Specification for humane imprisonment

While stopped next to a police car, I noticed that the back seat was heavily secured by a cage of black vertical steel bars.  It got me thinking about the way we treat arrested suspects and incarcerated prisoners in our culture.

When a person does wrong, commits a crime especially a violent, cruel crime, society wants him/her removed from freedom for their own safety, but we also want to punish the perpetrator.

In most highly developed nations, the penal system has evolved into an approach that favors rehabilitation.  The justification for that is that (1) society’s revenge benefits no one; (2) rehabilitating criminals improves safety and security for the rest of us; (3) it is humane to treat offenders with decency, fairness, and even kindness.

However, in this country, in odd discordance with its generally advanced respect for human rights, we use medieval methods to deal with crime, with the accompanying dismal results (“The United States [has been] the country with the most people incarcerated and the highest incarceration rate of any nation in the world.” – publiceye.org)  We cage suspects and convicts like dangerous animals, and we readily claim that that is what they are.

Yet, even dangerous animals are treated to free-range enclosures at modern zoos, and we have seen the positive effects from this greater freedom in the world’s best zoos (some of which are rgiht here in the United States).

When you put humans into cages, you trigger their most basic survival mechanisms, obfuscating all their higher human capabilities: you actually turn them into animals!  Only a sense of revenge can justify this approach, and that is contrary to every human right this country holds dear.

Of course, it is devastating when a criminal takes a life, steals valuable property, violates another human being.  But a reasonably humanistic, progressive approach to dealing with these problems benefits society, including their victims, in the long run.  Much lower crime rates result, offenders can be returned to society as productive members, and we can all feel safer.  Also, the cost of progressive penal system are much lower than the exorbitant expenses we incur in this country.

Why do people commit crimes?  There are many reasons, from simple greed, extreme selfishness, maybe even evil, to psychopathy, and other mental disorders, as well as drug addiction.  When we focus on treating these symptoms in a differentiated, solution-oriented way, we can achieve higher rehabilitation rates and reduce overall crime.  Instead in the U.S., we have increased punishment and length of incarceration to levels often incommensurate with the crime committed.  We limit our respond to crime to getting the criminals off the street and into a cage for as long as possible.

This is simply beneath us as a freedom-loving, humane society. It is time to move our criminal and penal systems from the 19th to the 21st century, not to go light on crime, but to bring greater safety and justice to our advanced society.  When we deal with criminals in a humane way, we benefit from our own magnanimity.

So what is the specification for humane imprisonment?

Some suggestions:

• All incarceration should be rehabilitation-focused: we want to apply our advanced understanding of human motivations, medical problems, and deviations to bringing perpetrators back into a state of productive, inoffensive existence.  This is expensive, but not as expensive as what we are doing now.
• Rehabilitation means access to training and education, personal safety, clean, humane living conditions, interaction with loved ones, and interactive access to information.
• We need to take the fear and violence out of incarceration; our prisons today are often inhumane on many levels and turn criminals into animals.  When they get out, they are then a greater liability and danger to society.
• We need to spend more energy on understanding what motivates criminals to act out as they do and focus on addressing root causes, not symptoms.
• We need to create prisons that are more human-friendly, not cages – the bars need to go, safety glass and other less obstructive barriers work just as well.  Reducing humans to a life of fear, shame, and oppression helps no one.
• We need to return to a humane, progressive focus on forgiveness, not punishment, and catch up with the rest of the advanced civilizations on the planet that have long since abolished the death penalty and other draconian punishments.

Education and economic recovery

Professor Christina Romer

In a recent speech, outgoing economic advisor to the Obama Administration, Professor Christina Romer* defended her and the Obama Administration’s economic policies in response to the Great Recession.

Whether you are a conservative, a liberal, or an independent/undecided voter, by now you have probably figured out that these policies, however well-intended, logical, academically sound, and justifiable, simple have not worked very well.

The argument that without them, it would all be much worse, may even be valid, but it conflicts with the Administration’s earlier promises of a “Summer of Recovery.”  It is simply not enough: we still have officially 9½%, but unofficially much more, unemployment in the country, and many working people have seen their wages cut, often drastically.  Job security, reasonable benefits, and hope for a better future have not recovered at all.

The failure of the Obama economic team will more and more likely result in  the House and Senate gaining Republican majorities in the November 2010 elections.  This in turn will probably turn the next two years into a period of political stagnation in Washington, with Obama possibly losing the White House in 2012, as the ultimate result.

If it happens this way, what will appear like a great Republican victory will cost us all dearly.  Republican victories in 2010 and 2012 will most certainly return us to some version of the failed Republican policies of the 2000s that resulted in the Great Recession in the first place: extreme deregulation and laissez-faire; excessive tax reductions; international belligerence; and excess power in the hands of the wealthy few.  Such a socio-economic calamity may well reduce the United States of America to a failed empire, in economic, geo-political, and human welfare terms.

Now what does all this have to do with education?

First of all, we must be careful to understand the limitations of education.  Prof. Romer’s speech was a stark reminder that academics like she are rarely good policy makers: they base their strategies on what should work, not on what is proven in practice.

Many of the Democrat-initiated stimulus programs and related efforts to bring the U.S. economy back from the brink met all the standards of intellectual, logical, and academic scrutiny, yet failed to have the intended impact.  Romer’s departure is a great opportunity for the President to clean his economic house, but this is not likely to happen, given his own heavy penchant for academic perspectives, mixed with an unrealistic dose of idealism.  He has received bad advice from Romer and her team, but seems to not even realize it – or, more likely, his own beliefs are equally academic and impractical.

The odd and failing focus on “green technology” job creation is a telling example of this failed advice: most “green jobs” are low-end manufacturing jobs, easily outsourced to low-cost producers on other continents.  In addition, the total economic relevance of “the green economy” is infinitesimal, as compared to the major sectors.  Nowhere to be found is an earnest, properly funded focus on truly lifting the American workforce out of last century’s manufacturing era into this century’s long-term growth opportunities in next-generation high-impact, emerging industries (e.g. biology, as in bio-medical products; chemistry, as in new compounds and materials; physics, as in fusion power, new computing technologies, and space travel; medicine; new forms of power generation; new forms of transportation; and a renaissance in art).

The careful incrementalism of the Obama approach to economic catastrophe is too little, too late, over and over again.

Students, prospective and current, can draw some important lessons from these circumstances:

• Just because they mean well doesn’t mean that professors are always right.  (Remember there is some truth to the saying, “Those who can, do, those who can’t, teach!”)
• Traditional “ivory-tower” universities (that produce the Christina Romers, Larry Summers’, and Barack Obamas) are often lagging behind private universities and colleges that teach students what they need to know for their work, instead of favoring lofty academics and intellectual theories.
• School learning is insufficient to inform good decisions: hands-on experience, practical research, adding new, innovative perspectives, and critical thinking are important additional ingredients.
• Good colleges and universities develop learning, thinking, strategy, and decision making skills in their students.
• Students should hold their schools, programs, and teachers accountable for results, not just ideas.
• To succeed in this century of cumulative complexity, we must favor collaboration over competition.

As we in the Internet marketing industry generate education leads, we should play a positive role in promoting the best schools, programs, and professors, because, while the role of education and of highly educated leaders is vital for our long term economic success,  the practical learning that the best of our clients promote may well be the ticket to our future economic prosperity.

Neither lofty academics like Romer, nor folksy simpletons on the extreme right, will bring us the needed solutions: we need competent, experienced, knowledgable, well-informed practitioners to move us back onto the right track.

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*) Christina Romer (née Duckworth; born December 25, 1958) is the Class of 1957 Garff B. Wilson Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley and current Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration.

The New Rat Race

The New Rat Race

Ever since the shock of the greed- and cumulative-complexity-induced Great Recession has begun to wear off – the way chronic pain grows on you – the systemic calamities associated with its continued severity have resulted in less life for many of us in the mainstream:

• Some people are still getting rich, but most of us have taken large-to-huge pay and life style cuts.
• Like any bully, the typical employer leverages his good fortune to the max: instead of hiring, he forces more work out of his hapless employees; instead of sharing, he lays people off, even when business is good (hello HP); instead of bonuses  or raises, he offers self-congratulatory comments about how good his people have it because they have jobs; instead of re-building, he outsources.
• Unemployment is at around 10% – says the Government.  The rest of us believe 15%, and some of us think 20% is just around the corner; none of these useless stats properly counts underemployment, those who gave up, and those who work for obscenely low wages.
• Retirements have been decimated – thank you Wall Street – health coverage still sucks, and welfare programs are running out of cash.  Just wait ’til the states go broke …

So what do we do, in the American spirit? We fight for our economic breath, we don’t retire – ever, we take on two, three, four jobs, we reinvent ourselves – again, we accept the dreary trickle of form emails turning us down for fictitious jobs because we are “overqualified” – the others don’t even have the manners to responds,and if we work – “if” that is! – we accept the boss’s eager humiliations, and whenever, wherever we can, we join the New Rat Race that has become so much more brutal, so much more brutish, and so much less human … and the upper crust laughs all the way to the (government-secured) bank!

And this is the American Dream in the new millenium?!

Cultural life

Leo Tolstoi

The other day, I heard a Russian immigrant say something regretfully to her friend about how the crisis has negatively impacted her “cultural life” …

It reminded me, a bit stereotypically, of my love for Rachmaninov and Rimsky-Korsakov, and Tolstoi, maybe.  Russians do have a great cultural history; they love to read and write, make beautiful music, put on great ballets, plays, and operas.  After all, Lenin’s and others’ writing in the Pravda newspaper (which exists to this day) was a key driver for the Russian Revolution in 1918 (whatever you may think about its merits).

But on a more mundane level, it is true that the Great Recession has taken some or all of their cultural lives away from great scores of people.  American employers have ruthlessly leveraged the crisis to aggressively depress wages, leaving many households that previously could afford movies, the opera, the occasional play or concert, to watch mind-numbing television instead. Enjoying great cultural events costs money that many of us no longer have.

In addition, the nature of the new rate race is such that to make a buck or two, we have to work more – longer hours and/or multiple jobs – no time, money, or energy left for “the finer things in life.”  Growing poverty not only depresses the populace, it also raises the proportion of uncultured brutes, not by their choice, but as a result of economic priorities.  We are slipping down the slippery slope of Maslow’s Pyramid, some of us faster, others slower, but leaving us (even) less capable in the future to cope effectively with the complexities of global life!

The nation pays lip-service to the drama of “the crisis,” but real action to better the lot of common folks has already fallen victim to partisan politics, and frankly. the ignorance of the people thus affected: any of us who believe that we have a deficit or potential inflation problems has it all wrong: having 10-15% of people not working and having innumerable others earn laughable wages is the real calamity in this country, because it will leave us intellectually stunted for at least a generation!

A people that cannot afford culture, cannot rise above.

Cable company customer service

Quality of Service Disaster

When I come home today, my cable modem is stuck in STANDBY mode.  I unplug and reconnect, same result.  I try this a couple more times, then I call the cable company.  I hit the familiar automated calling tree, where I first have to choose English as my language of choice.  Then I have to explicitly say “no” to an offer for some expensive cable content I could order right here and now, and finally, I get to make a few more selections to then be connected to a customer service person.

I tell her, “my cable modem is stuck in STANDBY mode; I have already tried to disconnect and reconnect the power cord.”

She answers, in a heavy accent, “Oh no sir, if your modem is in STANDBY mode, all you have to is press the STANDBY button, you do not have to disconnect!”

Instantly exasperated, I tell her, “I tried this … the modem …”

She interrupts, “You have to press the standby button!”

I try to explain, she interrupts me again right away, aggressive now.

Me:  ”Please connect me to your supervisor!”

She says, “Oh, he will tell you the same thing!”

Me:  ”Listen to me: I have already pressed the standby button, that doesn’t work ..”

She: “Oh then you need a new modem.  You can drive to the next office and pick one up!”

I hang up …. ready to throw the damn modem through the window.

And I thought we had made some kind of progress with cable company customer support ….

Why not do it right? A new online college for ambitious adults!

So many school have emerged all over North America, in part because the Great Recession is driving people back to school in droves (what else is there to do when you are under- or unemployed?), in part because loan money is readily available for students who want to get educated.

KM & Cie. is now undertaking its own effort to offer excellent adult education, Belair-Online:

Belair Online

Hold on a comment: you must be kidding, an “anomaly”?!

As reported in the San Diego Union (6/25/2010), Whitman said, “[The altercation with Kim young Mi] was an anomaly, and it’s one of things that happens in business.” [sic]

An “anomaly,” seriously?! Pushing someone physically to the tune of an internal settlement estimated at $200,000 is an “anomaly”?

Bull

Had Ms. Whitman at least come clean about the incident and admitted grave fault, we might have found a way to be comfortable with her transgression.   But to claim that this “happens in business” is pure bull.  It does not happen in business, because it is completely improper!

Imagining the scene where this “pushing” occurred can only raise one’s concern about how this type of temper would translate to the Governor’s Mansion.  And beyond that, let’s imagine for a moment the future Governor of California runs for President and beats Sarah Palin:  you want this type of bullying behavior in the White House?!   Hide the box with the red button!

What do you think?

“I apologize to you, BP ……..” really?!?!

Vultures ©2010 · Georges Merx Photography

According to USAToday (6/17/2010),

“Rep. Joe Barton, top GOP member of the panel, used his opening statement to apologize — twice — for the pressure put on [BP]. [...] [Barton] has received at least $100,470 in political contributions from oil and gas interests since the beginning of 2009, the second-highest amount among all the committee members.”

It is instructive to learn of these extreme cases of moral turpitude, because they shed a light on how easy it is for democratic principles to be usurped by “business interests.”  The extreme-right is already busy accusing the White House of “bypassing the Constitution to create a Democrat-controlled slush fund by shaking down BP.” What?!

Now clearly, BP is a very rich global conglomerate with deep pockets that are tremendously attractive to politicians having to finance ever more expensive (re)election campaigns.

But when our representatives (in extreme cases, agreed) are so beholden to these donors that they make an open and public mockery of the urgent crisis needs of millions of U.S. citizens and residents along the Gulf coast, it is difficult to react with anything other than shock and dismay.

When we elect representatives from among ourselves to enact laws on our behalf, we naturally expect these representatives to act in our collective best interests. Of course the constant arguments about what these best interest are never end, but it should be clear that we expect our representatives to excel in certain human qualities:

• Common decency and a keen, ethical sense of justice
• A priority on always doing what is right for the people
• A lack of prejudice and desire to properly and effectively represent all constituents, regardless of socio-economic, cultural, gender, etc. status
• Independence from special interests, if they are contrary to the common good
• An urgent priority to get the people’s work done as soon as possible, instead of furthering one’s own career
• A genuine ability and willingness to cooperate for the greater good, even “across the aisle”
• A consistent rejection of corruption

American voters must become smart enough to pick representatives that meet and exceed the simple criteria above, instead of falling victim to false allegiances and shallow talking points.  In this long-term serious crisis mode that America wallows in today, we need to elect representatives that will cooperate to get us out of the crisis, not waste time and bile on attacking the other party, the President, and each other.  We do not need obstructionists!

Making good decisions for your child

Gone Sailing

“I think that a lot of people are judging me by the standards they have for their teens and other teens that they know … and thinking ‘she’s exactly like them,’” [Abby Sunderland] said. “They don’t understand that I’ve sailed my whole life and I do know what I’m doing out there.” (Abby is the 16-year-old teen who had to be rescued from the South Indian Ocean last week.)

This very statement by the teen speaks for itself: teenage defiance is part of the process of transitioning from child to adult, and in that context, serves its purpose.  But that two adults, Abby’s parents, would have allowed their child to set off on an incredibly dangerous, incredibly challenging sailing trip without even a person to accompany her, apparently in order to beat some irrelevant record, defies all reason and justification.

Fortunately for all concerned, the teen was rescued, at substantial cost and some risk to the heroic (and grown-up) rescuers.  This incident nevertheless puts the parents in a terrible light of irresponsibly risking the life of their own child.  Is it not obvious that the absolute first responsibility of a parent is to keep his|her child safe from harm?  There is no other common sense view here than to accuse the parents of gross misjudgment.

Unfortunately, we live in a society where children are given excessive powers early on: we now ask our toddlers what they would like to eat; when they would like to go to bed; we beg them to please not throw toys at guests; and we carefully avoid scolding them or exposing them to any criticism.  We have come to believe that discipline is somehow counterproductive, and that we should instead give children what they demand, incidentally whether or not we can afford it.  We excuse these parental lapses with our guilt (the children spend all day at daycare), or peer pressure (their friends have Polo-brand clothes, too).

This does not work, because acquiring good judgment is a very difficult-to-develop human trait that does not mature until into one’s twenties.  Common sense is simply not sufficiently developed at 3, 5, 11, or 16, because it is based on experience.

Back therefore to parental responsibility:  the cardinal rule can only be to keep our children safe, at least in those areas where we have control.  Abby ending up in the middle of the Indian Ocean by herself obviously violates this simple rule.

Doing good things with your money

Meg Whitman (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

According to the Boston Globe (June 5, 2010), “[California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman], the former eBay chief executive[, ] has spent more than $81 million so far — $71 million from her personal fortune.”

Now of course, we can all do with our money what we want, shouldn’t we?  This is a free country, after all … or is it?

Whitman is estimated to be worth $1.2 billion.  While we may imagine to benefit from the freedoms bestowed upon us by the Constitution and our cherished Democracy, we are really subject to a rapidly increasing dominance of a super-rich oligarchy: the only news is that they are no longer all seasoned, cigar-chomping white males.

Instead of feeding her obviously enormous ego by running for California Governor, why not use that same 80-some million dollars to help the State and its suffering population directly?  Or has Ms. Whitman really convinced herself that this “investment” in her campaign is the best way to help our State?!

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have clearly shown the way: instead of feeding their own egos with nasty and expensive political campaigns, they put their money directly into charitable activities.

Rich politicians are a scary commodity for at least the following reasons:

• Their wealth insulates them from the lives of their (potential) constituents to an excessive degree.
• Their egos are often oversized, because they acquired their wealth and power in the corporate world, an inherently undemocratic environment, where senior executives are coddled and catered to.
• They can literally buy their elections by overpowering their competition with massive marketing campaigns; they are not just buying their elections, they are buying public power: this is deeply undemocratic.
• With money comes responsibility: if we live in a capitalist system where company executives can amass over a billion dollars, this opportunity ought to come with substantial responsibilities, and maybe restrictions, such as  not being able to parlay that corporate income into massive political power within a very short time frame.

Does wealth (Whitman) or notoriety (Schwarzenegger) make for good politics?  Whether it may, or may not, is not as disturbing as the very fact that a society where it increasingly takes either, excludes the average citizen from the political system to a point, where democracy becomes a farce.