sort of a big deal for $6.49

well, it's been a quiet week in lakeland, florida. the weekly crime map shows only a handful of robberies, some residential burglaries, a couple of stolen cars, and a graffiti report. even so, i was surpised to learn that shoplifting a $6.49 box of prophylactics from the lakeland sears could still land one's picture on the local crime stoppers leaflet shown above. a few hypotheses:

1. awesome technology. the picture quality was just too good to ignore. check it out: the poor lad is caught red-handed.

2. moral revulsion. some folks are still sickened by the idea of condoms being sold right out there in the open like that. perhaps if the young fellow had grabbed, say, a $6.49 bottle of brut the lakeland police might not have made this case such a priority.*

3. cold cash. maybe somebody is after the reward money: according to the crime stoppers f.a.q., "Tipsters remain anonymous and become eligible for rewards of up to $1,000."

4. crim theory. perhaps lakeland is big on broken-windows law enforcement or shaming sanctions.

5. wistful nostalgia. the mayberry-gone-wild aspects of this story would seem to evoke durkheim's society of saints. wouldn't it be nice if this was the picture of serious crime in america? the young rascal would naturally fess up in such a world, where he'd be given a good talking to by a kindly officer.

*oops, scratch that. only four days later, a crime stoppers alert detailed the theft of "a pack of socks and three bottles of cologne." i bet it wasn't brut, though.

state spending priorities

the san francisco chronicle offers a well-researched story by james sterngold on spending for prisons relative to higher education, but the figure above pretty much nutshells the story in california:

According to the May revisions of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's budget, the state will spend $10 billion on prisons in fiscal 2007-08, a 9 percent increase from last year. Higher education spending will come to $12 billion, a nearly 6 percent increase. Moving forward, the legislative analyst says, spending on higher education probably will grow around 5 percent a year, while prisons spending will grow by at least 9 percent annually.

berkeley's changed, dude

a former minneapolis police chief once tried to criminalize homelessness via panhandling licenses. the proposal couldn't get much traction in my fair city, and the chief was quickly dispatched to texas. today, such efforts continue in every city. the san francisco chronicle reports on berkeley mayor tom bates' more clever method to sweep the streets of the indigent:

As Mayor Tom Bates sees it, the alcoholics, meth addicts and the like who make up a good portion of the homeless population on Shattuck Avenue downtown and Telegraph Avenue on the south side of the UC Berkeley campus "almost always smoke." And because smoking bans are the hot ticket these days for California cities, why not meld the two as part of a "comprehensive package" for dealing with the street problem that Bates says "has gone over the top"?

ah, the comprehensive package! by tapping into the status politics of the anti-smoking crusade, the mayor will gain bipartisan support for measures that are punitive and restrictive, if not outright repressive. think about it -- what self-respecting left-coast liberal wouldn't support a smoking ban?

So far, Bates' ideas seem to be fitting fine with the Berkeley mind-set. When the smoking ban came up for discussion before the City Council last week, it was smooth sailing.
"I don't see anyone on the council voting against it,'' said Councilman Kriss Worthington. "In fact, it's possible that some council members would ban smoking throughout the entire city."

i can see one political barrier to mayor bates' plan, though it comes from the right rather than the left: he'd pay for the homeless smoking crackdown by raising city parking rates fifty cents per hour. while consistent with the "berkeley mind-set," such a move could cost him the support of the city's compassionate conservatives. repression is one thing, but repression with a tax hike quite another.

not too hard, not too soft

criminologists are often baffled by the sentences doled out to rich and famous defendants such as martha stewart. sometimes such folks are hammered for their celebrity, other times they get absurdly accommodating treatment.

now paris hilton is going to jail, which seems like the premise of a really bad summer movie. as punishment for violating the terms of her probation on a drunk-driving related offense, ms. hilton will serve about 23 days in a segregated jail unit. as anyone who has attempted to sleep in a jail can attest, the term segregated is important here. the scariest thing about jail -- the real deterrent, if you will -- is the prospect of mixing it up with much scarier inmates in a loosely-supervised environment. jails are typically far less orderly than prisons, since people are constantly moving in and out, and counties generally have fewer programming resources than state departments of correction. as a crude indicator of such strain, many first-time jail inmates determine that they really don't need to go to the bathroom for the first 4 or 5 days.

i'd bet that almost any academic could ride out the 23 days of boredom scheduled for ms. hilton, though we'd break down quickly if tossed into the LA county lock-up without any special treatment. as long as she remains in segregation, my guess is that ms. hilton will emerge unscathed from this experience -- and well-positioned for that cheesy legally-blonde-in-jail summer epic next year.

"outside-in" student activism

Outside-In is a group of Oregon State University students who have organized under sociology professor Michelle Inderbitzin. We have recently graduated from Inside-Out, a program that combines fifteen inmates from a local prison and fifteen university students in a class that studies issues of crime, justice and public policy. Our class was the first on the west coast to be held in a men’s maximum security prison, the Oregon State Penitentiary. While all thirty students, both inside and out, and Professor Inderbitzin took away a priceless experience, seven of us have decided to attempt to give back, not only to our inside classmates, but to all the inmates of OSP.

One of the many goals of Outside-In is to provide the institution with scholarly literature focusing on issues of racial, social and economic inequality within the justice system, as well as society at large, by organizing a book drive. Providing inmates with quality reading will allow them to become aware of the social and political context in which they have been imprisoned. By empowering inmates, it is our hope that they will have a greater opportunity to create change within the institution as well as on the outside, if and when upon release. Empowerment is a catalyst to reform and our prison system is overdue.

Please send your donation to:

Outside-In
C/o Professor Michelle Inderbitzin
307 Fairbanks Hall
Department of Sociology
Oregon State University
Corvallis, OR 97331

governing through crime

the witty and erudite jonathan simon of berkeley's jurisprudence and social policy program has launched a book and a blog titled governing through crime.

as a fan of professor simon's poor discipline, i've got governing through crime at the top of my summer reading list. here's a blurb from the publisher:

Across America today gated communities sprawl out from urban centers, employers enforce mandatory drug testing, and schools screen students with metal detectors. Social problems ranging from welfare dependency to educational inequality have been reconceptualized as crimes, with an attendant focus on assigning fault and imposing consequences. Even before the recent terrorist attacks, non-citizen residents had become subject to an increasingly harsh regime of detention and deportation, and prospective employees subjected to background checks. How and when did our everyday world become dominated by fear, every citizen treated as a potential criminal? In this startlingly original work, Jonathan Simon traces this pattern back to the collapse of the New Deal approach to governing during the 1960s when declining confidence in expert-guided government policies sent political leaders searching for new models of governance. The War on Crime offered a ready solution to their problem: politicians set agendas by drawing analogies to crime and redefined the ideal citizen as a crime victim, one whose vulnerabilities opened the door to overweening government intervention. By the 1980s, this transformation of the core powers of government had spilled over into the institutions that govern daily life. Soon our schools, our families, our workplaces, and our residential communities were being governed through crime. This powerful work concludes with a call for passive citizens to become engaged partners in the management of risk and the treatment of social ills. Only by coming together to produce security, can we free ourselves from a logic of domination by others, and from the fear that currently rules our everyday life.

more institutionalization, less homicide?

bernard harcourt is guest-blogging at volokh this week, offering engaging posts on deinstitutionalization, incarceration, and homicide. he nicely explicates a new state-level analysis of the national evidence discussed in his january times op-ed and texas law review piece.

the pattern appears to hold up under a more stringent state-level panel specification: aggregate institutionalization (prisons plus mental institutions) bears a strong inverse relationship to homicide rates over a long historical period. moreover, the correlation between homicide and aggregate institutionalization is far stronger than the correlation between homicide and imprisonment. my sense is that the individual-level literature shows rather modest associations between violence and mental illness. what might account for the strong aggregate relationship?

a second look at oregon's mandatory minimums

over the past few weeks, The Oregonian has been publishing some very interesting stories about prisons and sentencing in oregon. one series makes clear that "prison costs are shackling oregon" and offers compelling evidence to make the case.

more recently, another article reported that "With Democrats now in charge of the Legislature, lawmakers may try to soften a 1994 get-tough-on-crime law in a way that would allow the early release of juvenile offenders charged with murder, kidnapping and other serious crimes." while this change would not have a huge impact on costs (about 50 youths every year are sentenced under Measure 11 and given mandatory minimum sentences), it would certainly impact hope and morale amongst young offenders serving time in oregon prisons.

as journalist brad cain reports it, the proposed "second look" would give 15-, 16-, and 17-year-olds convicted of serious offenses and sentenced to mandatory minimums a chance to go before a judge after they have served half of their sentences. if the judge felt that significant progress was made while incarcerated, s/he could allow the young offenders to serve the rest of their sentences back out in the community under post-prison supervision.

this seems like a good idea to me, a bit like blended sentences used with young offenders in other states. one of the students in our inside-out class last quarter was sentenced at 16 to a minimum of 25 years. he's eleven years into his sentence now and, if this law were in place (and retroactive), he would have the possibility of getting a second look and being rewarded for the hard work he has done and the maturity he has shown while in prison. perhaps most importantly, it could offer him the hope of building a life. in prison, a little hope can go a long way.

*the photo above is from the oregonian and was taken in the oregon state penitentiary where we held our inside-out class.

somewhere between rikers island and the hampton inn

although most jail and prison inmates still come from poor and working-class families, the middle-class has not completely escaped mass incarceration. on this point, the times offers an intriguing look at california's pay-to-stay jails. if your family can afford about $82 per day, you can serve out that pesky d.u.i. sentence in relative cleanliness and safety -- far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife.

[thanks to rick rudell for passing along the link]

take back the news

heather hlavka has a piece in the daily today, highlighting an organization called take back the news and their efforts to challenge media representations of rape and sexual assault. although rates of sexual assault have declined significantly over the past 15 years, the first-person accounts powerfully illustrate the long-term effects on survivors. if you would like to contribute to the project, you can donate through paypal or share your own story online.

teaching impact

friend and colleague joel samaha received a big teaching award today. at the minnversity, a big award can be operationalized as involving (a) university-wide competition, and (b) a significant bump in recurring salary. joel is a history Ph.D. and attorney, who once taught u.s. and world history in chicago public schools.

for the past four decades, however, joel's quasi-socratic method has inspired hundreds of minnesota undergrads each semester. in lectures that often exceed 300 students, he learns all their names and often much more than their names. in assembling joel's dossier, i marveled at the letters from former students -- big-city police chiefs, judges, and community leaders. joel somehow gets them all to think well and clearly about the tenuous balance between individual liberty and public safety, and about relations between citizens and the state more generally. decades later, many of his students can quickly call to mind specific lectures or course materials that fundamentally changed their view of the world and their place within it.

i can't imagine that anyone has had a greater impact on the administration of justice in this state than joel, but his impact extends far beyond minnesota -- his publisher tells me that joel's criminal law, criminal procedure, and criminal justice texts are used in 468 colleges and universities in 48 states. wherever he goes, joel is stopped and thanked on a pretty-much-daily basis by former students. i can't imagine how that feels, though i was once pulled over by a police officer who had taken my delinquency class at wisconsin. after sizing up the rusty car i was driving, he took pity and let me off with a warning. do you think joel has ever gotten a ticket?

race, inequality, and incarceration

i'm still processing wednesday's conference on race, inequality, and incarceration -- a day of grim but powerful presentations from law, political science, criminal justice, and sociology. two sets of studies were especially striking:

first, political scientists jon hurwitz and mark peffley presented some disturbing experimental public opinion research. for example, they find that whites are significantly less supportive of spending money to "lock up violent criminals" than to "lock up violent inner-city criminals." worse, white support for the death penalty actually freaking rises when respondents are given the additional cue that "Some people say that the death penalty is unfair because most of the people who are executed are African Americans." sixty-five percent of white respondents supported the death penalty in the baseline condition versus 77 percent once race is introduced.

jennifer eberhardt of stanford psychology then presented some of the most powerful experimental research i've seen on visual perception and the racialization of crime. for example, she found that a flashed image of a black face enhances perceivers' ability to detect degraded images of crime-relevant objects such as guns.

as the evidence mounted, i kept reworking my talk so that the day's last session would include at least a sliver of optimism. in the interviews i've done since the conference, however, i've been tongue-tied when talking about race. am i deepening white opposition to reenfranchisement by saying that felon voting laws exact a greater toll on communities of color?

keep hanging on

another tough comment arrived tonight on an old post on expungement and employment. maybe you feel no sympathy for ex-felons or maybe you think they're exaggerating the pain. i get enough phone calls and letters and emails and first-hand testimony, however, to know that the stigma is real enough to push people over the edge. when a western state extended its five-year registration requirement to a lifetime public stigma, for example, i got a call from a guy at the end of his rope after 4.5 years. and it wasn't the first (or the tenth or the hundredth) time i've heard such desperation.

i posted my response and repeat it below, though it seems pretty lame. i tell myself that life is beautiful and anything is possible, but sometimes i'm just stumped. how would you respond to this message, from a commenter identified as dead soon?

Hello. I've got convictions a-plenty (five I believe at this point). All over a decade old and all centering around writing bad checks. I've worked in tech all my career and can't get a job. I had one at HP and was hired through a temp agency that was not required to run background checks at the time. I doubt that situation exists anywhere in America any more. If you lie about your record you will be found out and probably get fired if not worse. If you tell the truth, well you don't get hired to begin with. My advice? Stay in crime and as often as possible perpitrait those crimes against companies that have turned you down for honest work. What else have you got? See you in the grave as this is my last log on anywhere. I don't want to be a criminal and since losing my last job to a coworker that used my record to get me fired (she was promoted to my job)I give up. I'd say that a full year of no work due to a fifteen year old bad check conviction is enough. Tonight it's a drug smoothy that should end this existence and if it doesn't it's a bullett at 6am sharp as I have my alarm set. I served my time and didn't owe the interest society demanded. My kids couldn't afford it either but at least now they get the insurance. Can't look them in the eye anymore when I can't even get a job that pays the bills. Bye.

damn. try to hang on a little longer, friend -- sometimes you'll see something in the sunrise that wasn't there the night before. i can't know what you've gone through, but some of us have held on by our fingernails through tough nights. thinking about your kids ten years from now sometimes helps, as does the promise of strong coffee and an apple fritter in the morning sun (or maybe a heineken and an egg mcmuffin in the parking lot) -- rewards large and small for making it through the night.

imprisonment rates for 214 countries

the european society of criminology's april newsletter features an andrew coyle piece on imprisonment, reprinting data from roy wamsley's extensive 2007 world prison population list (7th ed.). the data seem well-suited for those seeking a punishment indicator for quantitative analysis, especially for those of us who are loath to impute punishment information or drop nations from the analysis due to missing data.

a few substantive summary points from the report:

• More than 9.25 million people are held in penal institutions throughout the world, mostly as pre-trial detainees (remand prisoners) or as sentenced prisoners. Almost half of these are in the United States (2.19m), China (1.55m plus pretrial detainees and prisoners in ‘administrative detention’) or Russia (0.87m).
• The United States has the highest prison population rate in the world, some 738 per 100,000 of the national population, followed by Russia (611), St Kitts & Nevis (547), U.S. Virgin Is. (521), Turkmenistan (c.489), Belize (487), Cuba (c.487), Palau (478), British Virgin Is. (464), Bermuda (463), Bahamas (462), Cayman Is. (453), American Samoa (446), Belarus (426) and Dominica (419). However, more than three fifths of countries (61%) have rates below 150 per 100,000.
• Prison populations are growing in many parts of the world. Updated information on countries included in previous editions of the World Prison Population List shows that prison populations have risen in 73% of these countries (in 64% of countries in Africa, 84% in the Americas, 81% in Asia, 66% in Europe and 75% in Oceania).

daniel beaty and fathers in prison

i've seen some amazing papers the past few days, taking in conferences on race, inequality, and incarceration and incarceration and fatherhood. friday's keynote speaker was the osborne association's liz gaynes, a powerful advocate for children with parents in prison. ms. gaynes introduced her talk with the daniel beaty video above. somehow, mr. beaty conveys the staggering loss of the experience within a message of growth and empowerment. if you just want the audio, you can skip the ruby dee intro and go directly to knock knock here.

under the bridge downtown / i gave my life away

i just gave an upbeat star-spangled interview about florida's move to enfranchise most former felons. as soon as i hung up the phone, however, minor threat sent word that the state has not completely abandoned the practice of dehumanizing former felons.

you've really gotta see the video to appreciate the story. like many places, miami-dade county has such restrictive rules for housing sex offenders that almost anywhere they live would violate the terms of their release. the shelters won't take them and they can't live anywhere near parks, schools, or daycare centers. yet these folks can't be homeless either, since their release is conditional on occupying a residence from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. according to a local story, a PO gave one poor guy the following directions to his new residence: "Go over the bridge. Once over the bridge, go under it towards the west side as far as he can go."

nice. according to cnn, the former felons are living under a bridge on the julia tuttle causeway, which offers no running water, electricity, or protection from rats and inclement weather. yet a state probation officer makes an early morning visit to the bridge every day to enforce the probation condition that they occupy a residence.

call me a soft-on-crime liberal egghead, but i don't think under the bridge is a viable long-term solution to public safety problems. in the short term, perhaps one of my florida pals could drive by and drop off a tent -- unless camping is against the rules too.

florida disenfranchisement, 1868-2007

dang. it finally happened. from the st. petersburg times:

By DAVID ROYSE

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) -- Most Florida felons who complete their sentences will have their voting and other civil rights more quickly restored under a rule approved Thursday by Republican Gov. Charlie Crist and the state clemency board.

All but the most violent felons would avoid the need to get on a long list for a hearing before the board, which sometimes takes years.

The board voted 3-1 on the immediate change. Attorney General Bill McCollum, another Republican, strongly objected to altering the Jim Crow-era ban on felons automatically getting their rights back once they finish their sentences.

But Crist was emphatic: "I believe in simple human justice and that when somebody has paid their debt to society, it is paid in full. There's a time to move on, a time to give them an opportunity to have redemption, to have a chance to become productive citizens again." ...

...Still, Crist's plan was a compromise, carving out murderers and other violent felons who would still have to either go before the board for a hearing or at least be subject to review by board members without a hearing in some cases.

..."I believe in appropriate punishment, I'm 'Chaingang Charlie,'" Crist said. "But I believe in justice."

That drew an "Amen" from several in the audience at the meeting, including advocates for felons.

A recent federal lawsuit challenged Florida's rights ban on grounds that it disproportionately affected blacks. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that argument in 2005, noting Florida first banned felon voting in 1845 - before blacks were allowed to vote. The U.S. Supreme Court later let that decision stand.

The ban was put into the state constitution in 1868.

fundraiser for mda research

i'm not sure which of my clever students or coworkers ratted me out, but i'm going back to jail on may 17. this is gonna seriously mess up my syttende mai plans.

here's the deal: the good people at the muscular dystrophy association tell me that some well-meaning friend nominated me for one of those jail-n-bail-charity-extortion things. they think i can somehow raise $1,200 to help the kids and adults mda serves in their local clinics. for the research-minded, each $65 contribution buys one minute of mda research to find treatments and cures for neuromuscular diseases. hmm. can that be right? it must be really good research.

don't worry. before committing, i made sure that it was a reputable organization and that mda actually stood for the muscular dystrophy association -- and not, say, the missile defense agency or minnesota department of agriculture or methylenedioxymethamphetamine. if you're so inclined, i set up a page for donations. if i get any, maybe i'll set up a jail n' bail to benefit the felon fund. if each reader just contributes $400, i'll be back on the streets in no time...

drop in domestic violence

amidst new fears that u.s. crime rates are creeping up again, a great deal of evidence is accumulating to suggest that rates of rape and domestic violence are declining. a nice mclatchy-tribune piece reports the good news and offers some explanations for the drop.

the rake and homicide in minneapolis

the rake's frank clancy takes up the issue of homicide this month, profiling and mapping all 60 minneapolis murders of 2006.

the numbers show a steep drop since the 100 annual homicides of the murderapolis mid-1990s period. the 60 little stories, however, offer a less sanguine view of public safety in the city.

good pub for pubcrim at oregon state

today's eugene register-guard features a great front-page story on michelle inderbitzin's inside-out prison exchange class. michelle brought 15 of her oregon state university students to join 15 oregon state penitentiary students for a course on crime, justice, and public policy. michelle has been posting about the experience at publiccriminology throughout the quarter (including, for example, some memorable poetry from an inside student). yes, the start-up costs seem daunting -- in terms of training, administration, permissions from deans and department chairs, travel, and security. for both inside students and outside students, however, i can't imagine a more meaningful or powerful vehicle for teaching sociological criminology.

criminal anagrams from a hog-sprung heretic

i enjoy playing with anagrams, rearranging my kids' names to fit some aspect of their personalities. for example, tor stanley uggen has the same letters as both gentle guy on star and let's not anger guy. yeah, that sounds about right.

it won't surprise my students to learn that christopher uggen is actually code for hog-sprung heretic, and, given my minnesota biases, gopher guts enrich. wondering whether similar magic applies for the sociological criminologists i've been teaching in my delinquency class this year, i came up with the following variations without too much trouble. i'm self-censoring here, because some of the really funny ones seemed too cruel or unfair. i trust you can figure them out on your own, if so inclined.

let's start with the classics. cesare lombroso whose criminal man connected primitive features with criminality in 1870, can be nicely anagramed into a slob score more. hmm. that rather nicely sums up atavistic theory, doesn't it?

it is tougher to reconcile clifford shaw's great work with his name. somehow scaffold whir or lads chow riff fail to capture the essence of social disorganization theory. how about my intellectual great grandfather, learning theorist edwin a. sutherland? it pains me to say so, but his critics might view he did learn, was nut or, more charitably, he did learn, aw nuts as all-too-appropriate alternative monikers.

speaking of professor sutherland's critics, i couldn't do much with social control theory's travis hirschi (stir a rich shiv or chris ravish it) or anomie's robert k. merton (torment broker and broken term rot are a little better). i had better luck with howard s. becker, who wrote a classic on marijuana use (saw herb rocked or sacred herb wok) and offered insightful critiques of mainstream sociology (bored whackers).

this week my students are reading meda chesney-lind on feminist criminology and juvenile justice, so her new moniker (she demand nicely) might seem fitting. i couldn't work the "q" into james q. wilson, but the brilliant conservative who wrote thinking about crime can otherwise be cruelly rearranged as jowls is mean.

ok, that's where i draw the line. in fairness, i should also note that christopher uggen can be cruelly rearranged as pure hogs retching. though my personal anagrams can't rival, say, mr. mojo risin’, i guess i'd prefer hog-sprung heretic to pure hogs retching.

from our inside-out poet

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)

too thin

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.

poetry from inside

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.