Evidencia

The other day I was reading a Smith Institute report on Juvenile Justice in England and Wales. The forward said something that I thought was interesting:

It is almost 10 years since the Attorney General of the US, Janet Reno, submitted an independent, scholarly report to the US Congress entitled Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn't, What's Promising (1997). When I read that report shortly after it was published, I immediately sensed a sea change in the way democracies would talk about crime prevention. No longer would we focus just on ideology. Evidence would soon take a much larger role in the debate.

This struck me because so much of what we do, especially in the world of criminal justice, is based on abstract ideologies, theories, or even raw emotion. We are angry and outraged when someone commits a crime, we paint them as someone outside of society and often throw them in prison where they are supposed to learn a lesson. And certainly there are crimes that merit this kind of punishment. But the great mistake in the American justice system is failing to realize that nearly everyone who is put in jail will some day be released. Ignoring the needs of those who break the law (drug rehabilitation, education, etc.) has been proven to lead to an increasing number of repeat offenders.

We can continue to build more and more prisons, or we can get smart about the way we do things, focus on the evidence at hand, continue to collect more evidence in the future, and do what's best for society as a whole.

More to come soon . . .

Art Classes

One of my newest projects here in Peru is an Art/Drawing class with some of the kids involved in our program. These kids are mostly from rough backgrounds, and they have some history with the law. They've also expressed some interest in art, graffiti, drawing, or some combination of the three.

The classes are supposed to go about an hour and a half, or two hours at most. I always assume that the boys are bored because we're working on pretty basic concepts, and frankly drawing cubes in two point perspective isn't exactly mind-blowing fun. So today after about an hour and a half I wrote their homework on the board and told them to copy it down. I told everyone that class was basically over, but they were welcome to stick around and draw if they wanted. I started to pick up my things, thinking that the boys would welcome my invitation to leave. But they didn't. In fact, they stayed another hour and a half, drawing diligently, page after page, totally focused on the creative process.

I told my sister when I came here that traveling has a weird way of making you grateful for things you never knew you should be grateful for. My example at the time was city parks. My home town is full of places where you can go to run around in the grass, play frisbee or a game of soccer, baseball, whatever. Growing up I never thought to myself, 'golly, I'm sure grateful for these parks!' But you live a few months in a place with no real parks and suddenly you learn to appreciate what you had.

Well, I'm starting to realize how lucky I was to grow up with art classes. These kids are 14, 15, 16 years old, mostly having dropped out of school, and those who are still in school will never get to take an art class. This was especially obviously during class today, when five adolescent boys worked diligently for three straight hours on their drawings. It was like they were starving for some sort of creative output. Even having basic materials like clean paper and pencils seemed like such a privilege to them, and they asked permission every time they needed a new sheet.

In High School I was awkward. Puberty was brutal to me, I couldn't talk to girls, or even get up the courage to look them in the eye. And while I have plenty unpleasant memories from high school, the one place I always felt safe and comfortable was in the art room. Sure there were some weirdos there, in fact, we were all weirdos. And I guess what I never appreciated at the time, but I'm starting to see as a real blessing, was the endless supply of inspiration, materials, and new possibilities.

One of the kids in my art class here is a really good artist, despite having no training whatsoever. I don't have much time left in Peru, but I'm hoping to work with him and get him enrolled in an art school. He lives in a really rough part of town, and it might be his ticket to developing a real career and leaving the slums some day.

Episode I, 2.0

Growing up I was never much of a Star Trek fan, but I had something of an unhealthy addiction to all things Star Wars. I was still buying action figures when I was in high school. I had a long time subscription to the Star Wars Insider Magazine. I enjoyed going to comic book stores and thought the people who worked there were kind of cool (ok ok, I was right about that one). Luckily Episode I came out during my freshman year of high school and it sucked just bad enough for my interest in the Star Wars Universe to wane. I say "luckily" because I was well on my way to one day getting married in a Boba Fett costume. Episode II was worse, and frankly I had a hard time getting through it in one sitting. Things kind of came together in Episode III as several of the actors decided that it might be a good idea to show some emotion once in a while, and we got to see Anakin finally let loose. But really by that time it was too little too late. I'd moved on, seen other movies. It had been years since I'd read the Star Wars Insider, and I was totally fine with that.

After seeing the new Star Trek movie, which was awesome by the way, I started to wonder again why Star Wars had to go and make three lousy prequels. I found myself getting angry at my old friend Star Wars. That's why I have decided to constructively funnel my anger into reconstructing the three prequels with new actors, story lines, and action figure spin off series. Feel free to participate with suggestions and feedback.

EPISODE I, TITLE TBD

Ground Rules:

1. Anakin Skywalker will never ever ever, ever ever be called Annie by anyone for any reason. Ever.

2. The Jedi Council was one of the worst groups of characters ever assembled in the history of modern cinema. Apparently their job was to sit in a circle, occasionally look inquisitively at each other, and say extremely boring things. The new Jedi Council will be a two parts X-Men, one parts Super Friends (with Samuel L. Jackson and Lawrence Fishburn playing the Wonder Twins-type characters), and one part Young Guns:

Basically, if you want to be on the Jedi Council you need to have some sort of personality. Even Aquaman, arguably the most worthless Super Friend of all, had personality. It's not asking that much, really.

3. Anakin Skywalker cannot start out as a child. There are two very important reasons for this. First, kids can't act. Second, kids are not interesting. They play with blocks, watch cartoons, and laugh hysterically at words like "poo" and "toot." If we're going to watch the development of subsequent fall of Darth Vader, can we please just skip the prepubescent stage?

4. Qui Gon doesn't get to be in the remake as punishment for sucking so bad at everything he did in the original.

More to come soon . . .

Tiempo Libre

The other day I was talking to an older man about the book Don Quijote. 

"Ah yes," he said, "I read that book back when I was in high school. I used to read a lot back then . . . of course, that was before television, when we had more free time." 

This guy probably watches 6-8 hours of TV a day. Little does he realize that TV hasn't taken away any of his free time, it has just changed the way he uses it.