Volume 54 - Issue 4

VOL 54 / ISS 4 / MAR 2022

THE NEW JOURNAL THE MAGAZINE ABOUT YALE & NEW HAVEN

IN GOOD FAITH Veterans discharged without honor are searching for an upgrade.

A group of students at Yale Law School wants to help them find it.

INSIDE: THE CAMPAIGN TO END SOLITARY THE PANDEMIC NEXT TIME DEMOLISHING OAK STREET

Editors-In-Chief Alexandra Galloway Zachary Groz Executive Editor Jack Delaney Managing Editor Eli Mennerick Associate Editors Nicole Dirks Jesse Goodman Caroleine James Noa Rosinplotz Dereen Shirnekhi Will Sutherland JD Wright Katherine Yao Senior Editors Beasie Goddu Madison Hahamy

Copy Editors Meg Buzbee Jabez Choi Anna Fleming Lucy Gilchrist Ella Goldblum Ella Pearlman-Chang Kaylee Walsh Creative Director Annli Nakayama Design Editors Savannah Crichton Jacob Feit Mann Ally Soong Photography Editor Lukas Flippo Business Manager Sherry Chen

Members and Directors Emily Bazelon, Peter Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Eric Rutkow, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh, Aliyya Swaby Advisors Neela Banerjee, Richard Bradley, Susan Braudy, Lincoln Caplan, Jay Carney, Andy Court, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Susan Dominus, David Greenberg, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Laura Pappano, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rawbin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Anya Kamenetz, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin Friends Nicole Allan, Margaret Bauer, Mark Badger and Laura Heymann, Tessa Berenson, Susan Braudy, Julia Calagiovanni, Elisha Cooper, Haley Cohen, Peter Cooper, Andy Court, The Elizabethan Club, Leslie Dach, David Freeman and Judith Gingold, Toby Galloway, Dana Goodyear, Paul Haigney and Tracey Roberts, Eli Kintisch, Bob Lamm, Kathrin Lassila, James Liberman, Sharon Lowe, Jim Lowe, Alka Mansukhani, Steven Mennerick, Beatrice Mitchell, Benjamin Mueller, Sarah Nutman, Sophia Nguyen, Amelia Nierenberg, Valerie Nierenberg, Morris Panner, Laura Pappano, Dennis Pierce, Jennifer Pitts, Jeffrey Pollock, Julia Preston, Adriane Quinlan, R. Anthony Reese, Raymond Rund, Eric Rutkow, Lainie Rutkow, Laura Saavedra and David Buckley, Marilynn Sager, Robert Scaramuccia, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Elizabeth Sledge, Caroline Smith, Gabriel Snyder, Elizabeth Steig, Fred Strebeigh, Jeff Strong, Aliyya Swaby, Jacob Sweet, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Daphne and David Sydney, Daniel Waterman, Kristian and Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Townsend Wilson, Daniel Yergin, William Yuen

The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., PO. Box 3311 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06515. All contents Copyright 2021 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and edi-tors-in-chief is prohibited. The New Journal is a student-run publication at Yale University. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. The Yale University name and trademark is owned and used by permission of the University. One thousand copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. The New Journal is printed by TCI Press, in Seekonk, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to thenewjournal@gmail.com. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

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54 T H E VOLUME ISSUE 4 N E W MAR 2022 JOURNAL THE MAGAZINE AB OUT YA LE & NEW HAVEN

Elena DeBre

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cover IN GOOD FAITH Veterans discharged without honor are searching for an upgrade. A group of students at Yale Law School wants to help them find it.

THE PANDEMIC NEXT TIME Frank Snowden, a professor emeritus in Yale’s History of Science and Medicine Program, studied epidemics and social change for decades. When the pandemic hit, his work gained new relevance.

Eric Krebs

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Dereen Shirnekhi

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DEMOLISHING OAK STREET Sixty years ago, New Haven destroyed a community to build an expressway. Now, the City says it wants to make things right.

Hannah Qu

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AGAINST SOLITARY, IN SOLIDARITY Putting faces to the fight against solitary confinement in Connecticut.

STANDARDS Phoebe Liu 4 Cleo Maloney 6

points of departure THE BLUE HOUSE THIS FLIGHT TONIGHT

photo essay Lukas Flippo 26 A SATURDAY AT LUCIBELLO'S ITALIAN PASTRY SHOP book review Daniel Inojosa 39 LESSONS FROM A FRACTURED LEGACY

Paola Santos 7

aside THE GALLERY IS CLOSED

poems Abbey Kim 19 ABeCeDarian IN E MAJOR Beasie Goddu 25 DIVING IN TWICE Ella Goldblum 41 SUBURBAN CAR SERVICE STATION AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

The Blue House

The house that sits at 320 Temple Street, between Silliman College and the Slifka Center, may have a baby blue exterior, but it’s far from its infancy. The building has stood here for two hundred years, always in use, with an identity spanning everything from private residence to alumni meetinghouse. Yale has owned the building for a century. But since March 2020, it has stood there unoccupied, its facade eroding and its future uncertain.

“There was bright blue paint coming off the walls, a really decrepit staircase and shitty carpet in the Blue House,” said Charles Comiter, who graduated from Yale College in 2020 and worked as a monitor in the building in the 2019-20 academic year, the most recent year Yale School of Music actively used the building.

Comiter said he thought of the building as a house steeped in 1800s wealth that, over the years, has aged into an “old and decrepit random building” known to fewer and fewer people. After all, most of the emails I sent—to dozens of students, staff, and other members of the Yale community—were met with variations of

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“We have no recollection of using this building” or “I wish I had information, but I don’t.”

Cellist Francis Fedora ’24 described the building similarly: “It's a little spooky, especially late at night… and also the creaks.” He imagined that the building may have had a past as an orphanage, and he spoke with fondness of late-night practice sessions in the building. His slow intonation work, focused performance practice, and messy sight-reading all felt delirious to him, surreal memories that revitalized hollow rooms with the sounds of midnight music and laughter.

Comiter and Fedora both imagined the building’s pasts in ways that were only partially correct but wholly constructed from memories and archetypes.

The tale of a storied building can never be much more than interweaving lines of blurred memory, faded photographs, and yellowed documents.

According to one such document, a listing in the New Haven Preservation Trust, the building was built in 1806 and became a patchwork quilt of Federal style and French Empire architectures. A combination of Yale Library archives, old issues of the Yale Alumni Magazine, and books published by the University Press reveal additional information: The building’s first known resident was Rev. Jedidiah Morse, an American Congregational minister often known as the father of geography and the father of Samuel Morse, of Morse Code and Morse College fame, who lived there as a child. The building underwent its first renovation in the eighteen-sixties, then

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DESIGN BY SAVANNAH CRICHTON

Late one night, we walked across the uneven floors of the building at 320 Temple Street, past hissing radiators and up a creaky, carpeted staircase. My friends and I were desperate to find a last-minute music practice space. The rooms­­—harshly lit, with paint peeling from the walls and carpet fraying at the edges—contained shiny Steinways and sleek black music stands.

As we filled the long, exhausted halls with the music of composers living and dead, I found myself thinking about the tattered building’s past—possibly glorious, possibly unremarkable, before time wore it down.

cycled through three owners and one more remodeling until Yale University purchased it in the early nineteen-twenties. In the decades that followed, it served as a dorm for Yale freshmen, then for women graduate students. It was the Yale Alumni House from 1958-1975, and subsequently housed the Department of Religious Studies until 2001, at which point its ownership shifted to the School of Music. For the past twenty years, the building has been a liminal space for the music school community, functioning as an extra practice, instruction, and social space when other buildings were being renovated or under construction.

Another tattered document, a floor plan from the mid-20th century stored in Yale’s Manuscripts and Archives, shows that a first-floor room facing Temple Street was once Rev. Morse’s kitchen, but became one of the few rooms at the School of Music with more than one grand piano, for students to practice duets and concerti. Bedrooms turned into practice rooms—spaces that, according to Comiter, were often frequented by graduate students during the day and undergraduates at night. The old porcelain bathtubs were covered with wooden planks and locked shut.

Somehow, through the decades of ringing and banging—from clashing cymbals, clinking piano keys, and whooshing clarinets—the house retained its shape as a house.

Now, according to J. Lloyd Suttle, Yale’s vice provost for academic resources, the Provost’s Office is in discussions with Robert Blocker, Dean of the Yale School of Music, about the future of 320 Temple.

MARCH 2022

According to Stefanie Parkyn, the Chief of Staff of the School of Music, the music school has “vacated the building” as of this year and is not actively using it. But Suttle said that “no decisions have been made about the future use of 320 Temple,” if and when the building is officially unassigned from the School of Music. Yale could essentially do anything it wants to the building in terms of physical modifications, said Alex Eginton, director of the New Haven Preservation Trust.

Fedora spoke about the long hallway on the building’s first floor, a hallway that extends past what was once, according to University floor plans from the nineteen-seventies, a “RESIDENCE SUITE” and “BED ROOM” for the house’s “MANAGEMENT COUPLE,” a staircase, two bedrooms, and three porches. In its seeming endlessness the hallway is evocative of the building’s long past and obscure future.

“I never went down the bottom hallway,” Fedora said. “It scared me for some reason. It was just so … long.”

I’ve never ventured all the way down, either, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get that chance. For now, the building will continue to occupy the same plot of land it has claimed for two centuries. Its floorboards will keep creaking, the paint on its walls will keep peeling, flake by flake, and its pianos will remain in purgatory.

Phoebe Liu is a senior in Trumbull College.

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This Flight Tonight

My flight from New York to Salt Lake City departed and passed without disruption. I seemed to close my eyes and wake up above the glowing grid that was Utah. On the ground I saw my father again—I hadn’t seen him since Thanksgiving. He only knows how to communicate through email, and I’m not fantastic at checking mine. He flew from Los Angeles, which we’ve both called home our whole lives. Salt Lake City was not our destination. It was a pit-stop on the way to visiting my mother’s side of the family for the holidays. They live in Bigfork, Montana—in the razed northwestern glacial floodplains of the Flathead Valley, just a couple hours south of the Canadian border.

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On the flight with him, I fell in and out of sleep.

Our plane was delayed two hours because of a snowstorm in the valley; he shook me awake before we landed and ordered me to tighten my seatbelt. The slight fear in his voice rose and fell and, above his mask, the light of his computer shone in his reading glasses. He remarked that landings on snowy runways are rough. Be prepared, he said.

It was about 1:30 a.m when the pilot gurgled something over the loudspeaker. The seatbelt sign was on, and with the adjacent “wifi” and “no smoking” icons, the roof of the plane was patterned in red, white, and blue light trios. My dad returned to his crossword, switched seats with me so I could watch the snowfall out the window. He’s touching retirement now.

Here, flying above the distant, agricultural regions of the Rockies, sodium vapor gas bulbs lit sparse barns down below. In the summer, farmers sow the fields with canola seeds and harvest the flowers to make oil. The ochre halos dimmed under the night-grayed blanket of snow. With each rush of wind on the plane, my anxiety seized and convinced me that this was the end. Soon, it said, we will join the rusted lights in the snow. Soon, there will be the most fantastic crash on that rural runway platform.

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DESIGN BY SAVANNAH CRICHTON

I missed three trains. In the underground network of Penn Station, I befriended a man from the Virgin Islands as we both failed to find the same platform. We were in matching black coats, and the two of us each assumed the other was a native New Yorker. He asked me for directions one floor below the voided track, where the thick train air settled and shoved warmth through our coats. I could not hear him; humidity muffled his voice. Together we sat on the second C train uptown, after the first left without us, and rode the fifty minutes to Queens from Midtown Manhattan. He rode one stop further than I, and we waved as I left the emptied train before him.

ASIDE

THE GALLERY IS CLOSED

BY PAOLA SANTOS

We landed safely. I reminded myself that I’m older now. That fear felt childlike. Sleepless passengers trudged past the relic construction machines shut down for the storm. The orange light glowed on the excavator’s teeth, and my dad wondered what they’re building. We passed through the three-gate airport— my mom waited for us on the other side—she flew out before us to see her parents. It was then two in the morning, and she ran to me before I could see her through the condensed exhaust clouds from the car.

The gas burned in my nose.

Before my rescheduled jumble of omicron-induced flights home, my last night in New Haven involved a midnight GHeav BLT, an emerald green puffer, and a fifteen minute trip to the YUAG. Well, more like a fifteen minute farewell shuffle that doubled as a 1.5 speed docent tour for my friends, who mistakenly trusted me to check the museum’s closing time (it’s earlier on Saturdays). I am certain my experience is not a unique one. If you find yourself in this position when the YUAG reopens, relish the pre-closing quiet. Pay your respects to the wooden Urhobo maternity figure on the ground floor, the one that toddlers love to hug. Glide through the Greco-Roman atrium and take the elevator to the fourth story.

Stop by Marie Watts’ pink and blue patchwork on the prey and predators of land. Remind yourself that it’s February by heading out to the sculpture terrace. Eight minutes before closing, security will inform you that the stairs are to your left. Amidst the chirps of a walkie-talkie-like communication system, you will realize you have overstayed your welcome. Much to Ben Stiller’s chagrin, the security team will make sure you do not spend the night at the YUAG.

She left the doors open, as she always does, and music swelled from the dashboard speakers. Her arms spread around me. I remembered I hadn’t been good about answering her calls. It was the end of my first semester in college, the longest I’d ever been away.

I see her image now, still, singing and jumping— she looks at me and belts Neil Diamond’s “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon.” Her voice buzzes contralto. The car feels warm inside. The song plays. It ends: “Girl, you'll be a woman soon Please, come take my hand.”

Cleo Maloney is a first-year in Silliman College.

MARCH 2022

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DESIGN BY SAVANNAH CRICHTON PHOTOS BY TIM TAI

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the pandemic next time Frank Snowden, a professor emeritus in Yale’s History of Science and Medicine Program, studied epidemics and social change for decades. When the pandemic hit, his work gained new relevance.

by Eric Krebs “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”

In 1975, three years before she published Illness as Metaphor, the book that contains the pair of sentences above, Susan Sontag learned that she was dying of cancer. Sontag wrote to eviscerate the ubiquitous metaphors (illness-as-battle, patient-as-warrior, cancer-as-demonic-pregnancy, etc.) that surrounded and, in her MARCH 2022

view, obscured our understanding of illness. She was concerned not with the actual geography of the “kingdom of the ill,” the tangible experience of life with disease, but the “lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped.”

Frank M. Snowden III is a political scientist by training and medical historian by happenstance. In 2007, when he was named the chair of Yale’s Program in the History of Science and Medicine, he quipped to his wife that his appointment was a sign of how far the program had sunk.

“I’d just been made the chair, and I didn’t have a degree in history, or

science, or medicine,” he says with a smile. Snowden has spent forty years studying epidemics and the societies in which they occur, in other words, the actual—not metaphorical—kingdoms of the ill.

Infectious diseases “are as important to understanding societal development as economic crises, wars, revolutions, and demographic change,” he writes in the introduction to his 2019 tome, Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present, a sixhundred-page synthesis of Snowden’s decades of teaching history undergraduates with limited knowledge of science and science 9

undergraduates with knowledge of history.

limited

The theory that unites Snowden’s scholarship and pedagogy is that epidemics are neither random manifestations of biology nor punishments from a higher power, but equal and opposite reactions to the forces of social, economic, and political organization in a particular time and place. Societies create their own vulnerabilities to infectious disease, and preventing epidemics means recognizing—and rectifying—those vulnerabilities.

“Meteorologists can’t tell you how strong the winds are going to be, and they can’t predict what year

tion beyond public health institutions and academic journals. That was, of course, until two years ago—when the sky darkened and the wind began to blow. * The seventh cholera pandemic was first identified in 1961, in Java, Indonesia. The disease spent the next decade criss-crossing Asia before making its way to the Middle East, North Africa, and— by way of the Mediterranean, in 1973—Naples, an Italian port city so unhygienic that even its residents thought it a dangerous place to live. In September of that year,

the country,” he concluded. Then the outbreak spread to Rome.

At the time, Frank Snowden was a 27 year-old political science doctoral student at Oxford, living near the Vatican and doing research for a dissertation on Italian fascism. When cholera arrived in Rome, Snowden saw its effects first hand: stones thrown through the windows of cars with Naples license plates, produce stands overturned, shopkeepers beaten in the streets by angry mobs. Social upheaval, political strife, violence—exactly what Snowden had come to Italy to study—all engendered by a force he had hardly considered before then: disease.

A decade later, Snowden—by then, a lecturer in European history at the University of London—was working on a study of early twentieth century political violence in the South of Italy. But while conducting his fieldwork, he came across countless references to a cholera outbreak in Naples and the violent, xenophobic responses it had provoked. His sources referenced 1911, but, as far as the historical record was concerned, the last major European outbreak (1973 notwithstanding) had been in 1892. He went to Naples to fill in the gaps.

Snowden's book, Epidemics and Society, published in October 2019, was widely recommended by scholars in the field in the first year of the coronavirus pandemic. it’s coming,” says Snowden, “but if you live in the Caribbean, you’d be really unwise if you didn’t prepare for a hurricane.”

For decades, Snowden and colleagues warned that the modern world was critically ignorant of the epidemiological storm waiting to happen. Their concern, however, demanded little atten-

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Italian President Giavanni Leone visited the city’s Cotugno infectious disease hospital and was photographed shaking hands with a cholera patient while holding the corne (rock-and-roll finger horns) behind his back, a folklore gesture meant to ward off evil spirits.

“Naples once again presents the mortifying picture of its wounds and problems to the attention of

He began in the city graveyard, counting headstones. Then he visited the records room of Cotunga Hospital—the same hospital in which President Leone once warded off evil spirits—and found that the 1911 edition of the hospital’s annual death registry was orders of magnitude thicker than the years around it. He combed through the research wing’s archives and uncovered that, in 1911, the doctors at Cotugno happened to all be studying the same subject: cholera.

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“I had the chance to do something that doesn’t happen very often,” Snowden says. “I was able to discover an epidemic that had no history.” The seed of curiosity planted a decade earlier in the sticky late summer of 1973 had sprouted. Snowden had a story on his hands—a forgotten epidemic, unanswered questions, and a whole lot of science to learn.

how antimalarial education helped expand trade unions, civil liberties, and women’s rights to the German army’s use of malaria as a bioweapon in the second world war. Conquest was released to critical acclaim, winning prizes from the American Historical Association, the American Association for the History of Medicine, and the Malaria Foundation International.

“I am committed to the view that you can't write the history of diseases without understanding how they work,” says Snowden. Upon returning to England, Snowden spent a sabbatical in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, reading old editions of The Lancet, a medical journal. He began with the journal’s founding in 1823.

“It’s something I wouldn’t recommend to anyone,” says Snowden, “But it did serve me in good stead.”

In 2010, Snowden’s undergraduate class “Epidemics in Western Society Since 1600” was immortalized on YouTube as a Yale Open

Course. In the decade since its posting, the course has accumulated nearly one hundred forty thousand views—half of which have been within the last two years.

“I would argue that emerging diseases are an inherent part of the human condition,” Snowden says to conclude the course’s final lecture. “And if I were to make just one prediction, I would expect that there would be more, and that the systems set in place and improved by SARS, avian flu, and

Snowden’s research on Italian cholera continued for more than a decade, and in 1991 it led him back to Yale, where he had been an assistant professor in the nineteen-seventies. This time, he was hired as a scholar with a unique dual-command of both scientific and social history. In 1995, he published Naples in the Time of Cholera, 1884–1911, the story of two outbreaks, why one was remembered and the other erased from history, and what they revealed about Italian society at the tumultuous turn of the century.

A decade later, Snowden published another book on Italy’s epidemic experience, The Conquest of Malaria: Italy, 1900-1962, which covered the country’s sixty-year mission to defeat what was once its “national disease.”

The book illustrated the connections between malaria and twentieth century Italian politics—from MARCH 2022

Photo albums in Snowden's library.

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swine flu will be tested again in our new century.” * Q: What is a disease? A: Who’s asking?

“Disease,” medical historian Charles Rosenberg writes in his 1992 book Explaining Epidemics, “is at once a biological event, a generation-specific repertoire of verbal constructs reflecting medicine's intellectual and institutional history, an occasion for and potential legitimation of public policy, an aspect of social role and individual—intrapsychic—identity, a sanction for cultural values, and a structuring element in doctor-patient interactions.”

poor, the damned, the ragged men whose overgrown facial hair trapped the disease and spread it. In the nineteen-eighties, HIV/AIDS exposed both Western society’s vicious contempt for gay men, and its blatant indifference to life on the African continent.

In March 2020, Snowden was again in Rome, working on a long-awaited book about the Cold War, when the coronavirus first hit Italy. Snowden and his partner both contracted Covid, mild cases, and confined themselves to quiet isolation in their apartment.

And, in the early twenty-first century, Ebola and SARS illustra-

Then Snowden’s phone began to ring.

To study epidemics through the historian’s microscope is to integrate all of those definitions and the murky forces of causality between them, to examine how the cultural attitudes, political institutions, and biological mechanisms all shape the course of history.

The bubonic plague, Snowden writes in Epidemics and Society, exploited the urban squalor of medieval Europe, upset its cultural and religious conceptions of death, and permanently reshaped its political, economic, and demographic makeup. In the late eighteenth century, yellow fever drove the French army out of Haiti, and, in the early nineteenth, dysentery and typhus drove Napoleon and the French out of Russia. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, tuberculosis, in its glacial destruction of the body, came to signify beauty, pedigree, the lavish tragedy of a life too well-lived.

Half-a-century later, the disease— reimagined through the innovation of “germ theory”—was transformed into a condition of the 12

Frank Snowden at his home in New Haven, CT. ted the fundamental vulnerability of an interconnected world; the false comfort of national borders; the “hubris,” as Snowden describes it, of a world that both recognized the threat of epidemic disease and operated as if epidemics—at least, the epoch-defining kind—were simply behind it.

“I’ve often quipped that there are two kinds of doctors: medical doctors, the useful kind; and PhD’s, the useless kind,” Snowden says with a grin. “You don’t want to wake up in a gurney and see Frank standing there.”

And yet, with the world in a THE NEW JOUR N AL

gurney, more people wanted to see Snowden than ever before in his life. “I think I was actually serving not in a medical therapeutic way, but in a sort of existential therapeutic way,” Snowden says.

“People found it, in a way, really comforting to talk about the past.”

By the end of April, Snowden had appeared in the New Yorker,

mic departments, all desperate to ask—“Has this happened before?” * If you ask Frank Snowden to whom the name “Frank Snowden” really belongs, he might say his father, Frank M. Snowden, Jr.: esteemed historian of the lives of Black people in antiquity; professor of classics at Howard University from 1940 to 1976; Dean of Howard’s college of liberal arts from 1956 to 1968; and cultural attaché for the U.S. State Department from 1954 to 1956, in Rome.

If you had asked Frank M. Snowden, Jr. to whom the name “Frank Snowden” really belonged, he might have said his father, Frank M. Snowden the first: a son of sharecroppers born in 1884 in Virginia; 1907 graduate of M Street High School in Washington, D.C.; enlistee in the First World War; senior Black officer at Camp Lee in the second; small-scale real estate entrepreneur thereafter; and grandfather to three grandchildren who referred to him only as “Colonel.”

the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Vox, the Washington Post, and dozens of other American publications.

Internationally, he spoke with journalists from Germany, Argentina, Korea, and Iran. Snowden estimates that he took part in some 150 interviews that year with reporters and writers and acadeMARCH 2022

In 1909, Charles W. Eliot— then president of Harvard University—published a collection of fifty books, classic works of literature, oratory, and history that, as he proclaimed in a 1910 advertisement, could “give any man the essentials of a liberal education, even if he can devote to them but fifteen minutes a day.” Colonel read them cover-to-cover. And while the Harvard Classics served him well, he wanted for his children a liberal arts education made of more than paper. When his son, Frank, Jr., approached schooling age, Colonel relocated the family from Yorktown, Virginia to Boston, Massachusetts—and, most importantly, the Boston public

education system.

At Colonel’s behest, Frank, Jr., went to Harvard. In the 1920s, Harvard, at the wish of President Abbott Lawrence Lowell—the great Dr. Eliot’s successor—had re-segregated the College’s dorms, so Frank, Jr. commuted to class from Roxbury, Massachusetts. He would graduate with a bachelor’s degree in classics in 1932, a masters in 1933, and later, a doctorate, in 1944.

By the time of Frank the third’s birth in 1946, Frank, Jr.’s appointment at Howard had already brought the Snowdens back to Washington. But Colonel’s wish to create at any cost a lineage of success stories—to personally produce some small part of what W.E.B. Du Bois (a friend to Frank, Jr.) called the “talented tenth” of Black leaders—would follow the Snowdens far beyond Boston.

At first, Frank the third attended Lucy Diggs Slowe Elementary School, in Washington, D.C., an all-Black public school.

When it came time for school to get serious, Frank was sent to St. Albans, an all-white preparatory school—at least until Frank’s arrival. Then eleven years old, Frank was informed that if he failed at St. Albans, the school would never admit a Black student again. “It gave me this absurd sense that I had a whole people riding on my shoulders,” says Snowden. “I learned to work hard, to take studies very seriously, and also to bear with quite a lot of abuse.”

In 1964, Snowden, realizing the patrilineal fate to which he was bound, enrolled at Harvard. “I thought of going somewhere else,” he says. “But I thought my father would die of apoplexy.” (Translation: have a stroke.) During Snowden’s four years in college, 13

Colonel called him once a semester just to ask if he had been inducted into Phi Beta Kappa yet. When his grandson eventually delivered the good news, Colonel replied, “That’s good, Frankie. That’s all I wanted to know,” before hanging up.

Snowden entered college as a steadfast “Kennedy Democrat,” the hopeful winds of the civil rights movement at his back. At first, he did not understand the purpose behind the bloodshed of the war in Vietnam, but there had to be a purpose, however inscrutable. Violence on that scale does not happen without reason, he thought.

On April 25, 1967, he chan-

ged his mind. Sitting in a Harvard auditorium, watching McGeorge Bundy—National Security Adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, central architect of the war— giving non-answer after nonanswer, claiming that he couldn’t remember what he had written in the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, saying that he could not decide if, given the chance, he would do anything differently in the run-up to the wholly optional conflict that would go on to claim over eight hundred thousand lives.

On April 25, 1967, Snowden learned that his father’s self-evident truth, that America “was changing and would get better,

that America was at-least self-correcting,” that things necessarily, eventually improve, might not be so self-evident. * In the two years since it was published, Epidemics and Society has been translated into Chinese, Greek, Korean, Japanese, Russian, Portuguese, Turkish, and Italian.

To date, the book—a six-hundredpage academic text published by a niche university press—has sold over thirty-one thousand copies.

Snowden is already working on another book, also for Yale Press, titled COVID-19: Origins of a Global Pandemic.

A page from Epidemics and Society.

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In March 2020, when Snowden’s tidal wave of interview requests began, everyone wanted to know: Has this happened before?

But they also wanted to know something else: What next? How do pandemics end? “It’s a very misleading question,” says Snowden.

“My best answer is that there is no such thing as pandemics in general, and therefore no rule. Each one is different, and ends in a different way—if indeed it does.”

We have now lived two years in the kingdom of the sick and, in doing so, have grown used to its metaphors, grown comfortable in them. And as that central question—How does this end?—has grown more pressing, we have seen a new set of metaphors crop up: COVID as the loss of twenty-first century innocence, the pandemic as a modern day Pandora’s Box, the wet-market bat as Eve’s apple in the Garden of Eden, too-little-too-late containment as original sin—all reconstructing the pandemic as a moral, not epidemiological event. “​​We have to use metaphors, but we need to be very careful about which ones and think carefully about what we're implying,” says Snowden. The COVID-as-plague metaphor—a metaphor so common that we’ve all but forgotten that plague is a real disease and not a category—is a prime offender.

So too are the societal-ill-as-plague comparisons (racism-as-disease, traffic accidents-as-plague, etc.) that have been en vogue since March 2020. “Traffic accidents are not a freak of nature, they are a product of design,” says Snowden.

“It gives an entirely wrong diagnosis of the problem.”

Frank Snowden is not Nostradamus. The prediction that he made at the end of his lecture in 2010— MARCH 2022

that we were likely to see another epidemic in this century, and that it would likely be an airborne disease, something like avian flu or SARS—was not divination. It was extrapolation.

Snowden, for one, is among the crowd that believes that we “cannot go back” to life before COVID-19. And though he turns to metaphor—particularly the Garden of Eden—to make sense of it, his reasoning is not metaphorical.

Only one disease has ever been eradicated by human action: smallpox. COVID-19 is a highly infectious, airborne disease with animal reservoirs, frequent mutations, and access to an irreversibly interconnected world—in other words, “a very poor candidate for eradication,” Snowden says.

that falls somewhere in between, where we slouch neither towards utopia nor armageddon, where we land neither in the kingdom of the sick nor the kingdom of the well but in the place between them, the place where—as history and Snowden would suggest—we’ve always resided.

Eric Krebs is a senior in Jonathan Edwards College.

If not eradication, then what?

There is a version of the future in which we listen to Frank Snowden’s answer. In the short run, we vaccinate everyone, mask and social distance as needed, improve ventilation in our buildings, and reduce our encroachment upon animal habits and reservoirs of disease. In the long run, we manage COVID for the most part, stamp out flare-ups, and bolster our global institutions to effectively limit outbreaks of new diseases. We, in Snowden’s words, “take responsibility for the world we’ve created.”

Epidemics are neither moral nor metaphorical events; they hold all the significance we assign them and nothing more. “Diseases have no agency,” says Snowden. “They depend on us.”

There is a version of the future in which we listen to Frank Snowden, in which we do all of the things he suggested, and there is a version of the future in which we do none of them. There is a version

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DEMOLISHING OAK STREET Sixty years ago, New Haven destroyed a community to build an expressway. Now, the City has set its sights on Oak Street again.

BY DEREEN SHIRNEKHI Demolition of Oak Street for the Connector, 1958. Courtesy of the Yale Library Historical New Haven Digital Collection

hat was Oak Street like?” former New Haven mayor Richard Lee asks his viewers in a short film made by his campaign in the nineteen-sixties. The film is black and white, stored in the Manuscripts and Archives department at Yale, and shows the changes made to Oak Street under Lee’s administration. “It's almost impossible to describe how awful it was.”

In the film, Lee provides the voiceover as aerial footage of Oak Street, which divides the Hill neighborhood from downtown, before and after his administration’s urban renewal projects plays across the screen. In the footage from before renewal, a man sleeps on the street, trash is scat16

tered around, and the camera peers inside dark, old-fashioned homes.

Lee mourns the fact that there were people living subpar lives in a community that he believes should have been cleared out years ago.

In the “after” footage, the homes and buildings are gone, replaced by clean but desolate streets. Lee praises plans for new commercial buildings, new apartments and the headquarters of a telephone company. He describes the new highway, efficient and conducive to long-distance travel, in place of the area’s once-crowded streets.

When the old buildings finally fell, Lee says he thought of the early settlers, who tore down trees hundreds of years ago and cleared

this land for “a better tomorrow.”

In Lee’s view, mid-century urban renewal projects like this one were a continuation of the project begun in colonial times, where destruction was justified to make way for progress.

In 1959, the city, under Lee’s leadership, began construction of the Route 34 Expressway, colloquially referred to as the Oak Street Connector. This stretch of highway was intended to extend Route 34 from Interstate 95 through New Haven. Construction continued through the nineteen-seventies until federal funding dried up.

Now, the Connector is stuck at a mile long, leading nowhere.

Oak Street is a part of the greater THE NEW JOUR N AL

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Hill neighborhood, and its demolition displaced 881 families, most of whom were working class, and 350 businesses. Renters could receive support from the city’s relocation services in finding new housing, but the requirement that it be affordable and of reasonable quality meant that some families were forced to move to neighborhoods far from their communities.

Homeowners received the market value of their property, but property values plummeted when news

The Connector’s construction destroyed communities and didn’t yield the economic bene ts of cials thought it would in large part because it was never completed. broke of the urban renewal projects and people stopped investing in the area. Most businesses simply shut down, as they received little compensation and were no longer guaranteed the customer base that had made them successful.

cated to the Annex neighborhood in New Haven, but it never felt quite right, she explained during recorded testimony in the New Haven Oral History Project. “It was lovely. We had all the meadows. It was really beautiful and my mother was so unhappy. So unhappy. She thought we took her to California.”

The Connector’s construction destroyed communities and didn’t yield the economic benefits officials thought it would—in large part because it was never completed. It cut off the Hill neighborhood from the rest of downtown, and the neighborhood’s economy suffered both as a result of Oak Street’s demolition and the neighborhood’s effective isolation from the rest of the city. The Hill remains one of the poorest neighborhoods in New Haven, with a poverty rate above 40 percent.

Now, decades after residents’ lives were uprooted, the city is trying to rectify the harm inflicted by the Oak Street Connector.

The Downtown Crossing Project began under former mayor John Destefano, Jr.’s administration in 2013, and its goal is to remove the truncated highway and transform it into walkable and bikeable boulevards.

But no amount of retroactive aid can undo the damage done to those displaced by the city’s decision to prioritize wealthy suburbanites commuting to the city for commerce over the inner-city, working-class residents of Oak Street.

The community included many Italian and Jewish immigrants, as well as a number of Black families.

Samuel Slie, who died in 2019 at the age of 93 and was a pastor at the Church of Christ in Yale University, spoke about his childhood on Oak Street for the New Haven Oral History Project. In the tape, he discusses how his family lived on the second floor of a house with a tailor shop on the bottom floor, owned by a Jewish man with an Irish assistant. He described the schools, houses, stores, factories,

Many families chose to find their new homes without the help of the city, so it’s difficult to know where they ended up. Francesca Ammon is a historian of urban renewal at the University of Pennsylvania, and during our interview, she said that most former Oak Street residents who could be tracked ended up in physically better housing, but were less happy. “They had trouble making friends and missed where they had been,” she said.

“And that’s a typical story across the country.”

Another renewal project in Wooster Square displaced Theresa Argento’s first-generation Italian American family. Her family reloMARCH 2022

Oak Street before demolition, c. 1950-1960. Courtesy of the Yale Library Historical New Haven Digital Collection 17

and people. “I stress that to say we were all growing up together,” he said, “kids with all these different families.”

Sam Teitelman, who died in 2021, described the community in his own tape. “Everybody seemed to know everybody else,” he said.

He and his family were Russian immigrants, and they were all quickly accepted into one of the many synagogue communities in the area. “You’d have meat markets, and grocery stores, and a shoe store, and a clothing store, and there was a very large grocery operation, fruits and vegetables and groceries.”

“Now, of course, it's just that gulf of access space for modern transportation,” Samuel Slie said.

Urban renewal, he said, became urban removal. The city became more segregated, public housing was torn down, and the people who fought against it were usually unsuccessful. “They took the heart of the middle class out of the city.”

Francesca Ammon dedicates a chapter of her book Bulldozer:

Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape—the first scholarly account of the history of the bulldozer—to the history of urban renewal in New Haven. She writes that New Haven received more urban renewal grants per capita than any other city in the country, and in the nineteen-sixties, the city destroyed one out of every six dwelling units.

Richard Lee, the former mayor, spearheaded urban renewal in New Haven. He embraced the opportunity to be at the forefront of progress, and happily took part in photoshoots in which he would sit in the operator’s cab of a wrecking crane, surrounded by demolition.

This process of urban renewal, even outside of New Haven, implies an inherent contradiction. Progress and renewal require demolition. When the city builds a highway, it razes neighborhoods to the ground. Prosperity in the form of modernization is made possible by rubble and bulldozers, or a wrecking ball tearing through

the wall of an old tenement building. In the Oak Street community, those homes were filled with working class Jewish, Italian, and Black families, who suddenly had to find a new place to live—a place that never quite felt like home. It’s difficult to believe what happened here to be progressive when an entire community was erased.

John DeStefano, Jr., who was mayor of New Haven from 1994 until 2016, mentioned in our interview that Richard Lee had been a friend of his. I asked how Lee later felt about the decisions he made regarding urban renewal in New Haven, after seeing its effects. DeStefano paraphrased something he’d heard Lee say much later in his life: “‘Our ambitions were glorious, and our failures were spectacular.’” DeStefano thinks Lee had good intentions, even though DeStefano’s own grandmother’s house was demolished in the process.

“There was this moment in America,” he said, “where cities and rebuilding cities were central to the national political dialogue, which it is not now.”

In 2013, phase one of the Downtown Crossing Project (DCP) began. The project originated during DeStefano’s mayoral administration in the early two-thousands. By this point, urban renewal was widely seen by both residents and city officials as a mistake.

Oak Street before and after construction of the Connector, c. 1960. Courtesy of the Yale Library Historical New Haven Digital Collection 18

“[The Connector] created this linear wall that people didn't walk across,” DeStefano told me, when I asked why he found the DCP necessary. The construction of the Connector created what is effectively a dead end, he said, where people don’t feel comfortable walking. “Commerce didn't thrive.”

THE NEW JOUR N AL

Througpasend

edgement that the city prioritized automobility over community cohesion. The maker of the website has included a photo that emphasizes Oak Street’s “before” and “after”—but the destruction isn’t a source of pride like it is in Richard Lee’s short film.

phasetwofDownto CrosingProject,hiy hasbenltomk moretaxblpy avilbefordpmnt whilesoybgn theprocsfigway removal.

Through phase one and phase two of the Downtown Crossing Project, the city has been able to make more taxable property available for development while slowly beginning the process of highway removal. Soon, Orange Street and South Orange Street will be connected by a pedestrian and low-speed vehicle friendly intersection. Once the federal government agrees to fund phases three and four, Temple Street and Congress Avenue will be fully connected.

“It is the goal to provide economic development opportunities for people that live in the surrounding neighborhoods, including the Hill,” Donna Hall, the senior project manager of the Downtown Crossing Project, told me. The idea is that the new accessibility of the area will allow residents to be more mobile and connected to the rest of the city.

It hasn’t been easy. “It took years of negotiation and study with the Federal Highway Administration,” she said, to ensure the city could build the intersection and still accommodate traffic.

The website for the project reserves space to discuss the Oak Street community and the city’s role in its demolition. Under the “history” tab, there is a description of the diverse families who lived on Oak Street, and an acknowlMARCH 2022

The Downtown Crossing Project is an attempt to rectify some of the harm inflicted by urban renewal. But for the hundreds of families expelled from Oak Street, and for the countless other work-

ing-class residents of New Haven whose lives and livelihoods were upended by urban renewal, it’s an attempt that comes sixty years too late.

Dereen Shirnekhi is a junior in Davenport College and an Associate Editor of The New Journal.

POEM

ABeCeDarian IN E MAJOR

BY ABBEY KIM

After dark it is easier to see Burning Cities with ice Dancing just out of reach.

Everyone is an element, afraid to Fuse, compound or Group together, instead we are inert Helium, only wanting to float up Into air.

Jealousy is rust and it Kisses sweet oxygen which Lingers because it is More than Noble.

Opening eyes is as hard as Plasma solidifying into Quilts of passionate stillness, and while Rubber bands pull and snap, Staying put is harder. Electrons Taste like lemon, smile like Under-eye bags, sound like Vacuums scraping up shards of White painted porcelain.

Xenon is noble, we all want to be noble, but You are different, you melt and mold and Zero me down to nothing.

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D H O T O I G A F IN

are r o o n ade. h t gr ol ou p h u t i r an ho . w c S d o ge ng f aw nd it r L a e sch archi t Yal hem fi i d se nts a elp t ns a r e ude ts to h Vet t s wan p of u o r Ag

BY

ELE

NA

E R B De

A Scarlet Letter Thomas Burke has lost his faith.

Not in God—Burke is now a pastor in the Norfield Congregational Church in Weston, Connecticut— but in his country, and the institution through which he served it: the U.S. Marine Corps. Their motto reads: “Semper Fidelis,” or “Always Faithful.” But when the Marines failed him, releasing him with a bad case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and a bad paper discharge, his faith in the Marines failed in return.

Burke, who looks like the doppelganger of Ted Lasso from the eponymous TV show, enlisted in the First Battalion Third Marines out of Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii right after graduating from high school in 2007. He served for three years, first in Iraq and then in Afghanistan, where he learned the local language of Pashto and developed close relationships with the boys who lived near the base. The boys would help Burke and his platoon, letting them know where bombs were hidden and bringing them any they located. One day, a group of kids was walking over to visit Burke at basecamp to hand over a rocket-propelled grenade they had found, when he heard a blast. The grenade had exploded.

Burke watched eight of the kids he had befriended die.

“They died right in front of me,” Burke says. “I started smoking a lot of hash to kind of deal with that. And the military, the Marine Corps, didn't really like that too much.” Right before his seven-month deployment in Afghanistan ended, and he was due to return to his station in Hawaii, Burke was drug tested.

It came back positive for marijuana. The military, in theory,

MARCH 2022

has a zero-tolerance policy on drugs. Enforcement, though, is at the discretion of a platoon’s commander. “There's this view of zero tolerance for drugs in the military,” Daniel Conway, a military defense lawyer says. “But the application trickles down from leadership.” Burke’s unit commander responded by giving Burke an Other-than-Honorable discharge, or what is known in the military as bad paper.

“There are three administrative separations a servicemember can receive,” a Department of Defense Instruction source tells me. They are: Honorable, the most common and highest designation; General-under-Honorable-Conditions for minor misconduct; and Other-than-Honorable, which is given in lieu of a court martial, and amounts, essentially, to expelling a soldier from duty. “Those are discharges that would definitely put a bit of a scarlet letter on you. You don’t get them if you didn’t, in the eyes of the military at least, misbehave in some way.

Or [do] something that the military condemns,” Brad Carson, the former United States Under Secretary of the Army under Barack Obama tells me. These behaviors are still often relatively minor offenses, such as failing a drug test or exhibiting a pattern of misconduct, like being late to work three times. “They’re definitely stigmatizing,” Carson continues. And the implications are damning.

Burke’s Other-than-Honorable discharge meant he was deprived of receiving any benefits he could have been awarded for his service.

This includes healthcare from the Veterans Association (VA) and post-secondary education from the G.I. Bill. Other-than-Hon-

orably discharged veterans are often the ones who need mental health treatment the most. In a Boston Medical Center Psychiatry study of U.S. Marines deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, researchers found that those with a PTSD diagnosis were eleven times more likely to have a misconduct discharge than those without. Decisions, for those who rank below officer, about whether misconduct is worthy of a less-than-Honorable discharge or not, and who gets blacklisted from VA benefits as a result, are made by the ranks of commanders, with no tribunal or oversight by higher-ups, documents of published military guidelines as well as conversations with sources reveal.

“There was no judge. There was no jury. It was just some guy who’s a middle-aged dude who just didn’t like me, and made a decision to fuck me over for the rest of my life,” Burke says.

Despite his PTSD and his lack of access to resources to treat it, Burke has built a new life for himself in the twelve years since his discharge. He graduated from Yale Divinity School. He became a pastor. But his discharge status still scars him. “An Other-than-Honorable discharge makes it seem like I'm this other-than-honorable person, especially in a culture that really celebrates heroic service in the military so much. This not just erases my service, but it is a negative and a pejorative on who I am,” Burke explains. While he acknowledges it’s possible to seek counseling for PTSD, he adds, “You can't work through an Other-than-Honorable discharge in therapy. Because no matter how far I get, no matter what healing I do, I always have this stupid piece

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of paper, this administrative bullshit, that keeps me from healing.”

Healing emotionally from the discharge may never be possible, but there is one way to bureaucratically erase the Other-than-Honorable discharge designation: applying to a discharge review board. Veterans of the Navy and Marines who believe they have been unfairly discharged can submit an application to the Naval Discharge Review Board (NDRB) and ask them to reconsider their discharge status. The Army and Airforce have their own boards. Last September, Burke put together a 70-page file to present to the NDRB. In October, Burke received his decision, in the form of a one-page response. “They just said, ‘Nope,’” Burke says. He wonders if they even read his file.

“I'm a pastor of a church, and I went to Yale. And I'm not getting an upgrade, because I watched little kids get blown up and smoked pot,” he says. “So, if I’m in this situation, I got to think that other applicants are much worse off than me.”

Over 500,000 veterans are living with Other-than-Honorable discharges. The NDRB rejects 85 percent of discharge status upgrade requests, according to documents the Navy released in the 2016 settlement of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by two military justice organizations against the Department of Defense. The military discharge review boards, 22

according to guidelines instituted by then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel in 2014, now referred to as the Hagel memo, are asked to give “liberal consideration” to cases where service-related mental health issues, like PTSD, could have contributed to the veteran’s behavior and led to the disciplinary discharge. But stories like Burke’s suggest that this isn’t playing out in reality.

Yale Law Jumps In On March 2, 2018, the Yale Law School (YLS) Veteran Legal Services Clinic filed a suit against the U.S. Navy, alleging its discharge review board process does not follow the Pentagon’s standards of giving “liberal consideration” to PTSD-related cases. On October 12, 2021, the court approved the Navy and YLS’s joint settlement agreement—referred to as the Manker settlement, named after lead plaintiff Tyson Manker.

A final fairness hearing for the case was held on December 16th.

Now, a judge is reviewing the terms of the class action agreement and determining whether the settlement will be finalized by the court.

In December 2021, Burke was hoping to join the settlement class of the Manker case. The settlement’s terms stipulate that the NDRB would have to reevaluate the rejections of class members, with careful consideration given to mental health when relevant.

Even though joining the settlement class still wouldn’t guarantee an upgrade for Burke, it would bring him closer than he ever has been to receiving one.

A source for the Navy’s defense asserts that commanders put careful consideration into their discharge delineation. “The commander isn’t making the decision in a vacuum.

There are lots of touch points that the commander uses,” the source says. But, the source explained in a conversation, discharge decisions are at times being made under the extenuating circumstances of war, which may have an influence on the decision. “An officer separating out an enlisted person might be making that decision with limited information, under stress, while managing a battle,” the source says. Commanders always have to be focused on mission readiness—making sure their unit is ready for battle—and have to take action when someone isn’t serving the unit. From that perspective, there is little room for misbehavior.

“Right here in New Haven, we have impacted the whole nation” “Yale’s veterans clinic has been a tremendous leader in military law,” says Eugene Fidell, a nationally recognized military law expert, a Senior Research Scholar at YLS, and an Adjunct Professor of Law at NYU Law School. The Hagel memo itself, which brought mental health considerations into discharge review cases, came out of a case filed by YLS. A settlement with the Army Discharge Review Board, which rejects 45 percent of discharge upgrade applications, with terms similar to those in the Manker settlement, was finalized in April 2021. “So really, right here in New Haven, we have impacted the whole nation with this legislation that has passed,” Conley Monk, the lead plaintiff on the Hagel case, reflects.

Yale Law School’s first-rank reputation in military law may come as a surprise, considering the current and historical political climate at the school. “There was a conscious manifestation of antiwar sentiment that came from THE NEW JOUR N AL

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Healing emotionally from the discharge may never be possible, but there is one way to bureaucratically erase the Other-thanHonorable discharge designation: applying to a discharge review board.

the student body and faculty after Vietnam.” Fidell explains. “Some of that still exists today, but is starting to change.”

Jane Jacoby, the President of the YLS Democrats says that a large portion of the student body identify as on the left politically.

“A vast majority of students at the Law School would likely describe themselves as Democrats. There are certainly a large portion of students that would describe themselves as far-left,” she says.

Just a quick scroll through YLS’s clinical service program offerings sheds insight as to why YLS may attract left-leaning students.

Yale is home to thirty law clinics—groups of students and faculty providing pro-bono legal services.

Every student is required to spend one semester doing experiential learning, either working in a clinic that tackles real world cases or taking a simulation course.

Most are oriented toward progressive causes, such as reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, and capital punishment. Students in most clinics, like the Veterans Clinic, work under their faculty members’ bar licenses in order to lead and take charge of cases.

Meghan Brooks, a Robert M. Cover Fellow at the Yale Veterans Clinic, describes the clinical learning process as, she says, “the same sort of idea as rotations at medical school.” But, Zoe Masters LAW ’22, a student in the Fair Housing clinic, draws a key distinction.

“If you’re in medical school and you’re doing rotations and specializing in different things, obviously that’s not political in any way. But in law school, the things that people choose to work on are informed by their view of justice,” she says.

This is why Amelia Dunnell LAW ’23, a student lawyer repMARCH 2022

resenting Tyson Manker in the settlement, struggled with her decision to work with the YLS Veterans Clinic. In her work, she feels a tension between her dedication to her clients and her personal skepticism of the military itself. “I have my own opinions and value judgments on the value of the military as a concept,” Dunnell says. “A lot of our clients are really proud of their military service, believe in the value of the military, and believe that it's an important institution and might not have the same criticisms against it that I would.”

Dunnell isn’t the only one who has felt this way. Jane Jacoby, president of the YLS Democrats, knows many students working at the Veterans Clinic who would identify as Democrats. “That's not to say that there are not right-leaning members of the Vets Clinic. But I do think that veteran issues are ones that are important to both sides of the aisle. It doesn’t map onto partisan politics in the way that maybe some other clinical offerings might,” she says.

J.L. Pottenger, a Nathan Baker Clinical Professor of Law and Supervising Attorney at YLS, believes the clinic is tackling military issues for the sake of justice, not for the sake of the institution itself. “I don't think that the Veterans Clinic is a right-wing clinic.

I don't think that people who go to it are more conservative,” he says. “And I don't think the Veterans Clinic is about the values of the military or upholding them.

It’s about trying to make sure that the veterans get fair treatment and the rights and the benefits that they were promised.”

That’s the philosophy that has guided Amelia Dunnell’s work with the clinic. “It’s interesting to work with clients whom

you might have some, what you might perceive as, fundamental disagreements,” she says, “but whom you're also really dedicated to obtaining justice for, that you believe they're entitled to.”

Rushed and Random Decisions, Life-Altering Ramifications Thomas Burke sees the cases coming out of the Yale veterans clinic as a beacon of justice in a military system that he thinks operates with a profound lack of it. He hopes the benefits of Yale’s legal victories will trickle down to his case as well.

After two rejections, Steve Kennedy, the lead plaintiff for Yale Veterans Clinic settlement with the Army Discharge Review Board, was able to get his General Discharge upgraded as part of the settlement case. Kennedy spent fourteen months in Iraq serving in the 82nd Airborne Division of the U.S. Army. He returned with severe PTSD. His deteriorating mental health came to a head when he was denied permission to leave his station for ten days to attend his own wedding. Kennedy went AWOL (absent without approval).

He was ultimately discharged under General conditions (which are considered less-than-Honorable).

“It was really traumatic. For me, being in the Army was such a huge part of your identity. And to have the Army then turn around Thomas Burke sees the cases coming out of the Yale veterans clinic as a beacon of justice in a military system that he thinks operates with a profound lack of it.

23

and say your services are less than Honorable, it's like you are less than Honorable,” Kennedy says.

“I was already really depressed to begin with. And then I was kicked out, and after that, I was a mess.”

But what gave Kennedy hope was a rumor that he had heard while enlisted, that discharges were easy to upgrade. “I heard it’s not a big deal. After six months, you just apply, they upgrade you, and it’s fine. But it’s not true. It’s not true at all.” Kennedy applied twice.

He was denied both times, even though his application described mental health diagnoses linking his PTSD to his active-duty behavior. The second time, he was denied on a three-to-two vote.

Josh Britt LAW ’22 worked on Kennedy’s case at the Yale Veterans Clinic. Before Yale, he served four years in the Marines Corps.

While enlisted, he also had heard that less-than-Honorable discharges were a painless upgrade.

Only when Britt started doing military justice work did he realize how far that was from the truth. “The perception was that it was very easy to get a discharge upgrade,” he recalls of his time in the Marines. “So, the commander was very quick to award less-than-Honorable discharges.

He had no sense of their huge life-altering ramifications.” Kennedy, in the years since his service, has talked to commanders who are in the position to delineate discharges. “I’ve heard that commanders just don’t appreciate what it actually means. You’re not thinking about what this person’s Sixty thousand applications are a lot for the five members of the Army Discharge Review Board to slog through.

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future looks like. It’s just you have to get your unit ready to go and this person isn’t working, so you send them out.” Kennedy says.

“You're not thinking, well I better make sure this person gets VA benefits.”

While there are regulations for determining what sort of behavior merits a less-than-Honorable discharge, the power lies in a commander to enforce it. Guidelines provide little standardization, and as a result, personal biases often influence the decisions. A report from Protect Our Defenders, a human rights organization focused on protecting vulnerable service members, revealed that Black service members were more likely to face military disciplinary action. “The persistence of racial disparities within the military may indicate the existence of racial bias or discrimination among decision-makers in the military justice system,” the report concluded. Garry Monk, the brother of Conley Monk, who was the lead plaintiff in the YLS case about the Hagel Memo, and who does veteran advocacy work in New Haven, says, “It’s like Jim Crow in the military, for lack of a better word.”

‘There Are Right Ways to Behave . . .…and Few Excuses Allowed’ Brad Carson, a former Under Secretary of the Army, has a different view of the process. “The military is characterized by a strong adherence to standards and norms,” he explains. “There are right ways to behave. And there are few excuses allowed. That’s the kind of the culture of the place.

It’s also a very rule driven place.”

Discharge decisions are made with urgency when the stakes are life and death. That’s why the discharge review boards were first

formed, after World War Two—to reconsider decisions made under the pressure and haze of wartime in the light of civilian life.

The discharge review boards do not function like an appellate court in the American judicial system. There is no jury of randomly selected civilians hearing the cases.

The board is a set of military officers, some active and some retired, all of whom have a strong sense of military values, which colors how they view cases. “The people who are deciding your case are the ones who have made a living in this system and are comfortable in it,” Kennedy remembers thinking when he was before the board himself. Though the board is given guidance from the Department of Defense and Congress, and has administrative protocol, Carson says that there are no standard publications of guidelines that tell the board how to review each case. As a result, personal biases prevail, along with a strong deference towards the unit commander’s original decision. “They have a real sense of standards and that there are behaviors that should get you separated from the military with a less-than-Honorable discharge. And they believe standards are important to maintain,” Carson says. The stigma against PTSD that is felt on the ground in the military is felt on the board as well. “It’s still a highly testosterone culture,” Carson says. “Is there still some stigma to saying I’m weak or I’m suffering? Yes.” It’s no wonder then that records referenced in the Manker settlement’s original complaint assert that the Army Discharge Review Board rejects a substantial 45 percent of cases, and the Naval Discharge Review Board rejects 85 percent of discharge upgrade applications. Yet, while those perTHE NEW JOUR N AL

centages seem high, a source for the defense in the Manker case says it’s important to remember the staggering number of applications being submitted to the boards for review. Over 60,000 veterans became eligible to reapply to the boards when the Kennedy settlement was finalized, so even if the board only accepts 15 percent of the applicants, that’s still nine thousand people who are getting discharge upgrades.

“It’s a false premise that the board doesn’t grant a lot of these,” the defense source says. “The people on the discharge review boards want to do the right thing for the veteran.”

Sixty thousand applications are a lot for the five members of the Army Discharge Review Board to slog through. The five officers currently sitting on the Naval Discharge Review Board may likely be hit with similar numbers once the Manker case is finalized.

A case like Burke’s, if accepted into the settlement class, might not be re-evaluated for another three years, Burke predicts. The review boards are overworked and understaffed, Carson explains, so an inundation of cases means that each one will likely only get a few minutes of review, likely leading to mistakes and oversights. “It’s so difficult to do right, to do justice, when you’re giving such brief attention to the case,” Carson notes.

‘Should They Suffer That Penalty For Their Remaining Lives?’

This quick decision by the discharge board can have life-altering repercussions. A less-than-Honorable discharge strips servicemembers of VA benefits and job prospects—some hiring managers require servicemembers to release their discharge status. Experts MARCH 2022

and studies say a less-than-Honorable discharge status is one of the strongest factors causing veteran homelessness. Carson thinks that re-resourcing the review boards may help break the cycle of rejection that traps so many less-than-Honorably discharged veterans. But a former official for the Navy speculates that the solution lies in a broader probing of the punitive discharge process as a whole. If the misbehavior of less-than-Honorably discharged veterans is a symptom of risking their lives for their country, should the rest of their lives be ruined as a result?

NDRB was too recent for him to join the Manker settlement class. His faith now lies beyond the military and its flawed justice system. He’s a pastor of the Norfield Congregational Church and does advocacy work resettling Afghan refugees in Connecticut. Even if his own chances for honor in the eyes of the military are now slim, he still hopes others will be granted a chance for honor through the Manker settlement.

All the settlement needs to succeed is the judge’s stamp of final approval. Burke’s praying for it.

Burke held out faith that the Yale settlement would help him upgrade his discharge status, but his original rejection from the

Elena DeBre is a junior in Pierson College and a former Executive Editor of The New Journal.

POEM

DIVING IN TWICE

BY BEASIE GODDU

“Is this love,” O’Hara wrote, “Now that the first love has finally died, Where there were no impossibilities?”

After you have swum and drowned Diving in will terrify— There’s marble at the bottom, dear: Your bones and heart will break on stone. but maybe we can float, you say— Hoping such a thing exists when broken hearts have come and gone and come again.

You’ll dive in somewhere else, you say The poet got it wrong— There’s one thing left for you to do You’ll find another river.

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A Saturday at

By Lukas Flippo Lucibello’s Italian Pastry Shop At Lucibello’s Italian Pastry Shop in downtown New Haven, preparing cakes for customers runs like clockwork. The order sheet is taken down from the wall, a cake is baked and iced, then placed into a box neatly tied shut with string before going into the refrigerator to wait for pickup. On this Saturday morning, one cake needs extra attention.

“It needs to say ‘Congratulations on passing your driver’s test,’” Isabella Scirocco, a Lucibello’s employee, tells Peter Faggio.

It’s Faggio’s job to fit all of those words in icing onto the little open space remaining on top of the cake. I wander anxiously over to the counter where the operation is set to take place, still mystified that anyone could fit that many words on top of such a small cake.

Faggio doesn’t hesitate. Leaning over, he neatly scripts the congratulatory note in pink icing. None of the other employees even notice.

I let out a deep sigh of relief.

“When you have been doing it as long as I have…” Faggio trails off with a laugh after seeing my reaction.

Peter is a second-generation owner of the Lucibello’s. The pastry shop originally opened in 1929, and Peter’s father, Frank Faggio, purchased it in 1959 after growing up working in the business.

These photographs show a typical Saturday at the historic pastry shop, which brings tourists, students, and New Haven locals together to enjoy authentic Italian pastries.

DESIGN BY ANNLI NAKAYAMA 26

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MARCH 2022

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AGAINST SOLITARY, IN SOLIDARITY Putting faces to the fight against solitary confinement in Connecticut.

BY HANNAH QU pandemic. By then it had already been a year since she had lost her son, Carl Robert “Robby” Talbot. The loneliness had become

“In Hebrew, Ruby means first son.” Colleen tossed a treat to her dog. “And Robby was my first son.”

Hospitals and prisons were a revolving door in Robby’s thirty years of life.

Robby struggled with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

He had been in and out of Yale-New Haven Hospital many times and was often arrested for possession of marijuana or trespassing.

After his last arrest for violating parole, he was brought back to prison at about 10 PM on March 19, 2019. Two days later, at 9:40 AM, he was pronounced dead.

When the phone rang and the news When I arrived earcame of Robby’s lier that day, Colleen death, Colleen told introduced me to her me that she asked the dog, Ruby, a three correctional officer year old “Cavachi,” a at the other end of Cavalier King Charles the line, “What hapCarl Robert Talbot's cell at the New Haven CorrecSpaniel-Chihuahua pened to my son?” It tional Center. Photo courtesy of Colleen Lord. mix. Ruby has kept took Colleen seven Colleen company months to get the medical examsince the onset of the COVID-19 unbearable. So Colleen decided to ination report, another year for her adopt a dog in his memory.

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DESIGN BY JACOB FEIT MANN

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olleen Lord rushed back to the kitchen to tend to the roast beef in the oven, leaving me for a few minutes to nervously explore her home. Her West Haven condo sat on the Long Island Sound with a window facing the water. The space was decorated with light blue and purple wallpaper, and a reproduction of a Monet painting hung on the wall. Photos of Colleen and her kids, smiling and rejoicing in each other’s company, stood on a ledge above the electric stove.

To the left of these photos was a little memorial plaque made of black stone.

“Carl Robert Talbot.

May 30, 1988-March 21, 2019,” it read.

to access the material used during the State Attorney’s investigation, and several months more to make sense of scattered evidence from footage, medical reports, and correctional officers’ testimonies.

Now, we were sitting in front of the 19 minutes of camera footage, provided to her by the state attorney around a year and a half ago, that depicted the four sprays of mace and the kick Robby suffered in his last moments of life.

Colleen pressed play.

If I wasn’t choked with shock and anger, I would have cried watching Robby’s life fade in front of my eyes. I told Colleen that I could watch it alone, in case she felt it would be traumatizing to rewatch the video. But Colleen stayed. As the video played, she hit pause at several moments to calmly explain what was going on; were it not for the subtle tremble in her voice, it might have seemed like we were just analyzing a movie.

the events leading up to Robby’s death are fairly clear.

On Tuesday, March 19, 2019, Robby took what would be his last dose of methadone in the morning. In the evening, Robby was remanded to custody in the New Haven Correctional Center for staying in a hotel with his father, which violated his parole. That night, in prison, Robby had a psychotic episode.

The next day, Robby’s withdrawal was worsening, and he was sent to the medical unit for psychological evaluation. Robby started yelling, screaming, smearing feces over himself and the cell.

The day after that, Robby was taken to shower and clean off. He had difficulty leaving the shower.

Lt. Carlos Padro stood by the door, ordering Robby to stand up. He soon lost patience and stepped into the tiny bathroom.

He pepper-sprayed Robby twice and kicked him once in the torso.

Robby screamed and pleaded, surrounding I can’t breathe! … I can’t see!

Help me!

Despite the publicity Robby’s death, however, nine months after that terrible morning Colleen was still desperately trying to find out what exactly had happened to her son.

“Many times,” Colleen replied when I asked how many times she’d watched the footage. “Sometimes I would be like ‘Oh, what did he say?’ and go back and redo it and write everything down in the timeline and identify all of the officers in there and compare what statements they said.” She forced a smile. “I still cry every day.”

Based on the video, a publicly available report by the state attorney, and Colleen’s memory, MARCH 2022

A person who is pepper sprayed needs to rinse the affected area for 15 minutes, according to CDC guidelines.

Robby’s eyes were rinsed for only 10 seconds.

Robby was sent back to solitary confinement instead of to a medical unit to rinse the chemicals off his skin. He fell out of his wheelchair in the elevator. The surrounding police officers told him to stand up, and Robby tried.

But, as a 400 pound man in a narrow space, he couldn’t.

The officers were growing impatient. Robby repeated “I’m sorry,” then “my skin is on fire,” and “help!” Lt. Padro pepper-sprayed

him again.

In Robby’s solitary confinement cell, the officers chained him to his bed. He writhed in pain— every inch of his skin burned. Lt. Padro was still repeating the word “Stop.” He sprayed Robby again.

Robby screamed for it to stop.

Other officers went in and out of the cell. They couldn’t stand the chemical agent in the air. Correctional Officer Charles Washington, whose first name was not disclosed in the report and who had been standing outside the cell, entered and lunged for Robby to hold him down by his chest.

Robby gulped, and once again managed to grit out the words, can’t… breathe. He never said anything else. He lay motionless in bed while officers continued attaching him to chains.

“Good job to everybody.” Lt. Padro said when the officers finally left the room. Robby was left alone in his unventilated, contaminated cell for around 90 minutes.

At approximately 8:57 AM, Lt. Champion determined that Robby was not breathing, and he was sent to Yale New Haven Hospital.

At 9:40 AM, Robby was pronounced dead.

Colleen eventually decided not to release the video. “I just keep thinking about what the state attorney said to me—not to make it public because there are ‘cruel people who have sick websites exploiting videos like this,” Colleen said. “I am cognizant that change comes [more] swift[ly] when people actually see what happened on video.”

The New Haven Independent not only covered Robby’s death but also paid tribute to him and his life

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in a profile published on March 25, 2019. Through their coverage, Robby’s death became a huge local story and sparked discussions about the prison system and police brutality in New Haven.

Stop Solitary CT

SSCT was founded in 2017 by Barbara Fair, a lifelong activist in New Haven fighting for criminal justice, whose work has been covered in the CT Mirror, the New Despite the publicity surround- Haven Independent, and The Poling Robby’s death, however, nine itic. Barbara Fair had witnessed months after that terrible morning firsthand how her youngest son’s Colleen was still desperately try- mental health rapidly deteriorated ing to find out what exactly had during his solitary confinement at happened to her son. In December Northern Correctional Institution, 2019, she still hadn’t received any where he was kept during pre-trial state police documents and videos. at the age of 16. She decided to Around that time, she read an artimake it her life’s work to end the cle about a group named Stop Sol- pain solitary confinement inflicts. itary CT (SSCT), in which Karen Over the years, SSCT has brought Martucci, a spokesperson for the together people like Colleen, forDepartment of Corrections, was mer Department of Corrections quoted defending the practice of (DoC) officers, formerly incarsolitary confinement, saying that cerated people, and legal experts. isolation “is reserved for the most Together, they have been fighting violent, unmanageable” offenders, to end solitary confinement statewide and replace isoIt was hard to get a sense of what was lation with a humane, safe, and rehabilitagoing on in the outside world while in tive system, such as solitary confinement. All the windows providing education were tinted with a painted black film, opportunities and reentry programs to and it took Tracie a long time to finally incarcerated people. scratch a little of it off. such as one who recently “embedded a fan blade in another inmate’s skull.” Colleen knew from Robby’s case that Martucci had mischaracterized the policy.

It was then, she told me, that she started to believe that the Connecticut DOC was running a legalized system of “torture,” a system with far-ranging repercussions beyond the death of her son. So when an SSCT member reached out to Colleen in December, 2019, she met him in a coffee shop in New Haven to learn how she could get involved.

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In 2019, Yale Law Professor Hope Metcalf, who has worked closely with SSCT, argued in a letter to the UN that Connecticut's practices of isolation and in-cell chaining qualify as torture. In 2020, the UN stated that prolonged solitary confinement (without meaningful human contact for 22 hours for more than 15 consecutive days) amounts to psychological torture.

In February 2021, SSCT called on the Connecticut legislature to pass the PROTECT Act. The Act ensures that all incarcerated people can leave their cells for at least 6.5 hours per day, limits

isolation confinement strictly to emergencies, and prohibits it from lasting more than 72 hours in a 14-day period. It also prohibits assigning members of vulnerable groups (such as young people, pregnant people, and people with mental illnesses or disabilities) to solitary confinement, and guarantees access to medical and mental health supervision. The act would also prohibit excessive use of “in-cell restraints”—locking someone in a cell using metal shackles and chains for up to 72 hours—and would guarantee one weekly 60-minute social contact visit to protect social bonds.

The PROTECT Act was passed by the State House and Senate’s Joint Committee on the Judiciary with overwhelming bipartisan support in April 2021, and in early June the full Senate voted to pass the Act. But on June 30 Governor Lamont vetoed it, in a move that activist groups like SSCT said was meant to appease the Correctional Officers’s Union, whose members threatened to strike if the Act passed. In a statement at the time, Lamont claimed that the Act “puts the safety of incarcerated persons and correction employees at substantial risk…[and] places unreasonable and dangerous limits on the use of restraints.”

Instead, Lamont replaced the bill with an executive order that can be revoked at any time. The order provides people in solitary confinement just 4 hours out of their cells each day, and allows DoC to incarcerate people for 22 hours per day for up to 15 days in a row, or 30 days in a 60-day period if an “exception” is granted.

The order also contains no protections enabling inmates to preserve social bonds, places no limits on

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Talbot was shackled in his cell and pepper-sprayed repeatedly before dying in solitary confinement.

Photo courtesy of Colleen Lord. in-cell restraints, and guarantees no ongoing transparency or independent oversight of the reforms.

The executive order seems to have made little difference in the lives of incarcerated people.

According to letters written by inmates of the Cheshire Correctional Institution, the prison has often gone on full lockdown due to “staff shortage” or COVID-19, leaving people locked in their cells for 24 hours.

This year, SSCT is again pushing for the state legislature to pass the PROTECT Act during its 2022 legislative session. At a recent panel that took place on January 22, Professor Metcalf and State Senator Gary Winfield of New Haven, who introduced the PROTECT Act, collaborated with SSCT members to educate MARCH 2022

people on the purpose of the bill, and to explain why the Governor’s executive order was insufficient to secure necessary reforms. Colleen, along with Tracie Bernardi, Ray Boyd, and Michael Braham, all three of whom were formerly incarcerated, attended the panel to share insight into the ways solitary confinement had forever altered their lives.

Seven Years in Solitary After the panel, I reached out to Tracie to learn about her life in solitary confinement. Her story was also reported this February in The Politic.Tracie lived in horrific conditions for 23 years at York Correctional Institution (a prison in East Lyme, Connecticut’s only state prison for women), starting in 1992. She spent seven of

those years in solitary confinement. Those seven years taught her things she never imagined she would ever have to learn, like how to take a shower in handcuffs and how to talk with other inmates through toilets and ventilation ducts. Tracie now has severe PTSD: she is still bothered by lights, she can’t stand the sound of a television, even at low volume, and she’s got anxiety attacks from certain noises, like jingling keys.

Initially, Tracie was sentenced to solitary confinement for two years. Yet each subsequent time that she was issued a disciplinary ticket, the time she had already spent in solitary confinement was discounted, and she had to start all over again. Once she got a ticket for giving a tea-bag to another girl because they weren’t allowed

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to share personal items, or “commissary.” Another time she slid a plastic garbage bag to another inmate without first asking the guard if she could. Two years became seven years, and her body, now in constant aches and pains, recalls the damage of that time.

After sleeping on a metal bed for years, Tracie told me her hips are bad—her back, her shoulder, everything aches.

Sometimes, in solitary, she wasn’t given enough to eat.

She recalled hearing guards making cruel announcements, saying “Oh, I spit in someone's tray today, I wonder whose that is.” In moments like those, she preferred to stay hungry.

Her body was also a means of humiliation.

Doctors announced whatever medical problems she had in public, she told me. Once, a guard asked a larger, mentally ill girl to dance and make a fool out of herself.

Sometimes, Tracie told me, guards strip searched them just to laugh at their bodies. “All of these made me worse,” Tracie said. Since there was no independent oversight that accepted inmates' complaints, Tracie and other incarcerated women suffered all of these in silence.

It was hard to get a sense of what was going on in the outside world while in solitary confine38

ment. All the windows were tinted with a painted black film, and it took Tracie a long time to finally scratch a little of it off. Once in a while she could make out squirrels climbing up a tree or people's feet as they were walking by. Human contact was nearly impossible.

For a period of time, she was only allowed visits from her lawyer. On

for people who wanted mental help. According to Tracie, the two J rooms were the dirtiest rooms. They had a connected pipe system, so when one toilet flushed, the contents passed to the toilet in the other room. Tracie found herself crying more in the J rooms than before. She said that this is what the system had been built to

The shackles and chains used to restrain Talbot while incarcerated at the New Haven Correctional Center. the rare occasion that her family visited, she had to meet them in handcuffs.

The humiliation and the loneliness severely damaged Tracie’s mental health, but asking for help often made it worse. Tracie told me that people in solitary confinement are often penalized for “overusing” mental health counseling, and she was no exception.

When Tracie told the correctional officers that she was suicidal and needed help, she was put into the special room in “J tier,” designed

do—to punish people for asking for help, and to let them languish without it. In the fifth year of solitary confinement, she came close to death, once attempting to hang herself.

Tracie said at the January 22 panel that she hadn’t known there was a group of people on the outside fighting for her while she was in solitary confinement. Now, she is fighting from the outside herself. Tracie never had access to education programs throughout her time in solitary confinement.

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After her release in 2015, she started taking classes at Quinnipiac, Trinity, and Wesleyan. She’s now a recovery support specialist, a volunteer leader of ACLU Smart Justice, and a frequent speaker at SSCT events. Fighting for criminal justice, such as advocating for abolishing solitary confinement, is a way for Tracie to make sense of 23 years in prison. Now 42 years old, Tracie can’t help but wonder, “What do people see when they look at me—what do they see?”

You See Lost Souls Looking at Ray Boyd’s gray and white beard, I could see the time that had passed him by. We met at the Starbucks near Yale’s campus for an interview; he is a man of few words with a quiet, low voice, but he put everything he had to say in his autobiography, The Model Inmate. Ray takes lots of pride in his book and always carries it with him. When I asked him if I could get a copy somewhere, he immediately took one out of his bag and offered it to me as a gift with his signature on the title page.

Ray started his incarceration at Cheshire Correctional Institution, about half an hour north of New Haven, in December, 1992.

In Cheshire, though not officially acknowledged, everyone is in solitary confinement: Ray told me that the only difference between “regular confinement” and “solitary confinement” at Cheshire is that the former has two hours outside cell time instead of one hour. He wrote: “As my cell door slid open I stepped out unsure of where I was heading; however, I had quickly realized when I came to prison the one thing that I would find myself getting used to was following the crowd in whatever direction they were flowing in.”

The flow, he told me, sends MARCH 2022

people into a deep abyss. As Ray recorded in his writing, many people were using church service as an excuse to find more out-ofcell time. “It was as if every crook, robber, rapist, thief, murderer and gangbanger [had] found their god on the inside,” Ray wrote. “The place looked more like hell if you’d ask me.”

Some choose to escape reality through medicine. “You got the individual who just could no longer take the hand that he was dealt and could no longer take prison; so, to cope with it he runs to the medication line each day and night to self-medicate to avoid the daily reality of being in prison,” he wrote.

Ray came back home in November of last year. Like myself and other young people around the country, he is working to get his driver license. A few days after our interview, Ray texted me that he unfortunately failed his DMV learner permit test, but he wished me good luck.

how I am adjusting. I hardly sleep, I sleep three hours per night.”

During his incarceration, Michael received his Associate’s degree, two Bachelor’s degrees and his certification as a paralegal, and he is now working with his former attorney Alexander Taubes LAW 15’. In January, Ray and Michael came back again to support SSCT. Ray said “I just wanna come home and advocate for it, you know, for what is right.”

Michael echoed that sentiment: “I saw Barbara was fighting for us, so I decided to join the fight.”

"I Was Diagnosed with PTSD" The problems that solitary confinement creates—the use of overwhelming force and physical restraints, the humiliation at the hands of guards, the lack of proper mental health and counseling, the hostile and toxic prison culture— are felt by everyone involved.

Kevnesha Boyd is a former therapist at New Haven Correctional

Formerly incarcerated people have to Kevnesha’s anxiety worsened, and learn to live normal she started to become paranoid about lives again after they leave prison, espe- losing her medical license because cially those who were she knew she was delivering a low level in solitary confine- of care. As a mental health counselor ment. For many, this herself, she started going to therapy. proves to be a difficult task. Michael Braham, who I also met at the SSCT rally Center. Kevnesha was Robby’s on Dec 10 and who was also fea- therapist. Witnessing her own tured in a February 2022 article in parents’ incarceration and the The Politic, wasn’t allowed to have impact the War on Drugs had on any visitors, including family and the Black community, Kevnesha friends, or to keep any commissary pursued a career in criminal justice other than religious texts during and landed her dream job at the his time in solitary confinement. DoC, a place where she believed In December, after being released she would be able to provide peofor 6 months, Michael was asked ple with much-needed help. about how he was adjusting to life Kevnesha started working at after prison at the SSCT panel. He NHCC in 2015, and her dream said, “Adjustment? I don’t know 39

job soon became a nightmare. She noticed that the DoC essentially had no enforceable code for the care of incarcerated people and the system resisted delivering actual treatment. Kevnesha witnessed and heard accounts of myriad abusive practices. An inmate told her that when they flushed their toilet, the feces would come up in the water fountain because the pipes were connected. Punching the wall became a common practice, as inmates injured themselves to distract from their deeper existential pain. She says someone once told her “I just needed to see blood, because sometimes I can't tell if I'm alive.” Another patient said, “I didn't want to kill myself until I got on suicide watch.”

ceration from September 2018 to January 2019. She remembered Robby’s gentle, naive behavior, remembered Robby’s love for his mother, that he always looked forward to family visits, and that he wanted to get better. Kevnesha wasn’t there the morning Robby died, but when she came in for the evening shift, she became distraught at the level of indifference at the prison. There was no discussion, no mourning. Officers went about their days, talking about Robby’s death without any regard for him as a human. That was Kevnesha’s last straw. Soon after that, she resigned from the DoC. She later joined SSCT and submitted testimony in support of the PROTECT Act.

Day after day, she was unable to provide the health care people needed: The DoC policy only allowed her to meet with her patients once a month, privacy was never guaranteed, calling her clients by their first name wasn’t allowed, and the people she wanted to work with didn’t always trust her.

Solitary confinement is more than a punitive practice; it is a system that teaches incarcerated people violence instead of rehabilitation. And it brings out the worst part of correctional officers, who were once normal citizens. It damaged the bodies and minds of Tracie, Ray, and Michael. For Kevnesha and Robert Gillis, a former warden who worked with DoC for 36 years, not a day goes by without them thinking about their involvement with solitary confinement, which compromised their ethical values and made them more callous. Fundamentally, solitary confinement calls into question what we believe to be the purpose of the criminal justice system: punishment or rehabilitation?

“It started to change how I was showing up as a mental health professional,” Kevnesha recalled. “It started to change how I was treating people, it started to change how I was thinking, and ultimately it started to change me personally, my relationships, my ability to sleep, my ability to be at ease.”

Kevnesha’s anxiety worsened, and she started to become paranoid about losing her medical license because she knew she was delivering a low level of care. As a mental health counselor herself, she started going to therapy.

There are some memories that Kevnesha still agonizes over. Kevnesha met Robby and became friends with him during his incar40

ney’s office released a report on Robby’s death investigation. The report concluded that “based on the independent review of all the investigative materials, it is the opinion of the State’s Attorney that no actions of any individual Department of Corrections official can be determined to be a proximate cause in the death of Mr. Talbot… no criminal charges will be brought with respect to Mr. Talbot’s tragic death.”

On a sunny afternoon in January, Colleen recounted Robby’s story to me. We sat in her condo by the Long Island Sound, staring out across the blue. As we watched the footage of Robby’s death, she closed the curtains—it was “too sunny.” By the time we pulled them open, it was 5PM, and the sky was painted a melancholic blue. We fell silent. We paused the interview to watch the sun set above the sea—the sky turned vibrant yellow, blazing orange, and then bloody red as the sun burnt through the clouds.

And then, it calmed down. There was pure, thick darkness, and we resumed our conversation.

Hannah Qu is a first-year in Trumbull College.

As Tracie wrote in a poem: “Can’t I the devil confess that you are Lord / and I too taste in Heavens reward / Can we finally bridge the gap between Heaven and hell / Can’t I the devil bask in your forgiveness as well?”

*** In March 2020, the state attorTHE NEW JOUR N AL

LESSONS FROM A FRACTURED LEGACY Yale lecturer Terence Renaud’s New Lefts, reviewed.

BY DANIEL INOJOSA

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aleb Maupin occupies a strange position in the leftist online mediascape. A journalist, author, and self-described “political analyst” with clear authoritarian sympathies, his work has drawn accusations of anti-Semitism, transphobia, racism, and other forms of bigotry, rendering him an undesirable representation of the Left. His most recent work, which one might generously call ‘investigative,’ claims to uncover CIA connections among leftist Internet personalities and only attempts to sow further discord. Maupin and other mud-slingers like him within the so-called “online left” are thorny obstacles in the milieu’s ongoing struggle to draw lines of solidarity.

Calls for unity occasionally surface amid this sea of discord. Yet for all their urgency, they ring hollow so long as their subject—the online forum—is divorced from real organizational forms, like those that characterized the twentieth century Left. If the Left must live up to its twentieth-century legacy through unity, that legacy first has to be understood in a way that rejects nostalgia.

Rather than cling to illusions of unity, Terence Renaud—a lecturer in the Humanities and member of Directed Studies faculty at

MARCH 2022

Yale—pushes his audience to tune into the discord that has always fractured the international Left.

New Lefts: The Making of a Radical Tradition charts a “third strain” of twentieth-century European ideological history, which stakes its place between the mid-century collapse and restabilization of capitalism on one end and the rise of Soviet Communist hegemony on the other. This third strain finds its character in a myriad of small organizations, through both their commitment to radical internal democracy and intergenerational conflict.

Renaud’s “New Lefts” ebb and flow across generations. The antifascist block in nineteen-thirties Germany gave way to the postwar transition to Social Democracy in the fifties, and then to the countercultural fervor of the sixties. Though “neoleftists”—a term coined by Renaud to refer to fringe heterodox Marxists— adopted tactics ranging from clandestine conspiracy to radical faceless democracy, their overarching goal always was to overcome the inactivity of existing working-class political institutions and their partisan squabbles—to break, in Renaud’s words, “bureaucratic sclerosis.”

Renaud avoids inundating the

reader with the names and histories of so many leftist organizations, instead grounding the beginning of his narrative through the ideological development of one Hungarian Marxist, Georg Luk ács.

By charting the life of this chief intellectual protagonist—from his tutelage under the social scientist Ervin Szabo, to his brief stint as a commissar in the Hungarian Soviet Republic, to his loyalty to the Communist International— Renaud renders accessible central theoretical debates on the Left and provides a blueprint for the story of neoleftists after Lukács. Like young neoleftists to come, Lukács obsessed over the authenticity of movements once they had solidified into partisan bureaucracies.

Renaud makes a great choice in using Lukács’ life to display the heterogeneity of leftist ideology, even in an age of mounting Soviet paternalism.

Renaud leaves Lukács behind after the initial chapters to confront his real subject matter: small left-wing organizations throughout the long twentieth century.

Renaud finds plenty of room to navigate narrative themes of newness, intergenerational conflict, and radical experimentation through the history of the Org, an underground syndicate of Marx41

Rather than cling to illusions of unity, Terence Renaud—a lecturer in the Humanities and member of Directed Studies faculty at Yale —pushes his audience to tune into the discord that has always fractured the international Left. ist intellectuals and working-class organizers. The Org’s initial strategic preoccupation with overcoming squabbles between Communists and Social Democrats highlights the way opposing forces within the Left motivated new organizational projects. Its eventual co-optation by rebellious students embodies the intergenerational conflict that drives Renaud’s history. Its tactical overhaul from a system of conspiratorial cells into a decentralized antifascist network demonstrates the kind of organizational fluidity throughout history that interests Renaud.

Even the Org’s change in moniker to New Beginning operates as an endearing thematic callback to youth and rejuvenation. The fact that such a cogent historical argument emerges from materials so sparsely translated and arranged for an English-speaking audience is a testament to Renaud’s skill as a historian.

From the Left Book Club in London, to the Italian emigres of Justice and Liberty, to the Catalan Workers and Peasants’ Bloc, plenty of other neoleftist organizations

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and their members also abound in the early half of Renaud’s narrative. Their relevance to the plot, however, often depends on their engagement with the antifascist front in Spain and their relationship with New Beginning once in exile. Beyond that, they hang like loose narrative threads. Renaud also limits his engagement with the subject of imperialism, which appears only as an occasional reference in later segments of the book without much contextualization or examination.

When he does manage to spin the transnational web together, however, Renaud proves remarkably effective. His treatment of the Spanish front offers a potent setting through which to examine leftist youth’s estrangement from the Stalinist project, once again forcing our attention towards intergenerational tensions while seamlessly integrating Spain into a historiographical perspective largely focused on Germany. As we look at the interwar years through Renaud’s neoleftist lens, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact becomes a climactic betrayal, the culmination of a gradual crescendo of aggressive Soviet policies against leftists abroad. New Lefts, through its biographical purview, renders bare the stakes of discord within the ranks of the workers’ movement.

And yet a bittersweetness hangs over the narrative. Renaud’s emphasis on German “New Lefts” lends itself to a depressing transnational narrative of impotence and co-optation in exile. Nazism’s rise to power inevitably scattered small leftist projects to the wind, forcing their members to demonstrate remarkable ingenuity in maintaining international and often illegal connections. The same precarities

of refugee status that spurred such ingenuity, however, also pressured fringe neoleftists to align with bourgeois democracies against fascism. Renaud inevitably tracks how interwar antifascists abandoned aspirations of grassroots revolution in Germany and segued their positions into populist Social Democracy. The narrative encourages us to appreciate the agency with which former radicals set aside their aspirations, and yet at no point can its author outrun the conclusion that, by the turn of the sixties, Marxism as a driving political doctrine had more or less died out.

Nor did the zeitgeist of the sixties unambiguously redeem twentieth-century leftism. Renaud’s nuanced telling of the sixties details the exhilarating revival of antifascist methods and rhetoric by youth retaliating against the new technocracy of post-industrial capitalism. But it also captures the dissonance between bourgeois students of the New Left and the workers with whom they politically aligned themselves. The same spontaneity and intentional refusal to centralize that characterized the sixties’ uprisings also proved politically ineffective, despite their cultural significance. Renaud goes so far as to lean into neoleftism’s ephemerality as an ironic component of a political process that strives to build tomorrow’s utopia through today’s practices. Neoleftists tried, failed, and tried again in a seemingly endless quest to remain forever young, authentic, and true to their utopian aspirations.

For Renaud, that irony is the point of neoleftist history and the driving force behind his narrative.

But, as a reader, I found myself wishing for his narrative to offer

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Neoleftists tried, failed, and tried again in a seemingly endless quest to remain forever young, authentic, and true to their utopian aspirations. a clearer resolution. In avoiding narrative contrivance, Renaud must contend with the weakened state of today’s Left, preoccupied as it often is by cultural concerns with little organizational content.

Renaud attempts in his epilogue to find a 21st-century American thread in the Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter (BLM), and recent electoral interest in democratic socialism among young people. Nevertheless, even these phenomena became defanged in faux cultural disputes. The culture

wars of today’s online Left seem very much an unfortunate inheritance of the sixties New Left, and a distraction from the material stakes that preoccupied the neoleftists of the antifascist years.

Through its novel intergenerational scope, New Lefts expands our understanding of the 20th-century left to include projects at the fringe of the workers’ movement.

After reading, though, I found myself grappling with the question of where we go from here.

The Occupy movement invited national ridicule before fizzling out. Despite Occupy’s subtler legacy in activist and electoral circles, few would so-publicly threaten Wall Street’s fiscal supremacy until the Gamestop stock surge earlier last year—an effort spearheaded

by capitalistic Reddit speculators.

The material demands of the early BLM movement, rooted in police abolition and community control, would also give way in the public imagination to corporate “anti-racist” commitments that lent themselves easily to movement capture by cultural elites. This is not to say that cultural commitments mean nothing; we should challenge our comrades’ shortcomings. But preoccupation with cultural reforms rings especially hollow amid the dissonance between our circumstances and our discourse. I wonder if New Lefts in some way reveals where this dissonance came from.

Daniel Inojosa is a junior in Silliman College.

POEM

SUBURBAN CAR SERVICE STATION AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

BY ELLA GOLDBLUM I.

At the edge of the world there is a suburban car service station, masked attendants waving entry to dehydrated vehicles. I drove there today to touch the nervous mechanic with my eyes—I don’t know, anymore, where to put my love for other people. He averted his gaze; I examined myself in the rearview mirror instead. It was so humid at the service station, I began to crave my own spit.

Once, I fell so hard for someone I was convinced I was driving off a cliff.

Months later we went silent on the phone. I became my own traffic island, circling the lush green trees in the neighborhood. They are way too alive, I wanted to scream at their creator.

II.

When you can’t smell the dead bodies in the air, you pray to God for reasonable things: drive-thru Chick-Fil-A, bag of waffle fries, slushie at the 7-11 off the third highway exit.

The only natural reaction is to tune the radio to the perfect station: the music, not the news, so if the world ends this afternoon, you will be the last to find out.

MARCH 2022

43

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