complich8′s journal

Lately I’ve been thinking a bit about justice in a broad sense, especially criminal justice, law and law enforcement.

So my last batch of Audible books included one called American Furies by Sasha Abramsky.

Abramsky’s journey through the American prison system covers some of its history and theory, from the inception of penitentiaries to the concept of the panopticon, differentiating rehabilitative and reformative theory from punishment and vengeance. He talks a little about some of the founding theorists of correctional theory and explores a bit of Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings on what he saw touring prisons, and about Hobbes’s Leviathan and the works of Bentham, among others. But a lot of his focus is the here-and-now.

The author spends a fair large amount of the book exploring problems with old-school vengeance-based theories for prison, and the recent “tough on crime” and “zero tolerance” trends as they relate to the growth of prison populations and the systematic injustice they incite. With increasing numbers of “life without parole” sentencing, mandatory minimum sentences (in particular for non-violent crime), three-strikes laws and other inclement policies. The main thrust of the book explains how these trends ratchet up the badness of being incarcerated: with no hope of ever being free, the only reason to follow rules is the avoidance of further brutality and suffering. Further, people who walk into prison systems psychically fragile often walk out substantially psychologically worse off than when they went in. Guards institute a culture of brutality and violence, regularly abuse prisoners or at least turn frequent blind eyes to prisoners being abused by others, and people who are paroled are often less able to obtain gainful employment after their imprisonment.

The book is largely an indictment, then, of what the modern prison system has become, and of the theories driving recent changes to the system.

Probably one of the weaker parts of the book is its brief but poignant invective against what amounts to conservative and Southern understandings of justice and the role of prison. While the parts about what the prison system is were, I felt, well-grounded in statistical, philosophical and scientific rigor, I felt like that particular section … while not in any sense incorrect, was maybe a bit … unnecessarily caustic.

Despite its weaknesses, I felt like this book helped my thinking about criminal justice, and as such it was a worthwhile listen (and/or read).

American Furies at Amazon, Audible.

More on the topic is queued up, and consider this me soliciting suggestions.

Will I live long enough to write a memoir? And if I do, will I have had a memorable enough life to write about?

just a random thing I was thinking about just now. Even though I’ve got a car I’m pretty happy with, that’s about 2 and a half years old with slightly more than 20,000 miles on it, every couple of months I find myself reading usnews car reviews for cars I could potentially buy, if I needed to buy a car right now.

I’m not totally sure why this is, but I find it fascinating entertaining the mental image of me in a Lexus ES or a Mercedes E-class. I even go so far as to go to relevant manufacturer websites and spec out the car I’d want to buy, if I wanted to buy one, and sometimes to search inventories and scope out the monthly payments.

But it got me thinking just now, as I found myself contemplating the monthly on a luxed-out Taurus SHO and comparing it to what I have available now and what I’m paying on my Altima, and I realized that the interest in cars is mostly an interest in commute comfort. Right now I’m doing pretty well … I’ve got good AC, good heating, comfy seats and good performance, pretty respectable audio system, satellite radio. That’s really all I’m asking for. But the entertaining other car ideas thing strikes me as a tradeoff.

See, I’m living in a situation where my rent and utilities are relatively low and the quality of the place I live is relatively high. If I stayed here indefinitely, I’d likely in the future want to scope out upgrades to my ride to and from work (and just in general), but if I only stay here a while longer and then move even closer to work, my driving would be a smaller part of my day, so I’d be less interested in trading up on it. But my living expenses would almost certainly be dramatically increased.

So there’s the question: does it make sense to sink your money into the present and near future, slowing your rate of savings in exchange for a solution to an immediate trouble, or are you better off putting your money in savings and buying the dream-house sooner?

I mean, obviously, should I survive to see that bright future, it’d be better to be prepared for it than not. But tomorrow is guaranteed to no man, so maybe it’d be better to be a little spoiled?

Regardless, I’m in a holding pattern right now. I’m around 3 months ahead on my car payment, but that’s still less than 60% of the way there. I’m still at least a couple months away from being done with my student loan (hoping I can still meet the birthday no-student-loan target, but it’s iffy, I might opt to buy a couple things instead). I just signed another 1 year lease extension. That means I’m still at least two years (and more likely three) away from having anything remotely resembling a meaningful down payment on a house around here, so it’s not like I’ve got any great situation-change options waiting for me. But it’s still interesting to entertain the possibilities. Shall I shop for an Infiniti? Do I find a condo in reach? I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach…

I recently gave Chris Hitchens’s “God Is Not Great” and Sam Harris’s “The End of Faith” some listening time, and thought I’d share some impressions.

My biggest impression is that these books are pretty much cut from the same cloth. Hitchens has, as his basic thesis, that the whole idea of religion poisons everything in the world. Harris has a pretty similar view, that the presence of faith is a corrupting influence in the world.

Both Hitchens and Harris are pretty hard on the Jews and on Muslims, too, and Harris especially beats up on Islam for its intrinsic and unmoderated violence. Neither of them loses any love in the direction of the Christian establishment either, and neither has any illusions about the violence inspired by dominant Buddhism and Hinduism, and they both spend a bit of time dispelling false beliefs about so-called “peaceful religions”….

Both books have another similarity too: they spend significant amounts of time in hamfisted brutalizing of their points. Like …. I think Harris spends like 30 minutes of the 9 hour book citing chapter and verse from the Bible, the Koran, and the Torah as examples of the violence inherent in those books. Hitchens spends probably the latter third of his book beating on various historical issues pointing out how the jews were nasty people before they were the displaced minority, about how the muslims have been getting progressively nastier, about how christianity marched boldly into some really dark times.

That’s really my biggest complaint about these books … they both make good cases for their points, but at some point you just kind of have to look at the flayed mound of horseflesh and realize that there’s not much point in continuing to beat on it. That’s it.

Harris spends some time exploring non-religious spirituality … meditation, the exploration of the concept of self as subject and illusion, the nature of mind…. stuff like that. So from a phenomenological perspective, his work is pretty interesting, and leaves the window open for spirituality while slamming shut the door of dogmatic faith. He also spends time exploring a scientific morality and some of the problems with figuring out where our moral sphere does and doesn’t extend given the absence of an imposed religious order. So even if you’re going to opt to skip over the half a chapter that’s built entirely of bloody verses from holy books, the philosophical subject matter is worth thinking about.

Hitchens spends more of his time on history, talking about how religions around the world were basically the source of all kinds of evil, and how even ostensibly atheistic movements that turned out pretty badly generally involved elevating a leader to the level of occult figurehead. Less of the Stephen Pinker philosophical rigor, more of the journalistic bent.

Still, if you’re interested in hearing about how religion is bad for things, both books are pretty good things to sink your time into.

I recently finished the relatively small morsel that is Atul Gawabe’s The Checklist Manifesto. Audiobooks are fun!

The Checklist Manifesto is a doctor’s exploration of unexpected ways we can cope with complexity in an increasingly complex world. Gawabe leads in by talking about the challenges that keeping track of a large set of relatively mundane tasks when we’re beset by complexity, especially in the context of his home discipline: medicine. He talks about patients he and other experienced surgeons have nearly lost because of avoidable complications and screw-ups in mundane stuff. It’s … a bit scary, in that regard. That leads to his thesis: that in a complex world, a well-crafted checklist, well-implemented, can be a huge boon.

He talks about the aviation origins of the checklist, and how modern pre-flight procedures in commercial airlines evolved from those origins. Explores the use of checklists in other fairly mundane but inherently complex trades, particularly construction and civil engineering, and then talks about application of the theory to less mundane things, particularly investing.

As a result of reading this book, I’ve sort of integrated its ideas a bit into my own work. Not going to get into it too much here, but … there’s a lot of things in my own life that work out better if I at least stop and take inventory of what I need to do before I start.

Blaargh, there’s more to say about it, but I’m not going to. Just read (or listen to) it, it’s good!