Monthly Archives: March 2016

Civic Death and the Afterlife of Imprisonment

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It’s primary season, and once again I am reminded at just how little the rest of the country cares about the disenfranchisement of the District of Columbia. I usually salve my irritation with the knowledge that individual votes are unlikely to sway an election, so I am largely unharmed personally. The problem, of course, is that the disenfranchisement of a large group of people who share some interests does seem likely to have serious policy effects, as those interests are systematically ignored. (Perhaps a more powerful argument defending the loss of DC’s voting rights in federal matters is that it might force us to attend to local politics where decisions are both consequential and close enough to our lives to be noticed. So far, though, I am unimpressed.)

In any case, my neighbors and I are not alone. Vann Newkirk has a piece in the Atlantic challenging felon and prisoner disenfranchisement:

The origins of disenfranchisement as a vehicle of American punishment are likely traceable to some form of the classical notion of a “civil death.” For the Greeks, the punishment of civil death was akin to capital punishment—a complete extinguishing of the civil rights that Greeks believed constituted personhood, including suffrage, landownership, and the right to file lawsuits. English common law borrowed the Greek concept, and civil death was long viewed as a suitable punishment for felony offenses.

But civil death as a formal punishment in the American colonies differed from the English system on which it was based, and from the punishments that would later evolve. Civil death was initially only adopted in America for a very small number of felonies, the most common of which were violations directly connected to voting—for example, fraud or bribery. This paralleled both an expansion of crimes considered felonies and a decoupling of felony punishment from capital punishment. The use of long-term imprisonment, instead of corporal or capital punishment, only came about in fits and starts.

It doesn’t have to be that way. In Maryland, former felons are regaining their voting rights this year, and that affects some of the graduates of the JCI Prison Scholars Program! It’s pretty great.

For too long, we have begun to imagine that violators of the social contract are somehow unable to participate in its revision. In a world without ungoverned spaces, it’s no longer possible to exile our trangressors into the wastes. But what we do instead is significantly more cruel: exiled to social and civil death, prisoners are meant to continue to live in our midst while occupying as little of our time and energy as possible. They’re invisible men whose future is supposed to hold no future except to be ignored.

Yet the fantasies of social death are pernicious precisely because they imagine no return. The reality is that most of these men must someday rejoin the communities from which they have been exiled. People come back. What’s more, they’re never really that far away.

Their lives and ours are still bound together: at the very least we still pay to keep our fellow citizens incarcerated, we still send some of our fellow citizens inside to guard and “correct” them. But it’s also worth remembering that the prison’s walls are remarkably permeable. Guards and visiting family stream in and out. Gang members inside help their outside colleagues agree to cessation of hostilities.

If we were still able to punish our criminals with exile or death, it would be much easier. Instead ghosts still haunt us long after their social death. Fathers and mothers still parent their daughters and sons from within the prison’s walls. Husbands have long arguments and tender reconciliations with their wives as phone calls and letters go back and forth at great expense. And in most cases, the men and women who go off to prison must eventually shamble back from the social death we’ve wished upon them.

I still don’t know if there’s room for prisons in a just society. Our vengeful impulses seem to require some sort of satisfaction, and imprisonment might just be the fairest one remaining. But I do feel confident that those prisons cannot be premised on social death any longer.

the question each citizen must ask

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(New York City) “The Question Each Citizen Must Ask” is my new piece in Educational Leadership, the magazine for k-12 school administrators (vol. 73, no. 6, March 2016, pp. 30-34. It begins:

When universal public education was invented in the United States, visionary proponents like Horace Mann believed they were building the first large-scale democracy in the history of the world. They realized that citizens would have to be educated to play their parts in a system that depended on millions of wise and active participants. They made a courageous bet that children could be taught to make democracy work.

I argue that civic education must equip students to ask the citizen’s core question, and I explain what that is and what pedagogies are most promising. (The article is also available via academia.edu).

Fighting Autocracy with Democracy

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We need to name and advance resources for democracy these days. Deborah Meier, in our blog conversation in Education Week about democracy in schools ("How Useful Is 'Academia'?" March 3), draws attention to young people's intelligence, and also the way education often squashes kids' spirit by policing the way they talk and think with concepts like "academic." This is how she puts it,

"I've always hated it when visitors to kindergartens ooh and aah over what 'cute' things the students say. They ignore, in this way, the children's genuine insights. In fact, these 5-year-olds are genuinely expressing interesting ideas, not trying to be cute at all. And if we listened with respect we'd realize that democracy is not a utopian idea--that virtually all 5-year-olds are capable of tackling important ideas and expressing them well until we discourage their intellectual curiosity with [terms like] 'academics.''

I love her blog. For many years, I have seen young people's intelligence, seriousness, and potential for doing substantial democracy work, what we call public work, through the youth empowerment initiative Public Achievement, now active in more than 20 countries. I also know from such experiences that young people's intelligence and capacity are vastly undervalued in society and education. Videos on Public Achievement like "We the (Young) People" and "Public Achievement in Fridley - Transforming Special Education" make the point.

In addition to highlighting young people's intelligence and capacity, Meier's blog has other resources for democracy in hard times. Here are five:

Democratic Deliberation

She describes discussion that is "noisy and maybe even on occasion rude, across generations, where adults and young people listen to each other and sometimes take each other seriously." This is constructive deliberation. It involves learning a set of democratic habits. This is what I was getting at in calling for "Putting the Public Back in Public Education."

Sustained deliberations can teach people to respect the intelligence and contributions of others. They counter anti-democratic trends. We also need such discussions to help reframe policy debates that are now narrow, polarized, and unproductive.

Free Spaces

Meier also identifies places where such deliberations can take place like schools community colleges, and libraries -- free spaces. Here are others. In the civil rights movement beauty parlors and barber shops were often free spaces. So were churches. In the deliberation I described earlier in the New Deal ("Against Political Saviors," January 28), with three million people discussing the future of rural America, land grant colleges and universities played roles through cooperative extension.

"Screens"

My colleague Margaret Finders, chair of the education department at Augsburg College, uses an idea developed by Kenneth Burke, called "terministic screens." These are terms which hide some realities and emphasize others. Screens can squash the democratic agency of students and teachers. She sites "teacher effectiveness," "achievement gap," "accountability," "standards."

"Academic" is such a screen. It's an individualistic, narrow idea of excellence which hides kids' intelligence and capacity for serious discussion in plain sight, in the process dampening their spirits and disempowering them.

"Democratic excellence"

We can only fight negatives with positives. Meier offers an alternative idea to "academic" which could be called "democratic excellence" -- outstanding work which contributes to democracy, giving the example of Jay Featherstone's book, Transforming Teacher Education, which suggests ways teacher educators can work "in the real world" to help change schools. "Cooperative excellence" is a related idea. Lani Guinier's book, The Tyranny of the Meritocracy, is full of stories of cooperative excellence, minority and working class kids helping each other to do well.

Citizen politics

Finally, Meier argues that "democracy assumes 'politics.'" This is the citizen politics we've been discussing - engaging "differences of opinion based on different stories and experiences." Such politics revolves around everyday citizens, not politicians, parties, or partisanship. Politicians can play helpful roles but they are not the center of the universe. Citizen politics, like deliberation, depends on and develops democratic habits.

The other day in the Republican debate Donald Trump hinted at politics by saying that to get anything done you need give and take, flexibility, negotiation rather than ideological rigidity. The problem is that everything in Trump's world revolves around Trump. He puts himself as the "top dog," as Omar Wasow tweeted.

Autocracy is the top dog taking power. There are a lot of worrisome autocratic trends not simply Trump.

Democracy is our collective power, our ability to act, our collective and ongoing work, not someone or a small group doing it for us.

We can only fight autocracy with democracy.

Register for D&D Climate Action Call using QiqoChat, 3/15

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We want to remind our NCDD members to be sure to register for the next D&D Climate Action Network (D&D CAN) conference call this Tuesday, March 15th from 5-7pm Eastern / 2-4pm Pacific. D&D CAN is being led by NCDD supporting member Linda Ellinor of the Dialogue Group and is working to build a community of practice that fosters mutual learning, sharing, and inspires collaboration around the complexities of climate change, and their monthly conference calls are a great way to connect with others in the field working to use dialogue and deliberation to address climate issues.

This month’s D&D CAN call will feature special guest Rev. Dr. Russell Meyer, the Executive Director of the Florida Council of Churches, who will be discussing the call’s theme – Reuniting Science & Spirit. You can register to save your spot by clicking here.

Here’s how D&D CAN describes the call:

We have enough climate change science. What’s out of balance are ways to talk about it and choose wise actions. To create safe places for sharing. To listen for what we don’t know. To explore together.

Russell will help us consider:

  • Why can religious frameworks make certain conversations about climate change difficult?
  • What languaging can we use in faith-based groups that is inclusive?
  • How can values and personal experience keep us together on the journey?

We are also pleased to share that D&D CAN is hosting this call using the QiqoChat platform, which is run by NCDD member Lucas Cioffi and about which we hosted a recent Tech Tuesday call (you can hear the recording of the call here). We are excited to see the combination of important dialogue and powerful technology, and this call promises to be one of D&D CAN’s best yet!

If you are interested in climate issues or if you are working with communities of faith, this call is for you. Be sure to register today or learn more about D&D CAN at http://ddclimateactionnetwork.ning.com.

the long march through institutions–for civic renewal

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(Baltimore, MD) I am here for a panel on “Systems Change and Culture of Health” at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Culture of Health conference. My great fellow panelists were Sonal Shah (Georgetown), Derwin Dubose (New Majority Community Labs), and Karen Matusoka (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services). The audience seemed to be composed mostly of health practitioners and policymakers who were already strongly committed to three goals:

  1. Doing a better job of understanding the needs, priorities, and circumstances of truly diverse people by engaging them in influencing health interventions and policies. For instance, instead of telling a specific group of new immigrants how to improve their health, pay attention to what they already know and want.
  2. Supporting solutions that require collective action by residents. Dubose brought up a situation in which individuals couldn’t exercise in a local park because it was too dangerous, but a group started tai chi exercises there every day at noon. Only a coordinated strategy would work, and coordination requires organization, trust, leadership, and skill. This point is related to the previous one, because community members would be the first to know about the danger of the park and the popularity of tai chi. Not only is a coordinated strategy essential, but only the participants are likely to be able to invent it.
  3. Recognizing and enhancing the civic capacity of whole communities to achieve better  health. For instance, Robert Sampson’s major book Great American City shows that Chicago neighborhoods achieve better outcomes for their children if the adults are organized and active in civic life.

Several participants noted that these were shared principles in the room–but none of the ideas are really new. In fact, a roughly similar discussion could have occurred 50 years ago, during the 1960s movement to make health (and research) more “community-based.” That impulse still remains marginal, which can be discouraging.

I would note that some relevant practices and networks have grown and strengthened over the past half century. (See, e.g., Community-Campus Partnerships for Health and the networks it represents.) But I would also acknowledge the powerful hold of a technocratic model in which solutions are developed at the “bench” and implemented at the “bedside.” That model is deeply rooted in modern epistemology and reinforced by the prestige of technology. It serves both governmental and corporate bureaucracies. So it is not easy to shake, and may even be worse than it was in the 1960s.

Policy changes can help. If–as one example–the National Institutes of Health funds community-based research, we get community-based research. But even the best-intentioned policies don’t implement themselves. They require dedicated and persistent work, everywhere from the national or state agency to the street level.

Civic engagement by communities can help. Why do Chicago neighborhoods get better outcomes–regardless of race and class–if they are organized and active? I would propose that this is partly because they support and compel local institutions, such as schools, police districts, and hospitals, to engage with them better. Every Chicago neighborhood has the same police chief, school superintendent, and mayor, but some neighborhoods receive more responsive government at the local level. Note that residents are not organized in specific policy domains, such as health or public safety. They are organized in multi-purpose civic and religious associations and networks. Those are essential for driving change through institutions.

Finally, we need effective organizing within the professions, a strategy that my friends Harry Boyte and Albert Dzur have advocated–and practiced–effectively for years. Like any good organizing effort, this strategy begins with recognizing the assets and interests of the people in question. Physicians, health administrators, and academic researchers are people, too. Lecturing them that they should be less arrogant and more sensitive to diversity may fail for the same reasons that it usually fails to lecture people to eat more vegetables.

But health professionals have interests that can be tapped–for instance, interests in getting better results and escaping social isolation. Most of all, they can develop genuine skills for engaging the public better. That is hard, complex, challenging work. It requires evidence and analysis. When we tell professionals to be less professional–to diminish their sense of expertise and authority–I think it goes over like asking people to eat their broccoli. Even if they want to comply, all the incentives work against it. But when we reward them for exercising advanced professional skills in community engagement, we treat them as assets and give them ways to excel. Combined with policy changes and grassroots pressure from outside, this organizing effort within professions may begin to change systems at a large scale.