for some reason, i’ve been distracted all day by the sound of train whistles and prison gates slamming shut. while tempting to attribute this condition to the full slate of meetings on my calendar this week, it is more likely the result of reading a merle haggard interview just before bed.

like many former prisoners, mr. haggard can still call to mind details of his release decades later. via esquire:

I got out something like nine that morning. February 3, 1960. There’s a big metal security device at the main door coming out of San Quentin. When they open that door, it comes up and you have to step over it. Just as I was stepping over that device, a Hank Snow record came on. “The Last Ride.” My foot just stopped in midair. The song was coming from a radio near this guard who was standing there with his gun. He said, “What, did you change your mind?” I said, “No, that’s a really great song.” I stayed there and listened to the rest of the song.
[words n’ music]

dang. wouldn’t that just be the coolest scene in the movie? a good song always stops a good songwriter dead in his tracks. the second coolest scene would show the young mr. haggard in the front row at the man in black’s first san quentin show in ’58. from rolling stone:

I met Johnny in 1963 in a restroom in Chicago. I was taking a leak, and he walked up beside me with a flask of wine underneath his coat and said, “Haggard, you want a drink of this wine?” Those were the first words he ever said to me, but I had been in awe of him since I saw him play on New Year’s Day in 1958, at San Quentin Prison, where I was an inmate. He’d lost his voice the night before over in Frisco and wasn’t able to sing very good; I thought he’d had it, but he won over the prisoners. He had the right attitude: He chewed gum, looked arrogant and flipped the bird to the guards — he did everything the prisoners wanted to do. He was a mean mother from the South who was there because he loved us. When he walked away, everyone in that place had become a Johnny Cash fan. There were 5,000 inmates in San Quentin and about thirty guitar players; I was among the top five guitarists in there. The day after Johnny’s show, man, every guitar player in San Quentin was after me to teach them how to play like him. It was like how, the day after a Muhammad Ali fight, everybody would be down in the yard shadowboxing; that day, everyone was trying to learn “Folsom Prison Blues.”

Then when my career caught fire, he asked me to be a guest on his variety show on ABC. He, June and I were discussing what I should do on the show, and he said, “Haggard, let me tell the people you’ve been to prison. It’ll be the biggest thing that will happen to you in your life, and the tabloids will never be able to hurt you. It’s called telling the truth: If you start off telling the truth, your fans never forget it.” I told him, “Being an ex-convict is the most shameful thing. It’s against the grain to talk about it.” But he was right — it set a fire under me that hadn’t been there before.

on most issues, i’m probably walking on the fightin’ side of merle, but he gets a 10 out of 10 for authenticity in my book. one more quote from the esquire piece:

I’ll tell you why it’s different when somebody else is singing “Mama Tried“: They’re reading the words. I’m telling the story. [don and phil sure sang it pretty, though]
[words n’ music]

amen. here’s a whole collection of mr. haggard’s prison songs.

via boing:

* Poetry, especially love poems
* Religion, especially Islam
* Physical and mental health
* Psychology and self-help
* Job manuals and career advice
* Hobbies and games: chess, card games, Scrabble, drawing
* Crime, gangs and prison life
* AODA and recovery materials
* African-American nonfiction topics: Black history, slavery, Black nationalism

if you are inspired by the scans or the project, you might consider donating a book from their amazon wish list.

in an attempt at real public criminology, i wrote an essay that has just been published in the oregon humanities magazine. the oregon humanities magazine is published twice a year and each issue is built around a single theme. the theme of this issue is “domesticity,” and i wrote about how men serving life sentences (or very long sentences) build lives and find meaning for themselves in prison.

to be clear, i had a great deal of help from my inside/inmate students who contributed most of the main ideas, examples, and points, and from the editor, kathleen holt, who did some major editing to make the essay fit into a humanities magazine. 8-10 of my inside students voluntarily took the time to write a few paragraphs or pages on their thoughts about domesticity in prison, and they then trusted me to try to turn the information they provided into a coherent essay. i think everyone feels pretty good about the final result. i am especially pleased to expose a different audience to the articulate and thoughtful voices of my inside students. maybe it will help remind us all that real lives continue behind prison walls every day.

here’s a modern take on the pains of imprisonment from david, one of my inside students. this is an excerpt from a larger essay he wrote discussing classic sociological/criminological theory (including, in his case, durkheim, quinney, and marx) and his view of the purposes of punishment. the last part of the assignment asked for reflection on how well prisons fit the purpose(s) of punishment; here is his thoughtful and brutally honest response:

i wrote about genarlow wilson’s case a couple of times this year (here and here), and i’m happy to report that genarlow was released from prison yesterday. he served more than 2 years of the 10 year sentence he received for having consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old girl. he was 17 at the time. in a 4-3 ruling, the georgia supreme court said the sentence was “grossly disproportionate” to the crime and was cruel and unusual punishment.

before the incident, genarlow had never been in trouble with the law; he was a strong student, an athlete, and and homecoming king of his high school. now 21, he plans to go to college and major in sociology. state lawmakers announced that they have raised $4000 for a scholarship fund for wilson, and jesse jackson has promised another $5000. i hope the academic world welcomes him and he has an easy transition back into the community. welcome home, genarlow.

the gallup organization has released its annual crime poll. as of october 4-7, about 71 percent of americans believe that there is more crime in the u.s. today than there had been a year ago.

only about 51 percent believe that crime is up in their area or neighborhood, as people generally believe that the crime situation is better where they live than in the nation as a whole.

such questions usually elicit pessimistic responses, but perceptions over the past few years appear to be growing increasingly out of step with the best available victimization data (see below). gallup researchers offer several explanations, including the following:

Americans’ pessimism about crime may reflect an overly negative interpretation on their part of the fact that the decline in crime has tapered off. It could possibly reflect a real increase in media attention to crime on the local and national news. Or it could reflect Americans’ broader dissatisfaction with the way things are going in the country, a sentiment that extends from ratings of President Bush and Congress to the economy, as well as to their satisfaction with the direction of the country more generally.

i’ve heard many stories about the pro-social behavior of prisoners, but here’s a fine example from norway, via jonathon tisdall in aftenposten:

We couldn’t let such a nice prison burn down,” Ronny Stenberg said after he and fellow inmates at Arendal Prison in Fyresdal chose to fight flames rather than run.

“I don’t dare think what would have happened if the prisoners themselves hadn’t discovered the fire and helped fight it,” prison guard Daniel Trollsås told newspaper Agderposten.

When firefighters arrived after about 40 minutes, a prisoner sleeping near the blaze had been pulled out to safety and the fire halted, with damage limited to only one barracks.

In appreciation of the effort, the prison threw a party last Wednesday after the blaze, with Trollsås buying cake and candy for everyone.

“I’ve done time in a closed prison, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone,” said Stenberg about the inmates’ decision to preserve their prison.

Fyresdal grants prisoners a high degree of personal responsibility, and this program gave the approximately 30 inmates little hesitation in staying to fight for their facility rather than going on the run when the fire broke out.

About 10-12 years ago prisoners took responsibility and saved my life when one of the inmates went completely berserk and tried to kill me. Now I have had another chance to experience that this prison is full of so many good and reasonable people that when things get dangerous, it is the prisoners that take charge,” Trollsås told Agderposten.

every presidential cycle, it seems we get more talk and hand-wringing about how this election will forever alter the composition of the u.s. supreme court. true, yes, but it ain’t necessarily so. what if we imposed term limits on those Justices?

npr’s Justice talking took up the issue of supreme court term limits this week. personally, i’m often more flummoxed by the opinions of the court’s junior members, but you might want to listen to jim lindgren’s proposal and read his case against “gerontocracy” in the judicial branch. an excerpt:

While mental incompetence was rare in the first century on the Court, since 1898 it has become a regular occurrence for Justices who serve more than 18 years; by one estimate about a third were mentally incompetent to serve before they finally retired.

yeesh. next thing you know, professor lindgren will be training his sights on tenured college professors and long-serving football coaches.

according to an associated press story, a pennsylvania woman was issued a disorderly conduct citation on thursday for shouting profanities at her overflowing toilet within earshot of a neighbor. ms. dawn herb of scranton could face up to 90 days in jail and a fine of up to $300.

“It doesn’t make any sense. I was in my house. It’s not like I was outside or drunk,” Herb told The Times-Tribune of Scranton. “The toilet was overflowing and leaking down into the kitchen and I was yelling (for my daughter) to get the mop.”

Herb doesn’t recall exactly what she said, but she admitted letting more than a few choice words fly near an open bathroom window Thursday night.

Her next-door neighbor, a city police officer who was off-duty at the time, asked her to keep it down, police said. When she continued, the officer called police.

this item paints the sort of sweet old-timey picture that awakens nostalgia for my ruby drive childhood. every springtime, when the neighbors would raise the windows, i’d learn all manner of creative cuss words. my neighbor, mr. ray, was a veritable pavarotti of profanity — renowned for the power and beauty of his tone, especially into the upper register. ralphie put it much better, of course:

He worked in profanity the way other artists might work in oils or clay. It was his true medium; a master. … In the heat of battle my father wove a tapestry of obscenities that as far as we know is still hanging in space over Lake Michigan.

so too with ms. herb, i’ll bet. don’t worry — the keen legal minds at volokh quickly rushed to her defense and she should get off scot-free. in this age of youtube and cellphone recordings, however, i’m sorely disappointed that nobody taped and posted said outburst online. now i’ll just have to imagine ms. herb as a character in my own flickering black-and-white sitcom — an enraged pg-rated alice kramden, ethel mertz, or weezie jefferson, brandishing a plunger and exchanging blustering oaths with mr. ray.

young lifers are making news again, this time in a piece by adam liptak in today’s times. the figure is taken from work by the equal Justice initiative, showing the number sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for crimes committed when they were 13 or 14 years old.