America's Most Wanted

My twelve-year-old stepson is not from America, and I wanted to teach him the time-honored, American tradition of kids making a few bucks selling lemonade. We modified our approach a little bit and decided to sell smoothies and green tea which we had brought from Japan after the earthquake. Yesterday, we went to the store near our house, and we bought watermelon, peaches, mangos, orange juice, apple juice, whole milk, ice, cups, and three poster boards for signs.

The two of us woke up early this morning and made our signs along with my two-year-old daughter, who indicated that she wanted to help with the drink stand as well. (She didn't understand that she was supposed to color inside the bubble letters I had written and spread pink crayon all over the board. But that's okay.) After some experimentation around the middle of the day, we created the perfect fruit punch with whipped cream on top and, in the early afternoon, we headed down to the end of our street, where we'd sell iced tea for two dollars and smoothies for three.

Almost as soon as we got down there, my daughter said she was hungry and wanted to go home to eat something. It wasn't the best timing in the world, but these things happen with little kids. My twelve-year-old stepson is quite mature for his age and he's experienced a lot more than most twelve-year-olds, so I had no problem leaving him in charge of the drink stand while I went home to make my daughter some food. Plus, he was just at the end of our street, so if I wanted to check on him, I could just walk out into the street from my front door a bit and have a look. 

After my daughter finished eating and as we approached the end of our street where the drink stand was, I could see from afar that the sign was pulled up and put away, the cooler was shut with everything which we had so carefully arranged on the tray table put away, and my stepson was huddled up and sitting on the rail, staring out between his knees at the ocean. 

"What happened?" I asked when I got down there. I wondered if he had gotten discouraged that no one was buying his drinks or maybe that no one could understand his accent. Or maybe he was just lonely down there by himself. 

"The police told me to pack up and go home," he said. Or, more accurately I discovered after making a few phone calls, the town police swung by and wished him good luck, and then afterwards, "someone in brown" came by and made my stepson stop selling drinks at the end of our street, because this required a permit, and my stepson did not have a permit to sell drinks.

After hearing a little more from my stepson and talking to the town police, I discovered that the drink stand was on land under the jurisdiction of the Massachusetts State Police. After attempting several times to contact the State Police, I reached only answering machines. Apparently, having someone on call on weekends is not in the Massachusetts budget (but breaking up lemonade stands is somehow cost-effective).

In what world is it acceptable to go around breaking up kids's drink stands? What are we teaching our children?

UPDATE 8/29/2011:

There has been some controversy over my assertion that it was the Massachusetts State Police that broke up my stepson's drink stand. I admit that I may have jumped to conclusions and apologize for my ignorance of Massachusetts state organizational structure and corresponding uniform color. I have amended the piece above accordingly. I wish to reiterate that I mean no ill will towards the Massachusetts State Police or law enforcement in general. This post is clearly not about demonizing any one police officer or policing entity.

Let me reiterate: this post is about how ridiculous - and how obviously ridiculous - it is that a twelve-year-old isn't allowed to sell green tea because it is in violation of some ill-conceived or ill-applied regulations.

Caylee’s Law and the Ratchet Effect

Casey Anthony, the young mother accused of killing her two year-old daughter Caylee, was found not guilty of first-degree murder. The world, it seems, is very angry that a young girl has been denied justice. Unfortunately, the reaction will be similar to other injustices involving children or sex (in the United States): a radical, emotionally-driven push to ratchet up the penalties for a broader set of crimes and put in place irrational safeguards to ensure that such injustices never happen again. At times like these, it is best to do what Hemingway did and just put the pencil down, head to the bar for a stiff drink, and don’t think about it again until tomorrow.

This, unfortunately, is not the way the world works. A crisis is a terrible thing to waste, and the politicians are wasting no time in scoring points by introducing something called Caylee’s Law. The crank of criminal penalties is self-locking, moving forward, but never moving back. It is easy to get a law on the books, particularly when it is named after a victim of highly public and terrible crime. The quickest way out of office for a politician is to be labeled as “soft on crime” (the tagline for Caylee’s Law is “a law to protect children” – are you opposed to protecting children, Mr. Senator?)  In contrast, a very easy way to gain votes is to appeal to people’s insecurities: imagine being victimized or, worse, having your child become the victim of a crime. So laws are passed and put on the books in the heat of the moment and, regardless of whether they do more harm than good, are there to stay.

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Prison Rape is Unacceptable

by VectorportalI live in Washington, D.C. I go to policy school. I read about politics, policy, and economics for fun. The news doesn't outrage me anymore.  I like to consider things in a cool, analytical perspective; think about what would be more efficient, or how to convince someone who had different values than I did.  

Usually.  

But right now I'm fucking furious.

The U.S. Department of Justice recently released its first-ever estimate of the number of inmates who are sexually abused in America each year. According to the department’s data, which are based on nationwide surveys of prison and jail inmates as well as young people in juvenile detention centers, at least 216,600 inmates were victimized in 2008 alone. Contrary to popular belief, most of the perpetrators were not other prisoners but staff members—corrections officials whose job it is to keep inmates safe. On average, each victim was abused between three and five times over the course of the year. The vast majority were too fearful of reprisals to seek help or file a formal complaint.

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Welcome to Hard Times

“Every time someone puts a little capital into this Territory I’m called in by the Govenor and sent on my way. It doesn’t matter I suffer from the rheumatism, nor that I’m past the age of riding a horse’s back. If a man files a claim that yields, there’s a town. If he finds some grass, there’s a town. Does he dig a well? Another town. Does he stop somewhere to ease his bladder, there’s a town. Over this land a thousand times each year towns spring up and it appears I have to charter them all. But to what purpose? The claim pinches out, the grass dies, the well dries up, and everyone will ride off to form up again somewhere else for me to travel. Nothing fixes in this damned country, people blow around at the whiff of the wind. You can’t bring the law to a bunch of rocks, you can’t settle the coyotes, you can’t make a society out of sand. I sometimes think we’re worse than the Indians... What is the name of this place, Hard Times? You are a well-meaning man Mr. Blue, I come across your likes occasionally. I noticed Blackstone on your desk, and Chitty’s Pleadings. Well you can read the law as much as you like but it will be no weapon for the spring when the town swells with people coming to work your road. You need a peace officer but I don’t even see you wearing a gun. I look out of this window and I see cabins, loghouse, cribs, tent, shanty, but I don’t see a jail. You’d better build a jail. You’d better find a shootist and build a jail.” - Brown from E.L. Doctorow's novel, Welcome to Hard Times

Welcome to Hard Times is the first novel of writer E.L. Doctorow.  When it was published in 1960, it was heralded as a beautiful and thought-provoking blend of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the generic themes of the American Western.  The novel is an account of how the human soul reacts to tragedy.  At the beginning, a "Bad Man from Bodie" comes into the makeshift town of Hard Times situated in the bleakness of the Dakota Territory.  In a drunken yet pleasure-filled rampage, the Bad Man kills several residents of the town, including the only man who stands up to him, Fee, rapes a local prostitute, and burns what remains before riding off into the proverbial sunset.

After the Bad Man from Bodie departs, most of the remaining townspeople do as well.  Blue, the mayor, too cowardly to have stood up to the Bad Man, takes personal responsibility for rebuilding Hard Times and convinces a few others to stay, among them a ravaged barmaid, Molly, and the orphaned son of Fee.  Blue takes Molly as his common-law bride and adopts Jimmy Fee, but Molly despises him for not stopping the Bad Man, and her paranoia infects Jimmy.  The remaining townspeople succumb to rage and madness.  From the 1960 New York Times review from Wirt Williams:

Perhaps the primary theme of the novel is that evil can only be resisted psychically: when the rational controls that order man's existence slacken, destruction comes.

Indeed, the ripple effect of tragedy on the human psyche is something with which we should be more familiar.  From the events of September 11, 2001 to the recent fatal shooting of six people at a Safeway in Tucson, Arizona, we as a technological civilization have reapeatedly responded to tragedy in a fashion characteristic of a different, tribal human nature, divorced from present time and circumstance: descent into direction-less madness, paranoia and finger-pointing.

David Hume once said that reason ought to be the slave of the passions.  It's okay to be angry when a tragedy happens, but we must be conscious of our anger, and we must employ it judiciously.  Any scientist or philosopher of science will tell you that anecdotal evidence should never be taken without a proverbial grain of salt.  Indeed, anecdotal evidence was the basis for phrenology and we all know where that kind of sloppy thinking eventually led: to techno music.  (Incidentally that previous contention rests on anecdotal evidence, but you see where I'm going with this.)

The interconnectedness of our media-saturated society makes us particularly prone to wild displays of misdirected anger sprung from obscure and isolated phenomena, like the shooting in Tucson.  For this reason, it is especially important in emotionally tense times like these to postpone action.  There is a reason the ancients prescribed long periods of mourning.  We must learn from the mistakes of the USAPATRIOT Act and the War in Iraq that hastily conceived legislation passed in an emotionally heightened political climate seldom achieves its stated ends without enormous repercussions.

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Social Networks and the Bystander Effect

Malcolm Gladwell's brilliant New Yorker piece, "Small Change", on how the Civil Rights Movement could never have been accomplished with Facebook and Twitter, reminds me of the murder of Kitty Genovese and the bystander effect; basically the more witnesses there are to some horrible event, the less likely it is that any one witness will intervene.  

The basic premise is that, for example, if there is a man dying on the street and there is one witness, there is a 90% chance that that witness will stop to help the dying man; if there are two witnesses, each will stop to help 40% of the time, totalling an 80% chance that the man will be helped; with three witnesses, each will help 25% of the time, totalling 75%; with four witnesses, each will help 15% of the time, totalling 60%; five witnesses, 10%, totalling 50%; 6, 7%, 42%; 7, 5%, 35%; 10, 1%, 10%, etc. 

Rock-solid research has shown such a diffusion of responsibility to be a highly predictable phenomenon: in inverse proportion to the number of witnesses, we are far more likely to do the right thing if other people are not watching.  Even without modern empirical scientific research, however, spontaneously evolved cultural institutions, like the ombudsman or a neutral proxy as absolutely essential to conducting business in Japan, show that the diffusion and avoidance of responsibility is a natural part of being human.

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Preventing Teen Violence Before it Starts

by Murray BarnesFor years, gun, gang, and youth violence have plagued Chicago, but the city has been particularly hit hard this spring. Last week, Chicago experienced more than 30 shootings and seven Chicagoans were shot to death in one night. Many of those killed were teenagers.  This comes on the heels of Chicago teen Derrion Albert’s brutal killing last fall where Albert was beaten to death by peers while walking home from school. The incident was captured on cell phone video by witnesses and garnered national attention.  Overall crime and homicide rates have gone down in Chicago over the past several years, but teen murder rates are still high. A record 36 Chicago Public School students were killed in 2009, up from 31 in 2008.

In trying to understand the myriad reasons behind Chicago’s violence, I came across Heather MacDonald’s controversial article on why community organizing and government intervention have been ineffective in curbing the violence.

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Don't Drop the Soap: Clean Out Prison Rape

Jack Chick on PrisonYou probably won't be surprised to learn that people get raped in prison.  It might actually be the first thing that you think of about prison: men rape other men there.  Well, if everyone knows that sexual assault occurs frequently behind bars, then why don't we do something about it?  The problem is that people fail to consider that behind humorous clichés like "don't drop the soap" lies a brutal reality: every year over a hundred thousand human beings are graphically abused, molested and penetrated forcibly and violently and this reality is paid for by your tax dollars, all too frequently supported or perpetrated by prison staff and institutionalized by our disregard.  If we cared enough to stop prison rape it could driven to the brink of extinction, as a new report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics commissioned by the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act demonstrates.

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Prison Reform through Electoral Reform

America is desperately in need of prison reform.  We have the largest prison population in the world, with 2.3 million people incarcerated, and our rate of imprisonment is six times as large as the global median.  We send too many people to prison, often for minor offenses like using drugs or writing bad checks, and for too long, since older people are more expensive to incarcerate and much, much less likely to engage in criminal activity.  Unfortunately, there isn't much of a constituency for prison reform since ex-felons can't vote and generally politicians fear seeming "soft on crime."  However, the New York Times editoral yesterday advocating allowing felons to vote in federal elections may partially solve that problem.  The proposal that makes sense on it's own merits, but will also create a powerful new incentive for politicians to treat former criminals as human beings.

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The Slow Creep towards Weed Legalization

 Irv Rosenfeld is one of four U.S. citizens who get their medical marijuana from the federal governmentFederalism is so powerful that it can even bring progress in the intractible feild of drug reform.  This cover-story in Fortune about how medical marijuana combined with Obama's distinterest in prosecuting violators federally has led to a de facto legalization of marijuana in many states, and especially in California, is fascinating.  My favorite part is when Roger Parloff, the even handed writer and senior editor, is seduced by the lure of that sweet ganja:

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The War on Drugs: Graft-Versus-Host Disease

Since it has been mentioned in the last two posts, a full post on prison and drug reform seems warranted.  Eventually, I’d like to discuss the social/economic impact of the current criminalization of drugs, but first I’d like to consider the moral and ethical questions surrounding the issue.

First, why is it illegal to consume certain substances?

It’s not.  Its illegal to possess drugs, but from what I understand consumption is not punished (at least not by itself: if you are on parole, applying for a job, or driving a car you can be punished for consumption).  Of course, it is impossible to consume without possessing, so this seems like a moot point.  Philosophically, however, this means that drugs are illegal apart from the question of whether adults should be allowed to do with their bodies as they see fit.*  Similarly, distribution is subject to greater punishment than mere possession, because that is the act of inciting illegality.  The real crime of drug possession is disobeying the express will of the paternal state.

So on what basis does the state declare drugs illegal?

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The Trouble With Representative Democracy

The criticism that politicians lack the testicular fortitude to back unpopular or broadly-impacting reforms because they must maintain relations with a local constituency is misdirected. Representative democracy is ill-equipped to deal with long-term issues - like climate change, healthcare, and social security - or acute problems that require a fundamental overhaul, like our financial regulatory system. But the reality of creating a majority coalition among 435 congressmen and 100 senators in a two-party system crippled by partisanship (see stimulus package) is that issues prone to negative-spin, like prison and drug reform, are consciously ignored.

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