Fall 2016

HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW

CITY AND COLOURED

AUTOMATED INEQUALITY

INTERVIEW: TOMI LAHREN

VOLUME XLIII NO. 3, FALL 2016 HARVARDPOLITICS.COM

ALL IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD GLOBAL ISSUES AT THE LOCAL LEVEL

THE NEW HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW. ON SCREENS NEAR YOU.

HARVARDPOLITICS.COM

ALL IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD

6 Health in the Developing Neighborhood Ayush Midha 9 Letter from Kensington Sarah Wu

24 Contagion Henry Atkins

12 From Mobilizing to Organizing Kevin O’Donnell 15 Love Thy Neighbor Lizzy Schick

CAMPUS

CULTURE

3 Gap Years at Harvard Kay Lu

35 Freedom from Fascination Olivia Dixon Herrington

UNITED STATES

38 State of the Sitcom Daniel J. Kenny

19 When Young Metro Don’t Trust You Matthew Keating

INTERVIEWS

21 Mass Incarceration in Rural Communities David Gutierrez 24 Contagion Henry Atkins

26 In Search of Transparency Henry Atkins and Ana Suazo

17 City & Coloured Russell Reed

WORLD 26 In Search of Transparency Henry Atkins and Ana Suazo

40 Tomi Lahren Mark Bode 42 Michelle Rhee Quinn Mulholland

ENDPAPER 44 Finding Love at Harvard Perry Abdulkadir

29 No Choice in Belfast Akshaya Annapragada 34 Automated Inequality Nicholas Yan

38 State of the Sitcom Daniel J. Kenny

Email: president@harvardpolitics.com. ISSN 0090-1032. Harvard Political Review. All rights reserved. Image credits: Contribution: 40- Tomi Lahren. Flickr: 9- Kevin, 14- cocoip, 16- Adamina, 24- Mike Licht, 31William Murphy, 32- Theo Pronk. Freepik: Cover- Designed by Freepik, Table of Contents- Designed by Freepik, 38- Designed by Freepik. Graphic Designer: 19- Peter Dovak. Public Domain Pictures: 21- George Hodan. Unsplash: 3- Sophie Higginbottom. Wikimedia: 6- Dave Proffer, 26, 29- William Murphy, 35- ben from Openclipart, 42- Commonwealth Club of California.

FALL 2016 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 1

FROM THE PRESIDENT

HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW

All in the Neighborhood

A Nonpartisan Undergraduate Journal of Politics, Est. 1969—Vol. XLIII, No. 3

EDITORIAL BOARD PRESIDENT: Joseph Choe PUBLISHER: Flavia Cuervo MANAGING EDITOR: Mark Bode ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR: Ali Hakim ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR: Perry Abdulkadir STAFF DIRECTOR: Ari Berman CAMPUS SENIOR EDITOR: Tasnim Ahmed CAMPUS ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Akash Wasil COVERS SENIOR EDITOR: Tess Saperstein COVERS ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Sam Kessler U.S. SENIOR EDITOR: Quinn Mulholland U.S. ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Carla Troconis U.S. ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Henry Brooks WORLD SENIOR EDITOR: Sam Plank WORLD ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Jack Boyd WORLD ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Jacob Link CULTURE SENIOR EDITOR: Hana Connelly CULTURE ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Emily Zauzmer INTERVIEWS EDITOR: Humberto Juarez HUMOR EDITOR: Richard Tong BUSINESS MANAGER: Enrique Rodriguez ASSOCIATE BUSINESS MANAGER: Jenny Horowitz SENIOR DESIGN EDITOR: Kyle McFadden ASSOCIATE DESIGN EDITOR: Victoria Berzin MULTIMEDIA EDITOR: Peter Wright ASSOCIATE MULTIMEDIA EDITOR: Sebastian Reyes WEBMASTER: Justas Janonis

STAFF John Acton, Victor Agbafe, Marie Becker, Marty Berger, Devon Black, Evan Bonsall, Jiafeng Chen, Benjamin Cohen, Chris Cruz, Nathan Cummings, Justin Curtis, Sunaina Danziger, Ali Dastjerdi, Sal Defrancesco, Brandon Dixon, Avika Dua, Casey Durant, Joshua Florence, Edgar Gonzales, Samarth Gupta, David Gutierrez, Eliot Harrison, Olivia Herrington, Thomas Huling, Minnie Jang, Cindy Jung, Daniel Kenny, Andrew Kim, Kieren Kresevic, Amelia Lamp, Ashiley Lee, Elton Lossner, Kay Lu, Ayush Midha, Malvika Menon, George Moersdorf-Schulte, Erica Newman-Corre, Derek Paulhus, Anna Raheem, Anne Raheem, Apoorva Rangan, Sebastian Reyes, Neill Reilly, Alyssa Resear, Bella Roussanov, Lizzy Schick, Soraya Shockley, Wright Smith, Sydney Steel, Nico Tuccillo, Celena Wang, Sarah Wu, Catherine Zhang, Anna Zhou, Yehong Zhu.

ADVISORY BOARD Jonathan Alter Richard L. Berke Carl Cannon E.J. Dionne, Jr.

Ron Fournier Walter Isaacson Whitney Patton Maralee Schwartz

The term “global village” was coined in the 1960s to describe how modern technology has contracted the world into a single entity—a socalled village. This paradigm seems to apply even more so today as our lives are increasingly affected by events that occur outside our immediate communities. For example, just recently we saw how the United Kingdom’s decision to withdraw from the European Union had ripple effects that reached as far as Japan, whose major stock market index experienced its steepest decline in sixteen years as a result.

Because developments in one area of the globe can have wide-reaching consequences that transcend traditional geographic and national borders, it can be easy to focus on large-scale, macro trends at the expense of local ones. However, rather than view the world with broad brush strokes, we must acknowledge that individual communities still exist and are integral as the ultimate building blocks of society.

These communities can be as fundamental as family units, cities, or neighborhoods. For the average person, local activities can have a more direct impact than what is happening on the national and international levels. For example, although my life will be affected by the outcome of this year’s presidential election, many of those effects will be indirect and slow compared to the effects of my neighborhood implementing a curfew, my city enacting new zoning laws, or my state legalizing marijuana. The

HPR recognizes this fact and therefore devoted this past summer to exploring various local communities around the world.

Summer recess provides an ideal time to embark on such a project.

During the school year the entire HPR staff is based in Cambridge, Mass. Yet once summer begins, our staff members disperse across the globe as they engage in internships, research, and study abroad opportunities. In this issue, readers can join Ayush Midha as he follows a local organization that began in Western Kenya to empower people affected by HIV. Sarah Wu invites readers to her own neighborhood of Kensington Market, which is currently witnessing a wave of gentrification.

Kevin O’Donnell travels to Columbus, Ohio, where the People’s Justice Project is mobilizing voters to fight mass incarceration. Lizzy Schick sheds light on the work the Office of Neighborhood Safety has done to bring the number of firearm homicides in Richmond, California to its lowest level in decades.

And finally, Russell Reed explores how ethnic segregation still exists in Cape Town, South Africa, more than two decades after apartheid was dismantled.

We may very well be living in a global village. However, it is important to realize that this global village consists of multiple underlying layers consisting of communities and neighborhoods just like the ones featured in this magazine.

Joseph Choe President

2 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW FALL 2016

CAMPUS

GAP YEARS..

AT HARVARD..

Kay Lu FALL 2016 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 3

CAMPUS

W

hat is the longest time that an undergraduate can stay at Harvard?

“Harvard allows seven years between [semesters], so technically you can stay around Harvard for a span of 39 years,” mused Enrique Ramirez ’17, who took a year off after his freshman year.

Even though this on-and-off strategy hardly sounds like a wise path, it does reveal Harvard’s flexibility about leaves of absence. Malia Obama’s decision to take a gap year between high school and college quickly drew the world’s attention to the flexible policy. However, she was surely not the only one to make this decision. Thanks to Harvard’s wide-open policy for leaves of absence, many Harvard students choose to take a gap year before, during, or after college for various reasons: opportunities outside of campus, breaks for self-exploration, rests for mental health issues, or mixtures of all kinds.

By making its policy flexible and accessible, Harvard tries to convey that gap years are more than a simple break from school.

They are a philosophy: the ability to take a step back, to open one’s mind, and to explore something outside of one’s comfort zone. According to William Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid, a gap year should be a “model” that lasts beyond college.

A MESSAGE FROM THE SCHOOL The pre-college gap year tradition dates back to the “grand tour” in the 17th century, when young men from upper-class British families travelled to learn about art, music, and architecture. This tradition evolved into gap years for high school graduates in the United Kingdom in the 1970s and started to gain popularity in the United States starting in the 1980s.

At Harvard, this practice started before the idea of gap years swept across the United States. Fitzsimmons said that the school started to encourage the option in admission letters in the 1970s, at the same time gap years gained popularity across the pond.

“Students may or may not take a gap year eventually, but we hope that they will at least take time to think and to consider this possibility,” Fitzsimmons told the HPR. The Harvard College Office of Admissions’ website features an essay entitled “Time Out or Burn Out for the Next Generation,” which warns students of the detrimental effects of excessive ambition and stress. “Perhaps the best way of all to get the full benefit of a ‘time-off’ is to postpone entrance to college for a year,” it says.

In addition to top-down administrative efforts to promote the notion, bottom-up, student-led efforts are common on campus. The website Gap Year Harvard College, founded by several “gappers,” is designed to offer reunion information for gap year students. Last year, Yuqi Hou ’16 proposed an off-the-record panel about taking time off to the Bureau of Study Counsel after coming back from her gap year. “I organized the panel hoping to target students who were considering taking time off but did not have a plan yet,” Hou told the HPR. Despite the enthusiasm for gap years, Harvard has insisted against a structured gap year program for students like Princ-

4 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW FALL 2016

eton’s Bridge Year Program launched in 2008. Since students can take gap years for various reasons, Harvard believes a structured program would destroy the purpose of a gap year. “We prefer to leave students the freedom to plan the year themselves,” said Marlyn E. McGrath, Director of Admissions.

LEAVING FOR OPPORTUNITIES Most leaves of absence at Harvard are voluntary. When opportunities outside of campus knock on some students’ doors, they decide that Harvard can wait. Such opportunities can vary vastly, ranging from a mission trip for the Jesus Christ Church of Latter-Day Saints, to an internship at Campaign for Hillary, to a Thiel Fellowship for start-ups.

Ramirez grew up in the local wards of the LDS. After freshman year, he left Harvard to be a full-time missionary, a role that he wanted to take on since his childhood. Cherie Hu ’17, a statistics concentrator passionate about music, worked for a music tech startup called “Jamplify” during her gap semester in junior spring. Rebecca Brooks ’18 joined Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign full-time in her sophomore spring. Cynthia Cheng, an incoming freshman admitted for the Class of 2020, has planned to attend a Chinese language program in Fudan University in China and travel afterwards in her gap year before college.

These are just a few of the many examples of students who stepped away from Harvard for exciting opportunities elsewhere. The choice seems risky to outsiders and even to “gappers” themselves. There are two main reasons that can eventually tip the scale for these “gappers.” For one, these oncein-a-lifetime opportunities are often just that—singular chances that won’t open up again—but Harvard will always welcome them back. Secondly, time off campus and time at Harvard are complementary experiences: the insights students gain outside of school may make their post-return campus experiences more fruitful and meaningful.

Additionally, one’s socio-economic status could affect his or her decision about gap years. Taking a gap year usually mean one more year’s financial dependence on parents. Students on financial aid do not receive it during gap years. As a result, questions of financially supporting oneself arise. Cheng was grateful that her parents would still support her financially for the next year.

“I think the majority of students come from well-off families, based on people I personally know, and looking at the kids in the Faceboook gap year group,” she said. Hu chose to work in New York so that she could stay at home to reduce costs. But it is also possible to live on one’s own: Kiyomi Lepon ’13, one of the cofounders of “Gap Year Harvard College,” sought financial independence by working as a ski instructor at the world’s busiest ski school for six months. “Knowing that I can financially support myself is empowering,” she told the HPR.

LEAVING FOR SELF-DISCOVERY While in an academic environment that stresses productivity, it is common for students to use cost-benefit analyses to evalu-

CAMPUS

ate gap years. If they do not have plans with potential benefits that outweigh those of an academic year in college, they feel that it is not worth it to take a gap year. But McGrath, who oversaw hundreds of students taking gap years, provided another perspective: a carefully structured gap year, though a good option, should not be the norm. “Oftentimes, students may have little idea of what their gap year would be like when they first made the decision.” McGrath’s elder daughter, Elizabeth M. Lewis ’09, was one of them.

Though an Admissions Officer, McGrath was still “stunned” when her daughter announced her gap year decision without any plan in mind. Despite the anxiety of her mother, Lewis deferred the enrollment. By a lucky coincidence, Lewis got the opportunity to work for an environmental activist in Massachusetts for the first few months. The initial exposure to the field shed light on her decision to be an Environmental Science and Public Policy concentrator in college and her entry into consulting career after graduation.

“She figured it out on the way,” McGrath said. She told the HPR that the ability to find something for oneself was an integral part of the gap year experience.

Ratna Gill ’16 echoed those comments. Upon receiving the admission letter in April 2011, she clicked on the “defer enrollment” button without having a clear plan in mind, except for a little bit of travelling. Having graduated from Harvard this past May, she reflected on her decision four years ago and admitted, “Gap year was great when you looked back, but you could feel scared when you were in the middle of it, because there were too many uncertainties.” But it is the uncertainty that brought her the constant drive to look for meaningful things to do: she found a job-shadowing opportunity at Sasha Bruce Youthwork near her home and a job as a Latin coach for her high school. She said this motivation to look for and manage the resources around her was essential in helping her adjust to college life in freshman year.

LEAVING FOR HEALING Outside opportunities and self-discovery are the most popular reasons for taking gap years, but not the only ones. Some students take gap years for health reasons, something that people rarely consider when the phrase “gap year” comes to mind.

Harvard is exciting, fast-paced, and sometimes overwhelming, especially for students facing health issues. When Harvard determines that the resources needed to cure a student’s mental issues exceed what HUHS could possibly offer, the school requires the student to take a leave.

Grace Young enrolled in Harvard as a freshman in the fall of 2013. In her sophomore fall, she started to struggle with health issues, including depression and suicidal thoughts. “When I ended up in the hospital, I knew it was time to leave,” she said.

“And even though I didn’t want to, I would have to,” because Harvard required her to do so.

In her gap year, she first worked at a bakery in her home state for several months, a childhood dream of hers, before moving to San Francisco to live on her own. Reflecting on her two-year time off from Harvard, Young told the HPR her break

had helped her deal with her health issues. “I definitely look at things differently now—the things I care are much different from that in college,” she said. Young has no definite plan of returning to school. She petitioned for return multiple times but was allowed to withdraw her application every time.

Similarly, Chris V. Winkle ’18 was required to leave school in the middle of his sophomore year for mental health issues.

Having taken a voluntary gap year before college, Winkle had as much freedom in his second gap year as in his first one, except for the procedure of returning to school. According to the student handbook, the return for an involuntary leave of absence is dependent on the mandatory consultation with HUHS and an encouraged “substantial period of employment at a non­academic job and a suitable letter of recommendation from the employer or employment supervisor.” Unlike Young, who now works as a data scientist at a start-up called Tribe Dynamics in San Francisco, Winkle has been backpacking in Northern Vietnam for the past eight months. Though he initially wished to come back in the fall 2016, his current plan is to return in the following spring.

“I feel like Harvard would want to see an employment history,” Winkle said.

Even though leave for medical reasons is mandatory, Harvard does not distinguish voluntary or involuntary leave of absence on its transcript. Furthermore, students who wish to take a voluntary leave rather than being placed on involuntary leave will ordinarily be allowed to do so. Perhaps what is more important than the procedural flexibility is the message that Harvard hopes to send: whether mandatory or not, a gap year is for students to take a breath and evaluate their lives in a different light.

A MODEL BEYOND COLLEGE Students take gap years out of various motivations and for different goals, but they experience some things in common: the freedom to make decisions on their own and the courage to challenge themselves. These insights refresh their perspectives on campus life and change their experience at Harvard after returning to school But such an attitude could go far beyond college. People today are likely to occupy many different jobs and even careers over their long lives. Fitzsimmons suggested that students give themselves a gap year in their late twenties, thirties, and even up to fifties to explore a different possible profession. “We hope that it is a model about how students conduct their lives well beyond college,” he said.

This piece of advice is good news especially for those who regret not taking a gap year before or during college. There are still opportunities for “gap years” in the course of life: a break after graduation or even after years of career, either to travel with fellowships or try out another profession. The definition of “gap year” changes, but the essence remains the same. “This is a model of being able to step back, to think about what you really value, and to think about how you want to spend your precious time,” said Fitzsimmons.

FALL 2016 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 5

CAMPUS

HEALTH IN THE DEVELOPING NEIGHBORHOOD TALES FROM WESTERN KENYA

Ayush Midha

F

or the residents of western Kenya’s Manyatta slums, Phelgone Atieno is no ordinary community health worker.

Universally revered as “Sister Phelgone” she is greeted by nearly every community member with an obligatory erokamano, the Luo word for “thank you.”

Ms. Atieno has come a long way from her life in 2002, when she was diagnosed with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, weighed less than 90 pounds, and stood on the brink of death.

After losing her job as a teacher at the Aga Khan pre-primary school, she began working odd jobs near her home in Manyatta, the largest informal settlement in the city of Kisumu. In 2004, Ms. Atieno and four other residents started a community-based organization called Pal Omega dedicated to empowering peers affected by HIV. Over the years, the organization’s reach has expanded con-

6 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW FALL 2016

siderably, and today, Pal Omega’s initiatives combat HIV-related stigma, support victims of gender-based violence, and offer comprehensive family planning education. But while members dedicate themselves to expanding accessible health care and increasing awareness of available resources, they face the challenge of a bloated and austere international development complex.

THE FORGOTTEN SHADOWS OF DEVELOPMENT While the United Nations has referred to its Millennium Development Goals initiative as “the most successful anti-poverty movement in history,” more Africans live in extreme poverty today than did in 1990. Much of the progress made in global development since the UN set its benchmarks stems from rapid

NEIGHBORHOOD

growth in China and Latin America, leaving behind the most vulnerable residents of Sub-Saharan Africa.

As it faces significant poverty and health gaps, Kenya is an archetypal case of the shortcomings and failures of modern development in Sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, the city of Kisumu, despite its designation as a Millennium City by the UN, maintains a poverty rate of nearly 40 percent. Throughout Kenya, extreme poverty and poor health engender a vicious cycle entrenching communities in poor living conditions, low life expectancy, and high child mortality.

Despite an influx of international aid and NGO investment directed at health care, Kenya’s infant mortality rate remains high and its life expectancy low. Malaria, AIDS, and TB are still highly prevalent killers even after numerous global efforts to distribute treatment and increase awareness.

Article 43 of the Kenyan constitution guarantees citizens the right to “the highest attainable standard of health care,” a truly progressive declaration. But the lack of affordable and accessible health care continues to produce unfavorable metrics in Kenya.

According to research conducted by World Bank economist Edwine Barasa, 83 percent of citizens remain uninsured, forcing the vast majority of Kenyan families to make exorbitant out-ofpocket payments for treatments and procedures. This phenomenon is clearly reflected in health expenditure data: the Ministry of Health reported in 2013 that 32 percent of health financing came directly from household payments, overwhelming even government expenditures on health care. Health care accessibility is further skewed for Kenya’s poorest quintile, which receives about half as many government health care funds as the richest quintile despite nearly twice the need.

A HISTORY OF NEGLECT Why is it that in spite of yearly infusions of around $2.6 billion in official international assistance, the vast majority of Kenyans are consistently deprived of accessible health care?

Part of the problem can be attributed to consistent government neglect of health care needs over the last few decades. The current iteration of the Kenyan health system, initiated in 1994 with the Kenya Health Policy Framework Paper, devolved most health care authority to local administrations. Today, the lowest, most accessible level involves village dispensaries, followed by district clinics and provisional hospitals. Nairobi’s Kenyatta National Hospital represents the most significant federal involvement in the Kenyan health system. But most health care provision and management occurs at local dispensaries and private centers operated by NGOs and domestic organizations.

While recent administrations have significantly hiked health care spending, a legacy of federal neglect continues to haunt the system. In 1970, the Kenyan government nationalized health care and eliminated user fees for all treatment. The results were tremendous—by 1980, Kenya had quadrupled the number of health facilities open to treat patients, and the population experienced a rapid increase in life expectancy.

The progress of the 1970s coincided with a global movement for health improvements. UNICEF’s 1978 Alma Ata conference produced a simple goal of universally accessible health care by 2020, and the conference produced a series of recommendations for governments and donors to hike funding for community health programs.

At the start of the 1980s, though, a distinct ideological mantra of “structural adjustment” took hold, encouraging privatization, user fees, deregulation, and austerity. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund became influential players in international development, and both offered loans contingent on the slashing of social services spending and privatization of public programs. The World Bank encouraged nations like Kenya to institute user fees, decentralize management, and jumpstart the privatization of social services.

International health metrics indicated an immediate and devastating blow. Developing nations in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America became attractive targets for international investment but simultaneously witnessed the weakening of their primary health systems. In Kenya, the initiation of outof-pocket payments for health clinics in 1989 was followed by a decade-long period of declining life expectancy.

In June 2016, the International Monetary Fund published a report reviewing the economic implications of its once-heralded agenda. The report concluded that while short-term effects of deregulation and privatization appeared favorable, those policies entrenched widespread inequality and gutted critical social services, undermining the foundation of long-term economic expansion and development.

AN UNWIELDY DEVELOPMENT INDUSTRY Nations like Kenya have recently reversed course, and as health challenges have attracted international attention, aid has also flowed freely into global health efforts, sparking an intense academic debate about aid’s effectiveness. Advocates like Columbia economics professor Jeffrey Sachs, an architect of the Millennium Development Goals, laud the successes of countless interventions, like the role of bed net distributions in reducing malaria deaths in Sub-Saharan Africa. On the other hand, economists William Easterly and Dambisa Moyo contend that development aid props up corrupt regimes and fosters dependence. The free distribution of bed nets, they respond, crowds out cheap local sellers of bed nets, driving out a sustainable indigenous solution and leaving a vacuum in the market after the end of the distribution efforts.

Regardless of the merits of these academic perspectives, there is no denying that in the West, “we now have a development-industrial complex,” argued Dr. Thomas Burke, Chief of Mass General Hospital’s Global Health and Human Rights Division, in an interview with the HPR. “It requires tremendous resources just to feed that giant animal, and it’s entrenched in its responsibilities to feed the salaries of Westerners.”

Indicators throughout Sub-Saharan Africa suggest that this

FALL 2016 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 7

NEIGHBORHOOD

“development-industrial complex” has failed significant portions of this region’s population. Those aid dollars have been so ineffective, explained Dr. Burke, because they have not addressed underlying factors, like governance issues and the lack of legal and regulatory institutions. Most importantly, though, international interventions often augment the very structure of inequality that produces negative health outcomes.

Consider the following thought experiment: a health-related NGO sets up shop in Western Kenya, starting a clinic with the goal of providing quality health services. Even before the clinic starts seeing patients, prices in the immediate surrounding spike as sellers take advantage of the affluent, money-waving wazungu, Swahili for foreigners. Prices for ugali, a local staple starch, rise exponentially and home prices skyrocket, entrenching families in a cycle of poverty. When the clinic finally opens its doors, only the richest can afford the fees of seeking the high-quality treatment. Supported by dollars from the West, though, the NGO attracts the most qualified and skilled doctors in the area, depriving public facilities of needed human resources.

This thought experiment has played out on a large scale in Kenya. The country faces an acute shortage of physicians, with only one doctor for every 10,000 citizens. The United States, for the sake of comparison, has 26 doctors for every 10,000 people.

To compound this problem, internationally supported non-profit clinics poach much of the available medical talent. Despite making up more than 40 percent of total health centers, governmentfunded clinics house only 22 percent of Kenya’s medical professionals. This discrepancy significantly impacts Kenya’s rural population that has limited access to international financing, considering that 50 percent of Kenya’s doctors serve Nairobi, which makes up seven percent of the national population.

As Dr. Burke argued, “we actually have the incentives all wrong.” International support, he suggests, has the potential to be successful when framed through the lens of innovation and entrepreneurship. But, he says, the “biggest obstacle to innovation and entrepreneurship” remains “us shooting ourselves in the leg through our own human wish for power and for money.”

This tendency has produced in Sub-Saharan Africa a widening gap between the expected and actual outcomes of copious sums of money in development aid.

EMERGING SOLUTIONS FROM COMMUNITYBASED STRATEGIES This gap is where Ms. Atieno and her Pal Omega team members come in. Today, twelve years after its inception, the organization operates several initiatives to financially and socially support other Manyatta-dwellers affected by HIV. The two-room early childhood development center represents the fulcrum of

8 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW FALL 2016

the whole operation, serving nearly 60 children aged three to seven, many of them infected with HIV. In addition to anti-stigma initiatives, support groups, and community health fairs, Pal Omega runs a group savings and loan program to alleviate the widespread poverty of HIV-infected residents of Kisumu.

Collectively, the organization attempts to fill the gaps between the expected health outcomes posited by the Ministry of Health and its NGO partners and the reality of rampant poverty, consistent HIV transmission rates, and unacceptably high infant mortality. International organizations often overlook the very real and largely effective efforts of community-based organizations like Pal Omega when they evaluate health care interventions. But despite the lack of robust financial support, Ms. Atieno and her fellow members work tenaciously, arranging regular health fairs and home visits to offer testing, referrals, sexual health education, and counseling.

This commitment to continued progress has not wavered in spite of a shrinking budget. The latest project being developed

by Ms. Atieno’s team is a planned initiative to comprehensively combat stigma surrounding HIV and family planning in the local community. In addition to holding local dialogues, community health events, and family planning clinics, the group has recruited student groups from the nearby Maseno and Kisumu Polytechnic Universities to regularly put on educational performances for students and parents. Pal Omega’s leaders firmly believe that health literacy and stigma reduction can bridge the gap between patients and the available health resources.

Perhaps most impressive, though, is the clear universal support for Pal Omega’s operations in the community. In spite of the stigma associated with the organization’s objectives, its regular involvement with community health fairs and home visits has made the organization more trusted than any international NGO ever could be. In combination with the group’s clearly evident tenacity, these community roots offer a real opportunity for community health improvements and poverty reduction.

The model of Pal Omega, a community-based organization, offers a significantly more effective outlet for the copious amounts of increasingly available international development funds. For NGOs hoping to maximize their positive impact, contributing to already existing efforts founded upon grassroots approaches can truly serve the needs of the poor. Dr. Burke agrees, declaring that “for the poorest of the poor, local CBOs are the best opportunity for success or for lifting out of poverty.”

The daunting challenges facing Kenya and the rest of SubSaharan Africa will not disappear, though, as long as inequality remains the norm. “At the end of the day,” Dr. Burke contends, “there’s a real problem with equity and … it will be an unending task to lift populations out of poverty.” For Pal Omega, though, the fight against poverty and disease in Manyatta will rage on.

STATE OF THE ART

LETTER FROM KENSINGTON

Sarah Wu

A

fter moving to Canada, my family settled in an apartment on the corner of Oxford and Spadina, where Kensington Market meets Toronto’s Chinatown. The place was falling apart, yet there was something beautiful about the centuryold red brick becoming our home. Creaky passageways that would give the fire department nightmares led to three other immigrant families. We were the last few to enjoy the building’s broken charm together. The windows through which I used to watch people come and go below have since been boarded up, the building acquired by a developer. Over a decade later, when I bring friends to Kensington, I am exploring as much as they are.

Change is the rule in Kensington. In the 19th century, the British Denison family’s estate was subdivided into small lots for British laborers—the beginnings of the Market. In the early 20th century, the rise of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe led to an influx of Jewish immigrants. Peddlers with pushcarts entered the scene and soon first floors of houses converted into makeshift shops. The area became known as “The Jewish Market.” After WWII, most Jews migrated to wealthier neighborhoods and successive waves of immigrant groups ebbed and flowed.

I met long-time Kensington resident Dominique Russell downtown, where towering offices and uniform Bay Street suits seem distant from the decidedly human feel of the Market’s Victorian row houses. Co-founder of the Friends of Kensington

Market group, Russell helps unite community members over the place they love and wish to protect. While the Market is not immune to gentrification, the process moves differently here.

Famed urban planning reformer Jane Jacobs—who called Kensington home for part of her life—helps us understand why traditional gentrification narratives cannot explain the case of Kensington. Known best for her critique of urban planning in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs rejected orthodox top-down approaches and advocated for local involvement in neighborhood change. She believed that so long as a neighborhood’s existing value was recognized, gentrification, to a certain extent, could be healthy. The case of Kensington breathes life into Jacobs’ philosophy. The Kensington community’s intentionality has enabled the regeneration, rather than the replacement, of the Market’s spirit.

Russell calls the Market “porous,” describing it as “a place where people who don’t have a place elsewhere can find a place.” Kensington has been a haven for immigrants from the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and East Asia; for young Americans fleeing the draft during the Vietnam War; for those escaping troubled homelands in Somalia, Sudan, Iran. Add to the mix artists and students from nearby schools, and you have the cultural mosaic so often embedded in the Canadian identity.

Despite its history of welcoming change, the Market’s newest

FALL 2016 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 9

NEIGHBORHOOD

wave of residents brings concerns about its future. Regarding immigration waves, Russell says that “there are traces of all those groups there. But right now, it’s wealthier, white people.

They’re leaving their mark.” While this “mark” has fundamentally changed other neighborhoods, its impact on Kensington has been different.

A CHANGING MARKET Though the Market may be “porous,” certain changes face resistance from the community. As challengers of corporate encroachment, Friends of Kensington Market garnered the support of tens of thousands in petitions against a Canadian franchise supermarket and Walmart entering the neighborhood.

While speaking with an architect about his Toronto office’s current projects, I asked about Kensington. He instinctively replied, “There are some places we don’t touch.”

More influential than corporate schemes in shaping Kensington’s development is the neighborhood’s reputation as a hipster destination. From hippies in the ’60s and the ’80s punk movement to anarchist collectives in the ’90s, Kensington has always welcomed the young and the subversive. They still flock here, now drawn by the café and foodie culture, the thrift shops, the promise of a #KensingtonMarket Instagram photo. The increasing demand for such businesses has increased rent, making it more difficult for non-conforming businesses to make a living.

As KT Ng washes dishes from lunch, she tells me that she opened Oxford Fruit in 1991. She points outside the window: “All four corners used to be fruit stands. One by one, they disappeared.” In place of those fruit stands are a gelato bar, a juice press, and the foundation of a new restaurant. KT cites increased rent and wages as challenges to keeping her business open, in addition to big grocery stores opening near Kensington. But it is okay, she says, they are still getting by.

To compensate for increased costs, more businesses have upscaled. It follows that some residents—especially those in public housing—cannot afford to shop in their own neighborhood. “It is less and less a place to start,” Russell tells me. For many people who grew up in Kensington, it was a place you left when you became more successful. Now, the successful are drawn to what has become one of Toronto’s trendiest neighborhoods. Russell, however, believes that, “It’s going to be hard to make a Yorkville out of Kensington Market.” Yorkville was once a bohemian hub in Toronto. Planners and politicians deemed it a problem area and enabled large-scale commercial redevelopment. In less than two years, Yorkville transformed into a high-end shopping district, catering to those sporting Prada and Gucci.

Relics like the Latin American Perola Supermarket have survived by finding niches. As I talk to the manager Hector Lopez, a man wearing a Canada Goose parka walks into Perola, nods to Hector, and heads to the chest freezer. Hector explains to me this man is a regular, a restaurant owner who comes here to purchase frozen cassava. Many of the ethnic supermarkets have specialized to serve such clientele. Hector tells me that the “Big Boss” opened this supermarket after immigrating to Canada

10 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW FALL 2016

from Mexico in 1964. When I ask Hector if he will be around next year, he chuckles and replies, “For fifty years more!”

While some old-timers have had to adapt to new clientele, others are still going strong on the backs of loyal customers.

The friendly king of fish himself, Louis Gouveia from Portugal, opened Sea Kings in 1957. A customer tells me that many West Indians shop here because “the fish is fresh.” He turns back to Joe, who hands him his bag of what must be ten fish and says, “Forty.” “Come on, Joe, that’s too much.” Observing their playful exchange, I sense a camaraderie familiar to the Market. Joe takes out a few and cuts him a deal. When I ask Louis about how business is going, he says that there used to be 17 fishmongers, but now there are only three.

Many newcomers to Kensington are responding to demand for socially and health conscious products. Hooked, one of the three fishmongers, was opened by two chefs and sells seafood from sustainable fish farms and Great Lakes fisheries. The supervisor tells me that they hope to “create more informed demand to change the industry.” To a customer asking for Arctic char, he replies, “Sorry, we are sold out. But there is a flight coming in tonight.”

LOVE THY NEIGHBOR Many Kensington activists like Russell see diversity as a community asset that needs to be protected. According to Russell, at a recent Friends of Kensington Market meeting, gentrification was the biggest issue: “the danger that we are losing this beautiful mix of ages, ethnicities and income—that’s very important to everyone.” This recognition is crucial to gentrification benefiting rather than detracting from Kensington, but it is only a starting point. With such a diverse population, questions of inclusivity are bound to emerge.

When Barbara Rahder first came to Toronto in the ’70s, she frequented Kensington as a University of Toronto student, the main campus only minutes away. “They used to have cages stacked of ducks and chickens and rabbits … You could pick out a live rabbit and the butcher would prepare it for you,” Rahder tells me. “It was stinky and smelly and wonderful.” Now a professor at York University, Barbara studies issues of equity and diversity in urban public spaces. In working on a critique of the creative city, Rahder and her student, Heather McLean, were surprised to discover opposition to Kensington’s Pedestrian Sundays.

In 2002, local activists lobbied for car-free street festivals, replacing car honking with samba music in hopes of celebrating and building community. These Pedestrian Sundays have taken place every summer since and are largely viewed as a successful regeneration strategy that draws thousands to the Market each Sunday. Rahder and McLean’s research, however, shows that while bars and foodie destinations benefit from increased foot traffic, retail and produce stores, which rely on truck deliveries and car-driving customers, do not fare as well. People come for the party, not for the groceries. This initiative reinforced the market as an increasingly popular destination for the young and

NEIGHBORHOOD

The Kensington community’s intentionality has enabled the regeneration, rather than the replacement, of the Market’s spirit.

the middle-class, alienating low-income residents and old-time merchants.

This unintentional exclusion also exists in Kensington community groups. Russell says that while Friends of Kensington Market is “diverse in that there are renters, homeowners, people that have been there a long time, newcomers, students,” the group is “very white.” With the goal of connecting with their Chinese neighbors—who are the largest ethnic group in Kensington—Friends of Kensington Market has run meetings in Mandarin and Cantonese, and ensures that there is translation available at city planning meetings.

Though there is no simple solution to exclusion, this community recognizes that it is an important problem to address.

“Necessarily, the people who are going to be able to speak out tend to be people who are more secure, who have more time, more confidence,” says Russell. Many immigrants lack stability and time as they try to make ends meet, and language barriers further decrease likelihood of contributing to public dialogue.

Those who speak are the ones heard by media and politicians.

These voices become the voice of the community, as city planners and politicians often do not have the resources to seek out unvoiced opinions.

FORWARD THINKING Intent on carrying the eclectic and welcoming ethos of Kensington forwards, residents and merchants alike feel ownership of the Market. “What was here before?” and “What do we want to preserve?” are two questions that have influenced business transitions. Russell tells me that “The people who own property are not rushing to exploit the land value.” Instead, changes tend to be made with the best interests of the Market in mind.

The building where Hooked now operates used to be home to Sanagan’s Meat Locker, a locally-sourced boutique meat shop

that opened in 2009 to replace the historic Max and Son butcher shop. When another butcher announced its closure in 2014 after over 50 years in the Market, Russell recalls how “everyone held their breath,” only to be relieved when Sanagan’s moved down the street into the bigger location. “They could have rented it to anyone, but they rented it to another business owner who’s been successful and gave them room to grow.”

In conversation with shoppers about why they frequent Kensington, I hear about the “openness” of the neighborhood, that there is “not too much judging,” that there are people from “all walks of life.” Kensington attracts both the wealthy and the marginalized. According to Russell, it is “a place where you can’t pretend that everything is fabulous, because the people you’re going to meet, not all of them are having a fabulous time.” From homeless services and court support for youth to senior groups and newcomer initiatives, the programs offered by Kensington’s St. Stephen’s Community House reveal a diversity of circumstances. “It’s not just who you want to meet, but who you’re going to meet.”

On a recent trip to the Market, I walked into the newly opened Grk Ygrt dessert bar. Jesse, the owner, tells me that Tim Horton’s was also vying for this space and would have been able to pay more. The landlord, however, saw his lot as more fitting for the indie small business feel. When asked about why he chose Kensington, Jesse tells me that this is his first business, and that Kensington is a good place to take risks and try new things.

Whether on the business front or in terms of community building, there is no doubt that this neighborhood will keep trying new things. Always evolving, yet steadfast in spirit, Kensington is the fruit of intention. Recognizing existing value, the community welcomes change that colors the Market anew without washing away the old.

FALL 2016 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 11

NEIGHBORHOOD

From Mobilizing to Organizing Kevin O’Donnell

I

t’s Friday at the People’s Justice Project office and the walls are covered with giant note pads. On butcher paper the team has written the names of the candidates in the Franklin County prosecutor’s race, accompanied by each candidate’s position on mass incarceration and policing—PJP’s main issue areas in Columbus, Ohio.

The incumbent, Ron O’Brien, has earned a reputation among PJP’s constituency—mostly formerly incarcerated individuals and people in highly policed communities of color—as a brutal, tough-on-crime prosecutor who dismisses movements for police reform. The challenger, Zach Klein, has presented himself as a “smart on crime” candidate.

Klein reached out to PJP after learning about their work building a voting coalition of working class people and people of color in order to fight mass incarceration. Presumably he’s also interested in the numbers written in orange on one of the sheets of butcher paper: 10,000. That’s how many people PJP and their allies at the Ohio Student Association registered in 2015. Next to that: 20,000—the number of people registered by the Columbus People’s Partnership, a coalition of the Ohio Student Association, PJP, and other labor, faith, and racial-justice groups. Many of those people also signed CPP’s BLOC Cards—commitments to get involved in organizing around community safety and prison reform. That number is PJP’s bargaining chip with Klein.

They’re planning to take issue with Klein on the Summer Safety Initiative. “That’s the mayor’s initiative to go into communities and increase policing,” Amber Evans, an organizer with PJP, told the HPR as she pulled up the arrest rates from last year. “It’s a lot of plain-clothes police officers jumping out of unmarked vehicles like they did to Henry Green,” referring to a 23-year-old black man who was killed by police this past July.

“Looking at the results from the Summer Safety Initiative 2015, there were 453 felony arrests, so if Klein is going to be overseeing those prosecutions, we should tie that into the meeting.”

“So his goal is clearly to increase arrests,” said Amna Akbar, an Ohio State law professor who works extensively with PJP. “He’s not going to be on the same page as us. He’s going to pre-

12 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW FALL 2016

tend, but we’re going to have to push him.”

“We need to have him define safety and justice,” said Evans.

“Because if we just lay out our positions, he’ll just say, ‘yeah, I support that!’ We need to have him say these things first so we can get him to commit.”

“And communicate to him that we have a base of voters that can influence the election,” added Akbar.

Though they’re getting involved in this election, PJP doesn’t operate like a political party. As of now, they don’t run candidates; they figure out what issues their constituents care about, and then try to build political capacity to push change on those issues.

If you ask Evans what she does, she might say, “I’m a community organizer,” but that description leaves much to the imagination. When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008 and touted his experience as a community organizer in Chicago, Sarah Palin scornfully, but accurately, captured most of America’s reaction: “What is that?”

President Obama spent two years at the Developing Communities Project in Chicago organizing residents to take on issues like water contamination and asbestos. He organized town halls and prepared community members to confront power holders.

With help from other organizers and residents, that work led to small concessions at the neighborhood level.

Community organizing comes down to building power.

Sometimes that power manifests itself as a voting block of people that is big enough to sway an election or get a ballot initiative passed. Sometimes it takes the form of noncooperation and protest, the ability to move people to the streets and shut the system down.

In going after Prosecutor O’Brien, the PJP team is using a similar strategy as allied groups in Cleveland. Last year, a coalition of the Ohio Student Association, PJP, and other groups built up enough political momentum to help unseat Timothy McGinty, the four-year veteran prosecutor who acquitted the police officer who shot Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy. McGinty lost his election by 15,000 votes, many of them new voters registered by OSA and PJP.

NEIGHBORHOOD

“We’re not focused on the national Clinton-Trump madness,” said Molly Shack, who helped found OSA and the Columbus People’s Partnership. For her, building power means giving people agency to take on the forces that oppress them in their daily lives. “We’re trying to connect with folks as we register them, and help them see that we have elections on the local level that have a way bigger impact on what our communities look like day-to-day. Your rec center lost its funding? Your cousin got sentenced for a minor drug offense? Electoral power is one of the ways we can fight these issues.”

SERVICE: THE FIRST POINT OF CONTACT After the PJP research meeting ends, Evans and Akbar head outside the office, where Impact Community Action has set up its annual Beat the Heat Fair. At PJP’s booth, they meet up with Tammy Alsaada, a veteran organizer who helped found PJP. Alsaada knows so many people at the Impact Community Action fair that she barely has a minute to sit down and eat the basket of fish and fries that the voter registration team brings over to her booth. A steady stream of friends and coworkers—from PJP, Juvenile Justice Coalition, the Youth Violence Prevention Advisory Board, and Ceasefire Columbus—come up to her and exchange hugs and updates. A young woman in nurse’s scrubs comes up to register to vote, and Tammy gives her a rundown of the upcoming prosecutor’s race and how PJP hopes to influence it. At the end, she hugs the young woman and sends her off with literature on civil rights when dealing with the police.

Most of the booths at the Beat the Heat kick-off provide social services for the 200,000 people who live in poverty in Columbus. However, many organizers still debate the role of such direct service in the mission of structural change.

To Alsaada, organizers must meet the basic needs in the communities while mobilizing for social change, and direct-service projects create pipelines to get low-income people involved in advocating for themselves. The next project on her plate is a “listening campaign,” where PJP will send dozens of organizers into neighborhoods to ask residents what they think would make their communities safer.

Earlier that morning, Evans had gone to court with a young man she is supporting through Voices of the Unheard, an independent group that works with PJP and the Juvenile Justice Coalition to provide guidance for youth and families going through the criminal justice system.

“We’re there through the whole process. After court date, we check in to see how things went and provide services,” said Evans. “We’re actually trying to build a village, a home away from home for families in hard situations. From there we transition from need-based advocacy to self-advocacy. They’re able to actually engage and take ownership over the process and take that power back.”

TOWARD BUILDING POWER Aramis Sundiata is surrounded by 15 college students who have signed on as summer Service Leader Interns for the Co-

lumbus Freedom School, a literacy program for students from grades K through 12. They’re in the Freedom Hub, a small chapel in the Summit Methodist Church where much of this work began. The Freedom School was born in 1964, in the height of the civil rights movement, and became one of the movement’s best tools for bringing families into the fight for voting rights and desegregation. It’s a natural partnership for PJP, especially since Sundiata and Shack met while working as SLIs five years ago.

Today Sundiata, PJP’s statewide organizer, trains the SLIs to work with their students on the Day of Social Action, a Freedom School tradition where the students organize around a social injustice. “The difference between direct service and direct organizing is in how they treat power relations,” said Sundiata, sweeping his arm across a PowerPoint slide. “Direct service fills the gaps created by unjust power relations, but does not directly challenge those power relations. Direct organizing challenges existing power relationships and tries to create a world where those inequalities don’t exist.” He pounded his fist on a desk.

“Direct organizing builds power.

Often the work of community organizing goes unreported because the process doesn’t provide the same media spectacle as mobilizing around sudden crises. Although PJP protests in response to police killings, especially since the killing of Henry Green in Columbus, the actual community organizing happens by talking with people, finding out what issues they care about, and giving them tools to take action.

The work comes in peaks and valleys; high-profile actions in the streets fill the peaks, and during the valleys they reach out to new constituents, train new leaders, and plan their next move. Their main tool is the strategic one-to-one, a conversation where the organizer tries to identify an individual’s interests and figure out how they can work together. One-to-ones are the soul of community organizing.

The pace of grassroots change can seem glacial, but the people on the ground with PJP can feel motion. More people are coming to their doorstep looking for something to do.

“In Columbus a culture is growing of young people hitting the streets through movement,” said Sundiata. “It’s shifted how far people are willing to go. A whole bunch of activist groups popped up after Alton Sterling. Before that, during the Trayvon Martin and Occupy moments, and we got sophisticated. We practiced our craft.”

On the wall in the Hub is a mural of a young man, MarShawn McCarrel, in a snapback looking to the sky. McCarrel worked alongside the PJP and OSA teams to build programs across the city, including the Columbus Freedom School. Just as he was gaining national recognition for organizing around racial justice, he committed suicide at age 23.

His mural stays in the Hub as a reminder of the stakes for young people organizing for justice. Many of the students in Freedom School remember marching with McCarrel in 2015 against Zero Tolerance policies.

“So much has changed in the last three years,” said Alsaada.

“I remember in 2011 wondering, ‘Where are all the young people at?’ Now they’re throwing themselves into the work and running these movements. This is only the beginning.”

FALL 2016 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 13

STATE OF THE ART

LOVE THY. NEIGHBOR. A Human(e) Approach to Gun Violence

Lizzy Schick

I

n Richmond, Calif., the Office of Neighborhood Safety accomplished in only eight years what no traditional law enforcement measures could: a 76 percent decrease in firearm homicides since the program’s 2007 implementation. The city—once considered one of the deadliest in America—yielded its lowest levels of gun violence in 40 years in 2015. While the program tends to receive notoriety for one of its practices in particular, paying offenders to stop committing crimes, the ONS also deserves recognition for its status as a pioneer in treating gun violence as a public health problem and using a communitybased approach to prevention.

The ONS seeks to treat both the causes and symptoms of Richmond’s deadly environment. The program’s officers— Neighborhood Change Agents—establish mentoring relationships with the young men considered Richmond’s most frequent perpetrators of gun violence. This is done in order to provide an alternative to the pressures of gang culture. The essence of the program’s message to its fellows is, as Neighborhood Change

14 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW FALL 2016

Agent Sam Vaughn explained to the HPR, “You did something wrong, but we recognize it’s not your fault. We recognize that systems across the board have failed you, and we’re going to apologize for that and then partner with you to try to fix yourself.” Sustained by private donations from community organizations, the office supplements its mentoring with educational, travel, and financial opportunities. The ONS’s startling results over a short period of time demonstrate the merits of its approach. Vaughn sums up the program best: “Young people die at an alarming rate, and people don’t give a damn. So we decided to give a damn.”

INSIDE THE OPERATION Media coverage of the ONS tends to focus on the controversial financial support it offers violent offenders and ignore its insights into the root causes of gun violence. In an interview with the HPR, Devone Boggan, the program’s founder, decried

NEIGHBORHOOD

portrayals of his work as at odds with law enforcement. Instead, he sees the program as a necessary counterpart to the Richmond Police Department. At its core, the ONS focuses on positively engaging those whom Boggan describes as “the most lethal, active firearm offenders in the community,” predominantly young men, by offering them a fellowship. The ONS identifies candidates through analysis of Richmond police reports and other data, then reaches out to potential fellows. The program includes everything from pathways to driver’s licenses and GEDs to its notorious monetary payments, which can range from $300 to $1000 monthly for a finite period, with the amount depending on the fellow’s progress within the program.

However, mentorship and travel constitute the most powerful opportunities the ONS offers its fellows. The program’s Neighborhood Change Agents, often former felons themselves, serve as mentors and exemplify the possibility of rehabilitation. For formerly neglected and isolated individuals, these relationships reveal a welcome alternative to the punitive measures of law enforcement. Boggan explains, “For the first time in these young men’s lives, they have city government seeking them—not with a badge, not with a gun—but seeking them, saying, ‘We need your help, we need your partnership, and we want to help you.’”

Neighborhood Change Agents engage with each fellow multiple times daily to communicate their dedication to his individual situation. Later into the fellowship, fellows have the opportunity to travel outside of Richmond, allowing them to participate in community service, meet mayors and lawmakers, and visit other countries, all experiences they could not find in Richmond.

Moreover, Boggan has a particular strategy for doling out travel opportunities to his fellows: He personally takes pairs of young men who consider each other enemies in the context of Richmond outside the city in the hope that they will resolve their differences. While seemingly risky, this practice returns results.

Boggan finds that “it’s hard to be in South Africa, on Robben Island, in Mandela’s prison cell, with your enemy from Richmond and that not have a life-changing impact.” So far, his trips have garnered popularity and reduced enmity among the fellows.

A variety of community issues play into the cycle of violence that produces firearm offenders. Parents and teachers often don’t have the time or resources to provide the support that young people need. Neighborhood Change Agent Sam Vaughn told the HPR, “There are millions of young people where the first violent act that they’ve ever seen or perpetrated was promoted by their parents—not because their parents don’t love them but because their parents live in a war zone.” Likewise, teachers in under-resourced schools like those in Richmond cannot offer the full amount of support their students need. Speaking from experience, Vaughn finds that with regard to troubled students, often, “a teacher can’t even teach. All a teacher can do is discipline.” Thus, the Neighborhood Change Agents of the ONS comprise a significant support system for its fellows.

BEYOND RICHMOND Other U.S. cities stricken by gun violence have attempted similar programs but none with effects as notable as Richmond’s.

In 1995, the Harvard Kennedy School pioneered the Boston Gun Project, using a data-driven approach and emphasizing community outreach to achieve significant reductions in crime. More recently, the Cure Violence project, which originated in Chicago

in 2007—the same year as the ONS—employed a similar holistic approach to rehabilitating offenders. Cure Violence currently partners with Richmond and a number of other cities domestically and abroad to use “disease control and behavior change methods” to combat gun violence, according to its website. Its numerous success stories provide corroborating evidence for the merits of the ONS’s approach.

Earlier this year, Boggan began working with the consulting firm Advance Peace to bring the ideas of the ONS to other cities, starting with Oakland, Calif., a city just south of Richmond known for its pervasive violence and corrupt police force. The ONS also regularly sends representatives to various other U.S. cities to share insights about its practices. International recognition of the program spans North America; in 2013, the ONS visited the city government in Mexico City. Canada’s national public radio station recently produced a special on the program’s potential for combatting violence in Toronto.

In Washington, D.C., Councilmember Kenyan R. McDuffie pioneered the Neighborhood Engagement Achieves Results Amendment Act of 2016 to create a program in the image of the ONS and its approach to gun violence. While Richmond relies on private grants for most of its costs, the NEAR Act calls for public funding, creating even higher stakes for the D.C. program. However, higher community accountability due to taxpayer investment should only strengthen the program.

Boggan emphasized to the HPR that future iterations of the ONS in other cities must tailor their programs to local factors rather than use a “cookie cutter approach.” He explained, “When we were putting this effort together, it was solely about the city of Richmond, and it considered and took into account the history of gun violence in the city of Richmond, the personalities involved, the communities historically impacted by that violence, and the current state of affairs in that city when we developed the effort.” The new implementations of such programs in cities like Oakland and Washington, D.C. will test the transferability of the ONS’s tenets to other locales. While the ONS focused on Richmond specifically, the problems that plagued the city aren’t uncommon today; over the course of last year, the CDC recorded almost 11,000 firearm homicides nationally.

The success of a gun violence prevention program that hinges on community investment and engagement points to a fundamental misunderstanding at the heart of our nation’s criminal justice system, which typically ignores those approaches. The ONS introduced the idea of building personal relationships to reimagine and restructure an entire city, taking an approach tailored to Richmond. The program relies upon a key component that many urban law enforcement agencies lack: the trust of its community. And while the fellows of the ONS comprise its focus, all of Richmond enjoys the program’s effects. In 2016, the residents of Richmond encounter quieter, safer streets than they did just a few years earlier. The results of community surveys conducted by the city in 2007, the founding year of the ONS, and in 2015 found an 80 percent increase in reported quality of life.

Over the same period, satisfaction with Richmond as a place to live and raise children more than doubled. While the ONS is by no means solely responsible for these changes, the program is one of the most significant variables in the evolution of Richmond over recent years. The model of an engaging, rehabilitative approach that draws its officers and funding from within the community it serves has proven its efficacy.

FALL 2016 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 15

BORDERS

CITY & COLOURED Race, Space, and Redistribution in Cape Town

Russell Reed

B

etween Cape Town’s airport and its city center, visitors drive past a poorly concealed scar: the underdeveloped townships allocated for black residents during apartheid.

Despite legion policy efforts, they remain similarly peopled today. Arriving at the urban center, however, this destitution is replaced by bustling malls, luxurious hotels, and a booming tourism industry insistent that segregation and institutional racism are a distant past, alive only in history books and museum tours.

The city, understood in whole, debunks this notion: Cape Town is home to many, but paradise to few.

Cape Town is branded by its multiculturalism. According to Apoorva Rangan a 2012 government census, the city’s most populous racial group, Coloureds (which refers to mixed-race citizens), makes up only 42.4 percent of the population, with Black Africans (38.6 percent) and Whites (15.7 percent) trailing closely behind. However, the current status of permanent housing, unemployment, and wealth distribution between racial groups evinces the challenges faced by a diverse urban population and the legacy of white superiority left by the Afrikaner National Party’s apartheid rule. Two decades after the NP’s fall from power, continued segregation in Cape Town exposes the shortcomings of post-apartheid urban policy.

M.I.A.’s juggling act of autobiography and musical commentary

A CITY PLANNED After taking power in 1948, the NP ruled with the policy of apartheid, the Afrikaans word for “separateness.” The regime’s aim was not only to separate white and non-white populations, but also to divide the non-white population by tribal boundaries in order to undermine its political power. Several early policies set the stage for apartheid, and by 1950, marriages and sexual relations between white and non-white individuals were made illegal. The white minority was granted over 80 percent of land nationwide through a series of property acts originating from the 1913 Land Act, which forced black Africans into reserves and barred the group from taking part in sharecropping. Policies mirroring the United States’ antebellum South became commonplace, and opponents like Nelson Mandela were silenced and jailed.

16 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW FALL 2016

NEIGHBORHOOD

The new policies were felt strongly in urban centers, including the economic hub of Cape Town. Before 1948, the city was one of the more integrated urban areas in South Africa. Yet policies regarding the function of non-white people within cities brought harsher segregation in Cape Town in the years to follow.

Apartheid urban planning was based on the Stallard Commission of 1922, which stated that “the co-mingling of black and white is undesirable” and that “the native should only be allowed to enter urban areas … when he is willing to enter and to minister to the needs of white man, and should depart therefrom when he ceases to so minister.” Through the lens of contemporary urban planners, cities were by nature and by implementation constructed for white people, giving non-white residents no place within the urban sphere beyond servitude. In order to establish white cities, black and coloured residents were forcibly relocated to designated areas, known as Bantustans, where poverty thrived and opportunity was null.

Harvard anthropology professors Jean and John Comaroff have researched the construction and dismantling of colonialism in southern Africa, paying particular attention to apartheid South Africa. They lived in Cape Town as children in the years leading up to apartheid and as students during its prominence, and they maintain partial residency today. According to Jean, “the history of the making of colonialism [in South Africa] has a lot to do with organizing landscape, housing, civilization, and the material conditions of life. It has always been about creating the context through which people live; you create people through the houses that you put them in, the neighborhoods that you structure.”

“Apartheid wasn’t really a set of regulations for racial segregation,” John told the HPR. “It was an extremely elaborate and engineered social system that supported political economy based on racial capitalism. It was always a juxtaposition between white and coloured, and black South Africans were always just beyond the peripheries of vision.”

By 1994, Mandela’s African National Committee took national power from the NP and began to seek reformation after decades of apartheid policy. Through controversy and international speculation, the ANC has remained in power with characteristically black leadership, and today eight of South Africa’s nine provinces are governed by the ANC. Only Western Cape, the province that houses Cape Town, is governed by the opposing Democratic Alliance, led by white Helen Zille.

A CITY DIVIDED Following the termination of apartheid policy in 1994, change came rapidly. Affluent neighborhoods—once entirely white, save for domestic workers—were quickly spattered with previously relocated citizens and new African immigrants, and the submerged cultures and languages of non-white residents rose uncontested among those of the white. National legislation was written and rewritten, space began to lose its color, and Cape Town, once lauded as a European paradise on the African continent, traded components of its Anglo culture to form an African identity of its own.

Furthermore, the economy informalized with newfound freedom. As apartheid crumbled, immigrants began to fill the sidewalks beneath large storefronts with small, informal stalls.

Economic opportunity came in various forms, though a rigid

barrier remained before the upper echelon of careers where whites maintained supremacy.

Not all economic changes offered opportunity. Taxes were raised and a minimum wage was implemented, two factors which encouraged local firms to move abroad. As labor and business went overseas, unemployment reached critical levels, with some communities seeing 60 to 70 percent of the young black male workforce jobless. To worsen matters, no major civil society was in place to respond to the damages. Recent attempts at job creation and redistribution have been ineffective in supplying opportunity at the scale necessary to outweigh these early failures.

“Under [the aforementioned] conditions,” Jean explained, “you need to have massive redistribution. And the social grants right now are a) not enough, b) not competently administered in many places because of endemic government corruption, and c) [unsustainable because] the tax base is eroding. Additionally, [the government] has all these other claims, including free education, and a middle class that is more vocal in making its demands. And the money’s got to come from somewhere, so the question of priorities is a big issue.”

The ANC offered several legislative changes, including a new constitution, to promote democracy and equality. In fact, the South African constitution is studied internationally for its clauses on diversity and human rights—measures considered necessary given its post-apartheid context. In the city, however, the constitution’s ideals have yet to be realized.

“The fact is that there was a transition in paper, and in terms of entitlements on paper, but the realpolitik of inclusion is not happening” Jean said. “In some ways in South Africa the revolution came too late, and it’s very hard to make a modern society— a modern democracy—under postmodern conditions.”

These shortcomings are evident in the city today. Townships bearing semblance to those sanctioned by apartheid remain almost exclusively non-white, and poverty and immobility still plague residents. Meanwhile, suburbs remain pristine behind walls adorned with electric fencing. In luxury cars, whites drive by black and coloured maids, and though some domestic workers have been relocated to affordable housing establishments on the fringe of the city, many still live in apartheid-era servants’ quarters. The city is changing, no doubt, but at its current rate it cannot outpace the lasting consequences of apartheid.

“These are the real problems: job creation, redistribution, and how [to approach] these under current conditions,” Jean explained. “So there’s a tremendous amount of public promising— to be anything you can be, to be aspirational—but people don’t have the means to do it, which is why crime becomes a mode of production here. It becomes legitimate to people for whom the law, and the economy, and the constitution, have failed.”

A CITY REFORMED The challenge that Cape Town’s urban planners face today is to reverse the structures implemented to uphold spatial segregation, promoting integration and accessibility in the cracks of apartheid engineering. The last several years have seen many such efforts, including the redesign of the apartheid train terminal to increase transportation and access for the 2010 World Cup, but these efforts have not promoted lasting change.

“There is a very long way between creating the scaffolding

FALL 2016 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 17

NEIGHBORHOOD

of an enlightened society and actually realizing that society,” John noted, “because what intervenes are structural factors of economy, global as well as local, and politics that is both international and supranational as well as national. But it seems that the most urgent thing of all is the problem of redistribution—that’s why affordable housing is so important.”

Guy Briggs is the Head of Urban Design at dhk, a South African architecture and design firm with an office in Cape Town.

His work spans across the African continent, with projects ranging from city regeneration to development planning. According to Briggs, desegregation has been stunted by the government’s failure to acknowledge the spatial and structural nature of Cape Town’s segregation.

“The stated aim of the government over the past 20 years has been to redress inequality through, for example, providing housing for those who do not have access to housing, and providing access to services for those who do not have access to services,” Briggs told the HPR. “Therefore, much of the delivery of housing and services has followed the same pattern that apartheid city-making followed.” He paraphrased Einstein: “you’re never going to solve the problem by using the same methodologies that created it.”

Cape Town’s affordable housing initiatives are ineffective for two main reasons: too few houses have been built, and existing developments are located in the same distant locations allocated for non-whites during apartheid. Consequently, the non-white workers employed within central neighborhoods must travel long distances to work every day—a commute that is typically inefficient, expensive, and in many cases, dangerous. Other cities throughout South Africa have implemented bus rapid transit in order to make neighborhoods more accessible and less insular, and Briggs believes this system is one of the few urban solutions that can successfully integrate Cape Town and its sprawl.

“What [other cities] are doing with BRT is identifying highcapacity movement corridors that run throughout the city— stitching together areas that were previously zoned for whites only, areas previously zoned for black only, areas in which people work, areas in which people live—and running highcapacity transport links between those,” he explained. “They then seek to facilitate and encourage substantial redevelopment along the edges of those corridors for higher density, mixed-use development, so those corridors essentially become integrated environments themselves. That’s a strategy that very cleverly recognizes that it will take many, many years to integrate the cities in totality, but what we can do is create threads of integration that run right through the cities.”

Central affordable developments are hard to come by in Cape Town, considering its urban density and competitive real estate market. The few available plots of land for affordable housing have become widely disputed, with one party arguing for integration and the other battling to maintain the quality and integrity of their neighborhoods. While Briggs stands firmly in the former, he notes that these developments still won’t fully al-

18 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW FALL 2016

leviate the housing burden for Cape Town’s displaced thousands.

For now, these land battles must be supplemented with solutions to promote local economies within the townships.

“There has to be more resource allocation to the poorer areas, and there is hope that over time, these areas will have much more robust internal economies,” Briggs said. “At the moment they are effectively dormitory environments; the population leaves the environment to make money, and the monies that are earned on the outside are largely spent outside. These environments need to be developing their own economies so that the circulation of money is not necessarily entirely internal but is at least two-way. Then, they will slowly start to be uplifted.”

Briggs and the Comaroffs agree that desegregation will take many decades (indeed, it has already taken two). These solutions—redesigned transportation systems, centrally located affordable housing developments, and dynamic internal economies—will take time and dedication to implement. An awareness of the spatial challenges the city continues to face in the wake of apartheid must remain in this generation and those to follow in order for new developments to overcome troubling histories.

“It is far easier to segregate, and to plan segregation, and to implement segregation, than it is to undo it once it’s done,” Briggs said. “I think there’s a simple reason for that: planning and implementing segregation is essentially a violent act, and violence is easy. It’s far more difficult to make peace and to stay at peace and to live at peace and to have solutions that continue to work.”

A 30-minute boat ride from the Cape Town waterfront, Robben Island, the jail at which Nelson Mandela was held for 18 years, offers tourists the opportunity to learn about the island’s history and the inmates who once peopled its cells. Each group is led by a previous inmate on a walking tour inside the cells, stopping for a moment at Mandela’s, which spans two by three meters in size. The walls, now painted turquoise, were colorless during his residence. After the guide tells his own story of imprisonment—after speaking of the horror, the abuse, and the injustice of his captivity—he will tell the group that, despite all of this, he now lives in harmony with his captors. He may even say that they have become friends. The story told by the guides is that of a successful transition from a bad society to one that is inherently good, one that has overcome its past. This is lamentably reductive.

Cape Town still wears the scars of its racial segregation, and they can be seen in every neighborhood and suburb within its jurisdiction. A full transition will require new, innovative housing policies, larger allocations of funding to redistribution and job creation for the very poor, and an absolute devotion to ensuring that the benefits of these policies fall upon those they are meant to serve. But for now, these changes may be considered from different neighborhoods: by the coloured in the Cape Flats, the black in distant townships, and the white in walled suburbs nestled into the slopes of Table Mountain, with Robben Island only an obstruction in the otherwise uninterrupted ocean view.

When Young Metro Don’t Trust You

How “America’s subway” fell off the tracks Matthew Keating

L

ast January, in our nation’s capital, over 380 people were trapped underground for more than an hour while their Metro car filled with acrid smoke. The incident left one elderly woman dead, dozens hospitalized, and millions of commuters who use the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority service on edge.

Unfortunately, this tragic accident at L’Enfant Plaza was not an isolated incident. A quick glance at the past year of WMATA operations reveals a history of safety, service, and communication failures. A fire in a power distribution plant, an oil spill on Metro tracks, a train derailment at the Smithsonian station, and an insulator explosion at the Federal Center SW station are just a few among a series of disturbances associated with the District’s public transit system. DC Metro commuters have become so accustomed to their city’s failing train system that the Twitter account @UnSuckMetro, has amassed as an online following of more than 50,000 commuters documenting WMATA’s daily failures.

How did “America’s Subway”—a metro system that at the time of its creation was hailed as the gold standard for American public transportation—get this bad?

THEY’RE NOT THE ONLY POWER The answer might lie within the structure of WMATA itself.

WMATA is a tri-jurisdictional government agency controlled and regulated through an interstate compact between Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. WMATA is governed through a board of advisors composed of two members from each of these regions, in addition to two members appointed to represent the federal government. Having these three regions constantly competing for their parochial interests has effectively politicized the board, producing a series of quid pro quo kickbacks. Board members deal out their budget through a back and forth battle over which region and constituency receives new lines, operational subsidies, bus stops, station renovations, or operating hours extensions. Beholden to their constituents, appointed members have more incentive to advocate for popular expansionary plans than to simply maintain service quality.

Another oddity of WMATA is the way the agency is financed. Most public transportation systems finance their capital and operating budgets through dedicated funding schemes by the transit systems’ respective regional governmental author-

FALL 2016 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 19

UNITED STATES

ity. However, since WMATA is spread out over three different autonomous regions, it cannot levy direct taxes like other systems. Instead, WMATA relies on local and state subsidies for a majority of its budget. These county and state subsidies are by no means guaranteed, meaning WMATA must compete with a slew of other local bureaus and departments for vital operational funding each fiscal year.

Boston’s MBTA by contrast, derives practically none of its budget from local and state subsidies, instead getting 62 percent of its funding from dedicated revenues like direct transit taxes in addition to fare and toll revenue. New York’s MTA, the largest and most utilized public transport system in the United States, receives just 8 percent of its budget from local subsidies.

WMATA’s budget, on the other hand, relies on an astounding 47 percent on subsidies.

This dependency on unreliable year-to-year local subsidies makes it difficult for WMATA to plan and allocate funds for long-term projects and multi-year safety renovations. It also makes WMATA funding susceptible to political manipulation by the three regional authorities it derives funding from. Just this year, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe threatened to withhold Virginia’s WMATA subsidy if the agency did not meet his administration’s newly devised safety standards.

With few other alternatives for funding, WMATA has been forced to increase riders’ fares in order to fund its projects. The DC metro is already one of the most expensive rail systems in the country, with a maximum single trip fare as high as $6.75.

WMATA riders finance a much higher percent of operational costs than most riders in other cities. The DC Metro’s farebox ratio—the percentage of operating costs covered by rider’s fares—is 67.8 percent, the third highest in the entire country.

Faced with declining revenue streams, WMATA continues to reduce operating costs at the expense of service quality. In 2012, Metro introduced RushPlus, a rush hour schedule that increased metro car frequency on the Orange, Blue, and Yellow lines.

Despite hailing it as a method to “serve more customers and reduce overcrowding on trains”, WMATA was soon forced to cut down service to certain sections of the Blue line and increase the waiting time to 12 minutes during rush hour on other lines. In an extensive article reviewing WMATA’s operations, the Washingtonian Magazine found that WMATA has repeatedly spun statistics to make them seem more favorable, once publicly declaring that they had exceeded on-time rail performance targets only after discreetly reducing the benchmark by 5 percent.

Even the Metro’s famous omnipresent elevator outage problem stems from a policy of frugality. Almost twenty-five years ago, WMATA decided to get rid of private contractors for elevator repairs and instead rely on mechanics trained in-house. Yet even with over 214 staffers—one for every four elevators on the system—and a budget of over $22.5 million expressly for elevator repair, on any given day, one out of every eight elevators in the system is out of service.

20 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW FALL 2016

NOW IF I USE THIS MODEL In trying to turn the system around, WMATA can look to New York City for hope. In the late 1970s, New York’s public transit system was in dire straits. Crumbling infrastructure, falling ridership, and near-bankruptcy led New York Governor Hugh Cary to appoint Richard Ravitch, a successful real estate and business magnate, as MTA chairman to turn the agency around.

Upon appointment, Ravitch wasted no time. He sat down with engineers and asked for a comprehensive expenditure estimate in order to completely repair and modernize the New York City subway. Ravitch held open town hall meetings with thousands of subway riders in order to hear their blistering complaints. Then Ravitch went on a blitzkrieg PR campaign, meeting with editors of New York’s largest newspapers in order to garner enough free press to grab the attention of the state legislature in Albany. He met with business leaders, many of them fiscally conservative Republicans, explaining how a lack of reliable public transportation was bad for their businesses and workers.

These business leaders then used their influence to convince upstate Republicans to put in place the necessary transit taxes to directly fund MTA’s capital budget. After months of campaigning, Ravitch achieved what MTA desperately needed: an unprecedented $55 billion in capital investment and the political support of both taxpayers and state lawmakers.

But will WMATA be lucky enough to find its own Ravitch?

It is more likely than it sounds. Last November, WMATA named Paul Widefeld, former director of the Baltimore-Washington International Airport, as its new general manager. Now almost half a year into his position, Widefeld has enacted some bold reform measures. This past spring, Widefeld proposed the most far-reaching maintenance plan in DC metro history. The plan, nicknamed “SafeTrack”, is a year-long project that will result in numerous line closures while the city implements much-needed repairs.

Widefeld has shown a readiness to enact not-so-popular measures in order to prioritize safety and the repair schedule.

During the SafeTrack program period, extensions of operating hours after midnight are forbidden for mass late night events, a common practice that, although popular to the public, severely limits the number of off-service working hours available for repairs. SafeSurge aims to achieve 3 years of normal timeline maintenance in just 1 year. The repairs are, at this point, emergency in nature in order to keep riders safe. The plan, however, will disrupt hundreds of thousands of workers and commuters trying to get in and out of the District for over a year—impacting worker productivity and the local economy. But after decades of negligence and WMATA leadership caving to complaints that these types of repairs are too intrusive, the agency has finally been forced to resort to extreme measures. As Widefeld remarked, “We cannot keep trying to Band-Aid over these issues.

This is tough medicine. But we have to take it. And the sooner we take it, the better we’re all going to be.”

UNITED STATES

MASS INCARCERATION IN RURAL COMMUNITIES OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND David Gutierrez

W

hen the local economy of Susanville, California stagnated, the town tried to use a newly constructed prison as a recovery tool. Opened in the late 1990s, High Desert State Prison cost $272 million to build. High Desert, originally intended to be a low- to medium-security prison, became a Level III and IV correctional facility. This required the town to spend millions building roads, bolstering the police force, and expanding services to those newly employed by the prison. Yet Susanville’s current unemployment rate is at an astounding 10 percent and its job growth is negative. By almost every measure, the prison failed to stimulate Susanville’s economy.

Prison culture is deeply ingrained in American culture. Even American entertainment is reflecting this fact more and more, with shows about prison life like Orange is the New Black and Prison Break becoming increasingly popular. Part of the reason prisons are such a mainstay of American popular culture may be that the United States has so many prisoners. The United States currently incarcerates 2.3 million of its citizens, 58 percent of them African American and Latino. But in all of this media attention about prison, little attention is paid to how prisons affect the communities where they are located. In fact, correctional facilities are completely out of sight for many Americans. Prisons close to cities, like the infamous Rikers Island off the coast of Manhattan, are now the exception. From 1992 to 1994, 83 prisons out of 138 were built in non-metro areas.

With the rise of stringent drug laws and the broken windows policy in the early 1990s, demand for new prisons grew, and so did the belief that prisons could serve as a tool for rural economic development. Thomas Coughlin, the New York Corrections Commissioner from 1979 to 1994, told Newsweek in 1990, “Prisons are viewed as the anchor for development in rural areas. We give our list to the legislature, and the next day I get back the list of where our prisons are going to be. They pick ’em.” Prisons, of course, brought a multitude of prisoners to these rural communities, who, due to Census policy, count towards the total population of the community. The net economic effects of prisons on rural communities, however, appear to have been overstated because of faulty studies, the fact that rural towns follow the economic path of their respective state, and the difficulty and length of the correctional officer training process.

FALL 2016 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 21

UNITED STATES

HIGH EXPECTATIONS MEET REALITY One of the origins of the misconception that prisons can revitalize a rural economy is research commissioned by governmental agencies who have political motivations to maintain their status and promote their own interests. Often, these groups are willing to promote laws that would increase the demand for prisons. For example, the California “Three Strikes” policy was strongly supported by the California Correctional Peace Officers Association. Many of the studies researching the economic impact of prisons were flawed and not peer reviewed. As a result of these studies, many rural towns lobbied for the construction of prisons in their town believing that these prisons would actually provide a sustainable job source for their residents.

According to a study that focused on the relation between the prison industry and employment between 1969 and 1994, however, the presence of a prison might actually harm the local economy. In fact, rural counties without a prison had faster growth in their income per capita and total earnings than their counterparts. Interestingly enough, employment grew at a slower rate when a new prison was built. But to understand the true impact of a prison on a rural community, the previous economic situation of that town needs to be accounted for. In rapidly growing communities, prisons aided the growth of public sector jobs. Towns that were struggling, meanwhile, were hurt by the construction of a new prison because the prison constrained private development. In general, researchers found that prisons did not improve the unemployment rate, median family income, or earnings. Instead, it appeared that the economic welfare of counties was more determined by that of the state they were in.

FOLLOW THE LEADER Cañon City, located in Fremont County, Colorado, had correctional facilities very early on its history. Founded in 1860, Cañon City built its first prison, the first territorial prison of Colorado, just 11 years after its founding. The advent of the correctional industry so early in the town’s industry molded Cañon City into what it is today. Territorial Prison, as the prison is commonly called, is located right on Main Street while the remaining 13 prisons in the town are located a couple of miles away. Yet, according to local officials, Cañon City is much more than just a town with prisons. Lisa Hyams, the Executive Director of Cañon City Chamber of Commerce, told the HPR that new businesses, like IHOP and Big R, recently moved into the community.

Hyams also mentioned the importance of its tourism industry with the flowing Arkansas River and the surrounding geography providing astonishing landscapes. Rob Brown, the director of the Fremont County Development Corporation, told the HPR that prisons should not be the main driving force for economic development as some thought in the ’90s. “[The prisons] have an extraordinary positive effect the moment they are created because you have major construction projects and a lot of activity. But once they’re up and running, then there isn’t a great deal of growth nor would you want a great deal of growth. That’s the only business that you run where your business diminishes in need instead of increasing in need.” Many of the jobs created by the prison industry only exist during construction and cannot actually be a driving force for sustainable economic growth.

22 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW FALL 2016

These construction contracts also tend to be given to large, outside construction companies, since their costs are smaller than local competitors. One prison constructed in Franklin County, New York, for example, was built by a firm in Syracuse, had its heating and ventilation completed by a firm from Albany, and its plumbing completed by a different Syracuse firm. These contracts were cumulatively worth more than $31.3 million, little of which actually benefited the residents of Franklin County. Local workers also do not always have the necessary skills required to build the prisons, which further limits their ability to benefit from prison construction. These construction jobs were also limited to the residents of Fremont County as the local tradesmen had less than the necessary skills required to build the prisons and outside contractors and workers were brought in.

The economic plans for Fremont County are now based on bringing other businesses into the area. “The city of Cañon City, they’ve created a program where they waive building permit fees and water tap fees,” Brown explained to the HPR. “So if you choose to build in Cañon City then you’re able to construct without having to pay a building permit fee or a water tap fee.” These incentives then help attract both businesses and prisons to the community. The building fee for Boulder, Colorado is $5,979 for the first $1,000,000 of a building’s evaluation and $3.85 for each thousand dollars more. Nearby, in the city of Fountain, Colorado, the water fees can be as high as $310,081.

DIFFICULTY TO WORK In 2012, 469,500 people worked as correctional officers. With such a difficult job, however, the turnover is extremely high—41 percent in private prisons and 15 percent in public prisons. The job of a correctional officer is stressful, dangerous, and extremely taxing. Jails are functioning day and night, and they require constant vigilance. Therefore, correctional officers need to be extremely well trained. In California, those who want to become correctional officers must submit an application, pass a written exam, and pass a physical fitness test. Each of these exams have long disqualification dates, ranging from four months to a year.

Therefore, the stakes for these tests are high and require extensive preparation.

To reach these testing sites, many applicants have to travel long distances. In California, there are 35 adult institutions and three youth facilities. Yet the state has only three testing centers, and all are located near large cities. After training, many new correctional officers have to work in a facility in urban southern California, where more correctional officers are needed, instead of a prison nearby their own rural community. This mismatch between where correctional officers are from and where they work is true of Colorado, too. “A large percentage of the people that work in [Florence’s prisons] don’t necessarily live in Florence and live in larger areas like Pueblo or Colorado Springs,” Brown said. Therefore, correctional facilities in rural communities don’t necessarily create long-term jobs for the residents of those communities.

PRISON GERRYMANDERING For residents of rural communities, there is one positive aspects of having prisons in their backyard: giving them a greater share of political power than they otherwise would have. Prison

UNITED STATES

gerrymandering, counting prisoners as residents of the town where their prison is located even though they cannot vote, has consequences for both urban and rural areas. This situation reeks of the British “rotten boroughs” of the late 1800s. When a household fills out the census, it is asked to avoid counting certain residents; these excluded residents include members of the household who are currently incarcerated. Census officials then travel to prisons and correctional facilities to count the prisoners themselves. This is because of a vague U.S. Census rule that states that people are counted at their “usual residence,” which is defined as “the place where they live and sleep most of the time.” According to this rule, adult prisoners are counted at the facility they are incarcerated in instead of the towns they came from.

Some districts benefited greatly from counting prisoners as residents. In Wisconsin, the 53rd Assembly District, which has the highest concentration of prisons in the state, has 5,583 “residents” residing in jail. Although this district claims to have a large African American presence in its town, only 590 of its 2,784 African American residents can be found out of jail. In New York, seven state senate districts only met the minimum population after the prison population was accounted for in the 2000 Census. One western Maryland district received 18 percent of its population from a large prison complex. As a result, four residents residing in this district have the same political influence as five residents living somewhere else.

The most important aspect of the census is its effect on the House of Representatives. Every 10 years, the House of Representatives’ 435 seats are reapportioned in order to account for the demographic shift that occurred in the previous 10 years.

Given the increasing number of Americans that are incarcerated, this reapportionment ensures in increasing numbers of House districts that are overrepresented or underrepresented. Not only are districts with prisons more politically powerful than their neighbors, but the political power of the prisoners’ original districts, often urban communities, is reduced.

REFORMING PRISON GERRYMANDERING Maryland, New York, and California have all passed laws to curb prison gerrymandering. These states, especially New York, which counted 71,446 prisoners at a different location during the 2000 Census, saw prison gerrymandering as a threat to their democracies. In August 2010 New York passed Part XX, a law that required the state Department of Corrections to collect the residential address of prisoners before they are incarcerated to allow for the correct demographics of each of its counties.

It is not just states, however, that are reforming their systems.

Two hundred counties, towns, and communities have taken it upon themselves to not count the prison population when the district lines were redrawn. Howard County, Texas, for example, refused to count a prison population of 5,000 when redistricting occurred, which would have given four residents of the county’s

first precinct the same influence as 10 residents in other areas of the United States. Jerry Kilgore, who served as the second precinct commissioner in Howard County from 1995 to 2010, fought against counting the prisoners as residents of the county. Kilgore told the HPR that this prison gerrymandering resulted in the county receiving more money for roads than it needed, and that angered him. “I don’t feel good about it, whether it’s local taxes or federal taxes. It’s still people’s money,” he said.

In Jefferson County, Florida the ACLU is fighting prison gerrymandering. Jefferson is a rural county of 14,050 residents and 17.2 percent of these residents live below the poverty line. By counting prisoners at the Jefferson Correctional Institution as residents in the county’s third district, four residents in District 3 have the same voting power as seven residents in other parts of the County. Nancy Abudu, an ACLU Legal director working on the case, told the HPR that Jefferson County did not have to count its prisoners. “[County officials] got a demographer who was able to draw and show that it was possible [to create a plan that didn’t count prisoners] … Yet the county commission adopted a plan where prisoners constituted 40 percent of the voting population,” explained Abudu. There are 1.6 million Florida residents who cannot vote because they were convicted of a felony. Disenfranchising the prisoners yet still counting them in the population allows for districts with prisons to gain inordinate political power.

TOWARD CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM IN RURAL AMERICA While the use of prisons as a tool to drive rural economic development has been mixed at best, rural communities can attract other sorts of industries. The New Homestead Opportunity Act of 2011 incentivizes entrepreneurship and local businesses in rural areas by providing government-matched savings accounts called “Individual Homestead Accounts.” Other programs, like the Rural Enterprise Assistance Program, provide necessary assistance for ambitious startups and small business owners in rural communities. Rural economic development is moving towards a brighter future and away from its dark past during the 1990s.

Yet the problem of mass incarceration remains alive and well.

Although the amount of incarcerated people is decreasing, this diminution is relatively small compared to the gigantic boom of the last four decades. Many Americans do not realize the sheer number of prison complexes around them because they are out of sight and thus out of mind. But just because they are invisible to the majority does not mean that they do not vastly affect the lives of minorities. The fight to reduce the number of prisons will be long and strenuous, yet so is every movement toward justice. After heavy criticism, the Census Bureau changed its policy so that willing states and localities could identify their prison populations and not count them. It is now up to individual towns and counties to make the ethical choice.

FALL 2016 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 23

UNITED STATES

CONTAGION FLINT’S EFFECT ON MICHIGAN POLITICS Henry Atkins

O

n May 17, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder sat before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and described the Flint water crisis as “a failure of government at all levels.” This statement would be ridiculed for months to come.

The failure of which he spoke is perhaps best understood in numbers: 10,200 polluted water lines, countless lost IQ points, and an entire city of 98,000 people poisoned by its own drinking water. It is estimated that since Flint, Michigan stopped drawing from Detroit’s water system and began using the Flint River as its chief water source in April 2014, the percentage of children with above-average lead levels increased by 50 percent. The source of the lead pollution lies in the Flint River itself, which is dangerously corrosive and has caused lead from Flint’s pipes to leach into the potable water.

In the eyes of many Michiganders, the blame for the disaster lies with Snyder and his administration. At the center of the crisis were Flint’s Emergency Manager Ed Kurtz, a Snyder appoin-

24 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW FALL 2016

tee who made the decision to disconnect the city from Detroit’s water system, and State Treasurer Andy Dillon, who authorized usage of the Flint River as a water source until the city could link up to the Karegnondi Water Supply. Many Michigan residents also hold Snyder’s administration at fault for its slow response to the crisis. By January 2016, several months after the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality pronounced Flint’s drinking water unsafe, Walmart, Coca-Cola, and Nestlé had together provided more bottled water to the city than the state had. Total state aid to Flint now amounts to a mere $234 million, despite Mayor Karen Weaver’s assessment that replacing all of the city’s lead-tainted water lines would require over $1 billion.

Snyder’s approval rating stands at just 40 percent—down 15 percent from last June—and his disapproval rating has climbed to 52 percent, which is the worst it has been during his tenure as governor. And the fallout from Flint does not stop there. It could seriously damage the Michigan GOP’s prospects in the upcoming election cycle.

UNITED STATES

RETAKING THE STATE HOUSE For Democrats, 2016 offers a rare opportunity to change the narrative in Michigan politics. Since the 2010 elections, when Governor Snyder swept into office with a landslide 58 percent victory and Republicans gained control over both chambers of the legislature, Democrats have struggled to regain their footing.

In the state house, Republicans hold 63 seats over the Democrats’ 46. In the senate, the GOP controls 27 seats, while the Democrats hold only 10.

Despite Republicans’ massive numerical advantage, House Democratic Campaign Chairman Adam Zemke (D-Ann Arbor) is optimistic about Democratic prospects at the polls this November. Zemke told the Detroit News in April, “Everything is lined up for us in 2016.” He cited the Republican presidential ticket, with Donald Trump at its head, as hurting the chances of downticket Republican candidates. Trump is deeply unpopular in the Mitten State, with Hillary Clinton holding a 17-point advantage over the Republican nominee. Many GOP legislators in Michigan will also find themselves term-limited this November, improving the chances of Democratic challengers aiming to win in Republican districts.

Now take into account the Flint water crisis and the Democrats’ odds of electoral success begin to sound plausible. Michigan Democratic Party Chair Brandon Dillon believes that Flint’s water disaster has damaged the entire Republican brand in Michigan. In an interview with the HPR, Dillon called the crisis a reminder of the consequences of Republicans’ “obsession with trying to run government like a business.” Dillon said Democrats are incorporating the crisis into their messaging efforts, focusing on “demanding accountability” and explaining to voters that the crisis was a direct result of the GOP’s governing philosophy. According to Dillon, there are between 12 and 14 state house seats that the Democrats are hoping to flip with this message.

Others are more skeptical about Flint’s impact on upcoming elections. In an interview with the HPR, John Truscott, the president and principal of Lansing-based public relations firm Truscott Rossman, countered that “the election is an eternity away” and that Republicans have “time to recover.” He also noted that in districts farther away from Flint, the issue might have less of an impact on voters. Since the party hopes to pick up seats in far from Flint, Democratic challengers in those races may not be rewarded as much for incorporating Flint into their messaging efforts.

SECURING THE GOVERNOR’S OFFICE If Snyder’s popularity continues to flounder, it will be extremely difficult for the GOP to win the next gubernatorial election in 2018. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that the favorite for the Republican nomination, Attorney General Bill Schuette, lacks the broad electoral support to do well in the general election. Critics accuse him of using his office to pander to the Christian right, as he has built a reputation as a conservative crusader in debates surrounding social issues in Michigan.

In 2013, when Michigan’s ban on gay marriage was challenged in federal court, Schuette argued that the ban needed to be upheld so the state could “regulate sexual relationships” and protect

heterosexual couples’ “unique procreative capacity.” Michigan lost the case, but rather than accept the ruling, Schuette took the matter all the way to the Supreme Court, where the justices’ decision in Obergefell v. Hodges struck down gay marriage bans nationwide. He has also filed lawsuits against abortion providers and medical marijuana dispensaries.

Schuette’s high visibility and consistent conservative advocacy have made him the most popular Republican in the gubernatorial election field. Schuette’s political action committee has raised over half a million dollars this election cycle alone, far outpacing the $332,000 brought in by Lieutenant Governor Brian Calley, Schuette’s most likely rival in the GOP primary.

In addition, he spoke at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland during its opening day, an honor which indicates the national GOP’s belief that he is a rising star.

Whoever clinches the GOP nomination will have to contend with the Flint question, and there are signs that Schuette may already be distancing himself from Snyder’s administration. In May, he called Snyder’s internal state investigation regarding the Flint water crisis an “obstruction of justice,” and in June he revealed that Snyder’s private attorneys were not providing documents he had requested.

But even while clashing with others in the Snyder administration, he has taken a leading role in the administration’s response to the Flint water crisis. In April, Schuette announced criminal charges against two state officials and one Flint city official for their part in the crisis. And on June 22, he formally sued two engineering firms for allowing the situation in Flint to “occur, continue, and worsen.” These actions indicate that he may be aware of the potential impact of Flint on a future gubernatorial run. However, Truscott warns that Schuette is “in danger of a huge overreach,” noting that Veolia North America, one of the two engineering firms Schuette sued, was not contracted for lead and copper testing in Flint’s water supply.

The Flint water crisis is also likely to impact the Democratic gubernatorial primary, where Ingham County Prosecutor and former Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer has long been viewed as the most likely nominee. However, given the Flint crisis, Congressman Dan Kildee, who represents Michigan’s 5th District, which includes Flint, is now one to watch.

Kildee has reportedly begun considering a run after seeing the impact of the current governor’s policies on his city. Like other Democrats, Kildee sees a direct link between the GOP’s governing philosophy and the disaster in Flint, suggesting the governor’s “obsession with austerity” helped create the crisis. He has also urged Snyder to set aside funds from Michigan’s $575 million budget surplus for providing relief to Flint. Thus, the Flint water crisis has allowed Kildee to insert himself in his state’s politics as a champion of environmental and social justice.

A recent survey conducted by Michigan State University found that for the first time in roughly 15 years, residents did not identify “jobs/economy” as the most pressing problem for the state to act on. Instead, Michiganders were most concerned about “infrastructure of cities.” Whether the state legislature is controlled by Republicans or Democrats, and whether the legislation it passes goes to a Republican or Democratic governor, the popular legitimacy of Michigan’s government will hinge on how it responds in the wake of the Flint crisis.

FALL 2016 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 25

IN SEARCH OF TRANSPARENCY

A COLLABORATIVE EFFORT AGAINST CORRUPTION IN HONDURAS Henry Atkins and Ana Suazo

26 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW FALL 2016

WORLD

O

ver the past two years, thousands of Hondurans have died due to inadequate medical care in the country’s public hospitals. Crucial supplies like kidney dialysis machines and x-ray plates have been unavailable when urgently needed.

The cause of the shortages is no mystery: in 2013, the director of Honduras’ national health care system embezzled $350 million from the agency’s budget, some of which was subsequently transferred to President Juan Orlando Hernández’s National Party. Up to 2,888 people died in the aftermath of this misappropriation; one observer labeled the theft “genocide without parallel in the history of [Honduras].”

Yet the incident was far from Honduras’ only recent struggle with corruption. Human Rights Watch’s 2015 World Report notes “endemic corruption within the police force” and “intimidation” of the judiciary as key problems the country faces.

Journalists working in Honduras are often subject to “violence,” “death threats” and “abusive judicial proceedings.” Transparency International currently ranks Honduras 112th out of 168 countries on its Corruption Perceptions Index.

But not long after the scandal surrounding Honduras’ health care system broke in January 2014, many onlookers saw reasons for optimism. In 2015, a grassroots anti-corruption movement known as Los Indignados, or “The Outraged,” gained broad traction with the Honduran public. After a UN-affiliated anticorruption commission in neighboring Guatemala known as the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala proved effective in exposing widespread government corruption and eventually led to Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina’s resignation, momentum grew for Honduras to establish its own version of the CICIG. Last September, President Hernández announced that an agreement had been reached with the Organization of American States to establish an anti-corruption commission. In a statement, OAS secretary general Luis Almagro said the Mission to Support the Fight Against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras would “seek to make the justice system an effective tool in the fight against impunity, that manages to earn the respect of the people of Honduras.” The OAS granted the MACCIH a budget of $32 million, while the United States and Germany contributed an additional $5.2 million and $2.5 million respectively. Yet 10 months since the MACCIH was announced and two months since it officially began operations, it still faces many obstacles.

It will take the cooperation from the Honduran government and a revitalization of public confidence in the country’s governing institutions for the organization to effectively challenge corruption in Honduras.

A ROUGH START In January 2014, Honduras’ National Congress passed the Law of Secrets, which allows the government to withhold information regarding security and defense spending for up to 25 years. This policy remains in full force, even as President Hernández promises the MACCIH will be granted unrestricted

access to government information. While nominally, the MACCIH “will have full access to information, official documents, databases, public records and archives,” the Law of Secrets provides the government with authority to deny the MACCIH information that could be relevant to its investigations.

If the MACCIH is to be successful, this law must either be eliminated or given urgent reform, according Rodolfo Dumas, a regional vice chairman with the Inter American Press. “Beyond restricting information access to both the population and the MACCIH, this law violates the international human right of access to public information,” he wrote in a local newspaper.

Dumas suggested a solution. “The MACCIH should propose to reform the [Law of Secrets], ensuring that it will comply with the minimum standards established by our legislation and the principles recognized by international law.”

However, Norma Iris Coto, a judge in San Pedro Sula who represents the Latin American Federation of Judges on the MACCIH, disagrees with his interpretation of the Law of Secrets’ impact on the MACCIH proceedings. In an interview with the HPR, she argued that “because the MACCIH was established in cooperation with the government, they will have total access to undisclosed information that proves useful to their investigations … for the MACCIH, this law will not have any effect.” However, the mere fact that there is ambiguity surrounding the law’s potential effect on the commission opens the door for disagreements between the government and MACCIH. While members of the group have stated that they will publicly denounce any obstacles that the government places in their path, it remains to be seen just how feasible that will be.

Another challenge for the newly formed anti-corruption agency involves its own design. The MACCIH does not possess its own investigatory and prosecutory powers, and instead the body will largely be relegated to a technical role in support of existing investigators and prosecutors in Honduras. This is alarming, given ongoing concerns regarding the independence of the country’s judiciary. It’s also a notable departure from the UN-backed CICIG in Guatemala, which was given the power to conduct highly sensitive investigations on its own. Many of the Honduran protesters who demanded an anti-corruption commission after seeing the CICIG’s success were, of course, disappointed by the MACCIH’s incomplete structure.

But even if the judiciary fully cooperated with the MACCIH, there would remain difficulties associated with coordinating investigations between various groups. Luis Larach, president of the Honduran Council of Private Enterprise, noted in an interview with the HPR that the MACCIH’s efforts will require time, as the commission will likely need many months to train the judicial personnel who will assist its efforts.

Some are also worried that the Honduran government may not abide by the agreement negotiated with the OAS to create the MACCIH. The creation of the body was delayed for months because the initial draft of the agreement granted the commission power to receive and investigate complaints, which the Honduran government opposed. In its final form, the commission lacks this power as well as the authority to compel legislative action to address corruption. On many occasions, the Hon-

FALL 2016 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 27

WORLD

duran government has demonstrated a disinterest in enforcing the country’s anti-corruption laws and has faced a potential loss of U.S. foreign aid numerous times due to its failure to rein in irresponsible public-sector behavior. Given this troubled record, it seems entirely possible that the Honduran government could ignore the commission’s findings or even renege on the agreement with the OAS entirely.

Moreover, the idea of permitting an international organization like the OAS to supervise the national justice system and take legal action does not appeal to every citizen, with President Hernández himself proposing instead a “Honduran solution” that would see a diminished role for the body’s investigators and consultants. Larach explained why an organization with broad investigatory and prosecutory powers may not be a suitable solution. “Replacing our institutions and our government system with an international organization would be an attack on our sovereignty and our weakened branches of government.”

Therefore, the MACCIH’s task is hampered not only by the government’s secrecy and intransigence, but also by some citizens’ skepticism.

FILLING IN THE GAPS It is clear that the MACCIH’s success hinges on the government’s willingness to cooperate with its efforts and respect the commission’s independent authority. Lester Ramirez, an investigation coordinator for Transparency International, commented in an interview with the HPR that “the government’s obligation is to ensure that there are no voluntary or involuntary obstacles in the investigation and prosecution of corruption cases.” Granting the MACCIH full access to Honduran government records, including those traditionally classified under the Law of Secrets, would allow it to more effectively uncover wrongdoing, as would permitting the commission to assemble its own impartial team of Honduran prosecutors and investigators.

Yet, as Judge Coto highlighted, the government won’t be the only key partner in the MACCIH’s operations. She noted that Chilean representatives from the Justice Studies Center of the Americas would be providing instruction to Honduran mem-

28 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW FALL 2016

bers of the MACCIH, which may help insulate the organization from government bias. Aside from protecting the MACCIH’s operations from politicization, this would mitigate bureaucratic complications arising from excess coordination between the MACCIH and Honduran government agencies.

The MACCIH may also benefit from collaboration with Honduras’ civil society. The agreement establishing the MACCIH mandated “the creation of a Criminal Justice System Observatory composed of academic organizations and Honduran civil society to monitor and evaluate the progress of the reform of Honduran justice.” Ramirez emphasized the importance of this body’s collaboration with the mission, saying that “this justice observatory will consolidate monitoring and oversight from civil society, which is crucial to ensure transparent investigations.”

Kurt Ver Beek, co-founder of the Honduran nonprofit Association for a More Just Society, expressed a similar opinion in an interview with the HPR, saying that while it is “possible” that the Honduran government may deny information to the MACCIH, he believes Honduran civil society organizations like his will be able to hold the Hernández administration accountable.

There are indications that Honduras may finally have the momentum and firepower to deal with its corruption problems.

The Indignados movement provided the strongest evidence yet that the Honduran public is closely following corruption issues.

Hundreds of thousands of citizens, including young people who traditionally participate less in political affairs, protested against corruption in over 50 cities across Honduras last year. Foreign nations like Mexico, the United States, and Canada are providing monetary and technical support to strengthen the MACCIH. At the same time, international pressure is being applied to the country’s government to root out corruption: earlier this year, the European Union provided funding for an independent study on Honduran corruption.

The MACCIH was born from the demands of Honduran society. And while it may not be a completely effective mission against corruption, it is certainly evidence that Hondurans and others are fed up with the country’s often irresponsible officials and have been able to mobilize political force behind their concerns.

WORLD

NO CHOICE IN BELFAST Accessing Abortion in Northern Ireland

Akshaya Annapragada

FALL 2016 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 29

WORLD

I

n April, a 21-year-old woman from Northern Ireland was given a three-month jail sentence for committing a crime considered heinous in her country. It was a relatively light sentence—under the law, she could have been condemned to life in prison. Strangely, the punishment was handed down for an action considered legal throughout the rest of the United Kingdom—taking mifepristone and misoprostol pills to induce abortion. The World Health Organization considers these essential medicines, yet it is forbidden to procure them in Northern Ireland. This woman (whose name was kept confidential for privacy) could not afford to travel to England for a procedure, so she bought the pills online. After her housemates reported her, she was prosecuted.

Ulster laws against abortion are strict: terminating a pregnancy is only permitted if the mother’s life is at risk. Exemptions are provided neither for victims of rape or incest nor for those carrying fetuses with fatal abnormalities. Violators and those who help them can face long prison sentences. This policy, according to many, violates women’s rights to control their bodies.

It certainly has negative public health implications and raises legal concerns given its inconsistency with current UK law.

But recently, Belfast’s stance on abortion has come under increased scrutiny by women’s health advocates, bringing hope to many that Northern Irish abortion laws will take a progressive turn.

A UNIQUE TRAJECTORY Today, Northern Ireland operates under the United Kingdom’s 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, which makes abortion completely illegal. The rest of the country modified the law with the 1929 Infant Life Act and 1938 Bourne Judgment, establishing lawful abortion when the mother’s mental or physical health is at risk. Although much later, Northern Ireland adopted this provision in 1945 and has since maintained it. But England, Scotland and Wales further modified these laws with the 1967 Abortion Act, allowing for abortion up to 24 weeks into pregnancy—and beyond, under extenuating circumstances—with physician approval and supervision. Despite legal access to abortion across the rest of the United Kingdom, this protection was never extended to women in Northern Ireland.

Understanding why Northern Ireland’s restrictive abortion laws contrast with those of the rest of the United Kingdom requires an examination of the region’s complex governmental history. When Britain’s Westminster government passed the 1967 Abortion Act, Northern Ireland was still ruled independently by its own parliament, which passed no similar law. The United Kingdom initiated direct rule over Northern Ireland in 1972, but pro-choice interests never gained traction, and the U.K. government never applied the 1967 act to the newly fully incorporated country. In 1998, the Belfast Agreement created the Northern Ireland Assembly to share power with the Westminster government. Today, it controls policy areas devolved, or decentralized, to it by London, including abortion.

Generally, Northern Ireland has tended toward more conservative social policy than the rest of the United Kingdom. The country only decriminalized homosexuality in 1982 (15 years after England and Wales did so) and is the only area in the United Kingdom to prohibit gay marriage. Abortion policy has proven no exception. Since 2010, when abortion matters were devolved

30 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW FALL 2016

to Belfast, Northern Ireland’s parliament has staunchly maintained its position, allowing abortion only when the mother’s health is imminently threatened.

A DANGEROUS CHOICE In recent years, pills for medical abortion prior to week nine of pregnancy have become available online from organizations outside of Northern Ireland such as Women Help Women and Women on Web. Mifepristone and Misoprostol are safe options for women looking to terminate their pregnancies, but purchasing them is illegal. Furthermore, women who buy pills online put themselves at risk, because they cannot be sure that the pills they receive are what they ordered. Genevieve Edwards, Head of U.K. Policy and Communications at Marie Stopes United Kingdom—the only charity to offer legal abortion pills in Northern Ireland—told the HPR that “when you buy pills online that aren’t regulated, you don’t know what the content or the quality of that drug is.” Purchasing pills through more reputable sources can alleviate this danger; however, there is still a risk of life-threatening complications when used without the guidance of a doctor.

Though Mifepristone and Misoprostol pills are usually safe and effective, they can cause serious, but treatable, side effects.

In less than 3 percent of cases, complications such as hemorrhaging, incomplete abortion, or infection occur, necessitating medical care. However, “if you’ve bought those pills illegally, it may make you reluctant to come forward for further medical attention. [This law] puts women in very, very difficult positions where they are potentially risking their health and also a jail sentence,” according to Edwards.

For the majority of Northern Irish women seeking abortion, the only legal option is to travel abroad. As much of a hardship as travel can be, explained Edwards, “[the women who travel] are the lucky ones. They’re the ones with the money, and the ability, and the means to travel.” Those who cannot travel “face a very stark choice indeed. It’s either being forced to continue with the pregnancy or risk[ing] their health and liberty by buying illegal pills online.”

In 2015, 16 known legal abortions were performed in Northern Ireland, while 833 women traveled to England or Wales for the procedure. But this number likely underestimates the amount forced to travel abroad for abortion, as many women don’t list a Northern Ireland address when they arrive, and some travel to Scotland or outside the United Kingdom. According to Edwards, “there is definitely a demand that’s not being met.

That’s for sure. You can see there is a gulf, a world of difference, between the numbers [of abortions] happening in Northern Ireland and those that are happening in England.”

The costs of travel, accommodation, and medical services for an abortion outside of Northern Ireland can range from $500 to $2500, an amount prohibitive for many women. Mara Clarke, director at Abortion Support Network, a volunteer led organization dedicated to helping women cover these costs, spoke with the HPR about the drastic measures some clients attempt before finding ASN. “They’ve drunk bleach and floor cleaner. They’ve gotten three packs of birth control pills and taken them with a bottle of gin. There was a woman who said totally matter-offactly ‘I’m trying to figure out how to crash my car but not permanently injure myself or die.’” Some women must turn to their

WORLD

abusers to raise the money needed for travel. “There was a girl who sold her car, and cut off her landline, and was then going to ask her rapist for a loan [to travel].” Stories like these underscore the dangers presented by lack of access to legal abortion.

Ultimately, “criminalization doesn’t stop abortion; it just stops safe abortion,” argued Clarke. Even for the women who avoid illegal pills by travelling outside the country, dangers remain. The time it takes to raise money and make travel arrangements may delay abortion until pregnancy reaches the second trimester. At that point, abortion can require surgical procedures and becomes riskier and more expensive. In fact, second trimester abortions are responsible for two-thirds of all abortionrelated complications. Department of Health statistics show that only 2 percent of abortions in the United Kingdom occur after 20 weeks, but Clarke estimated that roughly 7 percent of Abortion Support Network’s clients wait over 20 weeks to have an abortion because they’re raising the money to travel outside the reach of Northern Ireland law.

PUSHING FOR CHANGE The pro-choice movement in Northern Ireland is growing. In November 2015, Judge Justice Horner of the Belfast High Court concluded that “the Article 8 rights [pertaining to private and family life] of women in Northern Ireland who are pregnant with fatal fetal abnormalities or who are pregnant as a result of sexual crime are breached by [this law].” Public opinion is also building to support a pro-choice viewpoint, with 60 percent of the public supporting abortion in cases of fatal abnormalities and 69 percent in cases of rape and incest. Regardless, in February 2016, the Northern Ireland Assembly voted 59-40 against legalizing abortions in the first case and 64-30 against allowing it in the latter one. This refusal to permit abortion even under extreme circumstances shows that “the Northern Irish Assembly is not working very effectively,” said Sally Sheldon of the University of Kent Law School in an interview with the HPR. She believes that

“this is an instance where the politicians are actually a long way behind the public.”

But Northern Irish pro-choice activists are determined to effect change. Hundreds of women assembled to protest after the sentencing of the aforementioned 21-year-old for purchasing abortion pills online. Others have symbolically turned themselves in for violating abortion laws. Last year, 200 people circulated an open letter admitting to having broken the law by using pills or obtaining them for others. When no prosecution emerged, three retired teachers went to the police station to surrender in-person as an act of protest.

But pro-choice voices are not the only ones shouting. Bernadette Lynn of Precious Life, a Northern Irish pro-life group, expressed concern that the “sentencing [of the 21-year-old] was so manifestly lenient in respect of such a serious crime” and “could set a very dangerous precedent for similar cases.” Furthermore, both the Catholic Church and Northern Ireland’s largest protestant group, the Presbyterian Church, have opposed modification of abortion laws. Forty-five percent of Northern Ireland’s population is Catholic or was brought up Catholic, while 48 percent is Protestant or was brought up Protestant.

Yet despite the controversy, women are not backing down.

“Views are changing,” according to Edwards. Because no elections are scheduled for the next three years, “there’s an opportunity for people to consider this again and look at it in light of where we are today.” In June 2016, several pro-choice groups announced a collaboration plan to fly abortion pills via drone into Northern Ireland to call attention to the issue. It has been non-profit groups that have come to the aid of Northern Ireland’s women when government has not, and it seems that that trend will continue into the immediate future. But in Edwards’ opinion, “a big important part of change in Northern Ireland will come from women themselves who stand up and tell their stories … about the impact the restrictions ... have had on them.

There are some really amazing, brave women, along with lots and lots of other people [who] are, I think, going to be the change-makers.”

FALL 2016 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 31

CULTURE

AUTOMATED INEQUALITY Coping with the Inevitabilities of a Robotic Workforce

Nicholas Yan 32 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW FALL 2016

WORLD

H

umanity has been here before—at least three times before, in fact. At first, it was steam and water power, then came electricity and mass production, and then IT and computerization. Each time, the late Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter’s “gale of creative destruction” blustered as rapid advances in technology destroyed some jobs, paved the way for new lines of work, and ultimately provided enhanced productivity and lifestyles for the majority. Researchers predict that over the next decade or so, emerging technological breakthroughs will once again fundamentally alter jobs and manufacturing processes around the world—but this time, the consequences could be drastically different.

There is little debate that robots are coming for our jobs.

Two Oxford University researchers estimate that 47 percent of jobs in the current U.S. economy are vulnerable to automation within the next two decades, while a recent Pew Center survey revealed a general consensus among almost 2,000 leading experts that by 2025, robots will have taken over many of the jobs currently performed by humans. What is less clear, however, is whether or not the future will mirror the past and “human ingenuity will create new jobs, industries, and ways to make a living.”

Considered in abstract, a fully automated workforce might seem like an attractive prospect. In an idealistic future, machines would emancipate humans from menial, banal, or dangerous jobs, and free us up to pursue genuinely meaningful and rewarding activities. However, there is little indication that reality will reflect this best-case scenario. Many economists envision that the most profound challenge societies will face in transitioning to automated workforces is equitable distribution of the fruits of increased productivity. If vast swathes of the human population are rendered effectively unemployable, it is imperative that a mechanism is in place to ensure that everyone will stand to benefit from automation—many believe that a universal basic income might be the answer.

A FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION There are substantive differences between this impending technological explosion—what some have labeled a “Fourth Industrial Revolution”—and the ones that preceded it. Martin Ford, the author of two best-selling books on automation and technological unemployment, explained to the HPR that machines are now “encroaching on the fundamental human capability that really sets us apart as a species”—intelligent thought.

While previous developments in automation mainly threatened blue-collar workers on shop floors and in factories, high-wage and high-skill jobs are now also at risk. Research carried out by McKinsey & Company suggests that hourly rate of compensation is not necessarily a strong predictor of automatability; in fact, a significant percentage of activities performed by even the economy’s highest earners (financial planners, physicians, and senior executives, to name a few) are vulnerable to automation. Ford also noted that in industrial revolutions past, people transitioned to jobs that were still fundamentally routine and predictable—for example, jobs moved “from farm to factory to

office or retail store,” but still consisted of repetitious tasks. This time, however, he predicts that there won’t be a “new sector of the economy that will produce millions of routine jobs”; instead, all of those jobs will “evaporate in the face of technology.”

Nicolas Miailhe, a research fellow and co-founder of the Future Society at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, cites a confluence of three factors to draw another important distinction. In an interview with the HPR, he pointed to the “unprecedented velocity, scale, and magnitude” of the changes which face the global job market. This time around, he contends, the exponential rate of breakthroughs in automation and artificial intelligence will not afford displaced workers the time to adapt their skills; machines will invade every sector of the economy and job market; and anticipated technological developments may completely transform industries.

HUMANS NEED NOT APPLY The hyper-efficiency of machines and their potential to render much of the human workforce obsolete is fast becoming evident. Google’s fleet of self-driving cars, for example, has collectively logged more than 1.5 million autonomous miles on the road. The enthusiasm for self-driving cars is easy to understand: unlike humans, they are equipped with 360-degree vision, infinite patience, and unwavering attention to the road. Perhaps most importantly, Google’s self-driving cars are far safer than those driven by humans, and could radically offset the nearly 33,000 traffic deaths that occur in the United States alone every year. In the first six years of the project, the cars were only involved in 11 minor crashes—and according to Chris Urmson, the director of the program, not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident.

Given this stellar safety record, it is only a matter of when, not if, self-driving vehicle technology disrupts the transportation industry and render its occupations obsolete. Truck drivers alone are responsible for 8.7 million jobs in the U.S. economy, according to estimates by the American Trucking Association, and truck driving is the most common job in 29 of the 50 U.S. states.

But the transportation industry is just one of many under threat.

Earlier this year, Moshe Vardi, a Guggenheim fellow and professor at Rice University, said that the time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task is fast approaching. He then asked: “If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?”

A WORLD WITHOUT WORK? In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted optimistically that people would work only 15 hours a week by 2030, thanks to the magnified role of machines in the workforce. Miailhe, however, is not convinced by Keynes’ utopian vision of a world without work. While the notion of increased leisure time is certainly appealing, he argues that many people derive their internal sense of self worth from working hard and being successful. “Work is not only about income, but it’s also

FALL 2016 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 33

WORLD

a socialization process by means of which you find a role in society. It builds identity and ensures social insertion for millions of people.” Given the value placed on employment, there is no guarantee that people will suddenly want to stop working when robots take over jobs.

It is clear therefore that the definition of what constitutes meaningful work will need to evolve. For this to occur, it will likely be necessary to decouple society’s traditional association of jobs and income. Already, there are countless types of work which go unpaid and are not deemed legitimate forms of employment but in many cases are as valuable to society as paid occupations. In-home childcare and contributing to sites such as Wikipedia are only two examples. But as paid work becomes more and more difficult to come by, it seems logical that society will have to start regarding the homemaker and the daycare worker equally, and somehow enable people to perform valuable forms of unpaid work.

From an economic perspective, it will be crucial to share the benefits of automation equitably enough to drive growth. After all, machines don’t consume like humans do—a burger-flipping bot cannot enjoy a Big Mac, nor would a droid on the factory floor ever desire to purchase the iPhone that it assembles. In order to maintain demand and consumption, humans will have to retain the discretionary income and purchasing power to make economic choices. However, as Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the MIT Sloan School of Management pointed out to the Harvard Business Review, “there’s no economic law ensuring that as technological progress makes the pie bigger, it benefits everyone equally.”

In fact, a report released earlier this year by the Swiss bank UBS warned that it is the richest who stand to benefit most from the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The report predicts that not only will inequality increase between high- and low-income countries, but that it will also increase within countries themselves as the rise of automation squeezes out unskilled and semiskilled workers. Today, the income and wealth disparity in the United States between the very rich and everybody else is already larger than at any point since the Great Depression, and as technological developments threaten to amplify this inequality, the onus will be on policymakers to respond.

A BASIC INCOME FOR ALL Scott Santens, a freelance writer from New Orleans and a leader in the universal basic income movement, believes that simply handing consumers money might be the answer. Santens has dedicated his life to advocating for the idea that all citizens or legal residents of a country, regardless of means or employment status, should receive an unconditional stipend (a com-

34 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW FALL 2016

monly suggested starting point is $1,000 per month) from the government.

Though it is not part of any major political party platform today, the concept of a guaranteed income has historically attracted support from both ends of the political spectrum. Thinkers as diverse as Martin Luther King, Jr., Richard Nixon, and Charles Murray have embraced the idea. Those on the left see a basic income as a means to eliminate poverty, empower workers, and ensure a minimum standard of living for all people; meanwhile, those on the right view it as a more efficient alternative to the bureaucracy of a welfare state.

A universal basic income might also help to accelerate innovation. Santens argues that as long as people require jobs to pay for their basic needs, the automation of labor will always engender pushback from nervous humans. Earlier this year, Johnson & Johnson abandoned production of its Sedasys machine, an automated sedation system that performed the role of anesthesiologists at a fraction of the cost. Unsurprisingly, the corporation faced fervent opposition from the American Society of Anesthesiologists, which lobbied against the product years before it even hit the market. The implementation of a basic income would be a big step towards creating a society where innovation and automation is embraced, instead of one where even inefficient jobs are preserved in the face of more optimal solutions.

Conversations about basic income are already taking place all over the world, from Canada to the Netherlands, and New Zealand to Bulgaria. Santens spoke to the HPR from Switzerland on the eve of a historic referendum that the country held on a universal basic income. Although the proposal was roundly rejected the next day, illustrating that it may not yet be in the realm of political feasibility for most industrialized countries, Santens believes that “ongoing fears of technology and changes in the labor market” will only serve to increase support for the basic income movement.

And a monthly cash transfer isn’t the only option. A proposal like free-market economist Milton Friedman’s negative income tax—a system in which people earning below a certain threshold would receive supplemental pay from the government, instead of paying taxes—could be a more politically plausible way to achieve the goal of a basic income guarantee.

But whatever mechanism for wealth distribution ultimately ends up on the table, Brynjolfsson and McAfee ultimately conclude that whether the coming wave of technological breakthroughs creates positive or negative change is up to us.

“The outcome—shared prosperity or increasing inequality— will be determined not by technologies but by the choices we make as individuals, organizations, and societies. If we fumble that future—if we build economies and societies that exclude many people from the cycle of prosperity—shame on us.”

CULTURE

Freedom From Fascination

Representing Bipolar Disorder Olivia Dixon Herrington

A

bsence of understanding is dangerous. In addition to highlighting Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen’s possible links to extremist interpretations of Islam, most media dwelled upon his supposed struggles with mental illness, reporting as fact Mateen’s ex-wife’s suggestion that he suffered from bipolar disorder. As psychiatrists Maryam Hosseini, Christina Girgis, and Faiza Khan-Pastula noted in a CNN article, it is unlikely, given descriptions of Mateen, that he met the criteria for bipolar disorder. In fact, daily flashes of anger, like those his former wife recalled, are not an established symptom of the illness. More significant, however, is the implied association between bipolar disorder and violence—a source of alienation for the 5.7 million Americans living with the illness, whose true lived experiences remain underreported and misunderstood.

Nearly 40 percent of news stories that discuss mental illness associate it with violence—a distortion of statistics: just 4 percent of violence is related to psychiatric disorder.

This misunderstanding extends into the entertainment industry as well. Many well-known movies that feature mental illness, such as American Psycho, revolve around horrifically violent protagonists. And even when mentally ill film and television

characters are more benign, they still often contribute to inaccurate stereotypes. Elaine Flores, a writer and editor with bipolar disorder, wrote for The Root that the television show Empire’s depiction of bipolar, for instance, was overly dramatized, treating the “worst-case bipolar scenario” as the norm. Approaches such as Empire’s, which exaggerate the severity of psychiatric disorders, do little to correct newspapers’ erroneous focus on mental illness and violence. And although recent improvement in portraying those struggling with such diseases is cause for optimism, both the media and entertainment industries have a ways to go to do justice by the mentally ill.

THE PRIVATE LIFE For Kevin Hines, who has lived with bipolar disorder since his teenage years and works as an activist to raise awareness about mental illness and suicide, these issues are personal.

“Mass media has a huge problem with scapegoating mental illness when things go south. First of all, we in this country, if we watched mass media and only looked at mass media and what happened when there was a shooting or there was something

FALL 2016 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 35

CULTURE

terrible that happened,” he told the HPR, “you often see them referring back to bipolar disorder or depression or mental illness when, in fact, the mentally ill population is no more likely to commit a homicidal act than any of the rest of the population.

Yet you never hear that on the news. You only hear the opposite.”

His assertion is supported by government statistics: mentally ill people are responsible for just 3 to 5 percent of violent crimes, and most individuals with even severe mental illness are no more predisposed to violence than are individuals with no psychiatric history. In fact, violent crime disproportionately victimizes the mentally ill, who are more than 11 times as likely as the average American to have violence perpetrated against them.

Hines argued that this distorted media focus is itself dangerous.

“We’re conditioning the American people, and certainly even globally, to look at someone with this disease and think, ‘Oh, that’s what they’re capable of.’”

Bipolar disorder, a usually chronic illness characterized by episodes of high-energy mania and intensely dark depression, has an average age of onset of 25 years. Its reality is, of course, not well known by those distant from depression and mania, and the word bipolar—like the terminology of many psychiatric disorders—is an overused descriptor.

Olympic sailor Kevin Hall published his memoir about his experience with bipolar disorder, Black Sails White Rabbits: Cancer Was the Easy Part, in December 2015. He explained to the HPR, “There are some things that are unique to bipolar: the mania side of it is alluring in many ways and, frankly, hypomania is a very enticing state of mind and state of being. For me, before I get actually sick and become really irritable and then psychotic, I get a lot done, and I do have more ideas, and I am more energetic.

That part of it is hard to manage, and [I can see] why that part would be sexy for entertainment and the media.”

Models for more productive plot lines do exist, however, in newspaper tales of daily life as well as in the entertainment industry. The task now is to place these stories at the fore. The Voice Awards—created and run by SAMHSA, the U.S. government’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration—addresses this challenge by annually honoring direcJoseph tors, writers, Winters and producers of movies or television episodes with especially accurate or positive storylines related to mental health. SAMHSA’s goal for the awards, according to its website,

36 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW FALL 2016

is “to counter negative attitudes, beliefs, and behavior associated with mental and substance use disorders by recognizing accurate depictions of behavioral health conditions by entertainment media.”

THE ARC OF DISASTER Perceptive discussions of bipolar disorder tend to focus on families, as sickness naturally hurts family members and often affects relationships. And bipolar is frequently, if indirectly, a hereditary disease—it seems to have an unusually strong genetic component. This trend in arts and media of depicting bipolar disorder as a family affair pays special attention to children.

In a 2008 New York Times Magazine article, Jennifer Egan wrote of a family in which both parents and their two children had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The children’s behavior was a mix of typical childhood activity and distressing complaints about internal pain and, in the girl’s case, flirting with grown men. Their mother balanced this complexity by integrating both the normal and the abnormal into daily life—she topped their nightly psychiatric medications with whipped cream.

Though bipolar disorder’s prevalence as a pediatric condition remains hotly contested, many psychiatrists believe that children can suffer from the illness. And earlier age of onset often correlates with a more severe course. Children with bipolar disorder, like their adult counterparts, struggle with both stigma and fear of aggression. Alexis (she kept her last name confidential), the mother of an 11-year-old girl with bipolar disorder, wrote an article for Babble as an attempt to clarify misperceptions of the condition. After her daughter, Tara, told her best friend about her illness, Alexis recalled, the friend pulled away.

The friend’s mother had warned her to steer clear, worried that Tara was “probably ‘crazy’ and might do something strange.”

A more extended tale of a family’s experience with pediatric bipolar disorder is Boy Interrupted, a 2009 documentary that Dana Heinz Perry created to tell her son’s story. It provides an unusually thorough view of a lifetime of mental illness—in this case, Evan Scott Perry’s brief 15 years. Diagnosed with bipolar in his prepubescent years, he was frighteningly troubled even in elementary school. As a teacher in the film recalls, Evan considered suicide as a kindergartener. He went as far as to specify

CULTURE

his method: jumping out a window, the act he would one day execute.

It is tempting, watching the documentary, to regard the two sides of Evan as separate. But in reality, there is no clear dichotomy. Personality and psychopathology are tangled from the start.

In the words of one woman with bipolar disorder, interviewed in the documentary Of Two Minds, “Bipolar affects everything.

There is no, ‘Oh, I’m going to calm down.’ You can’t: It’s your brain.” Nor can one define mental illness as isolated strictly to those diagnosed, walled off from healthy human existence. Like all experiences, psychiatric disorder falls along a spectrum punctuated by the idiosyncrasy of each individual.

Evan seemed his most calm and healthy in the few years before his suicide. The numbered lists that eventually composed the 15-year-old’s suicide note were written, in his psychiatrist’s words, “hyper-sanely.” As the psychiatrist himself pointed out, they differed starkly from the typical representations in film or other media of what it means to be psychiatrically ill. In this way, Boy Interrupted forces a normalization of mental disorder onto its viewers, even as the documentary defines Evan’s experience as unusually severe. This normalization disrupts a framework in journalism and the arts of regarding the mentally ill as the “other” and forces viewers to accept that, in many ways and at many times, those suffering from mental illness don’t look much different from them.

THE SELF AND THE SCREEN And even though works like Boy Interrupted reach a relatively niche audience, the topic of bipolar sometimes makes its way into the mainstream. David O. Russell’s 2012 Silver Linings Playbook, for instance, whose main character, Pat, has a bipolar diagnosis, earned an Academy Awards nomination for Best Picture. Admittedly, the film’s approach to the illness is somewhat vague, highlighting an amalgamation of traits loosely categorized as bipolar. And it is unclear why Pat’s illness fades as the film ends. Still, Hall considers the film to be “pretty good.”

But he and Hines turn to Carrie, the protagonist with bipolar on the Showtime series Homeland, for an especially accurate portrayal of life with bipolar disorder. “I remember feeling like she didn’t misrepresent me more than she represented me when

I first started watching it,” Hall recalled. Hines finds the show “absolutely phenomenal.”

Yet even the finest characters cannot always do justice to reality. Hall pointed out the difficulty of seeing oneself in a celebrity or fictional character: “I think that the challenge for entertainment is that, if they make it too much about the dayto-day slog that it is for many of us with mental illness, it’s not a very compelling storyline. They have to balance something sexy enough to be entertainment with something responsible and compassionate to the mental health community, and I’m sure that’s a tough balance.”

Keris Myrick, director of the Office of Consumer Affairs at the Center for Mental Health Services at SAMHSA, on the other hand, argued in an interview with the HPR that there exists “really important work that can still be entertaining”; that there is “no need to be derogatory or [to] stretch” to create compelling content around mentally ill characters. She pointed to the Carter Center’s recommendations for portraying mental and behavioral health conditions, a thorough and easily digestible compilation of advice. The Carter Center guidelines make clear that psychiatric conditions constitute a piece of the nation’s public health landscape, a perspective that makes it all the more difficult to justify their often unscientific portrayal.

Myrick is optimistic about the progress already underway— particularly in movies and television. “In general,” she remarked, “TV and film, the entertainment industry, are doing a much better job of portraying mental illnesses accurately.” She admitted that news outlets have been slower to improve, “but they have also had good profiles of mentally ill people.”

Because of the sway media, television, and film have over American public opinion and awareness, the responsibility for stamping out stigma around mental illness generally and bipolar disorder specifically falls most clearly to these industries. This process will require more profiles with the realism of Jennifer Egan’s and the depth of Dana Heinz Perry’s. It will demand careful scrutiny of plot lines and characters, following the Carter Center’s advice and the model of the television episodes and movies that the Voice Awards highlights. The truth of bipolar disorder is more complex, and less tied up in danger and violence, than is the stigma.

FALL 2016 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 37

CULTURE

State of the Sitcom Laugh Track Drawbacks

Daniel J. Kenny

“B

azinga!”

T-shirts emblazoned with this nonsensical word, the catchphrase that The Big Bang Theory’s lovable nerd protagonist Sheldon Cooper uses whenever he’s kidding about something, line the shelves of novelty t-shirt stores.

Unfortunately for The Big Bang Theory, the popularity of this catchphrase has not been enough to sustain the show’s ratings in the midst of critically acclaimed prestige TV and the streaming service phenomenon.

BAZINGA! In reality, CBS’s The Big Bang Theory garners the highest ratings of any sitcom on television and was the most-watched series of the 2014-2015 television season. The show, which follows the daily lives of four scientists and their neighbor Penny, has maintained its popularity by appealing to a wide-ranging audience of young and old viewers since it debuted in 2007.

Yet despite initial success among TV critics, the sitcom has not collected much critical praise of late. Like CBS’s other long-running ratings bonanzas NCIS and Blue Bloods, the show is a popular boon but a critical bust. Its multi-camera format, in which several cameras simultaneously record one scene usually shot in front of a studio audience and with a fake laugh track, seems to be falling out of critical favor as well. Gone are the days when NBC’s multi-camera smash hit Seinfeld and hourlong whodunnit Law & Order respectively dominated the sitcom and drama fields, and here are the days of prestige TV. HBO’s The Sopranos ushered in an era of highly regarded dramas, a trend that AMC’s Mad Men and Breaking Bad brought to basic cable. During the original Golden Age of Television in the 1950s, viewership expanded as more people could afford to buy TV sets and access the then-limited number of network programs. The second Golden Age of Television—defined by the “prestige TV” that rules today’s airwaves-—is a revolution not just in quantity but quality of programming. Much ink has been spilled over the causes and effects of TV’s turnaround, but lost in the praise heaped upon compelling dramas is the revitalized TV sitcom. Sitcoms have been transitioning from network TV

38 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW FALL 2016

to cable and the web, from multi-camera to the more familiar and often cinematic single-camera, and from a lowest-commondenominator family-friendly brand of comedy to one of a more biting political edge. Amidst all of this, fewer multi-camera sitcoms are impressing critics. In October 2014, Eric Adams of the A.V. Club wrote that three sitcoms could “restore multi-camera’s reputation” by harkening back to the format’s early days. Those three shows were CBS’s The McCarthys, ABC’s Cristela, and Fox’s Mulaney. All of them have since been canceled.

A closer look at stand-up comedian John Mulaney’s eponymous Fox program—another installment in a long series of stand-up comics leading sitcoms about their everyday lives—reveals that the multi-camera format (and the network TV formula more generally) struggles to fit into the currently saturated television environment. Indicative of a larger trend in multi-camera sitcoms, Mulaney struggled to capture its creator’s zany comedic voice. By contrast, the sharpest, most critically praised sitcoms— including NBC’s Parks and Recreation, Comedy Central’s Broad City, and HBO’s Veep—are filmed in the single-camera format.

Sitcoms such as these, with biting and unique comedic voices, have used the single-camera format to take the sitcom from the domain of the laugh track to a venue for prestige television. More than simply a different conception of the sitcom, the single-camera format allows for sharper writing, more creative and open-ended visuals, and more control over a show’s tone.

COMMANDING TONE Perhaps if Mulaney filmed his sitcom in a single-camera format like fellow stand-up star Louis C.K., he could have more narrowly focused and developed his brand of comedy. Controversial or edgy programming is difficult to find on network TV, and even more difficult to find on multi-camera sitcoms.

As a mostly observational comedian, Mulaney rarely ventures into potentially edgy areas like politics or cultural criticism.

But when he does delve into controversial or strange territory, the multi-camera format restricts his tone. For example, an old Mulaney stand-up routine about lying to a doctor in order to get Xanax falls flat when translated to the multi-camera format.

CULTURE

Imagining Mulaney’s awkward handling of the situation better suits its self-deprecatory tone than watching Mulaney explain the story to a friend as extras throw confused glances at the pair from the background.

Louis C.K. first developed Lucky Louie as a multi-camera show for HBO. The show received mixed reviews and was canceled without fanfare. By contrast, the much lauded single-camera Louie has offered comedy’s biggest star the opportunity to write, direct, edit, and star in his own television show. He stamps his warped worldview on every frame, and the show exhibits expert command of its absurdist tone. For example, in an early episode Louie leans in to kiss a woman who resists his advance.

Suddenly, the camera cuts to Louie’s perspective and pans to reveal a helicopter. The woman jumps in, the helicopter takes off, and Louie is left sitting on a bench after an absurd turn of events that could have just as easily happened in a Buster Keaton film.

The single-camera format brings hyperbole to life.

When Mulaney returned to his primary format—stand-up comedy specials—he returned to form, indicating the importance of stylistic command in comedy. His November 2015 Netflix special release, The Comeback Kid, showcased his mix of oddly specific pop culture references and brutal self-deprecation and produced another hour of his trademark observational comedy. One A.V. Club critic hailed it as a “triumphant” homecoming for the comedian. The multi-camera approach had inhibited a performer who had proved his comedic chops before and after the sitcom’s run.

can release it on a personal website for a per-episode charge.

With so many content development opportunities, the network TV format that nurtured the multi-camera sitcom has gone out of date.

Two shows in particular demonstrate how the single-camera format, divorced from network TV, allows for sharp writing and otherwise unavailable visual elements to form unique tones: Veep and Broad City. Neither show would work in the multicamera format. Imagine a Veep wherein lowly White House liaison Jonah Ryan enters President Selina Meyer’s office, like Kramer enters Jerry’s apartment in Seinfeld, to thunderous applause from the studio audience. The show could not achieve its desired level of cynicism if it were taped in front of a crowd, nor could it rely on the rapid-fire laughs that its tautly edited vulgar back-and-forths generate.

Similarly, Broad City could not exist in the multi-camera format. The show began as a web series, until Comedy Central executives offered co-creators and co-stars Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer a slot on the cable network. How exactly would Broad City’s directors have filmed Jacobson dancing naked around her apartment and singing Lady Gaga’s “The Edge of Glory” if the multi-camera format had restricted them? This vintage Broad City vignette relies on the camera’s movement around the constrained space of the apartment, non-diegetic music, and cuts between aspect ratios. A multi-camera show could never convey the tone this scene represents—the tone that is so key to Jacobson and Glazer’s bizarre brand of humor.

OUTSIDE THE NETWORK STRUCTURE

ONE CLEAR PATH

The multi-camera format’s close relationship with restrictive network TV has in part kept it from developing the best new shows. In her positive review of Mulaney, Grantland’s Molly Lambert argues that a “false binary has emerged” between “experimental and smart” single-camera sitcoms and “successful and shitty” multi-camera shows. The dichotomy exists in the TV viewer’s mind because it reflects the reality of how TV shows tell their stories. So-called family-friendly sitcoms have tended to use the multi-camera setup, whereas more ironic or otherwise experimental shows have tended to use single-camera.

The thought of creating a multi-camera sitcom on network TV about a struggling comedian with zany friends would not occur to a showrunner-to-be nowadays. Instead, that comedian would likely follow in the footsteps of Mindy Kaling, Aziz Ansari, Tina Fey, Louis C.K., and others who opted for single-camera. When asked why he chose Netflix for his hit show Master of None, Ansari cited the lack of typical network barriers such as a pilot or development process, the need to edit for commercials, and more freedom regarding “content issues.”

In a surprise move, the more veteran Louis C.K. opted to film his Cheers-esque sitcom Horace and Pete in the multi-camera format. However, it is by no means a typical multi-camera show.

It is not filmed in front of a live audience, there are no commercials (it’s streamed on the comedian’s website), and its brand of humor is decidedly cynical. Sitcom creators like Ansari and Louis C.K. no longer have the patience to tolerate the dog-andpony show that is the network TV development process. There are content producers that will allow them near-absolute freedom, and if no streaming services will pick up their show they

If multi-camera shows could overcome their family-friendly stigma and feature honest, edgy comedy, then the format could perhaps endure. The A.V. Club’s Molly Eichel praised NBC’s The Carmichael Show, starring co-creator and stand-up comic Jerrod Carmichael, for its willingness to comment on police brutality and the state of the current civil rights movement but wrote that “[the show] feels oddly confined in the multi-camera format, and even when the show is highlighting its star’s unique perspective, it’s mired in the tropes of lesser sitcoms.” By contrast, when ABC’s single-camera Blackish dedicated an episode to police brutality, it better captured the issue’s somber reality. With no studio audience and the ability to incorporate real-life images from the news, Blackish was more equipped to tackle the issue.

In the era of prestige TV, Blackish represents what sitcoms can be, and The Carmichael Show represents what they were.

Single-camera shows display better command of tone, more polished writing, and more creative freedom. By contrast, multicamera sitcoms and the network TV process that perpetuates them stifle visual creativity and tone.

The Big Bang Theory adheres to network conventions and rarely strays from inoffensive themes and storylines. Such an unimaginative show is not the future of comedy on television. In the eyes of viewers and critics, TV can achieve and has achieved great visual storytelling feats normally reserved for the medium of film. Catchphrases like “Bazinga!” are cute and sell t-shirts, but sitcoms have so much more to offer than novelty clothing.

When we assess the state of the sitcom, we should look to shows like Veep and Broad City to see not just what the state is but what it can be.

FALL 2016 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 39

INTERVIEWS

INTERVIEW: TOMI LAHREN with Mark Bode

Conan O’Brien ’85 is a comedian and the late-night host of Conan on TBS. He has previously written for Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons, hosted Late Night and The Tonight Show, and is a three-time host of the Emmy® Awards.

40 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW FALL 2016

INTERVIEWS

We’ll start where your show ends, with Final Thoughts. How do you and your team select the topics?

Final Thoughts started a few years ago with my first show, on One America. It was the closing segment, and it came from whatever was on my mind that day. They started out not all being political—it was just things from daily life, things I observed, whatever caught my attention that day. After I went viral with those Chattanooga Final Thoughts, where I laid the smackdown on President Obama, then they became a little bit more political.

Now I write everything that I say. Every minute of my show is written by me. Nobody brings me a topic, nobody brings me words or phrases. It’s all from me, from my heart. So love me or hate me, it’s me. I’m authentic and genuine.

I usually look at Twitter in the morning and in the evenings and I see what people are talking about. I see what infuriates me, or what I’m passionate about and what fires me up, and what I see other people seem to be talking about, and that’s where I draw inspiration for Final Thoughts.

Sometimes that’s a big event, like Colin Kaepernick—that’s something the world was talking about, and I obviously gave my two cents on it. But sometimes they’re small things: Hillary’s the gift that keeps on giving, as far as Final Thoughts are concerned.

So it’s the day’s news, and whatever inspires me. That’s where you get Final Thoughts.

Was there a point at which you decided you wanted to go into broadcast journalism?

This has always been my dream. I’ve always been a talker.

Public speaking has always been something I’ve been passionate about. I was in debate in high school. I was always very vocal in student government, on the school board. I’ve always had a gift for articulating my opinion and being able to be persuasive.

Politics has always been a fascination of mine.

So journalism really is the way I express myself. I wanted to learn to become a journalist and learn how to write, but I always knew that I would not be happy being a reporter. That’s never been my intention. I did it in college, obviously, and I learned how to write better because of it, but I never wanted to be on the local news. I wanted to comment on the news.

I’ve found that I’m effective when I speak—my power comes from my delivery. My emotions are easily read on my face, and people connect with that. So when they get that straight-on, one-camera angle of me delivering my Final Thoughts with my hand gestures and facial expressions, that is a way for them to connect with me. That’s where I’ve found I have the most power.

We’ve acknowledged this earlier, but many of your segments have elicited strong reactions from both sides of the political spectrum. Is there a topic you are most proud of covering and delivering a message on?

Law enforcement and the military. Those are two of my most closely held issues. I lashed out at the Black Lives Matter movement because I didn’t agree with what that movement had

become. I also believe that that movement has endangered the lives of our police officers—black, white, purple, brown, whatever. That’s why I am so passionate when I speak out against it.

I’m also fiercely patriotic. I’m supportive of our military, as well as my country. That’s why the Colin Kaepernick Final Thoughts were so raw and emotional, because I love this country so much.

Taking a turn into some of the more unfortunate parts about social media, you’ve experienced online harassment following many of your segments.

Did that surprise you?

I absolutely expected it. I have more death threats on a daily basis than I can count. I block more people on Instagram than I can count. I have to send more reports to Twitter than I can count. I had more death threats in the last two weeks than I ever have. I was dox-filed not too long ago, where my information and my parents’ [information] were put on social media in almost a “call to action” to seek some kind of revenge upon me. So it’s something that I deal with on a daily basis.

I very rarely will react to it, because most of it is poorly spelled and grammatically incorrect. So usually I choose to ignore it. I laugh it off most of the time.

I would rather say things that strike a chord than dilute myself to the point where I’m holding back. You’re going to get a reaction when you tell the truth. You’re going to get support, and you’re going to get hate. I’m ready for it, and I will take it on because it’s my choice to speak out.

That leads into my final, and perhaps, overall question: where do you see your role in the national conversation?

It’s evolving, I think. I don’t say everything to be conservative or to be controversial. I really think, and I feel that this is the honest truth, that I was raised in a very average way. I was raised by blue-collar parents in Rapid City, South Dakota. It was an average upbringing. I was not privileged. I’ve never been wealthy. I’ve worked very hard for everything that I’ve done. I have student loans. I am an average American.

But because I am an average American, I feel that I speak for a lot of average Americans out there that are just doing their damnedest to make it in this world and doing their damnedest to stay above water. So my goal, and my aspiration, is to be a voice for those people that may not have a voice, or may not feel comfortable expressing that voice.

For as many people that say that my fan base is made up of old, white men—pretty much the opposite, actually. I have more young ladies come up to me in a social setting and want to take pictures with me, and want to talk to me and tell me I’m an inspiration. And that means the most to me. Because they say to me “we don’t have conservative women like you, especially your age, that we can look up to, like everyone looks up to the Kardashians and Beyoncé. We don’t have anyone.” So they appreciate my voice. If I can be a voice for people like that, then I’m doing my job and I’m happy. I hope to be able to continue to do that.

FALL 2016 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 41

INTERVIEW: MICHELLE RHEE with Quinn Mulholland

42 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW FALL 2016

INTERVIEWS

An educator and advocate for education reform, Michelle Rhee served as Public Schools Chancellor in Washington D.C. from 2007 to 2010. Following this period, she founded a non-profit organization called StudentsFirst that works for education reform. In addition to her involvement in the sphere of public policy, Rhee has been very visible with her advocacy work in the national media, having appeared on various television programs, radio shows, and documentary films.

As Chancellor of the Washington, D.C. public school system, you drew a lot of attention by firing hundreds of teachers who were deemed ineffective. Why fire these teachers instead of working with them to improve their teaching?

It wasn’t just punitive measures that we put in place in D.C. We also recognized and rewarded teachers who were outstanding. One of the things that you’ll hear from highly effective teachers is that nobody’s really paying attention to them, nobody’s saying, “Wow, we want you to stay. What you’re doing matters.” While part of what we did was to ensure that ineffective teachers could not stay in the classroom, we also created an environment where highly effective teachers wanted to stay longer… I think it’s easy from a systemic perspective to say, “We should spend a lot of time investing in ineffective teachers and making them better.” From a systemic perspective, that’s fine.

But when you’re thinking about things from the perspective of kids and families, it’s harder. It’s hard for me to say, “You know what, Ms. Smith? We know that your child has an ineffective teacher, but we’re going to spend a few years trying to see if we can them better. Meanwhile, your kid might not learn how to read, but this is the better thing for the adult.” That is a hard proposition when your responsibility is first and foremost to the kids.

Recently, we’ve seen examples of an overemphasis on standardized testing leading to negative outcomes like cheating and pushing low-performing students out of schools. Do you still think standardized tests are a valid evaluative tool?

First of all, I think it’s important to note that nothing forces people to make the wrong decisions and cheat. That’s like saying if you live in poverty, you’re forced to break the law and rob a bank. There are certain morals that you have to uphold when you’re a professional. That said, is there oftentimes a dysfunctional environment where people feel like test scores are the end-all be-all, the only thing that matters? Yeah. And I don’t think that’s good for the culture, and I don’t think it’s good for the profession. So, what I think you need is a balance where people understand that we are going to measure student achievement levels, and those matter a lot, but they matter a lot because what we care about is the fact that kids are learning what they’re supposed to be learning. The test scores and standardized tests are a means to an end, they are not an end.

Can you talk about why you see the movement to opt out of standardized tests as problematic?

Because I think the focus is on the wrong thing. The focus is that, “The tests are bad, and so let’s opt out of the tests.” And I think that what the tests do is give parents and schools an indication of how the students are performing, and that’s important to know. I think what parents and other community members should be focused on instead, and what’s negative, is not necessarily the tests, but the culture around how people are perceiving the tests and what their role is in the educational process.

They are a tool through which we can understand where kids are and what their needs are.

As Chancellor of D.C.’s public schools, you also decided to close many schools, predominantly in black and low-income neighborhoods. Do you see the disproportionate effect of these school closures on black and low-income students as problematic?

We had a situation in DC, and I think most districts that are closing schools have the same situation, where you are paying to heat, air condition, and staff buildings that are half full. So, when you are taking a certain amount of money, and spreading it over more schools, it’s actually not an efficient use of dollars.

When you can take that same amount of money and spread it over fewer schools, but make sure that those schools can be full, then kids can have access to more resources. When you have a building that only has 100 kids in it, which we had a number of those in D.C., and with that only comes a certain amount of resources, you are doing a disservice to those same poor, minority kids. They are better off if you consolidate schools, put them in a school that can be staffed appropriately and resourced appropriately, so that they’re more likely to get the education that they deserve, through the resources that they need.”

But isn’t that a self-inflicted problem because of the explosion of charter schools in D.C.? It’s not that these schools don’t have enough students, it’s that students are leaving to go to charter schools.

Students are leaving because the families are saying these schools are not serving our kids well. The answer can’t be, “How do we trap families in failing schools? How do we not give them any options so that they have no choice but to stay in this place that has been doing a disservice to the community and the kids for decades?” That’s never an answer.

FALL 2016 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW 43

ENDPAPER

FINDING LOVE AT HARVARD

Perry Abdulkadir

W

hen my first real crush rejected me at the end of eighth grade, I spent the summer lamenting the cruel hand that fate had dealt me. In melodramatic middle school fashion, I set out on a spiritual voyage after the calamity of my rejection. I channeled Emerson and Thoreau (granted, I was a pudgier transcendentalist) by seeking solace in nature to keep my mind off the one true love of my life—the strawberry blonde girl I would occasionally speak with outside the band room.

In retrospect, I may have fallen a bit too hard and fast for her. However, it began a precedent: forevermore I would see the world through a romantic lens.

Finally, in junior year of high school, I found her. Her. I understood on an intellectual level that the universe is a mechanical place governed by set natural laws, but I still believed deep down that there was a guiding narrative. And I’d be damned if that narrative didn’t ordain this girl being the one for me. We did everything that high school sweethearts did. From cutesy prom-posals to ice cream dates on the lakeside, from camping on the North Shore of Lake Superior to fancy anniversary dates in Uptown, it was everything 14-year-old me could have dreamed of. I was following the narrative.

High school came to an end, but we were going to stay together forever no matter what. The only wrench in our grand plan came when I got into Yale through the early acceptance program. She then applied to Yale by the regular decision deadline, but in the unwinnable game of college whack-a-mole I then got into Harvard. She would end up choosing a school in the Midwest while I would be going out East. No matter. Distance was not a barrier. After all, I had a playlist that included songs like “Hey There Delilah,” and “A Thousand Miles.” What could go wrong?

My phone became my best friend freshman fall. I’m not anthropomorphizing my phone here as a literary device; it literally was my best friend, my mouthpiece, my direct connection to her.

After class I’d take her out of my pocket to talk to her, tell her how my day was going, then stow her away while I whiled away the time before our next conversation. We laughed at other long distance couples’ fallibility. While the infamous Thanksgiving break “Turkey Drop” tore apart the vestiges of the few remaining high school relationships, we remained strong.

As fall turned into winter, the mental illness that she had struggling with all semester worsened. Her health was precarious, and it was clear that she would have to take the spring semester off to do inpatient treatment. While we were both home in Minnesota for winter break, I visited her nearly every day in treatment. We were no longer a regular young couple. She was fighting a life or death battle, and I was there with her through it.

Our calls and texts became more sparse spring semester. She was not allowed to have her phone at the inpatient care center except for very short windows during the day. I cursed myself when I would miss her daily call by two minutes. Despite the infrequency of our contact, I knew we would be together again soon. Rather than working in my senator’s Washington, D.C. of-

44 HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW FALL 2016

fice over the summer, I chose to work at his Minneapolis office so I could spend the summer with her.

Three months and eight days, or exactly 100 days. It was nice how the cosmic forces of the universe gave me a nice, round (at least in the base 10 numbering system) number of days to spend with her. One hundred days to pretend to be in high school again. While her mental illness was not conquered, she had progressed immensely. That fall, we both went back to our respective campuses. Sophomore fall largely resembled freshman fall.

The previous semester had just been an obstacle to overcome on our quest for everlasting love. Who’s ever heard of a quest story without trials and tribulations? That would be boring. We exchanged “I love you”s and talked of marriage glibly.

That winter break when we saw each other again, something had changed. The enormity of what we had done, what we had created, had caught up with us. We were approaching the point in our college careers where we had to declare our majors. In the many meetings we had with our respective advisors, we had charted out our plans for the future. She would go to medical school to be a psychiatrist. On the other hand, I was planning on law school, with maybe a few years off in the interim to get some experience. There were too many moving parts to coordinate.

For now, I pushed those thoughts to the back of my head.

Before college, I had been a starry-eyed Midwestern boy with a rosy conception of the world. My experience with final clubs, cut-throat networkers, proto-politicians, and the general pretentiousness of Harvard had made me jaded and disillusioned. The one thing I didn’t want to let go of was love.

She was the one who called it off. We had not been talking much the last semester of sophomore spring when she revealed to me that she had feelings for someone else and needed time.

I reluctantly accepted a month-long break if we could get back together during the summer. We both arrived back in Minnesota on our anniversary. Just three days later she would finalize the breakup.

I used to think Harvard was an unromantic place. It was a place where some nebulous evil called “hookup culture” prevailed. It was a place where people didn’t pursue serious relationships for fear of weighing down their future careers. It was a place where romance was eschewed in favor of pragmatism. I have been shown wrong.

Since the breakup, I have found love at Harvard. I’ve found love at late-night baking parties with my friends (my pastries were too heavy for some people’s tastes, though.) I’ve found love watching Coen brothers movies with people I met just this summer. I’ve found love reconnecting with people I had previously just known as acquaintances over coffee. I’ve found a lot of love since my phone stopped being my best friend.

“But, Perry,” you say to yourself as you read this, or more likely, “But, male writer whose name I didn’t bother to read, that doesn’t count as romantic love! That’s platonic love and it’s a cheap deus ex machina for your personal narrative.”

Okay, point taken. But, I met my current wonderful girlfriend on Tinder, so take that. Who said romance was dead at Harvard?

HUMOR