniture consisting of a seat, legs, back, and often arms, designed to accommodate one person, i’m at least partially responsible for the content of faculty meetings. at the request of undergraduate advisor ann miller, we allocated fifteen minutes of monday’s meeting to a presentation on the use of mid-semester course evaluations.

a representative from the minnversity’s center for teaching and learning introduced a model called student feedback through consensus. here’s how it works: a consultant comes to your class, asks students what’s working and what changes they would recommend, and meets with you confidentially to share the results. in the next lecture, you can then reflect the students’ concerns, reiterate your priorities, and explain your response to the recommendations.

i’m not sure i’ll use a consultant, but i always try to evaluate my courses as i teach them. i distribute midterm evaluation forms, with the first few questions mirroring those on my official end-of-semester evaluation forms. the front side of the form consists of likert-type items (e.g., the lectures are clear and well-organized; the professor is available to me outside of class; the professor resembles “beavis”), with some open-ended items on the reverse (e.g., would you like me to lecture more on readings? more discussion of hot topics? more theory applications and examples? whaddayawant?; do you think the exam format and grading have been fair? why or why not?).

when i reflect their responses, it gives me the chance to show the diversity of tastes and expectations in the class (e.g., some people really like my riffs on theory) and to reiterate my priorities and goals for the semester. i am usually open to changing test formats and will occasionally trim a reading or two, but students typically request much simpler changes. for example, i’ve been asked to put black-and-white rather than color handouts online, saving them a few dollars in printer cartridges. i also try to throw a few fun questions into the mix, which seems to liven up the discussion.

i’m convinced that midterm evaluations can simultaneously enhance student learning and one’s end-of-semester evaluations. they provide a quick heads-up on students who are really upset and an opportunity to clarify misinterpretations or make good on mistakes. for example, a student last year felt my delinquency class had an anti-immigrant bias, primarily because my social disorganization theory lectures and readings tied immigration to disorder and high crime rates. i appreciated the opportunity to get another shot at teaching these ideas and the students seemed to appreciate a more thorough discussion of immigration and crime. they certainly nailed the disorganization question on their final exams.

despite my support for midterm evaluations, i was a little nervous during monday’s faculty meeting. at the start of the midterm evaluation presentation, our speaker asked our busy faculty to form small groups and set them to work on a task. uh-oh, i thought. even though many of us ask students to form small groups for class exercises, i didn’t know whether her task would fly. how would your colleagues react if they were asked to get into small groups at the next faculty meeting?

i’m happy to report that the exercise was useful and thought-provoking. i’m even happier to report that my colleagues jumped into the unexpected task with good will and a bit of enthusiasm (perhaps because the speaker was well-organized and stuck to her allotted fifteen minutes). even so, i can imagine a few professors in a few departments being somewhat less cooperative. we didn’t complete any evaluations for the session, but i suspect they would have been quite positive.

yesterday’s sharp new york times editorial picks up on some themes discussed here and in pubcrim. very cool to see social facts escape the maximum security confinement of academic journal articles. here’s the piece:

Closing the Revolving Door
The United States is paying a heavy price for the mandatory sentencing fad that swept the country 30 years ago. After a tenfold increase in the nation’s prison population — and a corrections price tag that exceeds $60 billion a year — the states have often been forced to choose between building new prisons or new schools. Worse still, the country has created a growing felon caste, now more than 16 million strong, of felons and ex-felons, who are often driven back to prison by policies that make it impossible for them to find jobs, housing or education.

Congress could begin to address this problem by passing the Second Chance Act, which would offer support services for people who are leaving prison. But it would take more than one new law to undo 30 years of damage:

Researchers have shown that inmates who earn college degrees tend to find jobs and stay out of jail once released. Congress needs to revoke laws that bar inmates from receiving Pell grants and that bar some students with drug convictions from getting other support. Following Washington’s lead, the states have destroyed prison education programs that had long since proved their worth.

People who leave prison without jobs or places to live are unlikely to stay out of jail. Congress should repeal the lifetime ban on providing temporary welfare benefits to people with felony drug convictions. The federal government should strengthen tax credit and bonding programs that encourage employers to hire people with criminal records. States need to stop barring ex-offenders from jobs because of unrelated crimes — or arrests in the distant past that never led to convictions.

Congress should deny a request from the F.B.I. to begin including juvenile arrests that never led to convictions (and offenses like drunkenness or vagrancy) in the millions of rap sheets sent to employers. That would transform single indiscretions into lifetime stigmas.

Curbing recidivism will also require doing a lot more to provide help and medication for the one out of every six inmates who suffer mental illness.

The only real way to reduce the inmate population — and the felon class — is to ensure that imprisonment is a method of last resort. That means abandoning the mandatory sentencing laws that have filled prisons to bursting with nonviolent offenders who are doomed to remain trapped at the very margins of society.

Mathematica Policy Research, Inc.
Summer Fellowship Program
Pursuing Self-Directed, Issues-Oriented Research

Who: Students enrolled in a master’s or Ph.D. program in public policy or a social science. Qualified minority students are encouraged to apply.

What: Up to five summer fellowships with a stipend of $6,000 for full participation ($2,000 per month) plus $500 toward project-related expenses.

When: June 1 to August 31, 2007 (approximately)

Where: Princeton, NJ, Washington, DC, and Cambridge, MA

Why: To pursue independent research on a policy issue of relevance to the economic and social problems of minority groups. To expose students to social policy research in a non-academic environment.

How: Submit the following to Human Resources, Princeton office, by March 16, 2007:
• A resume
• A proposal (minimum 2,000 words) for the research project you hope to pursue, including a clear statement of the research question, its relevance to social policy affecting minorities, and the steps necessary to complete the project during the fellowship period
• Undergraduate and graduate transcripts
• Two letters of recommendation, including one from a sponsoring faculty member

For more information, visit our website at:
www.mathematica-mpr.com/employment/summerfellow.asp or contact:

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Mathematica Policy Research, Inc.
P.O.Box 2393
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Phone: 609 716-4396
Fax: 609-799-0005
Email: kchaffkin@mathematica-mpr.com

i jog at night while dressed in black. clever lad, eh? so i was gifted with a cateye ld100 flashing red safety light for christmas. i didn’t really want to wear it, but then again i didn’t really want to find bits of myself stuck to the undercarriage of a ford f-150 either. so i gave it a try.

as expected, the light seems to increase my visibility to impatient motorists. but there’s an unexpected side benefit as well: other walkers and runners now find me infinitely less threatening. see, any hard-running dude in a black hoodie represents a potential threat. but a hard-running dude with a flashing red safety light is immediately recognizable as a harmless dork. surely no predator would draw attention to himself in this way.

it surely makes my late-night encounters more friendly. i’ll still cross the street when i come upon a woman walking alone, but there’s no longer that awkward moment in which my intentions are subject to question. nevertheless, while the flashing light reassures people, their dogs are another matter. the light doesn’t seem to incite them, thank goodness, though a black lab once cocked his head and shot me a sneer, as if to say, whatta dork…

our second full class meeting of the inside-out class at the oregon state penitentiary went well. unfortunately, one of our outside students forgot her ID and was not allowed into the institution; she was very disappointed but a visitor’s ID is his/her ticket into and out of the prison, and there was no way to get it from corvallis (approx. 40 miles away) in time.

we made our way into the prison and up several flights of stairs to the education hall and waited for our inside students to join us. we started the class with a quick icebreaker and then the inside/outside students worked in small groups together to discuss a hypothetical scenario and figure out “who is most reprehensible” in the story. it was an interesting discussion of values and motivation, which led into a full group discussion of potential causes of crime/deviance. with that as the lead in, i then began discussion of the books and theories i’ve assigned.

one interesting point that came out was the inside (OSP) students’ belief that the outside (OSU) students should be admired for the tough choices they made to avoid trouble and to go to college. while the outside students have worked hard to get where they are, i tried to counter that for some of the outside students, college was really the easier and expected choice for them to make, but i don’t think the guys from inside quite bought it. i appreciated when one of my outside students said: “i think i’m getting too much credit for going to school.”

there are three books for the course: Classics of Criminology, 3rd ed.; Code of the Street; and Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation. all of my students find the classics difficult, so i spent a little time doing mini-lectures on a couple of the readings, translating the ideas into plain english. after a short water break, we had more small group discussion (with students in different groups) and then a closing circle in which everyone said a sentence or two about what they were thinking.

the comments from the closing circle reminded me that my job in this course is to *direct* the discussions and the flow of the class and then to try to stay out of the way of the learning that is taking place amongst the students. i’m used to being more center-stage in my classes, so it’s a little bit of a challenge to take that step back, but i know it’s important and the collaborative learning is the key to this entire experience.

one of the other comments from the closing circle was: “eight more weeks isn’t enough.” everyone is enjoying the class and the interactions so much, there is already consensus that the quarter is going to seem much too short. i chose the picture for this post of crocus in the snow partly for that reason — we’ve had snow during these first two weeks of class and i can see the crocus bulbs in my yard pushing their way through the soil. they’ll likely bloom before the class ends, giving hope for spring, and then they’ll fade into a memory. until next year, when they’ll be back, having multiplied, and bringing even more color and beauty into the world. it seems like an appropriate symbol/metaphor for this class.

speaking of metaphors, i thought i would share an excerpt from one of the inside student’s thoughts on the night before the first combined class. he wrote:

…it’s been fifteen plus years since my last ‘open’ conversation with people not associated with the penal system, family or friend. In a way that’s scary by itself. It’s kind of like a new pair of dance shoes I guess — you know the dance but will the shoes fit comfortably? Will they hurt a little at first and then settle in, or will they just be the wrong shoes all together? One will never know until he puts them on and takes ’em for a spin.

there’s a lot more i could write, but i recognize these posts get a little long. i’m hoping my outside students will add some comments and share their perspectives, too (unfotunately, it’s not possible for the inside students to do so since they do not have internet access). your thoughts and comments are invited and much appreciated!

when people plead guilty to felonies, they are typically thinking about whether, where, and for how long they will be doing time. most probably know that they will lose other rights and statuses, but they may not realize that the plea can lead to their deportation.

such is the case of luis alexander duenas-alvarez, a native of peru and permanent legal resident in the united states. he served three years for car theft in california, when immigration officials moved to deport him. this week, in gonzales vs. duenas-alvarez, the u.s. supreme court made it easier to deport aggravated felons, such as mr. duenas-alvarez. the ruling reverses the u.s. 9th circuit court of appeals, which had held that california’s law applied deportation too broadly.

i’ve written a lot about how convicted criminals can lose the right to vote, but i’m also interested in the myriad other collateral consequences of conviction — affecting employment, family life, housing, educational opportunities, receipt of public assistance and even citizenship status. deportation affects a relatively small number of convicted felons, though it surely ranks among the most serious and disruptive of the collateral sanctions.