7 minute read
prisoner’s paradox
You can hear the prisoners’ cheers in the background of Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.” You can hear them in that whole album, actually. Cash had microphones set up in the prison yard so the wider audience could hear the roars and hollers of the men at Folsom Prison as he sang.
He also kept the ad hoc dialogue on the final record, including an intermission between “The Long Black Veil” and “Send a Picture of Mother” wherein he grabs a tin cup of water, spits it out, and asks, “You serve everything in tin cups?”
I didn’t quite understand that part, so I asked Aaron* what it meant as we drove home from the Frank Crowley Courts Building downtown, and he said that if they were allowed to drink from glasses or water bottles, they’d see how yellow the water actually was.
I knew when my parents said I was getting a new roommate that I’d probably not come home to a new baby; I expected a dog, a foster child, an estranged brother. I did not expect an ex-con.
Aaron was discharged at 35 from North Tower Detention Facility, one of Texas's many, many infamous prisons, November of my sophomore year. I’m not sure whom he’d attacked — an exgirlfriend or a boss, maybe — but I pieced together fragments of overheard late-night kitchen table conversations: Aaron wouldn’t cause any further trouble, my parents asked; in return, they’d offered him my sister’s bedroom and a guiding hand in his job search.
I didn’t know what to do with my life at this time. If whatever passion project I’d eventually settle on didn’t work out, I’d follow my sister and become a lawyer, one who made enough money to subsist but not enough to be deplored. But I could feel my drive waning as my zeal diminished and I had nothing to take its place, and I saw no world problems I was uniquely capable of solving, no specific group whose pain I could alleviate, no reason to become educated other than to be educated.
Aaron drove around with me our neighborhood in my mangy old Lexus (he called it the “Flexus”), blasting Johnny Cash’s prison albums on repeat and explicating the parts of prison the media gets right and wrong: Top Ramen is money. Gangs cleave along racial lines. Guards aren’t armed at every moment, so when they are, something’s up. Nobody stays in your life for long, because once the red stamp’s on your resume, the next misdemeanor shoves you off the knife’s edge.
Before long, Aaron was gone. I don’t know where he is now.
I started paying attention to prisons after he left. My heart skipped a beat at the news that
Compiled by Keshav Krishna
President Biden ordered the Justice Department not to renew contracts with private prisons. You never expect something like that to actually happen, and although the effects of this order are limited to the federal level, rejecting the profiteering of the oxymoronic “justice industry” is a step in the right direction.
The deprivations of prison are far more psychological than physical, and prison is a physical enough place on its own. To be a prisoner is to have the wonders of modern logistics and engineering used to keep you in a medieval state of autocracy and punishment, as though living through every era of human history at once.
As an aside, I am not ignoring the problem. Crime is the problem that necessitates the prisoner’s paradox. But this column is about the solution, because that’s the more interesting and more ignored part of the equation, and because the common retort –– “Would you want to live next to a murderer?” –– places all the focus on the problem and none on what might fix the problem.
Texas is a paradox. Defined as it is by the times and habits of individual communities –– some insular and regressive, some open and progressive –– the way Texas responds to law and lawlessness eludes reason. Our state locks its people up at the seventh highest rate of all jurisdictions in the world, so each neighborhood (some more than others) is filled with its own flock of men and women with cuff marks on their wrists and albatrosses around their necks.
The “corrections system” is a paradox. It doesn’t live up to its name. Our gravitation toward recidivism –– the fact that we discharge prisoners only to put them back months later, that we’re less shocked when a former prisoner commits a crime than to a job, that we invite the rare felon who did correct him or herself to speak at galas and events, to write books and appear on talk shows –– damns our prison system more than does any flogging recorded on any contraband 240p camera.
Law is a paradox. It both protects and destroys. We erect literal walls between prisoners and civilization, axing a solutions-oriented correction and replacing it with the appealing justification that “they’re bad people and should be treated badly” as though we live under some Imperial Roman legalist regime that imagines people as completely static and incapable of the nuances of personal growth. We want them to change and yet deprive them of every possible channel of change. The paradox, therefore, lies not in the laws, but in ourselves.
*Editor's Note: To protect his privacy, Aaron's real name has been replaced.
STUDENTS AND FACULTY
Around the Quad
ANSWER OUR QUESTIONS
Q: What’s the biggest issue you hope to see addressed by the Biden Administration? ‘
Distribute 100 million vaccines in 100 days and figure out a way to address the amount of people that are out of work. First and foremost, fix the immigration system. It’s old, broken, and inefficient.
Sam Adams Sophomore Jorge Correa Spanish Instructor
‘Short-term, controlling ‘ the spread of
COVID-19, and long-term, helping the country overcome its divisions. I am eager to see what measures Biden will take to achieve his goal of a unified nation.
Aaryan Puri Senior Alex Geng Junior
I think this new administration needs to work hard to promote unity, especially on issues like social justice and the pandemic. I hope Biden takes BLM as well as other topics that have been heavily protested to heart.
Jamie Mahowald Managing Editor
Honors electives should supplement existing AP classes
Among the stated goals of the new daily schedule and the accompanying switch to semesters is an increased flexibility and variety of courses, especially as students progress into the later years of high school. Departments are reshaping their curricula to provide students with newer, fresher course offerings, so we encourage faculty and administrators to consider the practical facets of these additions for students, especially as they relate to college admissions and the weighted grading scale.
Advanced Placement (AP) and honors courses constitute a large portion of the Upper School curriculum for many students, and while these courses are appealing because of their rigor, students at a college preparatory school like ours are also drawn to these classes because of the college admissions process and the extra boost they bring to a student’s weighted GPA.
Because students here will inevitably pay great attention to the choices that make them strong applicants, a student may be more inclined to take an honors or AP course he is less interested in than a non-honors or non-AP class he is more interested in. This propensity for students to enroll in honors courses causes our offerings to revert to the familiar AP and honors courses we have had for years.
The DNA Science course, for example, has exemplified the on-andoff nature of these classes, as they frequently see such low enrollment compared to their weighted counterparts that some years they fail to make the cut. Departments should invest especially in maintaining courses like these that best utilize new facilities.
Furthermore, before they reach the wider diversity of honors and AP classes to choose from as upperclassmen, freshmen and sophomores have one primary avenue available to them to rack up honors credits: mathematics. Advanced tracks in language courses are also available to select students, but for the vast majority, the only way to differentiate oneself from his peers is through excelling in the math department.
This phenomenon places singular importance on students with strength in one particular area of study and does not reflect –– in the numerically based GPA –– underclassmen’s accomplishments in other subjects, putting students gifted in other areas at a disadvantage later down the line.
Therefore, departments should be open to adequately representing this diversity of interest by offering other honors courses to select underclassmen as well. Shifting to an entirely unweighted system would solve this problem in theory, placing non-honors classes in the same field as honors classes, but given our continual success in college admissions under this system, we do not advocate for this measure.
Also, giving all or most classes an honors boost would cause runaway grade inflation and devalue the success of many hardworking students, so departments should be judicious in deciding which classes to promote.
But overall, we implore faculty and administrators to be aware that –– especially as curricula advance into the later years of high school –– the unique and interesting classes they’ve been designing for months may be significantly more attractive with an “H.”
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February 5, 2021
