Solitary Confinement Is Cruel And Ineffective

The Article: Solitary Confinement Is Cruel and Ineffective in The Scientific American.

The Text: Some 80,000 people are held in solitary confinement in U.S. prisons, according to the latest available census. The practice has grown with seemingly little thought to how isolation affects a person’s psyche. But new research suggests that solitary confinement creates more violence both inside and outside prison walls.

Prisoners in solitary confinement—also known as administrative segregation—spend 22 to 24 hours a day in small, featureless cells. Contact with other humans is practically nonexistent. Because solitary confinement widely occurs at the discretion of prison administration, many inmates spend years, even decades, cut off from any real social interaction. More than 500 of the prisoners at Pelican Bay State Prison in California, for example, have been in isolation units for over a decade, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

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Are Suburbs Killing The American Dream?

The Article: Are the Suburbs Where the American Dream Goes to Die? by Matthew O’Brien in The Atlantic.

The Text: Rumors of the American Dream’s demise have been greatly exaggerated — at least in parts of America.

That’s the message of a new study that looks at the connection between geography and social mobility in the United States. It turns out modern-day Horatio Algers have just as much a chance in much of the country as they do anywhere else in the world today. But if you want to move up, don’t move to the South. As you can see in the chart below from David Leonhardt’s write-up in the New York Times, the American Dream is on life support below the Mason Dixon line.

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No, GOP, You Can’t Win Over Millennials With GIFs

The Article: Why the GOP can’t win millennials with GIFs by Alex Seitz-Wald in Salon.

The Text: The Heritage Foundation’s GIF-tastic listicle on BuzzFeed explaining why young people should hate Obamacare is coming in for mocking, thanks to its heavy-handed attempt to appeal to the youths much like, Tommy Christopher quips, “a narc walking around a frat party asking ‘fellow young people, where can I obtain an enjoyable reefer cigarette.’”

The post is actually kind of funny and nails the BuzzFeed style. And it was probably even made by a real live young person, since Heritage has enough of them around to necessitate having a dorm next door for its interns. But just as a narc would still be a narc even if he blended in perfectly with the stoners, Heritage’s message on Obamacare will never sell to young people as long as Obamacare helps young people. Just as with the social conservative plan to “make abortion funny,” the medium only goes so far if the message is wrong.

It’s easy to see why conservatives need to enlist the youth in their fight against Obamcare. The fate of the law is dependent upon enough young adults enrolling in insurance programs to keep the costs down for everyone else. Since they’re cheaper to insure, young and healthy people effectively subsidize older and sick people. If lots of young people leave the pool, premiums will go up, pushing more young people out, thus raising premiums once again, and so on in a premium “death spiral.”

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The Incarceration Business

The Article: The Business of Mass Incarceration by Chris Hedges in Truth Dig.

The Text: Debbie Bourne, 45, was at her apartment in the Liberty Village housing projects in Plainfield, N.J., on the afternoon of April 30 when police banged on the door and pushed their way inside. The officers ordered her, her daughter, 14, and her son, 22, who suffers from autism, to sit down and not move and then began ransacking the home. Bourne’s husband, from whom she was estranged and who was in the process of moving out, was the target of the police, who suspected him of dealing cocaine. As it turned out, the raid would cast a deep shadow over the lives of three innocents—Bourne and her children.

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The murder of a teenage boy by an armed vigilante, George Zimmerman, is only one crime set within a legal and penal system that has criminalized poverty. Poor people, especially those of color, are worth nothing to corporations and private contractors if they are on the street. In jails and prisons, however, they each can generate corporate revenues of $30,000 to $40,000 a year. This use of the bodies of the poor to make money for corporations fuels the system of neoslavery that defines our prison system.

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Gay Marriage In The Year 100 AD

The Article: Gay marriage in the year 100 AD by Annalee Newitz in i09.

The Text: Gay marriage sounds like an ultra-contemporary idea. But almost twenty years ago, a Catholic scholar at Yale shocked the world by publishing a book packed with evidence that same-sex marriages were sanctioned by the early Christian Church during an era commonly called the Dark Ages.

John Boswell was a historian and religious Catholic who dedicated much of his scholarly life to studying the late Roman Empire and early Christian Church. Poring over legal and church documents from this era, he discovered something incredible. There were dozens of records of church ceremonies where two men were joined in unions that used the same rituals as heterosexual marriages. (He found almost no records of lesbian unions, which is probably an artifact of a culture which kept more records about the lives of men generally.)

Bolstered by this evidence, Boswell published a book in 1994, the year before his death from AIDS, called Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe. The book comes out next month for the first time in a digital edition. It was an instant lightening rod for controversy, drawing criticism from both the Catholic Church and sex pundit Camille Paglia. Given the Church’s present-day views on gay marriage, these detractors argued, Boswell’s history seemed like wishful thinking.

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