One of the most important of the Catholic social teachings which helps us to understand that for each issue within life, there is a proper structure to respond to it.
Subsidiarity is at the heart of the work of Lampstand which posits the appropriate response to helping individual criminals reform their life is through a small community organization composed of one full-time staff (a reformed criminal with graduate education and other assets allowing him to effectively teach a reentering criminal, one-to-one, how to leave the criminal world and join the communal world) a board of directors, and a local network of other community resources.
This article from The Catholic Thing is an excellent look at subsidiarity.
An excerpt.
“Subsidiarity matters to me, and it’s useful to recall this core principle of Catholic social teaching (and of American federalism), especially this week, as Benedict XVI releases his third encyclical, Caritas in Veritate (“Charity in Truth”), which is expected to address the subsidiarity principle in the context of the global financial crisis.
“Here’s what I wrote about it a decade ago in my book, The Concise Conservative Encyclopedia, sandwiched between entries on Strauss, Leo (1899-1973) and Sumner, William Graham (1840-1910):
“subsidiarity: A term (the Latin subsidium for aid, help) from Roman Catholic social philosophy which expresses the view that, whenever practicable, decisions ought to be made by those most affected by the decisions. Put another way: the national government ought only to do what the states cannot; the states only what communities cannot; communities only what families cannot; families only what individuals cannot. This is not to suggest that Catholic social theory (especially as read in papal encyclicals) is always in favor of the minimalist state. John XXIII in Pacem in Terris (1963), while affirming the doctrine of subsidiarity, called for publicly funded health and unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, and government support for the arts. Still, it is clear that “a planned economy . . . violates the principle of subsidiarity . . .” (The Catholic Encyclopedia, 1965). Read: R.J. Neuhaus, Doing Well and Doing Good (1992). “Just as it is wrong to withdraw from the individual and commit to the community at large what private enterprise and endeavor can accomplish, so it is likewise unjust and a gravely harmful disturbance of right order to turn over to a greater society of higher rank functions and services which can be performed by lesser bodies on a lower plane.” –Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno (1931)”
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Monday, July 6, 2009
Politics and the Church
While never good bedfellows, there have been periods—certainly in recent American and history—when the Catholic Church has become much too closely identified with the policies of one political party or another, infecting the Church’s institutional integrity and ability to teach from her faith, and thereby partially reducing the potency of that faith among the faithful.
This tendency, and the wonderful relationship between President Reagan and Pope John Paul II which helped bring down communism, is touched upon in a recent review of the new book Reagan's Secret War: The Untold Story of His Fight to Save the World from Nuclear Disaster, by George Weigel.
An excerpt.
“The new revelation about the relationship in the Andersons' book is that the Pope and the President had an extensive correspondence, involving dozens of letters back-and-forth, which Professor Martin Anderson told me were by far among the most interesting of all the Reagan letters he had examined. Among the letters referenced in Reagan's Secret War is a January 1982 letter from the White House to the Vatican in which Reagan shifted the subject of the exchange from events in Poland (which had just been put under martial law) to his hopes for genuine disarmament, not just arms "control," at the talks about to begin with the Soviet Union in Geneva.
“Indeed, the Andersons' book makes clear that, somewhat to the consternation of many of his close advisers, Ronald Reagan was a nuclear abolitionist: he really did believe, as he often said, in ridding the world of nuclear weapons. His instruments for doing so -- ramping up U.S. missile capability to demonstrate that America couldn't be outmuscled, and the strategic defense initiative as an insurance policy -- were bitterly criticized by the liberal arms controllers, whose influence on the deliberations of the U.S. bishops as they prepared their 1983 peace pastoral was, to put it gently, considerable. But as the Andersons demonstrate, it was Reagan who was the true radical in this business: the man who wasn't satisfied with simply managing an arms race, the man who wanted to put the nuclear genie back into the bottle. Historians of U.S. Catholicism will thus be grateful to the Andersons for clarifying just how mistaken some of the policy assumptions underlying "The Challenge of Peace" were.”
This tendency, and the wonderful relationship between President Reagan and Pope John Paul II which helped bring down communism, is touched upon in a recent review of the new book Reagan's Secret War: The Untold Story of His Fight to Save the World from Nuclear Disaster, by George Weigel.
An excerpt.
“The new revelation about the relationship in the Andersons' book is that the Pope and the President had an extensive correspondence, involving dozens of letters back-and-forth, which Professor Martin Anderson told me were by far among the most interesting of all the Reagan letters he had examined. Among the letters referenced in Reagan's Secret War is a January 1982 letter from the White House to the Vatican in which Reagan shifted the subject of the exchange from events in Poland (which had just been put under martial law) to his hopes for genuine disarmament, not just arms "control," at the talks about to begin with the Soviet Union in Geneva.
“Indeed, the Andersons' book makes clear that, somewhat to the consternation of many of his close advisers, Ronald Reagan was a nuclear abolitionist: he really did believe, as he often said, in ridding the world of nuclear weapons. His instruments for doing so -- ramping up U.S. missile capability to demonstrate that America couldn't be outmuscled, and the strategic defense initiative as an insurance policy -- were bitterly criticized by the liberal arms controllers, whose influence on the deliberations of the U.S. bishops as they prepared their 1983 peace pastoral was, to put it gently, considerable. But as the Andersons demonstrate, it was Reagan who was the true radical in this business: the man who wasn't satisfied with simply managing an arms race, the man who wanted to put the nuclear genie back into the bottle. Historians of U.S. Catholicism will thus be grateful to the Andersons for clarifying just how mistaken some of the policy assumptions underlying "The Challenge of Peace" were.”
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Nonprofits & the Recession
An excellent report by John Hopkins University—at the jump—has just been released examining the impact on nonprofits around the country.
As expected, giving is down, but the nonprofit world is showing some resiliency—to which no one who has worked in the field for any length of time is surprised—and the most well led organizations will weather this period as they have weathered others, by being creative, tenacious and true to their mission.
As expected, giving is down, but the nonprofit world is showing some resiliency—to which no one who has worked in the field for any length of time is surprised—and the most well led organizations will weather this period as they have weathered others, by being creative, tenacious and true to their mission.
Saturday, July 4, 2009
The 4th of July & the River
This is July 4th and many of the folks in my town are down by, or in, the American River, as pictured above by our house, and I read this poem today that seemed so appropriate, and so beautiful, from the poet Charlotte Muse in America magazine.
An excerpt.
On the bank where it pours clear over freckled stones,
I want to sit and watch a leaf riding the surface,
a fish patrolling the water road
downstream through sun glint and flash of froth,
on through the river of light
river of water
river of light
And I’ll plunge in,
trusting the river which is not trustworthy,
to be carried on its back,
giving up my own motion to look at the unrolling sky,
then turning like a log to stare down
until I or the river
lets go
An excerpt.
On the bank where it pours clear over freckled stones,
I want to sit and watch a leaf riding the surface,
a fish patrolling the water road
downstream through sun glint and flash of froth,
on through the river of light
river of water
river of light
And I’ll plunge in,
trusting the river which is not trustworthy,
to be carried on its back,
giving up my own motion to look at the unrolling sky,
then turning like a log to stare down
until I or the river
lets go
Friday, July 3, 2009
Criminal World Culture & the Movies
I wrote about the impact of film on the criminal world in my first book, The Criminals Search for God: Criminal Transformation, Catholic Social Teaching, Deep Knowledge Leadership, and Communal Reentry (2006).
An excerpt.
“The criminal world has grown very powerful in the past five decades in America. As a result of social trends that are long-rooted but accelerated in the 1950’s; film, music, and fashion converged to enhance the attractiveness of rebellion and crime to youth. A corresponding inability of the traditional American socializing institutions to imbue youth with respect for the simple religious-based values that internally restrained so many generations of children has contributed to this situation.
“The visual and audio world of film and music has great power to shape the interior lives of criminals, which Klavan (2005) notes in relation to the evolution of films portraying crime, violence, and evil: “It was probably 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde that first showed screen violence not as a representation of actions between people but as the movement of filmed objects more or less beautiful to look upon. …Similarly, the balletic shootouts in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch …connected him to his world and us to his vision. In short, both Peckinpah and Bonnie and Clyde’s Arthur Penn were directors trained in the old school of filmmaking…By the time we reach the films of Tarantino we’re dealing with a director whose personal preference points seem not to be found in life but only on the screen. Pulp Fiction, as the title implies, is not a film about gangsters; it’s a film about gangster movies. …Sin City is the natural next step. It’s no accident that it takes its structure from Pulp Fiction or that Tarantino was brought in to direct a single sequence in which a dead man is reanimated. This is a film in which death has no sting because the characters have no lives to lose. It’s an exercise in camerawork, and its meaningless but beautiful violence invites us to relate to its victims as aesthetic objects. (Klavan, A. (2005). The sin of Sin City. City Journal, 15(3), 72-78. p. 76-77)” (Lukenbill pp. 94-95)
The Ethics & Public Policy Center has begun a summer series of films and remarks on crime and punishment which we will be following.
The first film is The Public Enemy and here is an excerpt from the opening remarks.
“This week we're once again kicking off with a movie from the early 1930s, William Wellman's classic gangster film The Public Enemy, starring James Cagney and - well, a bunch of other people whom nobody but film buffs now remembers….
“The audience of 1931 was as impressed by Cagney as we still are today, and his role as Tommy Powers, the eponymous Public Enemy, made him into the star he remained for the rest of his life. If modern screen acting begins with this role, so does the gangster film which has remained a hardy Hollywood perennial ever since, down to and including Scorsese's own Goodfellas (1991) to which tonight's movie bears a certain resemblance. But there is also an important difference between it and the movies that come after it.
“Most gangster movies, Goodfellas among them, derive their emotional force from the sense of belonging - familial, tribal, ethnic - that they romanticize. The family drama of The Godfather or The Sopranos is at least as big a part of their attraction as the daring deeds of their magnetic central characters. Cagney's Tommy Powers in The Public Enemy forms strong bonds with particular people, but he is very much at the center of things as an individual. Even his close friend and constant companion, Matt, he often dismisses as nobody or nothing. "I don't even know you're here," he says when they meet Mamie and Kitty in the nightclub. The family, in this film, is not what draws him into a life of crime but what tries, without success, to draw him away from it, while "the mob" is often referred to but is in fact almost invisible as such.”
An excerpt.
“The criminal world has grown very powerful in the past five decades in America. As a result of social trends that are long-rooted but accelerated in the 1950’s; film, music, and fashion converged to enhance the attractiveness of rebellion and crime to youth. A corresponding inability of the traditional American socializing institutions to imbue youth with respect for the simple religious-based values that internally restrained so many generations of children has contributed to this situation.
“The visual and audio world of film and music has great power to shape the interior lives of criminals, which Klavan (2005) notes in relation to the evolution of films portraying crime, violence, and evil: “It was probably 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde that first showed screen violence not as a representation of actions between people but as the movement of filmed objects more or less beautiful to look upon. …Similarly, the balletic shootouts in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch …connected him to his world and us to his vision. In short, both Peckinpah and Bonnie and Clyde’s Arthur Penn were directors trained in the old school of filmmaking…By the time we reach the films of Tarantino we’re dealing with a director whose personal preference points seem not to be found in life but only on the screen. Pulp Fiction, as the title implies, is not a film about gangsters; it’s a film about gangster movies. …Sin City is the natural next step. It’s no accident that it takes its structure from Pulp Fiction or that Tarantino was brought in to direct a single sequence in which a dead man is reanimated. This is a film in which death has no sting because the characters have no lives to lose. It’s an exercise in camerawork, and its meaningless but beautiful violence invites us to relate to its victims as aesthetic objects. (Klavan, A. (2005). The sin of Sin City. City Journal, 15(3), 72-78. p. 76-77)” (Lukenbill pp. 94-95)
The Ethics & Public Policy Center has begun a summer series of films and remarks on crime and punishment which we will be following.
The first film is The Public Enemy and here is an excerpt from the opening remarks.
“This week we're once again kicking off with a movie from the early 1930s, William Wellman's classic gangster film The Public Enemy, starring James Cagney and - well, a bunch of other people whom nobody but film buffs now remembers….
“The audience of 1931 was as impressed by Cagney as we still are today, and his role as Tommy Powers, the eponymous Public Enemy, made him into the star he remained for the rest of his life. If modern screen acting begins with this role, so does the gangster film which has remained a hardy Hollywood perennial ever since, down to and including Scorsese's own Goodfellas (1991) to which tonight's movie bears a certain resemblance. But there is also an important difference between it and the movies that come after it.
“Most gangster movies, Goodfellas among them, derive their emotional force from the sense of belonging - familial, tribal, ethnic - that they romanticize. The family drama of The Godfather or The Sopranos is at least as big a part of their attraction as the daring deeds of their magnetic central characters. Cagney's Tommy Powers in The Public Enemy forms strong bonds with particular people, but he is very much at the center of things as an individual. Even his close friend and constant companion, Matt, he often dismisses as nobody or nothing. "I don't even know you're here," he says when they meet Mamie and Kitty in the nightclub. The family, in this film, is not what draws him into a life of crime but what tries, without success, to draw him away from it, while "the mob" is often referred to but is in fact almost invisible as such.”
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Reentry & Background Checks
Information technology is a very good thing and the use of it by employers and the general public to become aware of criminal backgrounds of people they might hire or bring on as volunteers to their community organization or parish, is also a very good thing.
What it means for the penitential criminal is the mandate to accept the fact that, as it was centuries ago in the village and small town, virtually everyone may now know your past.
The increased burden on criminal transformative organizations is to learn how to use this in a positive way, and teach reentering criminals to adapt to this new reality.
Here is an excerpt from an article in the National Institute of Justice Journal which looks at one way of adapting—though given human nature being what it is, probably won’t be used widely, especially for reentering criminals—but still worth examining.
“According to the Society for Human Resource Management, more than 80 percent of U.S. employers perform criminal background checks on prospective employees. Add two additional factors to that equation — advances in information technology and growing concerns about employer liability — and we can begin to understand how complicated the issue of employing ex-offenders has become.
“The numbers leave no doubt that we have reached a broad penetration of criminal history records into the fabric of our society:
• In 2006, nearly 81 million criminal records were on file in the states, 74 million of which were in automated databases.
• Another 14 million arrests are recorded every year.
“What does this mean for employers? And what does it mean for ex-offenders who need a job?
“Consider a 40-year-old male who was convicted of burglary when he was 18 years old and has committed no further crimes. Every time he applies for a new job, he tells the potential employer that he was convicted of a felony; even if he does not state this up-front, the employer is likely to do a criminal background check. In either case, he probably will not get the job because many employers are unwilling to hire an ex-offender.
“This situation prompted us to ask the question: Is it possible to determine empirically when it is no longer necessary for an employer to be concerned about a criminal offense in a prospective employee's past?
“Most people would probably agree that there should be some point in time after which ex-offenders should not be handicapped in finding employment. The question is when, precisely, should this occur? In the case of our hypothetical 40-year-old, when should a prospective employer no longer consider a burglary that was committed more than two decades earlier if the job applicant has stayed clean since then?”
What it means for the penitential criminal is the mandate to accept the fact that, as it was centuries ago in the village and small town, virtually everyone may now know your past.
The increased burden on criminal transformative organizations is to learn how to use this in a positive way, and teach reentering criminals to adapt to this new reality.
Here is an excerpt from an article in the National Institute of Justice Journal which looks at one way of adapting—though given human nature being what it is, probably won’t be used widely, especially for reentering criminals—but still worth examining.
“According to the Society for Human Resource Management, more than 80 percent of U.S. employers perform criminal background checks on prospective employees. Add two additional factors to that equation — advances in information technology and growing concerns about employer liability — and we can begin to understand how complicated the issue of employing ex-offenders has become.
“The numbers leave no doubt that we have reached a broad penetration of criminal history records into the fabric of our society:
• In 2006, nearly 81 million criminal records were on file in the states, 74 million of which were in automated databases.
• Another 14 million arrests are recorded every year.
“What does this mean for employers? And what does it mean for ex-offenders who need a job?
“Consider a 40-year-old male who was convicted of burglary when he was 18 years old and has committed no further crimes. Every time he applies for a new job, he tells the potential employer that he was convicted of a felony; even if he does not state this up-front, the employer is likely to do a criminal background check. In either case, he probably will not get the job because many employers are unwilling to hire an ex-offender.
“This situation prompted us to ask the question: Is it possible to determine empirically when it is no longer necessary for an employer to be concerned about a criminal offense in a prospective employee's past?
“Most people would probably agree that there should be some point in time after which ex-offenders should not be handicapped in finding employment. The question is when, precisely, should this occur? In the case of our hypothetical 40-year-old, when should a prospective employer no longer consider a burglary that was committed more than two decades earlier if the job applicant has stayed clean since then?”
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Prison as a Parallel Universe
This article about an innovative in-prison program in Arizona is something to keep an eye on.
The core concept is that the normally corrosive prison environment has been reshaped to more closely resemble the outside world, or at least that aspect of it that someone trying to change his life might find; and in that respect it is certainly innovative.
The only two problems I see with it currently, is that the cost and logistics seem pretty substantial, not to mention the change in most correctional professional's perspective on the nature of their work, and in that respect, will probably resist replication.
The other is that with all of the good they can do, what happens in prison, even positively, has, at least so far, rarely translated into improved recidivism reduction.
However, it is really a strategy to revisit, once a proper multi-year evaluation by an independent and criminal justice credentialed third party, is completed.
An excerpt.
“The sad truth is that most traditional corrections systems in this country take men and women who are already clearly imperfect in their decision-making and severely restrict their opportunity to learn to make any decisions. In many ways, this allows them to continue to shift responsibility and avoid accountability for their prior bad acts and for their conduct in general.
“Shortly after I arrived in Arizona, staff throughout the Department of Corrections came together as a team to lay the groundwork for developing Getting Ready, a common-sense approach to pre-release preparation that begins on day one of incarceration and continues to the conclusion of every inmate's sentence. The program is a bottom-up, systemwide reform that can be implemented without enabling legislation or new funds. Getting Ready redefines the officer-offender relationship, shifting many responsibilities from the staff to the inmates and empowering both groups to function at substantively higher levels than in other correctional systems. For example, officers do not tell inmates when to get up and when to go to sleep. Getting Ready does not just preach about what you ought to be doing when you get back to the real world. We bring the real world — what we now call a "Parallel Universe" — into prison so that inmates in every custody level acquire and practice basic life skills from the first to the last day of their incarceration.
“Parallel Universe
“The remaking of prison life to resemble life in the community is a central premise of Getting Ready. Modifying ordinary facets of life in prison to parallel life outside prison — thus, its name, Parallel Universe — begins with one basic question: How do people in the real world tackle this problem?
“Take health care as an example. As most people know, health care costs are rising. In Arizona, we applied the Parallel Universe model by asking, How do we address this problem in the outside community?
“If someone in the community adheres to healthy habits — by not smoking, eating healthy foods, exercising and complying with medical directions — he will likely have a lower co-pay. On the other hand, people with unhealthy habits are at higher risk and thus will have a higher co-pay. We applied this same solution in Getting Ready, creating an all-encompassing incentive system that includes wellness, so that healthy habits deliver personal and fiscal benefits for both the prisoner and the system.”
The core concept is that the normally corrosive prison environment has been reshaped to more closely resemble the outside world, or at least that aspect of it that someone trying to change his life might find; and in that respect it is certainly innovative.
The only two problems I see with it currently, is that the cost and logistics seem pretty substantial, not to mention the change in most correctional professional's perspective on the nature of their work, and in that respect, will probably resist replication.
The other is that with all of the good they can do, what happens in prison, even positively, has, at least so far, rarely translated into improved recidivism reduction.
However, it is really a strategy to revisit, once a proper multi-year evaluation by an independent and criminal justice credentialed third party, is completed.
An excerpt.
“The sad truth is that most traditional corrections systems in this country take men and women who are already clearly imperfect in their decision-making and severely restrict their opportunity to learn to make any decisions. In many ways, this allows them to continue to shift responsibility and avoid accountability for their prior bad acts and for their conduct in general.
“Shortly after I arrived in Arizona, staff throughout the Department of Corrections came together as a team to lay the groundwork for developing Getting Ready, a common-sense approach to pre-release preparation that begins on day one of incarceration and continues to the conclusion of every inmate's sentence. The program is a bottom-up, systemwide reform that can be implemented without enabling legislation or new funds. Getting Ready redefines the officer-offender relationship, shifting many responsibilities from the staff to the inmates and empowering both groups to function at substantively higher levels than in other correctional systems. For example, officers do not tell inmates when to get up and when to go to sleep. Getting Ready does not just preach about what you ought to be doing when you get back to the real world. We bring the real world — what we now call a "Parallel Universe" — into prison so that inmates in every custody level acquire and practice basic life skills from the first to the last day of their incarceration.
“Parallel Universe
“The remaking of prison life to resemble life in the community is a central premise of Getting Ready. Modifying ordinary facets of life in prison to parallel life outside prison — thus, its name, Parallel Universe — begins with one basic question: How do people in the real world tackle this problem?
“Take health care as an example. As most people know, health care costs are rising. In Arizona, we applied the Parallel Universe model by asking, How do we address this problem in the outside community?
“If someone in the community adheres to healthy habits — by not smoking, eating healthy foods, exercising and complying with medical directions — he will likely have a lower co-pay. On the other hand, people with unhealthy habits are at higher risk and thus will have a higher co-pay. We applied this same solution in Getting Ready, creating an all-encompassing incentive system that includes wellness, so that healthy habits deliver personal and fiscal benefits for both the prisoner and the system.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
