March 2022 – The RCL Blog of Owen Hall

Draft of Civic Brief thing

The Ineffectiveness of Punishment

A young man, not knowing the consequences, is the middle man in the sale of 2 grams of cocaine in Mississippi. He’s only helping with the sale to help support his brother as they were raised without parents or anyone to look up to. He is caught and sentenced to life without parole. He will never leave prison. He has no chance to redeem himself. Scenarios like this are not an irregularity. As of 2015, the US had over two million citizens held in prison. There are only about ten million people incarcerated world wide, so this means that the US has 20% of the global prisoner population despite only making up 0.4% of the population.1 In the nearly 50 years since the start of the War on Drugs, the prison population in the United States has increased nearly 600% while the population has only increased by 51%.2 Furthermore, US prisons are utterly ineffective as 70% of US inmates will be arrested within five years of their freedom.3 America’s obsession on appearing tough on crime has decimated countless lives. The US prison system is crowded and ineffective; fortunately, we can work to fix it by implementing educational programs and severe reductions on punishment.

Prisons in America are overfilled and fail horrendously at their goals. There is likely a significant racial bias when it comes to arrests and imprisonments. It is said that one in three African American boys will be arrested during their life and one in six Latino boys compared to one in seventeen white boys who will be arrested in their life. Worse still, is that many of those who are arrested and freed face restrictions when returned to the regular world with nearly 50,000 federal, state, and local restrictions preventing them from acclimating back into the world. The US also leads the list with the most minors imprisoned out of any country in the world. The use of minimum sentences keeps these prisons full for a long time. Half of those imprisoned in the US are due to drug related offenses and nearly three quarters of those people are faced with a minimum sentence. 2 US prisons are not described very romantically and people are described as living in separation from outside society and all media create a contrast from the prison world to the rest of the world. They are made subject to degrading treatment, inhumane conditions, and abusive interactions. The prisons make little effort to rehabilitate the prisoners and focus primarily on punishment. 3

The reason for these failures is a history of a desire to be “tough on crime” with a total disregard of the prosecuted’s lives. Back in the founding of the country, much focus was put on fair trials and protecting those who had been convicted. Even in the 1800s, a French sociologist, Alexis de Tocqueville, came to the US to study prisons and was amazed by the prisons working to make conditions better and more livable, something he had never seen in europe. The US continued to do pretty well with not filling up the prisons until the 70s. The US government at this time felt the need to fight a new war, so politicians from both parties with Nixon leading the charge started the fundamentally flawed War on Drugs. They began the rhetoric that we needed to be tough on crime. While Nixon started the work of the war on drugs, Reagan took it all the way. He entered office with a little over 300,000 in prison and left to see a population of over 600,000. These numbers were disproportionately from communities of color. Even at the state level, prison rates boomed. It wasn’t only the federal government pushing this. In 25 years, from 1978, Texas quadrupled its prison count. 4 But things got worse. The democratic party wanted to be the party that was harsher on crime, but the republican party would not have this, so there was a constant war on pushing tougher and tougher laws to “fight crime” This led to Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, which bloated prisons beyond what anyone had before. The Bill allowed states to pass even harsher laws to appear tough-on-crime. And, in that year, every state had passed a minimum sentence law. It encouraged police to send more people to prison and for them to stay for a longer period of time. This set a strong precedent and in 1996, the democratic party showed off the effects of the law and how “tough on crime” they were. They pridefully showed off how they arrested more people than ever before. They even taunted that they expanded to sixty more crimes that receive the death penalty and encouraged the trying of young people as adults. But rest assured, this is not a partisan issue, Republicans had also been fighting to fill prisons and appear tough on crime. In fact, Barack Obama, a Democrat, has been at the forefront of decreasing prison populations as for the first time they had started to decrease under his term.Interestingly enough a 1994 Gallup survey revealed that 58% of African Americans supported the bill, while only 49% of white Americans supported it. This was largely due to the Crack epidemic that these communities wanted to see an end to.5 The four decades of “tough on crime” laws built up a system that arrested a great many people while doing little to make these people change how they act. Two things determine how many people are in prison at any given time.These are the number of people arrested and sentenced every year and the length of every sentence. Both of these factors have become very high in the united states through our work to be tough on crime. It has even become harder to avoid a sentence as bail and other ways to end a sentence have become far more difficult to achieve, which is especially preventative to the poor as they have no chance of paying off.

Back in 1984, there was debate in many cases about disparity in different sentences for seemingly similar crimes. Thus, the U.S. Sentencing Commission was created which set standards for sentence lengths. However, this simply pulled up many sentence lengths to match some longer ones and continued to contribute to the lengthier prison sentences of the United States. Mandatory sentences fill prisons for a very long time. For example, if you sell 2 grams of cocaine in Mississippi, you are required to serve life without parole. And, it is important to note that none of these laws have had any effect on drug use as it had remained stable for the 40 years in which the war on drugs mainly occurred (1970s-2010). Drug sentences make up a staggering 55-60% of those incarcerated to federal prison. In the 1990s, there was another fear, the rise in violent crimes. A number of famous cases developed in many people’s mind that those who commited violent crimes could not be reformed and should be separated from society for the rest of their life.This produced the “Three-strikes” laws which would give those who commit two or three offenses a life in prison. However, the crimes that fell under this law were not simply violent crimes, but also oft covered other crimes. The ACLU covers some ridiculous examples that were part of the three strikes policy:

“siphoning gasoline from an 18-wheeler, shoplifting three belts, breaking into a parked car and stealing a woman’s bagged lunch, attempting to cash a stolen check, acting as a go between in the sale of $10 of marijuana, or possessing a bottle cap smeared with heroin residue.” 6

In 1984, the federal government abolished parole and 16 other states were soon to follow. This made it impossible for many people to leave prison early on “good behavior”.

After reaching such a low point, America needs to make some significant changes to its crime and punishment system in order to become a better country. We need to eliminate minimum sentences for nearly any crime. A system needs to be implemented that can evaluate prisoners and find if they are reformed early and let them free. Those who do not prove themselves to be a threat should not be held in prison. In order to be let back into the world these people should prove that they are a safe person and that they have improved themselves in prison in other ways such as learning new skills. Incarceration should no longer be a punishment for low level and non-violent crimes. Often punishment is not the solution to offenders of things like drug violations due to addiction. Prison will not help them but drug treatments programs are far more likely to. The purpose of prisons should not be to ruin someone’s life and make them regret it, but to make them a better person. 7 An idea to make prisons more improving of these people’s lives rather than being simply punishment, is to allow for more opportunities for learning to occur in the prisons. College students could be encouraged to go to prisons in order to teach things that they are experienced in and many of these prisoners never got to learn, sometimes even basic math and English. In one area, Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a similar approach has been implemented quite effectively. The classroom inside the prison does not feel like a prison, except for the uniforms that the prisoners are wearing. Many of the inmates described the classroom as an oasis in the prison. It feels like an escape and is a place for these people to improve themselves. These prison classrooms did once exist widely, for in the 90s there were many more of these programs, but fell apart after the crime bill and budget cuts for those types of programs. Government support is needed to keep these programs afloat that are often just as important as the prisons themselves.8

It is imperative to search for what causes many people to commit crimes that lead them to go to prison. We need to provide more social programs that promote the well being of those who are in danger of getting in trouble with the law. “I realized that we’re not just locking up bad kids, we’re locking up hurt kids. It completely changed the course of my career,” said Bradley, a Fordham Professor. Emotional, social, psychological, and moral support need to be provided to kids who grow up in these conditions so they never face the hardships that lead them to committing crimes. We must diminish our society’s deposition towards poor people in order to keep them in society. Prisons have been used as a way to get these poor people who we often despise off the streets.9 On the opposite end of the spectrum of minimum sentences is maximum sentences. We need to implement maximum sentences. Sentences as long as 20 or 30 years are known to not rehabilitate prisoners more than prisoners with shorter sentences, but in fact increase recidivism. Adding maximum sentences for many crimes will help get people out of prisons quickly and help prisons focus on their main purpose, to make better people out of the prison, not to punish them for acting the way they do.10

Conclusion

“Highest to Lowest – Prison Population Total.” Highest to Lowest – Prison Population Total | World Prison Brief. Accessed March 28, 2022. https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison-population-total.
“Federal Drug Mandatory Minimum Penalties.” ussc. United States Sentencing Commission, 2017. https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-publications/backgrounders/RG-drug-mm.pdf.
Gramlich, John. “America’s Incarceration Rate Falls to Lowest Level since 1995.” Pew Research Center. Pew Research Center, August 18, 2021. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/16/americas-incarceration-rate-lowest-since-1995/.
Grawert, Ames, Hernandez D. Stroud, Carlton Miller, and Andrew Cohen. “The History of Mass Incarceration.” Brennan Center for Justice, March 22, 2022. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/history-mass-incarceration.
Ofer, Udi. “How the 1994 Crime Bill Fed the Mass Incarceration Crisis.” American Civil Liberties Union. American Civil Liberties Union, June 4, 2019. https://www.aclu.org/blog/smart-justice/mass-incarceration/how-1994-crime-bill-fed-mass-incarceration-crisis.
“Overcrowding and Overuse of Imprisonment in … – OHCHR | Home.” ohchr. ACLU. Accessed March 29, 2022. https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/RuleOfLaw/OverIncarceration/ACLU.pdf.
“Solutions.” American Civil Liberties Union. ACLU. Accessed March 29, 2022. https://www.aclu.org/other/solutions.
Barsky, Neil. “How to Fix Our Prisons? Let the Public inside.” The Marshall Project. The Marshall Project, December 17, 2019. https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/12/17/how-to-fix-our-prisons-let-the-public-inside.
News, Fordham. “Fixing America’s Prison Problem.” Fordham Newsroom, August 12, 2019. https://news.fordham.edu/fordham-magazine/fixing-americas-prison-problem/.
Cullen, James. “Four Things We Can Do to End Mass Incarceration.” Brennan Center for Justice, December 19, 2016. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/four-things-we-can-do-end-mass-incarceration.

Chinese Cuisine

Today, we travel to ancient China to discover their cuisine. There is not much information available on Neolithic cuisine, but some noodles were found! 4000 year old noodles were found in 2005. They were made of foxtail and broomcorn millet and are the oldest noodles ever discovered.

Oldest Noodles Unearthed in China - BBC — Oldest Noodles Unearthed in China – BBC News

China’s history has been largely dominated by a series of dynasties which have determined some of the foods that were eaten over this time. The Han dynasty’s rapid expansion caused the introduction of a great variety of land to the empire and with it a variety of consumables and an ever changing diet. Different land provided different food and thus different dishes from place to place. Further diversity in diet came about from invading steppe nomads, European missionaries, and Japanese traders. The food, though varying much throughout, could be separated into two regions, northern and southern food. Northern China was first introduced to dairy products like yogurt, milk, and Kumis (a fermented milk product coming from a mare or a donkey). Rice was used in the south and came about during the tang dynasty when an invasion caused people to move south. In China, food was seen as medicine, so great care was taken into putting it together and special dedication was given to it. Rich and powerful people had an appetite for food from far away that was very difficult to acquire.

The Qing Dynasty, the final dynasty of China, had a high imperial kitchen where the greatest cooks would all cook for the emperor and his constituents. They were kept here and thus their skill could not be shared to the rest of the nation or people. After the end of Qing Dynasty in 1912, these cooks were now free to start their own restaurants and thus from that sprung up a number of restaurants that serve food that was previously restricted to only the emperor and his court. Unfortunately, with the end of the Qing Dynasty came the communist revolution which resulted in massive food shortages across the country. Through much of this period there was little advancement in the culinary arts.

The staples of Chinese cuisine today is Rice, Wheat, and Noodles. Soybean products are also very popular. They also held many unique vegetables (which have since been introduced around the world) including baby corn, bok choy, snow peas, Chinese eggplant, Chinese broccoli, and straw mushrooms. Common ingredients added to dishes in order to enhance flavor include dried Chinese mushrooms, dried baby shrimp, dried tangerine peel, and dried Sichuan chilies. Before meals, cold dishes are served, like salad and pickles or even jellyfish or bean curds.

Popular dishes in China include Peking roasted Duck, Kung Pao Chicken, Dim Sum, and Ma Po Tofu. Peking roasted Duck is a dish containing very thin duck skin which is often combined with other things. Kung Pao Chicken contains diced chicken, dried chili, cucumber, and fried peanuts. Dim Sum is a large dish containing a great number of smaller dishes. Ma Po Tofu is made up of beancurd along with some minced meat in a spicy sauce.

Peking Roasted Duck - China — Peking Roasted Duck – China Highlights

The Issue Brief Introduction

The Ineffectiveness of Punishment

As of 2015, the US had over two million citizens held in prison. There are only about ten million people incarcerated world wide, so this means that the US has 20% of the global prisoner population despite only making up 0.4% of the population.1 In the nearly 50 years since the start of the War on Drugs, the prison population in the United States has increased nearly 600% while the population has only increased by 51%.2 Furthermore, US prisons are utterly ineffective as 70% of US inmates will be arrested within five years of their freedom.3 America’s obsession on appearing tough on crime has decimated countless lives. Rapid change is necessary in order to ensure a safe future. The US prison system is crowded and ineffective; fortunately, we can work to fix it by implementing educational programs and severe reductions on punishment.

“Highest to Lowest – Prison Population Total.” Highest to Lowest – Prison Population Total | World Prison Brief. Accessed March 28, 2022. https://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison-population-total.
“Federal Drug Mandatory Minimum Penalties.” ussc. United States Sentencing Commission, 2017. https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-publications/backgrounders/RG-drug-mm.pdf.
Gramlich, John. “America’s Incarceration Rate Falls to Lowest Level since 1995.” Pew Research Center. Pew Research Center, August 18, 2021. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/16/americas-incarceration-rate-lowest-since-1995/.

Irish Ingredients

Welcome back to this food blog! Today we are traveling west across Europe to the wonderful country of Ireland where we will explore the history of their splendid food.

Ireland has been populated for a very long time, so there is much history to cover. During the prehistoric era, their diet can only be guessed based on what they left behind. Many broken shells were found in ways that seemed to show that they were broken and eaten by humans. This fits the fact that the coastal town of Sligeach translates to “Abounding shells”. Because of it’s geography, ancient Ireland had much biodiversity with fungi, roots, leaves, stems, flowers, nuts, seeds, berries, and fruits. Pieces of stone have also been found that indicate that they were used as tools. In the Neolithic era, cereals began to be used, especially emmer wheat, barley, beef, pig, and goat. Aquatic food also became more popular. An ancient sort of waxy butter has been found that is referred to as Bog Butter.

Bog Butter – Wikimedia

In Gaelic Ireland, there were significant advancements in the complexities of their diets. Porridge is made from oats, barley, or wheat. Frumenty was a popular food that was made of cracked wheat mixed with heated milk with sometimes the addition of egg yolks. This meal was awesome because it nutritious and could be stored for a long time. For their meats, the Irish ate primarily variety meats, salted beef, and stew. The Irish had an advantage in their milk supply as grass could grow well 10 months a year and there was not a period when cows needed to be stored inside in order to survive.

The Irish loved all of their dairy product like milk and butter, but there was one unusual product, cow blood. When mixed with milk and butter, cow blood was very popular. But even more popular, and still enjoyed to this day by many Irishman is Black Pudding which is made of cow blood, grain, and some seasoning. Common Irish vegetables included onions, chives, cabbage, celery, wild garlic, and leeks.

Black pudding: is it really a superfood? | The Independent | The Independent

Black Pudding – the Independent

The Irish loved their drink, especially fermented milk, beer, and whiskey, which they actually invented. Nobles would drink out of a Meadair, or a drinking horn, which displayed their higher status.

In more recent years, with globalization and mass trade, Ireland has been able to greatly expand their pallets and experience many more foods from throughout the world. Fish and Chips have been incredibly popular, ever since their introduction in 1880s by an Italian immigrant from San Donato Val di Comino.

Let’s bring up the elephant in the room. Potatoes. By the year 1840, nearly half of Ireland’s people had diets exclusively dependent on potatoes. Colcannon, potatoes mashed with kale or other things is a popular potato based food in Ireland. Boxty is another popular potato dish, which is basically potato pancakes. They even had their own version of mash potatoes known as champ. But the national food of Ireland is also a potato based dish, the Irish stew.

Colcannon Potatoes Recipe: How to Make It

Colcannon Potatoes – A taste of Home

Civic Issues III: What can we do?

In my previous two blogs, I have spoken extensively of how America has an issue with crowded and ineffective prisons. Now, we must try to come up with a solution to these issues. To summarize the major issues: America has the largest prisoner per capita population in the world, an incredibly high return rate, and a history of a desire to appear tough on crime.

We need to eliminate minimum sentences for nearly any crime. A system needs to be implemented that can evaluate prisoners and find if they are reformed early and let them free. Those who do not prove themselves to be a threat should not be held in prison. In order to be let back into the world these people should prove that they are a safe person and that they have improved themselves in prison in other ways such as learning new skills. Incarceration should no longer be a punishment for low level and non-violent crimes.

Often punishment is not the solution to offenders of things like drug violations due to addiction. Prison will not help them but drug treatments programs are far more likely to. The purpose of prisons should not be to ruin someone’s life and make them regret it, but to make them a better person. (1)

An idea to make prisons more improving of these people’s lives rather than being simply punishment, is to allow for more opportunities for learning to occur in the prisons. College students could be encouraged to go to prisons in order to teach things that they are experienced in and many of these prisoners never got to learn, sometimes even basic math and English. Many students would benefit greatly from applying what they have learned to teaching in a unique setting, and they could be encouraged with credits for doing it. In one area, Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a similar approach has been implemented quite effectively. The classroom inside the prison does not feel like a prison, except for the uniforms that the prisoners are wearing. Many of the inmates described the classroom as an oasis in the prison. It feels like an escape and is a place for these people to improve themselves.

Students behind ba mix with those from 'outside' - USA Today — Students behind bars mix with those from ‘outside’ – USA Today

So why don’t more of these classrooms exist in an effort to improve these prisoners. Well, in the 90s there were many more of these programs, but after the crime bill and budget cuts for those types of programs. Government support is needed to keep these programs afloat that are often just as important as the prisons themselves.

A major issue with how our prisons function is the separation between the prison world and “the real world”. Prisons should not be designed in a way that there is a severe transition when leaving them. Allowing people to enter prisons (with safety measures in place of course) and share the happenings of the world and display new skills will help improve the prisoners connection to the outside world. Unfortunately, the transition will still exist, so a way to mitigate this is to have more gradual release from prison with the ending of the sentence being a more part of the world and giving limited freedoms. (2)

Another important thing is that prisoners need to feel that there is love in the world. They need to want to come back into the world and feel welcomed and cared about. The idea that while people are in prison and afterwards, they have limited voting rights is horrendous. All prisoners who are American Citizens should be given the right to vote because excluding them is excluding a very purposeful and specific part of the population. Doing this is to miss a significant opinion of the US. Also, not allowing prisoners to vote further separates them from the general population makes them feel that they are not cared about. (3)

On the opposite end of the spectrum of minimum sentences is maximum sentences. We need to implement maximum sentences. Sentences as long as 20 or 30 years are known to not rehabilitate prisoners more than prisoners with shorter sentences, but in fact increase recidivism. Adding maximum sentences for many crimes will help get people out of prisons quickly and help prisons focus on their main purpose, to make better people out of the prison, not to punish them for acting the way they do.(4)

We also need better programs to ensure that people returning from prisons can find jobs, housing, and healthcare, all things that lead to a life away from crime. Many of the things that I have mentioned will come with significant costs to the American people. The solutions to this problem that I have mentioned are all expensive. Fortunately, the prison system in the US at its current state is incredibly expensive with its size. Thus, some of the money that would be gained from cutting prison populations could be used for better rehabilitation for those who are still in prison. Obviously, the money cannot just float over from one sector to another. But it’s the idea that the US is willing to spend so much money on prison, they should be willing to spend just as much or less on helping people who are in prison instead of using fear as a tactic.

(1) https://www.aclu.org/other/solutions

(2) https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/12/17/how-to-fix-our-prisons-let-the-public-inside

(3) https://news.fordham.edu/fordham-magazine/fixing-americas-prison-problem/

(4) https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/four-things-we-can-do-end-mass-incarceration