Investigative food for thought

It is almost always interesting to read scholarship of some kind that connects to whatever project you're working on.

With this in mind, I enjoyed this recent New Yorker piece. It provides a good journalistic backdrop to the work that I and others are doing at CASES.

Here are some selected quotations that especially resonated.

• "What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment."
  
• "For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones."
  
• "The more professionalized and procedural a system is, the more insulated we become from its real effects on real people."
  
• "This is a general human truth: things that work interest us less than things that don’t."
  
• "Instead, small acts of social engineering, designed simply to stop crimes from happening, helped stop crime."
  
• "In truth, criminal activity seems like most other human choices—a question of contingent occasions and opportunity."
• "What matters is the incidence of crime in the world, and the continuity of a culture of crime, not some “lesson learned” in prison."
  
• "There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities."
  

Spurred by reading this piece, I've moved on to start this book.