the more light there will be

DECARCERAL STUDIES

[themorelighttherewillbe]

https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/landscape-review-postsecondary-education-in-prison/

[themorelighttherewillbe]

[themorelighttherewillbe]

https://careercenter.umich.edu/career-readiness

cf. the 5 foci + the 6 expectations

see also: 

https://www.chronicle.com/article/One-Way-to-Set-Up-Liberal-Arts/245252

https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Can-Colleges-Help/245295

https://www.educationdive.com/news/with-skills-mapping-colleges-create-a-universal-language-to-explain-valu/557422/

https://www.naceweb.org/career-readiness/competencies/career-readiness-defined/

https://www.naceweb.org/uploadedfiles/files/2016/career-readiness-resources/nace-cr-resources-career-planning-in-the-liberal-arts-preassessment-form.pdf

https://www.aacu.org/leap/hips

[themorelighttherewillbe]

Gangsters, Swastikas, Tweakers and Permaculture

This beautiful, sprawling permaculture garden is run by guys who met in jail or on the streets.

[currentsinbiology]

Swimming Eagle: Bald Eagle Caught In Viral Video 

Bald eagles are typically known for their elegant flying, skilled hunting and having such majestic strength and beauty that they became the U.S. national bird. But they also possess a lesser-known talent: swimming.

[themorelighttherewillbe]

https://corematerials.homestead.com/files/Douglass_July_4_1852.pdf

[themorelighttherewillbe]

http://www.cpts.info/2019%20Summer%20Institute%20Call%20for%20Proposals.pdf

[sashayed]

“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

— Howard Zinn, ‘A Power Governments Cannot Suppress’ (via scientificphilosopher)

[themorelighttherewillbe]

Washington Prisoners Get Chance to Pursue 2-Year Degrees -- Campus Technology

The Washington State Institute for Public Policy estimated that the state received a return on investment of $20 for every dollar invested in correctional education.

[ 2017 ] 

[literary-structures]

This talk of barbarism has a very particular history, though. ‘There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,’ Benjamin famously said […]. This is often taken to mean that culture is barbarism, once you’ve stripped it of its ideological pretensions, but that is not what the remark says. Indeed, it doesn’t, on the face of it, say anything very exceptional. Macchu Pichu and the Egyptian pyramids required the nameless toil of thousands; great monuments are built at an exorbitant human cost. Benjamin is asking us to remember those thousands, that cost. More interestingly, we might take him as saying that we like to forget that cost, to think only of culture, because the cost was so high; and certainly he is saying that culture and barbarism belong together, that you can’t have one without the other. This would mean not only that visible triumphs rest on invisible oppression but that culture and barbarism are different faces of a single moment, questions of perspective. Not identical, still opposed; but each entailing the other.

Michael Wood, Children of Silence: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (p. 198–9)

[themorelighttherewillbe]

Educating prisoners pays off

The state Legislature wisely lifted a decades-old ban on higher education in prison.

[ 2017 ] 

[themorelighttherewillbe]

Centralia College Professor Helps Inmates Make Connection Between Math and Music

The first part of Dr. Preston Kiekel’s week looks like that of the average professor. It’s the weekend when he marches to the beat of his own drum.

[themorelighttherewillbe]

3 Strikes and You're Out: After 20 Years, Is the Law Working? 

see also:

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/its-just-wrong-3-strikes-sentencing-reform-leaves-out-62-washington-state-inmates/ 

https://www.historylink.org/File/11148

https://columbialegal.org/report-washingtons-three-strikes-law/

https://www.washingtonpolicy.org/publications/detail/three-strikes-youre-out-a-review

https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/194106.pdf

https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/1993/apr/15/three-strikes-and-youre-out-again/

[latenebreuse]

Portrait of Ursula Le Guin.

[palabras-ajenas]

“In a universe of cells – who is not in jail?”

— Bob Kaufman, ‘Jail Poems’

[currentsinbiology]

Watch an ant rip apart a spiderweb to rescue a sibling

Ants are famous for putting themselves at risk for the wellbeing of their colony, but desert harvester ants (Veromessor pergandei) are especially heroic. New research suggests the insects charge into spiderwebs to rescue their ensnared nestmates, sometimes ripping the silk apart to free them.

[unencumberedbylogic]

“Only free and continued education can counteract those forces which are always at work to restore, in however changed a form, feudal oligarchy. Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.”

— John Dewey, “The Need of an Industrial Education in an Industrial Democracy”, The Middle Works, vol 10 (via philosophybits)