A Case for Thorns

I awoke to my cell phone nearly vibrating off my night-table. Earplugs in, deep in slumber, I shot to a seated position, answered the call with what must have been a weirdly vague monotone and heard a cheerful voice asking if the boys were planning to attend camp today. "Of course!" Quick glance at my phone's clock and a stunned realization that Tom and I had overslept by hours. "I am SO sorry we are late for the bus. Please leave without the boys, and I'll drive them out to camp myself."

I called downstairs to the boys who were completely immersed in a Pokémon movie on the iPad, told them to hurry upstairs to get dressed, thanked them profusely for staying inside (y'all might recall their getaway and subsequent return by the FBI round about this time last summer; yes, it is hilarious now.) and raced to pack lunches/get dressed/make coffee/etc.  Tom said he was sorry I had to make the drive. I, myself, just figured it'd lead to a new adventure and really, what else did I need to be doing?

We were out of the house in fifteen minutes and another forty minutes later pulled happily into camp, just as their bus did.

It was such an utterly fortuitous occurrence really. It was the boys' last day at this amazing camp, and I got to see just a bit of why they're so happy there. Then, since I was already out in the agricultural part of Maryland, I decided to go to a pick-your-own farm.

My first attempt led to a road to nowhere and then my gas light went on and I needed to relieve myself something fierce. To a field, to a Sunoco, through the car wash into which I spontaneously opted and back onto the road. This time to Larriland Farm, a spot I've long wanted to visit but which always seems just too far away for most days. It's out in Woodbine, MD, and though it's not completely organic, they spray very minimally.

I started in the peach orchard and felt happiness and zen just coursing through my veins. Butterflies fluttered all around, and the to-be-lush peaches nearly glowed on their perches. Peaches are an awfully lusty fruit when you consider them. This butterfly would surely concur.

My instructions were to pick the ones that were firm with a yellow blush under the red cheek because those had developed the best flavor and would ripen perfectly at room temp in one to three days. I found twenty-two pounds of divine before cutting myself off, realizing that blackberry and raspberry patches still awaited.

In the mess of blackberry vines, I thought of Nanny. I thought back to all the days my sister and I spent picking berries at her house, and I rued the loss of thorns on the fancy bushes from which I plucked today. Those thorns added challenge and work to a process which inevitably yielded such a delicious outcome; the caution we took, the thought behind each pick made our success that much better. That much sweeter.

Too often today, the drive towards efficiency also means movement away from hardship. Things become easier and more sterile, requiring less thought and patience. But where does that get us? Does that make us appreciate things more? No. On the contrary, it becomes all too easy to take for granted things that once were time-consuming and arduous but which gave accomplishment a deeper since of reward and fulfillment. Today's thornless blackberry bushes are yesterday's calculators; thorns and longhand division took longer, but didn't picking carefully and learning the how behind the answer mean something?!

Nevertheless, I loved every minute I spent picking my sixteen pounds of blackberries. I envisioned pies and the jam Jack loves like crazy. I thought about blackberry-buttermilk muffins, and smoothies, and cobblers, and on and on. The guys at the register said, "Wow, that is a LOT of blackberries!" and with delight I said, "I know!! It's amazing!"

Tired but energized, I paid up and then headed back to the raspberries for a new box and a new go. I am glad that I had no idea how hard raspberry picking is. Peaches and blackberries would be easy tasks for blind dogs, but raspberries are just not for the faint of heart. Good god!

Japanese beetles and honeybees were a'swarm and raspberries usually do not want to let go of the core to which they desperately cling. It was nearing 1:00p when I starting picking; I hadn't eaten since 8, hadn't brushed my teeth or had much water. I didn't have a hat or bug spray, not that I'd have worn either. The guys at the blackberry patch said the raspberry picking was "good, not great." And when I reached the raspberries, they looked peaked, and that's putting it kindly, and tired moms and a strangely high number of babies in Bjorns were a'whine.

But give me a thorny challenge, and I will rise. I am telling y'all, I was hell bent on becoming a master raspberry plucker. And soon enough, most everyone else had left, and I'd realized the bees really didn't want to sting me and the beetles are stupid bugs that are easily flicked away and if you look up and to the ground and under the leaves (same as with the blackberries), you'll find the gems that others didn't notice. And I got four beautiful pounds of the most scrumptious raspberries I've ever tasted. And every bit of getting there was an itchy, dirty, sweaty joy.

Also, no one should ever complain about how much raspberries that someone else has picked cost. Just pay for them and be thankful and get on with yourself, because raspberry picking is NOT an easy job.

At this point, I considered going to the tomato fields but opted against it. I was so hungry and hot and tired and an hour from home and the boys were coming back. So I went into the farm about bought a few tomatoes and an ice-cold, all-natural root beer and briefly spoke to a delightful old woman, the sort of which makes me think a bit of Ouiser in Steel Magnolias. If Ouiser moved further north and went liberal. I am a complete sucker for this type of woman.

Picture her: practical, tie-under-the-chin floppy sun bonnet; white shirt tucked into a mid-calf denim skirt; reasonable shoes; drives a Prius. This gal bought a fair amount of produce but what really took me back was the 15 dozen ears of corn she tacked on at the end. I couldn't stop myself. I said, "I am so impressed. What are you going to do with that much corn?"

"Well, I'm gonna stay up all night cookin' it and freezin' it." And she beamed me the warmest smile ever, and I felt a tad lame for feeling all awesome about my one billion pounds of fruit. Fruit is one thing. Corn, while easy to cook, is still something to deal with. I mean, what kind of a pot can accommodate more than six ears at the most? Do the math, and that's a frickload of times you're cooking corn.

"Hats off to you! I'm going home to can my berries. Good luck with the corn." And then I twisted off my root beer cap, took a big swig and slowly walked out to my car as she started loading the Prius.

That root beer tasted so good, and I headed home to take a shower and realize that I have no where in the fridge to store my berries. Alas. A friend texts -she of the 'her parents have a farm in DE and I am the lucky recipient of excess'- and asks if she can drop off some tomatoes. "Sure, sure!"

15 minutes later I get "some tomatoes" and feel inordinately grateful not only for her generosity but also that I did NOT go to the tomato patch earlier. Ya think?

"I have two more of these at home. You're one of the only people I could think of who might take them." And I'm like, "Are you kidding? You've brought me tomato Mecca in a tub!" One person's thorn is another's diamond.

Imperfections are human. Challenges make life harder but more rewarding. Thorns are both perfectly imperfect and totally challenging, and I wouldn't have them any other way.

The Abysmal American Prison System

I've been wanting to write about this subject for a long while now, but it's a heavy, hard one and so has been repeatedly relegated to my "I'll get to that soon" list. On Tuesday, however, I read a thoroughly wrenching New York Times article about teenage inmates suffering egregious abuse at the hands of their captors at Rikers Island (a place I believe may be one example of hell here on Earth). A number of these boys -ages 16 -18; those are not yet men!- begged for solitary confinement to avoid being beaten. If that's not a winless choice, I don't know what is. Sickened by what the US Attorney in Manhattan called a "deep-seated culture of violence" against young prisoners enabled by "a powerful code of silence" by Rikers guards and a worthless "investigatory" system to look into the attacks on inmates, I dusted off my pile of saved articles and got busy.

About this piece

The complexity of this topic necessitates both organization (in format of this post) and disclaimer: I am not an authority on this subject by any means and although I have amassed a good bit of information, surely there are inputs, results and other important elements that I have omitted or not made space for here. 

Likewise, although I believe firmly that our prison system is  hideously effed up, I also believe that the facts lead most people to that same conclusion. As such, this post is riddled with statistics from reputable, trusty sources like The Economist, Pew Charitable Trusts, ACLU and others committed to factual information rather than fear-mongering malarkey.

Lest you think I'm a lunatic softy, I absolutely believe that many people deserve to be imprisoned, some for much longer than they currently are sentenced. Those convicted with certainty of rape, murder (except in cases of real defense of self), child molestation, kidnapping and other such heinous acts should most definitely go to jail if not more (no space for discussion of death penalty here).

And lastly, this conversation is impossible to have in any substantive way without noting the enormous racial disparities in the U.S. justice system. Please read the rest of this piece keeping these statistics (copied from the NAACP's Criminal Justice Fact Sheet)  forefront in your mind:

• African Americans now constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population
• African Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites
• Together, African American and Hispanics comprised 58% of all prisoners in 2008, even though African Americans and Hispanics make up approximately one quarter of the US population
• According to Unlocking America, if African American and Hispanics were incarcerated at the same rates of whites, today's prison and jail populations would decline by approximately 50%
• One in six black men had been incarcerated as of 2001. If current trends continue, one in three black males born today can expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime
• 1 in 100 African American women are in prison
• Nationwide, African-Americans represent 26% of juvenile arrests, 44% of youth who are detained, 46% of the youth who are judicially waived to criminal court, and 58% of the youth admitted to state prisons (Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice).

Let's start with an overview of some of the critically important, negative shifts in the American prison system over the past 30'ish years.

Rapidly Rising Rate of Incarceration

Since 1980, the U.S. prison population has quadrupled to more than 2.4 million (sourced from many experts, including an 8/13/13 Wonkblog post via The Washington Post). Using the current U.S. population count, 313 million, and some basic math, that's roughly 1 of every 130 Americans behind bars in federal and state prisons. Over that same time span, the murder rate in America has plummeted, as you can see in this graph created by Talking Points Memo, AND the number of federal laws has increased from 3,000 to 4,450 (Economist blog, 3/13/14).

In this context, it is especially important to note that "The most serious charge against 51% of [federal prison] inmates is a drug offense. Only four percent are in for robbery and only one percent are in for homicide" (Wonkblog, 8/3/13). That's pretty staggering.

In describing the new federal laws, The Economist (3/13/14) points out that a large percentage of them:

"have poor intent requirements, meaning people are being locked up not to keep the rest of society safe, but for technical violations of laws they may not have known existed. This overreliance on imprisonment can be seen most starkly, and sadly, by looking at the juvenile population, which is just under 71,000 nationally. Around 11,600 [of those] are imprisoned for 'technical violations' of their probation or parole terms, rather than because they committed a new crime." ... "Around 3,000 are locked up for things that aren't crimes for adults, such as running away, truancy and incorrigibility. Incarcerated children are less likely to graduate high school and more likely to spend time in prison as adults."

Likewise, a 2013 Pew Report on time in prison and recidivism showed that although deterrence (avoiding future crime) and incapacitation (if you hold people for longer, you'll avoid their committing a crime for longer) are common justifications for lengthier prison terms, longer sentences do not, in fact, reduce crime by non-violent offenders.

What this all boils down to is that lots of people are in jail for longer periods of time and often multiple times for non-violent transgressions. That same Pew Report noted that prison terms have, on average, extended by about nine months per inmate. That extra time costs the U.S. an extra $10 billion.

So, we're paying to keep an enormous number of non-violent offenders in jail for longer which screws up their lives (see the above note about incarcerated children being less likely to graduate from high school), costs us money that's better spent elsewhere AND does not make our society safer. This strikes me as a seriously failed equation.

A final nugget: America "imprisons more people -both per capita and in absolute terms- than any other nation in the world, including Russia, China, and Iran" (ACLU report, 11/2/2011, and other sources). What terrible company to beat.

Increasing Privatization of Prisons

In tandem with, perhaps because of, the sky-rocketing incarceration rate, the U.S. is also seeing a boom in the building and use of for-profit prisons. Yep, jails have become money-makers. In a November, 2011, report, the ACLU stated:

"Private prisons for adults were virtually non-existent until the early 1980s, but the number of prisoners in private prisons increased by approximately 1600% between 1990 and 2009. Today, for-profit companies are responsible for approximately 6% of state prisoners, 16% of federal prisoners, and, according to one report, nearly half of all immigrants detained by the federal government. In 2010, the two largest private prison companies alone received nearly $3 billion dollars in revenue, and their top executives, according to one source, each received annual compensation packages worth well over $3 million."

Some argue that private prisons save states money and so are necessary but a for-profit institution is, eponymously, looking for profit. And the states pay the companies that run them. Profit = bodies in jail, so in concert with the increase in laws that can send folks to prison, well, make those arrests!

As Adam Gopnik wrote in the January 30, 2012, New Yorker:

"The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It's hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible."

These companies, such as Corrections Corps of America, have openly stated in investor pitches their belief that:

"private prisons comprise a unique, recession-resistant investment opportunity, with more than 90 percent of the market up for grabs, little competition, high recidivism among prisoners, and the potential for 'accelerated growth in inmate populations following the recession.'"  (John Whitehead, writing for Huff Post, 4/10/12)

It's hard not to think they're rooting for more, lengthier and repeat imprisonments, especially when estimates have put the profit opportunity at $70 billion (Business Insider).

Conditions and Experiences in American Jails

Beyond the abuse perpetrated by guards, American jails are also overcrowded, understaffed and, thus, more unsafe for and within the prisoner population. An October 15, 2012, article in The Washington Post noted a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) in stating that, “BOP officials reported increased use of double and triple bunking, waiting lists for education and drug treatment programs, limited meaningful work opportunities ..." all of which "contribute to increased inmate misconduct" and make prisons less secure.

This isn't surprising. What did surprise and horrify me was the July 27, 2014, piece in the New York Times about the frequent breaking of the law, held in 21 states, that forbids as inhumane the shackling of pregnant women in active labor and/or just after giving birth.

One woman featured, Valerie Nabors -a Nevadan who was imprisoned during her pregnancy, later sued the state because the prison officers bound both her hands AND ankles when she went into labor. Despite the ambulance driver's and the hospital nurse's protests, Ms. Nabors was shackled until a second nurse in the delivery room demanded she be released. Ms. Nabors gave birth via emergency C-section, was chained up again 10 minutes afterwards and was later found to have suffered pulled muscles in her groin as well as a separation of her pubic bones, both of which were found to be direct results of the restraints.

Any woman who has ever been in labor or witnessed any other woman in labor knows that NO WOMAN attempting to manage the extraordinary pain of contractions is a flight risk. If you don't want or have access to medicinal assistance like epidurals, moving about helps you manage the pain and helps your body naturally progress through labor. Restraining a pregnant woman trying to give birth is cruel and completely inhumane. It's how pregnant sows on factory farms are treated but worse, because we're talking about human beings. By the way, Ms. Nabors was in jail for attempting to steal $250 worth of casino chips.

I started this post with the horror I felt over the treatment of teenagers at Rikers Island, and to revisit them, let's just imagine how changed our own lives would be if we were jailed at the age of 16 for a small-scale robbery, beaten so severely that we sustained a skull fracture, placed in solitary confinement for unfathomable amounts of time and then, finally, released? Can you imagine the toll on individual psyches this could easily take, especially if the sentence was unjust in any way in the first place?

As I've noted, a number of people are re-jailed, sometimes repeatedly, both because of infractions of technicalities in the laws and because new crimes are committed. For those first imprisoned for truly minor offenses, time(s) in jail is often enormously damaging. If the individual is a parent, especially a single parent, who takes his/her child(ren)? What becomes of his/her job if there was on? What happens if he/she was in school? What about the pregnant women chained while in labor?

As we do with regards to gun regulation, climate change, public education and so many other issues, we really, really need to address this one. It's enormously damaging to our national sense of self, our reputation in the world, economically and, most important, to the millions of men and women who really never deserved being sent through the prison pipeline in the first place.

Sources

NAACP, Criminal Justice Fact Sheet, post-2008 Wonkblog, 11 Facts About America's Prison Population, August 3, 2013 The Pew Charitable Trusts, Prison Time Served and Recidivism report, October 8, 2013 The Economist blog, America's Prison Population: Who, What, Where and Why, March 13, 2014 Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker, The Caging of America, January 30, 2012 John W. Whitehead on the Huffington Post, Jailing Americans for Profit: The Rise of the Prison Industrial Complex, April 10, 2012 ACLU, Banking on Bondage report, November 2, 2011 The Washington Post, Prison Crowding Undermines Safety, Report Says, October 15, 2012 The New York Times, In Labor, In Chains, July 27, 2014

Peach Pie Jam and a Class, ear clog

How Ear Clog Can Facilitate Inadvertent Telephone Game

I awoke this morning with severely clogged ears. The children and I were like ships in the night because I could only hear about half of what they said. Now I'm not saying this is a bad thing, because the Pokémon obsession has not waned and my interest in it has definitely not grown, but it was such an odd experience to have misconversations. Kinda funny too.

"Boys, why are you each clad only in a shirt?"

I meant this literally because they were both completely naked except for tees which hung to mid-bum; tragically, they resembled what I imagine pedophiles look like when home alone. It's a terrible look.

"Where is my bathing suit?"

"What? We have no laundry chute."

"What, MOM?? What does that even mean?"

To myself: "What the eff are those kids making up now? They are nuts, and I really wish they'd at least put on some underpants."

I make coffee for me and breakfast for them. While they eat I attempt to explain what clogged ears feel like and with them how one experiences sound.

"I feel like I'm underwater or far away."

"Mom, can you hear me? Can you hear me?"

"Yes, boys, you're four flipping feet from me. I just mean the sound sounds garbled."

"What's garbled? Like weird? Can you hear me?"

"Yes, like hard to understand."

"What?"

Who's on first, for the love. I do feel that I've turned a corner in the health department so that's good.

I made their lunches for camp (just seven days of lunch-making left! Making lunches blows; that their school provides excellent-quality lunches every day makes me not care about the tuition. SUCH.A.LUXURY. I can see why my mother went on cooking strike after making my sister and me lunches for 10 years.) and got them to camp and came home to attempt to clear my ears and prep for my canning class.

Peach Pie Jam

As these events pretty much always are, this one was an absolute delight. It's fun to meet new people and welcome those you already know and then preach the gospel of something you love to do and probably would be doing anyway. We made Peach Pie Jam and also did a jam tasting of six or seven I'm canned so far this summer. Everything was a hit!

And now, back to the couch. Just in case!