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March 31, 2008

Earth Hour

We did it on Saturday, and enjoyed it so much we did it again on Sunday. Here's what one companion had to say about our power-free hours:

"Instead of being distracted by videogames and movies and music and TV, we talked. And laughed. And it almost felt like a drag to turn the lights back on. There's something really simple about sitting around in candlelight."

Now my goal is to have Earth Hour every night. It may not be going as far as this girl, but one hour of candlelight every evening sounds quite cozy to me.

March 28, 2008

Declaring "Rock War"

Topsham-based rock band BlackBridge have been invited to the "Live Indie Rock Wars" in Las Vegas the final weekend in April to compete with 19 other bands from around the country for a $50,000 recording contract with Black Mountain Records. They're hoping to do a bit of a "Road to the Rock Wars" tour on the way out to Vegas, perhaps to be kicked off by a show in Portland in a couple weeks. Seems like the contest is a first, so we'll see how it goes. Wish 'em luck, anyway - can't hurt!

March 27, 2008

Blethen bad news gets worse

We know the news hasn't been good for the Seattle Times folks of late, or for their soon-to-be ex-colleagues at the Blethen Maine Newspapers (the Press Herald/Sunday Telegram, Kennebec Journal, and Morning Sentinel).

It's been bad for a while, but it just got even worse. Sure, we told you back in August 2006 that the Press Herald would soon be for sale, and we told you (20 minutes before the Press Herald's own Web site told you) when that became official company policy on St. Patrick's Day. And we mentioned the coverage of that announcement, as well as some thoughts on who might buy the papers.

We told you in August 2007 that the Press Herald had lost 27 percent of its advertising revenue in the previous two-and-a-half years.

In October 2007, we explored how "convergence" and multimedia journalism were being done at the Press Herald (or rather, not done; we can now add to that failure the elimination earlier this month of the job of "Online Reporter" held by Dieter Bradbury).

In December 2007, we revealed that an alert Phoenix reader told the world something the Press Herald brass hadn't - that Plum Creek CEO Rick Holley was a personal friend of Frank Blethen and a member of the family-dominated corporate board that oversees the paper.

We told you in early January that Frank Blethen had predicted that 2008 would be a terrible year requiring "deep cuts" for the company. And we told you a couple weeks ago that the layoffs had begun.

In February, we explained how Press Herald editor Jeannine Guttman failed to understand the results of a Pew Research Center report on what kinds of news interest men and women - and that men and women are very interested, at roughly equal levels, in breaking news and important issues of the day. She spent most of her time talking about how the paper offers NASCAR news and recipes to combine into one publication so many niche-market topics that you could almost call the Press Herald a niche sausage.

And earlier this month, I wrote about a blogger determined to draw attention to the Press Herald's journalistic shortcomings (a blogger who just today wrote in a posting that he is depressed about the paper's future prospects, and said he is "done wasting energy" on "the Seattle Blethens and their local minions;" what that means for future posts is unclear).

But now comes even worse news, from Seattle, via Crosscut and its intrepid reporter Bill Richards, who has worked for the Seattle Times, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and has covered the Blethens for many years: Not only are print-ad revenues down, but they're down more than the Blethens expected. And online-ad revenues are also down, which suggests the Blethens' plans for future profits may be shrinking.

So however long they have to wait before they can unload the Maine papers, another question lingers for the Blethens - one certainly closer to their hearts: how long can they hang onto the Seattle Times, their family's flagship paper, before it collapses?

March 27, 2008

Three for Thursday: A short roundup of items

ITEM 1: Hillary's Snowe Job It turns out that the story Hillary Clinton told about when she visited Bosnia (you know, the made-up one about landing under sniper fire and running off the tarmac - the following video from CBS is the best) is true - just not for Hillary.

It actually happened to US Senator Olympia Snowe, the Washington Post reports today. Anyone else think it's odd that a Clinton Dem steals a story from a Bush Republican?


ITEM 2: College Repubs seeking revenge? Six members of the Maine College Republicans will be running for the Maine State House this fall, according to a release from that organization. No doubt they're remembering a move by a member of their own party (that's Representative Gary Knight of Livermore Falls) to prevent college students from voting in the towns where they live while going to college - an effort that failed in the last legislative session, after coming under fire from Maine College Democrats, constitutional scholars, and others around the country. What will their position on the bill be if it comes up again? No word yet. The real rules for voter residency and eligibility are here.


ITEM 3: Pianist perplexion A strange press release was the result of confusion, not snubbing, according to Portland Symphony Orchestra PR person Gillian Britt of gBritt PR. Her firm released an announcement last week that pianist Yuja Wang would not be appearing with the PSO on April 1 as previously scheduled, attributing the cancellation to "uncontrollable changes in her tour schedule." We got a query from an alert reader who asked whether that was obfuscation, because Wang had actually agreed to step in for Murray Perahia with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields in Boston the following day. (Perahia has a chronic hand injury that flares up at times, forcing him to cancel some appearances.) Turns out that the press release simply left out the information that Wang had long before agreed to be a stand-in for Perahia throughout his tour, and while she was indeed canceling her Portland appearance as a result of that, she wasn't just ditching us for a chance to play that Other City to the south of us. (Stewart Goodyear will perform the April 1 show with the PSO.)
March 26, 2008

Jan Schakowsky comes to Maine

Just got word that Illinois Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, a stalwart progressive, anti-war legislator, will be campaigning in Portland tomorrow night (18 Neal Street, from 5:30-7 p.m.) for Congressional District One candidate Chellie Pingree.

While this Colbert Report appearance has little to do with Schakowsky's politics, it's worth watching if only to see how elegantly she handles herself when the comedic genius dips a pork rind into a jar of Fluff -- and eats it.

March 26, 2008

I Quit chronicles quarterlife dilemma

It's a scenario that's all too familiar to some of us: The post-college-graduation blues, marked by professional aimlessness, financial instability, and romantic insecurities. We jump from job to job, we live with our parents and depend on them to pay our bills, we wait forever to get hitched. Confusion, and sometimes depression, ensues. Is this phenomenon unique to middle-class Gen X and Yers? Is it the result of childhood coddling, or of having too many choices at our fingertips? And regardless of the cause, what can we do to find stability, or at least maintain our sanity?

These questions have been addressed -- but never quite answered -- in books, in TV shows, and in movies. Now Portland has its own exploration of the subject in I Quit, a feature film produced by Portland Films and premiering tonight at the Nickelodeon.

I Quit follows the character of Issac, "who can talk his way into any job, but can’t keep one," according to the website synopsis. The film, written and directed by South Portlander Bryan O'Connor, features Portland Phoenix Short Film Festival zombie-winner Jarrod Anderson, as well as local actors Sam Applegate and Michael Best. (Full disclosure: Best and I are currently performing together in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest at Portland Players.) It was filmed during the early months of 2007; the crew then had to use five different editing programs to piece their work together, and at one point feared all their film would be unusable, says executive producer Matt Byron.

The 1.5-hour film survived, however, and will show tonight at 8 and 10 p.m. at the Nick. Tickets are $5.

Here's a trailer:
 

We'll let Anderson have the final word: "I hope this movie serves as a stepping stone for everybody involved. Local independent, digital film-making is still in such an infantile stage. I want this movie to be part of the ever growing pantheon of Maine cinema. There was a lot of talent on this production and I'd love to work again with anybody that was involved with I QUIT. I hope that Spielburg and Lucas see this movie, so they know...that we're coming for them."

March 26, 2008

Candidate debate @ SPACE tonight

All eight Congressional District One candidates are confirmed to attend tonight's League of Young Voters debate at SPACE Gallery tonight, according to the League's Katie Diamond (although Charlie Summers, who is currently serving in Iraq, will send a stand-in). The event is co-sponsored by the League and the Professional Firefighters of Maine. In addition to standard opening remarks and prepared questions (posed by moderator Justin Ellis, of the PPH), each candidate will be able to direct one question to any other candidate of their choosing -- and depending on the candidates' creativity, this could be highly entertaining. The festivities start at 6:30 p.m. If you're like me and have a packed schedule tonight, you can still catch the forum on Portland's Community Television Network.

March 25, 2008

Handing over the reins - Mad Horse changes riders

As longtime Mad Horse Theater Company artistic director Andy Sokoloff leaves the company in pursuit of a new career, some longtime members are stepping in to take over.

Barb Truex, who has helped with Mad Horse for several years, will be the new executive director. Christine Louise Marshall, a veteran performer and costume designer for Mad Horse, will be the artistic director. Peter Brown, Portland Stage Company's production manager (and a PSC Affiliate Artist), who has been a Mad Horse member since 2005, will be the associate artistic director. (He was also named one of Portland's Most Influential People Under 35 in the Arts by the Portland Phoenix back in 2003.)

Also joining the company are six new members: Brent Askari, Burke Brimmer, Shannon Campbell, Elizabeth Chambers, Jennifer Halm-Perazone, and James Herrera.

Mad Horse took the opportunity to announce their new season, too, which will feature The Children's Hour by Lillian Hellman, The Clean House by Sarah Ruhl, and The Normal Heart by Larry Kramer as featured productions, and for the late-night shows, A Life in the Theater by David Mamet and Danny and the Deep Blue Sea by John Patrick Shanley (plus one more TBD).

We spotted a few familiar faces in the crowd, too; in addition to those already named above, and a pile of cast members, supporters, and funders of Mad Horse, were the following: Ricky Boy Floyd (of the Horror and late of Granny's, now of MediaPower), Muriel Kenderdine (of Cast & Crew), Carolyn Gage (acclaimed playwright), Anita Stewart (PSC artistic director), Camilla Barrantes (PSC managing director), and Tony and Susan Reilly (of AIRE).

March 20, 2008

Let's Talk About Our Pasts

If Carl Wilson hadn’t mentioned Elliott Smith in his book about Celine Dion (reviewed here), I don’t think Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste would have made such an impact on me. I spend about one paragraph of the review hinting at the emotional ton of bricks Wilson’s book heaved upon me:

“Those who bemoan it [naked inspiration and catharsis in popular music] aren’t necessarily averse to emotion - the artifacts of indie culture are, by and large, quite sensitive - but they recoil at seeing it laid bare. Elitists prize ambiguity, art shrouded in dualities and murkiness. It’s Dion’s ‘Love can touch us one time/And last for a lifetime’ versus Elliott Smith’s ‘And I try to be but you know me/I come back when you want me to.’ If Smith’s weary resignation what appeals to us [sic], what does that say about our emotional health?”

I started listening to Elliott Smith in early 1998, after Gus Van Sant’s Good Will Hunting hit local theaters and immediately became my favorite movie ever (I kept a list. I was 14.) Beginning with the movie’s soundtrack - Smith classics interspersed with songs by the Dandy Warhols, Luscious Jackson, Al Green, among others - I quickly snatched up his three early albums, his major label debut, XO (which came out a few months later), and every demo and live cut I could find on Napster.

His music, I thought, didn’t just define me; it made me. I was a mellow, tasteless child. I listened to whatever was around, can’t recall a single hobby I had for more than a month or two. My main concern was fitting in and getting by, which in middle school and early high school is a really confusing process, as people idly branch off into “geeks,” “drinkers,” “smokers,” and whatever other categories. I wasn’t a cool kid or an outcast, but I wasn’t all that impressed with any of the clique options availed to me.

Smith, who Wilson aptly calls one of the “world’s fragile, unlovely outcasts,” helped me slip into my skin. His appeal was entire. He was quiet, usually calm, a little detached, pretty sad but not entirely pessimistic. He expressed my skepticism (“Everybody’s dying just to get the disease”) and chessily triumphant flights of fancy (“Got me singing along with some half-hearted victory song”). He basically made things make sense, in myriad barely describable ways, and it made me happier to know what I was wallowing about. And I did get happier. High school worked out.

Things got shakier when I made what, in retrospect, seems like one of the worst decisions you can make before going to college. That is, you decide you have a paralyzing crush on a classmate months before you part ways. Then what do you do? A lot of moping around, a lot of debating whether or not to confess your (sudden) feelings... a lot of looking for advice in Elliott Smith lyrics. You do a lot of other things too, most of which I just decided don’t fit into the purview of a blog post. Long story short: you repress a lot of ill-expressed emotions and eventually, to borrow a title of one of Smith’s songs, bottle up and explode.

Relating this back to Wilson’s book, the idea of repression’s pretty important. By basically allowing one musician to speak to a lot of emotions I’ve got so I don’t have to, there’s not a whole lot of growing up going on. Not a lot of reaching higher, like Celine might’ve wanted me to do. In the fall of 2003, while I’m studying abroad in London for a semester, Smith dies of an apparent suicide, a stab wound to the heart. Pretty devastating news, but I think that whatever ethic Smith’s music instilled in me made me handle it okay. Not maturely, though. I didn’t really face it, just repressed it and moved on.

I haven’t listened to Elliott Smith much since his final studio album, 2004’s posthumous From a Basement on the Hill (which foreshadows his suicide much more overtly than his other albums do), was released. Last year, a two-disc set of rarities called New Moon came out, which I’ve barely touched since it came out. Finishing up Wilson’s book, it seemed a strange behavior that I’d essentially avoided the album, full of songs from my favorite period of Smith’s work. I sampled some of it, wrapped up in thinking about all of this history, all of this me I attributed to someone else, but I couldn’t really listen to it. I didn’t want the words to sink in. To an extent, I’ve repressed and rejected Elliott Smith just as I might reject Celine Dion. He cuts too deep; I can’t handle it. He’s schmaltz to me now.

--

This entry - and my review of Wilson’s book - sort of skirts an issue that I hope is accepted as fact. Most of us, myself included, have a pretty wide variety of styles we listen to. I’ve got purely upbeat music, pretty miserable music, more that falls in between. Some of them have also factored in growing me up. I’d credit Spoon’s Girls Can Tell (2001) with hardening me a bit, making me feel more an indie rocker than folky sad-sack. But there are artists who serve as milemarkers in your life, and Smith ran more than a couple miles with me.

I still crave those artists and albums that’ll be with me when I’m vaguely miserable or needing some abstract catharsis. They come around regularly enough (Grizzly Bear leads the pack), but Wilson’s book made my selections feel disturbing. By and large, the bands on my “woe is me” playlist aren’t very intimate anymore. Grizzly Bear, for instance, gets me through formal command (they're powerful), oblique lyrics (they're mysterious, and you can project your problems onto them), and disarming shifts in atmosphere (they force a change on you). It’s gigantic, orchestral music, but it’s also sort of icy. It’s certainly colder and more repressed (or, at least, less explicitly expressed) than Elliott Smith’s solemn tunes.

Which got me thinking: did I just replace one depressing favorite artist with another, even more abstract one? What does that say about my emotional health?

I'm not going to answer this question, because as noted in my review, Wilson ends up sufficiently excusing the sentiment (and because we've already breached the TMI point). That does not, though, mean that I've entirely stopped stressing about it. Sometimes, the transformative power of art is a much thornier concept than it perhaps should be.

March 19, 2008

Trying to save a big-business handout

Maine lawmakers, having cut $140 million from the state's education, health, human services, and the criminal-justice system budgets, have asked the business community to contribute $10 million to the $200 million in cuts being sought to balance the state budget, according to state Senator Lynn Bromley (D-South Portland), who is the senate chairman of the Legislature's Business, Research, and Economic Development Committee.

Today, in response to a claim by Maine State Chamber of Commerce president Dana Connors that it the state's businesses shouldn't offer their ideas of where to cut spending, Bromley essentially called Connors's bluff, and invited his organization and other businesses to do just that.

The carrot she laid out, she told the Phoenix, was that if they can cut $10 million, then they could preserve the state's Business-Equipment Tax Reimbursement program (called BETR, the program was extended indefinitely in 2006, just before it was slated to expire, in what a recent Portland Phoenix story by Lance Tapley called the "Payments Forever" tax break). If they don't come up with $10 million, then the state's $66-million BETR fund could be cut, she says, not noticing the other millions we already give to massively profitable out-of-state companies (see "Tax Break Heaven," by Lance Tapley, February 22).

Of course, even if the businesses do agree to pitch in $10 million to fill that 5 percent of the state's budget hole, they'll still be receiving $670 million in tax breaks in fiscal 2009, as we reported last month (see "Tax Break Heaven" again). And the state's general practice of balancing the budget on the backs of poor, elderly, and sick Mainers - and continuing to give lavishly to out-of-state corporations (Wal-Mart, here's $439,000) - will continue.

Lawmakers are even still talking about creating a new tax break for businesses, which would be a blank check for the wealthiest Mainers and developers to refit old buildings with taxpayers' money - with almost no limits. We reported on that, too (see "A 'Good' Tax Break In the Making," by Lance Tapley, February 22). Bromley says she doesn't think new tax breaks should be considered given the budget situation.

But she's quite happy to keep the old ones, and keep the $140 million in cuts to education, health, human services, and the justice system.

March 18, 2008

Rustic Politics - Overtones of Protest

Rustic Overtones have released a video from a song off their once-and-future "new" album, Light at the End (reviewed by Sam Pfeifle back in July), in honor of today's national release on Velour.

The song is "Letter to the President," which is in rotation on the Overtones' MySpace page if you want to just listen to it. You can see the video here, if you have QuickTime (or click here to see the video in Windows Media Player, whose embedding doesn't seem to be working just now).

March 18, 2008

Press Herald sale - who would buy?

UPDATE: With Crosscut Seattle story link (also here). Definitely read that story - it has great analysis and some new ideas of who might buy the papers - including a possibility of the union taking it employee-owned.

Yesterday's announcement that the Portland Press Herald and the rest of the Blethen Maine Newspaper group are up for sale has a lot of attention in the expected arenas.

The Press Herald has a story here. The Seattle Times has a story here. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's story is here. I'm told Crosscut Seattle will have a story later today (UPDATE: It does, and that must-read story is here.) (and I'll post an update to this story when it's live).

The PressingTheHerald blog (which I wrote about in the latest issue of the Phoenix) has declared an end to its six-day-old "Blethen Maine Death Watch," and "T. Cushing Munjoy" has resumed buying the paper, only to find that he and Frank Blethen agree on something - that the Blethens will be lucky to recoup half of the $200-million-plus purchase price they paid for the Maine papers in 1998.

Even PortlandPressHarried's "T. Flushing Funjoy" is digging around, unearthing the Blethens' corporate memos and exec-speak from five years ago and ten years ago.

But nobody has addressed what appears to be a clear fact, which doesn't bode well for the papers' future: The Blethens likely have no prospective buyers.

Most businesses, and particularly privately-owned ones, don't generally announce that parts of their companies are "for sale." They announce that they have been sold, complete with answers to the "who bought it" and "when do they take over," even if not the "how much did they overpay" questions, and reassuring quotes about the future.

Not so this time - the Blethens have basically said, "We need to get rid of these companies - would anyone like to make us an offer?" They have also engaged the services of a major newspaper brokerage company, the New Mexico-based Dirks, Van Essen & Murray, which again suggests they have no idea who might buy the papers.

We know from my story on the impending sale of the Press Herald back in 2006 that some of Maine's big players aren't interested, and they've likely gotten even less so. The Bangor Daily News has laid off workers since then, and while the Lewiston Sun Journal has been expanding, their merger-and-acquisition people seem to be focused on weeklies, rather than dailies. Maybe the Sample Group, who own the Biddeford Journal-Tribune and just bought the Brunswick Times-Record, would be interested, but they just laid off people at the Times-Record, only days after begging the state for a loan they said would allow them to keep the newspaper operating.

Who's left? It's anybody's guess - even the Blethens don't have any ideas.
March 18, 2008

Prison life ain't so good

Well, we knew that. But here's an edited transcript of a talk Phoenix freelancer Lance Tapley gave last week at the Meg Perry Center, home to Peace Action Maine and the Foglight Collective.

By the way, you can hear this talk online at ThinkTwiceRadio.com (mp3 here) or rent it and many other progressive videos from Roger Leisner's Radio Free Maine at Videoport in downtown Portland.

Prison folly

Why? And what can be done?

 

The following is an edited excerpt from a speech given by Phoenix contributing writer Lance Tapley on “Human Rights and Maine’s Prisons” at a Peace Action Maine meeting in Portland on March 7.  Since 2005, he has written about physical abuse and other wrongdoing in the prisons, especially in the maximum-security, solitary-confinement Special Management Unit or “Supermax” inside the Maine State Prison in Warren.

 

By Lance Tapley

 

I knew nothing about this subject.  Most people don’t.  Unfortunately, most people don’t care about it—at best.  Including many who consider themselves compassionate liberals.  They appear to care more about the wrongs at Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo than about the abuse suffered by tens of thousands of human beings within America’s punishment system.

“Prisoners have rights?” a liberal friend, a good man, asked me.  This was an admission that he didn’t think of them as human.  All human beings have rights.

Why is this horror happening?  And what can be done about it?

Let’s start with a few statistics:

--2.3 million people are imprisoned in the United States, one in every 100 adults.  No other country comes close.

--We have 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of prisoners.

--The US keeps 35,000 human beings in solitary confinement.  This is unprecedented in world history.  Only the US has been able to afford it.

--We incarcerate at a rate five times the rate of 30 years ago.

Here is my best understanding, to date, of what has happened historically.  To be disingenuous, so many people are in prison because they’ve been arrested, convicted, and sentenced for crimes.  In other words: lots of arrests, a high rate of conviction, and long sentences.

Accounting for the arrests, we have seen a massive increase in the number of police.  Bill Clinton is partly responsible for this phenomenon.  There has been an enormous police campaign against small-time drug dealers and users.  Twenty-five percent of people in prisons and jails are there for drug offenses.

Accounting for the convictions, the poor are often unable to get proper legal representation.

Accounting for the harsh—often, by law, mandatory—sentences, the mainstream—dare I say, corporate—news media amplify every violent incident into a world-historic event, scaring and angering people to demand locking up every possible threat:  Jessica’s Law, Megan’s Law, etc.

There is an underlying theme in these arrests, convictions, and sentences: racism.  Nationally, 50 percent of prisoners are black; 30 percent are Hispanic.

The scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore believes prisons are where many of the uneducated manufacturing workers of the past, in the age of globalization, are being taken care of, so to speak—especially the African-American ones.

There is another, related theme:  Thirty years ago the country took a sharp political turn to the right in reaction to the racial and other social revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s.  The US became very authoritarian, stern, macho, aggressive in dealing with threats and perceived threats to law and order.  And the liberal leadership didn’t put up much of a fight because they didn’t have a basis anymore in the working class, and they got their campaign money from the corporations, too.

Speaking of corporations, another phenomenon to note is the growth of the corporate prison industry.  It is not as big a factor in explaining what happened as some liberal critics believe, but it is a growing factor.

Much more important, the mental hospitals began closing down 30 years ago, but governments didn’t fund adequate community support for the mentally ill.  So now many mentally ill people are housed in jails and prisons.

Let’s just touch upon some deeper underlying themes:  Ruth Wilson Gilmore also suggests that the prison madness has occurred because Americans believe the key to safety is aggression. . . . So here is the connection with my subject to Peace Action Maine.

Forgive me for getting even more theoretical, but I tend to think the prison madness also results from a national philosophy of materialism, which is based on the stoking of individual desire and dissatisfaction—that is, of unhappiness.

Happiness is bad for the corporations.  They will sell fewer goods and services if people are feeling satisfied with their lives, with what they have.  Strong families and communities are bad for business because sharing means fewer goods and services will be sold.  Labor insecurity and mobility is obviously good for business.  This is not a plot but a system.  In an unsettled society, when your family is broken, if you are rootless, if you are poor and uneducated, if you are unemployed, if you are perhaps mentally unstable, and if you can’t buy, buy, buy . . . In this situation, I can’t understand when people don’t steal and strike out in anger.

An unhappy society not only produces criminals, it finds scapegoats.

A prisoners’ spiritual guru who spoke in Maine last year, Bo Lozoff, put it this way:  We’re in an forlorn, declining empire of “narcissistic consumerism.” . . . And maybe liberals are too busy buying things to look into the prisons.

But, as I read in a recent Maine newspaper editorial, at least locking up so many people is driving the violent crime rate down.

This cannot be correct, mathematically.  We have four times as many people in prison as we had 25 years ago, and we started imprisoning people in big numbers at that time.  But the violent crime rate only began dropping in 1995, and it has dropped only by 55 percent.  That’s impressive, but it can’t be just because so many people are locked up.

Imprisoning so many people also is a factor in increasing the crime rate.  Prisoners teach crime to other prisoners, and the prison administration teaches antisocial behavior.  For example, there are rules against sharing in prison. The recidivism rate—the return to crime—is extremely high. It is 70 percent in California. 

So what can be done?  To deal simply with a not-simple question, I want to read a list of 15 prison-reform ideas I have collected from reading, discussions, and emails from friends and colleagues in the prison-reform effort, including from prisoners.  Some of these are pretty obvious, but they are not being done:

1.      Creation of a state-level group to watchdog constitutional and human rights of prisoners.

2.      Journalist access to prisoners without censorship by officials.

3.      A state-funded, independent ombudsman to investigate claims of official misconduct and rights violations.

4.      To reduce recidivism, more effort toward rehabilitation—less warehousing—including more prison jobs, job training, and educational opportunities.

5.      Parole reinstituted, instead of more prisons (30 years ago in Maine, murderers served, on average, less than 10 years of hard time before going out on parole).

6.      Shorter sentences, instead of more prisons.

7.      More alternatives to automatic imprisonment for small probation violations, instead of more prisons.

8.      More alternative treatment for drug-addicted petty criminals.

9.      More alternative treatment for mentally ill offenders.

10.  More alternative treatment for sex offenders.

11.  Mental illness treated better in the prisons.

12.  Abolish the state prison’s Supermax, which is a torture chamber, and retain a small number of maximum-security cells, which was the case everywhere previous to the Supermax construction binge.

13.  Better pay and training for prison guards; end of arbitrary discipline by guards.

14.  End of the surprising nepotism among prison officials.

15.  New, enlightened leadership: governor, corrections commissioner, wardens, Criminal Justice Committee members in the Legislature.

The biggest reform would occur—everything else would fall into place—if a lot more people recognized that prisoners were human beings like themselves.  As the old saying puts it, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

Many reformers say citizens will only respond to economic logic: locking up so many people is terribly expensive.  I think that’s a good secondary argument, but if we don’t place the moral argument first—the argument for human rights—we run the risk of continuing to see prisoners only as objects, which is fundamentally why we treat them as we do.  What if it could be proven that torture is cost-effective?

As Rama Carty, a prisoner at Windham, wrote me, “Being human means evolving toward the humane.”

Both those within and without the prison walls need this evolution.

March 17, 2008

Press Herald For Sale - For Sure

In August 2006, we used the above graphic to illustrate a story called "Press Herald For Sale?" in which I posited that all signs were pointing to an impending sale of the Portland Press Herald, and quoted owner Frank Blethen as asking, in a September 2003 Press Herald article, "Can you just keep going?"

The answer: Not much longer at all now, what with layoffs, an impending price hike, circulation drops, and shrinking area for news.

The following is a memo from the Seattle Times corporate office to company employees that went out this morning.




March 14, 2008

Cleaning up

It's kind of a strange day here at the office, as we're all making sure we vote for Portland in the Bushmills 400 Years contest (at www.Bushmills400years.com), which you can read about in Deirdre Fulton's story in this week's paper.

But then I look at the pile of mail from yesterday and notice that strange box I picked up, opened, and left on the couch in the middle of the afternoon. It's a sample of Listerine Smart Rinse, some new mouthwash, apparently. It's one of the odder samples we get mailed here in the office, in hopes, I assume, that we'll write about the product in some way. (You caught me!)

Investigating this package is a lesson in modern marketing, and a cautionary tale for anyone who might think there's such a thing as truth in advertising. It's touted as having "Magnetic Cleaning Action," which seems odd, because I don't think many people have trouble with too many iron filings or steel girders in their mouths.

Then I notice that it's in "Berry Shield" flavor, which makes me wonder what it actually tastes like. (You thought I was going to try that? Wrong. I smelled it, though, and it smells like berries, I guess, perhaps with a hint of shield.)

This particular product goes even further, offering to show "proof of a cleaner mouth," by which the literature appears to mean that there's some sort of dye in this liquid that tints "food particles and bacteria" so they're easier to see when you spit it out into the sink. What's preventing them from just dyeing everything you spit out some color, and then claiming it's all bad stuff the product has "cleaned" out? Nothing.

Making matters worse, they don't actually tell you what's in this liquid. The "active ingredient," sodium fluoride, is 0.0221 percent of the total. What about the other 99.9779 percent? We're left to guess. What do you think is in it? And would you try it if you didn't know?

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