The US Is Wasting Vast Sums On Mandatory Immigration Detention

Under the Constitution, people are entitled to all sorts of rights, particularly around personal liberties and freedoms. The current state of the immigration system in the United States is clearly violating some of these rights, in spirit if not in actual fact. Case in point is immigration detention; under the law, immigrants can be indefinitely detained while awaiting decisions on their cases, although a recent court case may change that. As my colleague Flavia Dzodan has pointed out, immigration detention is a global, multibillion dollar industry.

The United States spends $5.5 million daily on immigration detention. Expenditures are mounting every year, the result of a growing number of immigrants in detention, and at the same time, detainees are being deprived of due process thanks to a growing backlog of immigration cases that may leave people sitting for weeks, months, even years while they wait for hearings. To say nothing of conditions for detainees with disabilities, many of whom do not understand the proceedings against them and cannot adequately mount defenses in court, some of whom are in the US legally, but get deported anyway.

This is part of the prison industrial complex in the United States. The profits to be made from immigration detention are vast, especially as growing numbers of facilities are being privatised. Proponents claim this makes it cheaper to run detention centres, but this is not actually supported by the numbers, and it’s also ripe for exploitation and embezzlement, as seen when prison officials do things like pocketing budgets earmarked specifically for food. Companies stand to make huge amounts of money from running private immigration detention facilities, and the government washes its hands of responsibility in the matter. It is just doing its job, after all.

It’s hard to talk about immigration detention without looking at the growing tide of anti-immigrant laws in the United States. All 50 states this year considered immigration-related measures. Many of those measures led directly to increasing criminalisation for immigrants in the US, which in turn created a need for more beds in already overstuffed detention centres. Multiple US states effectively put money directly into the hands of prison privatisation corporations, by ensuring a steady flow of ‘customers’ for their caring attentions with this onslaught of legislation. It’s similar to the flood of ‘tough on crime’ laws seen in the 1990s that directly contributed to prison overcrowding, but there’s a key difference.

People put in prison in the United States are at least passed through some sort of semblance of a justice system. It is usually a mockery, it is classist and racist, it all but ensures that certain people accused of certain crimes will go to prison for it, but it is at least a pretense of constitutionality. People in US prisons, on paper, have been allowed an opportunity to go to court, to receive fair trials. The fact that trials are not fair is inescapable, and the fact that the system is in urgent need of reform is undeniable.

Immigrants, though, are detained purely on suspicion. They have not been convicted of any crime. They are being held while the government determines if they committed a crime. This differs from jailing in other cases, when people may be held if they are considered flight risks or threats to the safety of the community, while others are allowed out on bail, with the understanding that they will return to their communities. Mandatory detention laws in the United States require that people accused of immigration violations be detained until trial. This translates into indefinite confinement.

Conditions in immigration detention centres are not pleasant. They are crowded and often unhealthy. The risks of contracting a communicable disease rise dramatically, as do the risks of experiencing mental health problems related to the stress of confinement. Adequate medical services are often not available. Detainees may be cut off from contact with their family members, who may be afraid to visit due to concerns about being caught up in immigration sweeps, even if they have documentation to prove they are in the country legally.

Huge amounts of money are being wasted on immigration detention in the United States. No matter how people feel about immigration, government waste is a pressing issue, particularly right now, when budgets are undergoing severe contraction and we’re struggling to find the funds to provide basic services. The amount spent on indefinite confinement for people awaiting deportation hearings could be applied to much more pressing issues; to making sure that schools can meet the needs of their students, for example. To providing health care to residents of the United States. Even to analysis of immigration policy and recommendations for improving it.

The immigration system in the United States is undeniably broken; this seems to be one thing everyone can agree on. Indefinite detention does absolutely nothing meaningful to address this issue, and it costs us a lot of money, to boot. It certainly does much to pad the pockets of corporations, but little to actually benefit society at large. It’s inhumane, unjust, and possibly unconstitutional, depending on how one wants to interpret some clauses in the bill of rights. Like victims of the prison system in the United States, many immigrants also do not receive ‘fair’ trials when they finally do make it before a judge and have an opportunity to argue their cases. With a substantial court backlog, it’s virtually impossible to give immigration cases the attention they deserve.

This is not the only country that does this, not the only place that keeps immigrants indefinitely in harsh and inhumane conditions while preparing to expulse them. It is not the only nation passing an escalating assortment of anti-immigrant laws, some of which are so baldly racist that it’s astounding they stand up to legal scrutiny for more than thirty seconds. This, our handling of immigration, is absolutely nothing to be proud of, and it’s not in keeping with any national values I can think of.

30 November, 2011 – 10:52 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in politics, race | Tagged , , |

Does Pop Culture Have Social Responsibility?

Discussions about pop culture that touch upon oppressive content are often countered with the argument that pop culture is ‘just’ entertainment, and has no actual obligation to be responsible. The social role of creators of pop culture is to make art that people enjoy, and find fun, and consume with pleasure, not to provide social object lessons, not to lecture people on ethics, not to raise consciousness about social issues. This argument, neatly used to debunk criticism, ignores two important things:

1. The first is that criticism of works of pop culture is a valid activity, and that critics may approach pop culture from a number of different perspectives. In some cases, that perspective includes evaluating representations, and discussing where works of art fall short, or excel. Just as other critics may focus on pure aesthetics, like the lighting and staging of a movie, or the plotting, and whether the storyline holds up over the course of the piece. Critical evaluations of representations are just as valid as other forms of criticism and they add to the overall body of work surrounding pop culture, the wide range of discussions that enrich our enjoyment of media and indirectly contribute to shifts in the media.

2. The second is that, well, no, pop culture in general does not actually have an obligation to be socially responsible. But, it often positions itself in a way that suggests it is making an important social commentary, is contributing to ethical discussion, is attempting to cultivate responsibility among viewers. When creators of pop culture do this, it leaves them wide open to criticism; just as a filmmaker who claims to be upending traditional views on narrative style is now open to critical evaluation from a narrative perspective. When a creator says ‘I am sending social messages with my show/book/painting/etc.,’ then critics are most certainly going to talk about the messages being sent. Indeed, critics would be abrogating their responsibilities if they didn’t engage with the messages in the work.

The ‘no obligation to be socially responsible’ argument is extremely boring and tired, and it’s usually utilized when people don’t actually want to engage with the content and substance of the discussion at all. They can avoid any responsibility as viewers and fans to consider the critique, simply by declaring the entire critique invalid and not of interest. It’s one of the tell-tale signs I look for in responses to criticisms, because of the embedded ideas presented in it.

And it’s notable, too, that many people who use this argument are the same people heralding work as socially progressive. You cannot have it both ways. People cannot claim that Glee is a show with positive messaging and important lessons about the world and then turn around and attempt to silence critics who disagree with the messages the show sends. Joss Whedon fans can’t claim his work is feminist and then smack down any feminists (or others) who interrogate his work from that perspective, who grapple with the subjects he discusses and talk about where his handling perhaps falls short of the stated ideas and goals.

Because many creators of pop culture seem to believe, despite what their fans say, that they do have a social obligation. No all, not universally, not across the board, and some are very explicit about just wanting to entertain people. Many works, though, do come with an embedded social agenda and a commentary. They are intended to be evocative and though provoking, they are intended to spark conversation, they are intended to challenge consumers about the way they think. When this is a stated intent, when the creator is deliberately setting out to embed commentary in works of pop culture, then critics are absolutely entitled to respond to that intent, and to challenge it, if necessary.

The other thing that people seem to miss when they’re busy dismissing criticisms of their favourite pop culture is that most critics engage with work because they are care about it, possibly think it is interesting, and may even really enjoy it. There are, of course, a few exceptions—I am quite open about hatewatching Glee for example. But those cases are pretty rare. It’s easy to take pot shots at pop culture you don’t like. It’s harder to delve into works you really love to probe them and ask whether they are working not just as works of art, but also as works of messaging. It is one of the greatest acts of fanlove, to challenge the work you adore.

I read pop culture differently when creators explicitly say that they are using it for messaging. And I am harder on works of pop culture that are messaging, because they need to be accountable. I watch Revenge on ABC, a show which most certainly has made some missteps with regard to social issues. I could talk about those, except that the show isn’t trying to send a message. It’s entertaining viewers. There are some very obvious criticisms to be leveled at the show, but that’s not what it’s about, and I don’t see the need to hold the creators to a standard they themselves have not set.

When creators, right from the gate, are either explicitly saying they want to send messages with their work, or are effectively doing so in the presentation of the work itself, they should be prepared for viewers to call them on it. Because while pop culture in general has no social responsibilities, when people do claim to be doing something more with their work, they have created responsibilities for themselves. If they aren’t living up to those responsibilities, if they aren’t actually doing what they are claiming to do, if they are actively harming people with the kind of material they present, then, yes, people are going to be talking about it.

29 November, 2011 – 10:34 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in pop culture | Tagged , , |

Cure Evangelism, Again

The cure evangelists appear to be riding hot and heavy again, which requires me, once again, to explain what cure evangelism is and why it is oh so very annoying. For those of you already on board, sorry, this post is probably going to be tremendously boring for you. My deepest apologies, and have you considered vitamin E oil for that little skin thing? I mean, I didn’t want to say anything, but it’s just, you know, sort of noticeable and I wasn’t sure if you were doing anything about it. I mean not that it’s, like, gross or anything, I mean, not really, it’s just that I was worried about you.

So, cure evangelism. Almost everyone with a disability or chronic illness or even temporary bout of ill health has experienced cure evangelism. It happens when an oh so nice, and well intentioned I’m sure, and lovely person decides that you need some personal medical advice on how to deal with your limp, or asthma, or depression, or…whatever. This unsolicited advice is always provided in a way that suggests this person is doing you an immense favour, and when you rebuff the oh-so-kind offer of assistance, you’re labeled hostile and rude. Mean. All they were doing was trying to help. I mean, GOSH, I thought you might CARE that your skin was all crusty and weird.

Here’s the thing about living with disability, with chronic illness, with, yes, a temporary issue like a persistent bacterial infection or a cough or any number of things. You’re aware that there’s an issue. My friend Annaham, for example, is well aware that she limps, and doesn’t actually need to be reminded of it by random strangers and casual passerby. You are intimately familiar with your own body because, well, it’s yours, and you live in it, and it is kind of hard not to notice when it doesn’t work like the bodies around you. When you wheeze going up a hill because you have asthma and your walking companion does not, that’s going to be pretty obvious to you.

And if you’re aware that there is something going on, that there is something different about you, there’s a chance you are probably doing something about it. You may well be seeing a doctor. You could be doing some research to learn about different treatment options. You could have decided, for example, that you would like to use a cane to address your limp, which is not going to go away, because it helps you with stability and makes it easier for you to complete daily tasks.

You may, in fact, have tried a variety of treatments. Perhaps you tried several different medications for your depression. You tried acupuncture and meditation and herbs. You made some dietary adjustments. You found, ultimately, that some of these things worked for you and some of them did not. You made a conscious choice about which treatments you wanted to continue, and which ones you did not, and you’re managing your depression in a way that works for you, that suits your needs, that allows you to function.

And then someone feels the need to come along and say ‘oh, you have [condition]? Have you tried…’

The thing is that this is not a one-time occurrence. It’s constant. People seem to become amateur medical practitioners as soon as they find out someone in their vicinity has a medical condition, and they’re quick to pile on some hasty advice and suggestions. All with a smile, because they mean well, and they are absolutely sure no one has brought up a possible treatment, an alternative diagnosis, a different way of approaching the situation. When the cure evangelist’s victim says ‘thank you, but no thank you,’ it’s considered inappropriate and hostile. Why would you want to be so inconsiderate to someone who is just trying to help?

I have had people quiz me, aggressively and invasively, about private medical issues in very public places. I’ve had people shout across the produce section, trail me through the store insisting that I try this treatment or that, and did I know that their brother’s girlfriend’s cousin’s best friend’s ex-wife had [condition] ‘one time’ and managed to ‘cure’ it with meditation and crystals? Did I know that there’s a medication for that now? Have I considered exercise? Am I aware that gluten is the root of all evil and my medical problems would magically go away if I cut it out of my diet? Have I tried aromatherapy?

There’s an air of ownership, entitlement, there, with people assuming that I need their help or advice to address private medical issues. It’s never enough to say ‘I’m not interested’ ‘please stop’ ‘please go away’ ‘no thank you.’ No, I must explain, often to complete strangers, how I am managing my private medical care. Who my doctor is. Which treatments I am and am not using. What I have and have not tried. I am expected to be accountable to people who want to meddle in my life.

And this plays into the larger social obligation to be healthy; I am expected to be healthy, to ‘get healthy,’ to ‘overcome.’ If I do not, I am letting down the social contract and should be punished. People with chronic health conditions are frightening because these conditions do not go away, cannot be cured. People who don’t want to cure their chronic health conditions, who don’t view them as a problem, are even more scary. What do you mean you don’t take medications for that?

The belief that people must be healthy is tied directly into the belief that it is okay, and perhaps even required, to concern-troll people about their health. There is little difference, to me, between the person demanding that fat people exercise ‘to get healthy’ and the person at the post office last week who earnestly told me that my chronic joint pain could be cured with leeches.

Cure evangelism is offensive. Please stop.

28 November, 2011 – 10:13 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in disability | Tagged |

Teachers Are Not Immigration Officers

Schools in the United States are increasingly tasked with activities that are outside their normal purview, of providing education to students, and a safe place to learn, and an environment where people can explore a variety of topics. The compulsory nature of education makes it appealing to use schools as locations for enforcement; for vaccination, for example, where the most effective way to make sure as much of the population as possible is vaccinated is to require vaccinations for schoolchildren, to force the school itself to enforce this policy, to dedicate resources to checking on the vaccination status for attendees, to deal with the snarled red tape that surrounds vaccine refusers.

Schools are also the place where other interventions occur; where teachers attempt to spot children who are hungry, or abused, and get help for them, for example. Teachers are mandated reporters on topics directly concerning personal safety, which I would argue is as it should be. School is the place outside the home where people go and expect safety, and sometimes safety requires getting children out of unsafe environments, making sure that children have enough to eat, quietly slipping a child a pair of new winter shoes after noticing a pair of tattering sandals in the dead of winter.

This general social agreement, that schools can be a place to enforce some things, is being extended to more and more things, and those things are…not appropriate. Not in keeping with the function of a school, with the purpose of education, with the role of teachers in the lives of their students. This was brought home in Alabama, where a draconian new immigration law included a clause requiring schools to monitor and report the immigration status of their students.

Undocumented immigrants are persecuted in the United States. Tightening regulations, many of which are highly abusive in nature, make it extremely dangerous to navigate the world. You cannot, for example, get a driver’s license, it’s hard to get car insurance, it’s difficult to comply with the law, to participate fully in society, because you are constantly looking over your shoulder. Because the DMV employee may well report you, which may lead to deportation. Your family could be split apart by an action as simple as attempting to obey the rules of the road.

And now, apparently, an action as simple as going to school. Teachers, and schools, are not immigration authorities. Their job is not to police children, but to educate and protect them. Being undocumented is not an immediate threat to your personal safety—or it wouldn’t be, if you didn’t live in a racist country preoccupied with driving you out, excluding you, at any cost, including the passage of legislation that makes you unsafe and encourages people to attack you with impunity. A child who is undocumented, or is a citizen but has undocumented parents, is not in danger. This child is not about to starve, is not lacking in the basic needs required for survival, is not in danger of being beaten or abused by family members, simply because of immigration status.

Requiring teachers to report on immigration status sets a dangerous precedent. It is one thing to ask that educators be alert to signs of children in danger, to intervene to protect their charges. It is another entirely to demand that teachers do the work of law enforcement and report on non-threatening, non-critical issues. Furthermore, what is basically being asked here is that teachers exclude children from school by reporting them, or threatening them with the fear of being reported. Effectively driving children out of school endangers them; teachers are, in essence, being asked to directly harm their students or face penalties for not complying with the law. Teachers who choose to object may be punished, could find themselves unemployed.

Pushing children out of school deprives them of opportunities. It also forces them into a position of needing something to do with themselves. That might be work; child labour in the fields, and elsewhere, is not unknown in the United States. That might be crime; children with nothing to do, no hope, no opportunities, might find it appealing to join people who offer opportunities. That might be drug use, or any number of other things to cope with a world where you are constantly reminded that you are not wanted, do not belong, and should go away.

We should not be turning our teachers into an immigration task force. They have far more important things to do, and on rapidly shrinking budgets. School districts are experiencing funding slashes so deep that communities are raising funds to keep basic programs alive, to make sure that students have enough supplies to get through the year. And the government wants schools to waste resources on determining if children are living legally in the country, to push them out if they are not, to punish them for something that may not even be their fault.

Immigration has become the scapegoat, the symbol, something larger than itself, in discussions about policy in the United States. There’s a firm belief that ‘fixing the immigration problem’ will magically resolve scores of social issues. People seem to think that running people out of the United States will fix the economy, bring us all back to an even keel, bring back the golden days when everything was all right and everyone was happy. These same people are ignorant of the huge economic contributions provided by immigrant labourers, the tremendous loss to our country created through racist hate legislation targeted very specifically at particular groups of immigrants.

Telling teachers to police their students is part and parcel of a drum beat that keeps growing, and growing, and growing. Who will still the hands of the drummer?

27 November, 2011 – 10:42 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in race, social justice | Tagged , , , , |

Grief is the Thing That Sinks

Grief is a curious creature, alien to those who have never encountered it, intimately familiar to those of us who have. I say it is the thing that sinks because at first it skims the surface, gently settling over you like a whisper, and then it slowly sinks into your skin, saturates all of your tissues, inhabits you. It is not that you become grief, or it becomes you, but that it rides along with you, integrated, always there, waiting. Sometimes it stirs within you, twisting your organs unexpectedly, shakes you at the roots.

There are so many narratives about grief, and so many expectations about those in mourning. We are supposed to be neat and tidy, to display a seemly amount of emotion and then return to normal. We are supposed to dive to the bottom of the ocean and back to the surface in a single day, pop up with smiles on our faces as we bob on the waves, and return to swimming like everyone else. Grief is the thing that sinks, though, which means that once you hit bottom, it is hard to kick off and head for the surface again.

And there is nothing wrong with that. There is a myth, a belief, that grief is something you ‘get over.’ That once you’ve had your allotted mourning period, you become ‘normal again,’ and everything goes back to the way it was. How can it, though, when you are carrying something new inside of you? How can it when an element of your life has been stripped away? Grief is not something that goes away, it is something that changes shape, that has a sense memory.

When it creeps inside of you, it does something more than pulling, dragging, tearing. It conforms to the shape of your body, and your new existence, and no one knows what form it will take, and how long it will take to get there. For some of us, maybe it’s only a few days or weeks for it to settle into a stable form, for us to learn to navigate the world again with this new thing. For others, it may take years to settle. The process of taking it into yourself can be difficult, can be frustrating, can be unpredictable. You don’t know when it might try to sneak back out again, when an emotional outburst will occur, when you will suddenly feel trapped in a room you were perfectly comfortable in three minutes before.

There are also myths about who and what we are supposed to mourn, when and why we are expected to grieve. Some deaths are supposed to be tragedies, and people find it highly offensive when you don’t feel that way about a death. Others are supposed to be small, recoverable, easily and tidily managed, and people are chastised and censured for not experiencing them that way. For not being able to casually bounce back like nothing has happened, to ‘just get another one,’ as though living things, personalities, the people around us, can be so easily replaced, like buying a new mug to replace the one that chipped in the sink when you were washing the dishes.

Grief is the thing that sinks, but it sinks differently for all of us, and this frightens people, particularly those on the outside, who do not carry grief of their own. They do not understand how it cannot be consistent, why some people float back to the surface quickly and others do not. They find it naked and terrifying, to see people caught in grief, twisted in grief, pulled in it, just as they find it alienating and strange when people are not consumed with grief for people they have no reason to mourn, even if society says they are supposed to.

There is a shape-changing where you learn to live with grief, to carve out an agreement about what is and is not allowed, with yourself, and the grief, and everyone must negotiate their own boundaries, their own place in the world, at their own pace. It is sometimes untidy and messy, wet and sloppy, because this is the way of grief, and also of the world. Things are not clean and sanitary when you want them to be. Oddly, shaming people for not performing grief in the way that is expected doesn’t actually help people process it, deal with it, come to terms with it.

Grief strikes you at funny times, unexpectedly. It is there when you grab a container of something from the kitchen shelf and abruptly remember who was the last to touch it, when you find a hair that doesn’t match any of yours in a sweater you’ve just taken out of storage, when you are struck with a vivid image of who sat in that armchair, once. Sometimes it knocks your legs out from under you and you have to collapse onto the floor and stare at it, for a few moments, before you can move on with what you were doing.

Emotions are not controllable things, and grief is larger than a single emotion; it is rage and sadness and confusion and happiness, sometimes, all tangled up in a snarled mess that you cannot pick apart. You cannot neatly examine it, straighten it out, and put it away on a high shelf to examine at your leisure in the future. It just is, and slowly, over time, it changes shape and you change shape and you accommodate each other in an uneasy truce, agreeing, just between you, on how things are going to go, and where you are going to go from here.

This is not a thing one gets over, or shucks off, or rises above, or pushes through, or moves beyond. It’s just a thing, that is there, a part of you, your experiences, your sense of self. People who cannot see that, who do not understand it; well, they have never known the thing that sinks, now have they?

26 November, 2011 – 10:03 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in reflections | Tagged , , |

Notes From the Urban/Rural Divide: Trip Planning and the Rural Resident

One aspect of rural life that seems especially unfamiliar to people in urban areas is the procedure known as Going to Town. For people living in areas where they may be surrounded by people and businesses, there’s a sense of constant contact, of the ready availability of resources. This is especially true of middle and upper class urban people, who don’t know what it’s like to have to ride buses for 90 minutes to get to the grocery store because there’s a good chance there’s a store in their neighbourhood, or they have private cars they can take to grab groceries.

Going to Town, though, can be quite an ordeal in some rural areas. The closest neighbours may be 15 minutes away by car or more, let alone businesses. Which means that substantial trip planning is required before venturing outside the house. You cannot run to the corner store when you need a carton of milk, and you sure as hell are not going to drive 30 minutes just because you forgot to get toilet paper at the store. Every trip is a procedure, not a quick errand.

Thus, it’s common for people in rural areas to plan ahead with things like buying in bulk, often at big box stores because they may not be able to afford pricing at other locations, or because big box stores are all there is within easy reach. When you’ve already had to drive half an hour, going an extra 15 minutes to get to the locally owned business may not seem especially appealing. Telling rural people to support local businesses and avoid big box stores demonstrates profound ignorance about the realities of taking a trip to town when you live 30 minutes away.

I live fairly close to town. It’s a drive of a couple of miles, and I could bike it, if I was feeling ambitious and wanted to rupture my aorta trying to cycle back up Pudding Creek Road (even some cars whine at the trip). I still have the Going to Town mindset, though, and get annoyed when circumstances force me to make multiple trips in a day, or to go to town several days in a row. I have it easy compared to people who need to make much longer trips, often over much worse roads, to get basic tasks accomplished.

This isn’t just about trip planning from the perspective of rural residents, who need to generate a long list of errands to make a Trip to Town worth it; you try to hit the post office, the grocery store, the feed store, and if something comes up the next day that necessitates a trip to town, well, it may just have to wait until the next time you can go, because you are not going to make a special trip for that. That something might well be the delayed prescription that finally arrived, or a medical appointment, or a parent-teacher meeting, or any number of other things. So it goes.

It also shows up in socialisation, which can be really hard in rural areas. It’s not easy to hop over to a friend’s place when you live 45 minutes apart, on bad roads, and both work a lot. Rural people don’t have as many opportunities for casual socialisation, which is why the post office and the grocery store tend to be happening places. This can be alienating to visitors, who find it strange when people block up the aisle with their carts while they chat. This isn’t a mere exchange of pleasantries and an inconvenience to the city slicker, though; it’s a critical opportunity for social interaction and a chance to reach out and be reminded that you are not alone.

Older adults and people with disabilities in rural areas are often especially isolated. They may not have very many visitors and can have a hard time getting around. If you are a wheelchair user who doesn’t drive, for example, a trip to a neighbour’s might require you to use your power chair on a rural road with no shoulder, which is extremely unsafe. If you have chronic pain or fatigue, saddling up to go to town to visit people eats up all your energy, and at that point, you haven’t even had a chance to socialise yet. This can be an especially big problem in times of crisis; someone who needs some help around the house for a few weeks to recover from a fall, for instance, may be forced into a nursing home, because there just isn’t enough support available.

And, of course, the rural surcharge reflecting the difficulty of getting around shows up on deliveries. People in remote rural areas may not be able to arrange for deliveries of any goods at all because they are outside the delivery range. Furniture stores, for example, do not want to schlep 45 minutes, especially when there’s a narrow chance of another delivery in the same general area to offset the cost. When deliveries are available, they come with an extra fee. UPS charges an extra $5 to deliver to my house. And I live only a few miles outside of town.

The realities of transportation planning in rural areas usually require that you have a car to make plans with, because public transit is not available. And they require very careful planning and scheduling that are not favorable to casual disruptions. You cannot ‘just’ run down to the post office to mail something, for example, you need to Go to Town to do it, and that requires an added level of complexity. Not just physical, but also emotional, because there is a disconnect between outlying rural areas and Town. Many people do not like Going to Town.

We might be dismissed as hayseeds or loners because we don’t really want to be in town, but it’s jarring. It’s hard to transition from the quiet and remoteness of your home to the relative bustle of town. Especially when town doesn’t have what you need, and you know that you’re going to have to go to the city, which may be many hours away, to meet a basic need. This is a growing problem in rural areas hit hard by the economic crisis, where local businesses are dwindling away and products and services are not available in town because town is dying.

Trip planning concerns for rural residents may be unfamiliar to urban people, but when they tell us how to plan and conduct our lives without thought as to what our lives are actually like, it becomes a pretty big problem.

25 November, 2011 – 10:13 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in politics | Tagged , , |

Correlation is Not Causation, Part I Don’t Even Know Which: Marijuana and Crime

Medical marijuana dispensaries occupy a strange legal limbo. They are, in the most technical sense, illegal under federal law. Yet, local regulations may legalise and even welcome them. They offer a glimpse into a model of what legalisation could look like in the United States, and what might happen if people had ready, safe, legal, reasonable access to marijuana if it was something they wanted to have access to. Which of course means that they become political flashpoints, as advocates on all sides of the marijuana debate want to use them to prove or disprove points.

Prohibitionists are fond of claiming that marijuana leads to an increase in crime, and like to argue that it should be kept illegal for this reason. Evidence suggests that this correlation is not actually proof of causation. The greater connection here would not be between marijuana and crime, but between prohibition and crime. When you prohibit people from accessing things they want, they tend to work on creative ways to get them. In the case of marijuana, an industry has sprung up to supply the demand, and that industry can be a dangerous one. Not because marijuana itself is dangerous, but because criminalisation makes it dangerous.

Dispensaries occupy a particularly interesting role because they are, first and foremost, businesses. Their goal is to supply customers with a product they have requested, and to meet that demand as efficiently and effectively as possible. Prohibitionists argue that crime rates increase around dispensaries, that they expose fragile minds (like those of young children) to the fact that marijuana exists, and then attempt to regulate them out of existence in regions where communities have created a framework to support dispensaries.

Sometimes those attempts include very sinister tactics and scaremongering. In small communities, they can amount to personal attacks on individual dispensaries, conducted in the name of ‘public safety.’ Many such campaigns are fond of focusing on proximity to schools, suggesting that young children shouldn’t be exposed to ‘that kind of thing.’ I’d argue that a discreet dispensary is a lot less offensive than some of the content in school textbooks at the moment.

A study released in September shed some particularly interesting light on the subject1. Researchers found that crime was actually higher after a round of dispensary closures in Los Angeles. Advocates promptly leaped on these conclusions to support their points, and unfortunately ignored some serious flaws in the study methodology. Like the fact that the researchers only looked at a ten day period before the closures and a ten day period after, which is not a large enough sample to provide meaningful results, and, as it turned out, didn’t look at a complete set of crime statistics. What the study showed was that we needed more information, because the initial results were counter intuitive, at least for people who believe that dispensaries cause crime.

Like any other business, a dispensary has an active interest in keeping neighbourhood crime low. Dispensaries do not benefit from crimes in their area that expose them to the risk of vandalism, theft, and other problems. Replacing broken windows and cleaning up graffiti, after all, is expensive. Putting in security measures to address concerns about theft and violence is also expensive. And dispensaries bear a double burden when it comes to this issue because of the assumption that they cause crime, which means they have an extra incentive to work on keeping crime low, to be good neighbours, to show that legalisation, or quasi-legalisation as the case may be, does not in fact increase crime rates.

What increases crime rates is prohibition. Making something harder to access doesn’t make people stop using it, it just makes them go to greater lengths to get it. The dispensary model shows that providing people with marijuana in a safe, controlled environment has a number of benefits. Like lower crime because people aren’t resorting to street dealers, who have their own form of business overhead, so to speak. Unfortunately, dispensaries focus solely on medical marijuana, rather than on making the drug freely available to any consenting adult who wants to use it in full awareness of the potential risks and benefits. This means that they do not address the demand from people who don’t have medical reasons to use it, and it creates a situation where medical reasons are invented to get access to a medical card, which further muddies the legalisation debate.

There’s a legend that dispensaries create ‘neighbourhood nuisances’ which wasn’t supported by this study, and probably wouldn’t be supported with additional studies either. Because, again, no business wants to become a neighbourhood nuisance. Business owners want to contribute to their communities, want to have neat, tidy storefronts, want to keep crime rates low, want to be viewed favourably, because this is how they make money. This is one of the rare instances in our society of a situation where capitalism actually works, because capitalism and the bottom line mean that dispensaries have every reason to operate peacefully and pleasantly, so they can make more money.

The September study wasn’t really a decisive victory for either side of this often contentious discussion, especially after the retraction, but it was another piece of evidence in an ongoing debate. Increasingly, the evidence suggests that the reason marijuana is dangerous, the reason it causes social problems, is because it is not legal. No one is having shoot outs over carrots. People are not trashing houses to grow grapes. Wineries are not accused of attracting crime to the region. People aren’t taking to state parks to grow surreptitious crops of rutabegas. Rosemary isn’t a public health nuisance.

Marijuana is not innately dangerous because it contains THC and other psychoative substances. It’s been made dangerous by the social attitudes that surround it, the decision to criminalise and stigmatise it. People truly concerned about drug-related crime might want to consider commissioning some studies to explore that topic from the perspective of legalisation. And full legalisation, as well, rather than a hybrid and incomplete form which creates problems of its own by perpetuating the stigma and harmful social attitudes and creating needless regulatory snarls.

  1. It was later retracted, but sparked a great deal of interesting conversation. ↩
24 November, 2011 – 10:43 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in politics | Tagged , , , |

Where Are All the Young Farmers?

Young farmers in the United States appear to be thin on the ground these days, no matter what fawning New York Times features say. A shortage of new farmers is already looming, and the economic downturn has underscored the problems people who want to start farming face, in an era of industrialised agriculture, increasingly remote food production, and food prices out of whack. To take just one example of the issues facing young farmers, support like subsidies is only available for a limited number of crops, pushing people into production they might not actually be interested in, because the alternative is not to farm at all.

Family farms in the United States are beginning to disappear. They’re being chopped up and used to make housing subdivisions. They’re being eaten by conglomerates who can swoop in and offer a bargain basement price when farmers struggle to compete with them. They’re facing growing numbers of kids in farming families who don’t want to farm when they grow up. They see the hardship and the increasing barriers to entry and decide to pursue another career. Farming internships attempt to increase interest in farming careers, as do a variety of programmes to entice people to start farming, but the bottom line is growing unappealing.

Farming independently is a lot of work, and it’s very expensive work. Supplies from equipment to seeds can be expensive. For organic and sustainable farmers, the expense of maintaining certification and living up to their ethics can be a heavy burden. Especially if they also care about their workers and want to provide fair and reasonable compensation for the people doing the handwork in the fields. The smallest farms cannot afford the burden of organic certification at all and work to establish themselves in a niche market that may make it difficult to expand.

For those pursuing conventional agriculture, crops are often genetically modified, which means they’re often sterile. Each year requires a new purchase of seed, and crop rotation is starting to become less common because it’s too expensive, or because farmers want to grab the best price for their crops. That means the soil gets stripped out, which requires more treatment with fertilisers and other expensive products. Agricultural chemicals, whether you support or oppose their use, are expensive, and are critically needed for conventional agriculture to make crops yield a sufficient amount to be worth the effort.

Meanwhile, subsidies push prices out of joint and make it challenging to determine how much crops are really worth at the same time they force farmers to grow in a narrow range. Accessing subsidies may mean giving up on some things in favour of others to get that money, and to get compensation in the event of crop failures and other adverse events. Farmers interested in preserving heritage crops, in growing things that are not wheat, corn, and soy, do not receive the same government support and go it largely alone. That’s especially challenging when their farms are small and cannot functionally compete with corporate enterprises.

The startup costs for farming can be a significant barrier to entry, even for people who are ready and willing to do the work and know what they’re up against. It ranges from banks not being willing to make loans on risky enterprises to the growing expense of agricultural equipment. The United States could be facing a farming crisis and it appears slow to wake up to this fact. There’s much coverage of urban farming movements and hobby farms, but these yuppie endeavors do not create lasting food security for the nation as a whole. Increasing inequalities when it comes to access to fresh food are still a concern, and a hobbyist beekeeper in New York City isn’t having much of an impact on that issue.

Farming used to be big part of what, for lack of a better term, I think of as this nation’s values. There’s an idealisation of farming and farming communities that occurs even now, of course, but there was also a belief that farmers were contributing something valuable, and important, and wholesome, to this country. Those amber waves of grain stood for something, and the Midwest wasn’t a topic of mockery because it was where the farms were; those farms were recognised as important and so were the people on them.

Agriculture in the US today is looking more like a story of corporate greed and exploitation as megacompanies expand, buying up farmland and controlling a growing percentage of the agriculture. The same worker abuses documented in prior decades still occur on farms across the country, where migrant labourers, many of whom are undocumented, do the bulk of the work to keep tomatoes cheap and corn flowing. The situation for livestock is even worse, as it involves the abuse of animals and workers to bring cheap animal products to the table; meatpacking continues to be one of the most dangerous jobs in the United States and attempts at protecting farmworkers are constantly defeated because they might be ‘too expensive.’

The myth of the small farm, of being able to make a living on sustainable, ethical, responsible farming, is still alive in some corners of this country, a little light burning determinedly despite the gusts of wind. But it’s less and less of an actual achievable reality. Barriers to entry are too high, and pressures within the industry are too great. Consumers are pushed into purchasing the low sticker price products that come with a high ethical cost, and that, in turn, makes it even harder for young farmers trying to enter the industry to get support, especially if they want to farm like previous generations did. Where are the young farmers? Stuck outside a system that’s too expensive, and too grinding, to enter.

23 November, 2011 – 10:24 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in Food | Tagged , , |

A Visit to the Humane Society

Over the weekend, I went to the local humane society to meet cats. It was kind of a spur of the moment thing. I didn’t tell anyone I was going, or that I went, because I didn’t want to deal with the pressure. The inevitable questions. People mean well, they do, but there is a gaping hole inside of me that wants to scream when they start to ask questions. Say things.

They have what they call cat condos, large rooms opening out onto screened porches, where the cats free range. It’s much more comfortable and less sadmaking than seeing rows of cats lined up in cages looking dolefully out at you, and you’re encouraged to go in and sit on the couches and socialize with them.

I couldn’t help but remember when we went to adopt the first cat I had who was ever really mine, Mr. Bell, who passed away this July. Only days before his death, he was sitting on my lap, high on pain management medication, and someone said:

‘So, when are you going to get another one?’

I stared stonily back at him, thinking of how we rescued Mr. Bell from humane society purgatory, back in the pre-cat condo days. There were all kinds of cats there that day, but he was the one who reached out from the cage repeatedly to paw at us, claws carefully sheathed. He didn’t meow or purr, he just pawed, and looked at us.

We still had our old Volvo then, the one with no floorboards in the back, and I remember clutching the cardboard cat carrier and watching the road go by as we drove home. Mr. Bell lived with me for the next 18 years, through multiple long moves and life changes and upheavals, through four kinds of cancer. He outlived his friend Mr. Shadow, who fought a short and ferocious battle with intestinal lymphoma and died only a few months before Mr. Bell.

When you lose a pet, people say ‘get another one,’ like a pet is a kitchen implement you can throw away when the bakelite handle starts to crack and replace just as casually. They start to say it when your pets are dying, as I’ve learned, and they keep saying it after your pets are dead.

‘Is it time,’ a friend asks, ‘to get a kitty friend for Loki?’

Loki’s the surviving cat, and I think he’s kind of enjoying his single cat status. He never has to fight anyone for the cat basket, there are no awkward traffic jams at the litter box, the house no longer stinks, as it did for over a year, of cancer and the accouterments of dying, the large bore IV needles and bottles of rattling pills and vials. It’s just Loki and I at night, now, on opposite ends of the bed.

Sometimes I can tell he’s looking for Mr. Bell or Mr. Shadow, peering around the corner, looking in the laundry basket, and he comes back and gives me a puzzled look, but he shakes it off.

So I went to the humane society. I don’t really know why, I honestly don’t. I don’t want another cat in my life right now. I tell people I don’t want another cat. I honestly don’t know if I will ever get another cat.

I met a nice long-haired cat named Leroy who’s been there for over a year. I don’t know why, he was very friendly. He was black, and I guess some people don’t adopt black animals, but he purred and looked at me earnestly. A mackerel tabby wrapped around my legs and cocked his head up at me inquiringly.

Another cat mewed insistently until I petted her, and then clambered into my lap, surveying the other residents of the cat condo with pleasure. One cat purred when I stroked his back, gazing at me from startling blue eyes. A little black kitten with a bell frisked around, attacking my hands and pants viciously.

‘Oh look, honey,’ a woman said, scooping the kitten up. ‘Please can we take him home?’

The kitten purred and purred and purred and the man shook his head while their little boy reached up. She carefully transferred the kitten and it butted his chin and he looked at the man appealingly. The man still shook his head.

The woman thought I worked there, maybe because I was lying on the floor covered in cats. They crawled all over me, sniffing my pants carefully and settling their weight onto my legs. I was reminded of a day right before Mr. Shadow died, one of the few sunny days that October, when he painstakingly hauled himself across the house to sprawl across my legs while I was lying on the floor. He was so light by then that I hardly felt him, but I was afraid to move, breathless.

An orange tiger wrapped his tail around his legs and sat regally, glaring at me. A gray and white long-haired cat burst excitedly out from under a sheet, astounded to encounter a weedy tabby who looked shocked and appalled. Another large black cat, hair cropped short, blinked at me with huge golden eyes and then dismissed me as beneath his attentions.

I want to end this story on a feel-good note, to tell you about the cat I fell in love with and took home, but that’s not what happened. Instead I just felt myself getting sadder and sadder at the humane society, watching the cats, trying to keep my fingers out of reach of the kitten, watching people interact with them. If there’s one thing I learned from the experience, it’s that I definitely am not ready for another cat.

As I was leaving, carefully closing the double doors behind me to make sure no one escaped, I saw an old man shuffling through the cat condo, the little black kitten stalking behind him. He gave a little delighted chuffing noise of surprise when it attacked his slippers, and scooped the kitten up to look deep into its eyes.

‘Hello there,’ he said, a smile cracking his weathered face.

I hope he took the kitten home. I hope it works out for them.

22 November, 2011 – 10:47 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in animals | Tagged , |

What’s Slowing Downtown Revitalisation in Fort Bragg?

A local business owner leans across the counter, lowering her voice. ‘It’s at least a couple a day, now,’ she says. Our eyes drift to the customer in the back and she nods at me, going to help her. I look around at her business, spotless and filled with brightly coloured things, and my eyes drift across the street to the abandoned storefronts in buildings with sagging roofs and peeling paint, so faded that you wouldn’t know they used to be multicoloured. I could crane my neck out the door and see even more, walk around the counter and see another array of empty commercial storefronts.

The sidewalks, not so new now, are largely empty, and covered in scuffs. Numerous parking spaces are vacant; I had my pick when I drove into town earlier. A gust of wind swirls down the street, carrying choking dust with it. The trees lean, looking old and tired. Public Works keeps having to replace them when they’re vandalised, but the poor things never get a chance to grow very large. Some businesses try to take care of them, even though it seems pointless when you never know if they will still be intact in the morning. Faded graffiti smears the faces and sides of some buildings and there are a few broken windows.

Her customer walks to the counter and makes a purchase. ‘Have a nice day,’ I say, reflexively, after years of retail. ‘Thanks,’ the customer says, making her way out into the street with her purchases. The business owner leans over the counter again to continue our conversation. She tells me that the marketing campaigns for Fort Bragg paint a picture that is not reality, and that people are often jarred and surprised when they see the state of downtown, and sometimes express that when they enter her business. ‘Not disappointed, exactly,’ she says. ‘Just surprised. It’s not that they wouldn’t have come here, but they didn’t realise how bad it was.’

It’s bad. It’s gotten much worse since 2009, when I took photographs of empty businesses in the downtown core. The numbers of empty businesses are increasing and business owners tell me that they’re practically at the point of taking bets on which business is going to fail next. You can make some educated guesses on the basis of the faded items in the windows, the displays that haven’t updated in months, the increasingly desperate advertising in the windows.

Fort Bragg has invested a lot of money in the downtown core. The grants that paid for the new sidewalks, trees, and street widening were substantial. And earmarked, so the money couldn’t have been applied to other activities. It’s also notable that the plans for the mill site continue to include discussion of ‘a new downtown’ because apparently the old one isn’t worth it anymore. Not that the plans actually say this, of course, because the City doesn’t want to openly admit that it’s basically throwing in the towel, but it’s implied in a brand new shiny retail/commercial district proposal when the city can’t even fill the retail/commercial district it already has.

Local businesses in Fort Bragg are really, really struggling. There’s a strong chance that multiple businesses in the downtown core are not going to make it through the winter. Which is awful for the local community, because it means more vacant storefronts, more people without jobs. It also means that the downtown core as a whole will suffer, because vacant property is not aesthetically appealing, and failing business districts tend to hit a tipping point, where the number of vacant buildings leads people to assume that there’s nothing there, so they stop coming, which drives the remaining businesses out.

It’s also not particularly good for tourism, especially when the town is selling itself as something it is not. It is jarring to see promotionals featuring healthy-looking, happy businesses and to arrive to find a ghost town, a smattering of businesses struggling to function in an increasing sea of empty buildings. Empty, poorly maintained buildings, at that. Buildings that are in desperate need of rehabilitation before they can even be used.

The barriers to starting a new business are high right now. Startup costs are generally expensive and even more so when there’s little support from the city, or when you have to meet such exacting qualifications to get that support that you’re basically out of luck. And, of course, when there are no buildings you can use because they are all in such a poor state of repair. Try negotiating with landlords and they’ll tell you they don’t have the money to fix up the building but maybe they can work out a deal with you where you do the work in exchange for a discount. Meanwhile, commercial rents are sky high because all of these buildings are mortgaged to the hilt and the monthly payments are monstrously high.

Fort Bragg’s downtown is in urgent need of revitalisation, and it can’t stop at the roads and sidewalks. Grants for building restoration, for example, would be a really good idea at this point. As would incentives for landlords who clean up and restore their buildings on their own, without needing financial assistance from the city. So would a more functional grant program to help people open new businesses and hire employees; I know at least one business owner, for example, who was able to create a job because of grant assistance that partially pays for her employee, since she can’t actually support an employee on her own right now. Having an employee allows her to grow, which might make it possible to independently hire in the future.

Business owners are ready and willing to work on this, but they can’t go it alone. They just can’t.

21 November, 2011 – 10:42 am | By s.e. smith | Posted in economy, Fort Bragg | Tagged , , |