Up in smoke

West Virginia has made some strides in the direction of reason in its criminal justice system, but there is still huge room for improvement. The Charleston Gazette recently reported that marijuana arrests accounted for over half of the drug busts in the state.

For the record, El Cabrero is no stoner. I figure if alcohol was good enough for my old man and my hillbillly and Scotch Irish ancestors, it's good enough for me. But still...there's got to be a better way.

THE CRISIS THAT WASN'T. For years, deficit scolds like Paul Ryan have been warning that Medicare costs, like those of Social Security and Medicaid, are growing at an unsustainable rate. That turns out to be BS too, thanks in part to the Affordable Care Act.

ANOTHER CIVILIZED STATE? Could it be that even a state like Tennessee is considering expanding Medicaid?

ANOTHER GAP BETWEEN RICH AND POOR is in the quality of food.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

More good

In keeping with my occasional theme of talking about things that are going right in West Virginia, a friend sent me the following link about a project of Laotong Yoga in which some mutual friends teach yoga classes to inmates of the WV Division of Corrections. The program is popular with administrators as well as male and female inmates. Click on the link and you'll find some glowing testimonies to the mental, physical and social benefits of the practice on and off the mat.

AND HERE'S AN EARLIER INTERVENTION...The American Academy of  Pediatrics has a simple prescription for kids as young as infants: read aloud to them.

Just kidding

We once again interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to announce new arrivals at Goat Rope Farm.


Yesterday morning, Juno, daughter of caprine doyenne Arcadia S. Venus, was herself delivered of two kids representing respectively both the male and female persuasion.



I'm not sure what's gotten into the female goats around here...

WHAT WAS CUT IN THE LAST BUDGET DEAL: a lot, for ordinary people. And that's just the start of it.

A MODEST PROPOSAL. This NY Times item suggests that if Congress did nothing about the deficit things would get better--by letting Bush era tax cuts die.

AYN RAND AND PARENTHOOD. They don't seem to go too well together.

JUSTICE IS BLIND (BUT TIME OF DAY MATTERS). A study of parole hearings found that whether you get it or not may depend to a surprising degree on what time of day your case is heard.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A positive step

The old WV State Penitentiary in Moundsville. If those walls could talk...

For many years, a trend in West Virginia and around the country was to build more prisons and lock up more people, often for non-violent offenses. The predictable result was prison overcrowding, excessive costs, problems with re-entry, etc.

It's gotten to the point where we can't build our way out of this. Even if construction on massive new prisons began today, the overcrowding rate wouldn't change by the time they were built unless other things changed as well.

There are welcome signs that this is starting to change. Here's an excerpt from an AP item that ran in last Sunday's Gazette-Mail:

An average of three new inmates a day entering the state's correctional system has left West Virginia with a stark choice: build new prisons or change the way it thinks about crime and punishment.

The first option is unattractive in a time when state agencies are trimming their budgets and revenue is drying up. A new prison would cost up to $200 million, according to Corrections Commissioner Jim Rubenstein.

That leaves the second choice, which politicians have long feared will expose them to the charge of being "soft on crime,'' a tag no one wants during an election year in a conservative state.

Gov. Joe Manchin, though, is willing to risk political backlash by proposing policies he says will save the state hundreds of millions in the long run and do a better job of rehabilitating prisoners with the best chance at being productive members of society.

In the last few years, the state began a major day reporting effort as an alternative to incarceration in regional jails. Now on the agenda may be accelerated parole for non-violent, low risk offenders and increased attention to drug treatment and rehabilitation programs.

This makes sense since most people who go in are going to come out sooner or later and prisons are not generally known as places that improve behavior. A saying that has been heard more than once in statehouse circles is “We need to lock up the people we’re afraid of, not the ones we're mad at.”

(Hamlet will return tomorrow.)

MISSION NOT ACCOMPLISHED. President Obama is urging Congress to "finish the job" on health care reform.

REALITY CHECK. For all the whackadoodle paranoia about a government takeover of health care, a new study shows that the government will pay more than half of all health care costs by 2012 as things now stand.

ROOTS OF THE RECESSION. Here's part of an interview with economist Dean Baker on the bubble that burst all over us.

WHISPERING CANINES. De-barking dogs is something of a controversial subject these days.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

This one's for Frances

El Cabrero has spent a good chunk of time working on public policy issues that affect working and low income people. I guess it's only natural when that people who do certain kinds of things are interested in others who did similar things.

As far as effective advocacy goes, my vote for Most Valuable Player of All Time goes hands down to Frances Perkins, who has been described as a major architect of the New Deal and the social conscience of Franklin Roosevelt.

As I've mentioned previously, I recommend Kirstin Downey's biography, The Woman Behind the New Deal. While I was aware of her work in FDR's administration, until I read the book, I had no idea what an amazing track record of effective work she had done on issues of workers rights, safety, and women's and children's issues before she held any major public posts.

She kicked butt.

(Did I mention she was an Episcopalian? Go team!)

According to Downey, when FDR asked her to join his administration as Secretary of Labor, she told him she wouldn't accept it unless he was committed to work to enact a major--and almost unthinkable--list of social reforms. These "a forty-hour work week, a minimum wage, banning child labor, direct federal aid for unemployment relief, Social Security, a revitalized public employment service, and health insurance."

The amazing thing is that all but one of those things came to pass (though most of the public employment programs were phased out as the Depression lifted).

There's just one major item on the list that hasn't happened yet. I'm of course referring to health insurance, the major fight that's going on now.

Frances, this one's for you!

ON THAT NOTE, despite the recession, several states are expanding health care for children.

ASTROTURF. Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo unveils what and who is behind the WV anti-climate change protests.

THANKS FOR STATING THE OBVIOUS. REALLY! No irony intended. Some research indicates what a lot of people already suspected, i.e. that the juvenile and criminal justice systems often make bad situations worse.

IF I READ MY CALENDAR ARIGHT, this is the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. Here's some stuff from Wired Science about that. Which reminds me of one of my favorite songs.

LOW WAGE WORKERS GET A BOOST. This item from McClatchy discusses the increase in the minimum wage that was just enacted.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The fullness of time

There seems to be an irregular but natural rhythm in working for social justice. Certain periods of time are more full of crisis, opportunity, and chances for movement than others. The ancient Greeks referred to these critical moments as kairos, in contrast with more ordinary times which were called chronos.

In the Bible, for example, the word kairos is used for important moments and in such phrases as "the fullness of time" or "the time is at hand."

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), periods of kairos don’t last forever. Many people interested in social change have been shaped by such periods but were often not able to cope well with the more common periods of relative calm. And, like a record that is stuck, they may become inflexible in terms of tactics and analysis. Recognizing the inevitable rhythm of life and change and adapting to it requires a continual need for renewal or shedding one’s skin.

West Virginia author Denise Giardina captures well what kairos feels like (and the difficulty in surviving its passing) in Storming Heaven, her novel about the mine wars:

I loved that phrase, ‘the fullness of time.’ I shivered to whisper it to myself, for I sensed I was living in it, right then. Nothing afterward would be so important…We are put on earth for the fullness of time, we spend our days reaching it, and then we pass on. Some people die right then, with the passing of the fullness, and others breathe on, grieving all their lives that time is being strangled and they are not yet dead. I didn’t fret about this last. I couldn’t imagine it for myself.

The Tao Te Ching, an ancient book of Chinese philosophy often discussed here, contains a phrase which has become a proverb in many parts of the world: “Returning is the motion of the Tao.” Everything changes. To become rigid in a changing world is to die. Or, as Dylan said, “he not busy being born is busy dying.”

Periods of kairos demand all one’s attention, but probably the most important work is done during periods of chronos (when the time isn’t full, so to speak). These activities would better place one in position to take advantage of the situation when the next period of kairos rolls around.

I'd say right now is a time of kairos.

HEALTH CARE. The president of the American Medical Association said that the organization is open to a government-funded health care program for the uninsured.

LOSING YOUR JOB can be bad for your health.

PRISONS. A governor's commission in WV just released a study about prison overcrowding in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia. Some of the measures called for include reduced and alternative sentencing for offenders not believed to be a danger to the public, treatment for addictions, and help with re-entry...in addition to the inevitable call to build a new prison. Meanwhile, at a public meeting sponsored by the WV Council of Churches, participants preferred other measures to prison construction.

EMPATHY ON THE BRAIN. Research suggests people feel more of it for those in the same social group.

URGENT GIANT EARTHWORM UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

SOCIAL PSYCH

Caption: Venus the goat, left, is all about Adlerian psychology.

Aside from news and links about current events, this week Goat Rope is looking at one of psychology's lesser known Old Guys, Alfred Adler. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

As a psychologist as well as a Social Democrat, one of Adler's main ideas was about the importance of social interest or community feeling, so it's not surprising that he was also concerned about the need for social reform. He basically had a public health approach to psychology.

Living as he did during the rise of Nazism, he was aware of the dangers of prejudice:

Those who have travelled have found that people everywhere are approximately the same in that they are always inclined to find something by which to degrade others. Everyone seeks a means which permits him to elevate himself at little cost.

Economic hardships could make social hostilities increase:

Difficulties in earning a livelihood, bad working conditions, inadequate educational and cultural facilities, a joyless existence, and continuous irritation, all these factors increase the feeling of inferiority, produce oversensitivity, and drive the individual to seek "solutions." To an individual in this state of mind any outside interference appears as a threat to his security and rouses him to active or passive self-defense. Motives of hatred appear most clearly in the economic disturbances of our time.

War and group idolatry (my term, not his) were examples of how our natural tendency to social interest could be abused:

...the psychologist must work against nationalism when it is so poorly understood that it harms mankind as a whole; against wars of conquest, revenge, and prestige; against unemployment which plunges people into hopelessness; and against all other obstacles which interfere with the spreading of social interest in the family, the school, and society at large.

He also had an acute understanding of the pitfalls of power that echoes the ancient wisdom of Lao Tzu:

The struggle for power has a psychological aspect, the description of which appears to us today as an urgent duty. Even where the welfare of the subjugated is obviously intended, the use of even moderate power stimulates opposition everywhere, as far as we can see. Human nature generally answers external coercion with countercoercion. It seeks its satisfaction not in rewards for obedience and docility, but aims to prove that its own means of power are stronger.

The results of the application of power are apt to be disappointing to both parties. No blessing comes of the use of power. In power politics the man in power wins followers who are actually his opponents and who are only attracted by the intoxication of power. And he finds opponents among those who might be his followers if they had not automatically become oppositional. Those who are excluded from power line in wait for the revolt and are reception to any argument.

Adler probably isn't read or studied much these days--but maybe he should be.

RACIAL DISPARITIES persist in the criminal justice system.

THE MESSAGE. Here's an interview about communicating social issues with Thom Hartmann, author of Cracking the Code: The Art and Science of Political Persuasion.

DON'T WAIT FOR THE MOVIE. The CIA apparently destroyed videotapes of some "severe interrogation" sessions.

THEM BELLY FULL BUT WE HUNGRY. I almost missed this one. The USDA recently reported that 35.5 million Americans, including 12.6 million children, are having trouble meeting their basic need for food.

FULL COURT PRESS. The Manchin administration has joined Massey Energy in opposing federal court rulings about mountaintop removal mining that may limit the ability of coal companies to do whatever they want to.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED