1. Bail and the All Things Considered story about it.
There was a three-part All Things Considered piece the 21st and 22nd of January about bail [bonds] and their impact on poor Americans. You can check it out here on NPR’s website (second part; third part). I thought the pieces, by Laura Sullivan, were really good, although I’ll certainly acknowledge that I think she’s a bit biased towards the same direction as I am.
My junior year of college I was lucky enough to get to take a class with Barb Toews, who does restorative justice in Pennsylvania. The class was part of the Inside-Out program, wherein students in college take a class inside of a jail or prison, alongside currently-incarcerated men or women. I very much felt like this class gave me a viewpoint that would have been severely lacking in a class based on a college campus. It was experiential as much as it was academic; although we did quite a bit of reading and had some pretty good discussions, much of our work was anecdotal, as it must be. Still, I came to be pretty severely convinced that our prison system in the US is [still] part of the problem facing society, rather than something that helps. Even before taking this class, it seemed pretty clear that building more prisons is not and never has been the solution.
NPR seems to have a focus (lately?) on demonstrating some of the problems with current law and with the current prison system. A while back, they did a great series on California’s Three Strikes law (by Ina Jaffe). I remember hearing a fairly recent piece about sex offenders, focusing on Florida’s crazy laws. And now this.
These pieces are moving and, to be honest, make my skin crawl. One of the things my class with Barb discussed was programs intended to keep people out of jail — pretrial release programs. Our class focused on restorative justice — it’s pretty self-explanatory in basic idea. (See here.) I’ll grant that it’s ridiculously optimistic as a philosophy, but I think there are pretty clear results in its favor, and it’s not as though a punative justic system seems to demonstrate great results. (Oh no, not at all.) In any case, the NPR pieces are about how bail doesn’t seem to be helping anyone except for bail bondsmen, and how in fact they seem to be severely hurting (poor) defendants and the government itself.
Bail is intended to insure that a defendant, released pre-trial, returns to court to stand trial. If you can’t pay it, you sit in jail until you plea or until you get a trial — which may take months or more than a year. Many of the guys in my class were in this position. You generally only get a bail if your crime is nonviolent. If you can’t pay it, you can instead pay a few to a bail bondsman, who then puts up your bail for you. You don’t get the fee back. The way the system is supposed to work is this: if you then don’t show up to court, the bail bondsman pays your bail to the court, and uses bounty hunters (legal ones) to get you back. But as the NPR story explains, that doesn’t even happen. As in, the bail bondsman makes money from you, but the court loses money. And then police officers end up getting you back themselves. In any case, I’m perhaps focusing on a small part of this — the important point really is that many people can’t afford the $500 needed to pay a bail bondsman. And as such, they languish in jail, which hurts their chances of fighting their case, overcrowds jails, and makes it more likely for them to give in to prosecutors.
Short version: listen to the NPR story.
2. Super cool: Phineas Gage daguerrotype found.
3. Autism on On the Media and Fresh Air.
On the 5th, NPR’s fantastic On the Media had a rather mediocre piece on autism, focusing on the medical journal The Lancet, which formally retracted Andrew Wakefield’s disastrous paper this month. The paper was published in 1998, and is the one that made the bogus claim that vaccinations might be causing autism by using bad science. Immunologists like Paul Offit have worked hard to dispel this idea, but people persist in believing it. What frustrated me about NPR’s story was that they really didn’t do a good job of explaining just why it was retracted, and why even before it was retracted it had still been repeatedly demonstrated to be bullshit.
I really think that was a bad choice.
I got to see Offit speak at Bryn Mawr in April last year, and he was really a good speaker (he works in Philadelphia). My favorite part of his talk was an anecdote he told about his wife’s pediatric practice. As I remember it, he explained that his wife was seeing a young girl, who was supposed to be getting vaccinations that day. In the waiting room, the girl had an epileptic seizure, the first of what were apparently to be many. But imagine that the seizure had waited a day, or an hour. And imagine trying to explain to that girl’s mother that the vaccination had nothing to do with it. Think you’d get very far? Just because they might’ve been linked, however, would by no means reflect on causation. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
In any case, much more impressive were the three Terry Gross interviews of Temple Grandin on February 5′s Fresh Air. I felt like Gross asked some interesting questions; I also just find Grandin to be a really interesting woman. I no longer remember where I first heard about her, but she’s a professor of animal science who has high-functioning autism, and is also an activist in autism treatment and awareness. I recommend listening to the piece (they also have a glowing review of the HBO movie about her, starring Claire Danes — I am curious indeed), or at least reading up on her — Oliver Sacks’ article about her in An Anthropologist on Mars is a great place to start.
And with that, I’ll leave you. Some more personal updates soon.
