Comma Dot Comma

Until the 2000 elections, when I learned about convicted felons being disenfranchised, I didn’t quite realize that in this country we like to continue punishing people well after they have served their prison time. It came as a bit of a shock. Now Dr. G has cowritten a policy paper on the issue of lifetime sanctions for felony offenders. I’ll link to it once it comes out. He and his cowriter advocate two things: 1. Except in rare cases, lifetime sanctions on former convicts should be abolished or replaced with shorter-term sanctions. 2. Use of criminal background checks should be regulated and have sunset provisions (that is, people would be able to access only a certain number of recent years of a person’s record).

These sanctions are created for two reasons– continued punishment, and to reduce risk of further harm to society. Examples of these punishments at the state level include not being able to vote, not being able to get public funding for education, and being barred from hundreds of different jobs. Examples of preventing risk include sex offender registries and bans from adopting children. In most cases, Dr. G explains, these lifetime regulations are unnecessary and have ethical problems. This is a big deal because these laws affect 16 million people* already.

Let’s say a drug dealer with a felony charge completes his prison term and is sent back into the community to go and sin no more. “Become a productive citizen!” we tell him. “Except, you can’t get financial aid for school, there is a big list of jobs you will never be allowed to do, and for the jobs you can get, employers are pretty much going to rule you out based on the criminal background check. Good luck! We wish you the best! And oh, you don’t like these policies? Too bad, because you will never be able to vote to change them.” These sanctions not only put him at an immediate disadvantage in getting back on his feet, but likely severely limit the opportunities he has to create a better life for himself. Multiply his dead-end situation by 16 million. That’s just ridiculous. Punishment for a crime should be contained to a specific time period; once you’ve done your time, you should regain full citizenship. Anything else is, in my opinion, unethical except in cases where vulnerable members of society, such as children, need additional protection.

Voting in particular is an essential check on government abuses. Imagine if the government started picking on a particular group. Let’s say, Christians. Draconian laws are passed against Christian assembly and prayer. People are convicted of felonies for carrying bibles and spend years in prison. People plot to vote in more open-minded leaders. But once they get out of prison, they find their right to vote has been rescinded, so they can’t do anything legal to change the situation. The government has effectively taken a group it doesn’t like and found as many ways as possible to reduce its power. Dangerous policy, indeed.

Dr. G also pointed out the good research on what happens to people over their lifetimes and after they get out of prison. The fact is, people commit less and less crime as they get older. Some studies show that by the time career criminals are 40, their criminal activity goes into steep decline. Nearly everyone is done with crime by the age of 60. * In addition, the longer someone stays out of prison, the less likely they are to be arrested again. By the time someone has been out of prison for seven years, you can’t tell the difference in risk of offending between that person and someone who’s never been convicted*. They blend right in to the general population. So, then, there is no need for lifetime bans and sanctions, since people become much lower risks to society with each passing year.

That’s why the indiscriminate use of criminal background checks should be reigned in. The common wisdom”once a criminal, always a criminal” just isn’t true. To withold opportunity and trust from someone for a conviction from 10 or even 20 years ago makes no sense, in light of the facts. Let’s not stigmatize people lifelong for the crimes of their youth.

*Updated5/7

The best online resource on this issue is Chris Uggen’s webpage. The 16 million figure comes from his 2006 paper with Manza & Thompson, available on his research web page:
and another paper:

“Scarlet letters and recidivism: Does an old criminal record predict future offending?”

Esme was very careful with the ficus. In the old days she used to drag them around by their tasteful white wicker root baskets but it turned out that if you put one near the window in the sun all its leaves would fall off. They would grow back and then when you moved it to the shade they would fall off again. Those fibrous leaves were hard to vacuum up. Now she just kept the trees on either side of the pulpit with the white lights still wound around them. For weddings they’d run a green extension cord from the back wall and presto, twinkle-o, ready to go. What was it with ficus and weddings, anyway? All the girls wanted them. And the white lights, and some precarious arch from the Rent-A-Center as a, what did they call it, “focal point.” The worst part about the ficus was dusting the leaves. The assistant pastor said that the whole point of the ficus was the shiny leaves and if they weren’t shiny then why did the church board vote to pay for the real thing instead of getting the lower-priced fake ones? It was incumbent upon Esme, he said, incumbent, that she be a good steward of the ficus. She was thinking of having business cards printed up: Esme Howard, Ficus Steward. Or maybe Ficus Stewardess? In her mind trees and plants were outdoorsy and you shouldn’t have to dust outdoorsy things. They grew in dirt, for goodness sake, with a layer of green-gray moss over the soil for good taste. The assistant pastor also said that ficus were a type of fig tree. They remind us of our Lord’s homeland. The fig, a mighty symbol, he added, staring over her shoulder as if into Jerusalem. She’d never seen a fruit on either ficus but now while she dusted she sang, “Oh give us some figgy pudding, oh give us some figgy pudding,” and thought about those tiny, tiny seeds inside figs. More like grit than seeds. In a perfect world a fig would have a pit that you could eat around, and the leaves on the tree would stay shiny of their own accord. She took up her cloth and moved to the next branch, individually wiping each bright, elliptical leaf.

Sometimes I’m really tempted to blog about work. Encountering the intricacies of my workplace culture for the first time, it seems like ripe, low-hanging fruit ready for the picking. The grapes! The nectarines! But, no. In general, I try to avoid it. To me, my workplace is sort of like a person and I apply to it the standards that I apply to other people. Though I’m not perfectly consistent, the intent is to protect other people’s privacy. A blog is essentially an international public forum and while my particular blog is not being read by thousands (or anything like it), you never know who’s looking. So, while I have chosen to air my private life worldwide, I can’t assume that other people and organizations would do the same. When I’m blogging about people other than myself, I usually try to get permission from them first ( if they are bloggers I just assume it’s okay). Some people, like Dr. G, have just given a blanket permission. Other people can have, in this forum at least, some say in whether (if not how) they are portrayed.

When it comes to my work organization, I believe it has the right to determine how it wants to present itself to the world, especially since reputation is important to its success. If I were a journalist investigating the organization, that would be one thing; as an insider, I can’t disassociate myself from it enough. If I could keep both myself and my workplace anonymous, then I might be more willing, but sometime in the last few months this blog became connected to my first and last name, which can in turn be easily connected to my organization. I have no particular desire to hide my identity, so that’s no big deal except that it further restricts the subjects I feel free to talk about on the blog for the sake of people and organizations associated with me.

Thinking about it, I realize that I do talk about Dr. G’s work sometimes. Probably I should stop. That’s a little bit different, though, because his work is so independent that the few things I mention bear little relevance for his organization as a whole. Still, probably I should think more about how what I write could affect his professional reputation and err on the side of caution.

The same thing should apply to writing about my specific church, too, though for some reason that organization feels like a somewhat different category. Is it?

I tend to have an outsidery, satirical perspective on organizations and their quirky cultural mileus, and a lot of things strike me as funny or make me roll my eyes, and that is bound to come across in my blogging. So it’s probably best to just leave it alone.

The line gets fuzzy when I’m focusing on my experiences and ideas, which are personal and only indirectly related to other people and places. If I inscribe the circle too small it starts to get boring. But maybe that’s a false assumption. Here’s an idea: you can challenge me with the most mundane topic you can think of and see what I can do with it. That might be fun. Say, a dirty kitchen sponge.

When I’m doing creative writing for myself or for official publication, though, all bets are off. I will use any of my past and present experience in any form I choose and make any kind of judgment I want to about any of it. That is bound to include people and organizations. Maybe it’s a contradictory stance but really, if I had to worry about all that stuff I would never get anything written.  Double standard!  Awesome!

Here’s a blogging code of ethics.

And here’s the Colbert Report Metaphor thing

And here’s a cute cat I kind of know who could be included in a picture book. Vote for Chloe!

P.S.  Karen– I dominated in Risk so thoroughly that I ran out of pieces.  Beginner’s luck, I’m told, as well as bad strategy.  In a rematch today I got trounced.  My little pink squares seemed to cower more and more as the game wore on.  They knew their days were numbered.

All the animals and plants started flattening out like soggy pancakes, and no one could do a thing about it. The rich people noticed it first, when the fruit-bearing trees and rose bushes in their pleasure gardens began to sink and widen at the bases. They fired their illegally hired landscaping people but it didn’t help. Next it was the race horses, whose ankles thickened while their backs thinned until they couldn’t race. That’s where we get that old saying “easy as saddling a racehorce,” to describe an activity that seems straightforward but is actually impossible. The foodstuffs began to be affected as well. Everything tasted the same as before, except it was all the shape and consistency of a soggy pancake, causing no end of trouble for the food packagers and distributors, as well as for small children, who had been use to identifying disgusting food by its shape.

I don’t even want to talk about the housepets. It got to where you couldn’t tell a gerbil from a chihuaha; they were all just furry amoebas sliding around the house, and you tried not to step on them. People worried that humans would be next, since many of them had been sagging and thickening for a number of years. Fortunately, however, their rates of sagging and thickening did not increase. It seems they had built up some sort of tolerance or immune response. Scientists applied for multi-million dollar grants to study the phenomena, but when they came out with their results ten years later, the people had already voted to put a pancake on the flag. “Moot!” they cried. “Moot, moot, moot!”

Inspired by Russel Edson:

A woman was collecting snails at work. She had a good-sized pile on her desk when the boss came in.
These snails are all wrong, he said.
They do a good job of sorting and stapling, she said.
They will never do for the presentation, he said.
The woman had to admit he was right. Their big client was a sea albatross who was related to the boss by marriage.
Okay, said the woman. But don’t come running to me when the big client chokes on his mackerel and decides to give his fortune to the union.
You always say that, said the boss.
The snails didn’t say anything. They refilled the stapler and filed themselves under “E” for escargot.

My new favorite dorky comedian, Demetri Martin, did a Comedy Central show over the weekend. He had a whole segment of charts and graphs. His were super funny, since it is his job to sit around thinking of funny things. He had a line graph showing the effect of a girl’s cuteness on how interested he is in hearing about how intuitive her cat is. I’ve been inspired to make my own charts, which are amateur but I had fun making them.

This will be Year Three of my attempts to execute the following resolutions:

1. Do not try to save anyone

2. Do not try to prove anything to anyone

3. Do not try to accomplish anything

These resolutions provide me implicit permission to stop shoulding and striving.  Their crass absolutism has tasered, although not killed, the not-enoughing. Now that I don’t demand (as often) great triumphs and strides and rescues and performances from myself, I don’t feel the need to demand them from others.

To my own amazement I have not yet melted into a lazy, apathetic puddle of greasy cellulite and maudlin self-regard.  Maybe by 2008.

It’s good to start with art. In this case, the Spiral Jetty earthworks by Robert Smithson, which I tried in vain to see from the airplane window as we flew into, and out of, Salt Lake City last month. It can be seen from space as a white swirl in the pink lake. It started out black in the 70’s, accumulated enough salt to turn white, and now appears to be somewhat black again. It is always the same, and always changing. It is buried by water, or exposed by drought. Here’s a picture from someone called blurb:

It’s also good to start with prayer. Thus, the lyrics to Leonard Cohen’s “If it be Your Will,” followed by a YouTube link to art/folk singer Antony’s performance of the song from the just-ok documentary I’m Your Man. It’s the prayingest non-church singing I’ve encountered in a long time, especially beginning around minute two and a half.

If it Be Your Will

If it be your will
That I speak no more
And my voice be still
As it was before
I will speak no more
I shall abide until
I am spoken for
If it be your will

If it be your will
That a voice be true
From this broken hill
I will sing to you
From this broken hill
All your praises they shall ring
If it be your will
To let me sing

If it be your will
If there is a choice
Let the rivers fill
Let the hills rejoice
Let your mercy spill
On all these burning hearts in hell
If it be your will
To make us well

And draw us near
And bind us tight
All your children here
In their rags of light
In our rags of light
All dressed to kill
And end this night
If it be your will

If it be your will.

Antony sings “If it Be Your Will.”

Kate tagged me and I will oblige. Five things most people are unlikely to know about me. Hm! This is hard.

1. I had a crush on Kirk Cameron from 5th grade to 7th grade. I wrote him letters telling him I admired his work. I had a poster of him that sometimes scared me with its loominess in the middle of the night.
2. I still have, and wear, some of the makeup from my wedding 9.5 years ago. It’s a Clinique concealer stick.
3. My most frequently recurring dream involves my being in charge of a large vulnerable group in a dangerous situation. Past groups have included immigrants, the physically disabled, the elderly, the morbidly obese, toddlers on goats, the mentally ill, and lost ghosts. Past dangerous situations have included crossing a mountain pass in winter, fording a wild river in puffy down coats, and traversing the rotting floors of an old building.
4. My middle name comes from the name of the street the hospital was on.
5. I can’t stand to have a blanket covering my face. I’m sure that I will run out of air, though I know a blanket is permeable. I am also bothered when other people put blankets over their faces and I may try to rescue them.

I’ll tag Karen Joy. And Stephanie.

Today I am thinking about all the empty space inside my face. Mouth, nose, sinuses, ears. It is mostly wet, squishy empty space. I’m wondering what landscape I might be able to compare it to. An undersea cavern? The structure of a sea sponge?