the reality tunnel

The book group I’m facilitating at the county jail met again this past week, interrupting an Uno game going on in the common area of the cell block.  I had just played a game of Uno that afternoon, sprawled out across a post-picnic blanket on a grassy patch just above the lake.  Kids splashed below in the warm water, teenage girls lounged allofly in inflatable furniture, and in the distance, people careened back and forth across the wake of motorboats.  This is one of the things that is the most difficult about going into the jail - things that are completely familiar to me, like the Uno game, in a context that is completely different to my everyday reality.  Actually going into the jail has made me realize the boundary between solidarity and being in the same boat.  I think everything that I’ve encountered about jails and prisons firmly establish where you stand.  You are a guard, you are incarcerated, you are incarcerated and in the “therepeutic” block, you are in solitary, you are in the general population, you are a family member or friend here for visiting hours, you are a volunteer.  The roles, the mobility associated with each, and the expectations of each group by the others seem hard and rigid, ruts torn deeper and deeper with all the inertia of the prison industrial complex.  I want to just think that I’m just down, but even going in with the interest of supporting incarcerated folks is mediated by the fact, told bluntly by the corrections officer who did the volunteer training, that my ability to go in is largely based on the realization that programming in the jail tends to placate the incarcerated population there.

The reading group happens in the block and has a variable number of participants.  This is affected by what people have going on at the moment and the fact that people are constantly coming in and out of the jail, coming from a DOC facility for court or returning to a DOC facility after court.  This week, only 4 folks sat down at the table, with only 1 of them having read the book to be discussed.  The book might have been part of the problem.  A few weeks ago we had decided to read A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson, a travel account of two middle-aged men who decide to hike part of the Appalachian Trail.  It was funny enough, and met the criteria that was established by those initially interested in the group, of having a subject that seemed to be far, far from the reality of incarceration and didn’t have the self-help twelve-steppy overtones that mark some of the other programming they participate in.  Still, a few folks expressed that they couldn’t get into the book.  My favorite response to the book that I heard was one word - “quitters”, as the protagonists seemed to spend as many nights sleeping in hotels and eating at diners as they did in the woods.  As I read through the book myself, I was a little worried that the book centered on this activity that represented an idleness and mobility; to spend weeks just hiking without worrying about jobs, families, or the things that a lot of the things that people in the jail talk to me about as concerns; that it would seem just insensitive.  Still, it’s unfair and just not true to make assumptions about people’s situations or their reactions in the context of their lives.

So what is my place here in the jail?  Reading, for all the reasons that anyone loves it, with the additional weight of it being an activity that can happen, relatively unhindered, even within the constraints of incarceration, seems to be an important part of people’s lives at the jail.  People talk about the books that they read, and pass them around.  I remember a conversation starting with “Remember that Marilyn Manson biography …”, the book having apparenly made its rounds through the block.  There’s no question that books are important to people in jail.  Having someone come in to facilitate a discussion group about books seems of more questionable value. For the men in the cell block where the programming happens, their days are filled with different groups, many of them focussed around rehabilitation, I think that one more structured activity that involves a group and a discussion just doesn’t seem that appealing.  Volunteering in the jail, there seems to be such an impasse between what corrections officials and non-profits think people who are incacerated need and what people who are incarcerated say they need.  I think that more than anything, people need to not be incarcerated, because dealing with all the other things in life become frustratingly cumbersome to impossible.  Beyond that I think the concerns of incarcerated people are the same as a lot of people that I know, obviously with varying degrees of severity: economic security, a safe, comfortable place to live, help sorting out relationships and family.  Those are such large, ambiguous things, but it’s the way I can most accurately express it.

I like going into the jail because it has made me have to reevaluate how I think about other people and about prison issues as “issues”.  But, even though I feel like I’m getting something out of my volunteer work, the exchange doesn’t exactly seem equal.  One of the men interested in the reading group said he would talk to others in the block to guage the actual interest and to get some input about what format would be best.  We talked about two things that would be an improvement - meeting once a month instead of biweekly and reading shorter works of fiction.  One thing that seems like something that I can really offer is just giving people access to books.  The Monroe County Public Library has a sweet jail library program, but the men I work with said that while they used to get to go to the library once every two weeks, they now can only go once every 4 or 5 weeks.

I’ve also sporadically tutoring math in the jail, and had been working with someone who just passed his GED exams.  Working in this capacity seems like I can offer people something of myself that seems more useful, but it’s still hard.  The person who just passed his GED said that one of the reasons he wanted to get his GED was so he could go into the armed forces when he was released.  I don’t want to see anyone join the armed forces, but I’m afraid that, facing the realities of the current economy, and the additional challenges that someone with a criminal record faces getting a job, the options are limited.  It’s so frustrating that I, and the things I believe in, can’t offer an alternative.  This makes me feel like I’m not in a position to do what people really need.  I can give people books, or some tricks to solving math problems, but I can’t give people jobs or build houses.  It makes me feel like I’m not doing the right thing. Everyone, and I mean everyone everyone and not just incarceration people, need inspiration and tools, to be sure, but it seems really narrow sighted to think that they’re enough.

From a story on All Things Considered:

Since the 2000 elections, the number of young Americans going to the polls has increased steadily. This year is no different: In some states, double and triple the number of voters younger than 30 have turned out for primaries, compared with 2006. But another trend is also emerging: the widening voting gap between youth enrolled in college and their non-student peers.

Link

Georgia School Melds a World of Differences - New York Times:

“The fact that we don’t have anything in common is what we all have in common,” said Shell Ramirez, an American parent with two children at the school….

“The mission,” Ms. Thompson [one of the founders of the school] said, “was never to create an enclave for refugees only because that would just separate them more.”

…

”

Harvey Clark, whose son Zade is in the fifth grade, is a veteran of the first Gulf War and a hard-core Nascar fan.

“They’re getting exposed to cultures that they normally would not be exposed to except in National Geographic,” Mr. Clark said of the American children. “Instead of my boy having to go off to war to meet foreign people, he can do it here in town.”

This reminds me of Ryan being stoked by What is the What, which I believe is partially set in Atlanta, hearing Kara Walker on Art 21 talking about moving from California to the Atlanta area and realizing what it meant to be a black woman in America, and thinking about multicultural education with regards to Florence and Oona.

This radio piece had interesting statistics on the financial viability of the latest Radiohead album which was also available as a free download.

Adam Greenfield, the person interviewed in the piece teaches a class in Urban Computing at as part of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU.

Link

Update:

My friend Peter, had the following to add:

Regarding your recent blog post ( http://blogs.terrorware.com/geoff/2007/12/03/from-the-radio-analysis-of-digital-media-and-a-cool-sounding-college-class/). The statistics cited in the NPR story are indeed interesting, but not for the reason most people (even in the “quality” mainstream press) think they are.

As I reported in a recent issue of The Nation (http://www.thenation.com), the stats were gathered by Comscore, an internet marketing firm that gathers data from 2 million poor souls who let their every point and click be monitored in exchange for some free software and sweepstake entries. Their software doesn’t work on macs or in firefox. They provide no detailed information about the type of statistical analysis they use They don’t even publish their relevant sample sizes ( i.e. how many of the folks they monitor actually bought the album - the way they phrase it leaves). Their findings are not accepted by many trade groups, and have been widely (and justly) critiqued across the web. Yet the AP, the NYtimes, NPR, etc. etc. are all regurgitating their Radiohead findings, never once noting that the evidence isn’t there.

Why would they do such a thing?

While reporting my first story (a reported personal essay, also in The Nation) on the Radiohead album, I noticed that all the industry people I talked to were not-so-subtly trying to put down Radiohead’s effort. One exec told me he’d heard they were just demos they were dumping on the public for laughs. When I pressed him, he told me he got the info from a members-only industry message board. I weaseled my way into a membership and guess what? No talk of “demo dumping.” Others told me “just look at the reviews, no one thinks its any good, etc.” It’s aggregating in the high 90s at metacritic.com!

To quote one of my own articles:

“It’s hard to resist some cynical conclusions: Comscore’s client base includes several media conglomerates, media conglomerates want In Rainbows to fail, newspapers want stories, and failure sells.”

Update 2:

I read on my friend Jenny’s blog, Greater Detroit, about a Detroit-based artist who also released his latest album, DETRO!T BE!RUT, as a free or donation-based download.

From the artist’s website:

This music comes from South Lebanon, was born in Lansing and lives in Detroit.  A sound declaration.  This music is rhythm for revolutions, rebellions, empowerment and progression.  Through audio and images, history is projected onto the future, terrorific stereotypes are rejected, a slandered heritage is reclaimed, the ruins of a city are rebuilt.  Sound and visions express the struggles and share the beauty of Detroit, Beirut.

Honestly, I’ve only just started listening to the recording, but it makes me think about refocusing the question of downloadable music.  I think the question is often asked as whether free or donation-based music is viable for the music industry or for artists in the context of the music industry.  I’m not sure if it is viable for the industry, or artists trying to operate within that system.  However, I don’t think that’s problematic.  I think that the Internet and digital music is less interesting as a tool that can be assimilated into the current music industry’s business model, or even as something that will shift the direction of the music industry, and more interesting as something that allows for a completely separate space for the dissemination of music and ideas.

It’s easy to see downloadable music and the social and technological network infrastructure that supports it as something that can be exploited by those who wouldn’t succeed within the confines of the record industry.  This casts those who utilize these networks as failures within the mainstream media market.  However, I see the recording industry and mainstream media as failing to produce media that is multicultural or culturally critical and that speaks to or from those for whom the traversal of these cultural boundaries is personal and important.  Digital media offers an opportunity, not just as reform or critique, for artists to succeed where existing cultural systems has failed.  It offers a tool to create something that is completely new and separate, not a music industry, but, hopefully, music culture.

Online classes were just emerging as I left college.  There was a piece on Morning Edition this morning about the technology and trends in general and an instance of them at on University of Illinois branch.  I think this technology is inevitable and it does have some egalitarian advantages, as the president of the University of Illinois system state:

“But let’s be honest, there are hundreds of thousands of people in the world who don’t have the privilege of earning their education by leaving home, giving up their job, leaving the family and living on one of these campuses,” White said.

Still, there are also implications for a trend that is apparent even with living in a college town and meeting a lot of students on tour.  The idea of a university as a forum and a place where you might get exposed to unexpected ideas or ideas across disciplines is quickly eroding.  Technology plays a role in furthering this cultural shift.  As one professor says:

“But I can assure you that the next generation of students are ‘24/7 students’ that want stuff right now. They don’t want to come to your class and listen to a professor lecture and tell funny stories,” Mims said. “They want just what they need to succeed in that class and get a job and be successful in life.”

I did a fundraising event for Pages to Prisoners in partnership with a local multi-cultural sorority.  The sorority members made a presentation about prison and education issues, and one woman read an article about the Bard Prison Initiative, a program that allows incarcerated people in New York get a liberal arts college degree.  When one of the inmates who was participating in the program was asked why it was important for inmates to receive a liberal arts education as opposed to vocational training, the man said that while job training could teach you how to do a specific job, the Bard education that he was getting through the program was teaching him how to think.

I fear that the “I want what I think I want when I want it” collegian is going to further erode the value of knowledge and discourse in culture.

Link

So Oliver is trying to figure out what’s best for his kids, Stuse is working on an audio documentary about alternatives in education from the roadtrip of free schools and alternative schools she took in the spring, Ben is reading Teruvina’s copy of the Teenage Liberation Handbook, and Patrick’s friend Rich is working on a web portal designed to encourage science and engineering study for kids in Indiana, but seemingly lacking an underlying educational vision.  All of these things came up in the course of one weekend, which is a little crazy.  At least regarding Rich’s situation, I found this link on boingboing to the awesome Instructables website that shows a student in Ghana making his own headphones.  So, it seems like the science fair on the Internet with feedback model has some merit.  I think it speaks to one important idea - that kid-specific content and knowledge frameworks aren’t nearly as successful as kids finding an interface to real knowledge frameworks whether it’s the public library, Instructables, or Wikipedia.