Prison Fellowship's Position Paper on Criminal Justice Reform: Outrageous Justice, by Craig DeRoche, Heather Rice-Minus, & Jesse Wiese

Week One: "The police can lie to you?" "Sure they can. It's illegal for you to lie to the police, but the police can lie to you all they want."
Week Four: "When you come in, you hear them say, 'fresh meat' and 'new fish,' and you think, 'I ain't no meat, and I ain't no fish.' "
Week Six: "What can we do to change the prison culture?" "It all comes down to the warden. If he doesn't think the prisoners deserve better treatment, nothing will change."

These are not lines from a documentary. These are just a few of the many memorable moments I experienced while discussing the book Outrageous Justice with a group from my church.

Outrageous Justice is a team effort by staff members of Prison Fellowship, most of whom have done time themselves. I first learned of this ministry when I read Born Again, by Chuck Colson. (NB: the link goes to the comic book, while I read the actual book, but I just couldn't resist sharing this wonderful abbreviated version. Decent portrait drawing, too! )

So, Outrageous Justice. There's a book, a DVD, and a Bible study guide. For those of you unfamiliar with the last genre, it is a series of lessons to be used in an adult Sunday school or small group format. It will generally include or reference some Scripture, summarize or supplement the content of the book or DVDs to which it is tied, and provide lots of questions for the individual or group to complete.

In this case, both the DVD and the questions seemed to assume a group that was not very familiar with the criminal justice system or the realities of prison. However, we were privileged in our setting to have several members who had been in prison, worked or volunteered in prison, and/or been crime victims. Indeed, the biggest takeaway of the whole experience was how extensive the US prison system is and how much it affects all of us.

To get a very quick overview of why Prison Fellowship might call our criminal justice system "outrageous," you might watch this episode of Adam Ruins Everything. Or maybe John Oliver could explain it to you. Or you could even commit to 13th, the full-length documentary that explores why our prison system is, as a new book says, The New Jim Crow. But actually, there's no better way to understand what's wrong with the way we do things than to sit with a room full of lawyers, social workers, mental health professionals, mental health consumers, people in recovery, people who have done time, and people who have lost property and even loved ones to crime, and discussing questions like, "How easy is it to rejoin society after being incarcerated? How easy should it be? What can I do to make reentry more manageable for those who want to change?"

Aspects of criminal justice that are outrageous and should be reformed are many. There's the paucity of support for victims, both inside the system and culturally. We typically think of rape victims when we think of this problem, but really any crime can be more devastating than we usually imagine. There's the fact that at any given time, almost half a million Americans are in jail not having been convicted of any crime. Most of these folks will lose their jobs because of nonattendance; many will also lose their families. Some will have their charges dropped when the real perpetrator is found; some will plea to a lesser charge whether they are actually guilty or not, just to avoid running the risk of being convicted of a greater charge. Some, of course, will eventually be tried, found guilty and sentenced. Those whose only crime was looking like someone an eyewitness described, or being with someone who had perpetrated a crime earlier, or having the same name as a known criminal, will lose their jobs and their families just as surely as those who actually committed an offense.

There's the belief that prison should be punitive, that prisoners do not "deserve" opportunities to better themselves. Margaret Atwood wrote a wonderful novel about a man who puts on Shakespeare plays with inmates; it turns out this is a thing that really happens. But, as in the novel, in real life, many people question why those who have committed crimes should have the privilege of education, particularly arts education, or of being paid a living wage, or of having money to buy soap and toothpaste when they have outstanding fines. In other words, many people would love to return to the Victorian world depicted by Charles Dickens! This is indeed outrageous.

Once I started learning about the issues with our prison system, I started to see more information about it everywhere. This book is a fantastic introduction mainly because it includes lots of stories from prisoners, victims and volunteers. If you don't have such a group in your own circle of acquaintance, this might be a good placebo!

360-369: Social Problems, Solutions and Organizations

This category is full of books I would like to read anyway. Half the Sky was made into a documentary. It's Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn's exploration of the plight of women and girls worldwide. A Path Appears is also in this category, the eponymous path being the path out of poverty. Both books are very much like Kristoff's weekly column in the New York Times.

Eldercare 101, by Mary Jo Saavedra, and Passages in Caregiving, by Gail Sheehy, are obviously two approaches to the same topic. The former is very practical, detailing folders that should be set up, professionals that should be consulted, and other concrete actions. The latter is, to no one's surprise, more philosophical, and includes, again to no one's surprise, stages of caregiving. I started Eldercare 101, but I am so far along the path that it was just depressing to read about all the things I should have done 10 years ago. In fact, I am so, so very far along the path that, within the last three weeks, my eldercare journey seems to be drawing to a close, and the absolute last thing I want to read is someone else's philosophizing about how to sit at the bedside of a dying person. That's the problem with books like this: when they are not relevant, you wouldn't want to wade through them; by the time you do see their importance, you don't have the energy.

Extra Credit: March, by John Lewis (Political Science)

People must have started talking about March as soon as it came out, and, really, what's not to like: The Civil Rights movement, from the perspective of a participant, in graphic novel form, is a trifecta of my favorite things. So it went on my Christmas list-- but then, so did a lot of other things that didn't cost $50.

What do you know-- it's the one I got. The person who got it for me immediately wanted to borrow it... and then immediately wanted me to hurry up and read it, not least because I was planning on participating in that other march for the preservation of the rights of women and minorities.

Lewis's experiences were inspiring, sure... but mainly they were humbling, and not in the way that winning a Grammy is (apparently, so I've heard) humbling. No, more like in the way that thinking you are doing something big by getting up at 5 AM to spend a Saturday in Washington DC suddenly looks like a walk in the park (oh wait, actually IS a walk in the park, the National Mall park that is) compared to going to a lunch counter or a voter registration location or bus station to sit or stand or march until you get beat up or hosed or arrested, and then getting up the next day and doing it again until you end up in the hospital or dead.

As bad as things are right now, I don't even have a place to put what American elected officials and American law enforcement did to American citizens on American soil in the '50s and '60s. People, we have been in worse spots than this before, and we have prevailed, but only because forefathers like John Lewis did not value their own lives more than justice.

So. Read this book.

350-359: Mainly Military History and the Art of War

The whole point of this project was to read nonfiction in areas outside my natural interests, so I should have been happy when I got to the 350's. Definitely never read anything from this section before. Definitely never expect to again. So I kind of skated by, choosing a book that can be read out loud in a couple of hours, and at least I can now say I have read one book about military strategy.

Indeed, to hear some tell it, the ONLY book about military strategy. Or about strategy in any kind of adversarial situation. Forbes loves it--a lot. After all, as Mr. Wonderful from Shark Tank says,  "My attitude is business is war. You send out your soldiers every day in the form of your capital, and you want them to come home with prisoners. You want to salt the earth that your competitor is lurking on. You want to steal their market share. You want to destroy them and get their customers." Lifehacker.com loves it-- the enemy is that bad habit you are trying to break. Jessica Hagy turned it into charts (Forbes again!), seemingly applying every paragraph to a different peacetime challenge. My late pastor loved it, applying it to spiritual warfare against the world, the flesh and the devil. Even librarians love it! 

Well. I'm sorry, but for me it's simply a book about military strategy, specifically about how to overrun some other guy's territory and force him out of it, and I think this kind of thing:

Jessica Hagy for Forbes.com

is a stretch. But if you want to read this book devotionally, meditating on all the possible applications of each phrase to your daily life, knock yourself out. You'll be in good company.

340-349: Law. Out of Order, by Sandra Day O'Connor

There's real estate law and tax law and criminal law. There's the Constitution and courts, from the one downtown to that one in the marble hall in Washington DC. There are defense attorneys and prosecuting attorneys and defendants and convicts and prisons. And they are all found right here, in 340-349. I could have read any number of books about sensational trials or notorious attorneys, and, sadly, there was almost a whole shelf just for people who were convicted but later discovered to be innocent.

I brought home a book about the constitution called Me the People: One Man's Selfless Quest to Rewrite the Constitution of the United States of America by Kevin Bleyer, but it was very snarky and silly, so I didn't read it. I also brought home a book surveying cases that test the relationship between church and state, Holy Hullabaloos, by Jay Wexler, but it was also weirdly snarky, and in these troubled times, I didn't think I needed to be *more* cynical about our federal government. 


But Jay Wexler is not just a joke cracker-- he's also a number cruncher who, apparently, at one point combed through transcripts of Supreme Court hearings counting the incidents of Justices getting laughs (Scalia won). This factoid and a reference to it at Elena Kagan's confirmation hearing find their way into the book I actually did finish, Sandra Day O'Connor's Out of Order. The link will take you to a review so accurate that I will not repeat all the criticisms contained therein. I can only say in defense of this book that I did not read it as such. I got the audio, read by O'Connor herself. She is from Texas, and her reading voice reminds me very much of that of the highly intelligent, pioneering, professional women in my family, so it was very pleasant to let her tell me random stories while I drove to work. I do not think I could have finished this book on paper! 

However, I'm glad I did get through it, because it certainly was interesting to get some perspective on the history of the Court. The main thing I learned is that the role of the Supreme Court has really changed over the years, and that a few Justices have been pretty obviously incompetent-- highly partisan, possibly even corrupt-- and yet, the Republic has survived some kind of way. There is hope for us yet!

A Cheerful Take on Economics: How We Got to Now, by Steven Johnson

As Jerome K. Jerome said, "I like work. It fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours." I concur and heartily recommend Steven Johnson's book based on the PBS show of the same name. How We Got to Now is an opportunity for you to watch other people work, with no obligation whatsoever to do anything yourself. After all, air conditioning and microscopes and the War on Poverty and sewers have all been invented already!

It was truly an unmitigated pleasure to listen to Johnson trace the development of, for example, the technology of glass from its accidental creation in the deserts of North Africa to the experiments involving crossbows that resulted in fiber optics. The ingenuity displayed, the hardships suffered, the sleepless nights and fortunes won and lost that enabled us to read small print and live in Arizona and not die of childbed fever and associate iced tea and lemonade with the summer even though there is no naturally occurring ice at that time... all this and more fits into one slim volume, seven CDs, or 6 episodes on PBS, and is a great relief from these anxious times.

330-339: Economics

Economics... famously called "The Dismal Science." Turns out it includes not only boring but important works by Alan Greenspan, but also lively personal finance authors like Dave Ramsey and Suze Orman.

And very entertaining books about human motivation, probably the most famous of which is Freakonomics. This book became a cultural nine days' wonder and the title of a website, blog, podcast and overall cash cow for its authors. They have names --Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner-- but they are really more of a rock duo like the White Stripes or the Black Keys. They eventually issued a book/audio "Greatest Hits" compilation from their blog, meaning that I can catch up with their latest thinking while driving. And did I mention they are VERY entertaining? After all, the book is called When to Rob a Bank.

Speaking of entertaining and audiobooks, memoirs and bios are also available in this section. Disrupted, by Dan Lyons, is sort of the anti-How Starbucks Saved My Life, by Michael Gates Gill. Older white-collar white guy gets the boot, ends up at an entry-level job surrounded by people younger than his children, has some kind of epiphany. Only where Gill's epiphany was that money isn't everything and young people work hard, Lyons' seems to be that startups are ridiculous and so are the young people who work at them. He gets 50 pages or one disc, and if he's too mean-spirited, I'm going to give him the boot as well.


Second-best to the stunt memoir is the sensational biography, and American Heiress, by Jeffrey Toobin, fits that bill. If you are one of Lyons' or Hill's young co-workers, you may not recognize the name "Patty Hearst," but us old folks can never forget that enigmatic photo.  

Patty Hearst

Hearst was the disconnected 19-year old daughter of a newspaper magnate when she was snatched from her apartment by a group of about 6 people calling themselves "the Symbionese Liberation Army." She accompanied them on some bank robberies and eventually released this picture and a statement to the effect that it was her choice to join the group and that she believed in their goals (whatever they were). She changed her name to Tania. She went on the run, but eventually was captured by the FBI (I guess she should have read the Freakonomics book and timed her exploits better). She was tried and convicted, but her sentence was commuted by Carter, and she was pardoned by Clinton. If you're confused by now, you are in good company-- as this story unfolded on the national news, no one could figure out what in the world was going on! 

And who said economics was boring?