The Washington Post National Weekly

Worst Week Sen. Mark Kirk 3

Politics Will Perry’s wink get a nod? 4

Education Sesame Street’s big surprise 16

5 Myths About sunscreen 23

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY SUNDAY, JUNE 14, 2015

‘My hands are tied’ In one American meth corridor, a federal judge comes face to face with the reality of congressionally mandated sentencing PAGE 12

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WORST WEEK IN WASHINGTON

Sen. Mark Kirk

by Chris Cillizza

G

od bless the hot mike.

Without it, how would we know what politicians really think?

Take, for example, Sen. Mark Kirk (R­Ill.). On Thursday morning, he offered his thoughts about Senate colleague Lindsey O. Graham (R­S.C.) near a mike he thought was off. If Graham, a bachelor and presidential candidate, wins the election, Kirk said, “He’ll have a rotating first lady. He’s a bro with no ho.”

Er, okay.

So, here’s the thing: 1. No one says that (especially not white, middle­aged men).

2. Even if people did say it, a U.S. senator shouldn’t be using the phrase, especially not in public. Like, ever.

3. Kirk is also single.

This isn’t the first time in recent months that Kirk has been caught saying something impolitic.

Back in April, he drew unwanted attention when he talked about trying to build wealth among African Americans “so that the black community is not the one we drive faster through.”

Two months earlier, Kirk created a firestorm when, amid a fight over funding the Department of Homeland Security, he said, “The Republicans — if there is a successful attack during a DHS shutdown — we should build a number of coffins outside each Democratic office

KLMNO WEEKLY

CHARLES REX ARBOGAST/ASSOCIATED PRESS

and say, ‘You are responsible for these dead Americans.’ ” Kirk, not for nothing, also happens to be the single most vulnerable Senate incumbent up for reelection in 2016, running in a state that President Obama carried by 17 points in 2012 and where Democrats have a top­tier recruit in Rep. Tammy Duckworth.

Mark Kirk, for forgetting (again) not to say aloud absolutely everything you are thinking, you had the worst week in Washington. Congrats, or something. n

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2015 The Washington Post / Year 1, No. 35

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY TRENDS BOOKS OPINION FIVE MYTHS

4 8 10 12 17 18 20 23

ON THE COVER U.S. District Court Judge Mark Bennett is seen in the courtroom of the Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse in Sioux City, Iowa. Photograph by DANNY WILCOX FRAZIER/VII for The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Can he close the deal?

JIM YOUNG/REUTERS

Some see Rick Perry as a gifted retail politician. Others just see a glib pitchman.

At the Freedom Summit in Des Moines in January, the former governor of Texas was still months away from declaring that he would run for president again.

BY

S TEPHANIE M C C RUMMEN

W

hen it happens, Rick Perry is speaking to a friendly crowd in a living room in Greenville, S.C. He appears relaxed. His suit fits perfectly. Hair: great. Glasses: starting to seem more natural.

He’s gotten nods talking about jobs in Texas, laughs with the line about flunking organic chemistry and claps when he says a brighter future “starts right here . . . today!”

Then a man poses a question about the importance of speaking plainly, and Perry pauses a moment before he answers by asking rhetorically, which is to say confi-

dently: “Did I say anything today you couldn’t understand?”

People laugh, and this is when it happens: Rick Perry winks.

Because Rick Perry is a winker, and has been for a long time.

“It’s something he’s always done,” said a friend who has known Perry since the 1980s.

It could be argued that the Perry persona comes down to the wink, which friends and supporters describe as part of a broader repertoire of natural-born gifts that makes the 65-year-old former governor one of the most instinctive retail politicians in the 2016 field.

Other notable winkers: George W. Bush, at Queen Elizabeth II

after he accidentally suggested she helped America celebrate its birthday in 1776; President Obama, in his State of the Union this year, after dressing down congressmen who clapped when he alluded to the end of his term.

The Perry wink, though, comes with its own set of associations.

On one hand, it evokes country upbringing, Texas swagger and the ability to say things such as “I’m gonna love on you,” meaning flatter you, without laying it on thick. More fundamentally, the wink can seem to reveal a certain sensitivity — an ability to read a room.

On the other hand, a wink can

evoke the overconfidence and cheap tricks of the used-car salesman, the sort of character that Perry’s critics have often cast him as, especially after his performance in the 2012 primary. The infamous debate when Perry froze — trying for 45 seconds to remember the third agency he would abolish, before he finally gave up with an “oops” — has been read not just as a human fumble but the moment he was exposed as a lightweight.

Which is it?

Is the wink the mark of Perry’s essential authenticity, possibly his greatest asset? Or does it represent his biggest challenge — overcoming the perception that he’s all

SUNDAY, JUNE 14, 2015

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POLITICS flash and little substance? Or is it something more complicated?

Part of the answer lies in Greenville, where the wink is playing well in a friendly room.

For one, Perry’s timing is impeccable. He deploys the wink at the moment the audience seems most with him, as they’re still laughing.

Second, the wink isn’t strained; it seems natural, even through the lenses of his hipster glasses. Third, he aims it not at the man who asked the question but in the opposite direction — toward a cluster of women, including Racine Cooper, the bylaws chairwoman of the Greenville County Republican Women’s Club, who says later that he struck her as “a simple person who knows what it is to say something plainly. He’s not full of it.”

After the wink, Perry shifts back into a more serious tone.

“Good,” he says. “All right. Hey, listen. I’m telling ya. We’re on the verge of the greatest days in America’s history. That’s not rhetoric.”

He thanks South Carolina for sending soldiers to defend the Alamo, then steps into a red-walled room for the meet-and-greet.

“Watch him,” says Katon Dawson, state chairman of Perry’s political action committee. “Whether you’re with Rick or not, you can’t not like him.”

Perry grew up in the dusty flat sprawl of Paint Creek in West Texas, where his father, Ray, was a cotton farmer and commissioner.

Perry’s mother, Amelia, told the Dallas Morning News that when Ray and other men would gather to talk at the Methodist church, her 7-year-old son was always there, trying to work his way into the circle. “He wanted those men to recognize him,” she said.

In elementary school, he campaigned for Halloween king by handing out candy.

There is the often-told but unverified story that when Perry, a star high school football player, once got knocked out on the field and the coach went to ask if he was okay, Perry said he was fine but asked how the fans were taking it.

At Texas A&M, Perry was known for elaborate pranks. He was popular, but also wanted to be popular, winning an election to be one of five “yell leaders,” a prestigious position leading cheers.

Then there was his first job: as a Bible-book salesman.During college, Perry worked for the Southwestern Co. in Festus, Mo., where

ANITA PERRY VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

Perry’s critics and admirers say that his central achievement has been to sell Texas, luring companies such as Toyota and eBay. he was dropped off with a friend from college, John Brieden, at a gas station with nothing but his dad’s old Army bag and a box of books. The young men rented a room, ate breakfast at a diner and split up for long, hot days knocking on doors. At night, the two young men would sit at the diner and compare notes.

“Got told no a lot,” he says when asked whether selling came easily.

He pauses and leans in.

“But I got told yes enough to buy a 1967 Catalina Pontiac!” he says, grinning. “I want to say it was $2,700, which, that is a huge amount of money in 1969!”

Perry always had a well of ambition underneath the charm, Brieden says, recalling a conversation at the washateria that summer.

Perry asked Brieden whether he had goals; Brieden said he wanted to pay for college.

“He said, ‘No, no, what are your goals?’ ” Brieden recalls. “He said, ‘I’ve got three goals.’ ” One was to graduate, which the

chemistry-challenged Perry knew was no guarantee; two was to be a yell leader; three was to be a member of the Ross Volunteers at Texas A&M, an elite group of cadet honor guards for the governor.

“He did all of those three things,” Brieden says.

After college, Perry joined the Air Force and flew C-130 cargo planes in England and Germany and missions to Saudi Arabia and South America.

Then something happened that could be considered out of character for someone as driven and cocky as Perry seemed: In 1977, he came home to Paint Creek, moved into his childhood bedroom and spent six years adrift. “I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t happy,” Perry has said of that time, describing himself as “lost.”

Eventually, he decided to apply for a pilot job with Southwest Airlines. But before he got hired, a group of politicos convinced him there was a better use for his rugged good looks and obvious gifts,

This 1989 photo shows Rick Perry with his son, Griffin, and daughter, Sydney, when Perry was a member of the Texas House of Representatives.

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and Perry entered a profession that chose him as much as he chose it. He was elected as a Democrat to the state legislature, and then was persuaded to run as a Republican for agriculture commissioner. He won, and kept on winning, eventually becoming the longest-serving governor in state history, a job he approached the way he knew best: as a salesman.

Perry’s critics and admirers say that his central achievement has been to sell Texas, luring companies such as Toyota and eBay to the state with billions in incentives, face-to-face pitches and ads.

“This is Texas Governor Rick Perry, and I have a message for California businesses,” began one ad in 2013. “Come check out Texas . . . and see why our low taxes, sensible regulations and fair legal system are just the thing to get your business moving. To Texas.”

Perry set up the controversial Texas Enterprise Fund, which critics called a massive slush fund that has rewarded Perry’s political allies and which Perry called “the largest deal-closing fund of its kind in the nation.”

“Look, in powers of persuasion, he is among the top of all the governors, and I’ve worked with a lot,” says Dennis Cuneo, a former vice president for Toyota who was in charge of site selection for a new pickup-truck assembly plant soon after Perry became governor in 2000. “It’s his whole demeanor.

The way he shakes your hand, how he looks you in the eye. He says, ‘I’m here to make you successful.’ ” Cuneo says he was struck by the governor’s unbridled enthusiasm.

“Texas was a long shot,” he says.

“So I paid a visit to Perry in 2002. It was supposed to be a half-hour meeting and turned into two hours.” Cuneo says Perry knew he had grown up in Pennsylvania and struck up a long conversation about Pittsburgh. Perry told him that the pickup was “born in Texas” and that moving there would help with Toyota’s marketing. He upped the incentive package. He mentioned that he had spoken to the family that needed to sell the land. He gave Cuneo his cellphone number, and when Cuneo called later, Perry answered.

“He’s governor of a pretty big state — that doesn’t happen often,” he says. “He knows how to close the deal.”

At the start of the 2012 GOP continues on next page

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POLITICS

from previous page

THE FIX

primary, Perry was closing deals all over the place, raising millions from the business community, winning the support of conservative Christians, bounding out of his bus in the South Carolina sun and soaring to the top of the polls.

The wink and all the confidence and swagger it embodied seemed to be working again — until the oops, and an especially animated speech in New Hampshire that was odd enough that some speculated that Perry was drunk or high on painkillers for a back condition, all of which Perry denied.

There was a last, awkward swing through South Carolina in which Perry wandered through an empty antique shop and, finally, in a moment that was the opposite of a wink, announced he was dropping out and returned to Texas.

Only now here he is again, trying to get it all back.

He’s in Greenville, at the Hyatt Place hotel, saying that he didn’t learn everything about retail politics in one place, and talking about dust storms and his parents, the well-worn stump speech.

“So,” Perry is saying, “watching your —” He stops himself. He pauses.

Five seconds pass. Six. He’s squinting into the corner of the room.

Seven seconds. Still pausing.

And this is the other thing about Rick Perry: As confident and swaggering as he can seem these days, there are still moments when he can seem lost. Not exactly lost in thought. Just lost, not unlike he appeared to be on stage during the debates in 2011 — far from Texas and the persona he created there, standing before crowds that were not always friendly, not necessarily buying what he was selling.

“We never had a lot of new things,” Perry says finally, and now he’s back to the familiar persona and stump-speech stories, talking about how the harsh life of west Texas taught him how to handle adversity, his father’s stoicism, and on until an aide tells him that it’s time to go.

And it is somewhere between then and Perry’s closing argument — that he’s better prepared this time, and that he’s certain voters “will see a very different individual when it comes to my performance” — that it happens again.

Perry winks and, a little while later, heads to New Hampshire. n

Senate seats primed for flips BY

C HRIS C ILLIZZA

S

enate Democrats are well positioned in 2016 both in terms of the landscape — they are defending 10 seats compared with 24 for Republicans — and the early-recruitment wars. They have at least a shot at winning back the Senate majority.

In places such as Illinois and Wisconsin, Republican incumbents start as, at best, even-money bets to win. And in Illinois, the odds are probably slightly worse.

The key for Democrats lies in landing top-tier recruits such as Gov. Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire and former senator Kay Hagan in North Carolina. In Pennsylvania, where Democrats have been clearly unhappy with former congressman Joe Sestak as their nominee, keep an eye on Katie McGinty, the chief of staff for Gov. Tom Wolf (D).

Republicans have few pickup chances and have yet to land solid recruits in their two best opportunities: Colorado and Nevada. Rep. Joseph J. Heck may run in Nevada, but the no-go decision by Rep. Mike Coffman in Colorado takes away one of their best options against Sen. Michael F. Bennet (D).

These 10 races are considered the most likely to switch parties, with the No. 1 race the most likely flipper and all 10 competitive:

here because polling shows former governor Ted Strickland (D) ahead of Sen. Rob Portman (R).

Republicans insist that Strickland is at his high-water mark. I tend to think they’re right. The top-of-theticket dynamic in what has been one of the swing states in the past four presidential elections could tilt a close race.

Colorado (D): This seat gets tougher for Republicans be7 cause of Coffman’s decision not to run. Republicans point out that Sen. Cory Gardner (R) opted against the 2014 race and then reconsidered, but we’ll believe it

GOP Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire may be vulnerable, if Democrats can find a candidate.

when we see it. And Gardner was the shining star of the Colorado Republican Party in a way that Coffman just isn’t. The state GOP bench is also surprisingly thin.

Arizona (R): The decision of Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick (D) to 10 New Hampshire (R): Does run was a surprise to many. She 6 Hassan run? Or not? We’ll find seems to be gambling that a seriout this summer when the state ous primary challenge to Sen. John McCain (R) in the form of Rep. Matt Salmon could produce enough chaos for her to win in what is a GOP-leaning state. Maybe. And Salmon’s not in yet.

(R): Democrats are optimistic about their chances 8 Ohio

Nevada (D): The big question here is whether Republicans 4 can persuade Heck to run for the seat of retiring Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). It looks as if Heck is leaning toward the race, but until a candidate says he’s in, he’s not in. Democrats have quickly coalesced behind former state attorney general Catherine Cortez Masto as their pick.

Florida (R): Democrats would be feeling even better here if it 3 weren’t for these two words: Alan Grayson. The controversial (to say the least) liberal congressman continues to talk a big game about challenging Rep. Patrick Murphy in the Democratic primary. That would be a problem for the moderate-leaning Murphy and national Democrats. Republicans have their own primary shaping up between tea-party-backed Rep. Ron DeSantis and Carlos Lopez-Cantera, the lieutenant governor.

Wisconsin (R): Sen. Ron Johnson (R) continues to make 2 headlines — for the wrong reasons. The latest was his defense of “Lord Business,” the bad guy in the “Lego Movie.” Um, okay. Democrats have placed lots of faith in former senator Russ Feingold, which is interesting, given how terrible a campaign he ran in 2010 against Johnson. Still, this is a prime pickup opportunity for Democrats, as early polls show Feingold with a healthy lead.

legislative session ends. If she passes, there’s not an obvious second choice for Democrats. If Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R) escapes that tough race, expect her to be mentioned as a possible Republican vice presidential pick next year.

(R): Hillary Rodham Clinton is almost certain to 1carryIllinois Illinois by double digits in

setback for the anti-Sestak crowd.

But it’s clear that Democrats are committed to finding someone other than Sestak as the challenger to Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R). De-

2016. Can Sen. Mark Kirk outperform the top of the GOP ticket by that kind of margin? Anything’s possible, but it’s a very hard race — particularly because Democrats landed their first-choice recruit in Rep. Tammy Duckworth. Duckworth doesn’t have a clear path in the primary, though. n

North Carolina (R): Hagan seems decidedly noncommittal 9 Pennsylvania (R): Montgomery about running again. And it’s not 5 County Commissioner Josh entirely clear how vulnerable Sen. Shapiro’s decision not to run is a Richard Burr (R) is even if she does make the race.

spite being in a blue-leaning state, Toomey is a very able candidate, as he proved in 2010, and won’t go down without a well-executed challenge.

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Pulling more women into fundraising M ATEA G OLD Los Angeles BY

F

ran Seegull, the chief investment officer of a nonprofit investment firm, has worked in the elite fields of philanthropy and venture capital. But the Santa Monica resident had never dipped her toe into the world of political fundraising.

That changed when she saw Hillary Rodham Clinton gearing up for another presidential run.

Seegull donated to her 2008 campaign, but this time she wanted to do more. That meant raising campaign cash, she realized.

“I don’t think women have had as significant a seat at the table as they could and should,” Seegull said.

Energized by the prospect of helping the former secretary of state make history, many women are activating their personal networks for the first time to pool contributions for her campaign, helping Clinton tap into new sources of cash as she assembles what is expected to be a morethan-$1 billion operation.

Already, more than 60 percent of Clinton’s donors are women, according to a campaign official.

That puts her on track to outstrip the presidential high-water mark set by President Obama in 2012, when 47 percent of donors who gave him more than $200 were women, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The surge of female-driven contributions for Clinton could fuel a partisan divide when it comes to gender and political money. In 2012, women gave 52 percent of their federal donations to Democratic candidates, a slight edge the party has held since 1998, according to the center.

Here in California, Seegull is part of an early endeavor by a wide-ranging group that includes lawyers, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and stay-at-home moms working to collectively raise at least $1 million for Clinton’s campaign by the end of June.

“I just really wanted to do something around the excitement I had been experiencing with some of

BRET HARTMAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

NICK OTTO FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Clinton’s campaign is inspiring more donations and a new wave of novice political bundlers my friends, women who were saying, ‘What can we do?’ ” said Karen Skelton, a Sacramento-based political strategist who started the effort. “I thought, what is the best on-ramp for them? I couldn’t go to Iowa like I used to and be an organizer. I wasn’t going to leave my teenage girls and go do a phone bank in New Hampshire. To be an adult in the presidential race at this time, it’s all about the money.”

Skelton and other longtime fundraisers such as former Los Angeles city controller Wendy Greuel have been coaching those new to the process, offering tips about how to pitch friends and family. “Guilt works,” Greuel said.

Their efforts come ahead of the public launch of a formal program

by Clinton’s campaign to organize female fundraisers, and they hope to inspire similar efforts in other states. Nearly 50 women have signed on so far, with co-chairs committing to bring in at least $25,000. (They’re accepting donations from both men and women.)

That may be a modest sum for veteran bundlers, but it is daunting for those who have never tried asking people for money.

“I have no idea what I’m doing,” said Analea Patterson, a 43-yearold lawyer in Sacramento. “The first thing I did was hold my breath and do my own contribution for 10 times more than I had ever done before, which was very scary. I don’t know a lot of people who are going to write $2,500 checks. That’s not the world I live in.”

But Patterson said she decided to take on the project after her 8-yearold daughter asked her why there has never been a female president.

“I was completely stumped,” she said. “I didn’t have a good answer. I have two daughters, and I want them to grow up in a world where they don’t see barriers for women.”

Camilla Olson, a clothing designer in Palo Alto, said one of her driving motivations to get involved in the group was her son, who is gay, and the impact the next

At left, Fran Seegull, an executive at an investment firm, donated to Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008 but wanted to do more this time. At right, fashion designer Camilla Olson says, “I . . . have no time to be spending on Hillary, but I think for my children, I have to.”

president will have on the Supreme Court.

“I am really busy and have no time to be spending on Hillary, but I think for my children, I have to,” Olson said. “I have always been a feminist and always wanted a woman president. She is not a perfect person, but I am not, either. I don’t know a person who could do a better job than her.”

Brandee Barker, a communications strategist in Silicon Valley, said that after working with Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg on her “Lean In” initiative, she began thinking about the need for more women in elected office.

“I recognized that one of the ways we change this is by more women getting involved in the process around political contributions,” she said. “That is an important part, unfortunately.”

Women have long been dramatically underrepresented among political donors. In 2012, they accounted for just 27.1 percent of all contributions over $200 to federal candidates and outside groups, according to a study by the National Council for Research on Women. The gap was even wider when it came to big money: Men accounted for nearly 80 percent of the huge sums that went to super PACs and other independent groups.

It’s harder to pin down the gender breakdown of bundlers, those who pool checks for candidates, because the candidates are not required to disclose those names.

But veteran fundraisers on both sides of the aisle agree that their ranks are overwhelmingly male.

Many women feel priced out of the process, especially in an environment swamped with super PACs and seven-figure checks, said Barbara Lee, a major Democratic donor in Cambridge, Mass., who has sought to convince other women that they can have an impact by amassing small sums.

“It’s so incredibly important for women to be at the table as fundraisers for the same reason it’s important for them to be involved in politics in general — women’s voices change the conversation,” Lee said. n

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NATION

In prisons, a growing experience M ICHAEL S . R OSENWALD Westover, Md. BY

D

on Vass, an admitted drug dealer, pulls a cabbage from the ground, then hands it to Walter Labord, a convicted murderer.

They are gardening behind soaring brick walls at Maryland’s largest penitentiary, where a group of inmates has transformed the prison yard into a thriving patch of strawberries, squash, eggplant, lettuce and peppers — just no fiery habaneros, which could be used to make pepper spray.

It’s planting season behind bars, where officials from San Quentin in California to Rikers Island in New York have turned dusty patches into powerful metaphors for rebirth. The idea: transform society’s worst by teaching them how things bloom — heads of cabbage, flowers, inmates themselves.

“These guys have probably never seen something grow out of the ground,” says Kathleen Green, the warden at Eastern Correctional Institution, watching her inmates till the soil. “This is powerful stuff for them.”

And they are lining up for the privilege of working 10-hour days in the dirt and heat.

Gardens were a staple of prison life decades ago — Alcatraz had a lovely one — but experts say many disappeared in the 1970s as lockem-up-and-throw-away-the-key justice took hold. As some corrections systems veer back toward rehabilitation, prisons without gardens are scrambling to start them, contacting nonprofits such as the Insight Garden Program, which runs California’s prison gardens and is expanding nationwide.

“The demand is huge,” says Beth Waitkus, the program’s director.

“Prisons see the value of this.

When you have to tend to a living thing, there’s a shift that happens in a person.”

Some prisons are using the food to feed inmates, part of a green movement in corrections to save money, both in operating expenses and health-care costs, with many inmates suffering from diabetes

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

Gardens are sprouting up nationwide where herbs, vegetables — and inmates — can flourish and high blood pressure. Food quality is typically at the top of the food chain of prisoner complaints.

Other prisons donate the food to the poor, a powerful form of restorative justice where inmates help people living in situations very much like where they came from. Eastern Correctional prisoners are growing food for an area on Maryland’s Eastern Shore with some of the state's highest poverty and childhood obesity rates.

Last year’s total: five tons. And the garden is off to a good start this season. As the warden walks by, Maurice Jones, serving seven years for theft, drives a wheelbarrow over to help with the cabbage.

Vass holds one; it’s firm and leafy.

“Those look good,” the warden says. And it makes the inmates feel good, too.

“It makes it feel like you still have it in you to do something good,” says Labord, now 39 and serving a life sentence for an armed robbery and murder when he was a teenager.

Before he got into trouble, he used to work with his grandma at a church handing out food to the poor. “It felt good,” he says. “Now I’m giving back again.”

While Labord might never see another free day in his life, most prisoners do get out. Corrections officials think gardening is one way to keep them from coming back. Early studies of gardening programs in California prisons found that less than 10 percent of participants returned to prison or jail, a dramatic improvement from the National Institute of Justice’s U.S. rate of more than 60 percent.

Experts say that gardening provides career opportunities on the outside for ex-convicts with low job skills and that working with nature calms the soul and helps them jettison criminal behavior.

The Insight Garden Program’s curriculum includes classroom lessons on ecology, emotional intelligence and leadership.

Whole new worlds are opened.

Prisoners at Eastern Correctional

Prisoner — and gardener — Edward Carroll packs up the tools of his new trade after a hard 10-hour day in the field. All the work is done by hand, from tilling the ground to planting the seedlings.

even say they watch gardening shows on public television in their cells.

“You want to just learn everything,” says Edward Carroll, 43, convicted on drug charges. He has eight books in his cell — six gardening manuals and two Bibles.

The work is grueling. The inmate gardeners work long days.

Their work is slowed by the rhythms of prison life. When inmates move through the yard on the way to chow, the gardeners have to lock up their shovels so someone with escape on their mind can’t get near them.

The gardeners work in an unusual partnership with corrections officers. They are all novices.

They share ideas and study log books. If there is an issue, an officer will dispatch a gardener to the library for research.

“It’s custody,” says Lt. Debra Flockerzi, who supervises the gardeners. “They are inmates. But if we didn’t work as a team, we couldn’t do all of this, ” she said.

“I’ve got them growing a lot of herbs,” she said. “But not the kind you smoke.”

Flockerzi has set strict requirements to get on the garden team, including no gang affiliations and clean discipline records.

The gardeners say there is some jealousy from other inmates who want to work in the garden. Some tease that the work can’t be all that hard — just drop some seeds in the ground, rake the dirt, and voila.

“They see the fruits of our labor,” Carroll says, “but they don’t see our labor.”

“The quality is amazing,” says Matey Barker, an Eastern Shore behavioral health director. “The greens are just gorgeous.”

The inmates who are getting out all say they plan on having a garden wherever they live. Jones says he sometimes wonders if he would have gotten into trouble if he’d been tending to vegetables.

“I could have had one at the places I’ve lived,” he said. “It’s a nice little hobby.”

Vass says his fiance is jealous of his garden: “She says, ‘I want one when you leave.’ ” She’ll have to wait a few years. n

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News flash: You’re being recorded

BY M ARC F ISHER AND P ETER H ERMANN

A

police officer slams an unarmed 15-year-old in a bikini to the ground, pulls his gun and kneels on her as teens on either side of him shout and, of course, record the encounter. Within hours, millions watch the video: Some see a defenseless black teen being manhandled by an out-of-control white cop; others see a lone, scared officer in the crowded, chaotic aftermath of a fight he doesn’t yet understand.

Cellphone video has become as much a part of policing as tickets and handcuffs. Videos of police shootings have sparked national turmoil. But the ugly, cacophonous scene in McKinney, Tex., at first seemed like something more routine — a call about misbehaving teens at a pool party.

Then it went awry, at least in the seven-minute version of reality posted on YouTube. The clip is the classic kind of video that can crush public trust in police. Yet paradoxically, police chiefs want more video, in the form of body cameras, to repair relations with the public.

In theory, video sends a message of certainty: This is what happened. Recorded snippets of an encounter between police and the public can reveal the crushing, life-or-death stress that officers face — and the overwhelming power an officer can wield.

Social-science research and folk wisdom agree that being watched can also change behavior. When people know they’re being recorded, they tend to clean up their acts.

For police, whose own departments increasingly record their every move, “cameras have a natural tempering effect,” said Greg Seidel, who spent 25 years with the Petersburg Police Bureau in Virginia and now trains police on tactics and ethics. “Knowing that everything you say and do can be up for public inspection will make everybody more cautious.”

Yet YouTube is chockablock with recordings of video-monitored workers doing the wrong thing — in fast-food places, factories and nursing homes as well as

BRANDON BROOKS VIA YOUTUBE

In an era when everyone has a smartphone, why didn’t officer know he was bound for YouTube? patrol cars. Few would argue that Cpl. Eric Casebolt of the McKinney police was particularly tempered or cautious in his response to a call about disruptive teens.

Casebolt, a 10-year veteran who resigned Tuesday in the wake of the controversy, is seen in the video repeatedly cursing at teenagers, pulling the hair of the girl he threw to the ground, and cuffing teens who calmly protested that they’d just arrived to attend the party.

At least two teens held up phones as he threw the girl down.

Brandon Brooks felt compelled to post his clip on YouTube because, “this kind of force is uncalled for

especially on children and innocent bystanders.”

Videos that go viral are by definition aberrations; they represent not the usual interactions between police and citizens but unexpected, sometimes unacceptable moments. Yet many police departments do nothing to prepare officers for being recorded. A spokesman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said its 18,000 employees receive no training on what to do when citizens pull out their smartphones.

In Baltimore, Lt. Victor Gearhart, a shift commander, reminds officers daily that residents have

Cpl. Eric Casebolt, a McKinney, Tex., police officer, forces an unarmed 15-year-old girl to the ground. A video taken by a witness had millions of views on YouTube this past week.

Casebolt resigned from the department Tuesday.

the right to aim a camera at them.

“I tell the officer, ‘You have to stay in control at all times,’ ” said Gearhart, a 33-year veteran. Yet Gearhart said he is under no illusion that even good policing would make for comforting video.

“There’s no way to make violence look pretty,” he said.

For example, most people don’t realize how hard it is to handcuff a person who doesn’t want to be handcuffed. At the police academy, he said, an instructor told two of the largest cadets to handcuff the smallest. They failed. “If we really wanted to cuff him,” Gearhart said, “we were going to have to really hurt him.”

When officers who know they are being watched nonetheless behave with undue aggression, the problem is “poor selection and poor training,” said Stephen Curran, a psychologist who studies police and stress. “Most police departments don’t do psychological assessments of job candidates.”

But even good officers — like people in any line of work — can look bad when details of their workday are isolated in a video clip. Few surgeons would want the public to witness the harsh banter common in operating rooms. And many teachers would quickly bleach the humor out of their classrooms if video of the proceedings were fed to anxious parents.

“Very few officer-citizen contacts involve the delivery of good news,” Seidel said. “You’re usually asking people to do something they don’t want to do.”

Video doesn’t guarantee police make the right decision, but it is the best enhancement of training to come along in years, Seidel said.

He is “jealous of all the officers entering the force now, because they’ll be able to review their entire body of work and learn how to deal with dynamic situations.”

But learning those lessons, Seidel added, can be hard.

“Emotional maturity is the most important thing an officer can have, yet being good with people who are emotionally upset is difficult to measure,” he said. “It’s not like counting push-ups or timing a distance run.” n

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Does Britain need a constitution?

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ight-hundred years ago this month, rebellious barons and a despised, cashstrapped king gathered in a verdant riverside meadow 20 miles outside London to seal an agreement that would change the course of history.

The words of the Magna Carta have inspired democratic movements the world over and formed a basis for countless constitutions — most notably the one crafted by another group of king-defying aristocrats over a long and sweaty Philadelphia summer.

Yet somehow, despite birthing the principles of due process and equal rights under law, Britain never got around to codifying a constitution of its own. Now, with this ancient land enduring a period of teenage-style existential angst, many Britons wonder whether it is finally time to change that.

Britain is one of just three major democracies that lack formal, written constitutions. Its empire has come and gone, it has triumphed in world wars, and yet it has never seemed to need a written constitution.

But Britain has rarely faced the sort of fundamental challenges to its identity that it is confronting today. Scotland nearly split the United Kingdom apart in an independence referendum last September and may try to do so again after a landslide election victory for nationalists last month. Britain as a whole will soon have to decide whether it is part of Europe. And because of the country’s peculiar electoral system, last month’s parliamentary vote produced perhaps the most distorted results in British history.

That complex web of problems offers few easy answers. Advocates of a written constitution say none of the big problems are likely to be solved unless Britain does what others accomplished long ago and goes through the difficult process of writing down some basic rules.

“We’ve got a long tradition of helping other countries do it, without recognizing that we need to do

BEN A. PRUCHNIE/GETTY IMAGES

800 years after the Magna Carta became law, many are wondering if more guidance is needed it ourselves,” said Jeremy Purvis, a member of the House of Lords who has introduced a bill that would trigger a convention.

In truth, Britain does have a constitution, although only the most sophisticated scholars, perhaps with the aid of archaeologists, know where to find it.

Instead of a single document, the British constitution lies scattered across centuries’ worth of common law, acts of Parliament, treaty obligations and historical conventions.

“People should know the rules of their governance,” said Graham Allen, a member of Parliament who chaired the constitutional reform committee. Allen has long waged what has seemed at times a quixotic quest to talk Britain into writing down what it stands for.

His committee even commissioned a four-year effort by scholars at King’s College London to craft a model constitution that can be used as a blueprint if the nation ever comes around on the issue.

The result was published last

year. At 71 pages, it lays out everything from the formal name of the country (the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) to a bill of rights.

Allen then sought feedback from the public, and “for the Jeffersons or the Mandelas amongst us,” he promised a bottle of champagne to whoever could come up with the most eloquent preamble.

The winning entry begins: “United, we stand in celebration of the diverse voices that make up the great chorus of our nation.”

Others have taken their own stabs at a codified constitution, which, if enacted, would remove Britain from a small, constitutionally starved club that includes New Zealand and Israel. The London School of Economics recently unveiled a crowd-sourced document pulled together from online contributions and brainstorming events around the country, including “a constitutional carnival” highlighted by musical performances and cotton candy.

The constitution question has

A copy of the Magna Carta, the 800-yearold “great charter” that underpins British democracy, is seen at Heritage Gallery in London.

gained prominence lately, not only because of the anniversary of the Magna Carta, which will be celebrated June 15, but also because of strains on the United Kingdom.

The threat of Scottish independence is felt most acutely. The United Kingdom is not one nation, but four — Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland. For centuries, power has been monopolized in London, but demands are rising for control closer to home.

Purvis said the United Kingdom needs to define itself to survive.

“In the vacuum of there not being a statement about what holds the union together, it allows nationalism in England and Scotland to flourish,” he said. “I want there to be something that holds together as Britishness.”

His bill may have a chance of clearing the House of Lords, but it is unlikely to pass the all-important House of Commons. Cameron’s Conservative Party, which gained a majority of seats in the Commons in last month’s election, despite winning just 37 percent of the vote, has not ruled out the idea of a convention but has generally been cool to it.

Anthony King, a political scientist at the University of Essex, said there is no doubt that Britain’s political structures need significant renovation. But trying to craft a written constitution might only deepen the country’s problems, given the quality of those likely to be in charge of such a process.

“If you look at the people who drew up the American constitution, here was a group with outstanding intellectual capacity — James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, George Mason,” he said. “You couldn’t replicate that in Britain in 2015.”

Constitutions, King said, usually arise out of major upheaval, such as war or revolution. That spark has never been lit for Britain, and he said he doubts that the country’s current challenges — serious as they may be — will be enough to force the issue.

“The system is unsatisfactory, but it’s not ghastly,” he said. “We’re going to muddle along. Brits pride themselves on that.” n

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Carving into China’s ivory trade S IMON D ENYER Beijing BY

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hina has pledged to end the processing and sale of ivory, a move that — if fulfilled — would be a major victory in the battle to end the slaughter of tens of thousands of African elephants by poachers every year. But the country has not said how quickly it will act, and a top Chinese official has called on the United States to also tighten its rules on ivory trading.

Wildlife experts said China’s recent announcement represented a sea change in official attitudes and called the prospect of an end to the legal trade in ivory in this country the greatest step that can be taken to reduce poaching. But they added that much would depend on when China acts, and how firmly.

China’s legal trade in ivory products — largely based on a stockpile imported in 2009 — provides the cover for a vast illegal trade that fuels poaching in Africa and involves global crime syndicates, experts say.

A top Chinese wildlife official said his country was still deciding how far and how quickly it would act but added that China could not be expected to act alone. Meng Xianlin, China’s top representative to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) said that other countries — including the United States — also need tougher regulations.

“Some people say, ‘China should take the leadership, you first, you stop everything and other countries will follow,’ ” he said. “I understand, but I think we should negotiate with other countries to push these procedures gradually.”

On May 29, China destroyed nearly 1,500 pounds of tusks and ivory carvings in a public ceremony in Beijing, after similar events in southern China and Hong Kong last year.

In a speech, Zhao Shucong, minister in charge of the State Forestry Administration, surprised assembled diplomats and environmentalists by announcing that China would “strictly control the ivory trade and processing,

FRED DUFOUR/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Wildlife experts say pledge is big step to reduce poaching, but no one is ready to declare victory until eventually halting commercial processing and the sale of ivory and its products.”

The remarks prompted intense discussions within the wildlife conservation community, with enthusiasm mixed with disbelief. China had long argued that ivory carving was part of its ancient cultural heritage. Was it serious about closing its network of carving workshops, advocates wondered, or would it call a halt only when its existing stockpile was depleted?

Meng said there was a commitment at the highest levels of the Chinese government to build an “ecological civilization,” citing one of the many slogans of President Xi Jinping’s government. Now the principle has been established, he said, and it is just a matter of pushing the procedure.

“We participated in several rounds of discussion with our minister,” he said, referring to Zhao. “His attitude is very firm; his point is very clear. It is not simply a sentence; China will really put this

into practice.”

Wildlife groups have been campaigning for years to hear those words. A ban on the legal ivory trade in China would make it much easier to stamp out the illegal trade, they say.

Cristian Samper, president of the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York, said Meng’s remarks “should put all poachers on notice that their bloody market is no longer viable.”

“There is clearly a senior level of commitment from the Chinese government to stop the ivory industry in China,” he said. “Now, Chinese government agencies responsible for regulating and managing the ivory issue will need to develop a plan and a timeline to implement this decision. And people from all nations need to stop buying ivory.”

China imported 62 tons of ivory in 2008 at a time when elephant numbers were relatively healthy and limited international trade was allowed. It has been releasing

Recently, China publicly destroyed these ivory carvings — nearly 1,500 pounds worth — in May as a gesture of its seriousness about ending trade.

that stockpile gradually to more than 30 licensed workshops to be carved into ivory products.

Meanwhile, poor enforcement of the licensing system allows the widespread sale of products made from poached ivory, fueling the slaughter. The African elephant population has fallen from more than 1 million in 1989 to about half a million now, with more than 20,000 animals estimated to have been killed for their tusks in each of the past two years.

Meng said the government is selling five tons of ivory a year to carving workshops but would “gradually” reduce that annual quota to zero. He said a total ban on ivory processing and sales could come “very quickly” but then added: “One year, two years, three years, four years, 10 years. Is that quick or not quick compared to the history of the world?”

There is a precedent: Rhinoceros horn had been used in traditional Chinese medicine, but its use was banned in China in 1993, and it is hard to find here now.

Attitudes are also changing, with demand for shark fin soup sharply lower here in recent years.

Meng said his son, and the younger generation in general, no longer wants to eat endangered wildlife products. WildAid says that 95 percent of people surveyed in China’s three largest cities now support a ban on ivory trading.

But Meng said China should not be the only country to act.

The United States is the secondlargest market globally for illegal wildlife products after China, and it still allows trade in ivory acquired before a worldwide ban in 1989. Trophy hunters, Meng pointed out, are also allowed to import ivory into the United States for non-commercial use; Europeans still trade in ivory acquired in colonial times, while some African countries encourage trophy hunting for income.

In 2014, President Obama ordered a tightening of rules on ivory trading, while New York and New Jersey have both passed laws outlawing it. But the administration has failed to reach its ultimate goal of a national ban. n

AGAINST HIS BETTER JUDGMENT

BY ELI SASLOW IN SIOUX CITY, IOWA

They filtered into the courtroom and waited for the arrival of the judge, anxious to hear what he would decide. The defendant’s family knelt in the gallery to pray for a lenient sentence. A lawyer paced the entryway and rehearsed his final argument. The defendant reached into the pocket of his orange jumpsuit and pulled out a crumpled note he had written to the judge the night before: “Please, you have all the power,” it read. “Just try and be merciful.” ¶ U.S. District Judge Mark Bennett entered and everyone stood. He sat and then they sat. “Another hard one,” he said, and the room fell silent. He was one of 670 federal district judges in the United States, appointed for life by a president and confirmed by the Senate, and he had taken an oath to “administer justice” in each case he heard. Now he read the sentencing documents at his bench and punched numbers into an oversize calculator.

When he finally looked up, he raised his hands together in the air as if his wrists were handcuffed, and then he repeated the conclusion that had come to define so much about his career. ¶ “My hands are tied on your sentence,” he said. “I’m sorry. This isn’t up to me.” ¶ How many times had he issued judgments that were not his own? How often had he apologized to defendants who had come to apologize to him? For more than two decades as a federal judge, Bennett had often viewed his job as less about presiding than abiding by dozens of mandatory minimum sentences established by Congress in the late 1980s for federal offenses. Those mandatory penalties, many of which require at least a decade in

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DANNY WILCOX FRAZIER/VII FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

prison for drug offenses, took discretion away from judges and fueled an unprecedented rise in prison populations, from 24,000 federal inmates in 1980 to more than 208,000 last year. Half of those inmates are nonviolent drug offenders. Federal prisons are overcrowded by 37 percent. The Justice Department recently called mass imprisonment a “budgetary nightmare” and a “growing and historic crisis.”

Politicians as disparate as President Obama and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) are pushing new legislation in Congress to weaken mandatory minimums, but neither has persuaded Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee that is responsible for holding initial votes on sentencing laws.

Even as Obama has begun granting clemency to a small number of drug offenders, calling their sentences “outdated,” Grassley continues to credit strict sentencing with helping reduce violent crime by half in the past 25 years, and he has denounced the new proposals in a succession of speeches to Congress. “Mandatory minimum sentences play a vital role,” he told Congress again last month.

But back in Grassley’s home state, in Iowa’s busiest federal court, the judge who has handed down so many of those sentences has concluded something else about the legacy of his work.

“Unjust and ineffective,” he wrote in one sentencing opinion. “Gut-wrenching,” he wrote in another. “Prisons filled, families divided, communities devastated,” he wrote in a third.

And now it was another Tuesday in Sioux City — five hearings listed on his docket, five more nonviolent offenders whose cases involved mandatory minimums of anywhere from five to 20 years without the possibility of release. Here in the methamphetamine corridor of middle America, Bennett averaged seven times as many cases each year as a federal judge in New York City or Washington. He had sentenced two convicted murderers to death and several drug cartel bosses to life in prison, but many of his defendants were addicts who had become middling dealers, people who sometimes sounded to him less like perpetrators than victims in the case reports now piled high on his bench.

“History of family addiction.” “Mild mental retardation.” “PTSD after suffering multiple rapes.” “Victim of sexual abuse.” “Temporarily homeless.” “Heavy user since age 14.”

Bennett tried to forget the details of each case as soon as he issued a sentence. “You either drain the bathtub, or the guilt and sadness just overwhelms you,” he said once, in his chambers, but what he couldn’t forget was the total, more than 1,100 nonviolent offenders

and counting to whom he had given mandatory minimum sentences he often considered unjust. That meant more than $200 million in taxpayer money he thought had been misspent. It meant a generation of rural drug addicts institutionalized. So he had begun traveling to dozens of prisons across the country to visit people he had sentenced, answering their legal questions and accompanying them to treatment classes, because if he couldn’t always fulfill his intention of justice from the bench, then at least he could offer empathy. He could look at defendants during their sentencing hearings and give them the dignity of saying exactly what he thought.

“Congress has tied my hands,” he told one defendant now.

“We are just going to be warehousing you,” he told another.

“I have to uphold the law whether I agree with it or not,” he said a few minutes later.

The courtroom emptied and then filled, emptied and then filled, until Bennett’s back stiffened and his robe twisted around his blue jeans. He was 65 years old, with uncombed hair, a relaxed posture and a Midwestern unpretentiousness. “Let’s keep moving,” he said, and then in came his fourth case of the continues on next page

U.S. District Court Judge Mark Bennett presides in Sioux City, Iowa. Because of federal sentencing rules, he has given mandatory minimum sentences he often considered unjust to more than 1,100 nonviolent offenders.

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from previous page

day, another methamphetamine addict facing his first federal drug charge, a defendant Bennett had been thinking about all week.

H

is name was Mark Weller. He was 28 years old. He had pleaded guilty to two counts of distributing methamphetamine in his home town of Denison, Iowa, which meant his mandatory minimum sentence as established by Congress was 10 years in prison. His maximum sentence was life without parole. For four months, he had been awaiting his hearing while locked in a cell at the Fort Dodge Correctional Facility, where there was nothing to do but watch Fox News on TV, think over his life and write letters to people who usually didn’t write back.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked myself, ‘How did I get into the situation I’m in today?’ ” he had written.

Marijuana starting at age 12. Whiskey at 14.

Cocaine at 16, and methamphetamine a few months later. “Always hooked on something” was how some family members described him in the pre-sentencing report, but for a while he had managed to hold his life together. He graduated from high school, married, had a daughter and worked for six years at a pork slaughterhouse, becoming a union steward and earning $18 an hour. He bought a doublewide trailer and a Harley, and he tattooed the names of his wife and daughter onto his shoulder. But then his wife met a man on the Internet and moved with their daughter to Missouri, and Weller started drinking before work. Soon he had lost his job, lost custody of his daughter and, in his own accounting, lost his “morals along with all self control.” He started spending as much as $200 each day on meth, selling off his Harley, his trailer and then selling meth, too. He traded meth to pay for his sister’s rent, for a used car, for gas money and then for an unregistered rifle, which was still in his car when he was pulled over with 223 grams of meth last year.

He was arrested and charged with a federal offense because he had been trafficking methamphetamine across state lines. Then he met for the first time with his public defender, considered one of the state’s best, Brad Hansen.

“How much is my bond?” Weller remembered asking that day.

“There is no bond in federal court,” Hansen told him.

“Then how many days until I get out?”

Weller asked.

“We’re not just talking about days,” Hansen said, and so he began to explain the severity of a criminal charge in the federal system, in which all offenders are required to serve at least 85 percent of whatever sentence they receive. Weller didn’t yet know that a series of witnesses, hoping to escape their own mandatory minimum drug sentences, had informed the government that Weller had dealt 2.5 kilograms of methamphetamine over the course of eight months. He didn’t yet know that 2.5 kilograms was just barely enough for a

mandatory minimum of 10 years, even for a first offense. He didn’t know that, after he pleaded guilty, the judge would receive a pre-sentencing report in which his case would be reduced to a series of calculations in the controversial math of federal sentencing.

“Victim impact: There is no identifiable victim.”

“Criminal history: Minimal.”

“Cost of imprisonment: $2,440.97 per month.”

“Guideline sentence: 151 to 188 months.”

What Weller knew — the only thing he knew — was the version of sentencing he had seen so many times on prime-time TV. He would have a legal right to speak in court. The court would have an obligation to listen. He asked his family to send testimonials about his character to the courthouse, believing his sentence would depend not only on Congress or on a calculator but also on another person, a judge.

T

he night before Weller’s hearing, Bennett returned to a home overlooking Sioux City and carried the pre-sentencing report to a recliner in his living room. He had been through it twice, but he wanted to read it again. He put on glasses, poured a glass of wine and began with the letters.

“He was doing fine with his life, it seems, until his wife met another man on-line,” Weller’s father had written.

“After she left, the life was sucked out of him,” his sister had written.

“Broken is the only word,” his brother had written. “Meth sunk its dirty little fingers into him.”

“I hope this can explain how a child was set up for a fall in his life,” his mother had written, in the last letter and the longest one of all.

“Growing up, all he pretty much had was an alcoholic mother who was manic depressive and schizophrenic. When I wasn’t cutting myself, I was getting drunk and beating the hell out of him in the middle of the night.

When I wasn’t doing all that I was trying to kill myself and ending up in a mental hospital. Can you imagine being a four year old and getting beat up one day and having to go visit that same person in a mental hospital the next? No heat in the house, no lights, nothing. That was his starting point.”

Bennett set down the report, stood from his chair and paced across a room decorated with photos of his own daughter, in the house that had been her starting point. There were scrapbooks made to commemorate each year of her life. There were videotapes of her high school tennis matches and photos of her recent graduation from a private college near Chicago.

He had decided to become a judge just a few months after her birth, in the early 1990s. His wife had been expecting twins, a boy and a girl, and had gone into labor several months prematurely. Their daughter had survived, but their son had died when he was eight hours old, and the capriciousness of that tragedy had left him searching for order, for a life of deliberation and fairness. He had quit private practice and devoted himself to the judges’

oath of providing justice, first as a magistrate judge and then as a Bill Clinton appointee to the federal bench, going into his chambers to work six days each week.

Since then he had sent more than 4,000 people to federal prison, and he thought most of them had deserved at least some time in jail.

There were meth addicts who promised to seek treatment but then showed up again in court as robbers or dealers. There were rapists and child pornographers that expressed little or no remorse. He had installed chains and bolts on the courtroom floor to restrain the most violent defendants. One of those had threatened to murder his family, which meant his daughter had spent her first three months of high school being shadowed by a U.S. marshal. “It is a view of humanity that can become disillusioning,” he said, and sometimes he thought that it required work to retain a sense of compassion.

Once, on the way to a family vacation, he

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Down the hall in his chambers, Bennett was also considering the weight of 10 years: one more nonviolent offender packed into an overcrowded prison; another $300,000 in government money spent. “I would have given him a year in rehab if I could,” he said. “How does 10 years make anything better? What good are we doing?” had dropped his wife and daughter off at a shopping mall and detoured by himself to visit the prison in Marion, Ill., then the highestsecurity penitentiary in the country. He scheduled a tour with the warden, and at the end of the tour Bennett asked for a favor. Was there an empty cell where he could spend a few minutes alone? The warden led him to solitary confinement, where prisoners spent 23 hours each day in their cells, and he locked Bennett inside a unit about the size of a walk-in closet. Bennett sat on the concrete bed, ran his hands against the walls and listened to the hum of the fluorescent light. He imagined the minutes stretching into days and the days extending into years, and by the time the warden returned with the key Bennett’s mouth was dry and his hands were clammy, and he couldn’t wait to be back at the mall.

“Hell on earth,” he said, explaining what just five minutes as a visitor in a federal penitentiary could feel like, and he tried to recall those

minutes each time he delivered a sentence. He often gave violent offenders more prison time than recommended. He had a reputation for harsh sentencing on white-collar crime. But much of his docket consisted of methamphetamine cases, 87 percent of which required a mandatory minimum as established in the late 1980s by lawmakers who had hoped to send a message about being tough on crime.

By some measures, their strategy had worked: Homicides had fallen by 54 percent since the late 1980s, and property crimes had dropped by a third. Prosecutors and police officers had used the threat of mandatory sentences to entice low-level criminals into cooperating with the government, exchanging information about accomplices in order to earn a plea deal. But most mandatory sentences applied to drug charges, and according to police data, drug use had remained steady since the 1980s even as the number of drug offenders in federal prison increased by 2,200 percent.

“A draconian, ineffective policy” was how then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. had described it.

“A system that’s overrun” was what Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee had said.

“Isn’t there anything you can do?” asked Bennett’s wife, joining him now in the living room. They rarely talked about his cases. But he had told her a little about Weller’s, and now she wanted to know what would happen.

“Childhood trauma is a mitigating factor, right?” she said. “Shouldn’t that impact his sentence?”

“Yes,” he said. “Neglect and abuse are mitigating. Definitely.”

“And addiction?”

“Yes.” “Remorse?”

“Yes.” “No history of violence?”

“Yes. Of course,” he said, standing up. “It’s all mitigating. His whole life is basically mitigating, but there still isn’t much I can do.”

T

he first people into the courtroom were Weller’s mother, his sister and then his father, who had driven 600 miles from Kansas to sit in the front row, where he was having trouble catching his breath. He gasped for air and rocked in his seat until two court marshals turned to stare. “Look away,” he told them. “Have a little respect on the worst day of our lives. Look the hell away.”

In came Weller. In came the judge. “This is United States of America versus Mark Paul Weller,” the court clerk said.

And then there was only so much left for the court to discuss. Hansen, the defense attorney, could only ask for the mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years, rather than the guideline sentence of 13 years or the maximum of life.

The state prosecutor could only agree that 10 years was probably sufficient, because Weller had a “number of mitigating factors,” he said.

Bennett could only delay the inevitable as the court played out a script written by Congress

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30 years earlier.

“This is one of those cases where I wish the court could do more,” said Hansen, the defense attorney.

“He’s certainly not a drug kingpin,” the government prosecutor consented.

“He could use a wake-up call,” Hansen said.

“But, come on, I mean . . .”

“He doesn’t need a 10-year wake-up call,” Bennett said.

“Ten years is not a wake-up call,” Hansen said.

“It’s more like a sledgehammer to the face.”

“We talk about incremental punishment,” Bennett said. “This is not incremental.”

They stared at each other for a few more minutes until it was time for Weller to address the court. He leaned into a microphone and read a speech he had written in his holding cell the night before, a speech he now realized would do him no good. He apologized to his family. He apologized to the addicts who had bought his drugs. “There is no excuse for what I did,” he said. “I was a hardworking family man dedicated to my family. I turned to drugs, and that was the beginning of the end for me. I hope I get the chance to better my life in the future and put this behind me.”

“Thank you, Mr. Weller. Very thoughtful,” Bennett said, making a point to look him in the eye. “Very, very thoughtful,” he said again, and then he issued the sentence. “You are hereby committed to the custody of the bureau of prisons to be imprisoned for 120 months.” He lowered his gavel and walked out, and then the court marshal took Weller to his holding cell for a five-minute visitation with his family.

Weller looked at them through a glass wall and tried to take measure of 10 years. His grandmother would probably be dead. His daughter would be in high school. He would be nearing 40, with half of his life behind him. “It’s weird to know that even the judge basically said it wasn’t fair,” he said.

Down the hall in his chambers, Bennett was also considering the weight of 10 years: one more nonviolent offender packed into an overcrowded prison; another $300,000 in government money spent. “I would have given him a year in rehab if I could,” he told his assistant.

“How does 10 years make anything better?

What good are we doing?”

But already his assistant was handing him another case file, the fifth of the day, and the courtroom was beginning to fill again. “I need five minutes,” he said. He went into his office, removed his robe and closed his eyes. He thought about the offer he had received a few weeks earlier from an old partner, who wanted him to return to private practice in Des Moines. No more sentencing hearings. No more bathtub of guilt to drain. “I’m going to think seriously about doing that,” Bennett had said, and he was still trying to make up his mind. Now he cleared Weller’s sentencing report from his desk and added it to a stack in the corner. He washed his face and changed back into his robe.

“Ready to go?” his assistant asked.

“Ready,” he said. n

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EDUCATION

When the TV is the classroom J IM T ANKERSLEY New York BY

M

ost Americans born since the mid-1960s have a favorite “Sesame Street” skit. Jennifer Kotler Clarke watched hers on a black-and-white television set in her family’s Bronx apartment.

There were two aliens: One of them had long arms that didn’t move, while the other had short, moving arms. The aliens wished to eat apples from a tree, and they succeeded, after a couple of minutes, by working together. “Let’s call this cooperation,” one of them says. “No,” the other replies, “let’s call it Shirley.”

Clarke grew up to be the show’s vice president for research and evaluation, and she has long believed that the program’s laughs and lessons stick with children.

Now, landmark academic research appears to back her up.

The most authoritative study done on the impact of “Sesame Street” finds that the show has delivered lasting benefits to millions of children — benefits as powerful as going to preschool.

The paper from the University of Maryland’s Melissa Kearney and Wellesley College’s Phillip Levine finds that the show has left children more likely to stay at the appropriate grade level for their age, an effect that is particularly pronounced among boys, African Americans and children who grow up in disadvantaged areas.

After “Sesame Street” was introduced, children saw a 14 percent drop in likelihood of being behind in school. Levine and Kearney note that a wide body of previous research has found that Head Start, the program for low-income Americans, has a similar benefit.

The researchers also say those effects probably come from “Sesame Street’s” focus on presenting a curriculum, heavy on reading and math, that would appear to have helped ready children for school.

While it might seem implausible that a TV show could have such effects, the results build on Nixonera government studies that found big short-term benefits in watching

MARK LENNIHAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Research finds exposure to Sesame Street is as powerful for young minds as going to preschool the show, along with years of focusgroup studies by the team of academic researchers who help write “Sesame Street” scripts.

The findings offer comfort for parents who put their children in front of public TV every day and/or memorized entire Elmo DVDs. They also raise a provocative question, at a time when many lawmakers are pushing to expand spending on early-childhood education: Do kids need preschool if a TV show works just as well?

Yes, say the economists — and the “Sesame Street” educational team. Head Start, Kearney and Levine write, was designed to provide more than an academic boost: It delivers family support, medical and dental services, and development of emotional skills that help kids in social settings.

Levine and Kearney see the study as a clear lesson in the value of a (very cheap) mass-media complement to preschool. The

potentially controversial implication they embrace from the study isn’t about early-childhood education. It’s about college, and the trend toward low-cost massive open online courses, or MOOCs. “Sesame Street,” Levine and Kearney write, was the original MOOC. “If we can do this with ‘Sesame Street’ on television, we can potentially do this with all sorts of electronic communications,” Kearney said in an interview. “It’s encouraging because it means we might be able to make real progress in ways that are affordable and scalable.”

The research can’t say whether the show continues to deliver such high benefits to children, said Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, an economist at Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy. But, she said, it clearly shows “the importance of childhood education, which is really having its moment right now.”

Big Bird, with “Sesame Street” stage manager Lynn Finkel, has been a friendly part of earlychildhood education for decades.

“Sesame Street” debuted in 1969 and was an immediate hit: In the early 1970s, one-third of all American toddlers watched it.

That’s a Super Bowl-level audience share. But it’s even more striking because another third of the nation’s toddlers couldn’t have watched the show if they wanted to — they didn’t have the right antenna to tune in to their local public television station.

Levine read about that divide in early 2014. He realized it was the sort of rare natural experiment that economists live for — two groups of people, divvied up by fate and the Federal Communications Commission, who could be compared over time to see whether there was a difference in their educational outcomes.

Levine and Kearney pinpointed which cities had high or low levels of access to the show. Then they used census data to track children from those cities throughout school, to see whether they were staying at grade level. They couldn’t study individual people, or even determine whether people in particular areas watched the show. But they found a large and statistically meaningful effect on the educational progress of children who, because of where they lived, were much more likely to be able to watch. (The effect appears to fade out before high school graduation, they also found.)

“Sesame Street” researchers aggressively test their shows via focus groups to see what works.

Their success, they said, rests on a simple formula that wraps education in entertainment, harnessing the power of human narrative.

They said the approach could easily extend to college students — to MOOCs — as well as preschoolers.

“Storytelling is critical,” Clarke said. “If you organize information in storytelling, children are more likely to learn it.”

Like Clarke, Kearney grew up loving “Sesame Street.”

Kearney remembers running through her house with her sisters, singing a Big Bird song about the alphabet. Her favorite character was the Count — the one who most resembled an economist. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

The cult of secret wedding Pinterest BY

J ULIA C ARPENTER

A

h, weddings on Pinterest: 38 million boards brimming with white, pink and gold for all to admire.

Except when it’s not. Except when the planning is too personal — or too secret. Or when you don’t really have a wedding to plan at all.

Jessica Zahn, a 25-year-old marketing specialist in Atlanta, has two wedding boards: one private, one public. And more importantly, no significant other with which to plan a wedding … yet.

“I know some people feel that pinning/planning for your wedding before you are even in a relationship is silly, or even offensive,” she said. But by all accounts, a lot of pinners are doing it.

According to Pinterest — the social network that’s part scrapbook, part vision board — making a wedding board “secret,” or private, is becoming more and more popular. Since January 2015, secret wedding boards have grown from 15 percent of all boards to 30 percent of all boards created across Pinterest.

This kind of power is unprecedented in the Pinterest world.

According to a recent study from Millard Brown Digital, 96 percent of pinners are using Pinterest to plan for purchases — and 87 percent made a purchase because of something seen on Pinterest.

That doesn’t necessarily mean more pinners are getting engaged.

As Mashable wrote when secret boards debuted: “Pinterest is the perfect place to plan your wedding, whether you’re wearing a ring or not.”

Wedding boards aren’t breaking any norms of Pinterest.

They’re dream-filled road maps for future nuptials. And, of course, for the products, services and mason jar chandeliers you’ll buy — or (ideally) handcraft for yourself.

And yet there’s a subculture of undercover wedding pinners who never show their boards to anyone, tucked away from the larger world of DIY crafts and fresh tomato salads pinned for everyone.

“I haven’t shown my significant other my Pinterest board,” one In-

PINTEREST

Plenty of pinners are using private boards to plan their weddings, even if they’re not yet engaged ternet friend said of her secret board. “I don’t want him to get the wrong idea and think I’m ready to get married or that I’m always thinking about our future wedding.”

So what are these secret wedding-pinners thinking about — if not the big day?

“It’s a kind of dreaming, a kind of fantasy,” says Pepper Schwartz, a sociology professor at the University of Washington. “It’s like reading bride magazines, but it’s also like people reading Architectural Digest. . . . I should say 99 percent of them cannot afford — even 99.5 of them can not afford what they’re looking at. But they think about it.”

And then come actual wedding day, everything has effectively been mythologized. The pins tell their own story: a farmhouse wedding, with chalkboard nameplates and a mason jar chandelier.

Your Pinterest board is your “perfect” wedding.

At least, it is on Pinterest.

More than 38 million Pinterest boards are dedicated to weddings.

That’s a lot of pins to peruse.

Pinterest is different from bridal magazines in that there’s no page limit — you don’t hit a final page in a photo spread or back cover of the book that snaps you out of wedding Fantasyland and back to reality. Sara Fields, an Asheville, N.C.-based wedding planner, encourages her brides to pin — to a point. “I’ll have a bride who stayed up all night with a bottle of wine and pinned and changed her mind,” she said.

“It’s not just that it’s limitless,” Schwartz explains. “But that you’re actually doing something.

When you do something, you invest more in its reality. You put together the pictures. You make it real, in a funny sort of way. It’s more real in the fact that you’ve assembled your dreams. It’s personal. Now you have a better sense of what you’d really like to do, and that makes you more invested than you would be if you were just flipping through a bridal magazine.”

And that’s exactly why Fields tells her brides to stop pinning at a

A Pinterest secret board for weddingrelated pins. As if to underscore exactly how seriously people take the secrecy thing, its curator has asked to have her named blurred out.

certain point in the wedding planning process. Partly to solidify a vision for the big day — but partly to quell the pinning mania.

“You kind of can’t stop yourself,” she says. “. . . It’s a lot of additional stress.”

Pinterest user Amanda Taylor felt that stress even without a wedding to plan. She calls it “doing her due diligence.”

“There’s a sense of panic, too: ‘I have to remember that, but what if I don’t,’ ” she says.

Fields says she requests access to her clients’ secret pin boards — even though, as she admits, a secret pin board is “almost like a diary.”

“I can see, ‘This is what this wedding looks like inside this bride’s head,’” she says. “Before we had Pinterest, that was such a hard thing to cultivate. ‘What are you seeing in your head?’ You can describe it with words, but on Pinterest you’re seeing it all.”

Taylor deleted her Pinterest account, actually. Secret girly wedding board and all.

Taylor lives in Utah, and she’s a member of the Church of LatterDay Saints — most of her friends started living out their Pinterest wedding fantasies a few years back, but she’s single and not looking to get married any time soon.

Her wedding board was so different from her ironic, funny, quirky side she shared on other platforms like Twitter and Tumblr — the board was softer. There were more flowers.

And, of course, conspicuously, no guy.

“I don’t date that much. I don’t want people to know I’m even thinking about it. Like, ‘Oh you’re so sad you’re single, let me set you up with my cousin,’” she says.

She was ashamed of her secret wedding board and also of the pull she felt to Pinterest and its idealized version of her future — she knew deleting the board and starting over was a good move.

On the day of her eventual wedding, she says won’t miss her secret board and the pins pinned.

“Maybe if I was Kate Middleton —” she starts, and then stops herself. “But I’m not.” n

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BOOKS

How to keep a rising China in line N ON-FICTION

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REVIEWED BY

A LI W YNE

T THE CHINA CHALLENGE Shaping the Choices of a Rising Power

By Thomas J. Christensen Norton. 371 pp. $27.95

homas J. Christensen opens his new book by observing that post-1978 China has achieved economic progress that is “unprecedented in world history” and has registered “equally dramatic” advances in its economic and diplomatic ties abroad. Since the mid-1990s, moreover, its official military budget has grown even faster than its economy.

It was perhaps inevitable that such a dramatic rise — or resurgence, from China’s perspective — would elicit exaggerated analysis. Especially in the United States, to whose preeminence that phenomenon poses a singular challenge, one tends to encounter depictions of China as either a fearsome juggernaut or a paper dragon. Christensen, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, avoids both fallacies, offering instead a model of judicious analysis: Carefully deconstructing the economic, military and diplomatic balances between the United States and China, he reveals the magnitude of the latter’s challenge without inflating it.

First, the bad news: While China’s conventional and nuclear capabilities are a long way from approximating America’s, they pose growing threats to U.S. interests, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region. Christensen notes that an increasingly confident China “enjoys military superiority over most, if not all” of America’s regional allies, three of which (Japan, the Philippines and Taiwan) have intractable territorial disputes with China.

Of greater long-term concern, in his estimation, is enlisting its support in upholding the liberal world order that has been so instrumental to its ascent: “No government has experience . . . persuading a uniquely large developing country with enormous domestic challenges and a historical chip on its national shoulder

FREDERIC J. BROWN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

China’s military budget is growing quickly, though its capabilities are a long way from matching America’s.

to cooperate actively with the international community.” Christensen focuses on the obstacles to U.S.-China cooperation in the arenas of nonproliferation, global economic management, peacekeeping and, most vexing of all, climate change.

Still, “The China Challenge” strikes a tone of cautious optimism, and Christensen makes a persuasive case that conflict between the United States and China is far from inevitable. The scale of economic interdependence worldwide is unprecedented, and transnational production, a marginal feature of economic activity in the run-up to World War I, has exploded over the past quarter-century. In 2012, China’s trade with the United States, formal U.S. allies in East Asia and U.S. security partners in Asia accounted for roughly twofifths of its overall trade (about a fifth of its gross domestic prod-

uct) and one-third of official foreign direct investment flowing into the mainland. Conflict would risk those benefits and compound China’s diplomatic isolation: Christensen observes that it “lacks any strategically important allies.”

Finally, while China regards today’s world order as more of a Western imposition than a just consensus — alternatively reacting with confusion and irritation to America’s exhortation to become a “responsible stakeholder” — it has neither a coherent alternative to offer nor a compelling rationale for posing a systemic revisionist challenge: Japan, Germany and the Soviet Union suffered greatly for undertaking that course in the 20th century.

Yet one wonders if America and China’s sensible rhetoric — about forging a new type of great-power relations and avoiding what Graham Allison calls the “Thucy-

dides trap” (in his words, “the natural, inevitable inescapable discombobulation that accompanies a tectonic shift in the relative power of a rising and [a] ruling state”) — belies increasing pessimism about the trajectory of their relationship.

The path of least resistance, but also of greatest danger, would be for the two countries to conclude that they are prisoners of history. While implementing their shared desire for a constructive partnership will be among the most daunting projects of the new century, they must spare no effort in pursuit of that goal. n Wyne is a contributing analyst at Wikistrat and a global fellow at the Project for the Study of the 21st Century. He is co-author of “Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World.”

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Toxic secrets of an eccentric family

A black woman’s Nazi ancestors

F ICTION

N ON-FICTION

I

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REVIEWED BY

C AROL M EMMOTT

n 2008, “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” was celebrated by readers around the world. The heartwarming story centered on members of a clandestine book club living on the Nazi-occupied Channel Islands during World War II. But the novel’s back story had its own drama in the United States. Mary Ann Shaffer, the primary author, fell ill before the book was ready for publication. Her niece Annie Barrows, a noted children’s author, completedit.Now,drawinginspiration from her late aunt’s home state of West Virginia, Barrows has written her first adult novel. It’s as delightfully eccentric as “Guernsey” yet refreshingly different.

“The Truth According To Us” takes place in 1938 in the fictional town of Macedonia, W.Va. It’s an epic but intimate family novel with richly imagined characters, an intriguing plot and the social sensibilities you would expect of a story set in the South.

The stars of this small-town drama are the members of the quirky Romeyn clan, whose history is revealed mostly through the eyes of its women. But we also hear from city girl Layla Beck, daughter of a U.S. senator, who is exiled to rural Macedonia by her father after she turns down a marriage proposal he thought she was foolish to refuse.

Daddy thinks Layla could learn a lot from holding down a job, and she finds employment through the Federal Writers’ Project, which created jobs for historians, librarians and writers during the Depression.

Barrows’s thorough research on the writers’ project and the time period brings the economic woes of 1938 America to life.

For Layla, who becomes a paying guest in the Romeyns’ home, working in Macedonia feels, at first, like a prison sentence. She’s there to write a history of the town in honor of its sesquicentennial, but she doesn’t look forward to “taking down the reminiscences of a town full of toothless old hicks.

. . . I don’t know why the federal government wants a record of these people, I really don’t.”

And no one expects her to succeed. But by book’s end, she and the Romeyns will be inextricably joined, stereotypes will be smashed, and a family’s 18-yearold secrets will be revealed.

While collecting material for her book, Layla realizes that “a successful history is one that captures the living heat of opinion and imagination and ancient grudge.” Those words apply just as easily to the spark-filled story Barrows recounts in this novel.

Many tragedies haunt the Romeyns, including the dissolution of Felix and Sylvia Romeyn’s marriage. Sylvia abandoned Felix and their daughters for another man.

The traumatized girls, Willa and Bird, are exquisitely portrayed and the lasting damage caused by the abandonment is sensitively rendered. Willa’s indomitable spirit, keen sense of adventure and innate intelligence reminded me of two other motherless girls in literature: Scout Finch in Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and Flavia de Luce in Alan Bradley’s big-hearted British mystery series.

If “Guernsey” is a tribute to the power of books, “The Truth According To Us” is a testament to the toxicity of secrets. Jottie, Felix’s sister, is a beautiful and loving woman, but like most of these characters, she carries the weight of the unresolved past. Eighteen years after tragically losing the love of her life, she’s raising her nieces in the home she shares with Felix. Why has she never married or had a life of her own?

The languid pace of the first half of “The Truth According to Us” fits its steamy August setting. Just as we did in “Guernsey,” we empathize with the characters as if they’re our neighbors. As the story’s pace speeds up and confrontations explode, the Romeyns’ history unravels, and we can’t help but feel sorry for this family burned by incendiary secrets. n

H THE TRUTH ACCORDING TO US Annie Barrows Dial. 491 pp. $28

MY GRANDFATHER WOULD HAVE SHOT ME A Black Woman Discovers Her Family’s Nazi Past

By Jennifer Teege and Nikola Sellmair Translated from the German

by Carolin Sommer The Experiment. 221 pp. $24.95

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REVIWED BY

D EESHA P HILYAW

istorian Raul Hilberg said that “in Germany, the Holocaust is family history.” This observation is the backdrop for Jennifer Teege’s haunting and unflinching memoir, “My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me.” While browsing the library in search of a book to address her lifelong depression, Teege, the daughter of a German mother and a Nigerian father, came across a biography that contained a shocking secret: Her grandfather was Amon Goeth, the “butcher of Plaszow,” a Nazi commandant notorious for his brutal treatment of Jews at the KrakowPlaszow concentration camp.

Teege calls him “a man who killed people by the dozens and, what is more, who enjoyed it. My grandfather. I am the granddaughter of a mass murderer.”

This is an especially disturbing revelation for Teege, a biracial adoptee and married mother of two, who had longed to know her family history. Disillusioned and deeply depressed, she sought to come to terms with the past. Why hadn’t her mother told her about her grandfather? Had everyone in her life been lying to her for decades? What, if anything, had she inherited from her monster of a grandfather, a man who would have shot her, a black woman, on sight? What would she say to her friends in Israel, where she’d lived and studied for several years in her early 20s, meeting people who had lost relatives during the Holocaust?

Family secrets and the burden of silence are central themes of the memoir. Born in 1970, Teege was placed in a Catholic orphanage in Munich by her single mother, Monika Goeth. There, she was cared for by nuns until the age of 3, when she was taken in by a foster family. While in the orphanage and in foster care, Teege spent time with her mother and grandmother intermittently; this stopped when she was adopted by her foster family at age 7. She saw her mother again at age 21, then

lost touch. The book’s prologue opens 17 years later, on that day in the library when she stumbled upon her connection to Amon Goeth.

A little more than 200 pages long, “My Grandfather” seems twice that length — heavy, challenging and resonant. It is a memoir, an adoption story and a geopolitical history lesson, all blended seamlessly into an account of Teege’s exploration of her roots.

Rather than a strict chronology of events, the book is a series of minimemoirs. As a collective testimony, “My Grandfather” shatters the kind of silence that has plagued some German families for three generations and offers a healing alternative to what Teege calls the “corrosive” effect of family secrets.

She accomplishes this through research and through her concise and introspective narrative, which is interwoven with a second narrative by her co-author, Nikola Sellmair, an award-winning reporter at Germany’s Stern magazine who provides a historical and contextual backdrop to Teege’s story.

Teege lays bare her personal evolution toward making peace with her family history. She is of course horrified by her grandfather’s genocidal acts and lack of remorse. But Teege is most unsettled by the role of her grandmother, whom she knew well, as Goeth’s live-in lover.

Teege wrestles with competing images: the loving grandmother who comforted her as a child, and the self-serving woman who died in denial about the human suffering she witnessed and was still madly in love with a man who tortured others for pleasure. Human psychology, Teege ultimately concludes, can permit us to continue loving people even as we condemn their actions. n Philyaw is a co-founder of CoParenting101.org and a co-author of “Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Kids Thrive in Two Households After Divorce.”

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OPINIONS

How John Edwards set the agenda for 2016 JIM TANKERSLEY who covers economic policy for The Washington Post, followed John Edwards’s last presidential race for the Chicago Tribune.

John Edwards ended his presidential hopes seven years ago. Then the former senator and vice presidential nominee admitted fathering a child in the midst of a romantic affair.

His wife left him and soon died of cancer. Federal prosecutors put him on trial for alleged campaign finance violations; a jury acquitted him. Today Edwards is out of politics, practicing law. Even with a thin field behind Hillary Clinton, no one in the Democratic Party is urging him to run for president again.

Still, he’s won.

John Edwards will never be president, but everyone running for the job today is cribbing from his campaign.

Edwards famously preached that the nation had become divided along class lines. As he said in his speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention: “We still live in a country where there are two different Americas. One for all of those people who have lived the American dream and don’t have to worry, and another for most Americans, everybody else who struggles to make ends meet every single day. It doesn’t have to be that way.” When he ran again in 2008, he doubled down on that message.

At the time, Republicans mocked him. “Angry talk and class-warfare rhetoric and economic isolationism won’t get anybody hired,” President George W. Bush said in 2004. Now almost every major GOP presidential candidate describes the economy in bifurcated terms. Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Ted Cruz (Tex.) quote “two Americas” explicitly in their stump speeches.

Democrats haven’t just paid homage to Edwards’s rhetoric.

They have also adopted his platform. In 2008, Edwards ran on cutting carbon emissions aggressively to fight global warming and raising the

minimum wage to what, in today’s dollars, would be about $10.50 per hour. Now Democratic presidential candidates call for even more aggressive climate policies, and President Obama, who beat Edwards in the primaries, wants a $10.10 minimum wage; Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), running for the Democratic nomination, promotes a $15 minimum.

Sanders also seeks to make Medicare available to anyone who wants to buy into it, something Edwards pushed in his last campaign. Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, advocates making college “as debt-free as possible.”

Guess who promised free college for all qualified students, way back in 2008?

Edwards didn’t invent any of those ideas — in many cases, he was fairly new to them himself.

The phrase “two Americas,” in political context, dates back at least to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Edwards’s big contribution was a combination of marketing and timing. He packed the frustrations of a stalled-out middle class into one of the most memorable political tag lines in decades — at a time when economic trends were feeding those frustrations. Still, he was a sliver too early: The financial crisis that blew up after he left the race gave rise to Occupy activism,

LUCY NICHOLSON/REUTERS

Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) was talking about class divisions in the country back during his 2004 campaign for president.

tea party populism and a national political mood that is forcing every 2016 contender to be a class warrior to some degree. Median income fell during the recession and the early years of recovery, and today, adjusting for inflation, it’s no higher than it was in 1989.

“There is now a much more unified story about the economy, particularly in the Democratic Party,” says Heather McGhee, an architect of Edwards’s 2008 campaign platform who is now president of Demos, a progressive public policy organization. “That is a cross-partisan, nonideological belief — that America’s children are going to have tougher lives than we had, and that the wealthy and powerful have stacked the deck against everyone else.”

Don’t take that just from McGhee. Take it from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who told “60 Minutes” earlier this year that “the so-called 1 percent that the president is always talking about have done quite well” under Obama while middle- and lowerincome Americans are worse off.

Republicans have not, by any stretch, embraced Edwards’s prescriptions for improving the lives of second-class Americans; so far, they have mostly followed their new rhetoric with classic conservative calls for lower taxes, less regulation and smaller

government, promising that those changes would lift workers across the board. Liberals openly doubt their sincerity.

Democrats, in contrast, have shifted solidly toward the Edwards ’08 platform, particularly after Obama’s 2012 reelection. If her early campaign speeches are any indication, Clinton will almost certainly run with an economic plan that is as liberal and populist as Edwards’s was, and quite possibly more so.

Former Edwards aides — almost none of whom would speak on the record for this story — marvel at those trends. Some of them regret how Edwards stepped on his own message at times in the 2008 campaign with conspicuous displays of wealth, like building a mansion outside Raleigh; many lament how he self-destructed even as his message was catching on.

Almost all of them have noticed how the political world has bent toward their agenda in recent years. “The campaign made a choice early on in [the 2008 cycle] that it was going to go for bold and transformational policy,” McGhee recalls. It was “a deliberate attempt to move the party, and the other two leading candidates, in a more progressive policy direction. We were very cognizant of the policy impact we could have, even if we were the underdog.” n

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Giving Chicago a bad name LONNAE O’NEAL writes a regular column for the lifestyle section of washingtonpost.com.

I drive toward my former Chicago neighborhood and, as always, my perceptions of time grow blurry at the edges. I’m in town for two family memorial services and, crisscrossing the far South Side, I don’t see a white person for four days.

This is unchanged from the 1970s, when I was a child and white children (like white shoes) were something you saw only seasonally, after Memorial Day and before Labor Day, when you left the city on vacation.

Some leaders — including Mayor Rahm Emanuel — and residents are upset about director Spike Lee’s new movie, set in the city and reportedly titled “Chiraq.” Lee, who has provided few details about the film, tweeted a picture of “the Lee Family Filmmakers On Set Of CHI-RAQ.” The nickname, a reference to widespread street violence, was popularized by Chicago’s Chief Keef and other drill rappers, whose style is lyrical nihilism over menacing beats.

Chicago’s murder numbers are annually among the nation’s highest; a dozen people were killed over Memorial Day weekend alone.

I head to my old elementary school, steps from Jackie Robinson Park, to hear from voices on the ground. Last summer, while visiting, I ended

up running from gunfire.

The principal of Mount Vernon Elementary, Dawn Scarlett, “just saw a long line of people applying to be extras” in the Lee movie.

Chicago has “such negative press,” she says. “Here’s an outsider coming in and calling it Chiraq.”

But then, she acknowledges, “This is a tough place.”

Perhaps a movie calling attention to the violence might help, I suggest.

“No, I don’t think so,” Scarlett says.

I mention to security guard Thomas Hale that, at a news conference, Lee is pictured in front of a photo of Blair Holt, a 16year-old honor student shot in an attack on a city bus in 2007. Blair, the son of a police officer, died while shielding a girl as a teenager fired at rival gang members. “The name is

outrageous to me,” he says, referring to the film, “but the city has shootings every day.”

At the park’s basketball court, Chris Weatherspoon, 17, is shooting hoops alone. He gets out early from Percy L. Julian High School to work, but “I ain’t found no job,” he says. He’d heard the movie was “supposed to be about killings and gangs. I’m not into that.” He has no quarrel with “Chiraq” the movie. Lee is making it based on “what we call it.

Technically, it’s our fault,” he says.

There is always a roiling debate about whether urban ills are structural or cultural. But culture consistently rises in response to structural conditions. Weren’t the blues, another Chicago staple, a cultural response to social and economic misery?

“I tell my students, ‘Think about the circumstances in which you were raised,’ ” says Michael Jenkins, a criminal justice professor at the University of Scranton — about the parents, teachers, schools and others that were there to support them. Then “think about some of the poor decisions you made even with all those structural conditions in your favor.”

There are things “we celebrate as leading to success, but we fail to acknowledge that the lack of those things explains poor behaviors,” he

says. There are places that suffer from lack of investment, unemployment and underemployment, undereducation. We act as though everyone has “the same choices we have, then we take credit for our own decisions when they were also bounded, but bounded by more positive outlines.”

I think about being bounded, and the South Side, so full of life, so full of death, that keeps calling me back. I think about how decades ago, across America, white men sat in their white-men rooms deciding what kind of country they wanted to live in.

They put blacks under a kind of dome and fortified it with public policy, racist covenants and conventions, active malevolence, casual indifference and an increasingly militarized force to police it.

I leave the city — and always part of my heart — clear on one point. Chicago is not Iraq. It is a storied American city, parts of which have been allowed to remain in despair and decay for decades. It is a place where people make choices: Some act out rage and alienation by killing one another. Others act out their paralysis, their lack of political muscle, will, creativity and citizenship, by fretting over the name of a movie. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

OPINIONS

BY LISA BENSON

College is not a commodity HUNTER RAWLINGS is president of the Association of American Universities and a former president of Cornell University and the University of Iowa.

Pick up any paper or magazine, and you’re likely to see a front-page article on college: It costs too much, spawns too much debt, is or isn’t worth it.

I entered academia 52 years ago as a student of Latin and Greek expecting to enter a placid sector of American life, and now find my chosen profession at the center of a media maelstrom. With college replacing high school as the required ticket for a career, what used to be a quiet corner is now a favorite target of policymakers and pundits.

Unfortunately, most commentary on the value of college is naive, or worse, misleading.

First, most everyone now evaluates college in purely economic terms, thus reducing it to a commodity like a car or a house. How much does the average English major at college X earn 18 months after graduation? What is the average debt of college Y’s alumni? How much does it cost to attend college Z, and is it worth it? There is now a cottage industry built around such data.

Even on purely economic grounds, such questions, while not useless, begin with a false assumption. If we are going to treat college as a commodity, and an expensive one at that, we should at least grasp the essence of its economic nature. Unlike a car, college requires the “buyer” to do most of the work to obtain

its value. The value of a degree depends more on the student’s input than on the college’s curriculum. I have seen excellent students get great educations at average colleges, and unmotivated students get poor educations at excellent colleges.

And I have taught classes that my students made great through their efforts, and classes that my students made average or worse through their lack of effort.

A college education, then, if it is a commodity, is no car. The courses the student decides to take (and not take), the amount of work the student does, the intellectual curiosity the student exhibits, her participation in class, his focus and determination — all contribute far more to educational “outcome” than the

BY SHENEMAN FOR THE STAR-LEDGER

college’s overall curriculum, much less its amenities and social life. Yet most public discussion of higher ed today pretends that students simply receive their education the way a person walks out of Best Buy with a television.

The results of this kind of thinking are pernicious.

Governors and legislators, as well as the media, treat colleges as purveyors of goods, students as consumers and degrees as products. Students get the message. If colleges are responsible for outcomes, then students can feel entitled to classes that do not push them too hard, to high grades and to material that does not challenge their assumptions or make them uncomfortable. When rating colleges, people use performance measures such as graduation rates and time to degree as though those figures depended entirely upon the colleges and not at all upon the students.

So let’s acknowledge that college is not a commodity. It’s a challenging engagement in which both parties have to take an active and risk-taking role if its potential value is to be realized. Professors need to inspire, to prod, to irritate, to create engaging environments that enable learning to take place that can’t happen simply from reading books or watching films or

surfing the Web. Good teachers “supply oxygen” to their classrooms, in the words of former Emory University president Bill Chace; they do not merely supply answers or facts. And good colleges provide lots of help to students who face challenges completing their degrees in a reasonable amount of time.

But students need to make a similar commitment to breathe it in and be enlivened by it. They owe this not only to their teachers but also to their parents and themselves. The decision to go to college is a decision to make an investment in their future, an investment of time and money.

And for many, a college education is expensive. Students have to play a major role in making sure it’s money well spent.

The ultimate value of college is the discovery that you can use your mind to make your own arguments and even your own contributions to knowledge.

For that to happen, you need a professor who provokes and a student who stops slumbering. It is the responsibility of colleges and universities to place students in environments that provide these opportunities. It is the responsibility of students to seize them. Genuine education is not a commodity, it is the awakening of a human being. n

SUNDAY, JUNE 14, 2015

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KLMNO WEEKLY

FIVE MYTHS

Sunscreen BY

B OER D ENG

Summer’s smell — sun, sea, sandals, shore — lives in the vague sweetness of sunscreen. Sunblock is one of the season’s totems, along with pink­jacketed paperbacks and bottles of lime­favored beer. But for all its ubiquity, the elixir is often misused. Here are five myths, dispelled to help you protect yourself better.

1

You need sunscreen only on sunny days.

Plenty of people have had the unpleasant experience of going out on a cool, overcast day only to return with a nasty sunburn.

Yet one of the most-cited reasons for forgoing sunscreen is cloud cover. When clouds are shrouding the sun, it’s easy to think that they’re protecting you from its rays. But unlike light or warmth, the sun’s ultraviolet radiation can’t be perceived directly. Although clouds block some UV radiation, 80 percent still reaches the Earth’s surface.

Clouds can also have the effect of reflecting UV rays, enhancing their reach.

2

The SPF is what matters.

Advice about sunscreen invariably begins with the recommendation to use something with an SPF value of 15 or greater. But SPF (“sun protection factor”) is more akin to meter-markers at the local pool — a gauge for what might suit a particular swimmer. It’s an approximation of how much time you can spend in the sun without burning. An SPF 15 sunscreen, for example, will allow you to stay exposed 15 times longer without burning than if your skin was unprotected, while an SPF 30 product is said to extend this 30 times. Protectiveness against UV

rays does not scale in proportion to the SPF value, however: SPF 15 lotions block 93 percent of UV rays; SPF 30, about 97 percent.

3

Darker-skinned people have less need for sunscreen.

It’s true that some of us are more susceptible to sunburn than others. In part, this is related to the presence of melanin, a pigment in skin that absorbs wavelengths of UV radiation. But that natural shield is not so strong that sunscreen can be jettisoned: Melanin is thought to offer an SPF value of 1.5 to 2.0 and is less effective at blocking the most damaging UV rays, which penetrate deeper into skin.

The mistaken notion that dark skin is naturally more protected propagates in insidious ways. For example, a 2006 study found that sunblock ads are much more prevalent in magazines with predominantly white readerships, compared with those aimed at black audiences. Myths about sun protection among African Americans can have lethal consequences: Though the incidence of skin cancer among blacks is low compared with other groups, their survival outcomes are poorer — a 73 percent five-year survival rate compared with a rate of 91 percent for whites. This is partly because of differences in access to medical care and

LUCY NICHOLSON/REUTERS

partly because of the types of skin cancers that disproportionately strike darkskinned people, including the aggressive acral lentiginous melanoma. A lack of awareness of skin cancer risks is thought to contribute to black patients not seeking treatment immediately for suspicious lesions.

4

That old bottle is just fine.

Like spoiled milk, expired sunscreen isn’t much good. But consumers seem befuddled about whether an expiration date represents a meaningful warning or merely manufacturer caution. According to one study, one-third of people don’t check the dates at all. Sunscreens expire because their ingredients deteriorate over time, losing their power.

Old sunblock isn’t just ineffective; in some cases, that bottle in the back of the medicine cupboard might even be dangerous: Banana Boat was forced to recall a raft of North American products manufactured between January

2010 and September 2012 after it was discovered that these posed a “potential risk of . . . igniting on the skin” if they came in contact with a combustible source (the fire from a barbecue grill, say) before completely drying.

5

Sunscreen is toxic.

Driving these worries are past studies linking particular sunscreen ingredients with undesirable byproducts and possible negative health effects.

Some fear that it causes cancer, though the medical consensus says such concerns are overblown. The link between photodamage and skin cancer is well established; the possible adverse effects of sunscreen chemicals far less so.

And sunblock products in the United States are rather wellregulated: The FDA has considered sunscreen an overthe-counter drug since the late 1970s, making it subject to more regulatory scrutiny than cosmetic lotions, fragrances or creams that also penetrate the skin. n

SUNDAY, JUNE 14, 2015

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