Category: Uncategorized

H-T coverage of juvenile justice forum

I don’t have the time or energy right now to process yesterday’s community meeting on the building of the county juvenile facility.  I learned a lot, was pretty disheartened, and realized, more than anything, that perceptions and realities of limited resources force people with similar interests and goals to become adversaries.  This is how the local paper covered the event.

 

To clarify my position, I feel that the current Youth Services Bureau should not be relocated or its services replicated on the site of any secure detention facility (adult or juvenile).  I also feel like the current dual role of the YSB as a safe space and as a place where youth are sent by schools, police, courts, or parents is problematic.  There needs to be seperate spaces and adequate funding and staff for both roles.   Ultimately, neither should be on the same site or share staff with any kind of secure detention facility.  Furthermore,  our community needs to expand existing, and develop new  recreational, cultural, counseling, therapeutic, and healthcare opportunities that are youth-initiated, youth-feedback-responsive and voluntary to all the youth of the county.  We must respond to the needs and desires of youth before entering the juvenile justice system, during supervision, and after supervsion, as well as the needs of youth who do not come into contact with the justice system or other services at all.  The proposal of a justice campus would effectively lock much-needed resources and oppotunities for programs behind bars.

 

Juveniles focus of first meeting on justice issues
Reasons for, against building local juvenile center discussed

By Bethany Nolan 331-4373 | bnolan@heraldt.com
October 17, 2008

Reducing the number of repeat offenders, expanding the range of sanctions available to local justice officials and centralizing services have been identified as “guiding principles” for Monroe County as it looks toward building its own juvenile center.

That’s what members of the public learned at the first of four public forums related to potential construction of new criminal justice facilities, hosted by the Monroe County Criminal Justice Coordinating Council and Noblesville-based consulting firm PSMI Inc. The county commissioners hired the consulting firm back in April to develop facility, site space and operations programs for a new jail, sheriff’s office and juvenile center, plus help identify capital and operating costs and choose contractor, architectural and vendor services.

Other meetings will be held in the upcoming weeks that will focus on a jail and community corrections and work release programs. After those, consultant Bill Shepler said the firm will present the commissioners with a master plan.

Monroe Circuit Judge Steve Galvin — who handles juvenile cases — pointed out he’s sat in on 20 years’ worth of discussions about a juvenile center, and said Monroe County is the only one of the state’s 15 largest counties that doesn’t have its own facility.

“We have to do it,” he said of constructing a center. “It is our duty. It is our responsibility.”

He said the county spends about $1.4 million annually on both the Youth Services Bureau — which has a shelter and provides other services to young people — and to house local juveniles in secure detention at other facilities throughout the state. On any day throughout the year, approximately seven local youths are in secure detention and between 10 and 12 are in shelter care, he said.

Youth Services Bureau director Ron Thompson said he’s not so sure about a new facility, pointing out his current programs are underfunded and wondering if local officials would do the same in the future. He also wondered if his facility would be rendered moot by a new juvenile center. Galvin replied he’d like to leave the current shelter as is, but admitted it could be difficult to fund both.

Geoff Hing, with newly organized advocacy group Decarcerate Monroe County, said the county’s Safe Place site shouldn’t be at the same place as troubled youth, as it is now with the youth shelter. Others spoke about their concern of a “kiddie jail,” arguing that locking up troubled kids isn’t going to help anything, while others pointed out locating youth services next to an adult prison could send a troubling message.

“It’s never been our intention to have a youth jail here, but rather a part of a continuum of care,” Monroe Circuit Judge Kenneth Todd said. “We’re not about incarcerating kids.”

The idea for a justice campus and a corrections campus took root last October, when the plan was backed by all three county commissioners, the sheriff, five of the seven members of the county council and the county’s board of judges.

The project calls for building a new county jail, sheriff’s office and juvenile center on 85 acres off South Rogers Street. The county already owns the site, but it has no infrastructure.

After the new facilities are built, the plan calls for renovating the Justice Building — which houses the jail on its top floors — to make more space for courts and other county offices there.


	


	


					

					



	


	
howto make a quarter sheet daily planner from an ical file in linux


	

		
My Planner


Update: Photos of my planner! Mine is on the left, next to a moleskin to give you an idea of the relative size.  Below is what each day looks like.


Inside of my planner


I use Sandy for most of my calendaring, but don’t have a PDA or mobile phone with a convenient calendar app (and can’t afford one).  So, I needed a paper daily planner that could be generated on a weekly basis from the events that I shoot into Sandy.  I find that it’s no too hard to do a daily paper->electronic sync to update my calendar in Sandy.  Sandy has an ics export which is really nice if I want to view my appointments along with appointments from my other calendars (like my work one, managed by Webcalendar).


What you need:


    

  • Calendar software that supports printing a daily view (I used KOrganizer)
    • 

  • psutils package
    • 



Import your remote calendar(s)


I first imported my calendar into KOrganizer (File->Import->Import Calendar and then entered the URL of my iCal feed in the Location field) .


Print the calendar to a postscript file


I printed a page for each day of my calendar with  File->Print and then chose Print Day for the Print Style.  I selected a month worth of dates for the Date & Time Range.  I clicked Print and chose the Print to File (Postscript) option for the printer Name.  The ability to print to a file came with my default KDE setup, but it shouldn’t be too hard to get this ability from whatever printing management system you’re using.


Make the postscript file 4up


I used the psnup program to put four days on one letter sized page.




 ghing@silvertongue:~/tmp$ psnup -pletter -b0.25in -4 planner.ps planner-up.ps




The above options say that the output paper size is letter, that there should be a .25 inch margin around each page (I did this to allow for a binding on the left hand side of the sheets), that there should be 4 pages from the file planner.ps combined into every one page in the output file planner-up.ps.


Open the postscript file and print it


I used evince to open and print my planner.


Cut the pages into quarters


I used a paper cutter to cut the printed pages into quarters.  Take care to keep track of the order of pages so it’s easier to assemble your calendar.


Find a cover and a binding


For mine, I used part of the cover of a notebook that I dumpstered in Bologna and held everything together with a butterfly clip that I got from the supply closet at work.  Be resourceful!

	


	


					



	


	
Liveblogging from Linuxfest


	

		




Linuxfest 2008 web page.


In the first talk the presenter said that he felt the greatest contribution of Linux was that it was the great equalizer and that it was responsible for the generation of skilled IT workers in India, China, and other parts of the world that are emerging as producing a lot of technology and technology workers.


Building Community and Taking Linux to the Masses


Zonker talked about Linux and Community and offered this definition of community, saying that FOSS communities have a lot to learn from communities in general:


“Community is when a group of people come together for common cause, work together, and become something greater than the sum of the individuals.”


He pointed out that community building in FOSS is taking software and not just making it free of cost but letting people drive the creation of the technology.


Despite his employment with Novell, he said that people using Linux, even if it’s not OpenSUSE, is a win for him and he’s happy to point out other FOSS communities that are doing things right.


FOSS communities getting it right: Fedora, Mozilla.


FOSS communities getting it wrong: KDE (releasing beta release as 4.0, dropping support for KDE 3.5), OpenOffice (great product, not growing or good community, lots of head butting with Sun)


Community building


When do you start building a community? As soon as you start a project!  Do you want people to contribute to your code, or are you just pushing it to the world?


OpenSUSE is responsive to calls from Japan for more translations.  He feels like Europe has accepted English as a lingua franca for Linux distros, but Japan hasn’t.  Zonker pointed out that this is totally legitimate and noted the challenges of western Europeans/Americans trying to navigate signs in a non-latin alphabet.  He said signs leading to people being invovled in your community need to be clear to lots of different people.


Community building is in the long term (years ! months).  With FOSS projects it’s important to realize that the projects have to be responsible to the community and not just managers or developers.  From the Ubuntu community manager his job is “Making sure the community is getting screwed by Canonical and making sure that Canonical isn’t getting screwed by the community.”


How do you manage community?  Build up trust so that people (developers) want to contribute.


How do you meet the goals of both the community and managers?  E.g. different milestones for Novell and OpenSUSE community.


A community manager’s job is finding and connecting the body parts, but the community itself provides the spark to bring the project to life.


One of the challenges at Novell was to take people who had worked forever answering to managers and they had to learn how to also be responsive to people who weren’t their managers and didn’t even work for the company.


openSUSE build system allows people to build packages for distros that aren’t just openSUSE.


Cool stuff: Helping Hands sessions to help new users with using openSUSE.


Zonker came to being a community manager from being a technology journalist.  This experience has been helpful because it’s made him a good writer and communicator which is crucial for managing a community.  He misses the objectivity of being a journalist and not being perceived as being connected with a company.


Developing on Mac


Had a really nice slideshow.  Lots of big icons.  As with Zonker, the slides were really sparse with most of the details being filled in with the talk.


Presenter defined the fundamental concept of Unix as:


$ ls | wc


“Little bits of functionality that you can link together in interesting ways” 


Quartz composer tool is analogous to the pipe.  Patches link together graphic effects.  All the animations on the Mac are built this way.  




This Japanese artist uses Quartz composer in cool ways to make cool works (and he gives you the source).


This stuff is so cool.  The downside is that you have to be able to afford mac hardware and the OS.  I think the reason that people like Macs so much is because they’re fun to use.  Apparently all 6,7, and 8 graders in Maine get new Mac notebooks.  Kids found a way to cheat on a test, even with iChat disabled by creating ad-hoc wireless networks named things like ‘The answer to question 5 is D’.


Virtualization


There were two talks on virtualization.  The first was on enterprise virtualization and the second was on virtualization security.  Apparently, a lot of the big apps at IU like Oncourse, Onestart, and the IU home page are all running on virtual servers.  They did a cool demo where they moved a virtual machine from on physical host to another with no perceivable downtime.


One big advantage of a virtualization that I didn’t really think about was the fact that, by consolidating VMs on fewer physical machines, all the environmentals like electrical, cooling, cabling, space.

	


	


					



	


	
Oakland!


	

		
I’m in Oakland for the CR10 conference.  We flew in a day early and it was nice to have some time to chill before being at the conference and to get to think about the content of the dialog that Decarcerate Monroe County is participating in at the conference.  I went running this morning around Lake Merrit and it was really awesome.  I’ve realized recently that excercise really helps me feel more mentally sharp and less scatterbrained.  I love neighborhoods that have heavily trafficed public spaces and there were tons of people hanging out around the lake.  There just seemed to be all different kinds of people walking around and being active and enjoying the autum weather.  This was  a really different experience from when I went running on Defiance, Ohio tour in South Philly.  There, I felt so out of place, and I realized that, in many ways, even an activity that seems as accesible as running can be pretty classed.  I’ve ran, on and off, ever since I started running around my neighborhood in Boiling Springs to get ready for soccer season.  It feels startling to realize that something that you feel like you have a very intimate relationship with is really mediated by the places and cultures that you come from.  I guess this is a no-brainer, but it feels pretty profound when it feels like something that feels natural to you sets you apart from other people, or identifies you as an outsider.


Oakland has hella Asian people.  Being multiracial and growing up in a place where there were definitely not hella Asian people (or non-white people in general, for that matter), I know my exsperience is really different than a lot of the Asian people who live here, but somehow it’s still comforting.  At the supermarket, I paged through a book about Oakland’s Chinatown, and I thought about how many of the photos reminded me of photos of my grandparents.  It made me wonder what my dad’s life would have been like if he had grown up in a place less isolated from other Chinese Americans.




In the Bay Area, I think Chinese Americans have a huge and indelible role in the region’s history.   I tried to think about how Asians are perceived in Bloomington and didn’t come up with much.  I think they are largely assimilated into White culture or perceived as foreign students, having an akward and temporary relationship with the town.  One perception that came to mind out of nowhere though, was of an Asian family that owns a lot of property around town.  I don’t know how I get this feeling, and it’s hard to trace it to specific comments, but I just feel like there’s this expectation that, because the landlord isn’t white, he should be more down than white landlords.  Stingy, profiteering, condescending, or indifferent treatment that people seem to expect from your archetypical white “evil land owner” seems to be taken as a little bit worse from the Asian landlord.  This made me think about how whiteness is stereotyped and is, in many ways, is defined by a set of paradigms for success in our culture.  People of color seem to face additional barriers to this kind of success and also face additional criticism for aspiring to it or taking part in it.

	


	


					



	


	
U.S. “legal” immigration explained in flowchart


	

		


It’s dangerous to oversimplify what are ultimately complicated policy issues, like immigration, not to mention the huge variety of experience that immigrants face, but most of the public debate on this, and many other issues, seems founded on information, that, even at a basic level is pretty misinformed.  This diagram about different pathways to legal residency and citizenship is an example of helping people understand the basics of policy in a really clear way.


I’ve  always loved things like this.  Recently, I saw a great breakdown of the different positions of McCain in Obama that really concisely summarized the candidates rhethoric, their voting record, and analysis from non-profit issue advocacy groups.  This was in Glamour magazine, but it’s the kind of coverage that I think has been sorely missing in other media I’ve seen.  I’d rather see lots more of this issue-based breakdown, rather than being overwhelmed with manipulative identity politics or Monday Night Football-style coverage of campaign strategy.


As a kid, I read Zillions Magazine, who, like many other print publications, has since gone out of print.  It had a lot of similar diagrams that broke down the dynamics of finance and marketing for youth, trying to help make them critical consumers.


Seeing this flowchart got me pretty stoked and made me start thinking about a How do people get and stay incarcerated in Monroe County flowchart.

	


	


					



	


	
Bill O’Reilly reality check


	

		http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCSaF4KC3eE

If I ever need to check my tendency towards being a know-it-all or talking over people, I’m just going to watch this video.


The gender dynamic is insane as well.  I can’t imagine getting talked down to in this way by a colleague, especially when I was well researched, seemed to share the same political stance, and was, umm, correct.  Re-reading the sentence that I just wrote, the fact that I can’t imagine this is pretty telling as I’m sure it’s a reality that many women face on a daily basis, and not just at FOX News.  Frankly, it’s embarrassing to think about all the times I felt like I had to assert myself as an authority, even when I didn’t know what I was talking about and the mildly conflicting point of view was articulated politely and clearly.   I take this as proof that the cultural expectancies that tie gender to authority, and intelligence and the ways one can express them are making us all less intelligent.

	


	


					



	


	
sagging


	

		
Sagged Pants at Fashion Week 


At my high school, we called it sagging.  This word described the act of wearing baggy pants that would fall to mid-thigh and, if one’s t-shirt was not also quite oversized enough, reveal one’s boxer shorts.  In the midst of attempts by cities like Atlanta and Miami to criminalize sagging baggy pants, I thought it was really interesting to come upon photos from designer Thom Browne’s menswear collection that he showed at fashion week which featured models sagging their pants on the runway.  It was a stark reminder that different standards apply to the same activity for different people, in different spaces.

	


	


					



	


	
sexism or patriarchy?


	

		
I’m terrified about the galvanization of power that could result this November.  If there’s one good thing about how candidates have been framed in this election, it’s that the response has become very clear and articulate.  The analysis that Rebecca Hyman applies to the election and the cultural back-and-forth about Palin, Clinton, and gender that has come with it in her article Sarah Palin and the Wrong Way to Battle Sexism is really good and it articulates why the calls and campaigns for tolerance in a community like Bloomington seem so weak-sauce.


There’s a big difference between identifying sexist acts and undermining patriarchy, the system of power and privilege that reinforces and grounds particular stories about how men and women should behave, how sex and gender should be expressed, about who is rational and who is emotional, who’s a “fighter” and who’s a “babe.” These narratives are refracted and reinforced by the media and by people speaking from podiums, most certainly, but they aren’t the work of a few bad eggs.  


To equate feminism with the fight against “sexism” is to imply that the work of feminism is that of changing or eliminating those individuals who perpetrate these sexist acts. If we could just stop the Chris Matthewses and the Norman Mailers, the Maureen Dowds and the Phyllis Schlaflys, the story goes; if we could just get people to stop watching FOX News, or write another letter to MSNBC, then somehow, someday, women will be treated with respect. And it’s the idea that feminists focus on individuals, rather than systems of power, that grounds the conservative caricature of feminists as a cardigan-flapping bunch of prudes, censoring a couple of good fellows who were just making a joke.


If all it took to free women, or African-Americans, or immigrants, or the poor, from the stories that make them seem “different,” menacing, irrational and emotional was “recognition,” then feminists should be spending their money dropping educational pamphlets from the skies. But these ideas about masculinity and femininity, sexuality and race — ideas that make the joke of the New Yorker cover instantly comprehensible, no matter what you think of the joke — are entrenched and crucial to the ways we in America have made the world make sense.




[tags]gender, election, palin, clinton, patriarchy, sexism[/tags]

	


	


					



	


	
reason #4 to vote: the myth of America vs. the reality


	

		
I’ve been posting on the Defiance, Ohio website about why I’m voting for Barack Obama in the upcoming presidential election and why I think that people who connect with the content of Defiance, Ohio songs should vote, and vote for Obama.  I think there are limits to the power of voting, but I think punk people’s aversion to voting represents “a chilling disconnect from reality” and I want punk to be something that is connected, accountable, and malleable to as much of the whole world as possible.  I’m writing here about some more reasons why I’ve found myself feeling so invested in this election.


This article in Time about Obama, Palin, and American myth and reality is pretty amazing.  In his article, Joe Klein says:


 The Democrats have no myth to counter this powerful Republican fantasy. They had to spend their convention on the biographical defensive: Barack Obama really is “one of us,” speaker after speaker insisted. Really. Democrats do have the facts in their favor. Polls show that Americans agree with them on the issues. The Bush Administration has been a disaster on many fronts. The McCain campaign has provided only the sketchiest policy proposals; it has spent most of its time trying to divert the national conversation away from matters of substance. But Americans like stories more than issues. Policy proposals are useful in the theater of presidential politics only inasmuch as they illuminate character: far more people are aware of the fact that Palin put the state jet on eBay than know that she imposed a windfall-profits tax on oil companies as governor and was a porkaholic as mayor of Wasilla.


So Obama faces an uphill struggle between now and Nov. 4. He has no personal anecdotes to match Palin’s mooseburgers. His story of a boy whose father came from Kenya and mother from Kansas takes place in an America not yet mythologized, a country that is struggling to be born — a multiracial country whose greatest cultural and economic strength is its diversity. It is the country where our children already live and that our parents will never really know, a country with a much greater potential for justice and creativity — and perhaps even prosperity — than the sepia-tinted version of Main Street America. But that vision is not sellable right now to a critical mass of Americans. They live in a place, not unlike C. Vann Woodward’s South, where myths are more potent than the hope of getting past the dour realities they face each day. 


I grew up in a community very invested in the Republican party’s mythology of America that  Klein describes.  As a multiracial person growing up at the time that I have,  I didn’t feel too much of the overt racism, harassment, and blatant discriminaton that my father faced (and many others still face), but I felt strongly that there was no place for me at the forefront of the mythical America that my community loved and longed for.  That America, regardless of the power of its myth, is dead, and the myth will die too, though I suspect its demise will be a more painful, destructive affair.  I feel like, in the space of the election, and the work that we can do in its wake, there is a possibility to try to change the structures of power in America to reflect a reality that includes me, and Barack Obama, and immigrants, and people of color, and women, and even those that huddle beside the death bead of “Main Street America.”  Otherwise, I fear that we will see an ugly transition from one mythic America to another and I fear that while this new myth, its heroes, and villains will be very, very  different than the old, and hopefully a myth that I find it easier to believe in, and envision myself in, but that its existence will be hard-fought enough that it will be written with the exclusion of so many others.


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