Beth Schwartzapfel

Brown Alumni Magazine>Arts & Culture>A Story Stripped to the Bone

2009-05-27T13:16:00.001-07:00

A Story Stripped to the Bone

As a Friend by Forrest Gander (New Directions).

By Beth Schwartzapfel
May/June 2009

For his girlfriend's birthday, Les, the protagonist of Forrest Gander's first novel, As a Friend, hangs a horse skull from the ceiling, douses it with lighter fluid, and sets it on fire. "It was the most beautiful thing I ever saw," she recalls. "The slow liquid-blue flame in the shape of a horse's skull flowering into a new dimension, turning slowly on a string in the dark." This image is like the whole novel in one stroke: creepy and haunting, lovely and strange.

Les is a poet, a land surveyor, a charmer, and a liar. He keeps a wife on a farm in Missouri, lives with his girlfriend, Sarah, in Arkansas, and seduces barkeeps and folk singers on the side. Still, his childlike earnestness and his wide-ranging brilliance and wit are irresistible. Even those who hate Les love him. His friend Clay feels towards Les equal parts awe, eros, and envy. "It was as if he'd come from a place where excitement wasn't taken to be a reverse indicator of intelligence and where it was normal to mention Cocteau and blue channel catfish in the same sentence," Clay says. "The opal blackness of his eyes was magnetic."

"There's that phrase of Samuel Johnson's that I really love," says Gander, an award-winning poet and professor of English and comparative literature at Brown: "'rammed full of life.' I'm of course drawn to—we're all drawn to—figures like that."

The triangular relationship between Les, Sarah, and Clay becomes toxic, and the story's denouement—Les's suicide by three gunshots—comes early in the story. The fallout from his death and the traces of his life that live on in his friends' memories and in a taped interview with a reporter make up almost half of the book. "What interests me," Gander says, "is what comes afterwards—what's on the side of the stage, those elements of friendship that are so complex: sexual attractions and jealousies and awe and competition and love."

Les resembles the real-life Frank Stanford, an Arkansas poet and sometime land surveyor who died in 1978 after shooting himself three times. Back then, Stanford was living with poet C. D. Wright, who is now the I. J. Kapstein Professor of Literary Arts at Brown and Gander's wife. Stanford's death was "the beginning of the germ of the novel," says Gander, who started it about twenty years ago and returned to it periodically, amongst seven volumes of poetry and other writings. "This was one way of telling [Stanford's] story, and one way of dealing with my complicated relationship with him," Gander says.

As a Friend is a story stripped to the bone—106 pages of gestures and sketches. "All the secondary, tertiary worlds of characters and friends I had to eliminate and focus on a very limited set that I could intensify," Gander says. "That's what poetry does. You can intensify and open up small things."

FORWARD>Schmooze>How Do You Say ‘Charge It’ in Yiddish?

2009-04-22T14:24:00.000-07:00

How Do You Say ‘Charge It’ in Yiddish?

By Beth Schwartzapfel
April 22, 2009

Chalk it up to the recession; it’s making all of us behave in unexpected ways. The Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter Ring, a not-for-profit organization founded a century ago by socialist, Yiddish-speaking immigrants, recently launched its own credit card. With the organization’s logo in the upper-left corner, the Visa Platinum card offers new users the standard 0% annual percentage rate for the first six months. The Workmen’s Circle gets $50 whenever someone signs up and makes his first purchase, and then 0.3% of whatever the cardholder spends after that. “It’s such an easy way to share with the Workmen’s Circle/Arbiter Ring and continue our mission of progressive and cultural Jewish identity building,” the Workmen’s Circle’s executive director, Ann Toback, told The Shmooze. “I thought it was a win-win all around.”

The cards are issued by UMB Financial Corporation and marketed by the online company CardPartner, which helps small organizations and not-for-profits create customized credit cards.

What would the labor union-organizing generation that founded the Workmen’s Circle think about this new nod to consumerism? “Times have changed,” Toback said, “and the organization is changing with the times.”

Providence Journal>Books>‘Stealing MySpace’ recounts the battle to control the popular Web site

2009-04-19T10:57:00.000-07:00

‘Stealing MySpace’ recounts the battle to control the popular Web site

By Beth Schwartzapfel
April 19, 2009

I thought MySpace was so . . . 2006. Everyone I know has defected for Facebook and left her MySpace profile to molder, un-updated, into obsolescence.

Apparently not. According to the web research firm Hitwise, although Facebook’s numbers are indeed on the rise whereas

MySpace’s are on the wane, MySpace is still the Web’s most popular social networking site, according to several different metrics. In February, more than 70 million people logged onto MySpace to groom their own personal homepages, upload pictures and video, browse through and link to friends’ pages, and post messages.

Which is good news for Julia Angwin, who has written a thorough new book called Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America. Angwin, a Wall Street Journal reporter, has painstakingly detailed every crucial conversation, every rise and fall in stock price, every lavish party and influential blog post in the history of MySpace, from its start as a side project in a shady Los Angeles Internet company to its current place as the crown jewel in Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Interactive Media. The book is an excellent historical record but a somewhat dry read.

Stealing MySpace opens with the meeting in which Murdoch and the chief executive of Intermix Media — then MySpace’s parent company — sealed their gentlemen’s agreement. As was widely reported at the time, Murdoch’s News Corporation spent $580 million to purchase Intermix. (Angwin reports that when stock options and promised salaries are taken into account, the deal was actually worth more like $750 million.)

Intermix, which had only recently disentangled itself from several investigations into its spyware division, and whose most profitable venture was a wrinkle-cream business, was not exactly a prize. But it owned a majority stake in MySpace, and because of a complicated ownership agreement, Intermix could sell itself out from under MySpace’s feet. Which, in July 2005, is exactly what it did.

Still, the high-stakes backroom dealings between News Corp, Intermix, and other companies (like Viacom) that were angling to buy MySpace, make up only 27 pages of the book. Since Stealing MySpace would seem to be about precisely that dealmaking, its remaining 100 pages feel a little aimless; once the deal is done, there is little narrative tension to propel the rest of the story forward. That the story ends 2 1/2 years after News Corp’s acquisition seems arbitrary.

What’s more, the characters are not portrayed as sympathetic, three-dimensional people with real lives, but rather as game pieces in business deals. People are the beating heart of any story — it’s a heady mix of ego, idealism, greed, ambition, and a million other human qualities that make any deal go down (and that make investors buy stock, and that make an entrepreneur found a company, and on and on), and a book provides an author with the space that a newspaper article does not to showcase these complicated motivations. The fact that Angwin doesn’t do so makes the book read less like Barbarians at the Gate than like, well, The Wall Street Journal.

The American Prospect>Inconvenient Contraception

2009-03-17T07:43:00.001-07:00

Inconvenient Contraception

For millions of women, getting birth control is a laborious process. Would making the pill an over-the-counter drug be the best policy fix?

By Beth Schwartzapfel
March 17, 2009

Last week, birth control for college students got cheaper. An "affordable birth control" provision in the 2009 appropriations bill, which President Barack Obama signed last Wednesday, restored an incentive for drug makers to offer college health clinics discounts on the pill (the longstanding incentive had been inadvertently eliminated in a 2005 deficit-reduction bill). Still, even when it's cheaper, birth control will continue to be two things: inconvenient and thoroughly tied up with the medical system.

A trip to the doctor. Time off from work. A waiting room. A pap smear. A co-pay (assuming you're insured, of course). A trip to the pharmacy. Another co-pay. Then, finally, your birth control: 28 little pills, packaged in foil and plastic, standing between you and a pregnancy you don't want.

If you are one of the 11.6 million women in this country who relies on the pill to prevent pregnancy, this scenario, or some variation on it, has played out in your life again and again. It may not have to be this way.

"A pap smear is important. The pill is important. There's not really a connection between the two," says San Francisco gynecologist Dan Grossman. "It's a very paternalistic attitude to say, as a physician, we have to hold women's pills hostage -- you can't get your contraception until you get your pap smear."

England's National Health Service recently announced that later this year it will launch a pilot program to allow young women in two London neighborhoods to buy birth control over the counter after a brief consultation with a pharmacist. The London program is modeled after a pilot program that was conducted in Washington state between 2003 and 2005, in which 26 pharmacists throughout Seattle safely provided hormonal contraception -- the pill, patch, or ring -- to almost 200 women without a prescription. A similar study is being planned for California.

Now, a group of doctors, pharmacists, researchers, and advocates have received a grant from the Hewlitt Foundation to fund a working group that studies the feasibility of making oral contraceptives available over the counter: as easy to purchase as aspirin. According to the reproductive-health think tank the Guttmacher Institute, nearly half of women will experience at least one unintended pregnancy by the time they're 45, and almost a third will have had an abortion. Part of the reason for this, those in the working group say, is that the barriers to birth control are simply too high.

"It's harder and harder to access contraception care if you want it, here in the U.S.," says Grossman, who is a senior associate at the nonprofit research organization Ibis Reproductive Health, which coordinates the Working Group. "Non-use of contraception is going up among people who don't want to be pregnant, especially among vulnerable populations, like poor women and women of color." The group's hypothesis is simple: If birth control were easier to access -- fewer medical gatekeepers, less inconvenience, and lower cost -- more women would use it. If more women used it, there would be fewer unintended pregnancies.

Fair enough. But is it safe? What effect would a switch to over-the-counter status have on poor women's access to the medication? And if women were no longer required to get birth control from their doctor, would they still go for their annual exams?

The pill has been exhaustively researched, and most doctors agree that it poses almost no risk of serious side effects for the vast majority of healthy young women. But estrogen (one of two main ingredients in most forms of the pill) can slightly increase risk of heart attack or stroke among older women who smoke and women who have high blood pressure, diabetes, and a handful of other conditions -- so doctors prescribing birth control have long screened for these conditions.

"I think the doctor's got to be a gatekeeper," says Michael Cackovic, an instructor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Yale School of Medicine. The doctor should "not necessarily decide who gets to be on the pill and who doesn't but [should] at least make sure patients understand the risk. I have prescribed [the pill] to patients that are smokers and over 40, but after we've had the conversation."

Grossman instead argues that a clearly worded and easy-to-understand label is enough to let women screen themselves. "If you go through the list of all of the medical conditions that can make pill use dangerous, everything on that list except for [high blood pressure] is information that we get from a woman's history -- from what she tells us," he says. "You don't need a doctor to determine whether you have them." As for blood pressure, "educating women and making that service available," in places like self-screening kiosks in pharmacies, might be a better approach than requiring a doctor's visit as a prerequisite, he says.

"I'm personally convinced that there are not safety issues in taking oral contraceptives over the counter," says Sharon Camp, president and CEO of the Guttmacher Institute and a member of the Working Group. "For most of the people in the reproductive-health field, the issue of safety is probably not the biggest one. It really is, will an over-the-counter product be affordable for women who now get low-cost or reimbursed drugs? That remains to be seen." Camp's concerns stem from an earlier fight for over-the-counter access to emergency contraception, also known as Plan B.

Most insurance plans -- including most state Medicaid programs -- only cover prescription drugs. So when the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) finally approved the Plan B switch in 2006, millions of women suddenly found that the medication was no longer covered. At the same time, without insurance companies to bargain it down, the price of the medication jumped from roughly $27 to as high as $50.

"If we don't address that, but [if] we make the pill available over the counter, we will have made it more accessible to women who already have good access to health care, and less accessible to women who don't," says Amy Allina, program director at the National Women's Health Network and a member of the Working Group.

The Guttmacher Institute recently released a policy brief that said that at least 4.2 million women use visits to publicly funded family-planning clinics as their primary source of medical care. Clinics like Planned Parenthood become what the brief called "safety net providers." What would happen if they disappeared? "You don't want to say that you're requiring women to come in and get pills on prescription as a way of forcing them to get health-care services," Allina says. "But if women aren't coming into the clinics otherwise, and don't get those services, that's not good for them and eventually could lead to the loss of the clinics."

Still, an application to the FDA to make the over-the-counter switch is more of a long-term goal than an immediate plan. Grossman is hoping for 10 years, and part of the goal of the Working Group is to identify all the outstanding questions and answer them with research. Before it would approve a switch, for instance, the FDA would require "labeling comprehension" studies, to make sure the average user would be able to understand the instructions on over-the-counter packaging. They would also perform "actual use studies" to see if women would follow the instructions in the real world. Some of the research is either ongoing or being planned. "One of the lessons that I feel like we learned from the long battles over emergency contraception at the FDA," Allina says, "[is] that, if we ask the kinds of questions that we may think are above and beyond what the FDA should require, but are the questions that people in the community are concerned about -- and we can answer them -- it makes it easier to get past the political opposition."

But the precautions may not even be necessary. The Obama administration's proposed overhaul of the health-care system might make for an entirely new playing field by the time enough research has been conducted to actually move the process forward. Perhaps, in 10 years, poor women will have affordable and accessible access to health care, leaving Working Group members and other reproductive-health advocates to weigh the proposal on its merits alone.

Brown Alumni Magazine>I Will Be Heard!

2009-03-13T07:24:00.001-07:00

I Will Be Heard!

For decades Catherine Wolf ’72 AM, ’74 PhD worked as an IBM scientist getting computers to understand better how humans think. Then she was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Now she must rely on computers to tell other people what’s inside her own head and heart.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
March 13, 2009

When I first meet Catherine Wolf, she is sitting in the living room of her house at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in suburban Westchester County, New York. She wears an elegant velour pantsuit with matching brown flats. Nearby are two cats, two dogs and an oversized couch. Pictures of her family are everywhere: framed shots of her with her husband, Joel '73 PhD; their daughters, Erika and Laura; and, most abundantly, pictures of their two-and-a-half-year-old grandson, Ellis. There are at least thirty snapshots of him on the wall, and on a nearby table sits a digital frame with a rotating series of images of his smiling face. Outside the windows, the street is blanketed with snow.

On the day I visit her, Wolf is browsing Facebook, to which she recently became addicted. As a successful psychologist and researcher with decades of experience working at nearby IBM, Wolf has always been quick to pick up on new technologies. In fact, she's had a role in developing a lot of new technologies herself, from automated talking bank tellers to gadgets that convert handwriting to type.

But when Wolf clicks through the internet, she must do so with painstaking slowness. Confined to a wheelchair, she sits as still as a mannequin. Of the hundreds of muscles in her body, she can move only a handful. She breathes with the aid of a ventilator. Yet she types, talks, browses the Web, writes poetry, sends and receives e-mails, conducts research, and peppers the local paper with letters to the editor. She does all this using only her eyebrows.

On a tray attached to Wolf's wheelchair sits a laptop, emitting a soft but steady bong, bong, bong. It is the tether that connects her to the world outside her head. The tones it emits are the sound of the cursor moving through rows of letters on the screen. "Hello," the laptop says, shortly after I walk in, and then, some seconds later, "How are you?"

The voice is Wolf's. She recorded the greetings seven years ago, before she lost the ability to speak. In addition to a few key phrases, she recorded the names of her family members as well as some favorite jokes. (Question: "What's green and hangs from trees?" Answer: "Giraffe snot.") She wishes she had recorded more.

Wolf has curly red hair and expressive eyes framed by tortoiseshell glasses. She can still move her eyes and curl part of her mouth into a surprisingly bright smile. Her home-health aide places a chair for me beside Wolf's wheelchair so I can watch her type. It's unnerving to look over her shoulder this way. The image of a modified keyboard, in yellow, is arrayed in front of her. It has six letters to a row, plus punctuation, arranged like this:

e a r d u v .

t o i l g k ,

n s f y x q '

The cursor highlights one row of letters at a time. When it arrives at the row containing the letter Wolf wants, she raises her eyebrows. Click. The cursor then moves along the letters in that row, highlighting one at a time. When it falls on the letter Wolf wants, she raises her eyebrows again. Click. A T appears in a box at the bottom of the screen. Then Wolf starts again. A black band across her forehead lifts each time she raises her eyebrows, triggering an infrared switch mounted near her head. Bong, bong, bong. Click. Bong, bong, bong. An h appears.

After about a minute, Wolf has typed this is a scanning key... I see where this is going and say, "Ah, I see," but Wolf doggedly finishes that last word, typing b-o-a-r-d. She then waits until the cursor arrives at a particular icon and raises her eyebrows one more time, prompting the computer to read the sentence aloud. This time the voice is not hers but that of the computer: female, soft, and kind, but tinny and inhuman.

One of the great ironies of Cathy Wolf's life is that she built her career on the study of human speech, gesture, and handwriting. Compared to computers, humans are messy, complicated communicators, and Wolf's six patents and more than 100 journal articles and textbook chapters are all aimed at teaching computers to understand us better. But since amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)—also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease—began claiming her ability to speak, gesture, and write a dozen years ago, she has developed a whole new relationship with language. After leaving IBM on long-term disability in 2004, she began writing poetry. Her poem "Words" was published in the magazine Neurology Now in the fall of 2007. In it, she describes how she types:

Very,

Slow,

Ly,

Moving my head to the rhythm of beeps

Thankful for each tiny movement

Concentrating letter by letter

Squeezing each word out with gargantuan intensity

Like an ancient chiseling words in Aramaic

I will be heard!

The ability to speak is a remarkable thing. That we can move our lips and tongues into certain shapes and force air past our vocal cords in a certain pattern, that this will convey the contents of our heart or make another person laugh, is one of those human mysteries we rarely think about. We all instantly understand hullo, yo, hey, hi, or howdy to mean more or less the same thing, but to a computer these words, like the wave of a hand, are just a mass of disparate data. At IBM it was Cathy Wolf's job to help computers make sense of such things.

At the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Wolf worked as a research psychologist, designing and testing the interfaces between humans and machines. Collaborating with computer programmers, Wolf observed people in their workplaces to determine how a machine might be used in real-world situations. She led focus groups and tested mock-ups and program prototypes on potential users. One of the last projects she worked on at IBM was a technology called the Conversation Machine, which allowed users to do their banking by talking to a computer over the telephone. (User: "What's my checking balance?" Conversation Machine: "Your checking balance is $925.00. What else can I do for you?")

Wolf loved her work. She finds language endlessly fascinating, and it was exciting to be on the cutting edge of new technologies. She "was always a person who defined herself by her work," says her husband, Joel, an IBM mathematician. "I work pretty hard, but when I retire, I'll be ready to say, 'I'm done.' But she's the kind of person who would probably have never retired."

Wolf continued to work long after she became ill. When she could not use her hands anymore, IBM supplied an aide to help with many everyday tasks. To type, while she still had use of her neck, "I wore a reflective dot on my forehead whose position was detected by the head mouse," she says. "I pointed with my head to the letter I wanted and dwelled on the letter I wanted for a specific time to select it. At one point, I used a switch under my foot and showed up at IBM meetings with one shoe on."

It was in 1996 that Wolf first began noticing problems with her left foot and calf. "She went to a lot of foot doctors and then orthopedic doctors and then neurologists," Joel recalls. With every possible diagnosis, Joel recalls, they would think, "'Oh God, I hope it's not that.'" Then, "'Oh God, I hope it is that, because if it's not that, it's that.' And then when you get to the end of that string, the worst thing you could possibly have is what she had. She went from being a runner to being barely able to walk within a few years."

ALS is a neurological disease that attacks the motor neurons, the cells that the brain uses to communicate with the body's voluntary muscles. Over the course of three to five years, people with ALS progressively lose the ability to move their fingers and toes, their arms and legs. Then they lose the ability to speak, to turn their head, and to swallow food. When the diaphragm and chest muscles give out, they can no longer breathe. They die.

Although it was identified more than 100 years ago, scientists still don't know what causes ALS. There is no effective treatment and no cure. The only thing that can prolong life is a ventilator, which allows patients to continue breathing. But it does not slow the progression of the disease. To prolong life for too long raises the specter of becoming "locked in," of losing the use of every last muscle until patients are trapped inside their own bodies, fully conscious but unable to communicate, unable to blink yes or no, unable to signal when something is wrong, unable to say, Enough. I'm done.

Wolf is among a tiny minority of patients in this country—about 5 percent—who choose to have the surgery to connect them to a ventilator. The emotional and financial cost, to the patients and their families, is too high for most.

"My wife has a will to live that probably exceeds 99 percent of the rest of the world," Joel says. "Her will to live is more than just the desire to be alive; it's a desire to live a full life. As Cathy herself puts it, "as normal a life as possible despite ALS."

Which is why, after finally leaving IBM, Wolf realized that "something meaningful had to replace work." She became involved with PatientsLikeMe, an online community that provides a forum for people with ALS and other illnesses to share information about their experiences and to keep up with the latest medical developments. PatientsLikeMe offers users the opportunity to assess their condition by taking the ALS functional rating scale, or ALSFRS, at regular intervals. Wolf decided to answer the ALSFRS questionnaire:

Compared to the time before you had symptoms of ALS ... have you noticed any changes in your speech? She could no longer speak. Zero points.

Have there been any changes in your ability to swallow? She hadn't swallowed in years. Zero points. (When saliva pools in her throat, she types cmx with her scanning keyboard. The computer says "coughing machine," and one of her health aides suctions out her mouth and throat.)

And on and on. Cannot walk or move my legs. Zero. She couldn't turn herself over in bed or adjust the blankets without help. Helpless in bed. Zero. She couldn't breathe without a ventilator. Zero.

"I was offended," Wolf explains. "I felt it didn't reflect my abilities."

As a research scientist, Wolf's reaction to her rating was to question the methodology. The instrument, she reasoned, was too crude to provide much insight into a patient's true condition. "There's something in psychological testing called the 'floor effect,' when the sensitivity of the measure isn't low enough at its lowest levels," says neuropsychologist Paul Wicks, the research and development director of PatientsLikeMe. "She was trained as a psychologist, so she asked, 'Can we fix this?'"

She and Wicks teamed up to develop what they call the ALSFRS-EX, an extended version of the rating scale that accounts for the changes that people with ALS experience long after they hit the floor of the standard scale. "Accurate ways to measure ALS are important research tools to help slow the disease," Wicks says. "In traditional clinical trials, which is what the scale was originally designed for, you tended not to recruit people who were very, very sick. Unfortunately that means that people like Cathy, who has lived with ALS for twelve years— who are really the most interesting—are not eligible for the trials" because of their low rating.

Wolf and Wicks recruited more than 200 PALS users to help them devise ten new questions for judging abilities that the earlier scale ignored: computer usage, finger and toe movement, and mobility. On the original scale, for instance, if you require a wheelchair, your score on the walking measure is zero. "For my money there's a big difference between being in a wheelchair you can control yourself and a wheelchair where you have to be pushed around," Wicks says. "And there's a big difference between that and being so weak that you have to be in bed all day."

After analyzing the statistical sensitivity of the ten questions, they settled on three new scale items that focused on the use of fingers, the capacity to show facial emotion, and the ability to get around inside the house. Wolf, Wicks, and a third researcher then coauthored a scientific paper to introduce their new scale. It was published in the March issue of the European Journal of Neurology. "I am most proud of that paper of all my publications," Cathy says.

Wolf's interest in language dates back to her undergraduate days at Tufts, where she read a book by Noam Chomsky proposing that humans are hard-wired for language. "I thought that having an innate capacity for something as complex as language was remarkable," Wolf says. "After all, language distinguishes us from other animals."

Her interest coincided with an early interest in computers, long before they became a ubiquitous part of everyday life. In 1967 she met Joel, then an MIT mathematics student, via one of the two computer services (they squabble over which) that were the precursor to internet dating. "She was very pretty, very intelligent," Joel says. "She had a great sense of humor. She was a very good dancer. I'm a very un-great dancer, but I liked to watch her dance." The couple married in 1968, and both began working toward their PhDs at Brown shortly after, he in mathematics, she in psychology.

Cathy Wolf's interest in language led her to Peter Eimas, the Fred M. Seed Professor Emeritus of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, whose pioneering research demonstrated that infants have a far more sophisticated understanding of language than was previously thought. (Eimas died in 2005.) Wolf's research extended Eimas's findings by comparing the way children of different ages perceive particular linguistic nuances.

Wolf's daughter Laura says her parents remember graduate school as a time of hectic contentment. "Sometimes," she says, "they would share a gallon of ice cream for dinner because they were too busy to cook."

Later, cooking became a favorite family activity—Laura still makes the Thanksgiving apple pie each year under her mom's watchful eye—but Wolf never appreciated it as much as she does now, when she can eat only through a feeding tube. She still remembers in vivid detail her last meal, which she ate in 2001 and described in a poem titled "Last Supper":

chocolate mousse

the essence of chocolate

fresh fruit salad

with sweet blueberries, tangy raspberries

and mellow cantaloupe

pumpernickel roll with raisins

and sourdough French bread

baby asparagus sautéed al dente

mashed potatoes spiked with piquant garlic

poached fillet of salmon served with creamy dill sauce

my last supper

food!

aromatic!

textured, tasty on the tongue!

now bypasses my mouth and nose

a bland substance for survival

In "First Snow," a poem she wrote in 2006, she recalled Sneaking cafeteria trays out under bulky parkas/To slide down College Hill/The trays navigating by the avocado moon. In the same poem, she fast-forwards many years, to Rolling soggy snow with husband and daughters to build a teetering snowman/The tallest on the block.

The outdoors was another Wolf family passion. Cathy and Joel often took their daughters into the mountains and to the sea. "We have a lot of good adventure stories," says Laura, now twenty-eight. "Like getting caught in our tent during a lightning storm, and the dog capsizing our sailboat." Cathy also loved to run; on her fortieth birthday, she took first place in a 10K race, her first. Her daughter Erika, who is now thirty-two, went on to become a professional ballet dancer. She still remembers practicing waltz steps down the hallway with her mother.

Here is a day in Cathy Wolf's life, in her own typewritten words: "I get up at ten thirty. At the computer usually by one thirty. Read email, check PatientsLikeMe, work on various projects until nine or ten, watch PBS News Hour and Daily Show, go to bed at midnight." Her aides lift her from her wheelchair with a mesh-and-metal pulley and settle her in a hospital bed in what used to be the family room. (I sleep alone now/Not by choice but by disease.) She has to sleep with her bed at a forty-five-degree angle to keep from choking. A nurse must watch her closely all night; if Wolf wakes up and needs something, the only way the nurse will know is to see her eyes moving.

Wolf's family says she is angrier than she often lets on. And sadder. How could she not be? "There have been times in her life when things have been low," Erika says, "but there's always been something big coming up to live for: somebody's graduation, the birth of my son.

"Now it's all about my son."

Erika doesn't know exactly what her son, Ellis, understands about what's wrong with his grandmother, but he loves to sit on her lap. He is exceedingly gentle with her tubes and machines. He calls her "grandcat." His favorite pants are the ones she picked out for him. He calls them his "grandcat pants."

One day Erika visited her mother with her son. Outside, the sky was overcast. The familiar bong, bong, bong of the laptop was the sound track to the conversation between Erika and her mom.

"It's grey outside," she painstakingly typed, "but Ellis is the sun."

Brown Alumni Magazine>Arts & Culture>Doing It the Hard (Right) Way

2009-03-13T07:21:00.001-07:00

Doing It the Hard (Right) Way

By Beth Schwartzapfel
March 13, 2009

Jeff Prystowsky '06 started his music career riffling through Providence dumpsters for cereal boxes. He and Ben Knox Miller '06 would cut and fold the cardboard into CD covers and then silkscreen them. The art fit the rustic, handmade ethos of their band, the Low Anthem. "People would write us e-mails—'I ordered your record today, and I got Apple Jax! That's my favorite cereal! How'd you know?'" Miller recalls with a laugh. "We did everything the hardest possible way, but it was an aesthetic choice."

Those choices are paying off. Without shedding its homespun aesthetic, the Providence-based band is building a sizeable audience; it won the Boston Music Award for Best New Act in December, and NPR broadcast Low Anthem's "To Ohio" as its Song of the Day in early January. In February, Rolling Stone featured the band in their "Breaking Artist" column, which introduces musicians on the rise.

Band members Miller, Prystowsky, and Jocie Adams '08 met in Brown's music department, where they studied composition under Professor of Music Gerald "Shep" Shapiro. Before Adams joined the band, Miller and Prystowsky put out Low Anthem's first full-length CD, the 2007 What the Crow Brings. It revived themes as old as American roots music itself and gave them a modern story: "Sawdust Saloon" is about a soldier leaving not for the Civil War, but for Vietnam. The eleven intimate tracks sound as if they might have been recorded on the creaking porch of that sawdust saloon, or at the senior prom in a dying coal town. Miller practically whispers the lyrics, making even rock songs sound like lullabies. You can hear Prystowsky's fingertips walk the neck of his upright bass. The CD was voted Best Album in the Providence Phoenix's 2008 Music Poll, which gave it a leg up in the Boston polls.

Adams joined Low Anthem in late 2007, and in September 2008 the trio released Oh My God, Charlie Darwin, which has the same authenticity and heart as Crow, but a wider musical range. Gospel influences are apparent, and an occasional Tom Waits–like growl complements plaintive folk tunes. Miller sees Charlie Darwin as a more interrelated collection than What the Crow Brings. "We think of it like a book. All the songs are leaning on each other," he says. Vin Scelsa of the influential New York City folk radio station WFUV listed Charlie Darwin as one of his dozen favorite albums of 2008 (alongside works by Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson).

Miller, Prystowsky, and Adams play guitar, bass, and clarinet, respectively, but on Charlie Darwin each plays at least half a dozen instruments, including such obscure, old-timey ones as the pump organ and the rack harp. Miller usually brings to the band a musical idea, or a sketch of some lyrics."Always the songs come as just this little skeleton," he says, "and then they become what they are when these guys get involved."

So far, the band members have continued to do almost everything themselves, from booking shows to recording, producing, and promoting their albums. They recently hired a manager, Kate Landau '08, but Prystowsky still goes to the post office each morning to mail out the CDs people have ordered from the band's website. The covers are still hand-silk-screened—each copy of Charlie Darwin is part of a numbered series—only now they're done by an independent printing outfit, and, no, they're no longer made from cereal boxes.

The success of Charlie Darwin has drawn the interest of record companies, and the band's next album, which they're working on now, may be the first one that they don't release themselves. "It would have to be a record company that basically acknowledges the success that we've been able to achieve on our own," says Miller. "What are they going to say? 'We'll get you such and such.' Well, we already got that. It's a good position to be in."

New York Times>Green Inc>Greening the Prison-Industrial Complex

2009-03-03T09:21:00.000-08:00

Greening the Prison-Industrial Complex

By Beth Schwartzapfel
March 3, 2009

Instead of reporting to the laundry or the kitchen or the boiler room, a Washington state prison inmate, Robert Knowles, reports to the compost heap. Mr. Knowles is taking part in a “green work” program at the Cedar Creek Corrections Center. Inmates grow organic produce, compost the prison’s food waste, take part in ecological research projects with a nearby university, and even produce honey from the prison’s own hives.

The Washington State Department of Corrections boasts 34 LEED-certified facilities, with 923,789 square feet of LEED-certified space added in fiscal year 2008 alone.

Washington is not alone. It seems several states are busy rethinking the old concrete-box approach to the nation’s prisons — home to more than two million Americans — and high on the agenda are energy efficiency and other “green” upgrades.

This fall, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced 16 new green retrofitting projects, which they estimate will save $3 million in energy costs each year. The state already has solar power fields at two facilities, and plans to build six more in the coming year. A new $176 million juvenile detention facility in Alameda County — home to Berkeley and Oakland — recently became the country’s first jail to receive LEED gold certification.

Other green projects — from wind turbines to biomass boilers — have been announced by Departments of Corrections in Virginia, Nevada, and Indiana.

Mike Callahan, the physical plant director at the Putnamville Correctional Facility in Indiana, says the facility’s biomass boiler alone, which burns scrap wood from the prison’s pallet industry, has saved $6,300 a day in gas bills.

And the opening, in 2005, of Federal Correctional Institute No. 3, in Butner, N.C., marked the first LEED-certified federal prison. Scott Higgins, chief of design and construction at the Federal Bureau of Prisons, said that all new projects — including new federal prisons in the works in Alabama, Mississippi, and West Virginia — will be LEED certified, “unless some really weird things show
up.”

Ken Ricci, of Ricci Greene Associates, is currently working on a new $120 million detention center in downtown Denver, which the company plans to submit for LEED certification.

“There’s a recognition that sustainable, or ‘green’ design, is actually a plus for a population that’s confined 24 hours a day,” Mr. Ricci said. “Environment cues behavior. If you treat people like animals, they behave like animals.”

Mr. Ricci, who heads a sustainability committee as part of the American Institute of Architects’ Justice Architecture group, says design elements that earn LEED points, like daylighting and access to views, also improve security. “If you treat them like human beings — that is to say, there’s daylight coming in, the noise level is at a normative level — therefore your adrenaline level goes down, therefore your stress level goes down, the inmates feel safer.”

Still, not everyone thinks the new trend in prison design goes far enough.

Raphael Sperry, a San Francisco-based architect and green design consultant, is heading up a Prison Design Boycott Campaign at Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility. “Sure, saving 50 percent on energy when you’re locking people up is a savings,” he says. “But not locking them up at all would be a larger savings — and would also address social justice concerns.”

Ms.>National Reports>Lullabies Behind Bars

2009-02-23T14:43:00.000-08:00

Lullabies Behind Bars

In a few innovative prisons, babies find a safe haven with their moms.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
Fall 2008

Reprinted in Utne Reader, March/April 2009

It's midday on a recent Tuesday, and Rachael Irwin, 27, scurries across the floor on her hands and knees, playing peekaboo with her 10-month-old daughter, Gabriella. The baby’s big blue eyes dance with delight. Like many children her age, Gabriella is in day care. Unlike most children her age, though, Gabriella is in prison. She and her mother are participating in the Bedford Hills (N.Y.) Correctional Facility’s nursery program, one of only nine programs in the country that allow incarcerated women to keep their babies with them after they give birth.

Nationwide, nearly 2 million children have parents in prison. The number of those with incarcerated mothers, in particular, is growing exponentially: A recent report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that the number of minors with mothers in prison increased by more than 100 percent in the last 15 years.

“These children are sort of victims by default,” says Paige Ransford, research assistant at the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Boston, and coauthor of the recent report “Parenting from Prison.” Most of the children go live with grandparents or other relatives; one in 10 is placed in foster care. About half are separated from their siblings. These children are prone to a whole host of social developmental difficulties, and are more likely than their peers to be in trouble with the law later in life.

In the case of women who enter the system as mothers-to-be, the usual excitement of pregnancy is replaced with a sense of dread. The choices that, on the outside, are understood to be a woman’s right—such as where and how to give birth, and whether or not to breastfeed—are transferred from the woman to bureaucrats and officers at the state Department of Corrections (DOC).

Of the 115,308 women incarcerated in the U.S. as of 2007, some 4,000 women—4 percent of women in state custody and 3 percent in federal— were pregnant when they entered prison. In the vast majority of cases, babies are removed from their mothers immediately after birth and placed with relatives or in foster care. However, a small but growing number of states are recognizing that the mother-child bond formed in the first few months of life is crucial to the child’s development, and that the bond need not be broken.

“We’re definitely seeing more states grapple with what it means to send women to prison, some of whom are pregnant,” says Sarah From, director of public policy and communications for the Women’s Prison Association (WPA) and coauthor of the agency’s forthcoming report on prison nurseries. Eight states now have some sort of program to house female offenders together with their newborns, the newest being Indiana. The West Virginia legislature recently passed a bill establishing a program in its correctional facility for women, which is slated to open in 2009.

These programs vary widely in the length of time babies are allowed to stay with their incarcerated mothers and in the services provided while they’re in prison with them. South Dakota’s program allows babies to stay for just 30 days—with the mother in her regular cell—while Washington state allows children to stay for up to three years with their mothers in a separate wing of the prison. The Washington facility offers a federal Early Head Start program for prenatal health and infant-toddler development, and partners with the nonprofit Prison Doula Project to provide doula services to the women during and after pregnancies.

Originally started way back in 1901 when the prison was a state reformatory, the Bedford Hills Program is the oldest and largest in the country, with its own nursery wing and space for up to 29 mother-baby pairs. Women live with their babies in bright rooms stuffed with donated toys and clothes. During the day, while the women attend DOC-mandated drug counseling, anger management, vocational training and parenting classes, their children attend a day care staffed by inmates who have graduated from an intensive two-year Early Childhood Associate vocational training program.

Although the idea of babies living the first months of their lives behind bars is sad to contemplate, many experts say that the alternative—separating them from their mothers—is far worse. “If a woman is serving a short sentence and can look forward to a life with her child…so much research addresses the importance of that early bonding relationship,” says Sylvia Mignon, associate professor and director of the graduate program in human services at UMass Boston and coauthor, with Ransford, of the “Parenting from Prison” report. “The reality is, an infant does not know that she is in prison. All she knows is that she’s getting the warmth and love and attention of this wonderful being called mom.” Among women serving sentences of more than a decade, however, there is no clear consensus on what’s best for the child; the Bedford Hills program generally only accepts women serving sentences of five years or less. “We don’t want to create a bond that’s guaranteed to be broken,” says the children’s center program director, Bobby Blanchard.

Unlike in the general prison population, doors in the program are never locked; inmates must be able to come and go freely in order to warm bottles, do laundry and comfort crying children out of the earshot of other sleeping babies. Rooms are decorated with photographs and handmade posters that say things like, “Loving yourself is something to be proud of!” Danielizz Negron, 23, rocks her 4-month-old son, Jeremiah, while he naps in a stroller. She was six months pregnant when, after a year of fighting burglary charges, she accepted a plea deal and turned herself in. “If I had not known about this program, I would not have came in. I would’ve been in Mexico somewhere by now,” she says, only half-joking.

As the number of prison nurseries continues to grow, some caution against becoming overly sanguine. Prison nurseries are wonderful programs, says the WPA’s Sarah From, however “we shouldn’t be looking to build more prison nurseries, but rather work in the community to put less women in prison.”

The Nation>Your Valentine, Made in Prison

2009-02-13T09:54:00.000-08:00

Your Valentine, Made in Prison

By Beth Schwartzapfel
February 12, 2009

With Valentine's Day approaching, perhaps you're planning a trip to Victoria's Secret. If you're a conscientious shopper, chances are you want to know about the origins of the clothes you buy: whether they're sweatshop free or fairly traded or made in the USA. One label you won't find attached to your lingerie, however, is "Made in the USA: By Prisoners."

In addition to the South Carolina inmates who were hired by a subcontractor in the 1990s to stitch Victoria's Secret lingerie, prisoners in the past two decades have packaged or assembled everything from Starbucks coffee beans to Shelby Cobra sports cars, Nintendo Game Boys, Microsoft mouses and Eddie Bauer clothing. Inmates manning phone banks have taken airline reservations and even made calls on behalf of political candidates.

Still, it's notoriously difficult to find out what, exactly, prisoners are making and for whom. Most of the time, inmates are hired by subcontractors who have been hired by larger corporations, which are skittish about being associated with prison labor. Paul Wright, an expert on prison labor with sources inside many prisons, has broken many labor stories in his newspaper, Prison Legal News. It hasn't been easy. "As a general rule, you'll have an easier time finding out who Kim Jong Il's latest mistress is than finding out who these guys are working for," he says. (Starbucks, Nintendo, Eddie Bauer and Victoria's Secret did not return requests for comment; Microsoft declined to comment.)

Advocates of prison labor programs describe the arrangement as win-win: inmates keep busy and stay out of trouble, and employers get low-cost labor with little or no overhead. But critics, from labor unions to prisoner rights advocates, raise a host of concerns about exploitation and unfair business competition.

In 1979 Congress created the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (PIE), which provides private-sector companies with incentives to set up shops in prisons using inmates as employees. States offer free or reduced rent and utilities in exchange for the decreased productivity that comes with bringing materials and supplies in and out of a secured facility and hiring employees who must stop working throughout the day to be counted and who are sometimes unavailable because of facility-wide lockdowns.

Prisoners are often grateful for the work; when the system is working, they can learn marketable job skills and save money. "It provided a sense of independence," says Kelly DePetris, who worked for eight years in California state prisons at Joint Venture Electronics, doing everything from assembly to administrative jobs to materials control.

"You don't have to ask people for things," she says. "I have a son, so it was nice to send home money to help with little things--school clothes, things like that." As a Joint Venture employee, DePetris made about $1.74 per hour after deductions, compared with the thirty cents she estimates she might have made working in the prison laundry. When she was released last May after serving fourteen years, she had saved $16,000, with which she bought a used car, clothes and health insurance. "It's really come in handy," she says.

Relatively speaking, PIE accounts for a tiny fraction of the number of inmates in US prisons and jails. Some 5,300 of the 2.3 million inmates nationwide work for private-sector companies. "It's a small piece, but it's a significant piece" of the overall prison labor system, says Alex Friedmann, who served ten years in a Tennessee prison in the 1990s and worked making Taco Bell T-shirts in a PIE silk-screening shop.

PIE rules stipulate that work must be voluntary, that workers be paid a wage comparable to what free-world employees doing similar work are paid and that the program not compete unfairly with companies on the outside. But labor unions and companies on the outside have argued that this is impossible: there is no way for a company that pays no rent to compete fairly.

Talon Industries was a Washington State-based water-jet company whose competitor, MicroJet, had a PIE shop inside a state prison. Rick Trelstad, a partner at Talon, contended that his company shut down in 1999 at least in part because MicroJet consistently underbid him for work. (He and an association of his colleagues successfully sued the Washington State Department of Corrections to shut down the local PIE program, but voters reinstituted it last year.) Lufkin Industries, a Texas-based maker of tractor-trailer beds, claims it was run out of business because its competitor, Direct Trailer & Equipment Company, paid only one dollar per year for factory space in the local prison and so was able to offer much lower prices for the same product.

David Lewis, vice president and general manager of Joint Venture Electronics and Kelly DePetris's former boss, acknowledges that the setup has been great for his business. "They get no holiday pay. They get no vacation pay. There's no medical, dental: all that's paid for by the state," he says. What's more, if the company has to downsize, as it did recently, laid-off prison workers have few other places to look for work. When business picks up again, employees who on the outside would have found other jobs are still in prison, just waiting to be rehired. The waiting list for work at Joint Venture is up to 200 people long.

Advocates for prisoners' rights take issue with what they see as an inherently exploitative situation. Courts have consistently found that prisoners are not protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act. So they may not unionize. They can't agitate for better wages or working conditions, because any threats to walk off the job would ring hollow--where would they go?

What's more, by law, as much as 80 percent of PIE employees' paychecks is deducted for room and board, taxes, family support, victims' compensation or charity. The National Correctional Industries Association, the nonprofit organization that certifies PIE programs, found that participants kept only about 20 percent of their wages in the past two quarters. Friedmann, for instance, worked for two years in the late 1990s in the silk-screening shop. He estimates that after deductions for fines, fees and other charges, he left prison with $30. "So while businesses get rent-free space, prisoners are paying for their 'room and board,'" says Prison Legal News's Paul Wright, who himself served seventeen years in a Washington prison. "Prisoners pay their boss's rent."

So this Valentine's Day, if your shopper's conscience leads you to check labels, don't bother looking for "Made in Prison." Of all the hundreds of goods and services produced by prisoners with taxpayer subsidies, only one is labeled as such: a line of jeans and denim work shirts made at the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution. It's called Prison Blues.

New York Times>The City>Composing Songs for the One That Got Away

2009-01-31T15:09:00.000-08:00

Composing Songs for the One That Got Away

By Beth Schwartzapfel
February 1, 2009

SOMETIMES the songs are plaintive. Other times they are fuzzy and electric. One song is described as a “carnivalesque rock song.”

In all, there are 16 tracks and counting. And when Patrick Shea, a 31-year-old singer-songwriter from Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, lays them down, he is thinking about one thing: “Moby-Dick.”

This is Callmeishmael.org, a blog that Mr. Shea began in October. His goal was to write one song for each of the 136 chapters in “Moby-Dick,” Herman Melville’s sprawling 1851 classic, which tells the story of the ship captain Ahab and his haunted hunt for an elusive white whale.

Combining literary analysis with eclectic musical taste and a dark, clear baritone, Mr. Shea posts a new song each week.

Among the fans of Mr. Shea’s creations are Meg Guroff, the editor and publisher of the annotation Web site Powermobydick .com.

“I think it is a completely awesome thing to do,” Ms. Guroff said, “and I really like his music. People have written music about ‘Moby-Dick’ before, but I haven’t heard of anyone writing one song per chapter. It just seems like a very apt and obsessive response to this book about obsession.”

Another possible fan might be President Obama, who lists “Moby-Dick” as one of his favorite books on his Facebook page.

The song about Chapter 112, titled “The Blacksmith,” features an eerily echoing electronic heartbeat; the accompanying commentary is a 500-word reflection on labor, communal life, death and rebirth.

“As industry collapses, the very fabric of domesticity crumbles,” Mr. Shea writes. “Workshops and factories are the basement foundation of family life; the labor within its heartbeat.”

By contrast, the song about Chapter 2, “The Carpet-Bag,” is a sweet acoustic pop number with a catchy hook and the recurring lyric “I’ve never had the money you got/ To be on the inside,/ To find me a home.”

Mr. Shea, a sixth-grade teacher and the frontman for the Brooklyn-based duo the New Fantastics, said he came up with the idea for the blog over the summer. He had set two goals for himself over the break — to read “Moby-Dick” and to write a new song every day — and as time passed, he said, “the tasks slowly merged.”

Though he began with Chapter 1, he has otherwise chosen chapters at random. Melville in many ways was “the first postmodernist,” Mr. Shea wrote in his first post, “so I think he’d approve.”

The author might also have approved of a New Yorker seeking to keep his most famous work alive. Melville was born in the city and he died here, and worked for a time as a customs inspector on the New York docks.

More than 150 years on, during stormy economic times, Ishmael’s advice in Chapter 23, “The Lee Shore,” still resonates. Stay close to shore only during good weather, he warns; a ship near the shore during a storm will be dashed on the rocks. Mr. Shea writes: “Distilled to a pop song, I think this is all a way of saying enjoy the fair weather but let it go when you need to. How better to enjoy good times than to dance? How better to dance than to dance ‘The Lee Shore’?”

New York Times>New Jersey>From Bluegrass to Swing, a Jam Where Everyone Dives In

2009-01-31T15:04:00.000-08:00

From Bluegrass to Swing, a Jam Where Everyone Dives In

By Beth Schwartzapfel
February 1, 2009

LIVINGSTON

AS Mo Menzel sees it, those who attend the monthly concert and jam session at her violin shop here can be divided into two groups: pickers and grinners.

Pickers arrive at the shop, MoFiddles, with instrument in hand, ready to play. Grinners just sit back and listen. Ms. Menzel, 51, with her irreverent sense of humor, is a grinner.

Jay Ungar and Molly Mason, the fiddle-and-guitar duo who Ms. Menzel invited to kick off last month’s MoJam, are definitely pickers. Once a month, the MoJam attracts those who play and love traditional music to this shopping center. The forums are usually free but occasionally carry a charge, in this case $20.

On a frigid Thursday last month, Mr. Ungar and Ms. Mason, of Saugerties, N.Y., best known for their “Ashokan Farewell,” the musical cornerstone of the PBS documentary “The Civil War,” began with an hourlong performance. They played Irish reels, klezmer music, waltzes and love songs, and often they invited the sold-out audience of about 50 to sing along. “If you don’t catch on to the words we’re singing, use your own,” Mr. Ungar said in his introduction to his swing tune, “Backyard Symphony.”

Connor Dugan, of Madison, a virtuosic fiddler at only 16, joined them during several songs. He recalled that he befriended the couple when he was 10 years old; he knocked on their dressing room door during intermission at one of their performances with his violin in hand. “Hi, I’m Connor,” he said. “Want to play some tunes?”

Bluegrass jams and Irish sessions are as old as the music itself, with friends and neighbors usually gathering informally in a local pub to play together. But New Jersey has few such regular jams, and none that take the music as seriously as this one, several people at the MoJam said. Usually, Ms. Menzel said, “they’re run by some guy who likes to play and drink.”

“At mine, they like to play,” she added. “Because I bring in these special guests, they hone up on their skills.”

Ms. Menzel had lived in Houston for 25 years, and was working in cardiac research at the Texas Heart Institute there when her father, Richard Menzel, died suddenly. Mr. Menzel founded Menzel Violins, a repair shop, in 1973, and his daughter, who said she plays fiddle and mandolin only enough “to demo an instrument,” moved back to her native New Jersey in 2000 to take over the family business. But she had a hard time finding her place in what she described as the insular world of classical music. So in 2003 she created MoFiddles, a subsidiary of Menzel Violins dedicated to traditional music.

Strictly speaking, a violin and a fiddle are the same instrument. But according to Ms. Menzel, the difference is in attitude. “Do you want a vahhhse?” she asks, drawing out the word with a laugh. “Or a vase?”

“With classical music you have to train somebody,” she said. “ ‘No! No! No! Arm up up up!’ Traditional is however it goes, just so long as the story gets passed on. It’s extremely important for traditional music to be passed down from person to person.”

Which is where the MoJams come in. After the performance, around 20 audience members pulled out their guitars, upright basses, fiddles and mandolins, and pulled their chairs into a circle. The youngest member was 16; the oldest, 81. They were musicians, engineers, dentists, psychologists, professors and lawyers, like Richard Crossin, of South Orange, who had come with his fiddle and his fiddle teacher, Dan O’Dea, of Linden. “Most of the people here are just dedicated amateurs who would otherwise not have a forum to kick back and play,” Mr. Crossin said.

Ms. Menzel stood up to announce the start of the jam. “Who would like to lead the first tune?” she asked.

“Who knows ‘Fisher’s Hornpipe?’ ” Mr. Ungar asked. “In the key of D, perhaps?”

And off they went.

Surrounded by hundreds of instruments, in rows of rich reds and golds, they played “Arkansas Traveler,” “Angeline the Baker,” “Tennessee Waltz.” When a song was unfamiliar, Mr. Ungar played the melody one phrase at a time and the fiddlers played it back, while Ms. Mason showed the chords to the guitarists and banjo players.

Mr. Dugan suggested a rollicking bluegrass tune called “Whiskey Before Breakfast,” and before the plink of the mandolins had died down, Mr. Ungar called out the next one with a twinkle in his eye: “Key of G! ‘Temperance Reel!’ ”

FORWARD>Education>The Next Generation: Organizers and Activists Learn the Ropes

2009-01-22T11:00:00.000-08:00

The Next Generation: Organizers and Activists Learn the Ropes

By Beth Schwartzapfel
January 21, 2009

By 10 o’clock on a Saturday morning, a dozen bleary-eyed idealists were already milling around, chewing absently on bagels and sipping from little orange juice cartons. Sunlight streamed into the windows of the fifth floor of the brownstone on East 10th Street in New York City, where they had gathered to talk about leadership development and oppression. Later that day, they would use such words as “invisible-ize” and discuss systems of power and the best approach to knocking on doors on the Lower East Side. But they began the morning with an invocation of sorts, a reading from Grace Paley’s short story “Midrash on Happiness.”

“For happiness, she… required work to do in this world,” read 29-year-old Alissa Wise, who serves as the education director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, a Manhattan-based group that provides organization, education and advocacy. JFREJ had convened the Saturday meeting. “By work… she included the important work of raising children righteously up,” Wise continued. “By righteously she meant that along with being useful and speaking truth to the community, they must do no harm.” The 14 community organizers, seated in a circle, went around and read until the story ended. Then there was silence. Wise spoke first. “I love Grace Paley,” she said.

This was the fourth meeting of the inaugural class of the Grace Paley Organizing Fellowship, which JFREJ launched this year to train a new generation of organizers and activists. The fellows are mostly in their 20s, but they range in age from 19 to 45. Their religious observance runs the gamut from secular to Modern Orthodox. About half of them were already involved in JFREJ when the fellowships were announced, and they applied so that they could take their involvement to the next level; the other half used the fellowships as their way of becoming involved in JFREJ.

Rob Browne, a dentist who lives on Long Island with his wife and three children, had given money to JFREJ in the past, but otherwise had not been involved. Then one day, he heard some of his neighbors mention that they were looking to hire someone to clean their houses. “I said, gee, well, that’s a dynamic,” Browne said. “There seemed to be no rules. How much is paid, what the standards are in terms of hiring and firing people. It was all done differently from person to person. I thought, I know that’s what’s done, but there’s got to be something more organized.” Browne’s research into what Jewish law has to say about domestic workers led him to JFREJ and, shortly thereafter, to the fellowship.

Founded in 1990, JFREJ organizes its members to act on behalf of progressive causes in New York, such as labor and immigrants’ rights. In 1994, for example, JFREJ worked in support of the Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association in the association’s efforts to unionize a restaurant in Chinatown. For the past several years, two of JFREJ’s major campaigns have been Shalom Bayit, which aims to pass statewide Domestic Workers Bill of Rights legislation, and a Housing Justice campaign for affordable housing.

The six-month fellowship began in September 2008 and runs through February. In addition to attending these monthly training sessions and retreats, fellows commit to spending 16 hours per month working on one of the two campaigns, and to raising $500 toward JFREJ’s work. In addition, each fellow is assigned a seasoned organizing mentor from progressive groups around New York City, such as the not-for profits Jewish Funds for Justice and the Bronx Defenders. JFREJ received a grant from the Elias Foundation to help administer the fellowship, but participation is on a volunteer basis; no one is paid, including the fellows and the experts who lead workshops or conduct training at the fellows’ retreats.

JFREJ’s approach to training leaders is not simply to teach them concrete organizing skills, such as how best to knock on doors, make phone calls or organize a rally. The fellows certainly do learn these types of skills, both at these retreats and on the ground, in their work on the campaigns. At the recent Saturday meeting, for example, Yasmeen Perez, leadership development director of the group FIERCE, which is by and for gay and lesbian youth of color in New York City, taught a workshop on leadership development. But building of concrete skills is paired with theoretical and cultural analysis so that the fellows will have a context within which to understand the work they’re doing. On this particular afternoon, JFREJ’s executive director, Dara Silverman, and community organizer Danielle Ferris taught a workshop on anti-Jewish oppression. Some other topics have been imperialism and white supremacy, Jews and class, and gender and sexuality.

“The more knowledge I have as an organizer about how these systems work, the more power I have to affect positive change,” said Zach Scholl, 21, who has been involved with JFREJ for a year and a half, first as an intern and now as a fellow. “I really need to understand the ways that these systems of oppression affect us and divide us.”

After the Grace Paley reading, the fellows spent some time studying musar, or Jewish ethical practice. Wise is a fifth-year rabbinical student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and has, over the course of the fellowship, led discussions and study on taking responsibility for the “other.” The group reflected together on a passage from Exodus in which Moses’ father-in-law, Jethro, asks Moses to allow others to help him: “Why do you act alone, while all the people stand about you from morning until evening? The task is too heavy for you…. You cannot do it alone.” The group then broke into pairs to discuss what it means to be a good leader — when to ask for help, and when to take on tasks themselves. Most of the fellows are students; many work full time. Balance is a big issue.

After musar study, the fellows discussed the readings assigned to them that day, which included “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Relationships Between Black and Jewish Women,” written by feminist icon Barbara Smith, and “The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere: Making Resistance to Anti-Semitism Part of All of Our Movements,” a self-published pamphlet by Philadelphia activist April Rosenblum.

The fellows are mindful of the fact that they are rarely affected directly by the issues for which they are fighting. The question of what it means to work on behalf of, and in solidarity with, others is one that occupied much of the day’s discussion.

Vered Meir, 26, has been involved with the Shalom Bayit campaign for three years. She chose to apply for the fellowship even though she moved to Boston last fall. She has been commuting to New York once a month for training, and doing as much work as she can on the campaign remotely. “What’s hard about organizing as allies is that we have a choice to be involved or not, whereas somebody who’s being abused by their landlord, let’s say, doesn’t really have a choice,” she said. “I want to feel like my liberation is tied up in the liberation of [Domestic Workers United] members. I don’t want to feel like, yeah, I moved, so I’m not going to be involved anymore.”

Grace Paley, writer, activist and longtime JFREJ member, died in 2007. Wise says that the organization was looking for a way to honor her, so when the idea for the fellowships first emerged, it seemed like the perfect fit. Paley’s daughter, Nora, agreed. “This JFREJ fellowship is the right ship on the right sea to continue in her name,” she told the Forward. “How wonderful that these shining young people are on earth and willing to continue the human race in adamant decency. My mother would have been honored to meet each of them and work beside them, too.”

After Perez’s workshop, the fellows broke for lunch. They told stories, laughed, teased each other and chatted about their plans for the holidays. Before they reconvened to talk about oppression and what it means to be “out” as a Jew, they stood in a circle in the sunlight for a post-lunch warm-up. Lane Levine, community organizer for the Shalom Bayit campaign, had devised an “organizer stretch” — kind of like the hokey-pokey, but more grown-up. Sort of. “Stretch up for high goals!” he said, and all the fellows reached their arms to the ceiling. “Reach down to your grass roots!” They followed Levine’s lead, touching their toes, leaning left and right, touching their heads and wrapping their arms around themselves. As they finished, the room filled with flailing arms and legs: “Shake it out for social change!” Levine said, and they did.

FORWARD>Education>A Teacher’s Toolkit for Tackling Tough Issues

2009-01-22T10:51:00.000-08:00

A Teacher’s Toolkit for Tackling Tough Issues

Jewish Educators Learn To Address Bullying, Harassment and Eating Disorders

By Beth Schwartzapfel
January 20, 2009

On a recent Sunday morning, the third graders at Congregation Brothers of Israel Religious School, in Newtown, Pa., had just settled in for a snack. “There’s this little girl who’s adorable, 8 years old,” recalled Joan Hersch, the school’s principal. “And this boy in her class said: ‘You’re fat. You don’t need that doughnut. I’m going to eat it for you.’ And the girl said, ‘Okay,’ and pushed it over to him.”

Welcome to what Shira Epstein, assistant professor at the William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education, calls “an educational Jewish moment”: an opportunity to connect students’ everyday decisions and actions to Jewish teachings.

This past summer, Hersch attended a workshop run by Epstein and her colleague, Naomi Less, called “Addressing Evaded Issues in Jewish Education.” In the classroom, “what happens is, often it’s done with the best of intentions, but the socio-emotional issues get boxed off” in favor of traditional religious school curricula, such as preparation for b’nai mitzvah, Torah study and Hebrew-language lessons, Epstein said. The “Evaded Issues” workshops aim to integrate such issues as harassment and bullying, sexuality and relationships, sexism and gender identity, eating disorders and body image, and substance abuse into teachers’ educational “toolkits,” so that moments like the one in Hersch’s religious school don’t go unaddressed.

“A critical incident is a moment — as educators, we have 400 of them a day — when we have to decide how to respond, what to do,” Epstein said. “In the actual moment, you have things coming at you really fast. You don’t have time to think.” The workshops are a chance to “hit the pause button on the DVR. When we’re live with our students, we don’t have time to do that. If we can practice, and get better at it, then you’re better in the actual moment.”

Funded by the Jewish Women’s Foundation of New York, the Hadassah Foundation and the Dobkin Family Foundation, the “Evaded Issues” project eventually will entail a series of three two-hour workshops for educators. The first, launched last fall, encourages teachers and school administrators to look closely at their own gut reactions when uncomfortable subjects come up in the classroom. Maybe a teacher overhears one student calling another student a homophobic slur. Or perhaps during break time, a group of kids talk about how drunk they got last night. “There might be very real reasons that an educator might not intervene” at a moment like this, Epstein said. “The first thing we need to do is examine those reasons: Here are my own fears and discomforts. Let me put that under a microscope.”

Perhaps a teacher thinks it’s none of his business. Perhaps she doesn’t feel equipped to respond appropriately. Perhaps she doesn’t even realize there’s a problem that needs addressing. “It’s very difficult,” said Hersch, who also worked as a public school teacher for 40 years. In a different setting, she might have thought, “I’m opening a Pandora’s box, or, it’s going to get me in trouble. It’s not my job, I don’t have time and I don’t want to go there, because it will open up a whole other set of issues.” But in a religious school, Hersch said, responding is essential. “As Jewish educators, we answer to a higher authority,” she said. “We’re teaching values. And sometimes the kids don’t see how these little things add up to a big picture.”

The second and third workshops are currently being piloted and are slated for launch by June. Building on the first session, the remaining two will use role-playing, brainstorming, writing and other activities to help Jewish educators feel better prepared to respond when “evaded issues” come up in the classroom. This month, Epstein and Less held the first of what they hope will be a series of “train the trainer” sessions: Three students at the Jewish Theological Seminary (one rabbinical student, one cantorial student and one student at the Davidson School, which is a division of JTS) will participate. They, in turn, will a conduct schoolwide training session for other JTS students this spring.

As part of the “Evaded Issues” project, Epstein and Less also assembled a resource guide that includes listings of programs and resources that educators facing these issues might use, as well as a blueprint for those who would like to replicate some pieces of the “Evaded Issues” training in their own schools.

The trainings and the resource guide are aimed at teachers and administrators in all spheres of Jewish education, whether weekend religious school, Jewish day school or Jewish camp. “It’s not just that you’re teaching Jewish values,” Less said. “You’re teaching life skills. You’re teaching them how to be good human beings.”

As for Hersch, after that Sunday in religious school, she called the young girl’s mother to have a conversation with her about encouraging her daughter to love her body. Hersch is also planning a series of “pep rallies” for parents, “to give them ways to address body issues, when they’re dealing with ‘nobody likes me, everybody hates me.’”

These are both steps she admits she might not have taken had she not attended the “Evaded Issues” trainings. And in the moment? There were a million things she could have done. She could have said nothing. She could have engaged the boy about why he said what he said and how that might have made his classmate feel. She could have taken away the doughnuts. Instead, she looked at the girl and said, “Don’t let him tell you you’re fat; you’re gorgeous!” A drop of water in a wide sea, perhaps, but an educational moment all the same.

FORWARD>Giving>Let’s Talk About Sex

2008-11-13T08:18:00.000-08:00

Let’s Talk About Sex
Foundation Launches Educational Initiative

By Beth Schwartzapfel
Nov 13, 2008

Because she’s 17, Laura Alonge hears a lot of sex jokes. She and her friends have all seen “Knocked Up” and “Superbad” and the million other horny-stoner-kids films that have recently captured the hearts and minds of high schoolers across the country. It drives her crazy, though, that her peers don’t know truth from fiction. “They hear in a Seth Rogan movie, ‘the law of gravity, what goes up must come down,’ and they think you can’t get pregnant if you’re on top,” she said. Even at her public high school, in what she describes as her “very liberal, not very religious” town of Lynbrook, N.Y., on Long Island, “sex ed was too short and too late. The kids weren’t really walking away with what they needed.” So Alonge, in her quest to make sure she and her peers received scientifically accurate, age-appropriate, comprehensive sex education in their schools, teamed up with an unlikely partner: a faith-based organization.

The National Council of Jewish Women launched in September a campaign called “Sex Ed Works!” as part of its Plan A initiative for contraceptive access. The initiative provides resources, support, information and advocacy to local chapters that are tackling issues on access to contraception and sexuality education. “Everything supports [comprehensive sex education],” NCJW President Nancy Ratzan said. “The polling supports it, scientific data supports it and common sense supports it. The only real pushback against it is an extreme religious view about sex, and marriage, and procreation.”

Last year, on the 42nd anniversary of Griswold v. Connecticut (the landmark 1965 Supreme Court decision that overturned a state ban on birth control and guaranteed a Constitutional “right to marital privacy”), NCJW launched Plan A. Funded by the Ford Foundation, Plan A has as its cornerstone an 80-page “toolkit” that helps members of NCJW’S local chapters take action in five areas: pharmacist refusal, comprehensive sex education, emergency contraception (also known as “the morning after pill” and marketed in the United States as Plan B), affordable contraception and access to contraception for young women. “Sex Ed Works!” a poster and fact sheet, is meant to supplement the toolkit for members focusing on the education component of the program.

A 2004 Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that more than 90% of American parents thought that sex education, which included information about HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, and about birth control, was appropriate for middle or high schoolers. Despite this, the federal government has spent $1.5 billion in funding for “abstinence-only” education programs, even in the face of federally funded research demonstrating that these programs do not reduce the number of teen pregnancies or sexually transmitted infections.

The idea for Plan A took shape in 2006, when “we were hearing about grown women who took prescriptions for birth control into pharmacies and the pharmacists refused to fill them,” said NCJW’s director of Washington operations, Sammie Moshenberg, who helped develop the program. “A lot of times, the obstacles [to contraception] were couched in a religious context. For us, that’s not only a restriction on our reproductive health, but frankly, it’s a restriction on religious liberty, as well.”

Nationwide, four states — Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi and South Dakota — have passed laws allowing pharmacists to refuse to fill contraception prescriptions on moral or religious grounds, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a New York-based reproductive health research and policy organization. An additional five states have refusal laws that are worded broadly enough to apply to pharmacists.

As part of Plan A, Connecticut’s five NCJW chapters used the toolkit to help pass the Healthy Teens Act, which would have provided funding to local school districts for comprehensive sex education (the bill passed the state House and Senate last year, but was not funded by the governor). A chapter in California worked with a shelter for at-risk youth to distribute condoms and information. And the Peninsula chapter, on Long Island, launched a program to train teenagers as peer educators on issues of sexuality and contraception — which is how Alonge got involved. She was “born and raised in an Italian, Roman Catholic family,” and Alonge is the first to admit that it was an unlikely match. “You kind of associate Judaism with religious tradition. Stereotypically, you think the older generation are a little more conservative with their views.” And the women she’s worked with? “They’re totally not like that! They understand that to keep our young kids healthy, they need to give them knowledge to make proper decisions for themselves.”

The Forward>Fast Forward>The House of Rothschild: A Memoir

2008-10-03T19:48:00.001-07:00

The House of Rothschild: A Memoir

By Beth Schwartzapfel
October 2, 2008

When Matthew Rothschild was 8 years old, his grandfather told him a story about a little boy from Chelm who lost his name down a hole. “He was walking along the road,” his grandfather told him, “and shouted his name into the hole. It wasn’t until he got home that he realized it was gone forever.” Unlike the boy from Chelm, whose name would likely have faded into obscurity whether or not it was lost down a hole, little Matthew was an heir to New York’s branch of the Rothschild clan, the international banking and finance dynasty: His name was no small thing to lose.

 Still, if you ask him whether having been disowned by his mother and cut off from the family fortune makes him feel like that little boy, Matthew will say no. “When you choose, it’s different from losing,” he said in an interview with the Forward. “I think I’m the better for it.” Now a 27-year-old high-school English teacher, Matthew Rothschild has written “Dumbfounded” (Crown), a memoir of his years growing up with his elderly and eccentric grandparents.

The young Rothschild, an overweight boy with a Jewfro and a penchant for show tunes, is a lovable narrator. The breadth and scope of his childhood misbehavior are epic, and they provide almost as much comic material as his grandmother’s antics (at one point, she brings home a peasant woman as a souvenir from China) and his grandfather’s struggle to maintain his genteel composure in the face of it all.

“Jewish delicatessens and bakeries may punctuate every other block of New York City,” Rothschild writes, “but thirty years after my grandparents settled on the Upper East Side’s Museum Mile, theirs was still the only Jewish name in the most exclusive building in the most exclusive neighborhood in one of the most exclusive cities in the world.”

Matthew’s grandfather, a lifelong diplomat, was concerned with fitting in among the family’s WASPy neighbors — he hated to use the white limousine after Labor Day — but the child’s feisty grandmother loved to make a scene, and she insisted that “oil paintings do not run our life!” When young Matthew’s elite grade school offered only a Christmas backdrop for the Student-of-the-Month photos, the boy’s grandmother came storming into the headmaster’s office, shouting “I’ll drop-kick his Santa-loving ass from here to Macy’s!” When she found young Matthew playing dress-up with a maid’s clothing, his grandmother insisted that he “have some self-respect”: It was a cheap dress, and she was not pleased. “The next time you want to wear a dress,” she said, “come get me, and we’ll find you something decent.”

 But the book has an emotional core that prevents it from being simply comical. Matthew’s antics reveal a lonely boy clamoring for attention. As Rothschild explained: “I only acted out around holidays: Christmas, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day. I only realize this now because I’m a teacher and I see it with my students. I wanted someone to tell me that good attention is not the same as bad attention and that I could get attention for other things.” His classmates’ “Upper East Side Syndrome,” which provides so much comic fodder, is also a window through which Matthew tries to understand his distant mother.

 Although his mother handed him off to her parents when he was only a baby, Rothschild was 19 and a college freshman before he finally abandoned any remaining hope of having a relationship with her. She had often disappointed him, but the betrayal that finally ended their relationship was a larger one than most, as he recounts in the memoir.

“I was so mad, I was so terribly upset, that I decided I was going to go off on my own to spite her,” he told the Forward. “To elect for a life of obscurity or poverty when what you could have is so much more phenomenal, you have to be fueled by either saintly aspirations or some serious anger.”

 He paid his own way through the remainder of college, trying his hand at a wide variety of jobs. “I had to do a lot of things that I’d never had to do before — that I had no idea people actually did,” he said, somewhat sheepishly. “Like pay your own bills.” From museum docent to teaching assistant to software architect to video game developer — even a short stint as a busker on a San Francisco street corner — it took Rothschild several years before he stumbled on a copy of David Sedaris’s essay collection “Me Talk Pretty One Day” and discovered his calling. “The way that I was laughing and having such a great time while I was reading this book, I realized, this is what I want to do. I want to make people laugh the way I’m laughing right now,” he said.  And if his name gave him a leg up in the publishing world — after all, few 26-year-olds can sell a memoir on spec and get enough of an advance to quit their job, as Matthew has done after four years as a teacher — well, as far as he is concerned, it’s a bit of poetic justice. “It’s only slightly ironic that the financial success that I’ve achieved in the last couple of years has come from me writing this book about my family,” he said. “I get a little chuckle out of that.”

Brown Alumni Magazine>What's in a Building?

2008-09-26T10:06:00.000-07:00

What's in a Building?

When Brown announced plans last year for a new mind, brain, and behavior building, a group of faculty, students, and alumni objected that the Urban Environmental Lab would have to be torn down. What followed was a debate about how to capture the future without forgetting the past.

By Beth Schwartzapfel and Norman Boucher
September/October 2008

In 1963, a young professor of chemistry named Harold Ward arrived on campus to begin his teaching duties at Brown. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring had been published the year before, and Congress had just passed its first law authorizing the development of a program to address the rising problem of air pollution. Although concern for the environment had not yet coalesced into a movement, many health groups found themselves trying to understand the jargon of pollution science. Organizations like the American Lung Association called on Brown's chemistry department to decode strange new terms like micrograms per cubic meter.

The work intrigued Ward. He began to conceive of a role for the University at the forefront of helping the country grapple with the degradation of its biological environment. The idea simmered with Ward and his students for more than a decade, as national anxiety over pollution and the loss of wildlife escalated, prompting the passage, during the Nixon administration, of many of the federal pollution laws still in effect today. In 1970, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency opened its doors, and Ward began attending regional meetings of its officers and scientists.

On campus, meanwhile, students, taking advantage of the landmark curriculum reforms of 1969, began developing independent concentrations focused on the environment. By 1978, their numbers had grown large enough for them to begin looking for a place where they could assemble and exchange ideas. That year, on Sun Day—precursor to today's Earth Day—Ward and his students established the Center for Environmental Studies (CES) in the Metcalf Chemistry Lab on Thayer Street. A year later, the University approved a concentration program in environmental studies.

Despite these successes, Ward and his students sought a dedicated home for the center, a laboratory of sorts that would provide a comfortable gathering space while demonstrating both traditional and cutting-edge ways of reducing humans' impact on the planet. They envisioned a building with excellent exposure to the sun, which would allow them to mount solar panels on its roof. They imagined a place where students could live out the ideas they were studying and where classes could be taught. A garden would serve as a reminder of the human connection to the earth and draw in neighbors. The location, one student said at the time, would be a model "that will showcase the maximum of what can be done in an urban environment."

In 1979, they found their building: the nineteenth-century carriage house at 135 Angell Street. Designed by Lucian Sharpe, the architect responsible for Sayles Hall, the building had fallen into disrepair and was being used to store plant-operations equipment. Once the University administration had approved the move, Ward hired a RISD graduate to supervise the teams of students who would do much of the renovating: stripping off rotted wood, putting on a new roof, and installing new windows and super-thick insulation. Photographs from the time depict students hauling away trash cans full of construction debris, shoveling earth from the basement into a wheelbarrow under the light of a bare bulb, scrambling along the roof, and installing the greenhouse that is still the source of much of the building's heat. Working on the building, one student told the BAM in 1982, "was a distinct break from studying. It freshens you up."

Ward is in many of those photos from the early 1980s, his beard and hair a dark brown, his hands stuffed into his pockets or resting jauntily on his hips. "We did a lot of things that were experimental at the time," he says. "In 1981, you couldn't buy the kind of windows that now are common: double-paned and metal-coated on the inside so they reflect heat," he says. "These things are all standard now." Ward was also skilled at raising money for the renovations: more than $200,000 from the Mellon Foundation and a U.S. Department of Energy grant for energy conservation. "We wanted to demonstrate that we could take an older building and make it energy efficient," Ward says. The carriage house, he believes, was one of the first "green" buildings in the country, and certainly the first at a major university. "H.G. Wells, if he were alive and house-hunting," a BAM writer noted in 1981, "would be proud to live in a house like the one ... renovated at 135 Angell Street."

Five students lived in the Urban Environmental Lab (UEL) in its early years, and instead of paying rent they planted and managed the garden, gave educational tours, and maintained the house. Students measured the house's energy flow and monitored experiments. The tours were so popular that Ward began offering a class in basic home-energy issues. Teams of students went into Providence neighborhoods to help residents make their homes more energy efficient. Eventually, as environmental studies grew as an academic discipline, most of the students moved out to make way for offices. The UEL seemed here to stay.

In 2001, when President Ruth Simmons arrived at Brown, she found it lagging behind the other Ivy schools in terms of endowment and research funding. Classroom space was growing short, and labs were aging, threatening the prestige of the Graduate School. Aided by her senior staff, Simmons set to work crafting the ambitious Plan for Academic Enrichment. It mapped out an investment of more than a billion dollars to bolster the endowment, increase financial aid, and hire at least 100 new faculty. Brown would invest more fully in its graduate and medical schools, and would explore how and where to build new labs, classrooms, and performance spaces, all aimed at keeping it among the world's greatest universities.

One of the thorniest problems Simmons faced was providing the modern research, classroom, and living space that a twenty-first-century university requires. Providence neighborhoods hem in Brown on all sides, and although this integration with the city is a great strength, it also limits how much the University can expand beyond its current geographical footprint.

So in 2002, Simmons turned to Frances Halsband, of the New York City firm R.M. Kliment & Frances Halsband Architects. Halsband and her team spent more than fifteen months studying the history of Brown and its relationship to Providence. Halsband and her team interviewed hundreds of people. These included students, faculty, alumni, and staff; Providence residents; members of the city council and the mayor's office; and local business owners and civic leaders. In 2004, Halsband produced the Strategic Framework for Physical Planning, a master plan to guide the campus's physical growth for decades to come.

One of Halsband's central ideas was the concept of "consolidating the core": the University could avoid expanding into the neighborhoods by better utilizing the space it already had. Halsband identified potential sites for new buildings on campus, and suggested linking them through a series of walkways and green spaces that, among other things, would finally connect the Pembroke campus with the College Green. For years students walking from one campus to the other had to shortcut past a gas station and through a parking lot, skirting a row of dumpsters along the way. A goal of improved "circulation infrastructure," according to the strategic framework, would be to "foster community and to unify and enhance the campus."

Of the roughly 240 buildings that Brown owned, Halsband found that 105 were originally intended as residences. Many students and faculty insist that these houses help give Brown its village-like character, and are fond of their quirky architecture and human scale. But Halsband believed the houses were often inappropriate for the kind of academic work that's at the leading edge of today's research and teaching. "Normally what happens is, you give the chairman of the department the living room, you put the graduate students in the basement or the attic, you put the Xerox machine in the bathtub, and you hope for the best," Halsband says. "The minute that department starts growing and you run out of rooms, what do you do?"

Because most of Brown's houses were built long before accessibility and fire codes even existed, any time the University renovates, it must bring a house up to code. "A house has to have two enclosed fire stairs; it has to be sprinkled; it has to have an elevator," says Mike McCormick, Brown's assistant vice president for planning, design, and construction. Once all those renovations are made, he points out, the house may no longer have enough usable space to meet an academic department's needs.

Still, McCormick says, Brown has gone to great lengths to preserve its houses. Some have been converted back to residences as part of the Brown-to-Brown program, another of Halsband's recommendations: the University sells a house to a Brown faculty member at less than market value in exchange for the purchaser's promise to sell the house back later to the University. Other houses have been retrofitted to twenty-first-century standards. Last year the University spent $4.6 million to move the 300-ton Peter Green House, home of the history department, from Angell Street, where it stood in the path of the Walk, to its new home on Brown Street. "Many of the houses that we have make perfect academic and administrative space," McCormick says. "But there are also many that are too small to justify using in that same way."

Simmons and her senior staff recognize that if Brown is to attract the best faculty members, it must provide them with the best research and lab space possible, and many of the new buildings proposed under the Plan for Academic Enrichment aim to fulfill this goal. Late last year, Brown drew up plans for a new "mind, brain, and behavior" building to house the cognitive and linguistic sciences department, the psychology department, and the administrative offices for the Brain Science Program. Although the building is still being designed, and the money for it has not yet been completely raised, a location for it has been chosen. It will sit near the new Walk, where the UEL stands today.

Harold Ward, now professor emeritus of environmental studies, is not happy with this plan. Either the UEL will need to be moved to a new spot and reconfigured, or the CES, which had migrated to the UEL from Metcalf, will be forced to find new space. The University offered to move the CES to the third floor of the Metcalf Chemistry Lab—right back where the center started, an irony that was not lost on Ward. Ward blasted the center's alumni e-mail list with news about the University's plans, and some CES alumni formed a Save the UEL listserv. Ward called the Providence Preservation Society and the Providence Journal. Soon University Hall was receiving letters from irate alumni detailing the unique educational experiences they'd had in the building. They circulated a petition that soon had more than 150 signatures. Then, in May of this year, the UEL and two buildings adjacent to it made number one on the Providence Preservation Society's Most Endangered Properties list. The Providence Journal's David Brussat wrote an editorial in favor of protecting the building. It was titled "How to Preserve Brown's Spirit."

Associate Professor of Environmental Studies Steven Hamburg, who last year was the CES's interim director, also would like to see the building saved. On a recent Monday afternoon, he sat on a couch in the UEL's student lounge as an alumna worked nearby on one of the room's public computers. Students and faculty walked past, climbing up and down the creaky stairs that lead to the offices on the second floor. Hamburg argues that in addition to embodying the center's history, the building is the perfect space for promoting another priority: working across disciplines. "You need social spaces," he said. "You don't say, 'Now I'm going to collaborate with this person!' I run into Kurt [Teichert, one of the CES faculty], and then we start talking. You have to create space to create that synergy." He gestured towards the lounge, the kitchen, and the community garden outside the door. Gardeners from the neighborhood often wander in and chat with students about their turnips or the weather. Upstairs was a living room with a functioning fireplace, where many an impromptu meeting was held until it was subdivided into office space last year. "These spaces created that energy, which creates community." He turned around to look at the shoddy temporary wall behind the couch, also put up last year, which carved a conference room out of the student lounge. "It looks ramshackle now," he acknowledged, "because it hasn't been maintained. They were planning on tearing it down."

Other faculty members are not so sure the UEL remains central to environmental studies. They argue that technology, among other things, has changed the academic discipline, and the building on Angell Street may not be the ideal space for today's work. Even as they hate the thought of demolishing the UEL, some members of the CES community could see the benefit of moving back to Metcalf. When Kurt Teichert asked students in his Environmental Stewardship and Sustainable Design class to draw up plans for a green renovation of Metcalf's third floor, they envisioned a modern greenhouse and the latest solar panels on the roof of the building. Metcalf is also directly across the street from MacMillan Hall, home of environmental sciences and chemistry, and right at the center of campus. A renovated south stair in Metcalf could also connect the third floor directly to Lincoln Field. And the third floor of Metcalf contains 5,000 square feet, compared to the UEL's 4,000, with an attic that could also eventually be renovated and used.

Many of the green technologies that made the UEL so innovative in the 1980s look quaint today. "I walked past UEL the other day," Halsband says, "and I looked at those tiny little skylights that they have on the roof, and I thought, 'Wow, if you did that today, you would do an entire glass roof. Just blow the thing off. Just have solar panels and all kinds of amazing shading devices.'" These days, such technological advances as Geographic Information Systems and satellite imaging have become essential tools for understanding the environment. Computers can analyze water and soil samples "in a way you couldn't even dream about" when the center was founded, Ward admits. A fully modern facility, says Caroline Karp, a senior lecturer in environmental studies who has been with the CES since 1992, would have "really modern audio-visual capabilities, the ability to get real-time data" from various ecosystems around the world. It would need "a big mapping center or stations with monitors where people can do geographic or spatially oriented research," Karp says. Whether these activities can realistically happen in a creaky old house is open to debate.

What's more, as a result of the Plan for Academic Enrichment, the CES faculty is growing. The center is in the process of hiring a new director, and the hope is that its faculty and graduate program will continue to get bigger. Even before the mind, brain, and behavior building was announced, the CES leadership recognized that the UEL would soon need an addition or the program would have to move to a bigger space.

Caroline Karp argues that a renovation of Metcalf could be to the current generation what the UEL renovation was to the last one. "I think for a place like Rhode Island one of the big ideas is, how do we renovate historic old buildings at an almost industrial scale?" Just as New England's old mill buildings must be renovated to meet twenty-first-century needs, she says, Metcalf could be a demonstration project with implications for urban renewal in a city like Providence. "Renovating a very large historic building that is in the center of campus has big symbolic meaning" for the center, Karp says. "If we're over on the Pembroke campus"—one of the proposed sites for moving the UEL—"we're further away from the center of campus. Anything really creative that gets done there is just a little bit more of a satellite-type effort."

A move to Metcalf would have many drawbacks, however—more, many environmental studies faculty and alumni argue, than would be practical. The University allocated $6 million for a green renovation of the third floor, but even that would not be enough to do a feasible demonstration project there. A green renovation of just one floor of a building that size would require isolating the third floor's ventilation and insulation, a prohibitively expensive task. The required new elevator alone would take a big chunk out of the budget. Many CES faculty and alumni believe that the Metcalf site would rob the CES of its identity as a place that was on the ground level, both literally and figuratively, of the environmental community in Providence. The community garden would no longer be right outside the door, and the urge for passersby to just drop in would largely disappear.

On June 9, Mike McCormick convened the environmental studies community at the UEL to announce a newer plan. The Corporation, he said, had been "hearing from everybody. They're hearing from alumni, they're hearing from neighbors, they're hearing from the Preservation Society." As a result, the Metcalf plans have now been set aside in favor of moving the UEL to the corner of Brown and Cushing streets.

Ironically, several mature trees will need to be cut down to make way for the building's footprint, but the park that's currently there will surround the building and connect it with the adjacent Pembroke campus. The site also might offer space for a community garden, and the steep incline may allow for an extra basement-level floor. Joining the UEL to a nearby building on the new site might one day afford more space.

Steven Hamburg is among those applauding this latest decision. The UEL, he says, "represents a set of values, values that were forward-thinking in 1982. Those values haven't changed. If you tear [the building] down, you've negated the very existence of the building." He continues: "The idea that a gleaming building represents progress is an incredibly narrow-minded view of the world. If everyone makes their buildings state-of-the-art every twenty years, that's not sustainable."

Others are not so sure. To make this move work, only the shell of the original building can be saved; the entire interior will need to be rebuilt. Almost none of the original green-building design characteristics will move with the house: the greenhouse will be demolished, as will the basement with its brick arches designed to trap heat and cool the house in summer. If the basement expansion on the new site doesn't work out, the total interior space will be the same, if not smaller, and won't leave the program room to grow.

About thirty CES alumni attended the June 9 meeting, many via speaker phone. Also present were current students and faculty, several staff members from the Providence Preservation Society, and a few gardeners in floppy sun hats. Several alumni argued passionately on behalf of preserving the UEL. Then Caroline Karp turned to them with a question.

"We're talking about a building," she said. "What I want to know is whether your allegiance is to a building, whether your allegiance is to a program, separate from the building, or whether building and program go together no matter what. My allegiance is to the program. And maybe I have a form of autism here, because I care about the program, I want the program to survive. The program to me is the people. The intellectual and social capital and human capital."

As of this writing, the fate of the UEL is still not entirely certain. For the time being, it sprawls in yellows and greens on Angell Street, fronted by a community garden whose rows of arugula, tomatoes, marigolds, and rhubarb are surrounded by a bright new wooden fence. Would moving the building be an expression of Brown's belief in continuity and symbol? Or an expensive concession to sentiment and nostalgia?

The debate over the building's fate goes to the heart of the changes Brown is undergoing. The competition for top students and faculty grows more intense with each passing year, particularly in the Ivy League. Technology and academic disciplines now evolve rapidly; staying ahead of the onrushing wave while remaining true to such core values as nourishing community and preserving a human scale is one of the greatest challenges Brown faces. The fate of the UEL is a case in point. Can Brown remember its own history while evolving to meet the needs of the future? The University is struggling to get the answer right.

FORWARD>Schmooze>Sound the Bagpipes: Scots Design Jewish Tartan

2008-07-17T15:53:00.000-07:00

Sound the Bagpipes: Scots Design Jewish Tartan

By Beth Schwartzapfel

Thu. Jul 17, 2008

Rabbi Mendel Jacobs was never much of a kilt man. Although he is the only Scottish-born rabbi living in Scotland, he had always preferred suits to the traditional dress of his home country. Until now. The Scottish Tartans Authority recently registered the only official Jewish tartan, which was designed with Jacobs’s input. He plans to wear a kilt in the Jewish Tartan pattern to his sister’s wedding in November.

Tartan is the Scottish word for “plaid.” Traditionally, various clans or regions each had a unique pattern; the MacDonalds or the MacKenzies would pass down the pattern of their ancestors through the generations. The Tartan playing field has widened considerably in recent years: The Tartans Authority has registered patterns for Sikhs, Chinese, the state of Indiana and the Fire Department of New York’s bagpipe band. But it wasn’t until last year that Jacobs, a Glasgow Lubavitch rabbi, decided it was time for the members of his congregation and beyond to be able to “combine their Scottish heritage and Jewish heritage together.”

“People connect with their Judaism in different ways,” he told The Shmooze. “They might not wear a regular kippah, but they might wear a Jewish Tartan kippah.”

The Tartan is made with 100% wool, in keeping with the biblical prohibition against wearing sha’atnez, or a wool-linen mix. (It may be more than 90 degrees in parts of the United States this summer, but Jacobs said it never gets too hot to wear wool in Scotland.) All the elements of the pattern were chosen for their symbolic significance. The central colors are blue and white, representing the flags of both Israel and Scotland, and the design incorporates gold, silver and red, which represent the Ark, the adornment on the Torah and the Kiddush wine.

Jacobs has set up a Web site and an eBay store to peddle goods made with the Tartan print. Profits, he said, go to Chabad of Scotland and to other charitable organizations. Besides the hand-pleated kilts, which cost £330 (around $650) and up, gents can order cummerbunds, ties and “fishtail dress trousers,” among other sartorial items. Pens, mouse pads and Titleist golf balls — all tartan printed — are also available. Jacobs said he has shipped upward of 500 items since the Tartan debuted in May, to places as far away as Peru. In the works is a shot glass featuring the Tartan pattern and a phrase that plays on the Scottish word for “lake” and the Hebrew “To life”: “loch chaim!”

FORWARD>Fast Forward>The Word of God, Rewritten

2008-05-29T17:51:00.000-07:00

The Word of God, Rewritten

By Beth Schwartzapfel
May 29, 2008

On the upcoming festival of Shavuot, we commemorate the day when Moses carried the Torah — with its 613 rules, injunctions and guidelines on how to live a Jewish life — down from Mount Sinai. Some of its commandments, like “Do not murder” and “Love the stranger,” ring as true today as they did in the Sinai desert. Others, like “Destroy the seed of Amalek” and “Do not eat the flesh of an ox that was condemned to be stoned,” require a little creativity to remain applicable to the lives of 21st-century Jews.

So, two San Francisco-based artists have set up a Web site that allows Jews everywhere to apply their own brand of creativity and humor to the task. (RE)velation (http://revelation.xoxco.com) users “remix” the commandments, using colloquial English and a modern sensibility to reinterpret the lessons of the mitzvot. Thus, “Do not carry tales” becomes “Gossip magazines are not your friend,” and, in a rather unorthodox take, “Do not leave a beast that has fallen down beneath its burden, unaided” becomes “Mick Jagger just wants you to make love to him.” It’s sort of like a Talmud wiki.

“There’s nothing new about what we’re doing,” (RE)velation co-creator Ben Brown said. “There is a long tradition of scholarly interpretation and reinterpretation of the text. This is just a hyper-modern take on that process.” The Web site is only the first step in what ultimately will be a multimedia art installation that will be unveiled on Shavuot at the San Francisco-based DAWN festival.

DAWN was launched in 2005 as a new take on the Shavuot tradition of all-night Torah study: From late at night until the wee hours of morning, attendees partake in Jewish-themed musical performances, art installations, literary salons and religious discussions. This year, DAWN will mark the grand opening of San Francisco’s new Contemporary Jewish Museum, and (RE)velation will be one of the cornerstones of the event. Images of Mount Sinai will be projected onto a wall, and the text of the original 613 commandments, along with hundreds of their “remixed” counterparts, will descend from above. The voices of (RE)velation participants reading their commandments aloud will play from on high. A kiosk will allow visitors to offer their own reinterpretations, and their contributions will be integrated into the installation in real time. With lights and sound, the idea is that participants can “heavily re-imagine the experience of being at the foot of Mount Sinai while the commandments descend from above,” Brown said.

Skeptics might allege that when the God of Exodus said, “Do not muzzle a beast, while it is working in produce which it can eat and enjoy,” he most certainly did not mean “Go ahead — text during meetings. Really.” But some might say that’s exactly what he meant.

“You gotta be in conversation with the tradition,” co-creator Ari Kelman said. Besides, “I would hope God has a sense of humor.”

Rhode Island Monthly>The Advocate

2008-05-24T11:48:00.001-07:00

The Advocate

State child advocate Jametta Alston is willing to protect children in DCYF custody at all costs. Even if her bold decision to sue the state for neglect forces her to commit career suicide, she’s determined to make her case for the kids.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
June 2008

This piece won 1st place in the profile category of the Rhode Island Press Association's 2008 editorial awards.

Growing up in working class West Philadelphia, Jametta Alston never dreamed she’d be a lawyer. No, she had her sights set elsewhere: Broadway. The lights, the drama, the power to transport people to another place.

Twenty years later, Alston has plenty of drama in her life. But it’s not on a stage. Here, in Courtroom Four of the United States District Court for the District of Rhode Island, the focus is on children. Lawyer and governor-appointed Child Advocate Jametta Alston is convinced that the state is turning its back on its most vulnerable and wounded children, children whom it has sworn to protect. So Alston is doing what many consider the unthinkable. She’s suing her boss.

“It is just amazing to me how hardened hearts appear to be,” Alston says. “These children are being neglected, abused. And we should do nothing?”

Nothing—or worse than nothing—is what Alston accuses the Department of Children, Youth, and Families of doing in the face of its responsibilities. DCYF is charged with removing children from parents who abuse them or who don’t take care of their basic needs. The agency maintains a stable of foster homes, group homes and shelters to house the children while they are in state custody, and must either work with the biological parents so the children can return home safely or arrange for the children to be adopted. The sole responsibility of the independent child advocate’s office is to watch over DCYF: to ensure children are safe and well cared for while in state custody, to lobby the legislature on their behalf, and—if all else fails—to take legal action to protect their rights.

Alston, who was appointed to the post some two and a half years ago, had always seen this last option as a last resort. At her 2005 confirmation hearing for the post, she said, “I truly believe that if I must take matters to court, it means I’ve failed. I have failed to find the words or ways or means to...resolve matters in a beneficial way for the children of Rhode Island.”

Two years later—almost to the day—Alston filed suit in federal court against Governor Donald Carcieri, former Secretary of Health and Human Services Jane Hayward, and DCYF Director Patricia Martinez. Representing “Sam and Tony M.,” “Caesar S.,” and five other children whom she will argue represent a class, Alston’s lawsuit says DCYF “is plagued by fundamental, systemic failings of great depth and scope.” Not just benign neglect, the failings alleged in the lawsuit add up to willful ignorance—or worse. Federal dollars squandered because the agency simply didn’t meet the benchmarks for safety and efficiency required to qualify for them. Children placed in homes with people known to have committed domestic assault and sex offenses. Whole young lives destroyed by the instability and abuse suffered in custody of the state:

DAVID T. is a thirteen-year-old boy who has been in DCYF’s custody for eleven years. DCYF has cycled him through more than fourteen placements...When David was four years old...DCYF moved David to a shelter. David has not lived in a home since, and his lifetime of living in institutions, compounded with the stress of [a] disrupted adoptive placement, has caused his mental health to steadily deteriorate.

The statistics are damning. Each year from 2000 to 2005, Rhode Island ranked forty-ninth or fiftieth in the country in rates of maltreatment and neglect of children in state custody. Thirty-five to 40 percent of children in foster care are living in institutions—twice the national average. More than 60 percent of children do not receive enough face time with their caseworkers. Children in state care are experiencing abuse or neglect at twice the rate of the general population. “If they’re going to be raped and beaten [in DCYF care]—literally raped and beaten—then leave them at home,” says Alston. “You’ve taken them from something they know and said, ‘We’re going to make you safe.’ And then you put them in a place where they’re brutalized? It’s wrong.”

Four hundred fifty million dollars is a lot of money. It’s enough money to stop legislators and budget-makers and taxpayers dead in their tracks. It’s the size of the projected deficit in the state budget for the coming fiscal year, and it’s apt to keep growing.

Discussions about DCYF’s alleged shortcoming always come down to this: money. The 2008 DCYF budget totals $232.7 million—a $37.3 million decrease from 2007. Budget shortfalls caused two major changes to DCYF policy last year. The first, now reversed and widely acknowledged to have been a mistake, was legislators’ decision to try seventeen-year-olds as adults, and, if convicted, send them to adult prison. The second was to cut children off from DCYF services at age eighteen instead
of at age twenty-one.

Patricia Martinez declined to be interviewed for this story, but several other top administrators in the DCYF orbit testify that many of the Department’s failings, so painstakingly detailed in the lawsuit, are simply a matter of dollars and cents. On the issue of overburdened caseworkers, for instance, Lucie Burdick, president of SEIU Local 580, the union that serves DCYF’s social workers, says the union has been working with the Department to try to keep caseloads down. “Of course, what happened [since the last contract negotiation] is the caseloads became intolerable,” she says. Burdick doesn’t blame the Department, though. “DCYF doesn’t get the money they need to do things properly.”

On the other hand, even working within a tight budget, according to the lawsuit and to people familiar with the Department, many of DCYF’s financial woes could be avoided with better management. “It is an issue of money, but it’s also an issue of system reform, and we need to be working on both simultaneously,” says Elizabeth Burke Bryant, executive director of the nonprofit children’s advocacy organization, Rhode Island Kids Count. Burke Bryant declined to comment on the lawsuit specifically, citing ongoing work her agency does with both the child advocate’s office and DCYF, but she did acknowledge that “there are opportunities to improve the system even in this tight financial climate.”

Federal funds, for example, are available to states to help care for children with special needs in foster care, as long as states meet certain standards; this year, Rhode Island will forfeit $1.5 million of those funds because it places too many children in unlicensed foster homes.

Too many cuts in caseworker positions (or too few hires) have led to overwork and stress among the remaining caseworkers, which has led to low morale and even more staff departures. Rosa Gough was a DCYF caseworker until 2004; she loved her job, she says, but high caseloads and her frustration at what she saw as the system’s unresponsiveness to change eventually forced her out. In the years before she left, Gough says, case workers were regularly assigned eighteen or nineteen families, even though at one time DCYF’s target caseload cap was fourteen; with many families having more than one child, the number of children under their supervision at times reached as high as thirty. It was impossible for them to follow up appropriately with all of their clients, she says. This left her walking around with a constant low-level dread that at any moment she would get a call with the news that one of her kids was dead.

As a result, kids like David T. fall through the cracks, as the lawsuit alleges: DCYF removed David from his mother...due to neglect...By the time David entered foster care, his mother had already been deemed unfit to care for at least one of David’s siblings and had lost her parental rights. Despite clear indications that David had been sexually abused while in his mother’s care, DCYF failed to ensure that he received a sexual abuse evaluation or appropriate treatment...DCYF first placed David with a foster mother with whom he lived for two years and to whom he became attached. This was the first—and last—loving, lasting, stable home David would experience for the next eleven years. At the age of four, David was removed from the foster mother he referred to as “Mommy Mary,” because she was unable to continue to care for him. Despite its obligation to place David in a family-like environment, DCYF moved the young child to a shelter.

David and six other children in DCYF custody are the named plaintiffs represented by Alston, Providence lawyer John Dineen, and several lawyers from the New York-based nonprofit Children’s Rights, which specializes in bringing lawsuits like this. Attorneys for the state have filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. If Senior U.S. District Court Judge Ronald R. Lagueux rules that the case can go forward, the plaintiffs’ lawyers will next try to argue that the abuses they allege are widespread enough to allow the named plaintiffs to stand in for all children in DCYF custody, making this a class-action suit.

Children’s Rights has been involved with a dozen successful such lawsuits, from New Mexico to New Jersey. Typically, it will begin when an advocate or attorney on the ground, like Alston, contacts Children’s Rights; if Children’s Rights finds the case strong enough, the organization will offer its legal and organizational support. Because Children’s Rights lays out the costs of the lawsuit up front and is reimbursed only if the suit is successful (and then only partially), “we won’t bring a case unless we think we can win it,” says the organization’s associate director and the lead attorney on the case, Susan Lambiase. “The bottom line is the children really need this lawsuit. It’s never easy to reform a child welfare system, but the things that are wrong with states are fixable things. The law is quite good for us and for the kids.”

The settlements differ, but they usually include a court-enforceable reform plan, plus a court-ordered infusion of cash into the system to make the changes possible. “There are intractable bureaucracies that it’s really hard to change. It’s like mov-ing mountains,” says Lambiase. “But that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible. We’ve seen it happen.” As for Alston’s odds? “I would never presume to say how a case would go ultimately in court,” Lambiase says, “except that we did our research and our analysis and we’ve got the facts and
the law on our side.”

Alston’s is not the first lawsuit that the child advocate’s office has filed against DCYF. In 1986, then-child advocate Mi-chael Coleman asked a federal judge to intervene in the practice of “night-to-night placement”: shuffling kids, night to night, from one placement to the next. In 1988, a judge ordered DCYF to stop using the practice except in emergencies, and ordered the state to supply more funds for additional foster care beds. In the years since, each successive child advocate has moved to hold DCYF in contempt of court, citing numbers of night-to-night placements that continue to creep upwards.

Of course, many advocates say that it’s all a matter of priorities. The governor has taken flak from many in the human service sector for his reluctance to repeal the flat tax and the phase-out of the capital gains tax, both aimed at making Rhode Island a ‘business-friendly environment,’ even as he slashes DCYF’s budget. “Second to the death penalty, removing somebody’s children from their homes is probably the most awesome power that is entrusted with any state,” says Lisa Guillette, executive director of Rhode Island Foster Parents Association. “If collectively—because we all own that, the entire state owns that—we’re saying we don’t have enough money to do this right, that’s a big indictment on our priorities as a state. As a citizenry.”

Alston says that after meeting with DCYF Director Martinez and her staff every month for two years, after hearing promises made and seeing promises broken—about capping caseworker case loads, about training new supervisors, about all of the systemic problems plaguing DCYF—she felt that she had no choice but to file suit. “The excuses I was getting, I felt like maybe she needs my help by bringing a lawsuit,” says Alston. “Then it’s out of her hands, it’s out of the legislature’s hands, it’s out of the executive’s hands. We’re going to put this in the judicial hands. It seems like the only resort to make the kind of changes you need to keep children safe.”

Kevin Aucoin, a lawyer for DCYF, speaking on behalf of the defendants in the suit, says, “We do take issue with the facts as asserted in the plaintiff’s complaint. But it’s premature to get into any substantive comment with litigation pending.” The governor declined to be interviewed for this article, but in a July press conference, held just after the lawsuit was filed, he said, “We don’t believe right now...that there are any youngsters in our care right now being abused...Are the allegations in fact true? I don’t know any of that right now, but we’re going to get to the bottom of it.”

It was less than a decade ago that Jametta Alston, a round-faced woman with gold wire-rimmed glasses and a bright smile, was childless and happy about it. “I was a career woman,” she says. “I loved my lifestyle. I liked hanging out at Borders for three or four hours, drinking tea and reading books.” Children were the farthest things from her mind, in fact, confirms Susann Gardner, Alston’s best friend since childhood. “Jametta grew up as an only child. She was used to being by herself and having her own things.”

Things changed in 1997. DCYF was sued by a set of foster parents who claimed that a foster child they had planned to adopt was unfairly removed from them. At the time, Alston sat on the other side of the courtroom, working for Rhode Island Attorney General Jeffrey Pine. In order to understand better what the plaintiffs were alleging, Alston decided to go through the state’s foster parent training and licensing process. “I’m a hands-on attorney,” she says. “I wanted to see what the process is like.”

A few weeks after she became licensed, she got a call from DCYF. They said, “You’re licensed to be a foster parent, why don’t you take a child?” Alston recalls. After a brief stint with an eighteen-month-old boy (“I couldn’t send him back fast enough,” says Alston now, with a laugh), Alston gave in one last time when a caseworker begged her to come meet a little girl, seven years old. The girl had been in a shelter for nine months (children are not supposed to stay in shelters for more than three weeks), and she talked a mile a minute. “She drove me insane,” Alston recalls with a giggle in her voice. “I was an older woman who had lived alone for fifteen years, and she didn’t stop talking. She never stopped talking. She talked in her sleep!” After a few weeks, DCYF asked Alston to consider adopting the little girl.

By that point, Alston had all but decided that she simply wasn’t equipped to be a parent. She had resolved to keep the child through Christmas, and then go back to her quiet life. She was in the mall, of all places, holiday shopping, when a strange thing happened: She heard a voice in her head. “It’s not this big booming voice, but it was this quiet thing, like, ‘This is yours to do. This is your child,’ ” Alston recalls. “As soon as I accepted that—I don’t know if I’ll ever experience it again—there was a peace. A peace of rightness, a peace of joy. Thy will be done. She was my baby from that moment on.”

Now a poised fourteen-year-old young woman, Alston’s daughter poses in dresses and ballet leotards, braces and pony-tails, the stack of photos in Alston’s wallet chronicling a happy childhood. Still, she has provided a singularly intimate and personal window into the troubles that face children and families who enter DCYF’s system. “She is still struggling with all of the pain, embarrassment, shame that kids internalize,” says Alston. “Because kids think, ‘It’s my fault.’ I look at my daughter and I just worry. Can we overcome what happened the first seven years? And if we can’t overcome it, can we mute it? Can we give her strength?”

After graduating from Temple University in 1977, Alston pursued her dream of making it to Broadway by working as an entertainment manager at a casino in Atlantic City. There, she became increasingly disillusioned by the people she met, who were incredibly talented yet unfailingly unhappy. Then Bill Cosby arrived for a performance and was struck by Alston’s intelligence and competence. “ ‘What are you doing here?’” she recalls him asking her. “‘You need to go on to law school.’ ”

So she went to Howard University, and afterwards spent a few weeks on Cape Cod as a graduation present to herself. She fell in love with the beaches and the New England sunsets, and decided to apply for jobs in the area. “I thought I’d be here a year or two, and here I am, twenty years later,” she says. She worked first for Legal Services, then in private practice. She was at the attorney general’s office for almost ten years, and then left to become the Cranston city solicitor before being forced to step down after two years because the city’s char-ter stipulates the solicitor must live in Cranston (Alston lives in Warwick).

Because she was appointed to her job in Cranston by a Republican mayor, Stephen Laffey, and then to her current post by a Republican governor, many mistake Alston for a Republican. She’s not. In fact, she’s not much of a political player at all. The lawsuit is widely seen as political suicide for Alston, making a re-appointment in 2010 highly unlikely, and an appointment to a Family Court judgeship even more of a long shot. (As a case in point, a Senate bill proposing to eliminate the Office of the Child Advocate was introduced in early March. It was hastily withdrawn after an outpouring of support for the Office.) “I’m blunt, I’m tactless, I have no political sense at all,” Alston admits, only half-jokingly. “Honesty is a tool, not a weapon. But let me use this as a tool that we can break down some of these power plays and get to what we need to do to protect children. It may work against me. Do I care? No. My goal is to do this job well.”

Alston doesn’t worry about what’s in store for her. A deeply religious woman who follows her heart, she says, “you walk with faith. What’s important is to be prepared for whatever is delivered to me to do next.” She often jokes that her prayers include a request that her next job be at Borders—“Lord, you know I love books!” she says with a laugh.

To this day, Alston takes her daughter on a yearly trip to Broadway.

She remembers fondly all the shows she saw as a child. Her favorite was Sweet Charity, about a down-on-her-luck but ever-optimistic New York dance hall hostess. Susann Gardner recalls going to see Man of la Mancha with her best friend when they were teenagers. Even then, Don Quixote reminded Gardner of Alston. “She would always stick up for the underdog,” Gardner recalls.

Alston knows that it may take years for her lawsuit to come to any sort of conclusion. A lawsuit is not the speediest possible recourse, and it pains her that “while we strategize and go back and forth in this case, children are being harmed.” Still, when it is time to sit down and figure out a better way to care for the children in DCYF care, Alston will be there, bucking the system, hoping to get the better of a failed bureaucracy tangled in red tape.

Alston sometimes gets choked up when talking about kids in DCYF custody. It’s clear she feels the pain of each child as if he were her own.

“They are the gift we’ve been given. And there’s not one that we can waste. Not one,” she says. “This is giving these children a safe place to find their identity and their strength and their greatness. We’ve got to change the system. And we can’t worry about money,” she adds, her determination palpable. “Let’s acknowledge the system’s wrong. Now let’s sit down and see how we can make it better.”

Brown Alumni Magazine>A Nation of Jailers

2008-03-28T18:52:00.001-07:00

A Nation of Jailers

Economics professor Glenn Loury is speaking out about what he believes is one of the nation’s gravest injustices: despite falling crime rates, the number of black men sent to prison continues to rise. It's the latest cause for a man whose work has taken him from liberal to conservative and back again.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
April 2008

Standing in front of a room full of people, Glenn Loury stumbled. It was a rhetorical stumble, not a physical one. It came near the beginning of the first of two Tanner Lectures on Human Values he delivered at Stanford last April: "As it happens," he said, "I have passed through—" he paused briefly, taking a deep breath, "the courtroom, and the jailhouse, on my way to this distinguished podium.

Then he paused again, longer this time, collecting himself before reading the rest of the lecture. Later he recalled the moment: "It was harder for me to say than I realized it was going to be when I wrote it down on the page."

For Loury, the lectures marked an important moment on the long and ongoing trajectory that has joined his lived experience to his scholarship and his politics. Titled "Racial Stigma, Mass Incarceration, and American Values," the lectures brimmed with both moral passion and rigorous analytical scholarship, a combination that has become something of a trademark for him. The lectures asserted that the number of black men incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails—a number wildly disproportionate to their representation in the general population—reflects the social dishonor to which African Americans are still subject today, a dishonor with roots in U.S. slavery.

"We are becoming a nation of jailers, and racist jailers at that," Loury said later in the lecture. "We must ask, in light of our history, whether this is the nation we want to be. And, deciding not, we must then try to do something about it."

Loury has indeed committed himself to doing something about it. In addition to lecturing and writing on the issue, he appeared last year before a U.S. Congressional committee examining the economic costs of the surge in the nation's prison population. The issue has propelled Loury back into the role of public intellectual, a role he has flirted with through much of his career. As an economist, his work is to crunch numbers, but what the numbers have revealed to him has triggered his moral outrage. Loury makes no apologies for his attempts to "reach beyond science and, within the limits of my abilities, to address deeper questions." Unlike many of his academic colleagues, who after earning their PhDs obtain stable professorships and address their peers in scholarly journals, Loury's journey to Brown and the issue of prisons has taken unlikely twists and turns. It has involved not just the courthouse and the jailhouse, but years as a conservative pundit. It has included a religious rebirth followed by a repudiation of that religion, and now has brought him to the far left of the political spectrum.

The oldest of two children, Glenn Cartman Loury grew up on Chicago's South Side in the 1950s and 60s. Although the neighborhood was rough, Loury's family was comfortable enough. His father was a high-level administrator with the Internal Revenue Service and his mother a secretary with the Veterans Administration. He had cousins who were doctors and lawyers but, he recalls, he also had relatives and neighbors caught up in illegal activity.

The sociologist Elijah Anderson has described two broad categories of social orientation in inner cities: "decent families," who tend to be working poor (rather than unemployed) and who value self-reliance, hard work, education, and church; and "street families," who turn to lawlessness to make ends meet and violence to settle conflicts. Loury's family had a little of both, sometimes in a single person. "I'm talking about my uncle Mooney," Loury says. "He was a legitimate small businessman but also sold marijuana out the back of his barbershop, routinely. I'm talking about my great Aunt Candy, and Aunt Rosetta, who fenced stolen goods as a regular course of events. They had young women who were shoplifting clothing and foodstuffs from retailers, and they would get twenty cents or thirty cents on the dollar from my aunts, who then had big freezers in the basement. So that whenever you wanted to have a family thing, you knew that you didn't go and buy your ham and your turkey from the Stop & Shop. You went to Aunt Candy or Aunt Rosetta." When Loury gets excited telling these family stories, his voice clicks up a register or two. "These are church ladies with big hats!" he says. "They were salt of the earth, these people! But that's what they did."

One's racial identity was of primary importance in Chicago during that period. White flight had turned many of the city's neighborhoods into African American enclaves, and the civil rights and black power movements had fired up black youth, Loury included. In the prologue to his 1995 book of essays, One by One from the Inside Out, Loury tells a moving story about attending "one of those heated, earnest political rallies so typical of the period" with a longtime friend and neighbor, Woody. With two mixed-race parents, Woody looked white, but growing up in a black neighborhood with black friends, he identified as a "brother." When at the rally Woody raised his hand with a suggestion, Loury recalls that "one of the dashiki-clad brothers-in-charge" asked for someone in the audience to "vouch for this white boy." Eighteen-year-old Loury, fearing that "speaking up for Woody would have marked me as a disloyal 'Tom' among the blacker-than-thou crowd," said nothing. Years later, still cringing at his disloyalty, Loury continues to struggle with the issue of what it means to be "authentically black."

Even as his political approach to "the race problem" has veered sharply from left to right to center and back to the left again, Loury's foundational belief has remained consistent. He has always held that race is a "socially constructed mode of human categorization," as he wrote in his 2002 book, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality. The key intellectual innovation in this most recent of his books is the concept of "racial stigma," which he explains this way: "If we believe that people of a different look and hue and shape of face and such are different from us, and we act on that belief, we can create dynamics that make that a fact. Moreover, if we are unaware of how some of these influences bias and influence our conceptions in society, then we can draw conclusions and be very comfortable and set in those conclusions without interrogating them."

A heavyset man of fifty-nine, Loury sports a graying goatee and a presence that, although guarded at first, quickly softens. In conversation, he ranges from the formalized diction of the lecture hall to the chatty, easy way of a friend. He is unwilling to dumb down his opinions or his way of speaking. This has the effect of making people around him strive to be sharper, more well-read, quicker on their toes. He can be cocky, though not obnoxiously so, and his discourse is peppered with the names of his friends in high places.

Loury was an exceptionally bright student in high school, and, after graduating at age sixteen, he entered the Illinois Institute of Technology. But after his girlfriend—whom he later married—gave birth to their daughters, Lisa and then Tammy, Loury dropped out and took at job at a local printing plant. He continued to take night classes at a local junior college. (He also fathered a son, Alden, with another woman around this time.) Soon he had secured a scholarship to Northwestern, where once again he demonstrated great promise, particularly in mathematics and economics. In 1972, divorced from his first wife, he arrived at MIT and quickly became one of the top students in one of the top economics departments in the world.

Loury's 1976 PhD dissertation, "Essays in the Theory of the Distribution of Income," was a rigorous economics-based examination of why, years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, blacks still weren't getting ahead. He put forth a theory of "social capital," asserting that who a person knows—the informal networks and connections that can give one a leg up at everything from jobs to housing—matters at least as much as a person's intelligence or hard work. African Americans had few, if any, such networks. This view of racism as far beyond the simple fix of antidiscrimination laws and perpetuated by an ongoing, self-fulfilling social cycle, has since become one of the hallmarks of the American left and a frequent justification for affirmative action.

Over the next decade, however, Loury's thinking turned right and made him one of affirmative action's most outspoken black critics. He wrote essays and op-eds with such titles as "Beyond Civil Rights" and "Blacks Must Now Fight the Enemy Within," arguing that placing blame for the African American community's problems solely on white America was incorrect and counterproductive. "The bottom stratum of the black community," he wrote in a 1984 article in The New Republic, "has compelling problems which can no longer be blamed solely on white racism, and which force us to confront fundamental failures in black society. The societal disorganization among poor blacks, the lagging academic performance of black students, the disturbingly high rate of black-on-black crime, and the alarming increase in early unwed pregnancies among blacks now loom as the primary obstacles to progress." Personal responsibility became his mantra. Black folks, he said, needed to quit the blame game.

By 1982, when Loury, at age thirty-three, became the first tenured black professor in the Harvard economics department, he had gained a reputation as a brilliant, if ornery, iconoclast. He'd alienated such black leaders as Coretta Scott King and Jesse Jackson with his disdain for what he saw as their outdated approach to problems in the African American community. His intellectual allies were such conservatives as William Kristol and James Q. Wilson, who had the ear of the Reagan administration. By now, Loury was speaking publicly and vociferously against affirmative action. ("By what calculus of fairness can those claiming to be fighting for justice argue that outstanding white students ... should be denied the opportunity for ... education so that minority students who are not prepared for it may nonetheless enroll?" he wrote in "Beyond Civil Rights.") And even as old friends and family back home in Chicago were increasingly disappointed with what they saw as Loury's selling out, he says, "The answer I would give to that was, 'I'm a free thinker, and I go where the ideas lead me, and I'm sorry to disappoint you but I gotta speak the truth.' "

He resented the idea that he need hew to a party line because of his race. "I felt a little bit martyred," he recalls, "because, you know, these people gonna drop a ton of bricks on me just because I have the integrity to say what I think is correct? Because I'm black and I'm at Harvard I'm supposed to be part of some imaginary team that you people are constructing out there to help the race—quote-unquote? So now I've got a chip on my shoulder. You expect me to say something that is beyond the pale. In a way, I need to live up to that expectation. That's now my role. My role is to upset you."

In 1987, Loury's room in what he calls "the house that Reagan built" seemed secured when U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett offered him a position as under-secretary.

Meanwhile, thanks to President Reagan's War on Drugs and the generation of tough-on-crime policies that followed, Americans in general, and black men in particular, began going to prison in increasingly large numbers. "Two decades ago, it is fair to say, America faced a violent crime problem," Loury said in his Tanner Lectures. "This was a time when drive-by shootings and drug-deals-gone-violently-bad were common fare on local news, when the War on Drugs was taken to a new level, and 'gangsta' rap was born."

But, Loury now believes, like the drug use the incarceration boom was supposed to lessen, incarceration itself became an addiction. Once the United States began turning to lockup as the solution for a growing list of what had previously been considered social, not criminal, ills, it couldn't stop. Between 1980 and 1990, the number of people in U.S. prisons more than doubled. Although the rate of violent crime peaked in the early 1990s and has been declining ever since, between 1990 and 2000, incarceration rates nearly doubled again. Today, at least 1.6 million people are incarcerated in U.S. prisons. Include people on probation and parole, and the number jumps to more than seven million. According to a recent report from the Pew Center on the States, one of every 100 adults in the United States is behind bars—the highest incarceration rate in the world. As Loury points out in his Tanner lectures, Americans account for 5 percent of the world's population and 25 percent of its inmates.

"Today, fifteen years after crime peaked, the American prison system has become a leviathan unmatched in human history," he said. "Never has a supposedly 'free country' denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens."

The impact on communities of color has been enormous. According to U.S. Department of Justice figures, a black man has a 32 percent chance of entering state or federal prison during his lifetime. If current incarceration rates continue, one of every three black male babies born today will see the inside of a prison cell, a rate more than five times higher than that of white male babies. In many inner-city neighborhoods, a stint in prison is as much a rite of passage as graduation from high school. The effects of these incarcerations are not confined to the prison walls. More than half of state and federal inmates are parents of minor children; according to DOJ, black children are nearly nine times more likely than white children to have a parent in prison. Finding work for any person with a criminal conviction is already a challenge; for an African-American, that challenge can be almost insurmountable.

Prisoner statistics, Loury said in his Tanner lectures, tell only part of the story:

[N]o cost-benefit analysis of our world-historic prison build-up over the past thirty-five years is possible without specifying how one should reckon in the calculation the pain being imposed on the persons imprisoned, their families and their communities. How to value this aspect of policy is, to my mind, a salient ethical issue. Punishment politics, it seems to me, invariably discounts the humanity of the thieves, drug sellers, prostitutes, rapists and, yes, of those whom we unceremoniously put to death. It should be clear that social science has no answers for the question of what weight to put on a "thug's" wellbeing, or on that of his wife or his daughter and son. Nor can Science tell us how much additional cost borne by the offending class can be justified in order to obtain a given increment in security of life and property—or in peace of mind—for the rest of us.

When Loury says "the rest of us," he includes himself in his audience of well-off academic peers. He is in a stable marriage to his second wife, Linda, with whom he is raising two teenage boys in an affluent Boston suburb. Yet in the same passage Loury points out that by virtue of his race, he is "knitted together with offenders in networks of social and psychic affliction." His admission to his audience at the start of the lecture that he had once been behind bars echoes powerfully. In a sense, he is siding with the "thug."

"This was a big deal," says Josh Cohen, a professor of political science and philosophy at Stanford and a friend of Loury. "To be doing these lectures and to be stepping outside of his usual responsibility as an economist to be talking about issues of political morality: it wasn't like there was some bold new moral idea in the lectures, but that's usually not the way moral thinking works. You get yourself worked up about a problem. Then you try to bring it to bear."

Throughout the 1980s, as Loury's professional influence grew, his personal life fell to pieces. By day, he lectured at Harvard alongside some of the top minds in economics and political science; by night, he ventured into housing projects and strip clubs, freebasing cocaine and picking up women. Even as he preached about personal responsibility, he frequented crack houses and nightclubs, where he was not a Harvard professor but just another brother, out looking for a good time.

"I knew how to talk and how to walk, not to seem an obvious mark in such a community so that I would get robbed," he says now. "I wore that as a secret badge of honor. It made me, in some way or another—nutty, nutty, I can't defend this—more authentically black somehow. This is sick, I would say in retrospect. But I believe it's an accurate reflection of what I actually thought in the back of my mind in those years."

Three months after he was offered the position in the Reagan education department, he withdrew his nomination, citing "personal reasons." Days later, a twenty-three-year-old woman named Pamela Foster brought assault charges against him. She was, it turned out, his mistress, living at his expense in a Boston apartment. Although the charges were eventually dropped, she accused Loury of dragging her down a flight of stairs and throwing her belongings out the window. Local newspapers had a field day. Here was a conservative unable to live up to his own gospel of personal responsibility.

"At the time, I guess the way I'd construe it was: what I'm saying is correct," he says now. "Whether I'm doing what's right is another matter. People should take better care of themselves. They should take care of their children, they should be responsible. If I fall short of that, well, there you are."

Loury's problems were far from over. His drug use continued to spiral out of control. His marriage was at its breaking point. Then, towards the end of the year, he was arrested for possession of marijuana and cocaine. Shortly after the scandal with Pamela Foster surfaced, Loury recalls, he remarked to his friend, the evangelical Catholic priest (Loury calls him a "theo-con") Richard Neuhaus, that Martin Luther King and John Kennedy also had mistresses. "If he could have slapped me, he would have," Loury says now. "But he gave me the stern reproach look, the equivalent of a slap in the face. And he said, 'It was a terrible flaw in King. It seriously compromised his effectiveness. And it's a flaw in you as well.'"

A judge agreed to drop the drug charges in exchange for Loury's entering rehab. He emerged, after several months, a changed man.

He was still conservative, but, as one old friend told the Boston Globe, he was a "sensitive conservative." He was also a born-again Christian. He and his wife, Linda, who shortly after Loury returned home from rehab gave birth to their son Glenn Jr., joined the Bethel AME Church. The couple's second son, Nehemiah, named after the Old Testament figure, was born three years later. The church's pastors, civic leaders in Boston, helped the Lourys rebuild their family. "They saved my life," says Loury. "Our children were born into this church. Our marriage was saved there."

In 1991, Loury left Harvard over the protests of his colleagues and joined the faculty at Boston University for a fresh start. Over the following decade, he tried—unsuccessfully, he now says—to straddle the line between his old commitment to conservatism and personal responsibility and his growing awareness of the structural issues preventing black people from achieving full integration in every aspect of American society.

His 1995 book, One by One from the Inside Out: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America, was an attempt to delineate this new, softer position. It contains an essay called "Leadership Failure and the Loyalty Trap," in which he returns to his old frustrations about the "loyalty" that blacks supposedly owe to a particular political ideology. He indicts the black community for, among other things, having "made excuses for and sometimes even glorified the supposedly rebellious actions of thugs" and having made "apologies for the able-bodied, healthy, and intelligent young men who gather children and then walk away from the responsibility to support them."

At the same time, the book is humbler than his previous work, steeped as it is in his new religious beliefs. Its epilogue reads like a searching and personal confession. It also closes with a scathing review of the controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve, which asserts, in part, that a sizable proportion of America's (black) citizenry is simply not smart enough to grasp the nuance of anything less than a hard line on crime and parenthood, among other social ills.

The Bell Curve was one of a series of books published around that time by former friends and colleagues whose approaches to race made Loury increasingly uncomfortable. In 1995 Dinesh D'Souza published The End of Racism, in which he argued, among other things, that slavery was not a racist institution, and that the only reason racism continued to be a problem in the United States is because of such "racist" programs as multiculturalism and affirmative action. Crime and Human Nature, published in 1998 by James Q. Wilson (with whom Loury had, in 1987, co-edited a book) and Richard J. Hernnstein, argued that crime was caused by biological determinants, and that zero-tolerance policing with less emphasis on rehabilitation was the only answer. In 1999 Loury's old friends Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom cheerfully announced, in America in Black and White, that African Americans were doing just fine—better than ever, in fact—and that we should not impede their progress with such wrongheaded programs as affirmative action.

Loury began to speak out against such thinking, at first quietly, and then more forcefully, prompted in part by the chilly reception he received from conservatives for his critiques of their ideas on race. Commentary magazine, whose pages had contained many of his words over the years, refused to run his review of the The Bell Curve. The American Enterprise Institute, with which he'd long been affiliated, refused to repudiate D'Souza, who had written his book while he was a fellow there. Loury resigned in protest.

He also began to take himself to task for all the years he had provided political cover for what he was beginning to construe as thinly veiled racism among his colleagues. At a 1990 conference called Second Thoughts on Race, organized by the neoconservative David Horowitz, he gave a presentation in which he said that his agreement with conservatives on affirmative action "helps you to see your [position] as valid and nonracist. If by some magic I were suddenly to become white, my brilliant, perceptive, and courageous insights would just as suddenly be reduced to pedestrian, commonplace complaints, of little political or personal comfort to you."

Finally, in 1996, Loury reached a turning point. He and his old friend, fellow black conservative Shelby Steele, were assembling donors and board members for their new organization, the Center for New Black Leadership. California's Proposition 209, which proposed an amendment to the state's constitution prohibiting public institutions from considering race, sex, or ethnicity in admissions or hiring decisions, had just been placed on the ballot. The Center's funders wanted Loury and Steele to come out in support of the measure. It should have been a no-brainer. Here was perhaps the most central issue of the era for both conservatives and African Americans, an issue that Loury had not minced words in criticizing over the years. "What is our brand, as black conservatives, if it's not that?" Loury recalls Steele asking him. But he found that he couldn't do it.

"What I said was, 'I'm against affirmative action, but this is over the top.' I tried to split the difference, which was a mistake," he now says. "I was for affirmative action, is what I should have been able to say, but I couldn't quite make myself say it." Instead, he resigned.

It was also around this time that Loury repudiated his religious beliefs. He had many long, searching conversations about his growing doubt with his Christian mentors and friends. He found it increasingly difficult to reconcile his religious beliefs with his faith in rationality and science. But the breaking point came with the death of a bright young woman who had worked as an administrative assistant in his office at Boston University. It had taken her into her thirties to finish college, and she was now pursuing her dream to go to law school. She'd had a wildly successful first year at BU's law school and had made law review when she died, suddenly, of a freak heart infection.

"I'm devastated by the tragedy of this young woman's death," Loury says, describing his feelings at the time. "Don't tell me that this is God's work and he knows better than me. You're just fooling yourself. You're afraid to look down in the abyss." He is still haunted by the image of the young woman's mother, at the funeral, smiling because God must have loved her daughter so much to take her away. "And basically I haven't been back to church since. There was no going back from that."

These days, Loury has found his footing to the left of center. He has repudiated many of his own former positions on public policy, but the core of his beliefs, he insists, was not wrong. It simply lacked context.

"I'm not eschewing personal responsibility," he says. "I don't want to say, a kid goes out and commits a crime, it's society's fault, it's not the kid's fault. The core of the error was a failure to give an appropriate weighting to the communal responsibilities of developing and sustaining a cultural milieu that's supportive of human development. I was loading way too much weight on this autonomous communal capacity—self help and so forth—vis-√†-vis questions like, What's the IRS doing? What are the police doing? How are cities and states organized? And what role does race play within that?"

Loury knows that his changes in position harm his credibility with some peers. Others, however, see his intellectual journey as evidence of his honesty. Economist and former Princeton president William Bowen has been one of Loury's friends and mentors. (Loury wrote the introduction to Bowen's most recent book, The Shape of the River, a defense of affirmative action in higher education.) "When people would accuse Gandhi of being inconsistent," Bowen says, "Gandhi would reply, 'my goal has never been to be consistent with myself from year to year, but to be consistent to the truth as it appears to me.' Really capable people think like that. That takes courage, and I admire it."

Loury arrived at Brown in 2005, after a falling-out with BU's president over funding for his Institute on Race and Social Division. He has thrown himself into the life of the University, serving on the Advisory Committee on Slavery and Justice, instituting a seminar series on race and inequality, and publishing several papers in both economics journals and the popular press. "He is a combination of someone who is an incredible theorist—who can think in terms of economic models in a sophisticated way—but who fundamentally cares about the most important issues of the day," says Andrew Foster, chairman of the economics department. "He's also clearly stimulating research in this area among grad students."

Given his complicated history, Loury has been an easy target for armchair psychoanalysis. A 1995 New Yorker profile speculated that he had turned away from some of his earlier hard-line stances because he was lonely; as a black conservative he didn't really "fit" anywhere. A longtime friend and colleague, Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, was quoted in a 2002 New York Times profile as saying that Loury was "overcompensating" by listening to gangsta rap. And yet, even as his most recent crusade is deeply personal in some ways, he remains a consummate social scientist in others, and resents any implication that he is speaking out against racial inequality in mass incarceration as a way to assuage guilt or do penance for his former views.

Josh Cohen, the Stanford professor, recalls an incident during a series of seminars associated with the Tanner lectures. A politically progressive friend of Loury's made a joke about how Loury hadn't moved far enough to the left yet. "He used some sort of therapeutic vocabulary, like 'his treatment isn't quite done yet,'" Cohen recalls. "Glenn responded badly to that, and I agreed with him. He was saying, 'This is a matter of intellectual convictions. We're in this business of argument and analysis. It's really misguided to put this in the language of therapy and cure. It's about changing your mind. About being changed by reason.'"

Rhode Island Monthly>Bad Girls

2008-03-27T05:48:00.000-07:00

Bad Girls

Doing time at the Rhode Island Training School is punishment for young women who break the law. What's surprising is how many would rather be in the big house than out.

Beth Schwartzapfel
April 2008

While she’s here, Diamond Jordan-Brown looks perpetually as if she just rolled out of bed: blue sweats, hair standing up in all directions. At eight this morning, she actually has just rolled out of bed. Diamond is sixteen and has the spunk and wit of a teenager but the poise and smarts of someone much older. Even now, as she shuffles across the white, linoleum-tiled hall into the day room and plops down on a vinyl-upholstered chair to wait for breakfast, it’s with the weary resignation of someone who’s seen it all.

If she were awaiting sentencing, or if the judge had sent her here for a few days to try to scare some sense into her—as he has before—she’d be wearing orange, walking around like a human traffic cone. But since she’s been sentenced—she’s more than halfway through a six-month “bid,” as the girls call it—she’s wearing “state blues”: state-issued blue sweatshirt, blue sweatpants, white sneakers.

On any given day, the Rhode Island Training School houses some 200 children. Administered by the Department of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF), yet populated by those remanded here by the criminal justice system, the Training School exists at a crossroads between prison and foster care. It’s a juvenile correctional facility, make no mistake about it—double fences topped with razor wire surround the complex, and residents leave locked buildings only with handcuffs on—but it’s also a public high school and a place where children receive counseling and guidance. DCYF refers to it euphemistically as “a highly structured, secure residential facility,” and the children are called “residents” rather than inmates. The boys are divided into seven different residential “cottages” based on age, offense, treatment needs and behavior, but the girls (in 2006, 16 percent of the total population) are all housed here, in the Mathias building, a facility that feels more like a tidy, bright hospital wing than a prison. The unit consists entirely of one hallway, off of which are classrooms on one end and bedrooms on the other, and a dayroom, where the girls spend their downtime and eat their meals.

Diamond’s friend Jessica* is on kitchen duty this morning. While the rest of the girls filter in, she unwraps several loaves of white bread and pops slices into the industrial-grade toaster, six at a time; she tosses mini cartons of milk out of a crate and into the refrigerator, mixes bright green “juice” from syrup in a jug and distributes piles of paper napkins onto each table. A trolley has already arrived from the central kitchen with a giant steel tray of aluminum-foil-covered scrambled eggs, and she puts this tray out alongside mini plastic tubs of cereal and a bowl of fruit.

The count today is thirteen. At breakfast, the blues sit together at two tables, and the oranges sit together at a third.

Beyond this obvious self-segregation is a more subtle grouping organized roughly according to the Training School’s level system. There are four levels, each with a corresponding set of privileges (number of visits, visitors and phone calls allowed, bedtime). Training School residents enter at Level 2 and work their way up (or down) the levels by earning (or losing) points for things like working hard in school, attending groups and meetings, keeping their room clean, following instructions and volunteering to help out around the unit.

Because it takes up to six weeks to gain a level, girls at Level 3 or 4 have usually been here for longer than girls at Level 1 or 2; what’s more, only girls with good behavior and a positive attitude tend to earn enough points to move up. All of which contributes to the fact that girls in the various levels tend to stick together. “Our clique is basically Level 3s,” says Jessica. “When you’re down there, at Level 2, Level 1, you have nothing better to do [than pick fights]. Elbowing in the hallway, pushing in the bathroom, swearing across the tables. We have to just ignore them. It’s kinda like we just brush them off our shoulder.”

One of the girls in her clique is Diamond, who is serving a six-month sentence for assault, intimidating a witness and disorderly conduct—all charges related to a fight with another girl that got out of hand. Later, I visit Diamond at home after her release (she ended up serving four months), and she couldn’t look more different than she did when we first met: She cuts a dashing figure with long, braided extensions in her hair, tight jeans, knee-high zip-up boots.

Diamond and her mother, Auretha, are very close. In the months leading up to Diamond’s incarceration, Auretha tells me she was becoming increasingly frustrated. Diamond loved to party and stay out late. She’d be home only for as long as it took to dump off her bag after school and leave again. What’s more, she’d get into so many fights that eventually girls started arriving at their family’s house and telling Auretha to get Diamond so they could fight her.

“I wasn’t the type of person, before I went in there, to just let little petty stuff go,” recalls Diamond. “You could roll your eyes and I was on you. Anything could trigger me. You could walk by me and almost brush my shoulder. You was going down.” She laughs when she says it, but she has an iron will; she must have been scary. The judge sent her to the Training School for a night two years ago after a fight, but it didn’t stick. Diamond had seven cousins there at the time, so it seemed like a sort of rite of passage. Sure enough, a few months later, she was back, this time for real.

The first few months of her sentence were marked by her typical behavior. On her very first day, she shoved a staff member who was bothering her. “It took her two to three months to realize what was really happening,” says Auretha. “Before, she was really angry when I’d go visit her. She didn’t like this staff, she didn’t like that staff. Then she just did a three-sixty. She knew, what I’m doing right now is not going to get me out of here.”

After breakfast, the girls spend a quiet half-hour in the dayroom, watching television, chatting or flipping through magazines before heading off to class. The boys’ school, because it has so many more students, operates much the same way as other Rhode Island public schools. The girls’ school, on the other hand, has only two classrooms, one for special education students and one for everyone else, where the girls, with wildly varying grade levels and skills, work more or less independent of each other, with guidance from a teacher.

During class, minor tiffs erupt about who’s sitting in whose chair, and who graffitied on the chalkboard.

“Stories on the outside are you’re going to get beat up [in here],” says Jessica. But this is no vigilante jailhouse. Physical fights like those that Diamond used to get into are rare here, Jessica says. The Training School “doesn’t test you like that,” she says. “It doesn’t test your strength. It tests you emotionally. It tests you mentally. The stress of when you have court. The stress of having to sit in a holding cell all day, just to know you’re coming back here. The stress of knowing that your visit may not come this weekend. The staff might not let you make a phone call. You might not be able to talk to your parents all week. You might not get your deodorant, and you might have to smell. Go a week without getting letters and see how it feels. If you don’t get your mind right, if you don’t have that emotional breakdown here, you’re going to come back. If people walk out and say, ‘My time was easy,’ they’re going to come back. If I’m like, ‘My time was hard, I almost went crazy in there, I was sick in there, it killed me emotionally, I’m so happy to be out now,’ I’m less likely to come back.”

Emotions run high. Social worker Sirinath Seneth is the female unit manager; before this summer, when she began the top job here, she was a clinical social worker in two of the boys’ units: the maximum security facility (known as the Youth Correctional Center) and the substance abuse unit. More often the victims of trauma and abuse, she says, “the girls are more needy. With the boys, forty or fifty kids? I can cover it. Here, with only ten or fifteen girls, it’s difficult. They get nervous, they get anxious about what it’s going to be like when they get home. They get jealous, they get mad, they talk about each other.” With the boys, Seneth said, she had to ask them to come see her. “Don’t you have issues at all?” she would joke. Whereas, with the girls, “if you don’t see them for one day, two days, they want to know why they haven’t seen you.” Juvenile Program Worker Dawn Nunez agrees. “The girls are too needy,” she says. “They’re much more emotional” than the boys.

Mandated both to enforce the rules and to provide emotional support and encouragement, Juvenile Program Workers, or JPWs, are something of a cross between correctional officers and Big Brothers/Big Sisters mentors. Residents call them by their first name, with an honorific tacked on: Miss Jackie, Miss Michelle. To be hired, they must have a minimum of an associate’s degree and some work experience with adolescents; many have worked previously in group homes or residential programs. Before being hired, JPWs attend a six-week academy where they learn everything from fire safety to restraint techniques. One of the key things taught at the academy is the virtue of a “redirect.”

If a child talks back or disobeys an order, explains Joe Cardin, deputy superintendent of programs at the Training School, “you don’t make a big investment in it. And you certainly don’t go back to that schoolyard thing: escalation. The next thing you know you want to kill each other,” he says. This is, philosophically speaking, a huge departure from the classic correctional model, where if an inmate challenges the staff’s authority, the staff must reassert who’s in charge at all costs. Cardin recalls a recent incident where a pregnant resident refused to go to her room when instructed. The wrong response, according to Cardin, would have been, “‘Well, you’d better go to your room.’ [Because] then you get, ‘Well, put me in my room.’ Then you’re at a point as a staff member where you’ve just been called out. So what do you do? Do you people really want to drag a nine-month-pregnant female to her room? Does that make a lot of sense to you? Just walk out of that. There’s no direct threat to anyone. Except your ego.” Instead, staff members told the resident, “Fine, sit there if you want. We’ll come back in ten minutes.” She did, and they did, and then
she went to her room.

Very few girls are sent to the Training School for violent felonies. Training School data, which reflect the residents in custody on a single day in 2007, indicates that only two girls out of sixteen, or 12.5 percent, were serving time for felony assault. The largest proportion, almost 40 percent, was there for simple assault, a misdemeanor. The remainder were incarcerated for crimes against property, illegal-substance-related crime, and obstruction: resisting arrest or escape. Boys were more likely than girls to be serving time for violent felonies—almost 20 percent were there for felony assault or first- or second-degree sex crimes—but the majority of boys, too, were there for nonviolent crimes, about 40 percent of which were crimes against property.

Like many of its residents, Jessica is no stranger to the Training School. (According to an analysis by Rhode Island Kids Count, 25 percent of youth at the Training School in 2006 had been incarcerated previously.) This marks her fifth time here, though her previous visits were for a night or two, a week at most.

At sixteen, her skin is lightly smattered with acne, and her soft face still lacks the sharp angles of adulthood. Her boyfriend’s name is inked in dark-lettered script on her shoulder.

“They’d always say, do this program, let us see that you’re doing good at home, and you can go home for good,” she recalls. “I never got to that point [of changing her ways]. Reality didn’t hit.” Now that reality has hit, Jessica has the kind of perspective on her life and her behavior that she’d lacked.

Her mother was only fourteen when Jessica was born. Their closeness in age meant that it wasn’t always clear who was in charge—at least not to Jessica. “I wanted to be the mom,” she says. Shortly after Jessica was born, her father was sentenced to forty years in the ACI for second-degree murder. Her mother met her current husband while he was in the ACI serving time for breaking and entering; they got married while he was still locked up. “Me and my sister felt like she was picking him over us,” Jessica recalls. “She would always be at his visits, every other day, put money in his account when she couldn’t even buy us something. It was real hectic.”

Her stepfather was released about a year ago, and her young-est sister was born shortly after that.

Still, things didn’t start to get really out of control until about three years ago, when her father’s parole date began to approach. “When it started getting close to him going up for parole, I started acting up to my mom, yelling at my mom, disrespecting my mom,” she recalls. “Kinda like, ‘I don’t need you, I’m going to have dad.’” It only got worse when he was released, though, and all of the promises he’d made to her over the years—trips to the zoo and to the mall, quality time together—were broken one by one. “He was doing his own thing; he didn’t want to deal with nobody,” she says.

Jessica’s fights with her mother escalated to the point that in 2004 her mom filed a Wayward/Disobedient Petition with the local police department, essentially a parent’s way of asking law enforcement for help controlling her child. The petition brought Jessica into the orbit of the Family Court, which handles all juvenile justice cases. From there, the judge placed her in one group home after another, and in the group homes, she’d get into fights, she’d skip school, she’d run away.

In fact, that word “run” echoes through the girls’ unit at the Training School. The girls in orange, the girls in blue, from one DCYF placement to the next: run, run run. “This stuff shouldn’t be bringing kids into core corrections,” says Joe Cardin. “But they only come here because the courts tried alternatives, like probation, and the kids run. They always run.” Violation of probation, truancy, disorderly conduct, violation of probation, vagrant and disorderly conduct, reads one girl’s charge sheet, a litany of misdemeanors. Another sheet includes fully nine counts of violation of probation, or VOP, which means, usually, she ran. Wayward/disobedient, violation of probation, escape, simple assault, truancy. “It’s kind of like a broken record,” says Cardin.

As the chief judge of the Rhode Island Family Court, Judge Jeremiah S. Jeremiah sees a lot of these children in front of his bench. A man of imposing girth who’s known to many of the kids in the system as a sympathetic listener—“He feels people,” says Diamond—he says he hates to send kids to the Training School, but often he has no choice: “What do you do when you say to a child, ‘Here’s the deal: I want you to go to school regularly. I want you to respect your teachers. I want you home at eight every night. And if [you meet] those conditions, then I’m going to suspend your sentence.’ What do you do when they don’t follow those conditions? I don’t think you have any choice but to send them. Because otherwise they’d laugh at you.”

In fact, for some girls, visits to the Training School become as much, or even more, a part of the fabric of life as school and family. I visited the Training School twice over a one-month period, and on my second visit, one girl I’ll call Ramirez reminded me that I’d met her a month ago. “I was in orange then. I’m in blue now,” she says. “I got sentenced.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I tell her.

“That’s okay,” she says. “I won’t be here long.” We are eating a lunch of soggy grilled cheese sandwiches, tomato soup with plastic spoons out of Styrofoam bowls and canned pineapple rings. Most of the girls are complaining about the food, a common refrain in the dayroom, and discussing what their first meal “on the out” would be: Chinese food, homemade lasagna. From there it’s a quick jump to how uncomfortable the beds are. Ramirez pipes up to say she doesn’t mind the food. Or the beds, for that matter. “I actually kind of like it here,” she says. I ask why. “I feel more...” she pauses to find the right word. “Stable. When I’m not here, I’m running.”

Data provided by the Training School indicates that Ramirez’s experience is not unusual. Of the sixteen girls incarcerated on a single day last spring, only four had been living with a parent or family member immediately prior to incarceration; nine had been living in a group home, residential facility or shelter. Three had been AWOL, which is to say, running. (This data stands in stark contrast to the boys, almost 50 percent of whom had been living with one or both parents prior to incarceration.)

Once they are in the system, many girls rack up enough misdemeanors and violations of parole that it is only a matter of time before they get caught up in something more serious. For Jessica, that something turned out to be possession and delivery of marijuana. Jessica doesn’t even do drugs, she says. Her grandmother died of complications from drug addiction, and her father gets abusive when he’s drinking, which, these days, is often. “It’s in the family, and I don’t want that to happen to me,” she says. But still, her boyfriend had been shipped to his native Dominican Republic to clean up his act (like Jessica, he entered the system at fifteen or sixteen and had been in and out of group homes and the Training School ever since), and she was trying to make some quick money to bring him back. There was already a warrant out for her because she was on the run from a program, and when the cops found her, they also found the drugs. If she hadn’t had the drugs on her, she says, “I would’ve just had a violation of probation, probably go to another group home. But in a way, I think it was God that did that. If I didn’t have the drugs, and I got sentenced to another group home, I would’ve ran. I would have a warrant out for my arrest right now. On the street, having to watch my back all the time.”

It’s decidedly unnerving to hear one girl after another say that, ultimately, she’s glad she was incarcerated. Diamond feels the same way. Now that she’s home, she says, “There’s no fun in what I used to do.

Before, my mentality was just like party, party, party hard. Now, I kind of get a head-ache around loud music.” Two months before her release, Diamond’s social worker held her prerelease meeting at the Training School. In addition to Diamond and the social worker, also present were Seneth (the unit manager), Auretha and outreach workers from two different programs in the community. Together they crafted her release plan: Meet each of the outreach workers plus her parole officer once per week. Other girls’ plans are more elaborate, including visits with psychiatrists or social workers, curfews, attendance at school and other such restrictions, but, according to Auretha, the team decided these weren’t necessary for Diamond. She’d always done well in school, and her adviser—she goes to the Met School, which stresses individual attention —had been visiting her weekly while she was incarcerated so she would be able to dive right back in when she got out. And so she has, becoming a tour guide for visitors and prospective students at her school and teaming up with some fellow students to plan a volunteer trip to Africa for three weeks this spring.

Being away from her family, says Diamond, helped her learn not to take them for granted. By the end of her sentence she was entitled to two visits per week, and if her mother wasn’t there every Sunday and every Wednesday, Diamond was heartbroken. (“This girl is spoiled,” her mom says.)

“I’m glad I went,” Diamond says of her time at the Training School. “I’m not glad I was there for that long. It didn’t take me that long to get the picture. But if I didn’t [go], I’d probably be in a worse predicament than I was in.”

I ask Diamond and her mother if there is an alternative to the Training School that would have had the same effect. They’re sitting beside each other on the couch in their tidy Pawtucket living room, and images on the muted television dance silently in the background. Neither of them can think of anything. “She needed that long bid,” says Auretha.

Judge Jeremiah suggests that an effective foster care environment, like a group home but less institutional, a place where guardians can provide the guidance and support and structure that the kids so badly need, would be a better place to send kids like Jessica and Diamond. “Nobody cares about kids,” he says. “They don’t vote. So they’re hurting.” The foster care system and alternatives to the Training School are not allocated the resources they need. “It’s about money,” Jeremiah says.

Parenting classes and additional resources for families would also help. Many of these kids’ parents never learned how to parent because they grew up in similar environments to the ones they’re providing for their kids. “Sometimes they don’t know how to nurture their babies, even to hug them,” Siri Seneth says of the girls’ parents. “Because they never got that from their parents.”

Jeremiah agrees. “It’s a breakdown of the family unit,” he says. “I think that’s what lands them [at the Training School]. How often does somebody say to a child, ‘I love you’? How often do they say to their child when they come home from school —say they had a 70 average, now they have a 78 average—‘Gee, congratulations, you’re doing better.’”

However, indifferent or ineffectual parents are better than the alternative. Many of the residents were victims of abuse, whether at their family’s home, at a group home, or while on the run. An analysis by Rhode Island Kids Count found that on a given day 48 percent of adjudicated youth at the Training School were victims of documented abuse or neglect. All of this can lead to some serious emotional struggles and mental illness. “For females in particular, comorbidity [having more than one psychiatric diagnosis] is the norm rather than the exception,” says Dr. Joseph V. Penn, director of psychiatric services at the Training School. “With all of the physical trauma and abuse, this may be the first place they feel safe. They’re like pinballs all over the system. They get here, and they’re locked down; they finally realize they’re not going anywhere, and they start to make real therapeutic progress.”

Since she’s been at the Training School, Jessica has been involved with programs about anger management, personal responsibility, safe sex, and loss and grief. She attends the speech and debate classes taught each week by Brown University students. She’s involved in Project Peer, a program where residents at Levels 3 or 4 can apply to be a motivational speaker for kids who have gotten into trouble; the judge sends them by the vanload to the Training School for an afternoon to see what’s in store for them if they keep it up. She’s also earning her GED. “My thing was I could always start something, but I could never finish it,” she says. “Now I’m actually getting certificates. I’m actually going up in levels. I chose to finish those groups.

I don’t have to. I chose to work up the level system. I’m choosing to use my time wisely here.”

When Jessica is released, she plans to enroll in Community College of Rhode Island and take classes towards becoming a dental hygienist. She’ll move back in with her mother, but since her boyfriend is back in Providence with his own apartment, Jessica knows she has a pressure valve, someplace she can go to get away from it all rather than fight with her mom. “I’m doing it for my sisters,” she says. “Because my sister is going down the same exact path that I did—acting up, talking back to my mom, everything. It’s all coming out. I got a feeling that she might come here,” and she wants her sister to see that there’s another way.

Classes end for the day at 2:30 p.m., and the girls spend an hour and a half in their rooms, doing homework, napping, writing letters. At 4, pairs of girls are handcuffed to one another and loaded into a big silver van in which they’re driven to the gym for a surprisingly spirited game of indoor soccer. At 5:30, while everyone else is showering, Jessica starts setting up for tonight’s dinner and wonders aloud about what her next job is going to be when kitchen duty ends tonight (“All I can say is it’d better not be bathroom.”) At 6, Miss Michelle shouts, “Ladies! To your doors with everything you need for the day- room!” At 6:30, a JPW named Tay is dishing out dinner, and by 7, Jessica and one of her fellow residents are clearing tables, wiping them down, folding them and wheeling them into the corner. They clean out the fridge while two other girls sweep. And then everyone settles down to play cards until bedtime. These girls, along with the JPWs, are singularly focused, fierce competitors at spades. The bedtime for Level 3s like Jessica and Diamond is 10:30, but Tay lets them and their friend, Julie, who’s still at Level 2, stay up until 11, because their game is so heated. The television mounted on the wall plays a baseball game nobody’s watching.

Although her time here has been marked by slow emotional progress, Jessica knew coming in that this time would be different. “I knew I had to change,” she says. “It’s the end of the road. I’ll have another year until I’m eighteen. This is the end of my childhood. I don’t want to waste it in another group home. I try to tell girls who run, you cannot run forever.”

*Jessica's name and identifying details have been changed per her mother's request.

The View From a Treehouse of the Mind

2008-02-25T19:22:00.000-08:00

[I don't usually post work that has not been published, but this book review got killed at the last minute, after it was too old to sell anywhere else. So...enjoy!]

The View From a Treehouse of the Mind

NOW YOU SEE HIM: A Novel, by Eli Gottlieb.
Harper Collins. 272 pages. $22.95

By Beth Schwartzapfel

Fathers and sons, friends and brothers. The fractured and imperfect love we share is supposed to be the foundation upon which we weather life’s surprises; as it turns out, the love itself might provide the biggest surprise of all: Now you see it. Now you don’t.

These are the issues that Eli Gottleib continues to piece apart with his striking sophomore novel, Now You See Him. Set in a small town in upstate New York, the book is narrated by Nick Framingham, a loving if ineffectual father of two in a crumbling marriage. Nick can’t get past the recent death of his childhood best friend. The larger-than-life way in which Rob died both comforts--it somehow seems a natural end to such an oversized life--and nags.

“His name was Rob Castor,” Nick says, in the book’s opening pages. “Quite possibly, you’ve heard of him. He became a minor cult celebrity in his mid-twenties for writing a book of darkly pitch-perfect stories...Several years later, he murdered Kate Pierce, his writer girlfriend, and then committed suicide...” To Nick, Rob’s death is a question with no answer, and even as the rest of his community moves on, Nick continues to unravel. The loss infects his work, his marriage, his relationship with his parents, and ultimately, his sense of self.

Unexpectedly, Now You See Him turns out to be a mystery novel. Startling revelations late in the story shed new light on each early scene, each character and conversation gaining a weight in retrospect that we couldn’t have anticipated on the first go-round. And while watching Nick plod through his own self-destruction makes the book drag a bit at the outset, everything clicks masterfully into place as the narrative quickens.

It also reveals itself as a book about writing. In the world of "Now You See Him," more often than not, putting words to the page is ultimately destructive, whether for the writer or the subject. It’s not lost on Nick that both the rise and the dramatic fall of Rob Castor’s star are closely tied to his fiction; a writer’s block, which eventually spells Rob’s demise, afflicts him after his debut book is widely acclaimed. The critics and literati, with their pressure and puffery, are partly to blame, and come in for some ribbing: “Rob became well known for writing a book that, for at least one whole season, was the must-have fashion accessory on trains and planes for its ‘lyric anatomizing of the human heart,’” Nick tells us. The book’s villain, if there is one, is an opportunistic “grasping phony” named Mac Sterling, a childhood friend who now writes celebrity profiles for glossy magazines and who lands a “‘juicy contract’ to write the ‘definitive’ book on Rob.” In the aftermath of Rob’s death, the media are relentless, and their presence in the tiny town has a vulgar effect on its usually unassuming residents, who casually conspire to look news-worthy when the camera crews come around: “We were collectively like a hooker angry with the life she leads who is nonetheless rouged and waiting and open for business,” says Nick of his fellow townspeople.

And yet, the language in Now You See Him is painstakingly crafted. Gottlieb was a poet before he was a novelist, and it shows in Nick’s delicate turns of phrase and unexpected metaphor. Rather than seeming overwrought, as it might in the hands of a different narrator, the language with which Nick carefully dismantles his own thoughts is consistent with his character, who is “living in some little treehouse of the mind, spying out on the world and the world can’t see you back.” Where this lyrical self-analysis is ultimately ruinous for Nick, however, it is redemptive and beautiful for us, who can revel in, and learn from, Gottlieb’s wordsmithing and Nick’s uncanny insight into himself and his family, in a way that Nick can’t.

The narrator of Gottlieb’s celebrated first novel, The Boy Who Went Away, was a similarly self-conscious--if less polished--scribe. Although several decades separate Nick from Denny Graubert, the teenage protagonist of The Boy Who Went Away, the two are equally preoccupied with questions of fatherhood, families, love and lust. But where The Boy Who Went Away felt rough around the edges, like an unfinished treatment of these themes, Now You See Him gleams with poise and confidence.

Whether Nick will be redeemed from his downward spiral, whether he will be able to forgive and move on and reopen his long-closed heart to those who love him, remains an open question. But it’s never a question whether telling Nick’s story was an act of love on Gottlieb’s part. The answer is clearly yes.

Providence Journal>Books>An inside look at life in the ghetto

2008-02-24T12:55:00.000-08:00

An inside look at life in the ghetto

GANG LEADER FOR A DAY: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Street,
by Sudhir Venkatesh.

Penguin. 302 pages. $25.95.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
February 24, 2008

In the winter of 1989, a young sociology graduate student named Sudhir Venkatesh arrived at Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes. Armed with a clipboard and a stack of surveys, Venkatesh walked into what was then the nation’s largest housing project and the hub of a booming crack-cocaine trade. Ninety percent of its tens of thousands of inhabitants were on welfare, and local gangs served as both cops and robbers by controlling the flow of drugs, overseeing the local underground economy, and meting out vigilante justice.

Members of a local gang intercepted Venkatesh before he’d knocked on a single door, and, in a scene that’s by turns hilarious and hair-raising, fought amongst themselves about what to do with him. It was touch and go until a young man named J.T. arrived. “[W]hile I couldn’t have known it at this moment, he was about to become the most formidable person in my life, for a long time to come,” writes Venkatesh in his insightful and bittersweet new book, Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets.

J.T., it turns out, was the college-educated leader of a local gang faction. The two men formed an unexpected bond and Venkatesh began shadowing J.T.’s day-to-day operations. Ultimately he spent seven years deeply enmeshed in the life of Robert Taylor and its inhabitants.

The longer he stayed, the more people trusted him, and the more people trusted him, the more inside information he had access to: barbecues and birthday parties; mediation sessions between rival gang leaders, brokered by tenant leaders and local clergy; a dubious get-out-the-vote effort on behalf of Chicago’s political machine; corrupt policemen and unresponsive ambulances; gang mergers and sales strategy meetings; prostitution and crack use and domestic violence and creative ways to fix problems when the Chicago Housing Authority won’t help.

Venkatesh, now a prominent social scientist, built his early career from the data he collected during these years. Gang Leader for a Day is his opportunity to put aside the numbers and tell what happened. What emerges is a textured and complex portrait that is both affectionate and clear-eyed.

Ultimately, life in the Robert Taylor homes is both exactly what you’d expect, and exactly the opposite. It’s filthy, crime-ridden, and subject to the whims of criminals and apathetic bureaucracies. At the same time, it’s a tight-knit community where members look out for one another and do what they must to survive. The problems facing the urban poor don’t have easy answers — just how entrenched those problems are emerges vividly here — but Venkatesh takes a compelling first step by offering up names and faces behind the statistics, showing us just what we as a society stand to lose when we cordon off the projects and ignore the humanity inside them.

Providence Journal>Books>The Ever-Evolving First Amendment

2008-02-10T14:43:00.000-08:00

The Ever-Evolving First Amendment

FREEDOM FOR THE THOUGHT THAT WE HATE: A Biography of the First Amendment,

by Anthony Lewis.

Basic Books. 221 pages. $25.

BY BETH SCHWARTZAPFEL
Special to the Journal

During the run-up to a key presidential election, Matthew Lyon wrote a letter to the editor of his local paper. In it, Lyon mocked the sitting president’s “continual grasp for power” and his “ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation and selfish avarice.” Under the watchful eye of a Supreme Court justice, Lyon was convicted of “making odious or contemptible the president and government, and bringing them both into disrepute.” He was sentenced to four months in prison and a $1,000 fine.

This story sounds like one that could not happen in the United States. In fact, Lyon was arrested in his home state of Vermont and convicted under the Sedition Act, in 1798, less than a decade after the Bill of Rights — with its famous assertion that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” — was ratified.

In his new book, Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and professor Anthony Lewis brings this and other stories to vivid life to demonstrate that the First Amendment was, and continues to be, a moving target.

Tracing the origins of the First Amendment to King Henry VIII, Lewis writes that English censors dispensed “previous restraints” that regularly prevented books and newspapers from being published. Early interpretations of the First Amendment were that it protected Americans only from English-style previous restraints, and, what’s more, applied only to the federal government — not the states (“Congress shall make no law . . .”).

As the country and the Supreme Court evolved, approaches to the First Amendment changed, too. But it wasn’t until the 1920s and ’30s that the Court consistently began enforcing the freedoms of speech and of the press as we know them today.

In engaging and accessible style, Lewis considers the ways in which the Court has weighed freedom of speech and of the press with other rights that Americans hold dear. The right to privacy, for instance, versus the right of the press to publish information about one’s personal life. The right of the press to hold policy-makers and public figures accountable versus the right of those persons to not be misrepresented, at best, libeled at worst. The right of a defendant to an unbiased jury versus the right of a press to report on a case as it unfolds. And, in a timely example that turns out to be as old as the country itself, the right of the citizens to their civil liberties versus the responsibility of the government in times of war and danger.

Lewis takes a stand on some controversial issues, breaking with major journalists’ organizations to oppose a broad shield law protecting journalists from grand jury subpoena, arguing against Supreme Court decisions that identify campaign contributions as protected speech, and asserting — reluctantly, it seems — that “we should be able to punish speech that urges terrorist violence to an audience . . . whose members are ready to act on the urging.”

It’s hard to imagine a book about legal history reading like a page-turner, but this book does. The Supreme Court justices whose decisions have shaped our country emerge as conflicted and principled human beings. The questions that have yet to be settled press impatiently against the book’s pages, reminding us that the First Amendment continues to shift under our feet even as we read.

Ultimately, Freedom for the Thought That We Hate is both a paean to the First Amendment and a recognition of its limitations. In a far-reaching and sophisticated reading of American history, Lewis argues that freedom of speech and freedom of the press are nothing without their practitioners.

“Even in a country with constitutional guarantees of freedom, something more is needed to resist fear and its manipulators,” he writes. “That is courage.” With this compelling book, Lewis demonstrates just that.

Mr. Beller's Neighborhood>Coffee, and This and That

2008-02-03T13:05:00.000-08:00

Coffee, and This and That

By Beth Schwartzapfel
February 3, 2008

“I don’t know their names, but I know them by voice,” said Galo Cardenas, proprietor of GC Snax, located on the ground floor of the New York Supreme Court building at 60 Centre Street. And if Mr. Cardenas looks at his customers askance, it’s because sideways is the only way he can see them -- he’s legally blind, and only has vision out of the right half of his right eye.

GC Snax sells the standard fare that its name implies, as well as Sole Proprietorship Forms, Affidavit and Judgment Confession Forms, and legal document covers. Its walls are hung with pictures of the snacks on offer -- breakfast sandwiches, hot pockets, burritos -- and handwritten signs announcing prices and specials: “Snyder’s Pretzels, only 40¢ ea,” and “New Altoid: Dark Chocolate Dipped Mint.” The shop itself is like a tiny extension of the lobby, with worn marble floors and ornate wrought iron work around the door. A formica-topped wooden counter runs its length horizontally. When Cardenas first opened GC Snax ten years ago, he moved the cash register from the right side of the counter to the left, the better to see the customers who line up to the register’s right.

On a recent weekday, classical music played softly overhead. When a customer ordered a soft pretzel, Cardenas opened a heated glass case in which a rack of pretzels spun slowly, and the room filled with the smell of a New York City street.

“How much, two hundred dollars?” he asked the customer, who had just handed him a twenty. He likes to joke with his customers by adding a zero to their totals. “That’s twenty thousand there, Mr. Galo,” the customer replied. The cash register announced the numbers on the keypad in a mechanized voice as Cardenas punched them in. “Two. Zero. Point. Zero. Zero.” the register said.

Arriving at GC Snax from the street is a task; after climbing the Supreme Court building’s imposing stone steps, passing under George Washington’s words -- “the administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good government” -- and, appropriately, walking past 14 formidable stone pillars, one then has to go through airport-style security (belt off, watch and wallet in little plastic bin, bag on x-rayed conveyor belt), before doubling back to the left of the main entrance, where the shop is nestled. It’s nearly impossible to know how many New Yorkers pass through the Supreme Court each day. The Court System’s Communications Director, David Bookstaver, puts the number in the “thousands,” although they don’t formally keep track -- but Cardenas estimates that some 500 people a day stop by his shop. Of these, he knows about half, and he has a remarkable ability to recognize them -- and anticipate their purchase -- as soon as they walk in the door. “You want blueberry yogurt, right?” he asked a customer in a trench coat. “Yes, and a spoon and a bag,” the man replied. “No spoon! No bag!” Cardenas answered. “You use your fingers today!”

Cardenas, 60, was a guidance counselor for the Brooklyn Public Schools in East New York before he lost his vision 20 years ago in an accident. Born in Italy but raised in Spain, Israel, and the United States, Cardenas speaks 4 languages, and his accent is accordingly difficult to pin down. “I’m like a gypsy,” he said. His black hair, graying at the temples, is gelled and combed neatly back into a side-part. After several years of recovery and rehabilitation, Cardenas made his way to Lighthouse International, a New York-based nonprofit organization whose occupational therapists teach the blind and visually impaired how to negotiate work in a sighted world.

After learning “how to do coffee, and this and that,” as Cardenas puts it, he connected with the New York State Commission for the Blind and Visually Impaired, whose Business Enterprise Program operates shops in Federal and State office buildings statewide. He went through an interview process, where he had to demonstrate a mastery of business principles, like balancing profit and inventory, and then he was allocated the space at 60 Centre Street. He gives 25% of his profits to the Commission, whose business advisor comes to check in on him each month. His wife comes each weekend to clean and make new signs. And Cardenas opens his doors at 7:00 each morning, fires up the coffee pot, and begins cracking good-natured jokes at his customers.

“You got taller!” he said, squinting up at a blue-uniformed security guard. “You used to be a short guy! That’s what working here does to you, I guess.”